Plus: 200,000 of you, a cake, and a confession about my "pied marin."

June ended with me sitting in front of the Temple of Poseidon at sunset, listening to a French couple complain about.. people. It struck me, somewhere between their fourth and fifth grievance about "all these tourists," that I had spent a substantial portion of my life doing the exact same thing. So I added a small ambition to the list of things I work on: to be a little less French in the way that requires constant low-grade outrage. This Carnet documents the trip that produced that thought. Plus 200,000 of you. Plus an Athens taxi where I became a spare seat.

The last week of a very hot June

The first weeks of June in DC were the kind that make you understand why Americans invented central air conditioning as a matter of national identity. Also why there are so many pools. I spent a lot of time in this one, quietly grateful for chlorine and shade, aware that I was about to trade it all for five weeks abroad and a suitcase I could not yet close. That is the kind of anticipatory pleasure a former pessimist learns to hold both sides of at once.

Two hundred thousand of you, and a name

This is the cake from the day the Instagram counter reached 200,000. I did not expect to hit it this year, and I did not expect it to move me the way it did. Comedy has been a dream of mine for a long time; the idea that 200,000 people were now in on it felt structurally impossible in a way I was not prepared for. To mark it, I asked the community to name itself. After a lot of DMs, many excellent suggestions and a poll, the winner was — with total inevitability — Les Btchettes. Bienvenue à toutes et à tous. Merci.

London, at approximately half consciousness

I love the idea of a night flight, because you're saving time, but every time I land I wonder at what cost. I slept about an hour on the plane and decided — the way I always decide — not to nap on arrival, just to stay awake and let London do the work of holding me upright. The city was hot. I felt half daydreaming, half hallucinating — some sort of out-of-body experience with a coffee cup in one hand. This photo is from a conservatory whose name my jet-lagged brain refused to encode. Look at the plants. The plants remember for me.

The complaining French couple, and the Temple of Poseidon

The sunset at the Temple of Poseidon is the kind of thing that has been happening for a very long time. Sitting on stone that had held people watching this exact view for roughly two and a half thousand years, I heard French. A couple next to me was complaining. About the number of tourists, about social media, about people photographing the sunset, about people simply being there. It slowly dawned on me that they were, presumably, there because of the same social media. And that I had spent a substantial portion of my adult life running the same complaint reel. So I added a small ambition: to be a little less French in the way that requires constant low-grade outrage. The sun did not care, it kept setting.

Athens, where the tourists are lost and the vestiges are not

Athens itself is what you would expect and slightly more. The Acropolis holds its shape against the sky as if to remind you what "still standing" actually means. What I did not expect was the taxis. I took two — one there, one back — and in both cases, at some point during the ride, the driver stopped, and total strangers tried to open the door and sit down where I was already sitting, which is to say on my lap. Both times. Different people, different neighborhoods, same maneuver. I am starting to think that in Athens, the tourists are more lost than the vestiges.

Milos, and the confession of the overpacker

Arriving on Milos, I walked five minutes from the ferry to the quad-bike rental and painfully understood, in real time, that I had overpacked. I will use everything I brought. The weight is another matter. Loading my aluminum trunk onto the back of a quad bike was itself a small workshop in French denial. This selfie is the moment I decided to make peace with it. On the ferry from Milos to Santorini a few days later, the sea moved slightly more than my inner ear was prepared for. I have always prided myself on not being seasick. Since a similar performance early January on the ferry from Gozo to Malta, I may have been delusional about my "pied marin."

Et voilà! If you saw something I missed, hit reply, I read all of them and answer most. Until next month,

Jacques

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