Even Without the Brazilians and Iranians They Could Tell I Wasn’t French

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My First Three Experiences of France

Perhaps it is fitting that my first three experiences of Paris all begin with the same letter, or perhaps it just sounds more romantic if I say it that way. After all, Paris is the city of romance. There have been all too many books, movies, anecdotes and sappy poems telling of the lure, the charm or even the lust that this city creates in people (particularly those young and restless types), or perhaps more scarily, that this city actually has in it’s own right. I can assure you, without any hesitation whatsoever, that this is nothing but a fabrication and - as you will soon learn herein from my tales of public latrines, cappuccinos, Brazillian stag-parties, epilepsy-inducing towers, snails, Iranians and Marlboro cigarettes, but not in that order of course - Paris does in fact have a large number of places where I wouldn’t dare take a lady. At least if I had any plans involving her later in the evening that is.

I can also assure you, and with similar confidence, that there are certain parts of Paris that are in fact almost as romantic as drinking a bottle of expensive Australian wine on top of a secluded and snowy mountain somewhere in the middle of Mongolia, but these simply aren’t as frequent as romance novels would have you believe. Therefore, I think I will dedicate most of this entry to the more everyday aspects of the city, the more interesting things I did, and of course the whole thing about three Brazilians and an Iranian. Are you intrigued yet? I certainly hope you are.

I arrived in Paris in that most romantic of fashions. And by romantic I mean cheap as the bus from London cost less than my dinner that night (and yes, I know I’m a fat pig so you can save yourself the effort of commenting Lindsay). The uneventful yet pretty moment where we boarded the ferry from Dover would have brought a tear to my eye were I actually attached to the south-east corner of England but sadly the weather made the white cliffs look, well, just like the sky, so I spent most of my day engrossed in a book. My very first glimpses of the idyllic fields of northern France were truly glimpses as there is only so much interest to be found in wheat.

Paris was another story though, and my arrival at the eastern bus station was everything I had hoped it to be. To be fair, this was somewhere in the outer suburbs of Paris, but if a city wishes to claim the title of “romance capital of the literary world” then even out there things should be at least half decent. I would have skipped right onto the subway system had I been smart enough to get some Euros in advance, but sadly foresight is something I lack these days. I walked out of the subterranean station and looked at my options. To the left seemed to be more of the station, to my right there were tall buildings that seemed like they might house an ATM. At the very least I expected to find a currency exchange somewhere along the way so I started walking down the road. The road itself seemed fine, apart from the unusually conspicuous drivers (I subsequently learned that what I though to be a misguided stereotype was in fact true: Parisians can’t drive), but the buildings quickly began thinning out and after a couple of minutes I found myself walking down what could have passed for a backstreet in Bangkok. Around me there were people, lots of them, and they were all just standing there beside the road. Their possessions were collected in boxes or shopping trolleys, their children were silently standing beside their parents looking glum and, well, destitute.

Had I found a slum? In Paris? Were these immigrants? I never actually found answers to these questions. All I know is that on the street outside that bus station there is a line of hundreds of people waiting for something. . . I couldn’t ask them for my French had not yet spread beyond what is commonly known as “Moulin Rouge French” (you know what I mean) and I felt in a poor position to be inquiring as I was in fact looking for a large machine that would spit cash at me in exchange for typed numbers, so I turned back and returned to the bus station. If anyone can explain to me what I saw I would dearly love to know.

At the bus station I realized my mistake as there was in fact a gigantic shopping mall filled with yuppie French people (yet another shocking juxtaposition of this decadent world) and at least three ATMs about twenty meters away so I quickly found some money, bought something for the change and jumped onto the subway. For an introduction to Paris this was at least incredibly novel, it was not at all what I had been expecting from the city, but in retrospect it does seem to fit Paris’ character.

My second experience of Paris came when I emerged from the subway at the station across from my hostel. I guess you could say that any hostel found via my methodology (cheapest I could find before getting there) is going to be somewhere interesting, but this really took the cake. When I tried to explain to people where my hostel was they would usually look at me sideways and check to make sure I hadn’t mispronounced the name as Barbes-Rochechouart most certainly has a reputation.

