the market

i love markets. outdoor smorgasborgs of all kinds of stuff sold by vendors whose livelihood depends on it. i love the sights, smells and sounds and i like the interaction with real live people and their products, the bargaining, the human exchange.

having grown up in a cold northern city of malls – those indoor plastic complexes of retail, mass production, made in china, trendy chain stores, automated teller machines, simulated ugly everything and any other facet of big c capitalism that i can’t think of right now –i am happiest  shopping in a local outdoor neighbourhood market like this one.

in fact, i spent so much time cruising west edmonton mall with my pals as a 13 year old, that i now actually start to feel physically ill when i spend more than 15 minutes inside an indoor shopping centre. too much recycled oxygen for one life i imagine. i am not exagerating about this. malls make me sick.

this parisian market near ourq station is anything but plastic. it displays the diversity of the hood and i wanted to document it all. though there is nothing particularly exotic or grandiose about any of it, it shows a beautiful part of daily parisian life. we’ve all seen enough pictures of the eiffel tower, the notre dame and montmartre. here is the market and its people.

and since i was not  really at the market to shop but just to be a tourist and to soak in the sights and sounds, i roamed like the roma through the aisles and captured moments of that place and time.

and of course, being young female and fairly sexily dressed (it was a very hot, humid day, i was wearing a tank top), i enjoyed the attention of all of the young male vendors. as i mentioned before, in a previous post, men in paris are way more expressive than the ones in montreal.

“wow wow wow, madame, madame, madame, un ptit café, prenons un ptit café, madame revenez à 14h, je finis le travail à 14h, pourquoi prendre un ptit café! madame!”

i’m not saying this type of communications is always welcome. in fact, i can remember many an occasion when it becomes tiring, intrusive  even aggressive and completely unwanted but … on this day, I guess i found it flattering and entertaining. passing so briefly through town, i flirted right back at them and willingly took their enthusiastic advances in exchange for headshots.

see how happy and proud these guys were to pose for me. little do they know ive posted them on the web!

and these are the kind of friendly exchanges that can be had at the market. free of charge!

this guy was by far my favourite. i found him kind of hot. but when he asked me to go for coffee with him after he got off work i told him i had a boyfriend (not true). his response was, “what of it?” and i enjoyed his cheekiness but i was not looking for a date with a watermelon man on this here trip.

why not? what’s wrong with the watermelon man, you ask? well maybe because i only had 2 days left to enjoy my friends, i didnt want to waste it with the unknown watermelon man. and maybe because i was thinking about a few days later when i was going to see someone who had once been just a cute friendly stranger in the hood asking me out for a coffee.

the coffee that turned into dinner into a restaurant that turned into a kiss on the streets and a cuddle on the bus, a walk home and a promise of a date the next day and then…

i will not get into the details of that second date except to say that the consequences of saying yes to coffee with a stranger on the street when travelling in a strange city can be loaded with repercussions you never imagined of.

and mr watermelon man there could not even have imagined all the images that flashed through my mind while weighing the possibilities of saying yes.

so i didn’t.

instant childhood

one of the great pleasures of this three-day stop in paris is rekindling the musical vibes with a good pal of mine, sometimes known as reya sunshine. we met in montreal something like 5 years ago. both of us were doing music and looking for other girls to play with and at the time i had a huge apartment with a basement filled with instruments and an old beat-up set of drums.  how i inherited those drums from a very short-lived relationship gone wrong is another story but they really got their most action once i started playing with reya.

i had already been jamming and creating songs with my roomies and pals christine and psycho sonia but when reya joined the mix the energy just jumped through the roof. reya has a powerful and gorgeous voice and that kind of kick ass fiery start-up energy that us girls, living  in the shadowy depths of hochelaga sure could use a good dose of. with reya joining us, hochelagasti finally felt the sun. thanks to pal, dj and artist management queen extraordinaire tashish, we got ourselves a gig at the divan orange, opening for nomadic massive and … got our set together in a week of so. our music was a wide range of eclectic to say the least, with one song sang by so in italian, some reggae-rocka-blues courtesy of reya, and even a little spoken word fucked up with the delights of a digital delay. we liked to switch around, changing instruments so at least two if not three of us ended up playing the drums that night.

