Insulated picnic bags and ugly cunts

and you're wondering why there's so much empty space here? Well, so am I...

Streets and Metro stations do have weird names in this city and one often wonders how people could come up with these names, such as Glacière (Insulated Picninc Bag), Filles du Calvaire (Agony Girls), Bonne Nouvelle (Good news) or Penis street (see my previous post about that street). Enter Jack Jack is a colleague of mine. He’s from the U.K, has been living in Paris for more than a year and his French really sucks! (am talking about the language here, of course!) Jack lives in the 18th arrondissement near the Porte de la Chapelle (Door of the Chapel) Métro station. For a year now, Jack has been commuting on the Metro and has been hearing the names of these stations on the PA system with the sexy voice without really paying attention to how those names were spelt an what they meant. Near Porte de la Chapelle, Jack usually travels through a station named Marx-Dormoy believing the name of the station was Marx Dors-moi, which in turn meant in Jack’s slow-French-learning-brain: Marx sleep with me. Well, with some imagination and an extra preposition, it does mean Marx sleep with me. However, what scared me the most was what never occurred to Jack: Why the F-#£% would anybody name a métro station Marx sleep with me??? Well, no, Jack thought “why not”. The French are weird and they only think about sex and politics so why not, and after all, let's face it, France is a totally centralized totalitarian state… hence its passion for Marx... After going through various stages of disbelief, panic, laughter and Roast beef animosity, I started thinking like Jack: actually why not? That’s when I took my little subway map, read a few of those names and realized that by just reading the names out loud, some of them could actually sound weird and DO mean crazy stuff to the poor foreigners based in this city… So many stations and so many names, so let’s put them in different categories: 1) The sad stations, like how depressing is it to live there? Ternes: dull, Concorde: Stupid rope, Saint-Maur: Saint Dead, Sully-Morland: Slow-Death-on-bed. 2) The stations where animals have turned mad: Charenton: the Cat-Gives-Back-the-Tuna, Lamarck-Caulaincourt: The Brand-of-the running cod, Poissonnière: The female fish seller, Faidherbe-Chaligny: Made of grass, the cat reads and denies 3) The Communism nostalgia stations: Stalingrad: Stalin City, Marx Dormoy: Marx sleep with me 4) The "like, hello!" category: Maison Blanche: White House, Franklin D. Roosevelt: like HELLO!, Villejuif: Jewish city 5) The "like hello, what the hell?" category: Rue du bac: High-school Exam street, Monceau: My bucket 6) The intimate ones Bourg la Reine: Fuck the Queen, Choisy le Roi: Choose the king , Bourse: Scrotum, Châtelet: Ugly Cunt, Saint-Cloud: The-Holy-Nail, Rue de la Pompe: Fellatio-Street 7) The gross ones: Saint-Sulpice: Saint piss-on-it, Charonne: Dead meat, Rambuteau: Vomit-Drunk-Early 8) The appetizing stations: Gobelins: Gulp-the-linen, Parmentier: Mash-Potatoes-and-Minced-Meat Welcome to Paris...