Paris in an efficient week

This travel time is cheating a little bit because I met a friend in Paris and his friend had been living in Paris for the past few months studying cooking, so I kind of coasted.

Things that I did and found worthwhile were the Louvre. I went through the newer area up the stairs from the boat sculpture, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, first, which I think was a good idea because there's less pizzazz that route, and then when I was tired after lunch is when I hit up the crazy Italian wing. The French revolution wing was closed, which was a little disappointing because I'm a fan of Géricault and Delacroix, but ok.

Musée d'Orsay is not as massive as the Louvre, but is also very interesting and important more modern pieces and a beautiful building in its own right.

I really liked dining at the Jules Verne in the Eiffel Tower. It as a Michelin star and was of course pricey, but seemed like exactly the sort of thing you would want to spend money on. Make a reservation for sure, and as early as you can. I think they assume you want a good window seat and seating is based on how early you make reservations. Even locals believe Jules Verne to be "classique".

For other restaurants in Paris, the Fork App is apparently good. As one local put it, it's like Groupon for Paris restaurants, but good. You make discounted reservations when restaurants think they'll have extra capacity. There's also Yelp, but apparently the reviews in French can be quite different from the reviews in English. For instance, one restaurant within a short walk of the Eiffel Tower had things like "Good standard fare" while the French reviews called it a "National scandal!"

Pigeon is delicious. Heads up! Also of course escargot. My chef friend really recommends Grand Cœur as one of her favorite restaurants.

Also, my friend had been taking private French tutoring with a Paris local, and I think he enjoyed getting the inside scoop on local trends before he went. The Google Translate app is a must for weak French. Be sure to download the French dictionary ahead of time and get used to the app if it's your first time.

Apparently Parisian French is particularly hard to learn and understand. I had heard that from many sources, but it wasn't until I was dining with a new friend who was French herself, but who had been away for a decade or two, struggling to communicate with a server at a restaurant that I realized how serious that admonition was. She said that when she comes back, she often ends up speaking to her friends in English, so they can practice and because it just ends up being easier.

Notre Dame was beautiful, although an interesting trend is that Cathedrals or other older buildings in big old cities that have turned into sprawling modern metropolises is that there is just a lot more updating and other changes that happen to the buildings over centuries, for better or for worse. I did meet a cheese chef outside named Remy and kissed in the rain near the bridge to the other little island behind Notre Dame and he invited me to come visit him in Monaco. That seemed very Paris, but I also think I viewed the interaction in a more casual way than he did. Be sure to check out that view of the Seine and Notre Dame, I think it looks its best that way.

Versailles was great, but I definitely got lost going out there, had to ask people what train was the right one (which I should have done in the first place) and it's true that the line is pretty long to get in. It was what I thought it would be, which is a testament to its fame and current status.

A cheaper and dirtier version of French opulence was the Paris opera house, which was wonderfully more than I thought it was going to be. Also, for Phantom of the Opera fans, you can see the Phantom's box -- Box 5. While we were there, the inside (Chagall ceiling!) was closed for a ballet rehearsal. That was also beautiful to watch.

The catacombs were awesome! Again, because they are so small and down so far, only so many people can go in at a time so be sure to book well ahead, print out your tickets, etc. so you don't end up having to stand in the very long line and instead can stand in the shorter.

You can climb up to the Sacré-Cœur Basilica and check out Montmarte, in fact one of my new friends suggest I wake up early and climb up those steps to see the sunrise, but I was exhausted by this time.

I took a quick day trip outside the city to meet a new sociopath friend. More on her later, probably, but her story for me was perhaps one of the most compelling because she had just discovered her identity by chance a few months before, so I was seeing her discover herself and come to terms with it in almost real time. And she's such a classic example of what you would expect a very smart, beautiful, successful sociopath to be. Really you would all love to meet her, as well as the rest of the new friends I met on this trip and I hope to be able to write more about them in the next book.

I never feel sorry for the people I meet, but sometimes their circumstances are so poignant to me. A lot of them just want to live an authentic life of pleasure, but also some sort of substance or meaning. And it's not so much their unique mental processes that often keep them from it, but rather the reactions and misunderstandings of the people around them. I hope that we can do better as a society in this regard. I hope that we can come to understand each other better and allow each other to freely live genuine lives. 

Ohio? Southern Michigan?

I'm going to be in Northern Ohio the end of this month, if anyone wants to meet up? I'll mostly be around Toledo, but will have a car, am flying into and out of Detroit, and am willing to travel.

Central Europe: Poland, Germany, Italy?

Hello friends! I am already planning for this September. So far I have plans to be in Poland, Germany, and Northern Italy. Are there people in those areas or other parts of Central or Eastern Europe that would like to meet up? Also, really if you are anywhere in Europe let me know, because I might be able to arrange a little trip or long layovers in your city as well.

Thanks!

Stonehenge and Bath

Ok! Finally we get around to England/London. Next rest of London, Paris, then Russia and Eastern Europe.

