Today is Thursday the 20th of March, 2008; or, if you prefer, the 29th of Ventose (wind), the sixth month of CCXVI (the 216th year) of the agricultural calendar adopted in 1793 during the French Revolution (and tossed out by Napolean in 1804). Supposed to be light rain and mid 40's, but lately that gets mixed with some sun....still great walking and poking around weather, and it'll warm up next week a bit. But spring is coming, and having been here 5 weeks or so now the changes are palpable and everywhere: in the feel of the air, in the extra hours of daylight (it seemed, in late December in Germany, like it was dark gray by 4pm, but now, here, two-thirds of the way through March it is light til past 7 pm), in the buds on the trees along the Seine and the Champs Elysee and in the Jardins. The sunsets are wonderful this time of year.....wild, living skies turning gray and purple with shafts of sunlight penetrating fast moving skies and dusk setting in the south west. Best viewed from one of the many bridges of the Seine itself.
Last night I was out on errands in the rainy twilight, arranging things with my not anymore local but still favored caviste (wine guy) so that you all have enough to drink (interesting tidbit....delivery is free, but if his delivery guy has to cross the river the max is 12-18 bottles). I had to cross the Seine myself to get there, and coming back a huge full moon had come up to the east and was fighting to be seen through the darkening, scudding nuages (clouds).
We moved in, in two tries, on Tuesday. Spent that morning cleaning up our soon to be late and not much lamented bathroom, then took the bulk of our luggage down to the street and around the corner to a cab stand and across the Seine to our new digs at 21 Rue du Cirque (you'll find it north of the Seine, starting one block north of the Champs Elysees, just to the left of the Avenue de Marigny and the Elysee Palace)....just one longish block. Met our 'guide' M- (more on this later), unloaded and got a few explanations of how things worked, checked the internet, took a cab back to Rue de L'Universite for a last meal with Clothilde (sad all round but also the last of her marvelous cooking and especially her tarte tatins). Then, with my tennis bag hoisted on my shoulder we walked back, across the Seine, through the Tuileries, across the Place de la Concorde, past the Hotel Crillon, made our way past the carloads of flics, gendarmes and paramilitary anti-terrorist units guarding the American Embassy on Avenue Gabriel, past the guards holding the fort on the South side of the Elysee Palace, and up the street to our new crib (the rain nicely holding off for the most part). The rest of the day was settling in and getting things to work.
Yesterday I got up and found out we didn't have the 'necessities' for our sybaritic lifestyle, so I went foraging. Local boulangerie/patisserie on the corner (check), local meat market (for the few times we might want meat--check). I returned home with the daily baguette, some almond croissants, some creme for the coffee, a banana, some overpriced strawberry jam...enough to cobble together breakfast. Late morning found us walking into centre ville, along the Rue St. Honore to the Place Colette (make note that Jaime would like the costumes at the boutique store by the Comedie Francaise), through a covered alley to the gardens of the Palais Royal, indifferent lunch, then continue into the not to be missed Gallerie Vivienne (getting cards at marvelous looking Le Grand Colbert for lunch...Jess, that'll be lunch on Saturday maybe!), and around and around. I feel good, in the sense that I have a cocky idea I know my way in Paris a bit. But on this walk, backtracking and turning this way and that, I got turned around so many times I lost track. Paris is very flat so even the boy scout 'downhill to the water' mantra is of no use here; i.e.--sometimes in the space of a few moments I don't even know which direction to look for the Seine. The streets are twisting rabbit warrens or suddenly change names even when they haven't changed direction at all. I think perhaps they have so much history and so many heroes, scoundrels, politicians (sorry for the redundancy),saints and martyrs to memorialize that each Rue and Avenue and Boulevard has to do double, triple or more duty to try and fit them all in. Thus Avenue Friedland becomes Boulevard Haussman becomes Boulevard Montmartre morphs into Blvd Poissonniere, Bonne Nouvelle, St. Denis and finally St. Martin, only changing direction slightly as it takes one across Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Republic.
'One'. I don't know what all of you know about the French language (I suspect young Jessica is our best speaker and I will be testing her at every opportunity), but the ubiquitous use of the third person impersonal in speech I find off-putting. My friend Richard once described a brief conversation he had with a concierge in Italy: 'Is it cool to wear shorts here?' 'Si senor, if one is a child.' 'One' would enjoy dinner at this restaurant, for example. Really? Well, that's what some'one' might want, but what do you want? It makes them all sound like pretentious athletes or dead emperors.
We return to our 'hood' (and to our travelogue) in the afternoon, stopping to buy some fruit around the corner from the delightful Mahfoud Hareche at Le Potager Mermoz. Mahfoud has been in Paris for 30 years but hasn't lost his Algerian accent and Paris hasn't beat out his friendly manner (or, cynically, maybe he just wants to sell us more legumes). But as we leave he does a nice thing.....seeing we are heading to the cheese shop a few doors down he runs after us and makes introductions to Jean-Luc the cheese guy...Like that, we are set up. During our l'apres midi peregrinations I also stopped at several banks to see if I could change one of my 500 euro notes (we thought we might have to pay for our lodgings up front in cash so we brought roughly $24,000 in cash, all in big notes....each worth about $800, and largely uncashable). None of the major banks would do it...if you aren't a customer sucking wind on their passbook pittances then you, pardon...'one', is scum de pond. None of the small shops can do it. But my caviste at Nicolas.....he did it. So, I'm in....as long as I continue to buy vast quantities of Bordeaux, anyway.
And lastly, les flics (the cops). Specifically, the tax police. We received an urgent email the night before we moved in......our 'facilitators', based out of Seattle, had received a phone call from someone supposedly calling from France, supposedly investigating the Italian owners of our apartment. The caller did not leave a name or number. But they called our new building manager (Linda) before we arrived Tuesday promising a friendly visit that afternoon. Our contact in the French Resistance (otherwise known as the local rep of our facilitator) has told us not to open the door to anyone we don't know...in fact not to answer the door at all and to pretend we are not there (which we just did 5 minutes ago). We are instructed to pretend not to speak any French (that shouldn't be tough). We are forbidden to answer the phones (there is a gray one and a black one....one makes a sound like attacking bull elephants, the other ring is a classical tune). We are given a cover story.....we are friends of the owners and of course staying for free and of course, a la Seargeant Schultz in Hogan's Heroes.....'We know nothing!'). Above all, we don't know anybody in the Resistance....how we got the keys is a mystery. I try to explain that under torture I will probably confess to pretty much anything, but they don't listen. Anyway, so far so good (i.e.--only the one knock at the door, no one in a trenchcoat loitering around the entrance) though each day we do hear the phones, one after the other, competing with each other stereophonically. Maybe they are coming again. Who knows. Stay tuned. My next communique may have to be smuggled out out of the Bastille in a piece of bread. One lives in fear. A bientot, or perhaps adieu.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Parisian Moments Two Movie Reviews March 18, 2008
Yesterday Anja dumped me to go spend some girl time with some female classmates at a cloister near the Pantheon. I took myself off to see Peter Greenaway's new movie Nightwatchers, an interesting but somehow soporific film i am not sure i really 'got'....fair warning to the rest of you. Something about Rembrandt doing a lot of fornicating and figuring out a murder conspiracy that leads him to paint a huge picture that reveals the truth if you know how to parse all the imagery. He also spends a lot of time on his roof musing with some young prostitutes. I got to the theatre early and had to use the pissoir, paid for the ticket and asked the manager where it was and he told me, in French so i missed part of the explanation but he obviously didn't want me to go there right away because the last show was letting out. Okay, whatever, maybe he was worried about my safety pushing through the outrushing parisian assnobs. So, I waited for a couple of minutes and then went down, searched around and found out that the way to the loo was down the right side of the room my movie was in.....if you're following me that means that when my movie was actually playing folks would wander in, go down the side, use the facility and come back the same way. So, I do this, take a left behind the actual screen, very narrow here, find the tightest metal spiral staircase I have ever essayed, climb that and find myself in a postage stamp of a space with five fat old french women and one fat old french man. We are actually finding it hard not to touch each other as we wait for two doors to open to the two toilets, which from the top of the stairs is maybe three or four feet away. Immediately to my right is a sink (i mean immediately as in....next to me, one step back and I am going back down the stairs); the parisians are filling up all the space in between. And then I notice that to the left is a pissoir....a urinal. Two of the women are right in front of it, have their backs to it cuz it is right there in the open space, and they are unhappy anyway but even more upset to see another man. I had no wish to piss in front of a bunch of old women on my own, so I hesitated, but it was the obvious fact that they didn't want me to piss in front of them so much more than I didn't want to piss in front of them that spurred me to action. They parted grudgingly for me and as I initiated my stream I fancied I could feel their distaste, that I could see their already elevated noses gain just a bit more altitude. I wish I could have managed a fart, but finishing leisurely and then washing my hands in front of them was a far better experience than the movie itself.
As an aside, how can a city so full of itself and it's haute couture and haute culture also have streets so full of dog shit......how does one reconcile those two together? I just don't get it.
