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Sunday, Nov. 12, 2006 - 6:06 p.m.

Hola, peeps. Comments have been replied to; merci. :)

Pounding. Headache. Ow, ow, ow.

Can I just say? Fall? In Paris? Cold. Especially at night, and especially at night when there's wind.

Friday was a bust on Notre Dame. I realized on the way there that I had to go back home to do a girly thing, so by the time I got there, the sky was starting its clouding over thing and by the time I'd have waited in line and gotten up to the tower, it would have been all white sky, so I opted to skip it and just wandered around the Notre Dame area instead. And took like, the lamest pictures of Pont Neuf, ever. Why I didn't go to the other side and take pictures in the sun, I don't know. I was braindead and took pictures of the shady side, shooting toward the brightly lit opposite side of the Seine, so of course the contrast is too dynamic. I keep forgetting that while my old A70 would let me do that and completely compensate for it, the new SD550 has a light metering function and will not. I actually kinda really hate the SD550. It works like a real camera. Which is all fine and dandy if one is shooting film, but I got in the habit of actually shooting into the light with my A70, and that's a hard habit to break. Not to mention the insane images you can take when you can actually do that. Now I have to go back to old school and remember all sorts of stuff I haven't bothered with in 3 years. It's frustrating. If Canon made the exact same A70 but with 7 or 8 megapixels instead of 3.1, I would be in HEA-VEN.

So anyway, all my Pont Neuf images bite the big one.

After that, I was on the Metro bound for home when I passed through Concorde and thought, "you know, why the hell not," so I got off and went up to Place de la Concorde and shot some sunset stuff of the fountains. Most of it without flash, because I really don't like flash. The light is too stark and totally harshes my mellow. Turns out, though, the flash pics that I did take are kinda cool, because instead of the gold trim on the fountain being all red, it's actually bright gold. Unfortunately, the bronze is all covered with calcium, so with the flash, it's more light grey than pretty black. But I'm going to go back and do more probably tomorrow night (if the CNN-promised rain does not show up) and just lower the exposure a little to see about it being slightly less bright. The sucky thing about digital cameras is that the screen is LCD (and obviously lit), so you can't get an accurate idea of how dark/bright an image is until you look at it on your computer. Many's the image that looked awesome until I got home, where it was hopelessly dark and could not be fixed. But if I shoot one exposure normal and lower the next by a point or maybe a little less, I think it'll be okay...at least I'll have the normal exposure to fall back on... Also, I'll take my tripod. I didn't have it Friday and had to use the fountain itself as the tripod, so some of my angles were less than ideal.

Saturday was a bleak, bleak day, so I stayed in and looked at images.

Tonight, I went to see a sort of musical with MP, called Le Soldat Rose. She won tickets and graciously invited me to go, and then was kind enough to explain things to me, so I wasn't sitting there going, "the hell?" It's about this kid named Joseph who gets lost in a toy store, and while his parents are looking for him, he meets all these toys and they tell their stories. The Pink Soldier of the title is sad because no kid wants to take home a pink soldier, and his love, a little doll made in Asia, was sold, so he's living in limbo in the store. The other toys are a doll who keeps raising the prices on all the price tags so none of the toys will be sold and have to leave the store, a plan which is so far working out pretty well for her; another doll (Vanessa Paradis, Johnny Depp's sig-o) who is also "Made in Asia;" a chemistry set who sings about home chemistry experiments for kids; a train set; a stuffed black panther; a king and queen doll set who sing about how they get along about as well as cats and dogs do; and the pink soldier's lost love, who it turns out was sold to Joseph's sister. There's also a narrator and what I gather were the store security man and the janitor. The guy who wrote the show played the stuffed cat, and his son played the pink soldier. In the end, the store manager decides since the toys aren't selling to give them all to an orphanage, so the toys are happy they'll all get to stay together, and the pink soldier is reunited with his lost love (so I guess Joseph was found, though this did not happen onstage), and everyone sings a song about love that was wildly reminiscent of the Beatles' song, "Your Mother Should Know." Like, so much so, that I was singing the chorus of the Beatles' song along with the chorus of the one from the show. That and the song the soldier sings to Joseph about how no one wants a pink soldier were my favorites. The only critique I would have of it is that there was no acting. It was all just singing, and in between, the narrator (whose voice annoyed the hell out of me) would tell the story, which she was "reading" from a big child's storybook. The story is a nice story, so I wish that instead of the narrator, they actually acted it out.

The performance was being taped for french television, and was held at a really awesome theatre called the Rex. It's really cool. It was built in 1932 and has touches of art deco, but inside, there are these neat flowery designs inset in the ceiling, and the escalators are marble underneath with deco-y designs, and then when you get in the auditorium, the seats are red velvet, and on either side of the proscenium, up the walls toward the seats, there's a little roman village built out from the walls. I wish I could esplain it better, but it's sort of like Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride. There are arches and bell towers and cupolas, with wrought iron railings and balustrades, silk plants and palm trees, and on our side, a bas relief of a horse-drawn cart. Some of the little "buildings" are lit inside, and the ceiling is deep blue, with little twinkling pinpoints of light, like stars. It was totally awesome. :) The proscenium was an actual arch, raised out of the surrounding wall and kind of reminded me of the circle at the end of a Looney Toons cartoon, where Porky Pig stutters "That's All, Folks!" It was really, really cool. I had a great time. MP rocks. :)

When I got home tonight, I edited some more images, and now I really have to hit the hay. Here's some stuff from Concorde, though.

I swear, if you looked at my Flickr sets, you'd think the only places I went the entire time I was in Paris were Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, with a few trips to Place Concorde.

This is Notre Dame from across the Seine, with the handy dandy picturesque barge in the foreground and l'Ile St-Louis there on the right.

Cathedral & Barge

This is the Tour d'Argent, which translates to Tower of Silver (or Money). The quaintly distressed sign at the top proclaims it a hostellerie established in 1582, sporting a restaurant and wine cellar in the English cafe style, while the lettering underneath identifies it as a "little museum of the table." Presumably, one can grab a little shepherd's pie and a nice tankard of red while learning all about the history of flatware. Or something. I just liked the facade.

Tour d'Argent

This is at the base of all the lightposts on Pont Neuf. Because this is Paris, damn it, and plain lampposts are just sooo passe.

Pont Neuf Lightpost

Dude. This sunset, she eez, 'ow you say eet, incroyable.

The Eiffel Tower from Place Concorde

(Notice the ubiquitous Eiffel Tower in the background, there.)

The merman, he eez 'ot, no? No, he is. Trust me. He has an Apollo's Belt and everything. Keep your Davids. I'll take the fishmen in the fountains at Concorde, any day.

Male Figure

(the apollo's belt, btw, is like, the HOTTEST part on a guy. that and the hollow at the base of a guy's neck. damn, those are hot. both of them on TB just send me. he has the hottest neck hollow EVER. the boy is solidly smokin'. i'm just sayin'.) (bygones)

And last, the obelisque and part of a fountain at Place Concorde. See what I mean about the red?

Obelisk & Fountain

When I got home tonight, I took the stairs up in the dark, which I like doing, now that I don't have to worry about breaking my neck on them, though I totally bought it on the subway stairs at Bonne Nouvelle tonight and cracked the hell out of my wrist, and if I may wax halfass poetical for a moment, the moonlight lay upon them like a runner of pale blue, right up the center. It was really pretty.

Peace out,
Katie


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