It is now fall. Much greyer; rain every morning & drops off everything. Some things match: branches are leafless to let drops hang off every nodule and tip, and in orderly crystal strings refracting everything in their centre, pulling the eye into a quick glass bead game with Nature.

The city needs a good scrubbing, it has not yet benefited from the clean up leading to various commemorations that many EU capitals got. Some things do rinse the eye: the "jeunes filles en fleurs", the wilder varieties, the shiny top tier pimpin' gangsta' cars, the many revamped churches: oases of physical and temporal space in a city as fast as any other. Their small surrounding gardens are also gaps in the typical european "wall of building" urban style. The churches, and sometimes the street crosses signalling accidental deaths or martyrs, are also gaps in discussions or boredom: many, not only of the older generation, make a triple sign of the cross on their chest as they pass every religious monument. There are many churches, you can't really go anywhere in the city without seeing some. And that despite many having been demolished by the communists, some despite the UN world heritage patronage; one of the demolitions started with perhaps two hundred people barricaded inside. The miracle was more modest than expected: as the surviving counterrevolutionaries ran outside from the falling bricks, halos and wings they were not arrested but let to be lost again in the material dialectic world.