2004-12-07
"by then the Foot Cheese had morphed into Really Old Dead Body Cheese..."
The Smelly Bag incident reminds me of another humorous smelly incident, so I'm splitting up my Ode to Tschahn to post it.
About 10 years ago my friend Ms. Webbie and I took a whirlwind trip to Paris.
4 days. I think we left on a Thursday night and came home Monday night.
Which is ridiculous because you spend 20 of those ours in transit or on a plane, 12 hours trying to catch up on sleep, 25 hours sleeping regular sleep (or being passed out on Bad French Vin, take your pick), leaving you only about 38 hours to see All The Wonders of Paris, which we all know can't be done in 38,000 hours.
But we gave it the old college try.
We stayed in some dinky hotel in the St. Germain de Pres area, which is a Very Cool place to stay, but is also Very Noisy. All. The. Time. So more like 25 hours TRYING to sleep and trying to decipher what the drunk French people were screaming at eachother in the street.
Me: I think he just said "Your mother she looks as a cow."
Ms. Webbie: Are you sure? I thought I heard "To be vomiting harshly will I be soon."
During our stay we:
Saw a ballet at L'Opera, and got tickets in a private red-velvet booth where we sipped "Mar-ti-NIs", and felt very French and all "Smell US -- VEE are eeen a booothe!" and stuff. The ballet, as I recall, sucked the wazool, but we were so impressed with our Red-Velvet-Booth-and-Mar-ti-NI selves that it didn't matter. I think the principles were stand-ins, and the female was 5'10" and weighed about 160, the male 5'4" and weighed 130. The lifts made us a little nervous (Jean Pierre's arms shaking violently as he struggled to keep Guinevere aloft above his increasingly blood filled head), so we had to drink more Mar-ti-NIs. LA!
Spent 1.8 hours at "Le Damn Louvre", and we have a picture of us standing in line -- in the rain -- scowling miserably -- to prove it. We saw the Winged Victory (Wings: check. Victorious wings? Absolutely. Head: uh oh... where's the HEAD?! Do they KNOW the head is MISSING? How victorious can you BE without a HEAD, really?!), Mona Lisa (it's about the size of a postage stamp), and some cool mummies, but otherwise we got lost and cursed the French for creating either (1) a really bad floor plan of the place; or (2) creating a really bad floor plan, since we could never find anything we were looking for, namely, Le Bar.
Went to Sacre Coeur at o'dark thirty one morning and watched The Bird guy feed birds. I even fed birds. Nasty, dirty, Parisian pigeons and scrappy little sparrows. But it was cool anyway. I think I gave him what I thought was $10 and later learned was something closer to $100. We climbed a gazillion stairs, expressed awe at the City of Lights in the Smog of Morning, and then went off to find a chocolate croissant.
Saw some really really bad street art. I bought some.
Became very close with our hotel bartender, where, frankly, we spent MOST of our time.
Ate one fabulous Michelen-mumble-star meal and didn't leave a tip. (You're not supposed to right? RIGHT? WHAT? Shit. I was afraid of that. Stupid Americans.)
Watched Ms. W discover the "French (actually Turkish) toilette" for the first time -- the kind with the hole in the ground and two places to put your feet. I got a picture of her coming out of said "toilette" and it is priceless. I had no idea her eyes could get that big.
At the airport on our way back, bought some lovely, authentic, Fromage de France for Deb's then boyfriend (who basically funded our flights, so we Went All Out on that cheese, yessireebob). "Please to give us your vairy best fromage de pay-yee" we said, because if you can't speak french they like it if you make fun of their french accents when they speak english. They DO. I swear. Try it sometime.
We packed "le Fromage de Pieds" (Cheese of the Foot) in the overhead, and were quite alarmed to discover that as the cheese warmed to room temperature it became very pungent, boldly sharing it's Foot-cheesiness self with everyone on the plane.
We giggled behind red-wine stained hands watching fellow passengers squinch up their noses and exclaim to their seatmate: "What the FUCK is that SMELL" or "Quest-ce-que c'est ca MERDE de SCENT?"
The best part was when we actually landed and OPENED the overhead, because by then the Foot Cheese had morphed into Really Old Dead Body Cheese and all of the other luggage, coats, and carryons in the overhead were squinched into corners, quaking violently. Everyone near us was openly disgusted when we claimed our little package, and especially those whose belongings had shared the overhead with the RODB Cheese, because now they would never forget their flight back from Paris with "those two silly Americans, giggling all zee time and dreeenking too mahch du vin..."
After our trip we did a cost analysis of our expenses. Despite the fact that our flights were free, we figured that every minute we were in Paris we EACH spent $58.43... an HOUR.
No one ever said Paris was cheap.
Oh yeah. The Boyfriend LOVED the cheese. He still talks about it. My carry on still smells like FOOT, so it's really a win-win situation any way you look at it.
xquzme at sometime today