Fête Nationale

Military Parade!






Picnic!


Rock Concert!


Fireworks!

Je vais vite

What the French kids are listening to these days:

Lorie - Je Vais Vite

Bookreading Savages

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. So how do my reading habits stack up? Am I really an uncooth boor after all?

1 The Bible-

2 The Lord of the Rings- X

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte -

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - X

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee -

6 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen -

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - X

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - X

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - X

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens-

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott -

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy-

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller -

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare-

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier -

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - X

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks -

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger- X

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell -

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - X

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy -

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - X

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh -

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - X

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - X

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Gahame -

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy -

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - X

33 Chronicles of Narnia - X

34 Emma - Jane Austen -

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen -

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - X Wait, who wrote this list?! The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a part of the Chronicles of Narnia! Stupid BBC, don't you know anything?

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - X Honestly, what is this book doing here? It was fine (execpt for the incredibly lame ending), but top 100 books?! You've got to be joking!

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres -

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - X

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne -

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell -

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - X

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - X

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving -

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery -

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood- X Yeay! Can-con.

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding -

50 Atonement- Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - X Yeay, even more Can-con.

52 Dune - Frank Herbert -

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility -Jane Austen -

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth -

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - X

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley- X

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon -

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - X

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck -

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov -

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - X

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding -

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie - X

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville -

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - X

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - X

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett -

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante -

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray -

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens-

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell - X This book should get way more props than it does!

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro -

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert -

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White -

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton -

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad-

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - X

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks -

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams -

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas -

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare- X Since they've already produced several versions of Hamlet, I thought the BBC would be well aware that the Prince of Denmark is, in fact, included in the complete works of Shakespeare (#14)... I call shenanigans on this list!

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - X

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -

Suis-je Bothered ?

.
Sometimes I feel like my life is like this: French Exam.

Robin Leach meets Sally Kirkland

Oh, LOTRAF... how I've missed you!

Again with the Singing and the Dancing!

This time in Antwerp Central Station.



Thanks to CD fo this!

The Obsession Continues...

I think I've become obsessed with dance in general since starting my class!

He can womanize me any time he wants!

I'm kind of obsessed with this right now.

Pour les francophones seulement...

True dat!

Your band's album cover

The Natural History of Selborne — "The Photo You Want"

"The Photo You Want" is TNHS's second release and builds on the moody, etherial sucess of thier debut. Sweet, foggy vocals drift though a uncompromising, reverb-drenched, atmospheric soundscape comprised of floaty guitars, orchestration and pianos. The opener "Euskara" is born aloft by la-las and handclaps, while "Oriental Darter" is uncharacteristically acoustic folk, intimate and a joy.

Centraal Beheer

Adam & Eve Insurance Ad

Dragostea din tei

.
♪♫♪Vrei sa pleci dar nu ma, nu ma iei!♫♪♪

I never knew that T.I. and Rihanna loved Romanian boy bands so much! Did you?


Another thing I didn't know was that turn-of-the-century Eurotrash videos could be just as good –or even better– than videos from the 80s. You learn something new every day.

25 blah, blah, etc.

I’ve been tagged by several people for to do this and I caught wind that if I didn’t, I would be less cool. Since I am trying so hard to be regarded as 'cool' by my friends, here are the 25 random facts about me.

1. I can make a horrible first impression and many people have told me they thought I hated them when we met.

2. If I was a domestic animal, I would be a llama. If I was a wild animal, I would be a flamingo.

3. My biggest problem in relationships is that I tend to avoid talking about problems. (Which in turn causes more problems).

4. Clearly, there are vampires.

5. I’ve been collecting postcards since I was about eight and want to get one from every country in the world.

6. I don’t think people should travel to Burma and I secretly think less of anyone I meet who has.

7. I had a scary reoccurring dream as a child of being at sea in a storm on a pirate ship with Spiderman’s body in a coffin.

8. I think circumcision is bad and wrong and should be made illegal.

9. I am a nerd about the following things: capitals, flags, airlines, public transport, birds, languages, alphabets, Project Runway, French Indochina, postcards, Meso-American history, kanji, Thor Heyerdahl.

10. I don’t like driving and when I’m in charge, I will make private car ownership illegal and replace all roads with train tracks.

11. The beach is my favourite place in the whole world and if I could live there forever, I would.

12. My greatest fear is failure.

13. My dream is to travel around the world without leaving the ground.

14. If I could only watch Gong Li movies for the rest of my life, it wouldn’t really be so bad.

15. I spend too much money on clothes. I think I have a problem.

16. As much as I hated all the fishing and camping trips my father took me on when I was young, I appreciate them so incredibly much now. So many people have so little exposure to nature now.

