Tuesday, March 27, 2007

A Sunday in Paris















I admire Tiggy's writings


Always brings a place she is in into life


Imagine her


a lense that collecting daily life


as if a masterpiece of love


Tiggy the traveller


the lonely walker of paths of light


and colour


Do I talk about


a unique butterfly?


In which colours


one may paint her


fidgeting wings?

Laila Neihoum


She wrote From Paris to say:


Sunday morning and the streets of Paris poking their noise into my hotel room.
As I head towards the early Europe Marche of fresh produce I am filled with a rare anticipation for the day, as you know I am a night owl.
The sound of vendors praising the magnificence of their fruits draws me out of the bowels of the city’s metro. Streets packed with mothers and their bouncing children, old women with their dogs, students stuffing themselves with croissants and espresso . And me wrapped in my silence sating my starved senses.
Stopping at last for morning coffee in corner brasserie with hot apple tart and raspberry crème patisserie, I am refueled and ready for art hunting.
As I head back to the metro station I cannot manage to pass by the strawberry vendor again without buying a handful brilliant red rubies .. Keep the change,”ah! But she is marvelous!” he bellows to the passing crowd much to my embarrassment.
On to the Montparnasse and the marche de creation where for today Art is being sold instead of meat. Over a hundred painters, sculptors, and other artists display their work for sale each Sunday here . I am a child in a toy store! One particular painter caught my attention, the paintings of seashells, of beach pebbles, how I miss the sea!
“je peux vous aider?” can I help you?
I tell her I miss my home by the sea and the salt in the air. She has never seen the sea’s green eyes.
The afternoon is for Sacre Coeur the hill, the cathedral and the warren of alleys that surrounds it as if the cathedral is in fact a sacred heart and the streets twist and tangle like so much innards .
Steps endlessly upwards hugging the hillside , and a breath taking view once you finally get to the top. Paris , decadent and sluggish like a sultana glutted on wine and bedecked with jewels , I love you.
Not only tourists ,but the French also have come to lie on the green lawn and gaze adoringly upon You.
Reveling in anonymity and the fact that here , no one looks twice at me , I snap away with my camera , street vendors, gargoyles on the walls keeping watch , blue blue sky.
Life.
Lunch in a bistro with confused tourists trying to order a meal French-style .
Again I am delighted with all the little art shops and galleries, I leave the hill with a few paintings clutched in my covetous hands .
As I make my way down the stairway towards the foot of the hill I start to pass the street performers that come to play for the evening crowds , violins and cellos playing music sweet and sad .the violinist a young Josh Groban , a romantic figure with his curly hair dusty in the afternoon sun , a most beautiful boy .
Drummers and trumpet players down the next street, the crowds clapping and stomping in tune. Children running to drop coins in the hat remind me of my own brothers.
Walking to the subway I am grateful for a perfect day that had nothing of my life in it.

Tiggy Ibrahim