Le week-end et le ciel bleu

A lot bigger, cuter, and filled with more surprises that I expected, Lille just made me enjoy a perfect autumn weekend with a visit to three great museums (*), a Marché de Nöel, hot dogs and barbe à papa, pot au feu, Meert chocolate, and the loveliest communist café with a really nice honey beer.

Perfect and imperfect in magical proportion. I'm starting to think that might be true of all French cities. That balance between warm welcome and bluntly mockery, arrogant beauty and intermitent stench, between what is lovely and despicable, what makes them so unpredictable and therefore attractive. Or maybe I am the only one attracted by bipolarity. I'll start paying more attention to this.

Anyway, Lille je t'aime and I hope to visit you soon again! In the meantime, I promise to make a minimap of Lille very soon! (:

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(*) The museums are posts to follow, but since I don't trust my posting-self anymore, just in case you want to look for more info, they are: La Maison de la Photographie, where there was a great Martin Parr exhibition; the LAM, Musée de l'art modern, l'art contemporaine et l'art brut in Villeneuve-d'Ascq & La Piscine, in Roubaix, one of the most amazing spaces for a museum I've seen.

Sometimes / Coincidencias

I inhale great draughts of space,

The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.

I am larger, better than I thought,

I did not know I held so much goodness.

All seems beautiful to me...

 

 

Song of the Open Road

Walt Whitman.

 

 

Bright On

                                          Another day chasing the Californian sun, this time in an Artic Pole excursion mode.                      Let the memories of this day last forever.

“Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next. ”

― Virginia Woolf, The Waves.