Tomorrow I'll be back in the race, till then live and let live

[austin_dern]

We slept in, past the hotel's breakfast. We even properly checked out, although the hotel held our luggage since we had some hours before our train. For lunch we went to a crêperie just down the street that we'd kept walking past. And we even ordered and ate without embarrassing ourselves. It was great, and it reminded us of the morning in Amsterdam when we had a pancake, a large, slim thing that was filling.

Then we returned to Sainte Anne's, since it was so lovely in the evening and now there might be people there. So there were. We went back to the tiny carousel and found it open, and even running. The carousel had mixed ride mounts, including a fish; a donkey with a flexible, bouncing head; an airplane; a Nautilus-named submarine. And it was a lovely Jules Vernesque ride. It was coming to a stop at the end of one ride as we watched, and then ... well, the ticket-taker started locking up his booth and closed it off for, we supposed, lunch. We never saw him again, and never saw the carousel moving again. However, he left the ride open, un-shuttered, so that kinds would crawl onto and all over it. We used the chance to take some on-ride pictures too. Couldn't imagine someone just leaving a ride unattended, ungated, unwatched so far as we could tell.

Besides the carousel, though, that park also had some kind of open fair going on. There were people selling jewelry and knicknacks. bunny_hugger ultimately bought a clover pendant, a flower embedded in plastic, that she's been wearing since. They also had books for sale. Lots of books for sale. Row after row, although as far as I could tell all in French, so of limited value to me. They also had a protest march going around the area. It was a small one, maybe a dozen people or so, but they set up a tent off to the side and inflated some kind of structure in the service of protesting McDonald's. It felt wonderfully like being back on campus, in undergraduate days.

We also found several used record stores. They had a lot of ABC, for that nice Trevor Horn collection, although nothing irresistible. Something they did have was a Stan Ridgeway record. He'd been the lead singer of Wall of Voodoo, and bunny_hugger had got into them recently, and here was something she just never sees back in the United States. But could we get it back to the United States? I figured it was worth a shot. I wrapped it up in my suitcase, the larger one, inside a protective layer of all my dirty laundry. And it even worked! The record turned out to be in good shape and played quite well, and sounded more like Wall of Voodoo than did post-Ridgeway Wall of Voodoo.

While walking around we saw what looked like a hotel lobby, with a statue of an astronaut out front. Of course we went in to look. It was some confusing boutique. Apparently it was showing off some kind of design studio. They had modest but well-sculpted examples of dishes and ... well, stuff, spread across a half-dozen rooms of weird configurations. It was a bit hard to figure what we should be buying from there. They had a couple TVs, all showing a British documentary about a band I keep thinking is Oasis but I know it's not them. Somebody else.

And we kept wandering around, finding what looked like the cleanup at the end of a fish market. Well, it smelled fishy, and there were piles of ice being swept off the bricks, and seagulls were looking around.

We could've explored much more, naturally. The town was lovely and approachable and attractive and we didn't really get enough of it. But we did have to get back to the hotel, so we could catch a train.

Trivia: The War of Jenkins' Ear was declared by the British on the 19th of October, 1739, more than seven years after Captain Robert Jenkins's ear was cut off and his ship sacked by Spanish Captain Juan de Leon Fandino. Source: How The Scots Invented The Modern World, Arthur Herman.

Currently Reading: Water For A City: A History of New York City's Problem From The Beginning To The Delaware River System, Charles H Weidner.

PS: Vertex of a parabola – language in math again, a reblogged mathematics post. Sixth since Sunday!

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

My pendant is glass, not plastic, for the record. I looks like a droplet of glass, with the ever-green "clover" (actually some clover-like plant, an Oxalis or the like) inside.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Glass, yes. I did know that and I don't know why I wrote plastic instead.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I think the band was Coldplay.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I believe you're right, love. The documentary talked about things like how they'd passed out lights to the whole audience and set up some Internet-based mass program so the audience would be a deliberate light show, and part of the performance.