Global Warming...

...doesn't seem to be happening in Paris. It's chilly and rainy and generally obnoxious. Bursts of gorgeous sunlight punctuated by evil flashes of thundering rain. But I am in the mind of outrage about global warming because of something I noticed that made my blood boil. I have been here a week already and my friend Analia, whose apartment I am swapping, has received exactly two pieces of mail, both addressed to her and both probably solicited. Meanwhile, I asked her to pick up my mail everyday and I can assure you there is already a mountain of unsolicited garbage piling up. She probably can't find her way out of it.
If we are so concerned about global warming, one of the first things that must stop is that horrifyingly wasteful American custom of junk mail. It is truly obscene. And that shit that you are supposed to get on a list to reduce your mail is a total fabrication. I'm on it. It doesn't work. I have written to people to stop sending me (and three dead people) junk mail. It is to no avail.
Here in France they are not a culture of waste. They don't obsess about ice cubes and air conditioning and it certainly looks like they don't fell forests for junk mail. Enough.

Fat central

We have decided we are only going to eat one crazy French meal a day because we are starting to expand alarmingly. It is hard not to, with the affordable 3 course menus and the bread and pastries and crepes and the aperitif and everything is meat with fried potatoes… I’m sure one can still eat real well but there are also lots of very disappointing places. We’ve been going to affordable places and soso cafes. Lunch is a huge production and you need to invest the time. There are way too many tourist traps and I’m afraid quality has gone down. They serve onion soup out of Lipton’s. It’s horrible.
We did have the best couscous on Earth at Chez Hammadi, where the man himself saw to it that we ate, as if he was our grandpa. The best.

Premier jour de cours

First day of class and I’m already dizzy with the French. Actually, it is in many ways very similar to Spanish so that helps a lot.
To begin, they sat us in this very dramatic and uncomfortable amphitheater from some old century.
Apparently, either they haven’t heard of Powerpoint and the Proxima, or they are not fond of them. So they let us know which class we’d been assigned to it through acetate slides. Remember those, from like the 19th Century? Well, that’s how it went. It took way longer than it should. But finally, I was assigned a class with Madame Jacqueline. Level: elementaire. There is a more basic level, debutante, for those who really don’t speak at all, which makes me feel much better. Madame Jacqueline is very nice and has a good sense of humor. She taught us the masculine/feminine suffixes today, among other things. She assumes we already know how to utter a sentence. Some do, most don’t. Still, the two hour class went by pretty fast. Classes are in a nondescript building behind the Pantheon. The area is very cool, though. The Luxembourg gardens are nearby as is the Place de la Contrascarpe. It’s the student quarter. The Quartier Latin, so called because classes were in Latin, not because there are people dancing merengue at all hours.
In the afternoon, I went to the Grande Epicerie at Bon Marché which is a giant gourmet store. My jaw basically dropped just looking at the desserts and then I continued drooling through the teas, the spices, the cheeses, the meats, the wines, the chocolates, the jams. It’s a seriously alluring store.


Then in the evening we went to the ballet at the Opera Garnier, the theatre to end all theatres. It’s like a wedding cake gone berserk. It’s like somebody had a fit of overdecoration. And it is stunning. I felt like those people in the movies who deploy fans and do not pay attention to the performance because they are too busy looking at Mme de Sevigne or Fanny Ardant. We dressed up because the building demands it. But as Bea noted, there is no elegance anymore. People show up in their crocs (almost). The French dress a bit more formally, but there were lots of tourists.


We wanted to catch La Traviata last night but it was sold out, so we made do with La Fille Mal Garde, a very charming comedic ballet by Frederick Ashton. Ballet is an acquired taste. Bea was bored out of her wits and thought it charming but corny. I enjoyed it thoroughly. The company was really good and we had great seats. I had not been at the ballet in about 15 years. It was delightful, but a little goes a long way. They sell champagne at intermission, which undoubtedly must help with the proceedings, but champagne does not agree with moi so I went at it completely sober.


