July 20, 2001, to July 26, 2001
The Fifth Week! And finally, *finally*, it's begun to be real summer weather - sunny, hot and humid, heh. Yesterday we had one of the biggest, grandest, shortest-lived thunderstorms I've ever seen. Of course, I was outside walking around when it hit with no clear shelter in sight, so I got soaked. I had an umbrella with me, but my pants and shoes were pretty drenched anyway...
The reason I was out walking around was to buy stamps and then to meet Kristian, the Danish guy for drinks again. He is leaving to go back to Denmark next week, so there goes one friend :) Everyone appears to be on vacation right now, even my bosses/mentors here! Luckily *I* get to go on a mini-vacation soon too: I leave for Seattle on Wednesday for 10 days for the IJCAI'01 conference, and then for a week here in France showing my mom around. We're going to Mont St Michel, 3 Loire Valley castles, and Monet's home (Giverny), plus all the other Paris stuff. It should be really fun. That's why this email is extra-long, because there won't be a Week 6 or 7 email :( But there will be a Week 8, detailing all the great things I did (will have done) on my vacation :)
I saw two movies this week, one French and one American. The French one was "Liberté-Oléron". It was about a family who goes away on vacation (get a trend here??), and the father decides he absolutely *has* to have a boat. So the movie is a semi-dramatic comedy about the family bonding that takes place as they try to find a boat within their budget, and the cramped pleasure cruise they take and its consequences. Their speech was actually well-paced for me to be able to understand most of it, but there was a lot of marine and boating vocabulary that I had to go look up later. Also, an amusing sidepoint is that the husband and wife, when they really started arguing, would fight in English! I couldn't tell if they were doing so so their kids wouldn't understand or what. It seemed the movie audience laughed at the right times, so I guess they understood the English. It was a little disconcerting to hear the French wife bickering in French and all of a sudden come out with "Because I said so" hehe.
The second movie I saw was "Evolution", dubbed in French. It reminded me a lot of a goofy slapstick "Independence Day". In other words, I did not like it much. But I got to practice more French, so I guess it was not a lost endeavor. But David Duchovny and Orlando Jones are the two main stars and I think some of that effect was lost due to the fact that their voices are pretty distinguishing, and the French dubbed voices did not really fit, in my opinion. An issue I noticed was the movie spent a good deal of time making fun of the military mentality (i.e., if you can't figure it out, blow it up), and I was wondering how much of a global thing that is. I got to thinking about how American movies are often filled with cultural references and institutions like that (as well as conspiracy theories, alien hunting, paranoia against the government), and I wonder how much of that gets lost on the French people, or if they notice it and think how silly Americans are to believe that. Or if they perhaps believe it themselves. I asked some people at work and they didn't really confirm it either way - they just said they thought it was funny.
An interesting tangent related to movies here is that, while some take only a month or two to get over here (like Evolution, Final Fantasy, Shrek), others take much much longer. For example, "Save the Last Dance" and "Sweet November" are just coming out in mid-August. The ones that appear to make it over here fastest (lately) have been teenager-marketed "dumb" films like Dr Doolittle 2, Scary Movie 2, Evolution, Return of the Mummy, etc. I asked if "American Beauty" came out here and they said yes, so at least they get *some* good mixed in with all the other Hollywood tripe. Sometimes I get embarrassed at the culture they see - the movies and politics seem to be our biggest ambassadors, and they haven't exactly been giving the best image of America, especially lately. No wonder the government is afraid of the "American influence/infiltration" :)
Last weekend was the first nice weekend since I got here so I went down to La Défense, which is the place in Paris that they have isolated their skyscrapers ("les grottes-ciel"). Call me hopelessly urban but I immediately fell in love with the place. I've always liked skyscrapers and city skylines, and the French *do* have a way with architecture. Even their industrialized offices look cool. The way the buildings are laid out, they're on either side of an open pedestrian square, and raised up from the rest of the surrounding area. If you turn one way, you see the bustle of Paris, with the tiny-looking Arc de Triomphe in the middle of your field of view. However, if you turn around, you see nothing but open sky and this giant white glass cube (la Grande Arche) in front of you and huge innovative skyscrapers in your peripheral vision. It's like you're at the edge of the earth. Some of them are modern blue/tinted glass structures, but others are a little older and look like "futuristic" building complexes as imagined 20-30 years ago. I felt like I had been deposited in an old-style scifi movie.
Now, it's not that I don't think other, more historic parts of Paris are cool - I do. But I've decided: if I ever come to live in Paris (as I used to dream of doing when I was a child), I want to live and work in La Défense. It's mostly offices, but there are some residential apartments to be had, probably at wickedly exhorbitant prices. But by then I'll be rich and famous so it won't matter, right? ;) If you want to see some cool pictures of the place (not ones I took, haven't got those film rolls developed yet), click here or here.
I also stuck around La Défense for a while and shopped in the mall that's there ("centre commercial"). French clothes on sale = me buying way too much!
Then, on Sunday I walked from the Eiffel Tower to Notre Dame, which according to my map is about 4.8km or 2.75 miles! I had taken a boat cruise in the morning on a crowded not-so-pleasant ride, because there were soooooooo many tourists, out in full force to enjoy the sudden change in the weather. When I finally made it to Notre Dame I was pretty pooped :) I had a *big* ice cream sundae called a "coupe italienne" which had pistachio, vanilla, coffee ice creams and raspberry sherbet underneath a mountain of whipped cream (called "chantilly" here). It was perfect in the hot weather and the flavor mix was "parfait" (perfect). Then I decided to go home because I needed to clean my apartment and I was tired of tripping over tourists! :)
At some point this week, I had a crepe with nutella, shredded coconut and Grand Marnier in it. Now I've had ones with rum ("rhum") before and I never even really tasted the alcohol. *This* one however, tasted like it had been soaked in the stuff, and was not altogether very pleasant :( My tongue actually tingled a bit when I had finished it. I guess I'll stay away from the alcohol-containing crepes from now on :) To those of you who shop at the crepe truck near Drexel's campus back in Philly - the crepes here cost at most 20FF, or $2.50, but most of them cost more like $2.25 or less (depending on what you get on it, of course). And I almost always get dessert crepes; I figure, I'm eating them walking around so I'm burning off the calories as I eat them, right? ;)
Luckily I have not had any major weird experiences with French main dishes since the andouillette. However, the other day at the cafe at work, it said "Steack à cheval" on the menu. Now, "steack" is steak, but "cheval" is horse. And even the French interns I was sitting with thought it was horsemeat. They later changed their minds and thought it was something else, but rushed to assure me that, oh yes, in some parts of (southern) France there are butcher shops ("bucheries") which only sell horsemeat!
I have a bunch of interesting little stories about office culture and working this week. It's stranger and stranger the more involved I get in working here. The other day I needed to call my bank (woe of woes, the US made it mandatory for online credit cards and banking systems to use 128-bit encryption - which they can't export to here) to check my funds, and I don't have a desk telephone. However, they had told me I could use the office phones for short LD calls to the US. I went and asked the floor secretary where was a phone that would dial out and she said to go to Christian's office (one of my sort-of bosses) and use his. But he's on vacation. So I was like "is it ok for me to just go in there without him being there" and she really did not understand my concern. I have noticed people enter offices without knocking and without regard to whether the office owner is really there or not. In America I guess this would be considered a terrible breach of privacy, as well as rather rude. Very strange to my American sensibilities...
I also noticed, in walking down the hall the other day, that one of my male colleagues has a picture of a female in questionable amounts of clothing on his wall in his office. She is not nude, so I was not offended or anything, but I thought how completely unacceptable that would be in America, even though it is his private office. Again, strange to my American sensibilities... Of course, billboards for Playboy-type magazines are common, in train stations and malls (and *large*), so half dressed women (or less than half) are pretty much everywhere. Not to mention the French (European?) habit of sunbathing topless. Actually not all of the magazines with half naked women are even Playboy-type. It's just a European thing, I guess. Appreciation of the female body, or unabashed use of sex to sell products? you decide :)
A small minor amusing point is that none of their office supplies are even like American ones. You hold staplers between your hands like a paper hole puncher and *their* paper hold punchers are solely of the desk variety, with either 2 or 4 holes (of course, unaligned with my American binders!). Paper and envelopes come in completely different sizes, and looseleaf type binder paper has vertical lines as well as horizontal ones - it looks more like engineering draft paper than normal school paper in the US. Unrelated, the people in my office think nothing of wearing the same clothes 2 days in a row, and Christian has worn the same pair of pants since I've been here, hehe.
Yesterday was one of the other interns' ("stagiaire") last day here, so there was a small reception type thing in the office he shares with 3 other people (spacious, though). I believe he may have brought the food himself, I am not sure. There were weird little French snacks, and white wine mixed with blackberry liqueur (a drink called a "kir" here, which can also use strawberry or raspberry liqueur instead, rather sweet, but very tasty). At the mini-gathering, where everyone showed up to see him off and give him a sweater, I met a Canadian man who grew up in Montreal and has been living here for 2 years, and an American woman who has been living here for the past 26 years. We discussed some of the finer nuances of French culture - not only do they shake everyone's hand when they arrive at the office in the morning, but also when they arrive at parties; and when someone wants a snack, he picks up the tray/dish and carries it around offering it to everyone before eating some himself.
They were both pleasant people who seem to genuinely enjoy being here. I am always curious about what drives people to move to a foreign country and settle, as I always thought most people went abroad in their youth to explore, but eventually came back. Being here this summer has been an enriching experience. However, I'm left feeling that it would be a lot of fun to stay here longer than 3 months. Don't worry - I'm still coming back in the fall! But it's in my head now that I might want to come here to stay for a bit longer than a summer, and see how I adjust to really living here, as opposed to being an extended-stay tourist :)