Barcelona

Dear blog,

I've been cheating on you.

-Mile


So as my writing gets sparser and sparser, I wanted to make that clear. I've kept a diary for about 7 years now (some years more loyally than others), and this new digital diary experiment proved to be successful for some things and not so much for others. It's a weird combination, keeping a diary but that its meant for people to see. Writing for yourself but also others. My 108 entries make me feel proud of my unexpected dedication to keeping up with certain events of my life in events, but like most things in life, it gets old after a while.

And here comes the new lover, another cyber creature called Tumblr. No narration apart from some thrown in lines, mostly old photographs I've taken, some new ones, things other people do and say, my attempt to put video back to the top with photography in the hierarchy of my interests/internet procastinatory activities. (http://thestillmove.tumblr.com/)

But being the trooper that I am, I'm taking this Crash Years project to the end!

*epic music*

So I won't stop for this last month. In between travel plans I will try to fill in the blog with some details of my non-Parisian and, yes-Parisian, hm, days. First magic trip: BARCELONA.

Barcelona, Barcelona, Barcelona. First went in 2008, and like it, not loved it, like I did Madrid. Probably becuase in my mind Barcelona is to Spain and tourism and cliches what Paris is to France. But having lived in Paris already, hence used to many of these things, Barcelona was a beautiful breeze of fresh air. Spain! So beautiful, so warm, nice buildings, good color, good noise levels, some crazy people yelling, some young (and really old) people protesting in the Plaza de Catalunya, good food, good sangria...

The only bad thing was that people kept thinking I was a gringa and didn't understand me because:
1. I was sorrounded by English speakers
2. Costa Ricans don't roll their "R's", deal with it!

Number two is just annoying everywhere (although sometimes I can play the cute card with it) and number one was no problem because I loved everyone that stayed in our Barcelona apartment. Cem, Sam, Jess, Gina and her twin sister Lucy (visiting from Chicago), Annie, Pia James and Zach (Jess' friends from Australia) and me. Ten people, four double beds, a mattress and a horrible couch. An amazing balcony for morning (which in our vocabulary meant 3pm) smokes, snacks, talks and books.

Concerts for three days from 5pm to 5am. Some names I'll throw out which were my festival favorites ('in order of appearence' like a movie cast list):

-Caribou
-Big Boi (the two minute dance party I saw cause had to run to Glasser, best suggestion gotten from Cem in ever. Love them)
-Glasser
-Gold Panda
-Baths

-Las Robertas
-Deerhunter
-James Blake
-Ariel Pink (-.-)
-Jamie XX

-Warpaint (the birth of our very own girl band concept)
-The Album Leaf
-Gang Gang Dance

Yup. GOOD TIMES, which I hope were well captured in my 27-shot disposable camera with flash. First disposable yea!

Apart from concert madness we had some great outings. Our area, El Born, was on a greeat location and it had good mojito lifestyle. Cafes, benches and fancy Marais-style stores during the day. We became regulars to the internet cafe and the Cactus coffee in the morning. It was so nice tot alk to all the waiters and make friends with some of them. I even got the recipe for the perfect sangria from an amazing little bar we went to twice called El Corral. Had the best chorico 'al diablo' there. YUM! Tapas and sangria: best combination for spring evenings.

Oh yeah, I got my my purse stolen one and a half times (first one was on the metro, the "half" time in a club -Cem's was also taken- but we got them back). I don't even understand what happened but it was at the end of a very long and fun night and I ended up crying and screaming to the security guards in the video surveillance room, ran out to fin my friends and then there was Cem all stressed in the sidewalk wih out two purses running like crazy, and Sam running down from the closed club in his Bulls basketball jersey. Drama. You can find it in Spain. I love it.

I enjoyed walling A LOT around Barcelona. So many things to see, clothes lines in every window, colorful apartment builgins, gothic cathedrals, narrow streets, tiles, the typical guys with their mullet hair-do's. I like how people look Argentinian (or how an Argentinian looks like in my hair) but have the anger and elegance of the Spanish. They tease you in a way that would throw off a nice Costa Rican or Canadian, but in a nice way, as if they wanted to wake you up and make you shake out your unnecessary and sometimes excessive to the point of hypocrisy manners.

I love the SPanish, sometime I hate them like when they steal from me and stuff (haha), but they have a nice way of living life in Barcelona, and from what I remember from other cities as well.

Other cool sightseeing: Museu Picasso, Sagrada Familia, Barceloneta beach, Parc Guell, Montjuic, protests at Placa de Catalunya, Fondacion Joan Miro.

Estuvo chiviiiiiiiiiiisima y ya quiero volverrrrrr.

I shot only film in Barcelona so that means I probably ont see the pictures until I and evelop them in Costa Rica where its cheaper. The unexpected high price for tickets + robbery + no metro card +other stuff had made me so poor.

I'll steal some pictures from friends to post later.

-Vale, adios!

The Flea Market Experience

I just read an article in the NY Times called "The Flea Marketing of New York", which talks about (obviously)... flea markets in New York.

Anyway, I thought it did have some interesting ideas in between. Here are just a few quotes:

“For most people who go on these ritualized scavenger hunts looking for something that they may not know exists, it is a kind of pilgrims’ process through the detritus of the past.”

Ok, so maybe it is not such a dramatic experience, not all the time. Sometimes, you really just want a cheap summer dress because it's suddenly gotten to hot to handle. However, there is definitely a romantic element of pilgrimage involved in taking the trip to the market: the hunt, finding that specific dress, the unexpected, scavenging through piles and piles of... sometimes not the nicest or best smelling items.

In the NY Times article, a vendor says: “You looking for brand new junk?” he huffed. “Go to Bloomingdale’s. Go down to Chinatown. You can get new junk there.”

True. Oftentimes, there's a lot more more junk in the new, the poorly manufactured, cheap-fabric, thirld-world-assembled items whose ads we're being constantly bombarded with. Of course there's everything, good and bad pieces everywhere. But in the flea market, you can get the really good for really cheap... and that's when you score, that's why you undertake the the expedition! At least that's one of my reasons.

“Personal taste needs an urban space for fashion, like a flea market with an element of playfulness and randomness and spontaneity. We’ve got a nostalgia for outmoded, outdated and anachronistic items, especially when they’ve all been replaced by technologies.”

I honestly don't know if young people in the 90s were as obsessed with flea markets as my generation is now. I haven't done my proper research, but its my impression that this is just another trend particular to us, another piece in this nostalgic generation's obsession with vintage (which also makes me question, is it really that irrational to be looking bad? But that will be for another day!)

"And in the process of picking over other people’s junk, they are telling the world something about themselves". I hate these lines. I hate corny journalism/writing like this. I say this, yet my definition of 'alone time' usually means browsing for hours through the little vintage shops around les Halles and Beaubourg waiting for some special item to charm me. Moi... cliché parisien!.

There were two ideas I wanted to write down. The first one is about the concept of curation of personal belongings, and the curatory experience you get in markets. Vendors are curators, but in a larger sense, the consumer experience in general is also a process of curation. And I feel like this experience is especially enhanced in markets.

We all put on the jacket of the art curator when we browse through those endless piles of old photographs and albums, when we look at the hundreds of items in the one-euro pile, and carefully select what will make part of our collection.

And this activity of looking for things, picking, selecting, and most importantly, accummulating brings me to my second idea. It's that of our relationship, or the meaning we give to the things we decide to put around us, collect. This is something I've had to think about a lot for the past three years. It's also something I quite enjoy to talk about.

In fact, I had a brief conversation about this yesterday with Jessica's friend James. He's visiting for a few days, and will be travelling around Europe for about 7 months. So packing smartly, selecting what's essential is crucial in those cases: What will I really need to live in Europe for these 7 months? And then the question to be asked later: What about everything else I haven't used for this time? Does coming back imply that I need those things back, or the opposite?

The article in the NY Times mentioned something that caught my attention. A course taught in the Ontario College of Art and Design called "Stuff". Here's an excerpt of the description:

HUMN 3B92: STUFF: Material Culture and the Meanings of Things by Michale Prokopow

"This course examines the meaning of things, buildings and places and the relationships people establish with them. Interested as much in the methodological questions of how to assess critically the built environment, as in philosophical and aesthetic questions of meaning and significance, whether functional or emotional, that tend to accompany the interactions with "stuff", the course is structured around thematic units. Here, the intention is to interrogate the central, complex and powerful roles that things of all sorts play in daily life."

