The Cats, Cannonballs & Demon Babies of Lille

Wow. How long has it been since I’ve written something on this damn site?

Eh… who cares.

Here’s the thing: since I’ve spent the past month on vacation, all of my writing – until today – has been done with paper and pen.  Sometimes in rented rooms, in a tent, or in a moving car through varying degrees of inebriation, exhaustion or sickness.

It’s been a long, strange and tiring trip. It’s also been a very cool trip. Olivier and I are still living in a bit of disarray what with all of the packing and unpacking and the bit of neglect that our house has endured while we were off running amok.

We’re exercising again every day, which we didn’t do for a month. No, instead, we were eating everything that we normally wouldn’t, on top of everything that we normally would. We’re now fattened up and greasy. Exercise has once again become painful.

The suffering is worth it.

Like any journey, ours started at home. We spent the first week packing, planning and popping with anticipation. We slept in every morning, watched movies, drank, ate and were absolute fucking sloths. It was fantastic.

Then we were off to Lille in the northern part of France. So, yeah… it’s only about 2 hours away from home. We started out small. Our reason for hitting Lille for the first leg of our trip was because we have some friends who live there and Olivier has plenty of memories of the place since it’s where he went to college and got his degree in geekology.

It was more crowded than I had expected. Of course, it was nothing like Paris, which is much, much worse… but, well… we all know how I feel about being surrounded by people.

Now, the cool thing about Lille is that it looks nothing at all like Paris. The style of architecture is not quite French, not quite Belgian, has a very strong Flemish influence and has nothing to do with that in other areas of France. The buildings are much more colorful and often have some funky little details, like a funny munchkin guy or something like that.

Something else that was a rather interesting detail on a few of the buildings: cannonballs. Yep, like shot out of a damn cannon. A few of the buildings still have German cannonballs embedded in the facade from World War I.

However, the most bizarre thing that Olivier and I saw that day had to have been the colossal demonic dragon babies. Now, maybe where you come from, freakish nightmare images can be found on every street corner, but to me, it was completely out of place in a city like Lille.

Of course, that was before we happened along the cats.

Olivier wanted to show me The Kremlin, a martini bar that had been a hang out for he and his friends back in the day. When we arrived at the bar, the street was pretty empty, except for some cats that were roaming about, engaged in feline conversations, sauntering about as if the street belonged to them.

Although, not all of the cats in Lille are doing a stray cat strut around the hip martini bars.

If your French skills are rusty, or nonexistent, the sign says, “Careful!  Live cat!!” You know, in case someone should decide to poke any objects in the window display with a stick or other handy poking thing.

I mentioned previously that Olivier and I were staying with some friends of ours who live in Lille. What I neglected to mention was that our friends have a couple of kids.

Since we do not have tiny people of our own and are not really planning to have tiny people, we have to take advantage of these situations whenever they come up.

Of course, what I’m talking about is, the toys. Little kids have cool toys. We likely won’t be buying any of those things for ourselves, so when we’re around other people’s kids, we have to raid the toys.

Yes, we are immature.

Yes, we are okay with that.

Lucky for us, these kids had Play-Doh. I don’t have to tell you how cool that is. I’m also quite certain that I don’t have to explain to you how giddy Olivier and I were when we discovered that they had brown Play-Doh.

Because, really… how else can you make realistic-looking piles of poo?

Very, very immature.