Beauty and the Beast

What a great day we had.  Here's the view from our room at breakfast:

Next was caffeine and a walk, during which a young Parisian guy hit on both of us. Sophie didn't think much of it but.... some of us have to take attention where we can get it.

Then, so much beauty at the lovely Musee D'Orsay:

(This last one is for those of you with OCD, just to get you going. Sorry I couldn't get it any straighter, hehe....)

 But then we spied this.  And decided to go for a ride.

And just as we walked back home, Sophie turned to me and said "We are definitely the luckiest people on earth," and how could I disagree with that?  We walked 25,000 steps in the Paris sunshine today and it was magnificent.

 Oh, and also, this.

Poem for Paris

Awake at four to make a flight

to Paris in the dead of night

only to find our discount plane

made cancellations.  What a pain!

Steve and Han are still ok

to head to Edinburgh today

but Soph and I must make a plan

and get to Paris if we can.

She’s got a meeting there at three

(To be accompanied by me).

The taxi's coming very soon

(at ninety euros it costs the moon)

so the only thing to do is try

to find another flight to fly.

Steve books us one for 9AM

(Expedia is such a gem!)

so off we go, goodbye Milan;

be back in winter if we can.

We drop them first, goodbyes are said

to terminal 2 our taxi heads

but wait!  Guess what? Our flight is wrong

(The tiny violin now plays its song)

because the flight he booked’s at night

BUT 9 PM IS NOT ALL RIGHT!

“We’re screwed,” I say to Soph, aghast;

(I knew this good luck couldn’t last)

so off to ticketing I head

To put our budget in the red.

And for the record, let’s just say

don’t buy a ticket the same day.

There’s better ways to spend your dough

(trying not to think about them though).

So off we go, we’re on Air France

We finally do the happy dance.

We land, we get our bags, we go

But traffic makes our taxi slow

and phones don’t work so we can’t relate

we’re running just a tad bit late.

Now finally there and it’s SO posh

and again I hand out lots more dosh.

Soph goes in, her game face on

while I‘m frumpy, grumpy, pale and wan

in the lobby with the bags

looking at the fashion mags

and before we know it there she is!

(That’s how it works in fashion biz.)

And now we trudge through Paris streets

in search of SIM card, housing, eats.

Travel’s glamour has its cost

cause somehow, always, we get lost

and if you think it still sounds nice

Soph locked herself in bathrooms – TWICE.

My mastercard, it got denied;

my head it aches, my nerves are fried,

and our place is great—it’s tiny, cute

but it’s a workout for the glutes.

(I must admit I almost wept

when climbing up the hundred steps.)

But you know what? We will be fine

there’s croissants, chocolate, and wine

and not to end make it end all rude

But we’re in frickin' PARIS, dude.

Champagne Problems

So, people from Milan do not sweat.  At all.  It's 35 degrees out and high noon and every Milanese lady is coiffed and perfect in a linen dress and heels, and every Milanese gentleman is walking the street in a suit, or at least dress pants and long sleeved shirts, looking cool and sounding cool speaking Italian into a mobile phone. (Obviously wooing someone, all of them. Even if they are on the phone trying to book a colonoscopy, they make it sound sultry.)

"Have you ever noticed that everyone from Milan is either really hot or really old?" Hannah asks.  Not cold, but old.  And truthfully, I kinda had noticed that.

"No one has any back sweat either," I said, jealously.

"Well one guy had a couple of small spots," she countered, and I foolishly disagreed, which caused a rather furious debate about mens back sweat which I will not go into here, for your sake.  Heat like this makes people dumb.  When I said "Let's cool ourselves off by thinking about cold stuff!" Hannah went first and said "Okay, the airplane from Vancouver was cold," and I countered with the gem  "Yeah," and then that was as far as we could go-- neither of us could come up with anything good like gelato, or cold beer, or stepping outside in the first snowfall of the year.  We just trudged forward, like wartime soldiers in single file, on the shady side of the street, towards home.

