I was very sad to have missed the PRIDE float in the 4th of July parade (esp. since it met its oh-so-timely demise in the rainstorm), but, to be honest, I was very happy to have spent July 4th in a random cafe in Montmartre with an Aussie who now runs a non-profit to train people in other non-profits in Ireland, and a work buddy from Trinidad. The work buddy who is, as I speak non-verbally, still stuck in ol’ gay Paree thanks to our infinitely wise and thoroughly suspicious government.  I am slightly dizzy and out of it from travel, and also maybe from re-landing on earth after walking around a slightly different planet.  In brief (because the one thing I kept thinking about as I watched tourist pop picture after picture of really, the most inane things… like the light switch that Dali didn’t touch, or the small scale model of the Sacre Coeur in parmesan cheese… is “My god, I pity the poor fools who have to sit through that guy’s slide show.”):

  1. Dali is not overrated, nor is Gaudi.  Amazing.
  2. Churches are not necessarily cool, but entire abbeys jammed into the middle of giant pink rock formations and which almost single-handedly preserved the Catalan language from early expiry are cool. Also. hermitages.
  3. I may be getting too old to fully appreciate or tolerate the experience of hostelling.
  4. Any place that has wine twice as inexpensive as Coke is fine by me.
  5. For being populaces which have to deal with an inordinate amounts of wandering, befuddled, loud dumbass tourists for much of the year, both the Parisians and the Barcelonians are amazingly friendly and nice.
  6. You can get far just by knowing how to say ‘please’, ‘thank you’, ‘excuse me’, and ‘i’m sorry, i don’t understand’.  Also, ‘Bush sucks like a Hoover, and I didn’t vote for him’.
  7. Yay eating dinner at 10pm and having lots of people wandering about until 5am!

Pictures after I get them developed. That’s right, I said, ‘developed’.  That means the technology that arrived right after cave painting… if I took the digital camera, what would K have used to distract herself from all the feelings she was having during the July 4th parade???