17. The last time I cried was 12 January 2009.

18. I have always been incredibly, incredibly self-conscious about my taste in music. (See #24, for example).

19. I’m a leg man.

20. Although a staunch left-handist, I bowl with my right hand.

21. If someone offered me a free plane ticket tomorrow, I would have a hard time choosing between Toronto and Tahiti.

22. I think Couchsurfing.com is amazing and it’s basically changed my life.

23. I want to go to Nunavut so bad!

24. My first record (whoa – dating myself!) was Rick Astley’s “Whenever You Need Somebody”.

25. I didn’t learn to tie my shoes until I was eleven. My poor mother must have thought I was retarded.

You're My Preset Number in Hawaii

Some things that I thought everyone had seen, but apparently not, so now I'm sharing them with you!

Goldfrapp — Number 1


The Presets — This Boy's In Love

The world definitely needs more videos of boys beating each other up in milk. Hawt!

The Ellen DeGeneres Show — Hawaii Chair

Negativity

During my trip home, two different friends approached me to say they were concerned about me. They were worried what was going on with me because my attitude had become quite negative. —Never an easy thing to hear, but they were entirely right of course. Not an easy thing to talk to a friend about either, so I really have to thank them immensely for caring enough about me to do it.

To be perfectly honest, I do find Paris to be a negative place. I hadn't realised, however, how much the bad vibes had affected me since arriving here. While I'm generally a very happy, easy-going, independent person, it seems the trying times I've had here have secretly been taking their toll.

Enough with the boo-hoo woe-is-me excuses though! — It's time for some solutions. I present you with "Smiling in the Face of Adversity 101".

Step One: Think of one new positive thing every day.

Step Two: Focus on what I have rather than what I'm missing.

Step Three: Set realistic and achievable goals.

Step Four: Leave Paris more often.

It's Official!

You Scored as KINSEY six
SIX: face it hon, you're as
gay as they come

KINSEY six
81%
KINSEY five
38%
KINSEY
two
38%
KINSEY one
38%
KINSEY four
31%
KINSEY three
13%
KINSEY zero
0%

I'm a legal alien

Hurray! I got my student visa renewed today. Sure, it took four appointments, hours of waiting, thousands of documents and endless heartbreak, but I am no longer an illegal alien. My situation is no longer irrégulière, as they say. Yeay me!

2008 Year In Review: Photo

Submit your votes in the 'Comments' section!

Travel
Fes El Djedid

Mont St-Michel

Barcelona

Chambord

Berlin

Prenzlauer Alle

Cam River


Portrait
Balcony

Riad El-Bartal

Centre Georges Pompidou


Auto-Portrait
Arc de Triumf

Daniel-san

Hallway


Moé p'y Toé
Michael & Me

Polish & Me at Amélie's supermarket

Jer, Katherine & Me


Best Dressed
WWII Cadet

Hat-Sweater

Fez Hat


What Was I Thinking?
Lion Attack

Ho ho ho!


Around Town
Hôtel des Invalides

Catherine de Médici

Musée des Arts et Métiers

La Tour Eiffle

Gare d'Austerlitz

Palais Royale

2008 Year In Review

Like sands through an hourglass, these are the days of our lives.

DOWN
¤...Trying andouillette sausage. Quite possibly the most foul and revolting thing ever to have been invented by mankind. Absolutely vile. (Post here).

¤...Stress from school, work and France turning my hair grey. After a long hiatus from the hairdresser whilst growing my hair, I was completely aghast to go a few weeks ago and see that fully one quarter of all the hair that was lying on the floor was grey! Grecian formula here I come!

¤...Failing a class by an eighth of a point (full story) and the horribleness of my school in general. I feel like I'm not really learning anything to which is added an impossible workload and a byzantine and incompetent administration. Justanotheryearandahalf, justanotheryearandahalf, justanotheryearandahalf. My new mantra.

¤...London gets a lot of flack for having bad weather, but the weather in Paris is equally as horrible all year long. Grey, wet, cold, windy, miserable. In December, there were eight hours of sunlight during the whole month! The very few sunny, hot days of summer were absolutely revolting: sweaty and humid without a lick of air conditioning, even in the subway (which is one place it is most desperately needed).

¤...Running myself into the ground with my insane work/school schedule this semester. Scurrying around the city from 9AM to 9PM most days of the week, scheduling homework time on the subway and collapsing, exhausted into bed at 2 in the morning, never managing to get everything done for the next day.

