Les Librairies of My Life: Les Mots à la bouche

Les Mots à la bouche is my favourite bookstore in the Whole. Wide. World. It is on my favourite street corner in Paris: rue Sainte-Croix de la Bretonnerie and rue Vieille du Temple, in Le Marais, 4:ème arr.

Les Mots is packed with books, LBGT-themed and others, and they always seem to carry the top 5 books I've been looking for lately; classics as well as new stuff; everything neatly organized. They have a great wall of magazines, too. And a basement.

At the moment all I want is for that wonderfully nice staff to start selling tote bags with their logo, in the appropriate blue colour. It would be perfect in my collection, and I would carry it everywhere with me, showing it off.

By the way, on that same extraordinary corner is:

Amorino (the best ice cream in Europe),
Saveurs de pains (a boulangerie that does fantastic baguettes with gruyère & ham and a mean café crème)
L'étoile manquante (a great hangout café/bar with an otherworldly salad of fresh fruits and cheeses with mustard dressing - Salade d'Ètoile).

(All pics old and googled)

I'd Rather Be Reading

I sometimes forget that I am collecting tote bags from museums, libraries and such; probably because I've only got 4 as of yet. Arboga Stadsbibliotek, the Ghibli Museum shop Mama Aiuto, Antarctic base Port Lockroy and the little Penguin above that I originally used as my set bag for film shoots. Recently J was this close to get me one from a Kafka museum in Prague, but as he turned his back some woman got the last one. Thing is though, not to actually be at the tote bag site oneself is probably cheating.

The Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Tokyo

We have now been to heaven. For us and for the little Japanese kids, in a crazy Junibacken stylee. The guidebook said it was supposed to be really hard to get inside the Studio Ghibli Museum, but all we needed was a Japansese cousin and thirty minutes' worth of phonecalls and some getting tickets at some other place and... Yeah. We actually didn't dare to think that we were finally gonna go there. But we did! There was a Ghibli bus at the Mitaka station that took us to the museum. And when we got there - three stories of Totoro fun! Some wonderful rooms plastered with sketches from the movies, desks full of old used pencils, cigarette buts, inspirational books and tidbits... A room that showed the history of animation in a Ghibli way, complete with these wonderful Bouncing Totoro zoetropes.  They also had an Aardman exhibition going. And the Laputa Robot Soldier on the roof. And a real Cat Bus for the small kids (I wanted to jump on there so badly)! The shop made us both crazy - J bought an original cell from Spirited Away with No-Face on it and I got The Art of Totoro and The Art of Princess Mononoke books. Plus a bunch of small thingies and a bag with the Mama Aiuto logo that I'll be rocking back home.

The Greatest Tee in the World

Oh my!

Last nite J went through his wardrobe for the first time ever and found a black Strand tee with a red logo that he gave me for present! For the ones who don't know, Strand is like the big fat emperess of bookstores, situated on 828 Broadway (at 12th street) in NYC. Carrying both new and used, they totally rock. This is the place where I always go to brush up my great collection of ntozake shange books whenever I'm in town. It's almost like I long more to go to Strand than I do NYC.