Gay Paris

Oh Paris how I love you so.

What an absolutely brilliant city! And that’s coming from someone who doesn’t generally like big cities. Campbell and I spent three fabulous, fun days in the Paris sun and I can honestly say it was not nearly enough. We arrived very early (especially by Parisian standards) Saturday morning, a little worse for wear after a mostly sleepless night on the bus (never again), but thankfully had no trouble negotiating the metro to our hotel. We immediately changed into shorts and thongs (did I mention it was gloriously hot) and headed out for the most welcome breakfast I’ve had in a long time. Perfectly brewed café au lait, freshly squeezed orange juice, a hot golden croissant, and a crusty white baguette with home made butter and strawberry jam. Simply delicious and oh so French. And we devoured all this in beautiful sunshine while partaking in the French people’s favourite pastime – people watching. In fact, this was to be our morning ritual for the rest of the weekend - though we switched from the café to the snack bar version after we saw the bill. And if you’re wondering how it is that French chicky babes stay so thin with all this buttery goodness in their lives (I certainly did), well, I’ll tell you; they smoke like chimneys. In fact, on occasion it felt like everyone in Paris was puffing on a cigarette. But that, and the minimal number of gardens or parks in the city are the only negative things I will say about Paris. Everything else rocks.

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Dinosaurs with friggin laser beams

So life is progressing quite well here in old Oxford town. Work wise I’m busy which is good and getting stuck into analyses and the like. It has been extremely quiet around the department for the last few weeks as most of the folk working on tits (either blue ones or great ones), were out doing field work. But as of yesterday the field season seems to have largely finished for most of them so there will hopefully be a little more social engagement to be had at work. I have now had two social outings (drinking nights of course) with work people and they all seem like very nice and agreeable folk and they do seem to be a reasonably social group of people – so all bodes well in that arena. Though I have to admit it is taking a little while to connect with people as friends, but I guess that takes time.

But last Friday’s after work drinks were pretty cool. There was nothing really amazing about the preliminary sit-around-a-table-at-a-bar-and-drink-beer-and-talk -shit goings on of the first few hours of the night, but at some point somebody mentioned that some kind of laser light show was about to start at the museum of natural history – and that there would be a bar serving the precious amber fluid that the Brits seem so very fond of (I’m sure half the folk wouldn’t have budged from their seats without the alcoholic incentive). And so with the promise of lasers, dinosaurs and beer, we escaped the stuffy stranglehold of the Kings Arms pub and soon found ourselves at the museum in a sea of funky 20- and 30-somethings, sipping wines and Champagnes amidst the legs of giant dinosaur and woolly mammoth skeletons in a thick blanket of smoke-machine fog, with crazy lighting effects and “laser beams” illuminating the ornate spires on the glass roof of the truly beautiful 700 year old building. Extremely strange, but quite cool – especially when I found the unbelievably minute stuffed pygmy shrew – so cute.

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