¤...It's hard to judge which was the singularly worst course in the thousand-year history of higher education: Théorie de la traduction taught by Mme Plassard or Mr Bruyère's Initiation au Droit (Intro to Law). Both classes were excruciatingly awful in their own way, but I think blatant xenophobia and racism on the part of Mr Bruyère might have made his class that extra slight bit worse. He did fail every single non-francophone in the class after all.

¤...Trying to renew my titre de séjour (my residence permit). Four appointments later and I still don't have the paperwork needed to get this taken care of. Every time I go an waste a day standing in line, they ask me for new documents which they haven't told me I needed to bring! After screaming and shouting my way through my most recent appointment, I left the immigration office in tears because I still don't have what I need, and now I'm an illegal alien!

¤...Michael moving back to Canada.

¤...About a solid month of bickering and fighting with my old lunatic roommate to get my deposit back. When I moved out, he insisted I pay for a professional to repaint my room to cover up two scratches on the wall. I, of course, thought this was preposterous and said I would do it myself. He said that was unacceptable. I said he was being unreasonable. And so on and so forth, etcetera, etcetera, until we were both so blue in the face that we gave up yelling and just sent hostile text messages and emails to each other. In the end we compromised, split the deposit 50/50 and neither one of us was happy.

¤...The worst week of my life. Already blogged about here. 'Nuff said.

UP

₪...Mika concert at Parc des Princes in June. Acrobats and juggling bears! Exotic girls, Fire-eaters! Muscle-men, contortionists! Intrigue, danger and romance! Electric lights, machinery, oh the electricity! — The best concert in the history of the Universe ever.

₪...Crazy roommate begone! Bye-bye smelly religious gay lawyer! Au revoir Sarajevo-style bathroom and washing machine in the middle of the kitchen! Adieu putrid cooking smells of rancid disgustingness (Sauerkraut + tinned brussel sprouts + fish heads in microwave)! Salut pastel patchwork shell-suit track pants that look like an Easter egg committed suicide. Good bloody riddance to any connexion I ever had to his sad, sorry, depressing and depressive life! I love my new apartment, my new neighbourhood and my new roommate. I couldn't be happier I moved.

₪...The simply amazing and wonderful people I've had the good fortune to meet. Michael, Cindy, Victoire, et al; you are wonderful and amazing people and I am truly blessed to have met you. Thank you for the many good times we shared over the past year (despite France's best efforts to ruin our lives).

₪...Champagne-soaked New Year's on the Champs Élysées with Polish and DN. A New Year's that actually lived up to the holiday hype for once!

₪...Feeling like the last person left on Earth, sitting on a rock next to a gurggling alpine waterfall, after hiking through the absolute remoteness of the Andorran Pyrenees.

₪...After being motivated by several seasons of So You Think You Can Dance, I finally joined a modern dance class in Paris. There is something fundamental about dance I totally love. You connect to something deeply 'inner' and carry it through you to the outside world. I'm begining to undertstand the deep emotional connexions people can have to dancing. —Plus, I'm not the worst person in the class.

₪...Escaping the tyrannical opulence and winter grey of Paris for some good ol' fashion QT with family and friends over Christmas. A year and a half is really far too long to be away.

₪... Cycling across the Pont de Sully in May. Life was good. Only five more months 'til I can do it all over again (or 151 days or 13,046,400 seconds, but who's counting?)

₪...Mum's visit. There's an old French saying that "Paris is not France." After two wonderful weeks exploring Normandy and the Loire, I couldn't agree more. The "real" France actually has chock-a-block charm with quaint little towns, wildflowers and smiling, friendly people. It was quite a revelation to me that I don't, in fact, hate France at all. It's just Paris that's a vacuum of ostentation and arrogance. Who knew?

₪...Travel. 2008 was rung in with a champagne hangover and trip to Rock the Casbah in Fes and wound up in the icy Jack Frost darkness of Canadiana winter. A fantastic travel year which included my first micro-state -the gorgeous mountains of Andorra-, punting down the Cam River in England, East-meets-West sauerkraut sensations in Berlin and rockin' round the clock during my Zürich layover.

New Year's Resolutions
As always, my New Year's Resolutions is to be more fabulous, which I hope to accomplish with the help of a snappy new suit and an increased champagne intake (I am living in France after all).

Another resolution for 2009 is to improve my French accent. My French accent was actually better before arriving in La France and has slowly degenerated into a mouth-full-of-marbles broad Anglo mess. It's time to faire des efforts as Gran-maman would say!

After 2008, the year of Lost In France, I think everything well on track for a fabuleux 2009.

Happy New Year!
Bonne Année !
¡Feliz Año Nuevo!
明けましておめでとうございます!
恭賀新禧!

Take That — Do What U Like

Quite possibly the gayest, most homoerotic thing ever to have come out of Enland:

Do What U Like

I had to excuse myself after watching.