Drunken Decorating. The New Sport.
Eat this, Martha Stewed-prune.
Saturday morning, the sun just high enough to fall on the varying shades of long-spun hair, sipping sour and strong coffee from thin white china cups in my bare-walled living room.
Four of us, two canadiennes, an italienne, and our token young french lady who's sharp tongue sliced me to giggling ribbons the whole weekend through.
Coffees drained, strange demonstrations of varying types of female flexibility executed on the freshly vacuumed floor, juggling balls put away much to everyone's disappointment.
We trooped out to the March� St-Pierre in search of gold and crimson silk to replace the rocky horror posters I once had on my walls, in another country and almost another life.
Returning home hours later, laden with fresh groceries for a proper italian spaghetti carbonara and metres of translucent silk and a fistful of feathered butterflies, we drank aperitifs and watched Anna Maria teach us the proper way to make carbonara, and then we regaled ourselves with chocolate desserts and wine and port to round things off.
Once properly drunk and giggling and breaking into random dancing to the 80s music pouring from the new bright blue stereo, radio tuned to Europe 2, 103.5 FM, we set about to falling from chairs and stringing gold and grimson and orange in strange shapes from the walls.
(and whistling at my rather buffed neighbour across-la-cour who was doing his ironing in his underwear)
Returning home in the morning (because the lovely and talented Mr. Pyke required my leaving before sunrise to r�cup�re him from the airport) part of my breathlessness wasn't from the almost-customary stairclimb.
Sunday's rollerblading marathon was the strangest thing. Twenty kilometres of sheer whooping exuberance, with our monstre playing worriwort and streaming from front to back of several thousand rollerbladers looking for the poor, lost, Mr. Pyke who gave up after the first, and toughest incline.
Of course, I'd gotten lost in the crowd by then and hadn't been able to explain that it all got easier from there...
Mussels and belgian fries (because they're not french, you see, they're belgian) at the place de la Bastille, beer on the house and a pair of whitebread Canadian tourists at the table besides us, their ears turning red from the talk of sociopaths, childhood terrors and things that the mundanes should never be obliged to hear, lest it oblige them to think outside their bubble...
Raspberry mead still too heavy from yeast, candles and incense and CDs CDs, talk that continued until it was time for PROPER CANADIAN HUGS (oh god how I missed them so terribly) and les brumes du sommeil came searching for me...
All in all the weekend flew past in a frenzy of wonder, this morning's work-related fears all but ridiculous in the harsh fluorescent lights.
And tonight, tonight there will be canadians once again set loose on this town.
:D