DAY TWENTY FOUR, FIVE and SIX of MySexLifeInParis
After twenty five days in a big city that thought actually half empty is completely crowded from the point of view of BiH citizen, one starts to dream of untamed wilderness. And logically what one does is to stay in a tiny apartment because it is the closest you can get to ‘people free’ when car free. Naturally, trapped inside four walls, guilty of not going out.. I was in great danger, practically only one step from eating a whole sausage if it was not for my flat mate Francois that introduced me to the Paris bicycles.
They have these stands with rental bicycles that you take at one point and leave on the other, take a metro and than maybe again another bicycle somewhere else, and all this for one euro per day.
Since the day twenty four I have already went couple of times by metro to the Bois de Boulogne and enjoyed the peacefulness and beauty of cultivated nature.
For a modest price of 6 euros (plus another 50 that I lost when paying a bill!!) you have a view on Eiffel tower from this exclusive terrace. The exclusive and bourgeois are somehow terms that I hear and use often since my arrival to Paris. Big cities do this to you. In Mostar you can be a billionaire and yet the best restaurant you can go to will charge you at most 50 euros, if you come with two friends. Here it is no problem at all to find a restaurant that will charge you a dinner 300 euros. And it is a big problem to find a place for 30 euros.
I don’t know exactly how to explain it, I just have often a feeling that the size of your wallet is extremely important. And that a lot of people are estimating it all the time. Even when I went to the cinema to see a movie that was advertised as a French family saga from the eighties to nowadays it was all about who bought what to whom, what job, how many holidays and where… and in this ‘posh’ cafés and parts of the city you see it clearly – the urgency of underlying that you are different from the rest. As far as I can see this is the most desired difference one can claim here.
I know that in Mostar the car you drive or the brand of the cigarettes you chose to kill yourself with are also very important.. but on the whole, ‘chez nous’ the social hierarchy stress is still much less omnipresent.
Bosnia and Herzegovina: war traumatized, corrupted and poor, and yet it feels more equal and easy going. Bravo!
And as if he could of felt my latent homesickness my Saturday date, a French, thought Greek by father, took me to dance in the center of Paris, to the Seine embankment. I was very excited and I’ve put tip top make up, mini skirt, mini.. everything mini. Because I was going to dance on Saturday night in Paris.
We entered.
I throw out my vest.
I was ready.
The music was ready.
‘Gas, gas..
Ovo je ritam..
Ovo je seksi ritam…
Gas, gas…’
For those of you that read and don’t die of laughter or tears, let me explain: ‘gas, gas… this is the rhythm.. this is the sexy rhythm…’ was one of a WHOLE night serial of imbecile sort of gypsy disco folk songs in our language. I cried, I laughed.. but I did not dance. A black guy next to me asked me where I was from. I answered. He said he never heard of it while he was listening to the worst music of a country he never heard of. The whole place was dancing, completely oblivious of .. well anything… letting it go, enjoying the so stupid to be super cool less than three notes music.
Tour of France: three hours of wandering on Champs Elysees to see this. It is another of those things that I would normally never do, that I don’t like etc., but because I am a tourist I had to do it.
A protest of some Sri Lankans against the terrorist organization LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). It was moving to see how much energy these people were putting in their cause. And it was especially moving to understand that the cause they fight for is just basic human rights.
