August 31, 2001, to September 6, 2001
(This ended up being the longest update yet - read at your own risk!)
My second to last week draws to a close today. This weekend is my last weekend in Paris - I'm planning to finish up seeing the last few things I haven't had a chance to yet (Fontainebleau, Chantilly, a couple lesser museums). Next week I will continue to be busy at work with the presentation I must give on my work here when I return to Drexel, and of course, packing up my shtuff. This week was relatively slow, but I did have an interesting weekend so that's what this update is primarily about :) As far as the weather goes, it has been COLD (10-16 degrees Celsius, about 50-60 degrees Fahrenheit). And rainy and cloudy almost every day since the end of August. My coworkers say this is normal. I imagine it is difficult to stay chipper all winter here, since the bad weather starts almost before summer ends!
This past Saturday I went to Versailles, finally. I had gone with my friends on our Spring break trip this past March but it was closed due to a museum workers' strike (une grève). These are apparently common in France, in all areas of industry. This weekend, they were not on strike however, and I got to see all the amazing opulence inside the palace. Opulence is not even strong enough to describe it. The ceilings and the walls were covered with molding inlaid with gold (paint or real I don't know), but everything sparkled. Other walls had rich thick fabric as a kind of wallpaper - my favorite room was this dark green bedroom, I think it was King Louis XIV's bedroom. I spent about 3 hours at Versailles, just walking around inside; an audioguide came with admission to the King and Queen's suites, so I got a little bit of history with each room. I took many pictures, but flash was not allowed, so I'm crossing my fingers that there was enough light inside since it was overcast that day.
On Versailles' grounds there are many of what are known as "living statues", that is, people who put on a costume and makeup and stand around all day, only moving to bow when you drop a coin in their jar. They exist in Paris also near other touristy places like the Musée d'Orsay. I have seen ones that look like Egyptian mummies, all gold, or like an ancient Greek statue, all in white. The Greek ones are more impressive, I think, because they hold their arms out all day, never moving! It's a bit weird too - the first time you see one, you definitely do a double take to check if it is real. The first time I saw a living Greek statue I had to stare a long time before I believed it was a real person (I was kind of far away).
Anyway, for the afternoon I had decided to go to see the basilica (a huge church) at St. Denis, a former suburb of Paris which is now located right on the northernmost edge. (Versailles is very close to Paris, perhaps 30 minutes by train, to the southwest.) But before my train to St. Denis I decided to have lunch. I ate at a place called le Breton, where they served only galettes and crepes. Galettes are like crepes but they are darker, open-faced and served as main dishes. I had one with mushrooms, tomatoes, egg, lettuce, and scallops (they were white and red, I never knew there were red scallops before), which are called "coquilles St. Jacques". This is where English gets the word "cockleshells" from. Anyway my galette and dessert crepe (bananas and dark chocolate) were delicious. I also had cider (sparkling) because it seemed to be a house specialty; it was pear flavored. Then I left for the train...
...and on to St. Denis's basilica: I was approaching it when I noticed the city hall building, very old and beautiful. On its steps were 2 wedding parties! One bride was dressed up in a beautiful Western wedding gown, and the other was dressed in traditional Indian (subcontinent) attire, equally beautiful and extremely colorful. Both parties were having their pictures taken, and the French bride had hers taken on the steps of the basilica too, which was adjacent. After I had finished staring at the beautiful dresses :) I entered the basilica. This basilica is particularly noteworthy because almost every king and queen of France has been buried there. There are sarcophagi all over the church, carved with exquisite depictions of the king or queen lying in state. Certain burial monuments are more impressive, like Henri II and Catherine de Medici's, which has their two sarcophagi under a marble temple-like arch with statues of them kneeling in prayer on top of it. Pretty amazing to see. There is also a huge statue of Marie Antoinette and King Louis XIV kneeling in front of a cross. The church was beautiful - I love Gothic churches, and I was really glad I went to this less-traveled and very non-crowded spot.
On my way home I stopped to see la Stade de France, the stadium where France won the World Cup in soccer in 1998 (I think). It was big, and slightly futuristic looking. Otherwise, a blah stop. But I figured I had to do it. Then when I went back to the subway, there was some music playing in speakers installed in the corridor - the first such thing I have seen in the Paris Métro. They were playing some weird Pink Floyd-esque music. It kind of made the place seem like the set of a scifi or horror movie, especially since no one else was in the corridor while I walked through it.