The first day in London I went to the British Museum, which is free like all other state run museums and open late on Fridays like most. It was really great -- the type of place where you round a corner and essentially run smack into the Rosetta Stone. Also, they have thieved great parts of the Parthenon from Greece.

I stayed just this one night at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel London Kensington, which was good and close to museums -- the National History Museum, Science and Victoria and Albert. I stayed there because I had to wake up at like 5:00 am (jet lag, what?) for my sunrise Stonehenge tour with Premium Tours. I was surprised how much I loved Stonehenge? That place is photogenic as hell. I could have stayed there forever. And definitely I think it made a big difference that we had the special early entry (can also be later entry) in which we got to actually go inside the stones. Don't touch! Don't kiss! Definitely don't lick!

The tour continued to Bath, where I was going to meet my first new friends! I don't know what I expected, but I was surprised at how young and tall S was after our conversations and his girl petite. They were both so fun. He said that he has relative empathy -- that is he could feel a sort of empathy if he himself has felt and/or had access to that same type of emotion himself. He is also high for fearlessness, with stories like driving and having the bonnet of the car pop open, but he doesn't freak out or even slow down too fast, just looks between the crack at the bottom and steers onto the next off ramp. He says that it is difficult to finish a thought because as he’s thinking all sorts of other parallel thoughts, like a static electronic ball that shoots off little electric bolts (what another sociopath called a chaos brain). He has olfactory issues, which is an odd crossover but a verified one. He can't tell the difference between coffee and orange smell with his eyes closed. He works with his hands and he does say that he is more prone to accidents than others in his profession. S was super sincere. He said one of the things he doesn't like in other people (maybe the root of his antisocial views) is the hypocrisy and lack of sincerity in others. They just wait to talk, he said. He also has interesting ways that he learns from mistakes (sort of learns caution or a sort of respect because he has internalized the physical harm he has experienced, but only after severe or repeated exposure to the bad consequence and he never gets around to fear) that I get into more some other time maybe. Sometimes I would chat with his girl alone and she would tell me that she feels badly for him because he has no one to talk to about any of this, that is why she was so excited to meet me. Yes, I do think it is often a little sad and hard for sociopaths to have no one to talk to about how they view the world. But her situation seemed just as bad, if not worse. It seemed odd to me that they would have many people they could talk to about any BDSM stuff they get up to, because that at least has earned a degree of acceptance in the world, but she will probably never be able to talk to anyone what it is like to love a sociopath.


Bath is nice too, probably worth the trip. It's made all out of the same pale yellow stone (Bath stone) and built basically at the same time in the same Georgian style. It's a little reminiscent of inner Paris that way with the Haussmanian architecture. Also the roman baths are very interesting, beautiful, and historically fun, and finally, this part you can lick!!! (the water has a very strong mineral taste that is a little reminiscent of blood.)

Melbourne in two efficient days

Sorry for the delay, just got back from England/France/Belgium, which I will get to shortly. But first we finish up Australia.

I arrived in Melbourne in the afternoon, took a nap, and showed up intolerably late for a dinner appointment with my new friend P because I got the times wrong in my head. We had dinner at a local eatery and then drinks at Naked for Satan, hip, a lot of nudity in the decor, and a great rooftop view of the city.

The next morning I woke up and did a tour of the Old Melbourne Gaol. Again, I was struck by how my brothers sociopath were treated and based on such a paucity of evidence. There were exhibits on Phrenology and other attempts to explain criminology through physical or inherited traits. In fact, by the 19th century, Melbournians were calling for greater law and order, particularly in the slums. The rally cry was that criminality (among almost all other traits, apparently) was inherited. Where do the criminals live? The slums. Where were the criminals having children, the slums. So it stands to reason that the slums were just a genetic cesspool of criminality. And thus under this reasoning, one's class was essentially one's mortal and moral destiny on this earth.

The thing that struck me about this part of the jail was how common this belief is again -- that people
are sort of naturally bad or all bad in this black and white thinking and the main solution is to "lock them up." In fact, I was just looking at some random twitter account whose name included those words. I Googled them today and saw black and white thinking from both liberal and conservatives on American political issues. The idea is that either Obama/Clintons or Trump/Kushner/Etc. or essentially just criminals trying to ruin the lives of ordinary good people and that the solution is to lock them up. When large percentages of the populace are seeing their brother man this way and thinking the solution is to imprison them, kill them (as some of the more extreme believe or wish) or to wish them into nonexistence somewhere far away to never be engaged with again, I see parallels to the inhumane ways we have historically treated prisoners and alleged criminals.

