Well, CSI New Your series 3 BIG CLIFFHANGER episode has ground to a halt so I thought I might as well write something.  Incidentally, I have seen the 1st episode of series 4 so I am able to keep a tally of which characters are definitely going to survive the threshold of the series, so no big shocks for me. 

 
So, anyway, Paris.  Well it all started on the bus.  Not the the Eurostar is beyond my means (at least not the discount tickets), but it's as if something forces me to surrender myself to the dirtbag way of travelling.  But perhaps with the Eurotunnel fire it can be put down to astute premonition rather than imbecilic public transport masochism.  What, a mere 2 hours from a station 10 minutes down the road, oh no.  Let me take the crawling slow bus that departs from a station many a tube station away.  Give me 7 to 9 hours of uncomfortable seating.

That said the journey wasn't so bad.  Got to go on the boat as well which was not so great at midnight as there was not much to see.  No one got pulled off the bus for having dodgy papers for a change so there were no impediments to the journey.  It was so smooth that we arrived at the bus station in Paris at 5.30 instead of the predicted 6.15 and had to wait for a bloke in a van to come and open the station.  Galliani station was not as bad as I remembered.  In fact only on the way back did I see a sole tramp sprawled and comatose in the entrance.  I then embarked on the journey to Chinatown, opting for the metro after the helpful information booth woman who initially ignored me told me there wasn't a direct bus to my destination.  And so I went, kicking myself along the way for failing to produce a sentence of French without unwittingly adding some element of Chinese.  C'est loin ma?  Twat.

So I got off at a once familiar intersection only to be confronted by a personage who, whilst begging, would not fit too comfortably into the common description of beggar.  Rape victim?  Who knows.  Confrontational and unnervingly bilingual as she was I made a sharp exit in the wrong direction.  But I got to my friends place eventually, a tiny room seemingly barely lived in for the few years she'd been there.  Visually, she was barely changed for the long years since our last meeting, apart from the startling cuts and bruises which covered her head to foot.  Ideologically she had made a U-turn.  While we sat, her on the bed and me entwined in a grey sleeping bag on a grubby mattress on the floor and caught up with the events of the last few years, and I heard the stories of how and why.  As for the bruises, it wasn't quite as bad as I had concluded at first sight, but after the events of the morning and the slight feeling of strangeness from our long period of estrangement I was gripped by the old Parisian feeling, the suffocating fear that I'm sliding towards something ominous.  It was partly that which spurred me to leave 5 years ago.

Sleep got me first, and a few hours later we got up and walked around Chinatown.  Paris Chinatown is really something else.  Back when I lived up in the 18th I visited the 13th and instantly was captivated.  It's exotic, it's Chinese, but certainly not China.  Like La Defence, it has the air of a 1970s vision of the future.  It's got looming tower blocks and Chinesy Vietnamesey Frenchy shops.  It's got an underground warren-like Asian shopping mall which emerges into the most surreal tableau in Paris, a cluster of low shops topped with thick concete pagoda style roofs, guarded by  a station of tower blocks, and as a final touch a retro brown tower block composed of 3 cubes stands in the middle distance.  Around the high streets the air at times is thick with the pungent smell of durian from the Chinese stores.  People speak Cantonese, or French and I can't quite get over seeing perfect French coming from Chinese lips, or strong espressos being consumed by the Chinese.  Over in China people boggled at my coffee habit, only attempting the stuff themselves if it was heavily diluted and laced with milk (powder) and sugar.

Presently we went and sat under the tower we used to stay in all those years ago, passing by the metal fence upon which I sat 5 years ago pondering the Chinese unknown into which I was soon to jet off into.  That was a warm summer night and the wind blew strongly.  I hardly followed the conversation.  The next time I was in the company of one of the conversation members was the following year, my first return from China, his funeral.  Cause of death- self induced, no accident.  But in China all of that felt so far away.

Returning to last week, after walking round Chinatown we headed to nearby Biblioteque, another example of Parisian stark weirdness, and, as I found out,  riddled with design faults.  My friend pointed to the extra metal in the floor to prevent people slipping on the wet floor in the rain, the rotatable wooden panels in the windows to stop the sun frying people in the four glazed corner turrets.  Then there are the wires holding up the trees in the sunken centre portion, without which the imported tropical fauna would topple.  Nonetheless it is a stunning place, just ripe for a sequal of La Jetee.

Later that evening we went to her friend's squat, which was an incredible example of exactly what one imagines a idealised squat to be like (except for the lack of a bathroom) when you dream of running off and living in one as an adolescent, before you got such in the 9-5 mentality and dreamed of nice Ikea furniture.  It had everything you could need, and totally DIY.  The sheets were somewhat grey though, a unifying theme in squats as I observed in my limited experience over there.The host did all the construction herself, and then topped it all off with a home made cheese and spinach tart, if I remember correctly.  But i might not, because I was on holiday after all...

Some others were there, allowing me to put a face and context to some of the earlier stories.  We didn't leave that late, we had an old friend to see the following day, and a lot more chat to catch up on.  It was the early hours before we went to sleep, and the afternoon before we awoke.  But we got a lot done that day.  Stay tuned for our next exciting installment, featuring epic trawls across Paris, and hanging out with tramps on ring roads.  Now perhaps I can return to CSI and see how those unconvincing Irish mafia types are doing.