Scavenging

Living in a hostel on a fairly limited budget has meant a bit of scavenging. I pick up anything I can find that could be useful: bits of leftover food from the free breakfast, a book, internet acess cards that people leave lying around, and, perhaps most importantly, a South Americans discarded bottle of cologne. I am in Paris by myself for a few days, so in a sense I have also done a bit of scavenging for friends.

Photojournalism is about action verbs, the budding Romanian photojounalist told me. We were sitting in a coffeehouse endlessly, neither of us had anywhere to go. He explained growing up in Romania where no one understood his talent, and his moment of triumph when national geographic accepted one of his pictures, the one about the trash collectors in the danube delta. Photojournalism you see, blended perfectly his passions for the environment and talking to people. As a photojournalist you have to make your subjects comfortable, so comfortable with your presence that they forget you are there.

Smelling like a South American, I entered a different coffeehouse, of the second variety that I described earlier. It was a bit too expensive but I was cold, and I did not see many tourists. A somewhat distraught woman kept looking at the door and then at my book. I looked horrible and am not in the habit of picking up strange French women in cafes, to be frank. What was she doing? After awhile, perhaps it was the way I smelled, she offered to buy me another coffee. She explained that the man she was waiting for had apparently ditched her, but she thought highly of the author I was reading. I did not want to make the evening too exciting, so I started talking intensely, too intensely, about politics. The evolution in international sovereignty is the most significant facet of globalization, and the like. In the sense that she supplied me with a list of left wing authors and then continued on her way, I suppose it had its intended effect.