Gay Paris

It's strange but even though I've spent somewhere in the vicinity of 26 hours on planes and in airports since yesterday morning, and despite the fact that I spent the rest of the time until this point surrounded by people whose language I can't understand for the life of me, I still don't think the whole concept of what I'm doing has actually sunk in yet.

The flights were pretty non-eventful. The jar of Vegemite I had in my bag as a requested present for my Parisian hosts was confiscated first thing by a Qantas girl. She seemed incredulous that somebody would dare, or simply dream, to bring something like that on board with them. I had nothing else confiscated then, or in the second Qantas check, or in the check in Singapore, but then in London on the final plane switch, they took my expensive bed bug repellent because there was an extra 25ml than allowed in the bottle: It was probably for the best - spending the other flights knowing I had gotten away with this gross breach of international security had got me thinking, and if it hadn't been confiscated, I would have come up with a plan so heinous and infernal those 45 minutes between London and Paris would have gone down in the history books.

But I have enjoyed my day in Paris. My host, Patrick, handed me a helmet, leather jacket and pair of gloves when we got home from the airport, and offered to take me on his infamous motorcycle tour of Paris.

We alternated between short tourist stops where I sometimes remembered that I had a camera with me, and crazed, high-speed races mere inches between buses, cars and other motorcycles. I couldn't help recalling the now broken promise to my travel insurer that I would not be on a motorcycle, and I managed to break that one in less than 24 hours of my trip.

It did give me a chance to observe the rules of Parisian traffic, however. Rule One is that you drive in your lane on the right-hand side of the road. Rule Two states that if it's too hard to stay in your lane, don't worry about it and drive in whatever lane (or number of lanes at any one time) that you feel like. Rule three is that if you can't easily stay on your side of the road due to slow cars, too many cars, or not enough lanes for your liking, don't worry about it and feel free to drive on the wrong side of the road so long as there's nothing coming. (This was clearly amended some time in the late 1990s to add, "and if you really think it will be fun to zip between a bus, two cars and two motorcycles [none of whom are staying in any kind of lane at all, pursuant to Rule Two] when they're on the wrong side of the road, nearly upon you, and everyone's doing fifty over the speed limit in a pedestrian zone where traffic technically shouldn't even be anyway, then we're behind you all the way.") I was pretending I was in some movie, probably as someone like Matt Damon in the Bourne series, getting chased by cops. The real cops don't seem to do anything much actually; it's as if they acknowledge the traffic is much larger, stronger and way crazier than they are, and their solution to it is to close their eyes and pretend they can't see it and that, using the same logic as Douglas Adams's Ravenous Bugblatter Beast, simply deny there even is any traffic.

Anyway, here are some really boring touristy photos. Some are blurry because I took them wearing motorcycle gloves and a full face helmet from the back of a running and impatient motorcycle. Others are that way because I'm really not a very good photographer.

This is a photo of Paris from the highest point. Apparently the building in the background on the far right was the first - and only - really tall office building to have been allowed to be built so high.

This is a photo of the Montmarte Cathedral from the outside. You should have seen the inside. Even with a couple of hundred thousand tourists trying to meander their way through the cathedral, there were those who were just there to pray. I saw one woman throw herself at the velvet rope cordening off a shining, polished metal statue of the Virgin Mary and start weeping.

This is where Opera happens. Note bus, motorcycle and herd of cars just waiting for their moment to leap onto the wrong side of the road and make the pedestrians run for the their lives.

Um, this is one of the gates, can't recall which one. They all kinda look the same to me anyway.

And no Parisian photo journal would be complete without a photo of the Eiffel Tower. It looks smaller in real life.

Okay that's it for me, I've already (quite literally, might I say) fallen asleep about five times while typing this up. Tomorrow - I try to get a train or bus or convince Patrick's cats to saddle up for Le Puy because I am aching to get started on the walk.