day2-unwelcome welcomes at Sacre Couer

Patrick was already awake on the bed. With the weak winter light already starting to dim, we decided to head for the Sacre Couer, which shouldn't be too far away to reach and too huge to see it all. The underperforming aesthetic appreciation of Patrick, resulting from the jet lag, also played a key role here, for the Sacre Couer was not something he wanted to see with all his faculty perfectly tuned. The Metro, which became elevated at some point to reveal the largest graffiti of the "Obey" giant that Patrick had ever seen, took us to the station at the foot of the basilica. Upon leaving the station we were in the super-touristic approach up to the basilica, lined with kitsch souvenir shops and cafe's for tourists, just like the ones stud the sides of the approach of Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto. Following the flow of the crowd, the iconized three domes of the basilica revealed themselves between the roofs of the three-story buildings along the narrow slope. Two mysterious stains of two different shadows of magenta on the smaller dome on the right side caught us wondering. The large stains with unintentional drippings did add some surprise and interesting change to the otherwise too perfectly symmetrical basilica, but pink and magenta didn't seem to be the likely colors they choose to decorate their religious architecture, let alone smearing it permanently with paint. Could it be somebody's bad joke, or could it be some form of protest from some unknown cultural terrorists?

A carousel with strands of light bulbs and a pack of black gangs pressure-selling strands of some mysterious merit to helpless tourists roughly greeted us at the end of the approach. One tugged at my arm and threw a barrage of sales talk as I tried to free myself from his intrusively friendliness, without looking into his eyes some 12 inches from mine. I clumsily struggled to circumvent his sly blockage of my way, totally unprepared for this kind of aggression preying on tourists, which one might (rightly) expect in Tanger, Morocco, but not in France. Patrick peeled me off from him, but the rough ritual of initiation to tourists sites wasn't over yet.

About five steps ahead, where the never-ending stairs climbing up to the basilica starts, there was a man sitting on the side of the steps and another with a crutch, standing leisurely about a yard from him. Smile on their face, moving their hands liberally as they talk, they seemed to be the kind of people who enjoy chitchat with random strangers at parks and public plazas. As we approached, however, the man on foot blocked our way up by placing his crutch across the way, as if poking the sitting man with it, which appeared to me to be a natural part of their playful conversation. Patrick shoved him in a rough movement so unlike his usual gentleness, and we made it through them. Having noticed unfamiliar tension on his face, I questioned Patrick if that was such a critical situation where we might have had our valuables pickpocketed if things turned out the other way. The man with the crutch was not looking at the seated man, he was looking at Patrick with his uncanny eyes, with an obvious intent to cause trouble, he said, which I didn't notice, being too busy picking myself up after the previous encounter.

The physical challenge of the long stairs soon stripped me of the ability to ponder on the incident. Feeble as we were, we stopped at the lower terrace, trying to conceal our humiliating pant, pretending to be interested in the sprawling city below. The city with an ordinance banning skyscrapers lay as low as any medieval manor village with towers of churches piercing the sky. The smoky grey of the cloudy late afternoon blurred the boundary of the city, making it appear deceptively larger than it really is. With our legs and lungs in a somewhat shape, we resumed our ascent.

Seen from the upper terrace, the mysterious twin stains on the roof took the shape of two people, one slightly lighter in tone and smaller in size than the other, almost like two lovers leaning against each other's shoulders. Patrick pulled out his zoom lens and started to take some pictures of the city below, whereas I wandered off to the side of the terrace, looking for a good angle to capture the pink stains when an womanizer Frenchman approached me. He looked decent in his charcoal-grey wool coat and matching light grey scarf around his neck, and his claim that he used to work in a small Japanese town, which I wouldn't imagine to be internationally well-known by any means, gave him some credibility, but I was defensive after all the previous rough welcomes. I told him that I was leaving the next day and drove him away. "I will cry for you," he said jokingly as he dissolved into the crowd entering the basilica. Half drunk with this unexpected petting on my insecure ego, yet half ashamed of the stupid excitement it brought to me, I trotted back to Patrick and didn't tell him what happened. We resumed walking toward the pillared and dome-ceilinged entrance of the now-towering basilica.

Originally uploaded by uBookworm.