This seems like a losing battle, but...

...I'm still going to try to catch up, haha. A good two weeks ago, the Champs Elysees was all dressed up...in nature.

It's a very French thing, you totally have to commune with the land. This is the sort of thing that can make or break a presidential candidate, that's how serious it is. I'm not kidding, Sarko has lost MAJOR points here for not being interested (or at least pretending to be interested) in agriculture. There's an agriculture festival every year, and it's basically obligatory for the pres to be seen smooching a cow. The problem is that Sarko has screwed this up repeatedly. Chirac, on the other hand, was quite good at it. And no one beats Mitterrand for the theatricality of regionalism.

But I digress. The point of all that was to say that the Champs Elysees being covered in trees and bushes was not at all supposed to be funny or kitschy, it was dead serious. The point was to show off French agriculture. And it was indeed impressive, as you can see:

Even the nuns were rockin' out, haha.

I went with Ben and Amanda and Kari (not pictured):

The even was divided up by type of agriculture, so there were trees:

And vineyards (obviously). As I was standing there admiring the oysters, some random dude came up to me and started chatting about grapes and wine. Seeing where this was going, Kari high-tailed it out of there, leaving me to fend for myself from the lecherous dude looking for some sort of trophy mistress. So I agreeably said yeah, wine was good, then he was like, "do you like castles? Would you like to come to mine?" hahahahaha. That's when I said I had to go join my friends and bolted too. When I found Kari again, we wondered who the hell would fall for something like that? I mean, really, wtf??? I was like, "yeah, I mean, seriously, it's a perfect set-up, the whole 'come to my castle but let's go to the hotel first, then suddenly you find there's no castle and no car and you're left strangled on some bed somewhere.'" Kari thought I was being rather extreme on the dénouement of that one, that it was probably just "let's go to a hotel and oh, oops, too busy to show you the castle, I'll just take you home." But in any case, seemed like a perfect sociopath psychokiller set-up to me. So much for the vineyards.

And even oysters!

One of my favorites was the real food pyramid, haha:

The quote of the day, however, clearly goes to Amanda. We were walking down the street when all of a sudden she was like, "Man, every time I think, 'no, really, France can't be THAT politically incorrect...then I see something like THIS...'" Not realizing what she was looking at, I looked around and stumbled upon the object of her gaze. My response, "oh YES, that HAS to happen!"

Yeah, you're seeing that right. Some random dude was walking around as a "redskin" (literally...there was even a woman with him reapplying paint wherever the sweat wore it off) and taking pictures with people. Oh, the political incorrectness. At least he was promoting environmental awareness? In any case, I think everyone else was horrified, but OBVIOUSLY I had to get my picture taken with him (haha).

Afterwards we went for drinks in honor of Ben's birthday:

And here's Luis and Anne-Helene: