The Braineater Gazette & Clarion

Friday: Porridge for breakfast at Leeds-Bradford airport, Berthillion ice-cream for supper in the Rue St-Louis En L'Isle.
My 18-years-ago A-level French is actually comprehensible to French people! (Who mostly switched to English at once).
I was asked what I was eating twice in one day. "Croque monsieur" was much easier to explain than "buckwheat pancake with tomato, potatoes, bacon, and a fried egg on top and spamchicken gizzards".
Paris looks ridiculouly like London, only more sort of French.
Mmm, patisserie.
I got so Louvred out. Did you know they have four Rembrandt self-portraits? That's just showing off. The Winged Victory of Samothrace was cool, so was suddenly bumping into a Holbein in a side room, so were some animal studies by some painter I'd never heard of. The Grand Salon of Napoleon III: Not understatement. When they said "A salon, and make it grand!" in the Second Empire, they meant "Fucking Grand, OK?"
Notre-Dame is really small.
I was staying in an undistinguished suburb near the business district. My hotel was on the high street. Within two blocks, among the key-cutters and pharmacy and banks and small supermarkets, were two greengrocers, two butchers, a charcuterie-traiteur and a plain traiteur, (who ready-make food on the premises for you to to take home and cook), a cheese shop, a wine shop, a chocolatier, four bistros, three bakery-patisseries and two artisan bakery-patisseries. Vive la cuisine.
The Marais and the Quartier Latin are nice antidotes to the homogenous boulevards thing.
Mmm, real French bread.
The Kindle did work brilliantly, I didn't miss toting half-a-dozen real books at all. Fanfic downloaded from AO3 was very useful for subway rides. (Speaking of which: I went on the metro and three separate sorts of suburban railway- what they call trams, which didn't seem to run along roads as you would expect trams to do but hey; the RER, which are the cool double-decker ones; and the SNCF's own suburban lines. Next trip I shall have to try for the Grandes-Lignes and a few buses.)
I like Pisarro more than I thought. My favorite things in the Musee D'Orsay were a toss-up between a Manet still life and the Art Nouveau living-room, though.
I have a nasty foreign cold and some nice foreign chocolates. I expect the cold will last longer.

God, this is an awful keyboard. Placeholder entry until I have time to write myself up a proper one.
Friday night; ( Comedy in Leeds )
Saturday; Geffrye museum with sigmonster, which was a lot of fun. They've refurnished one of the old almshouses and you can tour it, as well as going round the interior diaormas they already had. Also, got expensive chocs at Montezuma in Spitalfields Market, and went to an all-organic pub near the Angel. Then had fun laughing at dippy cats and watching (=being sarky about) Chamber of Secrets with L.

Yesterday, a huge dim sum lunch and browsing in Forbidden Planet and Murder One with A.; I didn't buy anything due to having to carry it, but he bought enough for both of us, so that was OK. A very nice meal with H. et al, talking about Romanian vs UK class systems, linguistic vocab in film studies... silliness.

Not sure what I'm going to do this afternoon. Something that involves sitting down, possibly, ooh me poor feet. Then Tedstock! Yay, much looking-forwards-to.
Still need sushi- probably lunch tomorrow, I expect don't-eat-seafood-on-Monday applies even more if it's raw.

Yesterday went lke this:

Get up eeeaaarly to get to airport for 10 o'clock flight
Arrive at airport
Notice that flight is not listed. Nasty feeling creeps over me. Check flight times.

Do dance of slapping self on forehead and rolling eyes.

Well, being four hours early is better than four hours late, right?

As airports that I've had to hang around for a long time go, Heathrow gets pretty good marks. Their internet facilities airside, however, consist of two (2) computers at 10p per minute on a wet string connection with some sort of b0rken interface. Must Try Harder. I had books, of course.
(You'd think that after the time I got the train to Stanstead for a flight that was actually at Gatwick I'd remember to triple-check my tickets. (I caught that plane, too.) Oddly, I'm fine with catching trains, despite their being much less expensive and troublesome if you miss them.)
...
I arrived to the remains of a tropical storm. Amazing cloudbursts! Rain bouncing a foot off the pavement. It looked like there was no room for air between the drops. I got here without getting wet, though, and was very happy to see everyone, and had curry (straw to Brick Lane? It was nice), and was veryvery glad to go to bed.

One good thing about jetlag is seeing the sunrise. It's cloudy today, but there we go. Now to listen to some Boosh radio shows until everyone wakes up and we get on the move.