the drums. god. i dont think i have ever been as happy as  that night sitting on stage using one of the nomadic massive boys’ drum kit to rattle away the beat to one of reya’s songs. blissed out like a three year old. we were good that night, performing as the sous-soul sessionistas.  the audience loved us and we loved them and it was over before you could say cheese.

after such a fiery debut reya was soon off to mexico and the sous-soul sessionistas didn’t get a chance to ride the wave of love.  she and i had experienced such intense moments together before she left though.  one night i helped her get her stuff back from an abusive ex-lover, convincing her to call the cops for assistance and standing there at the door, witnessing the brutal angry and final break-up. a few months later it was reya staring down at me from the top of a building roof, saying “oh.my.god.caroline.” as i lay upside down, miraculously held up by the ladder which had failed to support me coming down the 12 feet from the roof to the cement floor, one of my legs trapped between a ladder rung and the glass table which had been shattered by the fall. meanwhile, i alternated between laughing crazily — obviously in a state of shock — and screaming for help at the top of my lungs — while the boys on the floor below continued their jam, completely oblivious to my near brush with death.

and the band played on….

so reya was off to mexico where she eventually met her love and i was left in montreal with this revelation  that i loved drumming and had pretty kick-ass rhythm but that it wasn’t so easy for me to find the right people to  play with. i guess there aren’t so many people i feel totally comfortable being myself with. its only when their is no pretension or fear that the music seems to flow from me. but life and music continues, other songs are played, experiences had ….

flash forward to the present. five years later reya is living in paris. i’ve moved to barcelona for a sketchy gambian rastafarian, lived out a roller-coaster ride of an adventure and come to my senses and returned back home to montreal, wiser and more peaceful. reya and i  both still love reggae music, the soulful blues, rock and roll, you name it, we still keep in touch and we both still connect so well musically when we get into a jam session. these three days in paris, so many seeds are planted. so many grooves and riffs and beginnings of songs… so much good energy thats its really too bad an atlantic ocean divides us or that i can’t quite bring myself to move to paris, despite all the relatives i have there. this summer trip i made there made me consider it again, but i know living there full time is a different bag than dropping in whilst on holiday. just making rent there is a whole other factor to consider… but at least now i know what to come to paris for and that some how this girl and i have got find a way of collaborating long distance.

there is a project there, waiting to be born. i can’t wait.

siberian meditation

my hosts managed to convince me that it was imperative that i stay up all day despite my fatigue. this way i would adapt to the time change faster. i did sneak in a few cat naps here and there but otherwise stayed semi-active all day and even agreed to accompany them to a meditation session given by a chilean shaman woman at someone’s apartment that evening.

soledad didn’t look anything like what i imagined upon hearing the words “shaman.” stereotypical images of a long haired, aboriginal woman with long loose-shaped garments of natural fibres flashed through my head. elise had met her while researching the ancient mayan civilization in mexico city; she was actually a very sexy and fashionable lady who looked way younger than her age, with a beautiful smile and gentle energy.

a group of about ten of us — all women except for one man — met in someone’s apartment for the session. she told us that today was the birthday of the founder of this form of meditation and that the way one spends one birthday is extremely important as it establishes the foundation for your year. many people spend their birthday drinking and indulging but soledad recommended against it for this reason. she also spoke alot about the sun’s energy and how powerful it is and how we were in a period when it was particularly powerful.

she led us through a series of exercises. many of them were not physical at all, as i had expected. one of them involved getting into groups of two or three and taking the time to give each person a compliment. in another, we had to think of several positive attributes about ourselves and then share these with our group members. another exercise involved standing facing another person and looking into their eyes for five minutes. i found this very difficult, i dont think i was able to look at her directly for more than seconds at a time but  found the woman i had chosen as a partner to be very open and generous with her gaze.

