Gypsies and McFlurrys

"I cannot prevent the french from being french" - Charles de Gaulle

I spent a wonderfully rainy weekend in Paris last weekend. We took the 6:00 am train and got there in time to do a handful of sightseeing before lunch. In my mind, I had pictured Paris to be filled with glamourous people who walked poodles down flower decorated streets. While I did see one poodle, my Parisian daydream was far from accurate. We visited the Louvre - whose biggest attraction I've decided are all the people shoving eachother out of the way to see the Mona Lisa- and Notre Dame, and Montmartre, and the Eiffel Tower, and the Arc de Triomphe, and the Latin Quarter, and the Palace de la Concorde. They were all filled with beauty and history but my favorite part of Paris were the gypsies. They suffocated you at every street intersection and at the doorway to nearly every building. "Do you speak English?" they would ask; knowing your answer would be "yes." If you were naive enough to respond, their children would swarm you and pick your pockets while the gypsy mother tried to get you to help her with some english phrase. Very clever! The only thing that would have made these women more interesting would have been if they'd been wearing hundreds of dangling necklaces and came complete with their own pirate ships. 

In contrast to London, Paris was a city of organization. In Paris each tree was exact the same distance apart, each street on a perfect grid, and the people perfectly groomed. London, on the other hand, loves mayhem. Trees sprout in unwelcome areas. Streets dead-end or change names. And many of the people seek "coolness" in their fight against being perfectly groomed. While both are different from Kansas (and by different I obviously mean better), I was ready to come back to the mayhem. 

Tonight I went with one of my flatmates to scalp tickets for the Deathcab for Cutie concert in the ghetto of London. Purposely taking very little cash with us proved beneficial, as we paid nearly nothing for our tickets. They give an amazing concert no matter how many times I see them live. Being the ghetto of London, not many cabs drive out there and tube had stopped running for the night so naturally we did what all American girls do to try to fit in: we went to McDonalds and got McFlurrys to eat while we waited for a cab to come. Oh London!