4-19-09 Paris Day 5

Today was our day to check out some historical sites related to some of our favorite French philosophers and other writers living in Paris. We happened across an outdoor bird store as we left the subway station, which was really neat. We then took a short walk around Notre Dame cathedral, and made our way to the left bank of the Seine, where some booksellers sell books from small metal boxes attached to the stone wall beside the river. One of these sellers had a really neat drawing of a cat posing as William Blake’s God. It was a little too expensive and would have been difficult to transport, or else I would have bought it.

From there we visited the Shakespeare & Co bookstore, which has a rich literary history. We then found the two cafes frequented by Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, and many others. These were the Les Deux Magots, the Cafe de Flore, and the Brassiere Lipp.

After this, we visited the Cimetière du Montparnasse to catch a few more famous tombs. These included Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, Man Ray, and many more.

After this, we had a few hours before our scheduled rendevouz with my old friend from Anarchy Online. We decided we would try to interact with history a little by eating lunch at one of those famous cafes we saw earlier. We picked the Les Deux Magots. This turned out to be the most expensive meal of our entire trip (and all told, in all of my recent memory). We were charged 6.50€ for a single drink - a simple glass bottled Coke Lite (what they call Diet Coke in Europe). Our lunch ended up costing 30€ for two drinks and two simple sandwiches. These people know how to milk tourists with an intellectual bent.

Finally, the time arrive to go and visit my old friend. When I started playing Anarchy Online in 2002, Erik was one of the first people I met and befriended in game. We had played together on and off throughout the years. I'd never heard his voice in person (all chat being done via typing) and hadn't spoken to him in a few years, neither of us having played the game in a long time. Still, we were both excited to finally meet.

 We got to his apartment and met his wife, children, and friends. The adults spoke very good English, so we had no problems striking up conversations. Erik's little boy Milan (about 6 years old) was a blast to hang out with. He only knew a few words of English, and didn't seem to understand that I didn't know French, so he would go on and on and I could only chuckle and try to figure out what he was saying. By the end of the night he was dressed in a Batman costume and challenging everyone to swordfights with his Sabre-Laser (pronounced sab-ehr las-ehr, French for lightsaber). Natasha tried to fake death in order to stop the fighting, but Milan repeatedly insisted in rapid French that she was only hurt, which took us several minutes to translate.

Erik cooked us up some barbeque chicken and had us drink some Pastis (a liquor flavored with anise, which I am not keen on, but drank to be polite) and some delicious red wine. I don't drink very often, so this was enough to keep me toasty for the rest of the evening. We stayed up until almost 11 talking about politics and gaming and all manner of things. This was probably the best night of the trip for me. The whole experience was mindblowing.