Leaving Paris, entering travel continuum

How can one live this much in one day? Do I mix things up? I think not. Saturday we walk big time. We meet Malcolm's friends from work over lunch: Anne & Jean-Michel. A really cool couple. Smart. Experienced. Ultra traveled. Professional. And nice. On the way to lunch, we walk through Malcolm's neighborhood, brimmed with food shops: living mollusks of all kinds, fruits, magnitudes of cheese, fish, oysters, candy, asian specialties, cakes, bread, wines. A divine place for the person who digs food. A good memory.

Later, we go out walking again. We go to a massive mother of all malls. The perfume and the masses confuse me, making me almost dizzy. The heat is massive. I see some cool stuff. We regroup at Malcolm's, listening to the answering machine. Setting up a rendevouz with Steve & friends. Leave for the 13th arrondissement, the Asian quarters. I have never been to a place like that before, never felt that I was a racial minority. That was sooo exciting: chinese tong punks hanging tattooed on the corners in a massive apartment/shopping complex chatting to pink short skirted chinese girls. Karaoke specialty shops in bulk. Convenience stores with so many vegetables I have never seen. Fruits. Meats. Fishes. Strange cans. Lots of cool looking people old and young. Empty buddhist temple, incensed to its teeth, psychedelic whirling patterns.

We went to a restaurant, ordering Phô, a slightly cinnamonish spiced, not hot at all, soup with strange short sausage-like objects, very saignant thin slices of meat and tripes galore. Yum. Long leafed coriander (never saw it before), holy basil and mung sprouts. Perfect. One of the most memorable things I've ever eaten. We subway back to Malcolm. We fall asleep. Wake up. Eat. In a hurry to meet Anne at Rue Oberkampf, a street formerly infamous for drugs, violence, poverty and whatnot. Now COOOOL. Bars and shops everywhere. Cheap. very very cool people indeed. We have Caipirinhas all the way. 1. 2. We change bar. 3. 4. The most beautiful waitress I ever saw, totally vietcong chic with hair in a tail, gray shirt + pants. I almost die of knightly love. We change bars. 5. Salsa. Caixhassa in the Caipirinia. Wendy & Rob drink Long Island Ice Teas, fucker of minds. Bar closes due to police threats. Everyone ends up on the street, imbibing their imbibables. We taxi to a disco. I don't dance. The feeling is high school. I have a demi, mouth a bit too sweet from the limes and cane sugar. I hang, shoot some shit, refusing to dance as per usual. Not overly drunk, I and Malcolm haul ass home.

Sunday. The finale of Tour de France, the ultimate tour de force of biking makes central Paris into a boiling mass of human flesh. Bigscreened, the race is visible to everyone. We hit the pavements of Champs Elysees just in time to see the final 2 laps. At 70 km per, the bikers pass us, fastmotioned beyond recognition. The yellow leader shirt, poster guy for cancer recovery, pass by a little later. We leave, walking with the human syrup. It's over 40 degrees Celsius in the sun and the shadow is nowhere to be seen. Alongside the Seine, up a flight of stairs. Is it true Pont de L'Alma is old sacrificial grounds? I wonder...

More walks. More heat. Badoit drunk by liter. Visiting more friends of Malcolm. Rhum drinks. Ricard. Conversation. It's very pleasant to meet new people that aren't people I'd normally meet. More travel histories, this time from French Guyana and Ivory Coast. Pictures of huge turtles. Discussions about genetically altered products. We leave. In the morning we leave Paris. Putting kilometrage to the odometer, we slip away from Paris thru vast fields of sunflowers. We are free on the payage, me reliving a journey I last did in 1987. The stream of new data runs amuck in my brain, stored away behind seldom used neurons. The chronocrome acts up, mixing dreams with reality, lysergic-style. 150, 160 km per hour makes time into a totally different thing, a bending, writhing, ever-changing dimension. My mind peaks all the time. So many new things. Why did I ever forget that this is the world, too?