Signs Taken for Wonders

The second long-promised post. My attempt to redeem myself continues.

I accompanied my siblings to Paris, where I finally got to see the Catacombs and the Musée de l'Orangerie. Game 7 began at 2am the night we arrived, so my siblings dutifully trekked out to a bar in Paris to see it. I mourned Vancouver's loss by getting a horrendous cold, which I nursed all through our trip to Champagne country (my brother, ever optimistic, had arranged it for the next day).

Random Paris moments: wandering through the design studios open houses, seeing the weird things one could conceivably do to chairs and drinking "Disney champagne." (It tasted of fizzy pinkness. I'm not quite sure what it was); running into and learning about the White Dinner, which looked fabulous, and which I'd love to do sometime; and reading upstairs during an improntu piano concert at Shakespeare and Company. 

Crossing the Inception bridge at night on our way back from the Eiffel tower, we were surprised by a young man wearing yellow contact lenses and vampire fangs. He leapt out of the shadows and asked us (in French) to wait one moment because something something something.

My brother, who apparently has low tolerance for a) vampires and/or b) people dressed like them, snarled "NON!" and led us stomping across the bridge... straight through the filming of a highly-choreographed vampire fight scene. The actors halted mid-chomp and looked vaguely embarrassed as we stormed through.

From this I learned that: 1) LARPers and actors should remember that jumping out at strangers while in costume is unlikely to go well, even if they are fluent in your language; and 2) my brother is never going to convert to vampirism, no matter how many episodes of TRUEBlood he watches.

For the record, the vampire film turned out to be called "Blood Dust." I asked the next time I was accosted at dusk by a Parisian vampire, because by then I knew what to expect.

Back from a whirlwind research trip to Britain. Internet connections were hard to find on this trip, hence the lack of updates. But I did stuff, and stuff happened, and I'll write a long post about it sometime when I'm not sleep-deprived.