Sunday was another interesting day. I spent the morning at la Musée de l'Homme, or the Museum of Mankind. It's a natural history museum, with info on evolution, population, culture and so on. I like natural history museums most of all I think. This one was especially cool for several reasons: 1) it was cheap, only $3 for students; 2) it was not crowded - it's near the Eiffel Tower so everyone stands outside it for photo ops because it's a great view, but no one enters the museum - except me! ha ha; 3) it had the head of an actual Easter island statue (you've seen pictures). The info about the head said the whole thing would not have fit to be transported. But all the captions were in French - it might have been broken before they took it here. It seems wrong they would have uprooted them and broken them to send them around the world... I dunno.
Another cool thing about this museum is that in the cultural sections - they had a different area for each people in each major part of the world, with clothes, jewelry, tools, and info on their ways of life - was an authentic reproduction of a Turkish house. You could walk in it and look in the drawers and closets and stuff. It was neat. In the South American area, there were "caves" you walked through and they had cave paintings :) An interesting cultural sidebar to the museum was that they had an exhibit about what makes people different from each other - hair color/type, eye color, height, etc - a kids' exhibit. They had a photograph of a naked pregnant woman, not covering her chest, and in another area a photo of 20-30 naked people of various ages just standing around (diversity). I was struck by how natural and normal nakedness is viewed in France (and in Europe?) whereas in the US parents would be screaming if a museum had a naked person in a kids' exhibit. Food for thought, I guess.
So after I got tired of practicing my French by reading all the captions, I left the museum and went to le chateau de Vincennes, which is actually just outside the city limits of Paris. It was a huge medieval fortified hunting lodge which was expanded by Charles V and later by Louis XIV for his honeymoon. It's located in the Bois (woods/forest) de Vincennes, which were famous hunting grounds for the kings. I went on a tour, where we got to walk up on top of the defense wall and look down into the moat (which no longer has water in it, but how cool would that be!). We also saw the inside of the Sainte-Chapelle, or the holy chapel, a rather large Gothic chapel built within the chateau walls. The guide said there were actually 3 chapels including that one, but the other 2 are not Gothic style, just normal buildings. The chateau was used as a prison, later in history. You can walk around inside the grounds anywhere you like for free, but to see the chapel and take the tour it's $3 for students, a bit more for regular people.
On my way home I was forced to take a different route back because apparently there had been a Metro accident in the tunnel and my line was closed. I got home ok, though, so don't worry! :) To reassure you about the safety of the trains in Paris, this is the first accident I've heard of all summer.
This past Wednesday night we had another barbeque at work. I got very tired rather quickly but tried to be social. A coworker drove me home afterward. It was much the same as last time - cold salads, barbequed sausage and chicken, too loud music, etc - except they started it off with a presentation about OpenCASCADE because the BBQ was for the entire building here and OCC is just a child company of the parent, Matra DataVision, and it has been independent for a relatively short period of time, so no one at MDTV knew what they were up to. I socialized mostly with my immediate officemates; we spent quite a bit of time talking about accents and how to remember certain pairs of opposites in English and French, heh. Incidentally, the French word for barbeque is "barbeque" :)
I bought 2 CD's this weekend (the first CD's I've bought in France). The first was called "Beatles Go Baroque"; it's an orchestral arrangement of 4 Beatles classics, "Penny Lane", "Hey Jude", "Hard Day's Night" and uhmm I forget the other one. I bought that at Versailles, baroque being the popular music at the time of Louis XIV. I bought the second at Vincennes, Mozart's Requiem mass, which he actually died before completing, and one of my favorite pieces of classical music. It's dark and sad but I really like the richness of it. I knew it was more expensive to buy it in a touristy shop than somewhere else along the line, but I've always liked it so I took it as a kind of sign to buy it.
Parisian billboards are so interesting. In the subways they have actual math problems/topics, like the Pythagorean theorem, perfect numbers, and Euler's theorem (circuit), in the cars. Education in France is very different than in the US. French teenagers study more material by the time they've graduated high school than Americans. In spite of this, they have much more vacation that we do - they go for 7 weeks of school, 1 week of vacation, 7 weeks of school, 1 week of vacation, until summer, when they have 2 months. And they only go to school 4.5 days instead of a full 5 - they get Wednesday afternoons off. When French teenagers finish high school, they also take a test called le baccalaureat, or le bac for short. If they pass, they can go to college in France for free. It's a very big event in their lives, as you might imagine.
Speaking of school, it's back in session and now the trains are full of French teenagers in large droves heading to schools. Back-to-school is known as "la rentrée" here and it generally took place on Sept 5th.