At one point we went into a store just because it was air conditioned, and picked up things to try on which we had no intention of buying.  Hannah turned and looked at me and loudly said "Jeez Mum, you look like you've been in a swimming pool."

Aren't teenagers are fun?  "But in a totally sexy way right, Han?"

"Oh my god Mum, just... no."

At least that made her walk away for a second so I could sweat in private.

Fifteen glorious minutes of air conditioning in that store and I still hadn't stopped...er... glowing. But we had to leave since anyway it wasn't getting any cooler outside.  How did we get home?  When we finally did we had to suffer the indignity of sitting on the stairs outside our door while I hunted through my enormous purse for the key, and as I did this Hannah, furious at having to wait even one more minute, looked at me with the disdain one might reserve for someone who has admitted to drowning kittens.  Once inside we knocked each other aside, elbows flying, whipping off shirts and skirts and dresses before the door was even shut, each throwing ourselves in front of a fan dramatically in our skivvies.  Who cares that all the windows and blinds were open?  Screw those perfect Milanese people in the apartments across the way.  They would probably turn away in disgust from our uncouth splayed legs anyway.

The final humiliation was that the cold bottle of prosecco waiting in the fridge had a weird string on the top of it and nothing else.  How do you open that?!  No wire cage or cork sticking out like usual. We felt like cavemen opening the first ever bottle of prosecco, banging it on stuff and scratching our heads and crying before finally just googling it and learning you're meant to open it with a corkscrew.  Crazy Italians.

But then finally, gloriously, this:

Sassing and Shoving your way through an Italian Renaissance Museum

Saw lots of Italian renaissance era art in Milan today and when all the religious imagery starts to get a bit much for us we end up making up silly captions for the paintings.  Wanna see?  If you're Christian I apologize in advance and hope you find me irreverent and silly instead of insulting.  That's the spirit these were meant in anyway.

Also at the museum was a video showing an elaborate restoration of a cartoon for the School of Athens fresco by Raphael.  Watching it, I decided that I want to be an art restorer who painstakingly cleans dust off masterpieces in Italy (and also get a blunt haircut, hip glasses, lab coat and cool shoes like the girl in the video.)  My family thinks this is ridiculous however, since it is essentially a job where you do a lot of cleaning, which they were quick to point out, is not really my specialty when we are at home.

"But I can lie on a specially built platform above a priceless work of art and swirl a q-tip in circles too," I said.

"Those people are trained, mum," says Sophie.

"Job requirements: Can you swirl a q-tip in circles?  You can?  Do you have cool shoes? You're hired." I say.

"Mum! They know stuff. It's more than swirling."

"Hey, there's also people that shove the platform along sometimes." (Hannah).

"What?"

"See that bit?  Once they're done a section, they have, like, people that shove the platform a foot down so they can swirl more," Hannah explains.

"Right."

"You could shove.  You're good at shoving."  The girls agree on this point.

"Thanks girls, I feel loved."

Madrid, Caliente

Today's my last full day in Madrid.

It was 36 degrees out.  So what did we do? Naturally, we decided to walk uphill in the hot sun for about 15 minutes to get coffee with hot milk at a cafe. Since we hadn't eaten breakfast, the next obvious thing to do was walk a little farther, to the famous 'Chocolateria San Gines', which sells churros-- hot fried dough sticks-- that you dip in hot chocolate sauce.  (Don't judge; I'm on holidays here.)  And why choose to sit inside, in the air conditioned restaurant, when you can sit at a cafe table outside in the sun, and soak in the Madrid street atmosphere?  The inside of the restaurant is for chumps, not for stylish, seasoned travelers like us.

It was a trifle hot is all I'm saying.

Afterwards we did some sightseeing as we walked back, and then we had a hot lunch that my friend had recommended.  (I'm serious.  Some people never learn.)  We then walked off the heavy food at El Retiro park, a beautiful big park in the city that is of course a hot, sunny, uphill walk away from the restaurant.  The park has some shade!  But also very, very hot, sunny sections that have beautiful views of hot people doing hot stuff like rowing rowboats in the hot sun.  I sat down on a rock to watch the hot people row each other around and immediately leapt up because the rock was insanely hot from baking in the sun all day.

