Yankee Scouser

I have a different blog for the summer - yankeescouser.blogspot.com. Goeth. Noweth. or whenever you get around to iteth.

[insert name here]

Two notable things recently:

1. I've been typing enough on a French keyboard that being on an American one screws me up.

2. My sister and I discovered an incredibly cool used book store in Auvers sur Oise.

Once I figure out what it's called (the bookstore, not an inability to type correctly), I'll edit the title of the post. The store is owned by a man from Quebec and spans a previously abandoned/boarded up building on the train tracks and three old train cars. It had an impressive coverage of subjects and vintages. While perusing through the poetry section, I found a book that had an old (unused) postcard saying, roughly translated, while you are reading this words, please suck on a cherry. Perhaps that's some French saying, but it definitely raised my right (and then left, and then both) eyebrow. I got some gems - an old feminist text in French about birth control among others - and we gave the guy who owned it the gears.

Dimanche

Today was a beautiful day in Auvers sur Oise - sunny and warm with a gentle breeze. Speaking of breezes, I'm assuming that that's what was keeping me up last night (the shutters banging against the house) and not, as I suspected in my state of fight-or-flight heightened awareness, some French intruder. After church I came home, opened the floor-to-ceiling windows in my room, and fell asleep watching the leaves move framed between the wooden shutters outdoors. After dinner, I walked around town and took pictures. There are more, of course, but I picked a few of my favorites to post today. What I wished I could have taken a picture of was a wc... what is it with French people and hating public restrooms?

Paris!

Several days and one horrendous delayed flight after I left my apartment, I stepped foot on mainland European ground. I felt the understandable urge to kiss both the solid earth and my sister - but not necessarily in that order. Aside from thinking I was going to die on the rocky-would-be-an-understatement flight, I was happy to spend time with N & her daughter, perhaps the most gorgeous child to wobble the earth on this side of the pond. Get ready for some extreme baby cuteness. And don't say I didn't warn you.


It should be illegal. Today we went on an adventure to Paris, ostensibly to find some shoes and return some baby food that came with bugs in it. Yikes. And my sister wanted to exchange it - brave woman. In the end, I didn't feel like buying shoes but I did go in this crazy fabric store with my sister - the mannequins are wee little things, and I found one that reminded me a bit of Lucille Ball. I had to engage in operation covert picture taking, so my apologies for the composition.



Maybe not Lucille Ball, but certainly... something. Wow. I can imagine that being in that store in the dark might possibly be one of the most frightening things I could fathom.

One of the things I love about Europe (since we all know that it's just a country anyway) is that the public transportation here is excellent. Sometimes the stops are a little ghetto,



and some of the lines are a little retro,



but some of them are just cool.



Et ca suffit pour moi.

Art is not a crime.

Today I helped (or aided and abetted, as the cops might claim) my friend Ash Mae set up some performance art. I love her ideas - they are centered around community and focus on involving "real," "normal" people and getting them to engage.







 

This show is called "Grow." It consists of several hundred old catalog cards that rest, cut up, tempting most students to steal stacks of them from the library. Two cards are sewn together with wildflower seeds inside. We taped blank cards to the wall and then stapled these filled cards to them - some even have drawings on them. The instructions are as follows:



I love it. It reminds me a little of the giveaway going on over at Petit Elefant. Anyway - I tore tape for hours as we cracked jokes and interacted 
with the passers-by. People met their neighbors for the first time after
living nearby for 7.5 months. 

They left notes.



Lots of people slowed down, stopped, or raced by. Someone even called the cops, who were nice enough after they had finished accusing us (understandably) of graffitti-ing this building whose wall we were borrowing. My favorite line was when one cop went off to return the phonecall to the concerned citizen that had called us in for supposedly tagging the wall. "Yes... as it turns out, they're just taping seeds to the wall. Yes. wildflower seeds."

We offered to let him take a packet, but he wasn't interested in taking anything but Ash Mae's personal details. Too bad for him.