Kaboom!
Those of you who checked out my photos from the D-Day beaches in Normandy the other day might recall my mentioning a place called the Pointe du Hoc, and how I didn't take any pictures there because it was pouring rain. Well, Marjorie's dad sent me his pictures from the whole weekend, including some from the Pointe du Hoc, and there's this great, ridiculous one of me, Marjorie, and Jenny in a huge hole left by an Allied bomb in 1944. We're all wearing identical windbreakers; they were promotional items from M's dad's company, which he brought to protect us all against Normandy's notoriously rainy Autumn weather.
Haha, I wish you could feel the wind and rain we were studiously ignoring in order to have fun out there. I'd brought my good umbrella but the second I opened the thing it immediately turned inside out and broke! At least in the bomb hole there was a little less wind. Immediately after this was taken, Marjorie an I climbed out of the hole as fast as we could, stranding Jenny; the sides were a lot steeper than they look here, not to mention slippery with mud. I think she's still there.
In other news, I have a bunch of fun new stuff up on Cool Stuff in Paris:
Recent articles:
Recent blog posts:
I've also created a LiveJournal syndication of the Cool Stuff in Paris blog if you'd like to add it. It's here:![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif)
coolstuffparis. It's not ideal in that it seems to only update every 24 hours or so, rather than in real time, but it's still a good way to keep up with my Cool Stuff blog if you don't feel like following it on Blogspot or adding it to your rss reader.
How're you?
Haha, I wish you could feel the wind and rain we were studiously ignoring in order to have fun out there. I'd brought my good umbrella but the second I opened the thing it immediately turned inside out and broke! At least in the bomb hole there was a little less wind. Immediately after this was taken, Marjorie an I climbed out of the hole as fast as we could, stranding Jenny; the sides were a lot steeper than they look here, not to mention slippery with mud. I think she's still there.
In other news, I have a bunch of fun new stuff up on Cool Stuff in Paris:
Recent articles:
- An unfinished statue of the Virgin Mary, buried for eight centuries
- Saint Denis, the decapitated guy you'll see all over Paris
- L'Hôtel de Ville — a great place for an execution!
Recent blog posts:
- And the award for Parisian bar most likely to keep all their neon letters in good working order goes to...
- Hidden in plain sight: fake windows painted onto a building in Beaubourg
- Monsters in the Jardin des Tuileries
- Beautiful Russian nesting dolls at Peterhof
I've also created a LiveJournal syndication of the Cool Stuff in Paris blog if you'd like to add it. It's here:
coolstuffparis. It's not ideal in that it seems to only update every 24 hours or so, rather than in real time, but it's still a good way to keep up with my Cool Stuff blog if you don't feel like following it on Blogspot or adding it to your rss reader.
How're you?
Today I let Alexis talk me into going to McDonald's with him — thereby ending a streak of about five years without fast food, and also marking my first time in a French McDonald's — and the gods punished me for it. I waited in line with Alexis and we eventually approached the register to order a fine selection of American delicacies. My total was six-Euros-something, and I handed the young lady a twenty-Euro bill. She looked at the bill for a second, and then held it up and stared at it again and said something to me that I didn't understand at all. I asked her to repeat herself. She waved the bill at me again and said the same thing again, and I still didn't understand, because I was distracted by the very alarmed look on her face rather than looking at the bill itself. When I shifted my gaze to the bill, I saw that it had a considerable amount of blood on it. I looked down at my left hand and saw that I'd somehow cut my finger open and was bleeding all over the fucking place. As usual when I don't understand what someone's saying in French, as soon as I figure out what's going on I replay the words in my head and then they make perfect sense; she was saying, "Is this blood, sir?" but of course that was so far outside of the normal context of the situation that my brain didn't let me hear it until I actually saw the blood. Anyway, I apologized to her profusely for handing her money with my life essence all over it, but she clearly wasn't offended at all, just very concerned. I snatched the bill from her hand and quickly fished another twenty out of my pocket with the other (non-bloody) hand; she laughed at this gesture because she clearly wasn't asking me to take the bill back, she was just informing me that I was possibly bleeding to death. At that moment my food arrived, and as I grabbed my tray the lady smiled and handed me a bunch of extra napkins. Ha.
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