To begin with, this is the only subway station I found where men will openly try to scalp tickets (they buy in bulk from the machines and sell off to you at the regular price to make some small profit on each ticket), police get mobbed by hordes shouting insults (it was as though a fight had broken out, everyone ran over to shout at the poor policeman) and random guys try to sell you cigarettes. This last one was the strangest for me as I am more used to the Asian “salespeople” who each have their own unique way of trying to sell drugs to you, from the quiet but honest “marijuana, marijuana” in Nepal to the “toke toke” of Bangkok, yet here in Paris the big seller was “Marlboro, Marlboro”. The suburb appeared mainly muslim and the hordes of people haggling with fruit stand and jewellery pawners on the streets made the place feel distinctly unlike what western Europe is supposed to in the movies. Everywhere I went I was inundated by sellers and buyers of all kinds, bootlegs were everywhere, kebabs were practically falling from the spit of their own accord, I somehow felt at home.

Home for the few days that I was in Paris was to be found right in the middle of the thronging hordes around the subway station. This was a nice and friendly hostel in the process of redecoration. Now, all good hostels have quirky charms (like the rooftop bar with the accompanying staircase of drunken doom in Siam Reap, or the kitchen cum tour agency in Ulaan Baatar) and this one certainly had that. However, unlike the other nice hostels that have quirks which everyone has a good giggle about, this hostel had a quirk that interrupted my sleep when the owners came and confiscated my bed each morning at 9am “in case the inspectors come”. I’m all for making extra profit by stuffing four beds into a room, but do you have to wake me up to remove the evidence every day? Nevertheless, this did give me a good excuse to get up and see a lot of the city and they would dutifully replace the offending bedding each evening, and to be honest it was quite a funny sight to watch the guys hurriedly moving twenty beds in and out of a closet every day.

This brings me to my third experience of Paris and it began as soon as I entered my dorm that first evening. There were three others sleeping in the dorm that night, two Brazilian friends (one who spoke English too much and one who didn’t at all, a good average you might say), and an Iranian-American. The Brazilians were an interesting pair, the first was a mountainous man who had just arrived in France to meet his girlfriend who was conspicuously staying in another hotel with another man, and the second was small but energetic and had been living in Rome and working on the subway there for some months. The Iranian-American was, in comparison, the subdued companion who was returning home after a winter in Iran with his relatives; I will tell you more about him in a bit.

The four of us teamed together that evening as the Brazilians offered to show us around (after all, they had been in Paris for a week and knew some good bars/restaurants) and we headed out to what we imagined to be dinner. Those of you who know me, and no doubt those of you who have read any words I may have written here in the past, are aware of my gross, no that’s a bad word for it, my grand love of food. If food didn’t exist I would have almost no inclination to travel I would think. Also, I would die of starvation, but that isn’t the point. The point is that when I go out for dinner on my first night in Paris I am most definitely inclined to indulge myself as soon as possible with numerous courses of frogs, snails, livers and bread. Some wine would be nice too. To this end we all boarded the subway and headed towards the Bastille.

Now, contrary to my understanding of Paris in which the Bastille was a gigantic building which looked conspicuously like an enormous castle with a moat and Leonardo di Caprio in a small paddle boat drifting nearby, the Bastille is actually just a roundabout with an elegant little monument in the middle of it. How, I ask you, is a roundabout going to hold prisoners? Are all 17th century criminals afraid of traffic? (Despite being a highly unlikely phobia this would actually be a smart move on the part of anyone living in Paris, although the myth about there being an accident on the roundabout underneath the Arc de Triomphe every seven seconds proved to be untrue as I did not see a single one during the ten minutes where I stared at the traffic there.)

Anyway, I digress. We arrived at the monument which stands where the Bastille used to be and walked a few streets over to find the Brazilian’s girlfriend and then we finally headed in the direction of some food. By this point I was getting nicely hungry, but not critically so, and the street we were guided to turned out to contain numerous choices.
Somehow though we got sucked into a bar for a quick pre-dinner drink which was ok at first as long as it was just the one (and they had house wine which was a nice way to start my French experience) so we all got into the spirit of being merry and getting to know one another.

The loud Brazilian was indeed quite loud as he explained the three passions of his kindred: football, beer and women, in that order. His explanations gained momentum with his second beer as he began to divulge stories of bachelor’s parties he has been to (stories that put anything we do in Australia to shame, let me assure you) and when he began getting the bartender to play Brazilian music I feared that my dinner was slipping beyond reach. Unfortunately he was the only one of the four who spoke enough English to enjoy chatting with the Iranian and I so the night soon slipped into that awkward phase where no one really knows what is going on.

