Yesterday we went to Place Italie to the urban mall to get paint to repaint the chairs in the living room, ate a pizza in some place and came home with the paint.
The apartament is really small, two rooms with no outside space so we rolled back the carpet laid down some newspaper. The newspaper was really real estate magazines with small pages so it looks really messy. The only way to get the air flowing in the apartment is to open the big windows on rue Saint Jacques and to open the front door. We are on the first floor so the traffic is real loud when the windows are open.
Men doing manual work seem to groove on loud music so we put on Serge Gainsbourg to drown out the sound of the traffic. I refuse to paint chairs so got to watch my boyfriend engaged in chair painting while I worked on the computer, trying to concentrate. I must say that it is a good exercise learning to concentrate when the noise/distractions are big, it takes practice but is possible. In the middle of the paint job we hear a voice from the street below, we look and see our neighbour friend, the wild guy from Russian descent that is yelling to us. He is coming to see us. He takes a while to get here because he goes to his flat and gets a bottle of some Danish fennel flavored spirit to offer us. He normally speaks loudly so with the sound of the traffic, the music and him speaking louder than usual to make himself heard, the volume level in the apartment was high to say the least. I don't know what was more ovewhelming the smell of the paint or the noise level.
Our friend not only talks loud and laughs to himself he talks all the time. He had brought with him a watercolour painting of Kandisnky that he thinks was replaced by a print when it was reframed. He was asking if I could tell if it was original. It was really hard to see but then the painting had glass over it and he wouldn't let you hold it long enough to look. Suddenly I was so tired so I thought I might go and cook some food but then thought I might lay down abit instead. I thought about a German friend of mine that tells me of when she first arrived in Paris and was learning French she would fall asleep everywhere because her brain was so fatigued. The same thing was happening to me. So I went to the bedroom to lay down on the giant laytex matress fit for a queen to have a nap, closed my eyes and listened to the neighbours chatting. I managed to sleep a half an hour despite the ruckous. I awoke when our friend had left.
Our neighbours that share the platform at the moment are American tourists. The flat was renovated only a few months ago and has hosted several groups of American tourists.
They were coming and going while we were screaming and laughing. With the door to our flat wide open they would look at useverytime they came or left and we would look at them. The looks on their faces became ever more tense and we laughed at how obnoxious we were. We joked about inviting them for a drink and asking them to sit on the chairs with wet paint. I wonder what they have to say about the French after yesterday.