An interesting exhibit on the death penalty discussed how much the general populace loved to see public hangings and how there were many who felt deprived of a natural right when hangings became private. When the number of people executed sharply rose in the 1890s as a result of an economic depression, many understood the connection between people living in desperate situations and engaging in crime and started wondering about the morality of hanging. Frances Knorr was a particularly polarizing hanging. She had been convicted of the murder of one baby, although she later confessed to killing at least two during these tough economic times. According to Wikipedia:

Australia was in severe depression from 1873 to 1896; with no state welfare, women in particular faced a hard life. The diaries of John Castieau, governor of Old Melbourne Gaol from 1869 to 1884 indicate that as children were permitted to stay with their mothers, it was a common practice for a pregnant woman to commit a crime so that she could have her delivery in the gaol and be cared for.

During the 1893 Commission, Melbourne's public health officer testified that the post-mortems he had performed on over 500 children showed that more than half had been murdered.

Frances's husband had been imprisoned for fraud and her lover had abandoned her. She had taken to baby farming," the practice of caring for illegitimate or other unwanted children in exchange for money, and decided like many did, including this couple, to kill the babies she was being paid for rather than care for them. Her death sentence so divided the populace that the hangman committed suicide just days before her execution date, partly in response to his wife telling him that she would leave him if he executed Frances.

This quote from Chaplain Keith Forbes from around this time: “It would be impossible for those who have witnessed, like myself, the 'brutal exhibition' of a human being launched into eternity to refrain from asking, 'Can this thing be justifiable in the sight of God?'”

The Gaol also had various portraits of prisoners, the charming Frederick Bailey Deeming, a possible candidate for Jack the Ripper, who was finally caught "masquerading as the dashing Baron Swanston," about to be engaged to a third woman after he had killed two other wives (and four children!) in the space of a year. Wikipedia describes him as a "difficult child" whose teen years were marked by fraud, deceit, and theft with "behaviour variously described as aggressive, ostentatious, ingratiating and overly attentive to women" but was also known by his employers as being an excellent worker, whose employers gladly loaned him 200 pounds to start his own business and who, although he eventually murdered her, was known for treating his wife with the utmost civility. Hello, brother sociopath.

After that I went on The Little Penguin Bus tour to see the parade of penguins, featuring the very cute Little Penguin. The tour was awesome, the guide was awesome. It was such a change from the bad experience I had in Cairns. I definitely recommend seeing the penguins, they are hilarious. They eat fish out in sea and come back to shore every couple days or so to feed their new chicks. But teh chicks don't recognize the parents, only the parents recognize the chicks. So every baby chick is out there squawking and harassing every single adult they see begging for food. Like some seriously aggressive badgering, and the adult is just trying to like slide by without getting harassed. The baby chicks are also like 80% as tall as their parents. So they look like these big furry baby bullies harassing the sleek looking parents. I added the Guided Ranger Tour, which had pretty good seats for seeing them come up from the beach (you can see a million forums about this), but honestly the closest I got to penguins was after everyone got up from their seats and started going through the walkways, when the penguins were just inches away. So don't stress about getting better seats or tour options, I don't think, but the guided ranger tour was still pretty interesting and worthwhile to do if it's available to you.


A quick funny story, while I was out on the penguin tour there was an incident on the same block as my hotel where a man drove into a crowd of pedestrians. My very friendly and very conscientious guide was trying to break the news to me gently, perhaps because I would be upset by it? But she needed to tell me because the roads were closed off and they would likely need to drop me off a bit down the street. I had no clue how to respond to her, though, and I was tired and could not summon up a proper response so I just stayed quiet, but then left to use the toilet. I wonder if she noticed anything unusual.

My last day of Australia I went with new friend N on quick road trip of the Great Ocean Road. If you're used to driving on the left side of the road, you could totally rent a car and do this yourself in a somewhat long day, or they have tours! In fact, the Little Penguin Bus also does Great Ocean Road tours.

I shook down my Little Penguin Bus guide for an itinerary, and this is what she suggested:

• Head straight to Loch Ard Gorge via the city Colac (not along the Great Ocean Road, cut across on the faster straighter freeway). Check out the Gorge look out and the Razorback lookout
• London bridge maybe if you have time.
• Gibson steps is just a lookout. 
• 12 Apostles
• Maits rest rainforest walk is just about an hour from 12 Apostles and a quick 20-30 minutes walk
• Apollo bay has some famous ice cream, Dooleys.
• Kennett river about 30 minutes from Apollo bay has wild koalas.
• Anglesy golf course has wild kangaroos 

Travellers

Almost immediately upon arriving in a foreign place I try to imitate the natives as much as possible. Every day I pick up a new item of clothing, a new phrase, a new mannerism that will help me blend in. It must seem a little ridiculous or pointless now because I'm obviously not one of the natives, but I try anyway. I realize this doesn't make me a sociopath -- I could be a hippie backpacker, a travel writer, or a spy. But I think being a sociopath makes me this type of traveler.

Another thing I like about traveling is the chance to see how arbitrary your own culture's traditions are. Everyone makes a big deal about conforming to social norms and ostracizing those who don't quite fit, but that is just a tool of oppression. The social norm is not the important feature to society, the conforming is.

I don't think it's a coincidence that nonconformist Gypsies are sometimes called "travelers."