Finally we decided that enough was enough and the Iranian and I left the bar in search of food only to find that the restaurants in that particular area had long since closed leaving us with the options of streetside kebab (hardly a French delicacy) or streetside crepe (hardly the best way to experience it) so with crepe in hand we headed back through the subway to our beds and called it a night. I don’t mean any offence to the Brazilians, I was just hungry and bored.

So, my first day in Paris had amounted to an odd experience at the bus station, a brief exploration of Barbes-Rouchechourat, the only part of central Paris that fits precisely none of the sterotypes that it is supposed to, and a bar filled with more Brazilians than French people. Oh, plus a crepe, but that only leads onto my next dilemma. As I fell asleep that evening I hoped that the next day would be more typically French; I wanted to feel the love, the passion and the romance, I wanted to experience the snootiness, the chic and artsy, I wanted to see the Paris I had always heard about.

The Dilemma of Food

I hate to sound like a broken record, which I am told is especially painful to the ears in textual mediums such as this, but I love food and for me Parisian restauranting was that intriguing combination of often disappointing on occasion but so fantastically brilliant on others that you tend to forgive the failures. Getting food into my mouth, and subsequently my stomach as I sometimes like to do, turned out to be quite a chore in this city and by the end of my tenure I was quite over the whole effort, however, on the few occasions where everything came together correctly I was simply blown away.

It all started with that first night where what I shall term “Brazilian interference” got between me and my baguette. I definitely wasn’t off to a good start so the following morning I tried to correct things by finding a true French bakery. According to all sources French bakeries are to be found on every street corner; baguettes are supposed to be falling off wagons, out of people’s pockets and off street stands as if it were baguette migratory season and the ground constituted a warm destination. This turned out to be a false presumption, particularly in the area immediately around my hostel, so I somehow found myself wandering the streets somewhere between the Arc de Triomphe, Champs Elysees and Eiffel Tower in search of a bakery which didn’t exist.

Then I discovered the vital words “petit de jours”. Now, I think I can be forgiven for not knowing this phrase at first as breakfast for me is anything but petit, but you have to learn these things when you travel. I added the key phrase to my now overly full and completely convoluted foreign language memories (I often confuse my Lao with my Mongolian and completely forget all of my English in lieu of my Chinese) and dove into what turned out to be a lunchtime sandwich. Breakfast was going to be an issue in this city.

Later that day, or more towards the evening if you are keeping detailed records of my whereabouts, and after a hastily bought baguette from a small shop window near a street which I later discovered was locally known as “bacteria alley”, I met again with my Iranian friend (the Brazilians had left for Spain) for dinner and together we decided that enough was enough. It was time to feast French style. I did something I’m not proud of, I admit it, we were just that desperate for a good dinner: I found a restaurant recommendation in my guidebook. Yes, I broke the rule and read the bible, and off to the left bank we went. And what a good decision that was! After being accosted by two very lovely young ladies who were doing a survey about romantic foods who recommended us a nice creperie in exchange for answering their questions (plus we got to chat to two beautiful girls, neither of us was complaining about that), the two of us found ourselves walking down a perfect slice of French city life.

The streets were cobbled and on a small hill, in three directions the thin lanes were bordered almost exclusively by restaurants. The dilemma was choosing which one to take. By virtue of its downhill slope we went left and soon found ourselves wandering between take-out places, internationally themed restaurants, student bars, small clubs, wine cellars, and a dozen or so little restaurants, each advertising a long list of local foods. I’ve thought back since that evening and tried to remember what it is like in Townsville on this score. You see, if I go out eating back home I might go to a Chinese or Indian restaurant, perhaps Italian or Greek. You would never find a restaurant in my town advertising itself as an Australian restaurant, that just isn’t exotic enough. Sure, we have such food about, but it isn’t found in the streets full of fancy restaurants and similarly in Paris I found it hard to find a French restaurant as they simply weren’t labeled as such. This night was different though as the two of us decided upon a cute looking place with wooden floors and a friendly looking man (sans moustache) waiting the tables that couldn’t have looked more French if it had tried.

We ordered a Burgundy and two set menus. The bread arrived (oh I love bread with my meals now), the wine was tasted and poured, the entrees arrived and pretty soon I had six snails vying to be eaten first. Having never had escargot before I was intrigued to know if I liked it. . . I did, a lot. It was simply one of the best meals of my life, and I say that without exaggerating, the crème brulee alone was worth the price of the entire meal. Paris was starting to become a really enjoyable town, especially as my newfound Iranian friend was quite entertaining to talk with.

Unfortunately that was a hard meal to beat and from that moment on I spent my time searching for an equally inspiring meal. I have no idea how many perfectly wonderful restaurants I passed by without eating at simply because the menu did not seem quite up to the same standard. In the end I found myself returning to that same street only to find that the other restaurants there weren’t even of the same standard. Also, I found myself feeling despondent that I was eating far too many nice meals alone.

Breakfasts were similarly difficult as all of the nice cafes either didn’t open early enough or were too far away to be convenient. As I see it, all Parisians eat their breakfast at home, go to work early, and if the weather is good they knock off early and sit in cafés from 3pm onwards. I even found it impossible to find a seat in a café on one evening! Nevertheless, I did manage to find a number of good omelettes, pains and croissants when the occasion demanded (although this was more frequently at lunch time than breakfast).

As I said earlier, I was finding it awfully arduous to eat in Paris. Whenever I was searching for a particular meal I would only find one of the others; bakeries appeared at dusk while I was searching for chicken, and a three course dinner appeared at midday. The simple action of finding dinner turned into a two hour cross river hike before I found a restaurant that was identical to the one five minutes from where I started and I gave up and ate there. And despite all that effort and annoyance at not finding what I was looking for, the searches always seemed worth it when I found a good meal because it would be so incredibly brilliant.

Thankfully, getting a coffee wasn’t nearly as trying. The only catch was that the waitresses would never understand what I said unless I said it seven times. Say cappuccino (which I’m pretty sure is more French than English) six times and you get a latte, seven and you get what you asked for. On one occasion I walked into a café to escape the rain which had rather unseasonably started ruining a perfectly sunny afternoon and I sat down by the window to peruse the menu. The menu was, of course, written entirely in French but they do happen to spell cappuccino the same way as us so I didn’t mind. The waitress came over to me and I smilingly said my one word order “Cappuccino” to her. She looked confused and tried poking my hand with a piece of paper. I thought this a little odd at first so I repeated my order only to find that she repeated her poking. It seemed as though an automatic response in French people is to poke you when you say things but I didn’t have time to explore this thought further as she annunciated that she was holding an English menu. “Oh” I said as I took the menu, opened it, and said “Cappuccino”. She smiled, nodded and went and got me the drink. I really didn’t get it. Firstly, how did she know I wasn’t French as I was dressed unusually well and not carrying any bags at the time to betray my backpackerness. And secondly, how was my order any different when I was holding the new menu?

What’s the Deal With the Eiffel Tower?

I can only imagine the conversation in the Paris city planning committee meeting when the tower was suggested. The concept of erecting a three hundred meter tall rust-red tower of steel for no reason other than to give a better vantage for thumbing their noses at the English must have met some severe resistance. Eiffel himself probably had to promise that it would last less than a year as it quite obviously destroyed the Parisian skyline. On a scale from one to more out of place than a good actor in the Evil Dead Trilogy the Eiffel Tower is still way off the chart. This building doesn’t have even one single hint of similarity to its surroundings; it really is the most out of place thing I’ve ever seen. Even to this day the French people are placing placards all over the thing swearing that the tower has been useful for one reason or another (as a radio tower during the war is the only plausible excuse that I found, but even then it didn’t really seem to help them much) or putting the names of famous dead French people around it so that some locals may be fooled into thinking it nothing more than a cemetery.

Honestly, if it weren’t for tourists the tower wouldn’t be in Paris. Perhaps it would have been bought and moved to some more fitting location, such as upside down on the moon as a modern art piece, but I am certain that the French would have gotten rid of it long ago. At least that’s what I thought at first.

Fear not, as I do have reasons for this viewpoint. When I arrived at the tower I found hordes of tourists lined up in great arcs waiting for the elevator while less than thirty waited for the stairs, which A, provided a better view, B, cost a ridiculous amount less in ticket fees, and C, were really a lot shorter than you might expect. Most of the stairs were removed years ago so buying a stairway ticket is kind of like buying a half price elevator ticket where you spend five minutes walking up stairs instead of standing in a line sweating for two hours. You have to be pretty damn lazy to take the elevator up to the first level and compared to your average Buddhist temple it is barely a bump.

