Midnight in Paris

“Anything you can settle with money is cheap.” E.M.Remarque in Arc de Triomphe

This week's favourite tweet about Monday's incident :

This week was overall an average week in preparatory school : we got back another test where the average was 10/20, at least 6 people got thrown out of physics class for inexplicable reasons and a girl got shouted at because apparently she made eye contact with someone during Saturday's supervised exercises.

I got invited by a close friend of mine to be the disk jockey at his birthday. I have about a month to prepare myself. In the House of the March Hare I put as the accompaniment of my post Chris Luno's groovy house mix in Berlin. One of the reasons being that, in the video you can tell that the vibes are very much groovy. That is precisely the atmosphere I want to create at the start of my DJ-set. It is background music. It is not supposed to have punch, it is supposed to create a journey that one can enter at any moment.

Another friend of mine is studying in Paris and I deemed that going to the capital of France is an absolute must. So on Saturday at 16:14 I arrived at Gare du Nord in Paris.

Paris is still magical. It has everything. Within the first hour of arriving I had seen a girl's first cigarette puff, people selling vegetables on bus benches and heard a man screaming "Gilet jaune un jour, gilet jaune toujours". On Saturday we walked from the Sacré-Cœur to the Seine. On more than one occasion I could see in the distance some spiky tower-thing that had some funky lights on it.

On Sunday, we visited the Pompidou Center's modern art exposition. My friend and I agreed that big museums are not the best, since it is difficult to stay focused for longer than two hours, thus you get the feeling of guilt when skipping out on some parts. I still enjoyed the visit and found a few new favourite paintings. Afterwards we wandered to and from the Tuileries to Shakespeare and Company alongside the Seine. I purchased myself "Tender is the Night" and it even got a special Shakespeare store-stamp.

Of course literature has fuelled my love for Paris. One of my favourite books being Arc de Triomphe. Remarque's style is simply remarkable. The dialogue seems effortless, the sentences are rarely longer than 10 words, but this creates an overall aura of characters being in the moment and not wasting time on empty words.

I wish you a solid start to the week!