The next night Anja and I went to see Taken, the new Liam Neeson film, a mindlessly violent riff/rip of so many other senseless violence movies it was hard to ever get into it. The first few scenes establish he is a divorced dad living in reduced circumstances who has quit his high violence former life in the CIA, though his old buddies still come by for brewskies and steak, in order to spend some time and 'reconnect' with his extraordinarily insipid 17 year old daughter. He buys her a hi end all in one karaoke system for her birthday and takes it to her party which is being held at her stepfathers palace. She is unwrapping his offering when stepdad oneups him by giving her a horse.....bye bye 'old' dad. Of course we don't really know how badass he is, and neither does his family. The kid is very shortly thereafter on her way to Europe to follow the summer U-2 tour. He of course tries to drill a little common sense into her on the way to the airport, but she hasn't been in Paris for more than 30 minutes before she and her hard to believe even more ditzy girl friend have been kidnapped. She is talking to her dad as the mob carries off her buddy and he is packing before she is even out the door, having simultaneously recorded their voices and instructed her on what to do and then warning her captors that he is coming after them. 30 minutes later he is on the stepdad's private jet. He has also called his old beer buddies from 'Langley' (why didn't he invite some of them along?), played the voice recording for them and almost instantly found out the perps are an Albanian mob that turns innocent girls into crack whores. These Albanians are so tough (The Usual Suspects) that even the Russian mafia gives them a wide berth. And, to give the story some added spice, he is told that he only has 96 hours before little dipshit will be sold and disappearred. Gosh, what to do? Find the spotter at the airport, beat the shit out him, beat the shit of his buddy, steal a car, chase down the spotter who leaps off an off ramp and escapes only to mess it up by stepping back into the street to check out his pursuer only to get t-boned by a semi ala Meet Joe Black (note to self: in the unlikely event of ever escaping from a situation like this, DO NOT back into the street to check on my pursuer without looking both ways first). Seems like a dead end now...what to do? Find out where Albanians hang out in Paris, talk stupid to one of their street whores, then plant a bug on the Albanian pimp who shows up to beat him up, having had the forethought to hire an Albanian translater first, then go back to the car, listen to the pimp bad mouth him to some other Albanians, follow the Albanian to where a whole bunch of Albanians run a combo wrecking yard slash outdoor brothel, infiltrate brothel and find his daughters jacket, kill a couple of customers and then all the Albanians in various and sundry.....where is Joe-Bob anymore.....kung-fu, shooting-fu, car chase into a fork lift-fu, etc. He kills all the Albanians! What to do....oh, in escaping from and killing all the Albanians he also avoids several hails of bullets and he also grabs the innocent crack whore with his kids jacket. Of course, like every ex-spook he has a safe house from the old days (check each and every Robert Ludlum novel) and a scant few minutes later, with nary a peep from the flics (cops) he has his new friend in a hotel room and has rustled up some drugs and an IV. Crack whore wakes up and tells him she's nice and his daughter is nice and she gave her the jacket.....oh, and I remember that they took me to a house on Rue de Paradis with a red door. That's it for the crack whore......we never hear of her again. The sun hasn't moved on the horizon and Liam's outside the house with the red door masquerading as a French police bigshot who talks himself into the house, in English (note to self: never fall for the fake French inspector scam if the scam artist can't speak any French), with the scam that he is renegotiating the Albanians monthly payoff to the police department. He spins this line long enough to identity the actual Albanian he talked to on his daughter's phone....though why he goes to the trouble is not clear because right afterwards he kills ALL THE REST OF THE ALBANIANS. All except one. After he kills almost all the Albanians he wanders around the house and finds the useless girl friend who is already dead of an overdose so she's not around to complicate the plot any further. Anyway, back to the last Albanian.......he is wounded but unfortunately for him still conscious. Scant moments after the aforementioned carnage we find our hero, who has miraculously found himself a dark basement, with two very large nails in hand which he drives into the thighs of the remaining, thoroughly tied up to a chair Albanian. While delivering a sermon on the dependability of the Parisian power grid and reminiscing nostalgically of the old days, our hero is deftly hooking our vicious mobster's new metal appendages into said mains. Now there is a few tense moments of ask the question, get spat on by recalcitrant mobster, apply liberal amounts of electricity, watch veins bulge on mobster, ask question, get spat on again, apply power longer, get answer to question, turn power back on, and leave (right out of Man on Fire) mobster to fry.
We move immedately to our next venue, a rich man's party palace near the Seine where drugged up crack whore novitiates are being sold to the highest bidder. Well, we kill a few people and get into the auction and make sure that the bidder we are now holding hostage actually buys our daughter (who of course was the last and best auction item). And now, on the way to actually get his daughter....disaster. Our hero is felled from behind and moments later is hanging from a pipe. Enter rich guy, who asks a few questions, orders his 4 men to kill Liam quietly and exits back to his party. Not only does our hero kill these four armed men from an initial position that seems slightly disadvanteous, but he does it so quickly that the rich guy hasn't even reached the elevator. Liam kills one more guy to get to the rich guy who of course wants to bargain, but after he answers a few questions our hero toasts him in his elevator. Our hero exits the building. Notes his little girl being bundled into a big Audi. Chases said Audi on foot along the Seine (ala French Connection ll.....yes, I know that was Marseilles). Eventually gets tired of running and somehow grabs a high end car of his own. Follows the auction winner (amazingly, the guy he made buy his daughter has taken possession of his purchase) to a supersized yacht (by the way, Paris being denuded of Albanians by now the new bad guys are high gloss, impeccably dressed, champagne swilling, oily petrotrash). Yacht gets underway, our hero follows and eventually jumps out of the car and off one of the Seine bridges onto the boat where he lands, rolls into a petrothug, kills him and AFTER being discovered kills ALL OF THE PETROSCUM. The denouement, after all the minor fish have been executed, is that he finds himself in a room with your quintessential fat oily Arab in a voluminous burnoose, holding an evil looking knife to our hero's daughter's virginal (well, probably not anymore) neck. He too wants to bargain. He too barely has time to draw a deep breath (shades of Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive...."I don't negotiate!") before....well, you know.
I won't bore you with the rest; if 95% of the movie is violent nonsense, the last 5 reaches rarified heights of mushy moronity.
As an aside, how can a city so full of itself and it's haute couture and haute culture also have streets so full of dog shit......how does one reconcile those two together? I just don't get it.
The next night Anja and I went to see Taken, the new Liam Neeson film, a mindlessly violent riff/rip of so many other senseless violence movies it was hard to ever get into it. The first few scenes establish he is a divorced dad living in reduced circumstances who has quit his high violence former life in the CIA, though his old buddies still come by for brewskies and steak, in order to spend some time and 'reconnect' with his extraordinarily insipid 17 year old daughter. He buys her a hi end all in one karaoke system for her birthday and takes it to her party which is being held at her stepfathers palace. She is unwrapping his offering when stepdad oneups him by giving her a horse.....bye bye 'old' dad. Of course we don't really know how badass he is, and neither does his family. The kid is very shortly thereafter on her way to Europe to follow the summer U-2 tour. He of course tries to drill a little common sense into her on the way to the airport, but she hasn't been in Paris for more than 30 minutes before she and her hard to believe even more ditzy girl friend have been kidnapped. She is talking to her dad as the mob carries off her buddy and he is packing before she is even out the door, having simultaneously recorded their voices and instructed her on what to do and then warning her captors that he is coming after them. 30 minutes later he is on the stepdad's private jet. He has also called his old beer buddies from 'Langley' (why didn't he invite some of them along?), played the voice recording for them and almost instantly found out the perps are an Albanian mob that turns innocent girls into crack whores. These Albanians are so tough (The Usual Suspects) that even the Russian mafia gives them a wide berth. And, to give the story some added spice, he is told that he only has 96 hours before little dipshit will be sold and disappearred. Gosh, what to do? Find the spotter at the airport, beat the shit out him, beat the shit of his buddy, steal a car, chase down the spotter who leaps off an off ramp and escapes only to mess it up by stepping back into the street to check out his pursuer only to get t-boned by a semi ala Meet Joe Black (note to self: in the unlikely event of ever escaping from a situation like this, DO NOT back into the street to check on my pursuer without looking both ways first). Seems like a dead end now...what to do? Find out where Albanians hang out in Paris, talk stupid to one of their street whores, then plant a bug on the Albanian pimp who shows up to beat him up, having had the forethought to hire an Albanian translater first, then go back to the car, listen to the pimp bad mouth him to some other Albanians, follow the Albanian to where a whole bunch of Albanians run a combo wrecking yard slash outdoor brothel, infiltrate brothel and find his daughters jacket, kill a couple of customers and then all the Albanians in various and sundry.....where is Joe-Bob anymore.....kung-fu, shooting-fu, car chase into a fork lift-fu, etc. He kills all the Albanians! What to do....oh, in escaping from and killing all the Albanians he also avoids several hails of bullets and he also grabs the innocent crack whore with his kids jacket. Of course, like every ex-spook he has a safe house from the old days (check each and every Robert Ludlum novel) and a scant few minutes later, with nary a peep from the flics (cops) he has his new friend in a hotel room and has rustled up some drugs and an IV. Crack whore wakes up and tells him she's nice and his daughter is nice and she gave her the jacket.....oh, and I remember that they took me to a house on Rue de Paradis with a red door. That's it for the crack whore......we never hear of her again. The sun hasn't moved on the horizon and Liam's outside the house with the red door masquerading as a French police bigshot who talks himself into the house, in English (note to self: never fall for the fake French inspector scam if the scam artist can't speak any French), with the scam that he is renegotiating the Albanians monthly payoff to the police department. He spins this line long enough to identity the actual Albanian he talked to on his daughter's phone....though why he goes to the trouble is not clear because right afterwards he kills ALL THE REST OF THE ALBANIANS. All except one. After he kills almost all the Albanians he wanders around the house and finds the useless girl friend who is already dead of an overdose so she's not around to complicate the plot any further. Anyway, back to the last Albanian.......he is wounded but unfortunately for him still conscious. Scant moments after the aforementioned carnage we find our hero, who has miraculously found himself a dark basement, with two very large nails in hand which he drives into the thighs of the remaining, thoroughly tied up to a chair Albanian. While delivering a sermon on the dependability of the Parisian power grid and reminiscing nostalgically of the old days, our hero is deftly hooking our vicious mobster's new metal appendages into said mains. Now there is a few tense moments of ask the question, get spat on by recalcitrant mobster, apply liberal amounts of electricity, watch veins bulge on mobster, ask question, get spat on again, apply power longer, get answer to question, turn power back on, and leave (right out of Man on Fire) mobster to fry.
We move immedately to our next venue, a rich man's party palace near the Seine where drugged up crack whore novitiates are being sold to the highest bidder. Well, we kill a few people and get into the auction and make sure that the bidder we are now holding hostage actually buys our daughter (who of course was the last and best auction item). And now, on the way to actually get his daughter....disaster. Our hero is felled from behind and moments later is hanging from a pipe. Enter rich guy, who asks a few questions, orders his 4 men to kill Liam quietly and exits back to his party. Not only does our hero kill these four armed men from an initial position that seems slightly disadvanteous, but he does it so quickly that the rich guy hasn't even reached the elevator. Liam kills one more guy to get to the rich guy who of course wants to bargain, but after he answers a few questions our hero toasts him in his elevator. Our hero exits the building. Notes his little girl being bundled into a big Audi. Chases said Audi on foot along the Seine (ala French Connection ll.....yes, I know that was Marseilles). Eventually gets tired of running and somehow grabs a high end car of his own. Follows the auction winner (amazingly, the guy he made buy his daughter has taken possession of his purchase) to a supersized yacht (by the way, Paris being denuded of Albanians by now the new bad guys are high gloss, impeccably dressed, champagne swilling, oily petrotrash). Yacht gets underway, our hero follows and eventually jumps out of the car and off one of the Seine bridges onto the boat where he lands, rolls into a petrothug, kills him and AFTER being discovered kills ALL OF THE PETROSCUM. The denouement, after all the minor fish have been executed, is that he finds himself in a room with your quintessential fat oily Arab in a voluminous burnoose, holding an evil looking knife to our hero's daughter's virginal (well, probably not anymore) neck. He too wants to bargain. He too barely has time to draw a deep breath (shades of Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive...."I don't negotiate!") before....well, you know.
I won't bore you with the rest; if 95% of the movie is violent nonsense, the last 5 reaches rarified heights of mushy moronity.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
March 2, 2008 Two weeks in Paris; moving on to past participles
So, it has been a quick two weeks of Parisian life in the 6th arrondisement. We arrived on the 15th of February and quickly settled into our new pied a terre which has a wonderful location and fabulous hosts, but is quite expensive for what is really one bathroom with a not really optimal shower and one very small toilet, hidden inside a closet, that is isolated on the other side of the house. The internet connection is iffy, there is no landline even just to receive calls. But again, the pluses are there and we’ve been happy. But for guests this would be a nightmare. So, we’ve been doing the Paris two step, checking every website and web-vetting an innumerable number of quasi possibilities.
Yesterday morning was typical; outside the door at 10am to meet Xavier at a superb location around the corner from the Jardin du Luxembourg. He is very nice, but the apartment is a shithole. There isn’t a single nice thing about it, it’s not clean, the paint is flaking and the kitchen cooking ensemble consisted of a hot plate….that’s it. No stove. No oven. And the price: 6,200 euro’s or about $9,300 a month! But that’s not all. He is also trying to sell the place and the asking price (no parking either) is a cool 1.2 million euro’s, or 1.8 million dollars. He vouchsafed that the living area was 112 square metres, so essentially for this broken down space that would need to be completely gutted and renovated he wanted the equivalent of $1,500 a square foot…..essentially 3 times what we got for 12th avenue. Ridiculous, but who knows.
We looked at a cheaper apartment on a 6th floor walkup and the stairs and entryway looked like a set from the slasher movie Hostel…..it was so bad it was weird. We went to another near the Pantheon and the owner is prattling on about his family and how the kids had enjoyed growing up there and I was thinking: it looks like a place a coven of crack whores have been living in. The furniture looked like all the springs were gone, the carpet was totally threadbare, the kitchen looked like an unrenovated and unclean revenant of the 1970’s and the beds were worse than those you’d find in a dorm. The place had zero class or appeal, but he still wanted $5,000 a month or so. Did I mention that most of these places have no or only a vestigial lift (think one person and one carry on item). It’s depressing, but we are soldiering on.
We passed our first two weeks at Alliance Francaise. I was relegated to complete beginner status, where I belong. Anja is the next grade up and working much harder than I on tenses and word position and prepositions and what not. We both plan to work very hard these next two weeks and then I will probably quit for the next few weeks because of guests. But we both put in the hours…up to 3-4 hours after the four hours of class every day. Our normal day is up at 7 or 7:30 and have a light breakfast of coffee and bread ‘integrale’ (with nuts and dried fruits---very tasty and healthy) with olive oil, and couple of gulps each of orange juice and mineral water, maybe a quick shower, and we’re off for our twenty minute hike up the Rue du Bac, crossing Boulevard St. Germain
at the intersection of Boulevard Raspail, continuing up Raspail to Rue Fleurus where we take a quick left for 10 metres to our classes. Raspail itself is not a beautiful street but the walk is invigorating this time of year and reminds me of similar experiences in Florence (1994/5) and Lucerne (1997), when I was studying Italian and German.
My class, like Anja’s, is (most of us will continue) an international one. We have Ray, a doctor from the U.S. who speaks Arab, is in his mid forties, and lives in Chad (here: Tchad) with his wife and two kids. He is here for now while the violence hopefully subsides back in the desert. Very cool….but not a life I could handle.
Next to Ray is the nice but most useless member of our band: Kana from Japon. She has so little command of the verbal language and also cannot understand even basic questions that it is really embarrassing. Sometimes the teacher will ask her a question three or four time and eventually, sometimes, her simple moon face lights up and she animatedly bursts out with some diaphragm originating vowel sounds that shows that she ‘got it’….but it is almost always a false alarm and is then followed by a number of additional one-off vowel bursts, as if she was trying to grunt out all the two letter words in the world that end in ‘h’….uh!....ah!....eh! and so forth. The she lapses back into her normal catatonic state. She is a hairstylist and her mom and dad run a little restaurant back in the old country. I don’t get it; why is she here wasting her money and time?
We have the beautiful 30 year old blond Inge from the Czech Republic, living here with her fiancé Mano, a native of NYC out of Indian parents. He was taking lessons too but is off now to try his hand at some investment boutique.
There is Mo from Israel. Cute and very opinionated. And Magda, here with her whole Polish family, taking some time off from working on her advanced degree in Psychology. Diego from Bresil, and Arturo from Mexico. Not sure what their raison d’etre to be here is, since neither of them looks to be studying. And Tom from Sydney…typical friendly outgoing sport loving Aussie with a good mind and a good sense of humor. There is the lovely 20 something Henrietta from Norway, also blond but perhaps less mentally endowed than Inge (or perhaps more shy).
To my immediate left is the ‘in gamba’ (very chic and cool, fast and smart) Elisabetta from near Venice. She works for La Mode (Moda?) but is following love here to Paris. To my right the bright and chunky Asian American Connie, chafing about how slow the class is going (she’s right). She is very nice, studying contract law in New York and California. Chris from NYC is to her right, very nice childless forty something, here for three years with her husband and dog. And last, at the end of the table, the enigmatic Natalia from Russia. Early 20’s, supposedly an economist in training and dancer (what kind and for how much, I wonder), living in expensive digs near the Champs Elysee probably symbiotically on some fat oligarch’s rubles (but seriously, what do I know?).
I have spent 80 hours with these people the last two weeks, not to mention our nice but perhaps not optimally organized professor, Isabelle. And that feels really kind of weird, as if at my age I should be somehow more in control of the people I hang out with, regardless of the milieu, for such extended periods. I haven’t spent that much time cumulatively with either Jaime or Frank the last 6 months….and that is sad.
Anyway, Paris. I feel like I have passed some mark of distinction by having walked the city extensively for two weeks now and having avoided every single piece of dog shit. Paris is way better than twenty years ago and has made much progress on the merde issue over the passing of time…..but the Parisiens are still distressingly filthy regarding their pets. There is shit somewhere on each street, though, interestingly, I can’t say I have actually smelled even one piece. The streets in any event are disgusting in general. Every night I hear and every day I see the endless green trucks sweeping and cleaning garbage and literally kind of watering the streets, and yet if you stop on any rue and just look, you see that each is covered with a patina of shit and gum and spit and the ever present trail of wet new, sticky drying and cold trail piss. There is also more vomit here than elsewhere, seems to me. You just walk down any main street and there will be some dog, like as not with some superior looking Paris snob holding the leash, taking a (considering the ambient temperature) steamy dump nearby or in your way.
Mind you, there are the attractions. The light is beautiful in the afternoons regardless of the weather. The place is alive with people at all hours of the day. It is a walker’s dream, with new nooks and crannies and discoveries to found everywhere. The streets are twisted like an old crones back and then a block later they explode into broad boulevards with grand vista’s, Places, and monuments. And the other stuff in all the guidebooks.
We have been eating and drinking very well, I would say. I have refound my respect for medium priced French wine and have been consuming more than my share of Graves and Cotes du Rhone with price tags in the $10-15 vicinity for the most part, and they have been wonderful (deeper and suppler than I remember, with fruit I can actually taste instead of barely find). And we have used a guide book and other recommendations to find a number of very nice bistro’s and postcard size eating establishments all over the city. We have had some extraordinary quiches (avec champignon; le meilleur!) and cheeses (none better than Clothildes cheese pie with Robluchon right here at home).
Okay, gotta go do some homework.
So, it has been a quick two weeks of Parisian life in the 6th arrondisement. We arrived on the 15th of February and quickly settled into our new pied a terre which has a wonderful location and fabulous hosts, but is quite expensive for what is really one bathroom with a not really optimal shower and one very small toilet, hidden inside a closet, that is isolated on the other side of the house. The internet connection is iffy, there is no landline even just to receive calls. But again, the pluses are there and we’ve been happy. But for guests this would be a nightmare. So, we’ve been doing the Paris two step, checking every website and web-vetting an innumerable number of quasi possibilities.
Yesterday morning was typical; outside the door at 10am to meet Xavier at a superb location around the corner from the Jardin du Luxembourg. He is very nice, but the apartment is a shithole. There isn’t a single nice thing about it, it’s not clean, the paint is flaking and the kitchen cooking ensemble consisted of a hot plate….that’s it. No stove. No oven. And the price: 6,200 euro’s or about $9,300 a month! But that’s not all. He is also trying to sell the place and the asking price (no parking either) is a cool 1.2 million euro’s, or 1.8 million dollars. He vouchsafed that the living area was 112 square metres, so essentially for this broken down space that would need to be completely gutted and renovated he wanted the equivalent of $1,500 a square foot…..essentially 3 times what we got for 12th avenue. Ridiculous, but who knows.
We looked at a cheaper apartment on a 6th floor walkup and the stairs and entryway looked like a set from the slasher movie Hostel…..it was so bad it was weird. We went to another near the Pantheon and the owner is prattling on about his family and how the kids had enjoyed growing up there and I was thinking: it looks like a place a coven of crack whores have been living in. The furniture looked like all the springs were gone, the carpet was totally threadbare, the kitchen looked like an unrenovated and unclean revenant of the 1970’s and the beds were worse than those you’d find in a dorm. The place had zero class or appeal, but he still wanted $5,000 a month or so. Did I mention that most of these places have no or only a vestigial lift (think one person and one carry on item). It’s depressing, but we are soldiering on.