 finally we did some movement-oriented exercises of all kinds. some involved visualizing the energies we wanted to be rid of — such as all of our addictions and dependencies — while breathing out and pushing these energies down and away from our solar plexus. one of my favourites was imagining all of things we wanted to receive in life and visualizing them all and picking them up and bringing them up to our belly. i couldnt stop imagining all the things, ideas and experiences i wanted and the flow of images never stopped and i kept bringing them to my belly. i think i was the last one to stop. ha ha, i was a tiny bit embarassed. its true i want a lot.

one exercise we didnt do but that reya told me soledad had taught me, was something to help concentration. you draw a black circle and post it on the wall somewhere. every day you spend ten minutes trying to concentrate on it with your eyes. best is if you use a timer so that you don’t spend your ten minutes wanting to check your watch. i tried it that night. i wasnt able to do it for ten minutes but i did feel its effects immediately afterwards. i was able to focus better on one thought and one action at a time from start to completion, rather than mentally hopping all over the place like i usually do. imagine if i did it regularly.

havent made any of these exercises a practice yet but i did feel their power. and the greatest testimony to them is soledad herself. this woman has no homebase. she spends all of her time travelling all over the globe – spending a few months concentrating on a particular continent — giving her workshops. i asked her if she ever felt tired and she said that no, she didnt. i realized, why would she if she is constantly practicing this energy-building mediation?

a different kind of paris

i have family in paris so ive been lucky to have visited several times. there is much to see and do of course but i never had the sense that paris had much of a truly underground subculture until recently. this is probably due to the fact that most of my family and friends there are pretty bougie, so that’s the only paris i ever saw. three summers ago i almost caught a glimpse of paris subculture when my friend marta introduced me to her polish punk friends living there. unfortunately said polish punks were rather bitchy and definitely miserly about sharing their world so … i never did find out where they hung out. one time, i met some friends at this bar that upon first impression, kind of looked like and reminded me of les foufounes electriques in montreal. so i got kind of excited … until they started playing french pop music. it turned out to be a pretty bo-bo kind of place, paris slang for bourgeois bohémien. now i’m not saying im not guilty of belonging to this group of people in some ways but … i am always looking for something else.

this is the first time i stayed with friends and not family in paris so it got me discovering a whole other city. my friends live near metro ourq which is in the north eastern part of the city and in the vicinity of the canal st martin and parc la villette. this means that although you are definitively in a big urban sprawl of a city, you are surrounded by water and green green nature nonetheless. my first day in town, i was completely jetlagged and exhausted and paris was really hot and muggy so we never got farther than the park. reya and i chilled out in the grass and caught up, enjoying the sights and sounds of children and dogs running around and adults playing sports or jamming with djembes. at one point, we even found a secluded section of the park where you couldve sworn you were hanging in the country side. i wasnt invasive enough to take pictures of them, but i enjoyed the sight of a bunch of shirtless guys sleeping in this oasis.

i couldve spend my whole time there, in that park. funny how i went all the way to paris to realize that all i really felt like doing was sleeping in the sunny grass.

but the fact that i could was in itself a revelation. i remember about ten few years back when i came to paris in order to fly to tunisia with my brother. i had to wait a few days while he sorted work-related business out and since i only had just enough cash for the trip to north africa, i spent my time in free public spaces, including the park near his place. one afternoon i fell asleep near a pond of ducks. i was woken up by a couple of security guards who informed me that sleeping in the park was not permissible. say what?! but remember, this is a city that closes its gated parks at 11 o’clock every night.

parc la villette is definitely an oasis in this land of social control.

