Transliteration fun!
So there I was at the Quick by the Barbès-Rochechouart Métro station, enjoying the atmosphere — which is basically the European equivalent of Wendy’s, non-McDonald’s fast food with a generally red-and-white color scheme — and determined to be glum and preemptively mourn my GPA, which stands currently at 3.988 and is definitely going to take a beating at the hands of those inscrutable French professors. Yes, I worry too much about these things. Anyway, there I was trying to do the whole glum thing when I started reading the signs hanging from the ceiling, which appeared to be total gibberish. I mean, I’m getting better at deciphering French abbreviate-y webspeak-y stuff, but either this was a meaningless collection of letters or I’d developed a weird form of insta-dyslexia. It took me a few seconds to figure out that I was looking at English song lyrics, transliteraed into French:
Aïe biliv aïe quann flaïeuh
Aïe biliv aïe quann teuch ze skaïeuh
Aï’m e saixe bombeuh, saixe bombe.
Aïe ouil sur vyve
Yeah. So that killed the glum mood. I would have taken pictures, but you know, it’s weird to go around a fast-food place snapping photos of the signs hanging above people’s heads. They’d probably think I was going to come back and rob the place.
In other news, I went by one of the little French Pizza Huts today. I am quite impressed with them. All right, so they seem to be almost exclusively delivery/takeout places, pretty small, but they’ve got two things I have not encountered in the US. First is these packets of spicy sauce, about the consistency and color of olive oil, that are great for adding to just about anything that isn’t already spicy (with the possible exceptions of Tootsie Rolls and kittens). Second, they’ve got these really clever plastic bags. You know how pointy hard things tend to punch right through plastic bags? They noticed that too! And they preempted it! See:
Isn’t that clever? Totally distributes the weight and stress on the bag well, and makes it less likely to actually break. Oh how clever.
Oh yeah, and here’s that synagogue I said I’d taken a picture of. Not a terribly good picture, but I found it, so here it goes:
