Urban Survivor

One of the last things I did before I left Kuala Lumpur was to watch Robinson (The Swedish precursor  to Survivor). Here in Paris I'm overwhelmed with the changes that comes with the continent swap. The age of buildings, the blue sky and flaky weather, the clean streets and the good quality food. Yes yes, some might object and say that there is good quality food in Malaysia too. But they are wrong. When I'm talking about food I'm not talking about the extremes that one might find after large about of energy and/or money spent. I'm talking about the readily available options every day people choose and value. Here the food culture if much more focused on the simple, organic and quality of basic stuff. Although I have to say the Italians might be the best at this concept of complexity and simplicity in one. The french are definitively up there and has it's own angle to it.  But! this is not what I wanted to talk about. It seems that whatever I start thinking of it's an inevitability that the topic will change to food. There are other things with the same symptom of inevitability. On e is the fact that all free forums will eventually turn into a mating forum. Yes meeting people with the end result of pairing up or mating. This is especially true for online forums. That is also a side topic I'll deal with later. What hit me after the initial chock of coming over here was the homeless people in the streets. I'm not sure what I was expecting but there are a whole bunch of em here and many are surprisingly young. My awareness of this problem seem to have taken a dip as the surge of things dirty in Asia seemed to have washed away the shadier parts of my European memories.

Well that or that I've once again forgot how few homeless people we have in Stockholm.  But when I think back upon the number of encounters with people needing money in Asia the homeless seemed to make less of an impression on me way out east. True, the pure numbers I've seen over there easily triumph the ones here but these ones seem to stick out more. Over there it fitted in in the surroundings of dirty and ghetto rigged as a way of life. Here they stick out like sore thumbs in the midst of historical buildings and "bobo" cafés.