all the ways you can wait

after no sleep at all on my night flight i arrive in paris. once again i am confronted by the fact that airports are not actually people friendly. the wait for my lone piece of luggage – small enough to have put in the overhead bin if i had been intelligent enough to think of it — is interminable. then there is the queue for the passport line. finally, the queue for train tickets to paris proper. i dont have the proper cards to be able to avoid the line-up and use the automatic ticket dispensing machines although i do have to try them before figuring this painful truth out, thus losing my place in the line-up to the place where real people serve you. while attempting to use the ticket machine, i realize that i do have cash but not the right change but that this can be easily solved by buying a badly needed coffee. i head over to the little expresso counter and order one but in my sleep deprived stupour I forget to ask for change. three minutes later when I realize my mistake and ask for it, the cashier asks me to wait until she serves the customer she is with, who does ask her for change. when it is my turn again, she doesn’t have any more change. exasperated I make some exasperated comment to which bitchy, she replies bitchily. to which i explain that i am not blaming her but that i am tired and frustrated to which she replies that they are not there to provide change. to which again i retort that i understand but that this whole system is very inconvenient. to which she had another ready and uncaring reply. at which point i realize my fatigue and latent latin temper has inadvertently led me into a loop of parisian bitchiness which will get me nowhere. i resign myself to rejoining the long line of people waiting for a single  human ticket teller to serve them. i make a mental note to make sure that next time i travel to this city i will not only have cash on hand, but small change.

the line-up is really endless. i am worried because i think reya, whose place i am staying at, has to be at work at 1 and it is already dangerously close to twelve. another thing i mistakenly thought would be easy is to phone her. i naively thought somehow that i could just conveniently pick up a new sim card for my canadian cellphone and voilà! transform it into a french one. no such imaginary place where sim cards can be bought exists. for the phones you need cards. probably i couldve bought one somewhere but somehow i am too tired and to scared to lose my place in the line-up to figure this one out. after fretting about the time, unsuccessfully trying to send text messages with my phone  and getting increasingly impatient with this absurdly long line-up – why the fuck don’t they have more tellers working? — i see that a kind-looking african-french woman behind me is using her cellphone and so i ask her if i could give her some money in exchange for using it. she refuses my money but regretfully says she fears she may not have enough credit. i try it and it doesn’t work. i wait and fret some more. finally i build up the courage to ask some large, macho, mediterranean looking man if i can borrow his cellphone, which he has been using incessantly in a language i don’t recognize. he reluctantly agrees but asks if the number is local and insists on doing the number himself. then he dismissively tells me it looks like his phone only does greek numbers and resumes his business of barking into his headset. ive tried and ive tried and ive failed. i must trust fate.

i reach the head of the line. i buy my ticket. i walk downstairs to the train. a small asian woman who was behind me in the queue upstairs approaches me and tells me i can try her phone. i thank her and call reya and reach her. nothing to worry about after all. her crazy boss lady hasn’t called her to go in yet today and anyways she is planning to quit so there is no stress, she can wait for me to get to her place. ah. relief. i hand the phone back to the woman and thank her again for her kindness. the train arrives and we sit near each other and chat. she is a doctor who works for medecins sans frontieres in london but often commutes to paris on business. originally from burma she has worked all over the place, most recently in some of the former soviet states. she tells me all about how scarce their resources are. she also tells me about burma, about how she got into medecine, thanks to her father’s insistence. about how although she misses the food and her family sometimes, she will never go back to live there. she tells me she likes london, she has found members of her community there and a few places to buy the kind of foods she likes. she is very sweet and kind and when i finally tell her a bit about myself, including that i work in radio and oral history, she laughs and says she understands now how it is that i got her to tell me her whole life story in under ten minutes.

after that i am a little embarassed about my probing and i stop. we sit in silence and i observe this white woman and her two kids. she is very overweight and underdressed (it is a very hot day here) and both her kids are a much darker skin tone than she is so i wonder what the dad looks like. the mom is eating a baguette sandwhich and feeding bits to her kids and she seems impatient and curt with them. but how easy it is to judge other people’s parenting. maybe they truly are brats. or maybe it is just really hot and she is fed up. i play a game of eye hide-and-seek with the toddler son until it is time to get off and i say goodbye to my burmese friend whose name i never learn.