We passed our first two weeks at Alliance Francaise. I was relegated to complete beginner status, where I belong. Anja is the next grade up and working much harder than I on tenses and word position and prepositions and what not. We both plan to work very hard these next two weeks and then I will probably quit for the next few weeks because of guests. But we both put in the hours…up to 3-4 hours after the four hours of class every day. Our normal day is up at 7 or 7:30 and have a light breakfast of coffee and bread ‘integrale’ (with nuts and dried fruits---very tasty and healthy) with olive oil, and couple of gulps each of orange juice and mineral water, maybe a quick shower, and we’re off for our twenty minute hike up the Rue du Bac, crossing Boulevard St. Germain
at the intersection of Boulevard Raspail, continuing up Raspail to Rue Fleurus where we take a quick left for 10 metres to our classes. Raspail itself is not a beautiful street but the walk is invigorating this time of year and reminds me of similar experiences in Florence (1994/5) and Lucerne (1997), when I was studying Italian and German.
My class, like Anja’s, is (most of us will continue) an international one. We have Ray, a doctor from the U.S. who speaks Arab, is in his mid forties, and lives in Chad (here: Tchad) with his wife and two kids. He is here for now while the violence hopefully subsides back in the desert. Very cool….but not a life I could handle.
Next to Ray is the nice but most useless member of our band: Kana from Japon. She has so little command of the verbal language and also cannot understand even basic questions that it is really embarrassing. Sometimes the teacher will ask her a question three or four time and eventually, sometimes, her simple moon face lights up and she animatedly bursts out with some diaphragm originating vowel sounds that shows that she ‘got it’….but it is almost always a false alarm and is then followed by a number of additional one-off vowel bursts, as if she was trying to grunt out all the two letter words in the world that end in ‘h’….uh!....ah!....eh! and so forth. The she lapses back into her normal catatonic state. She is a hairstylist and her mom and dad run a little restaurant back in the old country. I don’t get it; why is she here wasting her money and time?
We have the beautiful 30 year old blond Inge from the Czech Republic, living here with her fiancé Mano, a native of NYC out of Indian parents. He was taking lessons too but is off now to try his hand at some investment boutique.
There is Mo from Israel. Cute and very opinionated. And Magda, here with her whole Polish family, taking some time off from working on her advanced degree in Psychology. Diego from Bresil, and Arturo from Mexico. Not sure what their raison d’etre to be here is, since neither of them looks to be studying. And Tom from Sydney…typical friendly outgoing sport loving Aussie with a good mind and a good sense of humor. There is the lovely 20 something Henrietta from Norway, also blond but perhaps less mentally endowed than Inge (or perhaps more shy).
To my immediate left is the ‘in gamba’ (very chic and cool, fast and smart) Elisabetta from near Venice. She works for La Mode (Moda?) but is following love here to Paris. To my right the bright and chunky Asian American Connie, chafing about how slow the class is going (she’s right). She is very nice, studying contract law in New York and California. Chris from NYC is to her right, very nice childless forty something, here for three years with her husband and dog. And last, at the end of the table, the enigmatic Natalia from Russia. Early 20’s, supposedly an economist in training and dancer (what kind and for how much, I wonder), living in expensive digs near the Champs Elysee probably symbiotically on some fat oligarch’s rubles (but seriously, what do I know?).
I have spent 80 hours with these people the last two weeks, not to mention our nice but perhaps not optimally organized professor, Isabelle. And that feels really kind of weird, as if at my age I should be somehow more in control of the people I hang out with, regardless of the milieu, for such extended periods. I haven’t spent that much time cumulatively with either Jaime or Frank the last 6 months….and that is sad.
Anyway, Paris. I feel like I have passed some mark of distinction by having walked the city extensively for two weeks now and having avoided every single piece of dog shit. Paris is way better than twenty years ago and has made much progress on the merde issue over the passing of time…..but the Parisiens are still distressingly filthy regarding their pets. There is shit somewhere on each street, though, interestingly, I can’t say I have actually smelled even one piece. The streets in any event are disgusting in general. Every night I hear and every day I see the endless green trucks sweeping and cleaning garbage and literally kind of watering the streets, and yet if you stop on any rue and just look, you see that each is covered with a patina of shit and gum and spit and the ever present trail of wet new, sticky drying and cold trail piss. There is also more vomit here than elsewhere, seems to me. You just walk down any main street and there will be some dog, like as not with some superior looking Paris snob holding the leash, taking a (considering the ambient temperature) steamy dump nearby or in your way.
Mind you, there are the attractions. The light is beautiful in the afternoons regardless of the weather. The place is alive with people at all hours of the day. It is a walker’s dream, with new nooks and crannies and discoveries to found everywhere. The streets are twisted like an old crones back and then a block later they explode into broad boulevards with grand vista’s, Places, and monuments. And the other stuff in all the guidebooks.