As for myself, the amount of my "assets" had dramatically decreased since I went to Vancouver for the first time in 2008. I'm at the point now where I've lived in 10sq meter dorms and everything that I own (with a very few exceptions) is contained in that space. Furthermore, the things in those little rooms I've inhabited are continuously subjected to 'purges'. I clean out closets, drawers, photos and posters everytime I have to go back home for the summer, and must fit all my belongings in two black bags once again. Those same two black bags that have come back and forth so much! Big companions.

In Gage, September 08. Packing my stuff to move to my 1st year dorm in Vanier.

In Cite Universitaire, September 2011. My bags in G and Mp's car, and
then my first meal in my Cite U drom, sitting on top of my bags.

These almost ritualistic purges have always been a big thing in my house. Cleansing, donating what we don't need anymore, cleaning up, letting the old out to welcome the new, letting things flow in and out. Back home, I've been taught that all my life. We're the opposite of hoarders and I've repeated this pattern even more intensely living by myself.

I love to have things circulating in my life, and buying second hand fits well with this whole principle. I buy clothes that have belonged to someone else, when I don't need them anymore I pass them along, leave them at the store and change them for something else, and so the circle goes on... Nice idea, no? It's nice because it satisfies an appetite for change and new things, yet it avoids accummulation of the unnecessary.

I'm cynical enough not to be a vintage-utopianist, but I do think flea market-ing and second hand shopping is a fun way to consume responsibly.

-------

AAAAANDDDD.... I just spent two hour on this because the pictures wouldn't load. I better go study for my 8am final tomorrow. Ciao.

Cannes pictures coming up later tonight during study breaks.

Mid-May morning

105 posts, just saw that as I was logging into my blog. 105 posts in... (let me check) 264 days. Not bad! I actually can't believe I've written this much.. and also can't believe I'm about to hit the 9 month mark since I left Costa Rica and landed in France.

What I wanted to say today was... I have a great morning!! I'm eating what is probably one of the best grapefruits I've ever had in my life (watermelon-size) and for some strange reason, people in Bastille are taking it easy and being nice and quiet (no drilling sounds through the window, no screams, just love and a fresh breeze).

Just openend my computer and my only worries of the day are (in order of priority): leave this comfy chair to boil water for a tea, gather all my documents for the Russian visa (will expand after), steal Sam's pictures from Cannes to make a nice post about our weekkend in the Riviera, study for my first final.

I'm going for the tea now that I found inspiritation and come back to get into the Russian story.

...

So, my family is going to come "pick me up" in late June-early July and the plan was to make a trip together. We've been talking about it probably since I left, but never got on actually planning the trip. That is until Luci came back from Raleigh and got down to business. The initial plan was to do an eastern Europe trip ("las capitales imperiales"!) but then we realized... ah... who's idea was that? Why did we choose those places? When those questions were asked everyone's answer was "I though YOU wanted to go there" or "I'd love to go but I'm only really going because that was "the plan". So my dear sister found another more exciting alternative... "Hey, why don't we go to Russia!"

Uh... YES! Why don't we!

So we're MAYBE, POSSIBLY going to Russia. We need visas first. Yes, those Russians are tough o the visas, I've been looking at the requirements and gathering documents to take to their embassy here and it'sreally susprised me. Anyway, my mom just sent me an email I decided to leave it to be checked this morning when I was not so sleepy and I'll do that in a second (my guess is it has the documents I asked from her). So the only thing left is my part. Now have to go to the Russian embassy (...), face them in French and plead for a visa (the only give you a one-entry one, and you can't stay longer than a month).

Next on my list is getting the pictures from Cannes. We had a great great weekend there and Sam took a lot of pictures the first day we went to the beach. So I must get my hands onto them in order to write more about it.

SPOILER. Keywords will be: sun, sea, beach (duh)... food (and by that, I mean PIZZA), vin rosé and Karl Lagerfeld.

And now I get to the part when I have to explain why I need to start studying for my exams this early (my first one is Monday).... because Marifer is coming on Friday!!! :) I'm so excited for her coming back now that the weather is noce and we can just chil outside, make a nice picninc, ride bikes and do all the stuff we didn't have time to do when she came for New Years. That'll be my highlight of the week... so studying will be bearable knowing I'm gonna have a lovely visitor during the weekend.

I should post a picture right... It looks nice when I do. Hmm... let me go through my photo library and wee what I can find.