While taking the stairs I was happy to be away from the tourists, and to be honest I had been enjoying looking at the tower from the ground, but then I got to the second level. This was where the stairs ended and I had to join the line for the elevator which was barely two minutes long thanks to all the paupers who couldn’t afford to pay for a ticket all the way to the top and who had still managed to line up for two hours and pay more than me to take the elevator less than a third of the way up. I casually walked into the elevator, smiled at the cute girl operating the lift, and looked out the glass window while wishing that I was either not afraid of heights or not looking out of the window. Then, and may I stress the extreme suddenness of that “then”, sixty Koreans flew into the two meter by two meter elevator. There I stood, a full foot and a half above the mass, and thus able to fully survey the horror of my situation, while yet another thirty Koreans attempted to get inside. They had entered in the same way that a tonne of sand might do; pouring in all at once and quickly filling all available space. The only real difference between sand and these tourists was that sand is considerably more friendly and doesn’t blame me for the predicament. For some reason neither the obvious lack of space, obvious age of the elevator (this is the Eiffel Tower after all), nor the pleading of the cute operator seemed to perturb the remaining Koreans and in the end the door simply shut on us and cut the seemingly contiguous mass of people in half. Then came the fun part as the elevator rose and not one, not two, but every single one of the Koreans attempted to get to the window where I was standing.

If the window did happen to break I was pretty sure that I could use my size advantage to position the falling population in such a way that my fall would be sufficiently cushioned, but the thought of spending the rest of my life with thirty cameras embedded in my abdomen put me off the idea.

By the time we reached the top I was fairly sick of the tower and was wishing it’s demise but as the doors opened the rollicking mass of bodies did exactly the opposite of what they had been trying to do up until that point as they all flowed out onto the viewing platform and washed a small collection of Germans over the edge and into oblivion. Ok, that last bit didn’t really happen, but it very well could have if the viewing deck wasn’t so full as to make moving impossible already.

I looked around the deck as well as I could, avoiding the tourists where I could, trying to avoid getting into photos wherever possible but inevitably ending up in someone else’s as I did so, walking around the film crew making yet another soppy romance film, and then I got back in the elevator and out of the tower. Once at the bottom I looked back above me and realised that the best view was actually from the ground anyway (Paris doesn’t really look that special from high up, it’s fairly uniform and non-Eiffel-Tower-like). I wanted to get away from the tourists and thus I decided that Paris would be much better off without the tower and that it should be moved to Seoul or the Moon.

Opinions, however, are subject to change, and in this case mine certainly did change in an unexpected way.

Late that evening, after dinner with my Iranian friend, we decided to head to the tower for a night-time viewing; I went along more for the company that actually for the view. We arrived at the south end of the garden which extends from the tower’s base and the tower itself was obscured behind a building until we entered the garden itself. There, ahead of the two of us, the garden stretched in dark and hidden hues, symmetrical and simple, and above it rose a completely new building. Arcing upwards it was a backlit bronze masterpiece, glowing shades of brown and orange simultaneously and seeming to light up all by itself. The tower stood like it does in those romantic movies against the black sky and looked like the symbol it claimed to be. Something about the dark night, and the lights highlighting the steel frame, made the Eiffel Tower actually look fantastic. And then the epilepsy began.

At precisely 11pm the tower changed from a serene and alluring pale orange to a cacophony (or at the very least the visual equivalent thereof) of bright, flashing, white lights. Covering the entire tower and randomly sparkling for fifteen minutes the lights bored into my eyes and very nearly made for a repeat of the horrific Japanese cartoon epileptic incident. And yet the tower still seemed intrinsically interesting.

So, the Eiffel Tower has two very distinct sides to it. One, the day time show, is full of annoyances and lacks in unexpected visual pleasures, the other, the night time extravaganza, is when the tower comes alive and shows off how beautiful it truly can be. Furthermore, the tower was actually living up to its loftily romantic claims.