i get off at ourq station and take the escalator up. a french-african man turns around to look at me and tells me he finds me very seductive. i smile and say thank you. he starts to ask me questions. i am friendly enough although not in the least interested. we get to  where the neighbourhood map is located and i try to figure out what exit to take while he continues to try and charm me. welcome to paris. this encounter is typical of this city and frankly, so uncommon in montreal, that i dont even mind it. maybe i have not had enough male attention recently so i enjoy the moment for what it is. a quick ego boost.  i choose my exit and he follows me out. after a few more minutes of humouring his questions, i finally tell him plainly that i am really tired and that i need to get to my friend’s place quickly and so, i really dont want to have a coffee. he graciously accepts his defeat and walks away. i walk down the street in the humid heat, slowly starting to recognize the quartier. i am hot, i am tired, i cant wait to drop my bags and take a cold shower, but i am happy. soon i will be home.

travellers

a few minutes before the 9:25 pm take-off. after the long wait for the check-in, i rushed to my gate to be pleasantly surprised to see jenna, the girl who does the anarcho-punk music radio show that comes on after mine.  she’s headed to paris too where she’s meeting a friend with whom she’s going to walk across spain. wow. now that’s a trip. makes my little two week jaunt to attend a wedding and catch up with old friends seem so … plebian. but hey, not all of us can be so hardcore. she is also a vegan. a punk anarchist vegan who will cross the whole of spain on foot with all of her food in her packpack. that is very cool but it sounds hard. core.

oh my god the testosterone level on this plane just shot up a good couple of notches as a group of fine-looking french men just came aboard. distraction.

what was i saying? oh yes that jenna’s political beliefs are not exactly what makes her the kind of person who would walk across a country on foot, are they? i mean, i could do that. could i? the enterprise does involve a certain amount of commitment and dedication to an action — a physical action, a physical activity, — that may take about 30 days or so. at least. and apparently most people who make this walk are pilgrims. christians doing a religious pilgrimage.

jenna also told me about this world air guitar contest that takes place every year in finland. it was started by people who believe there would be less wars if more people took up air guitar. apparently participants can even attend a pre-contest retreat where they learn techniques on holding and catching their air guitar. check out the documentary, called “air guitar nation”. i think if you were to think about it long enough, you would find that there are many similarities between christian spain-on-foot-crossing pilgrims and finnish air guitar competitors.

i love travellers, they are the most interesting people. i consider myself one too but i know that i have not even skimmed the surface of my traveller nature. and i am reminded of this every time i cross paths with true free spirits like this girl. she is also hitting barcelona but she will truly experience the underground world of anarchists, punks and squatters whom i only observed from an interested distance when i lived there.

then again, i was slumming it with the west africans in gypsy-land. so what. comparisons are never useful or that worthwhile to pursue.

wierd possessiveness

this girl, who was a few metres up in the queue, asked me if she could borrow my pen. i smiled and said yes of course and promptly handed it to her. i then spent the next ten minutes alternating between suspiciously eyeing her and wondering if she was the kind of person to just forget to give it back and actually going to the trouble of taking pictures of her to document her image, either way. she gave it back. it was a cheap pen i’d gotten for free at my job for christ’s sake. what the hell was wrong with me?

airports

there’s enough time between trips that i forget how many hours are spent waiting in interminable line ups. this is what it looked like that evening, waiting to get on an overnight flight to paris.  as the two french dudes behind me were observing, some lines are short and long and some lines are long and fast. this one was long and long until i got worried and grabbed an airport staff to see if i could skip ahead since my plane was leaving in less than half an hour. i could.

taking off

 

 

a few minutes to 7 pm. sitting on the shuttle bus, waiting to depart to pierre elliott trudeau airport for my 9:25 pm flight to paris. i hope i get there in good time. they say three hours for international flights, i’ll be there at least one and half hours before. but they also say the check-in counter closes an hour before the flight so 8:25. it should be ok but it will be cutting it close. i didn’t use to worry about these things, breezing in at the last minute. but experience — and a few costly repercussions — have taught me. i thought about recording but … unfortunately most public experiences are now mediated by the sound of commercial radio. i’ll spare you. uh oh, here we go. radio’s off, motor’s running and off we go ….

coming soon ….

working on an audio-visual blog of my trip to Europe, catch up with me in a few days ….