2 days back from Paris, have finally recovered. Very expensive city, basically just a shit London, only thing it does better is vice (the old lady seemed so nice!). Oddly enough, met more French at home than in Paris, and the first thing me m8s did after stepping foot out of the station was get scammed by Indonesians who spoke neither English nor French until you told them to fuck off, at which point they spoke fluently. Wouldn't have it any other way, when you're brushing shoulders with shady Moroccans, dodgy Frenchnamese and a gorillion Sino-Murrican tourists with their entourage of 30 dozen African Eiffel tower merchants and armed Frenchies guarding Shoah memorials; you're in spirited company, and are not in want for excitement... At a price. Hilariously, just like the EU the projected cost turned out to be 4 times what I was told, and this has hurt me grievously, in spite of all this I have been so culturally enriched that the U.N. has banned me from entering Iran lest they use me to develop weapons of mass cultural enlivenment. Still, got to see some interesting shit. The Mona Lisa is overrated, everything else was underrated, spent about 10 minutes looking at a wall of amphora depicting Heracles beating the crap out of people with a club and 20 minutes looking at the Deluge or the Rape of the Sabines or that one painting of Italians dicking around in Heaven that covered what could well have been 20ft of glorious Italian renaissance. It was interesting to see all the Frenchies museums gush over Napoleon after ours did so for Wellington; the answer in who was better is clearly not in who won (Wellington) but in who had the giant funeral death metal carriage of spikes and Mars (also Wellington). The Eiffel Tower was meh, the Notre Dame even better than I thought, the Churches dotted around on hills and all that adequately gothic, saw the Hebdo killing site and the graffitid lion (I know it's all political but do they care about maintaining monuments?), the Bastille (well, where it was before they revolutioned over it) and went to see the graveyard where Oscar Wilde was buried in a literary pilgrimage but it was shut down due to some terror alert shenanigens. All in all I think it was more poetic to walk all that way only to get as close to the gates and as far away as Siberia. It's a nice metaphor for life, but everyone looks at it different ways. Going through Calais during all the immigrant border running and train jumping was far less interesting than I imagined it would be; they prefer the Lorries to the trains so I never got to meet any of them. A city is as good as its underside (Abu Dhabi pls step up your game) and Paris has an all right underside. I had great fun, and I also got to understand why the French hate Paris more than anyone else on the planet. What more can you ask for, than a 6 year old red for the price of few months old beer?