The day we went to Jardin des Plantes and the Mosque

Before that when I took the trash out and Bridge took my picture out our window

The night before we left to Cannes (I think) and we were being normal

Me being cool as usual with the city view from Parc de Belleville

My birthday is in 8 days.. I don't know if it means anything to me, oh no, actually it does, I don't want to turn 22 because being younger is always nicer and easier (after you turn 18 in Costa Rica). 21 was good I wanna stay 21 forever! Not 18, 19 or 20... but 21. Actually 22 doesn't sound bad either. It should be fine, I don't really mind. I'll write more about my birthday later, now I just wanna watch the 6 YouTube videos I've been waiting for hour to load.... damn Parisian wifi it's so bad!

Bisous,
Mile

Courtyard Picnic

This word will be repeated so many times from now on. We had a picnic last week, or the week before I guess, with Noemie and other people that joined later in the Sciences Po courtyard. Beautiful weather and Noemie made the best food.. I had forgotten how much I liked caramelized onions and now I'm addicted to them on everything as well. She also made an apple pie, oh! Can't even remember, it's painful how much I want to have that right now. We also got some beers, cause we thought since there was a patry going on organized by the Bureau des Arts that drinks ouwld be around and sold..... nobody else was drinking but that didn't stop us. That's how we roll.





















Bridgette and I then headed to Menilmontant,where I wanted to get some of the books I mentioned in the last post (I actually wanted another one but it was too big and heavy to carry back to CR-Vancouver unfortunately). Crossed the river, saw the usual cafe terrace scenes you get with this type of weather around Saint Germain, got to Menilmontant, etc. This quartier has become my new favorite. Ever since I did my project on Parisian street art I've read a lot about it and my appreciation grew for this place. I think of it as my new Faubourg Saint Denis, although I think that will always be my favorite street in Paris because of all the good times (and really bad, akwards, creepy ones) spent there by myself and with friends.

Rue de Seine

La Seine

Menilmontant

These metro stations in the north that I love and hate. Ligne 2.

Readings

Finished school, or, at least finished handing in assignments, so now I can really choose what I want to read and I've done it. Actually, I got a little overexcited and now I have so much to read I'm not reading. But they're waiting there, by my bed, and I'll start devouring some pages soon.

So, lists.. I love them. this is my reading list for the next week(s):


-Beaux Arts special on the Manet Exhibit



-Book Paris Sous Tension



-Magazine Le Tigre



-Photo Book Mai 68 d'une Photographe



-And as soon as I finish this, I spotted my next acquisiton today at the press stand. The hors serie edition of Le Monde featuring Simone de Beauvoir.

La Defense and Around Town

Trying to catch up in chronological order now. My batery charger for some strabge reason disappeared, well actually its not so mysterious because I lost it while moving in/out (one of the many times, I'm an expert on the matter since 2008). Anyways! That's why I have a lot of photos in my camera that can't be uploaded here yet... but I'll try filling the gaps with other people's pictures.

So Yuna was over here last weekend (can you see we're running a guest house? And this is nothing, we have like 34536475857 guests in June). We did so many things, those touristy often times boring annoying ones, but also cool ones. I did have to stay in lines for hours to get into the Louvre (yuck) and the Musee d'Orsay just to stand in crowds while the raging masses try to take pictures with the frames they can recognize. I'm a snob, and hate this kind of things.

Ok now to pretty things. The weather was beautiful, so great... so it was nice walking around, we had a great group of people over for Sunday brunch, we biked, ate ice cream, yummmm....

And another great thing... I finally went to La Defense! Had been wanting to for months, ever since Hjalte and his mom went and told us it was really impressive. We were just talking on the couch Saturday afternoon (Y, B and I) and then decided to head off there and explore what it was all about. We saw the sunset, walked on top of a cemetery and got a view from the arch all the way to the Arc de Triomphe.

Here are some of Yuna's pics from La Defense and her stay in general.


Night walk aroudn Sacre Coeur, a beautiful view.



Walking towards the Louvre, 30 degrees.




Those maddening crowds I mentioned. That was the Mona Lisa bien sur.



Yuna took this shot of the apartment which I really liked.


Bastille Metro.



The Arch of La Defese.



There's a cemetery right below this.



Yeahh

Peaceeee