One thing I hadn't mentioned before was that, at the movies, they play full length commercials after the previews and before the show starts. Actually the way movies are organized is different - for 10 minutes or even sometimes 20 minutes before the actual movie reel starts, they play previews. Then they cut the projection and turn on the lights for about 2 minutes. After that they lower the lights again and start the reel, with typical local adverts for the theatre or mainstream commercials, and the show starts. In movie listings, they list the start of the séance, meaning the show, and everyone knows you can go up to 10 minutes later guaranteed and not miss the movie. I saw one commercial last week which I had heard is pretty popular in the US - the Nike "freestyle" commercial, with a bunch of basketball players doing stunts and making rhythm music with the sounds of their dribbling and feet squeaking on the floor. It's really very innovative and cool. Well they are playing it here before movies now, I've seen it twice. I also saw a version with soccer players. Advertising may be cold, manipulative and sensational, but some commercials are truly artistic.
I have been living, quite amicably and quite out-of-character-ably, with a spider who has taken up residence in the corner near my fridge. I first was going to try to sweep him out like I do with the daddy longlegs (altho they STILL come back), but he was too fast for me. So I decided to trust fate and hope it wasn't poisonous. It is rather large compared to ordinary household spiders. I had never seen one like it so I performed a webhunt. Judging by pictures, and descriptions of its web and behavior habits, I think it is a Tegeneria atrica. This genus is apparently very common in Europe but not so common in the US. If you are brave, here is a picture of it: Tegenaria atrica. Its body is about 6-10mm long (about 1/2 an inch) but its leg-span easily puts it into the inch-and-a-half range. I figure, I am leaving soon, it can have the place. If I were staying I'd probably try more proactively to get it outside. The website I checked says the males come out and look for females in the late summer-early fall, but I have not seen any other spider that looks like him so I imagine (hope) he won't find any female to mate with and lay eggs in my apartment. If he does, let them wait till *after* I leave :)
I don't think I have mentioned this before but by law, French people only have to work 36 hours a week. If they work more, they don't get paid overtime but they accrue more vacation days (on top of the mandatory 5 week minimum they already get (*everyone*)). In fact, however, not many people work overtime over 38-40 hours. Not like America where half the people work 50-60 hours a week. I was trying to explain how, to be successful in America's business world, family life has to be relegated to the back burner - you can't leave work to pick your kid up from school because she has an earache, for example, or if you do, it's not really accepted. Or worse yet if your child is chronically ill. Here, however, that attitude is viewed as not a little bit barbaric. I told them things are changing, becoming more progressive now, but slowly and in high powered industries like investment banking or what have you, it's still very much true that, as far as the company is concerned, their employees don't have families. I don't think any of my French coworkers will want to work in America anytime soon after that conversation heh.
I've spent most of my emails talking about happy and nice things, but one thing I feel I should mention is the unfortunate epidemic of le chomage and les sans-abri (unemployment and the homeless). In France, unemployment is at like 11%. This is why it's nearly impossible for a non-French national to just get a job in France (my case is special, I count as a "researcher"), because by French law priority goes to French nationals in interviews and such. (It's also part of the reason behind the 36-hour rule - less hours means more people needed, in theory.) But the unemployment is still impossibly high, and especially around Paris you see lots of street and subway beggars - these people are not always homeless, although many are that as well. Unlike other cities, where 'problem areas' exist where the concentration these things is higher, they seem to be everywhere in Paris, from the steps of Notre Dame to each and every subway corridor. I may be exaggerating a bit, but it is still a sobering sight.
I've spoken about street and subway artists, but I didn't mention the people who get on car after car of a train and begin a long monologue which they have clearly said over and over many times, asking for money. I rarely see people give them money, but I see these people on at least 50% of my train rides. While I view the people I've described with compassion and pity, there is another class of beggar which I cannot bring myself to find anything but annoying. These are the group beggars. In high-traffic touristy places, women in twos or threes, with children in strollers, approach people who look like tourists and ask "Speak English?" If you are misfortunate enough to look startled and say yes they either hand you a piece of paper with some kind of plea for money on it, or beg aloud in broken English. The reason I find these women so annoying, and why I usually pretend I don't speak English when I encounter them, is that they have some kind of angry attitude in their faces and do not exactly seem poverty-stricken. They're not poorly dressed, nor extremely thin, and neither are the children, so I doubt they're in true need of francs.
So there is a lower side of Paris - all is not sunshine and happy tales - and I thought I was being overly glossy by not putting anything gritty in these emails. So here is a piece of the truth, like it or not. The sad thing is, we can feel sorry for the people we see in 3rd world countries on TV who are starving, but seem to have relatively little compassion for our own starving and unwanted.
Well I will close on that note, however depressing it might be, and ask you to forgive my random ramblings. One week remains: see many of you in a short 7 days!