Did I mention I chose today to dress all in black?

Eventually we did the long, hot walk back home.  We stopped at the square near our apartment and bought cans of lemonade and drank it down all at once as we sat on a shady bench.  And guess what happened? A soccer ball rolled over to my feet.  I looked up and could tell it belonged to a little boy who was playing with his dad.  His dad was standing a ways away, very tanned and fit and dark and shirtless.  If you were middle aged and your eyes were starting to go, and you were squinting in the heat, you could mistake that dad for Cristiano Ronaldo.  I'm just saying.

I kicked the ball back.  It was hot.  And also kinda hawt.

Spanish Sisters in Madrid

Today Meg popped into a coffee shop while I waited outside and she came back grinning.  "I just played soccer in Spain, and you didn't!" she said.  It was very obvious gloating.

"What?!"

"Yeah, there were three boys in there kicking the ball around and one pass rolled right to me and everyone kinda waited and looked at me so I smiled and kicked it back."

"Damnit!!  Not fair!"

Huge Meg smile.  I have never seen so many teeth and gums on her.

I have to admit I owe a huge debt to her for agreeing to come to Madrid with me at the last minute.  She works a lot-- like fifty hours a week maybe?  And she has kids too so we don't see each other as often as we should. But in late July I sent her a text that said "So.... Do you want to go to Madrid with me for five days in August?"  And then within 24 hours she sent me a text back that said "So, looks like I could book a British Airways flight on air miles...." ..and before I knew it it was all booked and she sent me a series of 3 emojis: an airplane, something I couldn't recognize, and a smiley face.

"What's that middle thing?"  I texted back.  "The emoji.  Is that a tampon?"

"It's a picture of money with wings.  As in 'my money is flying away on this trip I'm taking with you'," she texted back.

Can I just interject here that I'm really glad there's no tampon emoji?

Anyway, I'm lucky to have her.  Today she came to the Caravaggio exhibit with me and patiently listened to me drone on and on about it and then when we came home we opened a bottle of cava and I drank way more than my share of it and she totally noticed and didn't say anything at all.

Madrid Cuatro

Madrid highlights of today:

1. When you order a beer in a bar, there is no choice of craft beer or anything, in most places there's just the one kind.  And when they bring it to you, they also bring you a snack without you asking for it.  Yesterday it was a dish of olives.  But today it was two little slices of French bread, each soaked in some kind of oily green stuff with a silly little whole fish on the top of it, topped with some strawberry jam.  Not joking.  Mmm...fish and jam.  "Are we supposed to eat it or laugh at it?" I said to Meg.  We did it, we ate it, and we were feeling pretty self congratulatory, but then I swear I saw two hombres peeking out from behind the kitchen door giggling at us and saying "Dude, I told you they'd think it was a Spanish specialty.  You owe me 5 euros."

2.  Kids as young as six were playing soccer in the square until 11pm tonight, and every single one of them is wearing a Real Madrid jersey which makes it really hard to make teams because everyone is wearing red. I  SO wanted to join but I was a little worried about playing in the dark on stairs in flip flops.  The ball did roll towards me at one point and I almost had my chance to kick it back but it hit a tree instead. Meg kindly said "I totally would have gotten out of the way so you could have kicked it," and I said, "yeah, don't worry, I would have pushed you out of the way if it meant I could have kicked it."  We're close like that.

3.  There's a whole lot of Jesus in Madrid.  Like, A LOT, a lot.  Today we went to the Prado museum and saw happy Jesuses and sad Jesusus and skinny Jesuses and kinda Nordic, Swedish style Jesuses, and even one baby Jesus that was the spitting image of Betty White.  For real.  It's probably for the best that I can't post photos of that one.  It was a little disturbing, I'm not gonna lie.

4.  I've done three museums in three days, so tomorrow, I'm going shopping.  I'm going to try to buy myself a Sergio Ramos.  Google him.  You can thank me later.