Paris

The journey by train from London to Paris takes two hours and 20 minutes, including 20 minutes under the English Channel. During that time, you feel like you are in the Sozina tunnel, only that the "Eurostar" goes much faster and you don't hear "kadaj-kadaj, kadaj-kadaj"... or however anyone translates the monotonous clattering of our trains.

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We spent the night in a hotel on Montmartre, a hill from which, as if in the palm of your hand, you can see the whole of Paris. Although I was in the "city of light" for the first time, I had the feeling that I had already been there, especially when we found ourselves in front of the world-famous sights: the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Sorbonne or while we were walking along the Champs Elysées, Montparnasse , along the banks of the Seine and rested in Luxembourg Park.

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One of the sights of Paris is the metro, opened 122 years ago (1900). It is more pleasant in it than in London, as if it is not underground. I guess because it is more spacious, brighter and the distances between the two stations are smaller.

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A busy station in the Paris metro is called "Stalingrad". Many have decided to forget everything that has to do with the Soviet Union, including the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the bloodiest in human history, a turning point in the Second World War. The French, apparently, are not.

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I was persistent and after a bit of wandering in the Latin Quarter, near the Sorbonne, I found a memorial plaque with the name of a maternal cousin, Jovan Žan Kopitović, who was mentioned in an earlier blog. The memorial plaque reads: "Zhan Kopitović, a Yugoslav patriot, fell here, mowed down by German bullets, on March 11, 1943." Francois-Guillaume Loren wrote an interesting book about him, "You must be a relative?" - declared the best of contemporary French history in 2019. In order to find out how Jovan deserved such an honor, the French writer did not hesitate to visit Brčele in Crmnica, where the Kopitovićs are from.

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In London everything revolves around the Thames, in Paris around the Seine. Although both are female, Thames, for me, has always been somewhat more robust, Sena more gentle, perhaps because of the name. In addition, detective novels writers such as Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about the Thames, its bridges and secrets, while the most beautiful verses about love woes next to the Seine were written by the great French poets of the 19th and 20th centuries, from Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud to Paul Valeri and Jacques Préver.

And yes: the Thames is much murkier, almost brown in color.

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For life after life, the most rewarding thing is for a person to be a musician or a writer during his life. At the famous Père Lachaise cemetery, the graves of Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde are separated from intrusive fans by a fence, and the "eternal houses" of Chopin, Edith Piaf, Moliere, Honore de Balzac, as well as the unfortunate painter Modigliani are covered with flowers. Few people pay attention to the graves of researchers, philosophers, scientists... who made the world a debt.

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I thought literacy could be taught, but it can't. Literacy is God-given. Whoever was illiterate in first grade will remain illiterate for the rest of his life. But, in our time, the illiterate had respect for literate people and were somehow on the defensive, today, thanks to social networks, the inflation of education and morality, the illiterate are on the offensive. It turned out that there are more of them than literate ones, their time has come, they raised their heads and even showed their teeth. They don't have to be ashamed of their illiteracy anymore, they freely discuss various topics, comment, evaluate, they are full of jokes and nonsense, but there are so many of them that they rarely catch the eye individually, because they are drowned in a mass of their own kind. And that mass, like a lion, swallows everything in front of it and more often succeeds in its obscure intention - to direct public opinion.

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"I am not an Athenian, I am a citizen of the world!" - Diogenes is said to have exclaimed. I would also like to exclaim that I am not Baranin but a citizen of the world. Unfortunately, that is not true. I can go from Bar to the end of the world, but Bar from me - hard...

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"Paris gave you herself, a piece of heaven forever," Johnny sang in the unforgettable "Pavel"...