You Arrogant Bastard

Virtual European Tour: Paris

The Virtual European Tour is a series of brief impressions of well-known European cities. Click on images to view the bigger picture.

After a few days in Amsterdam, the Whiskey Gang was tired of staring at whores behind thick plate glass. It didn't matter if they were dead or alive anymore. And the local flower (the noble tulip) was all over the place and the boys had viewed their share and were satisfied.

So it was off to Gay Paris, the city of lights, the city of romance, where the whores roamed free on the streets and the local flower is a filthy old man. When it comes to baseless city comparison, Paris holds two major trump cards: every single building in the city is aesthetically magnificent, and sandwiches are sold out of restaurants directly onto the street. Forget walking inside a room: the hat-wearing French have no time for this. Sandwiches are prepared in advance (how long in advance is impossible to determine, since the dumbass French can’t fucking speak English like a regular person), and then shelved in streetside windows,as plump waitresses stand there and wait for you, yes you, to come by and purchase one. You place your order, which is always the same, a croque monsieur, a poor man’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner: Cheese, Ham, and Delicious Bread, grilled for several seconds in a hot sandwich press.

The crew was shacking up in Montmartre, the bohemian capital of Paris, a cultural hotspot full of fabric stores and children, children, children. Water runs down through the sides of the streets at night, to wash away garbage, to provide a delightful piss valley, and to promote the pompous neighborhood attitude: “We live on a hill.” The centerpiece of the neighborhood is the Sacre-Coeur, a giant white basilica. Nobody has ever been inside, and nobody knows what it represents. Such is the mystery of the Sacre-Coeur. For more information about mysteries, please visit http://www.world-mysteries.com/

Behind this monolith is a neighborhood where delicious crepes can be bought (I think that’s the only place in Paris where you can get them), and in front of it is a view of the whole town. At night, hundreds of lights on the Tour Eiffel (in English, Eiffel Tour) flash as though the whole structure was a prop in the giant dance club that contemporary Europe thinks it is.

Paris suffers from one major flaw, which is its drunk-person transport system. The metro stops running at 12:30 am on weekends, and cabs, of which there are not nearly enough, are overpriced and will not carry more than three people. This makes escaping the drug-addled twentysomething from Canada exceedingly difficult. Do not accept the offer to “crash at the house I am house-sitting”- a cab will come eventually. And you will be compensated- with knowledge!... for the extra time you spend hanging around empty bars with this sad, drunken lady. Apparently, you can get a quick, legal high from some strange canisters found only in sex shops. “It fucks you up beyond belief for ten seconds, but you get an awful headache the next day- worst hangover of your life.” Sounds great- we’ll note it in our travelogue. Thank god for you, woman. Please give me your contact information, so I may one day entrust you with my house as well.

These Movies Require Quicktime.
-Tour Eiffel- A view from the top, (673 KB)
-J. Russell Translates Hieroglyphics at the Louvre, (1.4 MB)