Basically, I wanted a simple digital camera that could be easily taken everywhere and performed as good as possible in low light and at night. Oh, and good colour rendition was another concern. After a lot of reasearch online and checking it in the shop, I was convinced that this was the best for me; as simple as it is, it does enable me to control shutter speed and aperture, and it has some other nice features. Already tested it and, so far, so good!

Just a tiny little bit. But, then, who can blame me? Anyway, here are some goods for others like me…

#A nice featurette:

#Prequel comic written by one of the producers:

http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/inception-comic.html

#Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page talk about the movie (two different interviews):

# Behind the scenes footage:

As lovely as it is, it does squash the pages a little bit, but if it is a problem for somebody other than me, you might easily use it as any other bookmark, as it is not too thick. That’s just what I’ve been doing and I have no complaints so far.

Worth taking a look at!

Found via Stitch London.

Photograph © Untapped Cities by Michelle Young

The door shown above is actually fake, meaning that it leads nowhere. The artists Julien Berthier and Simon Boudvin put it up in 30 minutes and there it rests until this very day. Well, actually I don’t know that, but I can only assume, since it stayed put for over four years (can a door not stay put? I don’t think it’d fancy stretching its joints every now and then… Yeah, so funny.). Anyway, my favourite thing in it is the number, 1bis. Despite thinking it’s utterly crazy, I love how, whenever in need of one more number in the middle of two consecutives (uh?), the French just put a bis after the immediate anterior number. May I add that both France and England’s way of numbering houses makes me quite desperate at times? Things in Brazil are definitely easier, what with the whole thing of having more or less 100m per block and having the numbers follow this system (yes, I don’t know how to explain it properly, but, believe me, it is easier to locate oneself).

To learn more about this project, click here or on the picture’s link.

Flying Dragon, Turned Up Turquoise and Ruby Pumps. The colours are not those, by the way. Tried hard, but I just couldn’t make my camera or my brother’s get the tones right. The turquoise one is particularly wrong. I blame today’s terrible lightning!

Flying Dragon on my nails. Bad photo because, well, I’m a bad photohrapher. That and also I had to photoshop it a lot to make the colour a bit more similar to the real thing. The extremely fine red and blue glitter is not apparent in any of my shots, though.

Lambada and Rainbow. Colours are more or less like shown.

Detail from Rainbow, yay! Please, please, please, search for swatches of it and you’ll see with much more ease just how flamboyantly beautiful this polish is.

From the choice of colours, it is clear that I’m not that discreet, right? I’m actually quite shy and quiet in person, so that’s probably the reason why I’m so drawn to extravagant nailwear. No need to say that my father is not really into it, is there?

Anyway, while it didn’t make me laugh like hell, it was definitely funny and worth reading. The book tells the story of the end of the world, sort of. The thing is the Antichrist is born and, eleven years later, he’s bound to bring Armaggedon around. Aziraphale, an angel, and Crowley, a demon, both quite reluctant to let a planet they like so much become history, join forces in a desperate attempt to avoid the whole thing.

Full of unbalanced (for lack of a better word) characters, Good Omens keeps you hooked until the very end, which is imperative for me nowadays, as I seem to have completely obliterated any attention span I might’ve once had. But being so fun to read has a downside, too: the book finished much too quick. Still, can’t really complain about it, as it was way easier for me to carry it around than the one I’m currently reading, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke (more on it after I finish reading all the over a thousand pages.

First big news is that I finally found a place in London that carries China Glaze and OPI nail polishes. I was happy beyond reason, obviously, but I managed to hold myself and only got three bottles that were on offer: Flying Dragon, Turned Up Turquoise and Ruby Pumps, all by China Glaze (in order to check some swatches made by other bloggers, click on the name of the polish). Using Flying Dragon right now (pretty-pretty-pretty!), but as I’ve had some trouble with my camera, no pictures of it are available as of now.

And as I was looking for swatches of those three to decide which one I was going to use first, I came upon this wonderful flakie:

image from steph’s closet

It is from Danish brand Gosh, found on Superdrug. As I had to go out anyway to buy a topcoat (the one I brought from Brazil is sorta off, after so many months without use), I decided to kill two birds with one shot only. Fortunately, I found it, but, unfortunately, it was part of a offer so I HAD to bring home a second colour – Lambada (the forbidden dance, according to an incredibly bad early 90s movie), a beautiful red. They also have this interesting holographic polish, but I couldn’t find it today. The quest, therefore, continues.

I’m still completely obsessed with my trip to France in 5 days (countdown, yay!) and have been searching for insider (uh!) tips all over the internet. I have yet to find good recommendations of rock clubs, but I’m pretty sure that I won’t die of hunger in the capital. There are so many blogs dedicated to food and, in each of them, so many posts dedicated to “foodie tours”, it’s hard to decide what is really essential. It’s not that hard to imagine that my priorities are, obviously, chocolate and candies first, followed closely by the combo bread-cheese and, only then, every other food. This blog post over at Detours is just a dream come true, as you may imagine: Myriam, the owner, made a list of the 10 best places to find pains au chocolat in Paris, yum! I’ll be sure to try and check some of them out; only a couple, as a matter of fact, since I don’t really wanna come back 10kg fatter!

My father is coming to France with his wife in a week and my brother and I will join them there. First, we’ll go to Bordeaux for 5 days and, then, we’ll all head to lovely Paris! I’m really excited about it, because I love the language and I love the culture and I love the music and, basically, I love everything French. \o/ The best thing is we’ll get to stay in an amazing flat in central Paris, which will make it really easy to visit the main tourist attractions and to get to the more distant places we want to see. Included on this magical trip is a day journey to Giverny! I just cannot express how I feel about it. I love Monet for so long and now I’ll get to visit his house and see the adorable Japanese bridge in front of me, for real. I might just burst with joy when I see it; I’m almost exploding with the anticipation right now.

For the planning I’m using Lonely Planet’s Paris City Guide and the internet. It’s amazing how many great things you can find on blogs nowadays. I specially love people that come up with really specific tours, according to their own interests and post them so strangers may get a shot at visiting their favourite spots. So I thought I could leave some of the links I’ve been researching in here. Maybe it’ll be of help to someone else!

#Design*Sponge guide to Paris (also, be sure to check their regional roundup with french designers for a few tips on where they go when in need of inspiration; and it doesn’t hurt that their work is quite amazing! Parts one, two, three and four.)

#Paris Daily Photo, with, well, daily photos and nice suggestions of places to visit

#Paris 26 Gigapixels, where you can make a (spectacular) virtual tour of 20 of the city’s attractions

#The HiP Paris, with amazing recommendations (my fave post is the one that explains how to be a Parisienne in 10 golden rules

#Stuff Parisians Like, which last post on “mental afflictions as a sign of intellectual superiority” is almost tailor-made right now. =p

# Parislogue has this special post for people who are going to the city in June (me, me, me!)

# Jennie en France, for improving your French

# Free Paris Walks

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