We have been eating and drinking very well, I would say. I have refound my respect for medium priced French wine and have been consuming more than my share of Graves and Cotes du Rhone with price tags in the $10-15 vicinity for the most part, and they have been wonderful (deeper and suppler than I remember, with fruit I can actually taste instead of barely find). And we have used a guide book and other recommendations to find a number of very nice bistro’s and postcard size eating establishments all over the city. We have had some extraordinary quiches (avec champignon; le meilleur!) and cheeses (none better than Clothildes cheese pie with Robluchon right here at home).
Okay, gotta go do some homework.
March 2, 2008 To Hell with RW Emerson
In Paris---Some thoughts out of chronological order. I remember reading RWE and his saying that travel in most instances is over rated. And I have decided I hate that; I do go looking (which is mostly what he derides, saying most of what one will ever want is already close at hand) and I do go to look. I relish the journey itself and yes I am trying to find meaning both in that journey and also from the journey. If speaking a second language gives one a second soul (I give no credence to the first but I like the quote), then travel certainly gives a different perspective. One of the few ways I can imagine overcoming previously held beliefs and opinions is to walk in other lands and see how other people in other locales/countries/continents live. To refute Henry James, one can even do more than simply 'rearrange prejudices'.
Thoughts from Vidova Gora-looking west to Hvar and south into the haze. VG is not very high but it is the highest place on this island and in the vicinity. Regarding Hvar from on high with field burns visible around the island reminded me of scenes from the Lord of the Rings. The signal fires, for one. And with the multitude of islands surrounding us and undulating mistily in the distance I had thoughts of Cirdan the shipwright at the Grey Havens taking the elves, except Arwen, off to wherever they were planning to spend eternity. There is a comm station up here on the top of the mountain, and a little restaurant (closed, of course), and scrub brush and lots of rock and occasional birds soaring and whirling and crying out in their various voices, some shrill and warbling, others sounding like harsh harbingers of war, death and pestilence (the ravens of LOTR, perhaps).
I was reading three books to while away the long, painful nighs on Brac while I waited to see if the crackling noises all through the stygian darkness were just from the 19th century heater or from hands at the door. I wondered whether they city folk in Split could hear what sounded like chanting and if so what they told their kids, or whether they kept them indoors on 'island bbq night'. I wondered is that the surf of the Adriatic or the howls of the local Cthulhu Mythos as they decended on our largely undefended bungalow.
I was reading Alain Bottones book on travel and there are some very interesting anecdotes and some much deeper thoughts, some of which are evident to me on my little diatribe on RWE. Walking in nature is a step away from the daily rat race; it is going physically to the forest and getting out of the trees. It is taking time away from being in a reactive mode to a reflective one, and it is worth every moment if just to recharge my batteries. When I am depressed I walk; it is my best cathartic reaction. At the end of 2-3 hours of wandering, thinking and not thinking, on and off topics of concern, my problem is usually reduced to an action plan or a acceptance of whatever is going to happen......and it is hard most times to know whether the thought process brought the peace of mind, or perhaps just the walk itself.
The second book was Smile When you're Lying about the travel industry and the lies they tell and it was mostly very funny and light.
Lastly, I read with most relish Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, a futuristic romp on a grand, imaginative scale, beautifully conceived and executed. An absolute treat. Ranks right up there for pleasure with The Baroque Cycle.
Thoughts from Vidova Gora-looking west to Hvar and south into the haze. VG is not very high but it is the highest place on this island and in the vicinity. Regarding Hvar from on high with field burns visible around the island reminded me of scenes from the Lord of the Rings. The signal fires, for one. And with the multitude of islands surrounding us and undulating mistily in the distance I had thoughts of Cirdan the shipwright at the Grey Havens taking the elves, except Arwen, off to wherever they were planning to spend eternity. There is a comm station up here on the top of the mountain, and a little restaurant (closed, of course), and scrub brush and lots of rock and occasional birds soaring and whirling and crying out in their various voices, some shrill and warbling, others sounding like harsh harbingers of war, death and pestilence (the ravens of LOTR, perhaps).
I was reading three books to while away the long, painful nighs on Brac while I waited to see if the crackling noises all through the stygian darkness were just from the 19th century heater or from hands at the door. I wondered whether they city folk in Split could hear what sounded like chanting and if so what they told their kids, or whether they kept them indoors on 'island bbq night'. I wondered is that the surf of the Adriatic or the howls of the local Cthulhu Mythos as they decended on our largely undefended bungalow.
I was reading Alain Bottones book on travel and there are some very interesting anecdotes and some much deeper thoughts, some of which are evident to me on my little diatribe on RWE. Walking in nature is a step away from the daily rat race; it is going physically to the forest and getting out of the trees. It is taking time away from being in a reactive mode to a reflective one, and it is worth every moment if just to recharge my batteries. When I am depressed I walk; it is my best cathartic reaction. At the end of 2-3 hours of wandering, thinking and not thinking, on and off topics of concern, my problem is usually reduced to an action plan or a acceptance of whatever is going to happen......and it is hard most times to know whether the thought process brought the peace of mind, or perhaps just the walk itself.
The second book was Smile When you're Lying about the travel industry and the lies they tell and it was mostly very funny and light.
Lastly, I read with most relish Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, a futuristic romp on a grand, imaginative scale, beautifully conceived and executed. An absolute treat. Ranks right up there for pleasure with The Baroque Cycle.
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