Snapshots from Paris

Things To Do on a Rainy Day

Have cake.

Go shopping.

Count rain drops on the surface of the canal, while cuddling up under an umbrella with your beloved.

And go for brunch with your friends. Somewhere warm, and laugh the weather away along with your headache.

Dreaming

Today, I spent the afternoon chez Ladurée, pretending. That I was Marie Antoinette. And so so I discovered that I now prefer the macarons au café. If they are chocolate they should definitely be amer.

Right now I should be getting ready for the dinner I have been looking forward to what feels like forever, but first I will just sit here listening to the jazz-filled street for a little while. And that must bode well for the future.

One Perfect Mess

The Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris is literally almost out of this world. So incredibly beautiful. I had never been there before, but this Saturday the temperature reaching beach levels (for a frozen Scandinavian like me) combined with my desperate need for a little serenity made sure I had no reason to put it off any further. For the record, going there has been on the "should do" list for all but forever... And, most fantastic of it all, is that the my plan worked! We walked around for hours, looking at the plants and the stones, wondering quietly what all of the people whose namse surrounded us were like, and took pictures. Sometimes looking at the world through a lens can be very meditative. And right there, The combination of chaos and calm is perfect. For eating panini in a sunny spot under golden trees, forgetting everything about the frenetic week of dragons and disasters (the dragons are figurative, of course. Although I really wish I had a real one) that a moment ago seemed so important.

The next day was all about sleeping late and celebrating the sunshine with this lemon and merengue pie.

Men's shirt from Gap; jeans from 7 for all mankind; shoes from Zara; bag and belt, both from Furla.

Weekend in Paris

Somehow, I've never really understood the concept of talking to the person sitting next to you on a plane. But then again, usually the people that feel an overwhelming urge to befriend me in air planes are kind of creepy. With the exception of the Danish girl who chatted me through Sex and the City the Movie on an overnight plane to Hong Kong once. She was nice, although her height and honey blond cheeriness were sort of overwhelming for my introvert Finnish and rather sleepy self. But, as a general rule people ignoring my demonstrative hiding behind a Financial Times seem to be slightly reddish middle aged men, and for some reason they all seem to want to talk about Thailand. Which naturally always is a real treat.

So imagine my surprise when the definitely neither overweight nor fried-looking guy sitting next to me this time turned out to be both talkative and nice. Ok, so I should probably rather have been working on my footnote-checking than listening to stories about my new friend's three-month-old Parisian baby and how the baby in question as a result of its father's business trip to Finland would now be introduced to real Finnish rye bread (the father in question being Finnish, of course. Frenchmen don't get the rye bread thing), but whatever. There are worse ways of spending your Friday evening than going to where you want to be for a weekend off work, teamed up with a pleasant surprise. And taking into account that the surprise in this case did not even get drunk, despite my stubborn refusal to help him drink up his notes the steward did not have the change for, I think we can safely conclude that there is a chance still for Finnish middle aged men.

And I have made my first real disposable friend.

P.s. I know the picture has nothing what so ever to do with the rest of this post. Sorry about that, but the security staff at Roissy clearly didn't appreciate the artistic value of me taking pictures of the terminal buildings at sunrise. However, I think an afternoon break in the sun at Café Lateral pretty much sums up the spirit of the "weekend in Paris". At least to me it does.