However, the image was once again dashed to pieces in one fell swoop. On this evening it came to pass that my Iranian friend was experiencing a call of nature (thanks to the Burgundy at dinner) and unfortunately we couldn’t seem to find a public toilet anywhere around the tower (on a side note, Paris is filled with portable and free public toilets that all seem to exist within ten meters of an alley that stinkingly attests to how little use the toilets are getting). Given his predicament, my friend decided to do the bad thing and he quickly disappeared into the gardens below the tower.

I waited patiently, occasionally glancing up at the tower soaring above me to check and see if the epilepsy-inducers had turned off, and after ten minutes I started to worry. After fifteen minutes he was still gone; I was a little worried. But then, from a little way down the street he emerged and walked up to me. “No good” he said, “there isn’t a single unoccupied bush in the whole garden”.

So, as beautiful as the tower is, don’t stray of the path or you might see something that will ruin the view forever.

This City Has A Catacomb!

I do have other tales of my few days in Paris, although I think I will leave them out of here for now as I am running the risk of text overload. Let me summarise as best as I can (rather verbosely I predict).

Paris is a very strange city which seems to have more faces then most. Sure, all great cities can be viewed from any number of angles, each of which will show you a completely different and occasionally scary scene. Paris, however, is different in that these facets are so readily available and within even the shortest of explorations I managed to turn up more oddities and intrigues than I can competently put into words. Aside from what I have mentioned here already there is the freaky subway system where two consecutive stations can move you from Singapore to Harlem, there are the not so well known girly bars where a six foot four African “woman” in a corset asks if you “want a big mamma”, there is the hilltop gardens around Sacre Coeur where half of Paris seems to gather in the sun, there are the expensive, trendy and yet decidedly unappealing restaurants on the Champs Elysees, and there are centuries old mines which now play host to millions of skeletons “arranged” in the most boring of fashions. And I saw all of them in one afternoon. Add to that the louver museum where hoards of European schoolchildren participate in a game of “lets take photos of every single artwork in the Louvre with our cameraphones while not actually looking at any art with our eyes”. I’m sure that there were several thousand photos deleted that night (I’m serious here, they photographed EVERY painting in EVERY room without even stopping walking).

To put it simply, Paris has a lot to see and a lot to do, but unfortunately not too many of them are the things that I like to regularly do. Sure it was interesting to see it once, but I think I would rather live somewhere that does not have beauty and horror in equally visible proportion. I was excited and happy to see what I did, and yet I was happy to move on, but then again, my next stop was something truly exciting.

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Photos

A Healthy Reminder of Sanitation in Paris
Only in Paris have they resorted to moving entire cemetaries underground while still failing to educate the people about public toilets.

The Tripod Lands
Set for the new version of War of the Worlds.

Jardin
The garden leading south-east from the base of the Eiffel Tower, a place you do not want to idly wander at night for fear of... well... you know.

Long Way Up
The cover for the next book by Mr McGregor.

The Tower
Yep, looks just like it does in everyone else's photo.

Elevated Cemetary
Subtle way to trick the locals into keeping the oversize filmset.

Paris
As noted, not the most spectacular city when viewed from this angle, it's much better from street level.

The River Seine and Beyond
Ok, maybe the view from the tower had its moments... but they were few and far between.

Not an Accident in Sight
After ten minutes there had not been a single noticeable accident anywhere on the roundabout.

Tour de France
Champs Elysees at its finest.

Yes, I Most Definitely Am In Egypt
Only Egypt has Pyramids!

Shakespear Was English
Just pointing that out.

Notre Dame
I felt as though I knew my way around this cathedral, and I did actually. Thanks to an old video game I played many years ago I could figure out exactly where to stand to avoid all zombies.

Creepy Entrance to the Catacombs
Your job is to convert an old mine into a catacomb so you decide to spend your spare time down in the mine carving replicas of french chateaus into the walls... right.

Sacre Coeur
Pinnacle of Montmatre, and easily accessible from the Moulin Rouge (the real one).

Comments

[Keep Smiling]

Macabre
Another great tale Matthew - but, hey, if you enjoyed the catacombs, you'd have loved the Pere-Lachaise Cemetery. Fascinating graves of the good and great - from Oscar Wilde, Yves Montand, Edith Piaf, Jim Morrison and Isadora Duncan to Modigliani, Bizet, Chopin and Marcel Marceau, among hundreds of others (no Aussies though). You're young but you must have heard of at least some of them. Keep smiling!