Then we walked, me and my little heels, all the way back from the Opera to Notre Dame because that’s what you do in Paris.

Class

We show up at 8:30 am at the Richelieu Amphitheatre so we can know what class we've been allocated.
They still use the acetate system. No powerpoint for them. My brain is fried from so much French but I think I'm going to learn a lot.

A L'ecole!

Tomorrow is the first day of class! Wish me good teachers and no homework.

Wifi From Hell

Bon. I’m sure it’s probably Mercury rising or some such obnoxious planetary event that is preventing me from the simple task of finding a WiFi café that works. Finally, I relented and went to Starbucks, because one can be sure that when all else fails, the gringos can be counted to save the day with things that work. This, after visiting 2 other places where the wifi just didn’t take. The first, a truly charming café with a temperamental wifi. In the second one, a password was needed and the waitress gave it to me twice as if I was asking her with a gun to her tete for the combination to her family’s safe or the life of her firstborn. I tried the password she gave me and couldn’t get through. She could tell I was having trouble but chose not to help further. So I drank my stupid camomile tea and left. Starbucks comes to view, a beacon of hope shining in the darkeness of French non laissez faire. It clearly says WiFi on a sticker on the door. Starbucks, ugly as sin, has lovely electric outlets to connect the laptops. I drool in anticipation. Mais non so fast, my dear amis. Because it just so happens that today, aujourd hui le wifi is not working. Perhaps tomorrow, if the repairateur deigns to swing by down from Mount Parnassus where he must surely live, in peace and harmony with the locksmiths who don’t work on weekends and the waitresses who hate your guts.
This is not the first time this comes to mind: The French look like they know their shit and they look like they like order and they get all bent out of shape if things are not exactly comme ça. But they are a Latin people in the end, which means that underneath the semblance of functionality, chaos lurks. Somebody said that when it comes to efficiency, the French think they are Germans but they are actually Italians.
There are always extraordinarily complex explanations for everything, but if you want to find what you are actually looking for, you have to for it somewhere in in the dusty volumes of the old Encyclopedistes. You may learn who built the building, and that the elderly and unemployed don’t pay or where to reserve your tickets for next year, but it doesn’t say anywhere what are the box office hours. Unimportant stuff like that. Oh, well.

Culture Shock

After the concert at 10 pm, in need of a banana for my fruit smoothie tomorrow, I search in vain for an open store or supermarket. This is one of the disadvantages of living in a city, NY, that truly never sleeps. If you think that the rest of the world is going to be as crazy and open all night just because you need toilet paper, ice cream or bananas at 2 am, you are sorely mistaken. In the rest of the world, and quite especially here, they are very particular about their schedules. They wouldn’t dream of working past the civilized hour when everyone goes home and stops for the day. So, yes we have no bananas until demain.

Café Marly (across from the Louvre pyramid). Lunch (meaning: homicidal starvation).
No one at the gate to deal with the barbarians. No hostess to speak of. So one takes matters into own hands and starts looking for table to park tired ass from the Louvre. Voila, hostess appears stopping you midway and asks in total bewilderment, as if this does not happen with every single arriving party, where the hell do you think you're going, but nicely and in French. You say table for two, she says go wait at the door. This happens with absolutely everybody who walks in, while waiters scream after the patrons all day long “Madam! Monsieur! And send you back to the door.
Here’s some friendly unsolicited advice:
A simple sign at the door, coupled with an elegant velvet rope if you want, as befits the place, saying: "Please wait to be seated”. Or if this fails, a hostess who stays at her post.
Easy. Non?

Bouillion de Culture

These are the things to do in Paris: Walk. See Culture. Walk some more. Eat. Walk. See more Culture. In fact, so much culture is starting to give me a sense of satiety the kind of which I can only associate with looking too long at porn (not that I do). Because culture here is on a very grand scale and there is never enough. I’ve been here 2 days and I’ve already been to the Louvre twice. It’s not my fault it is so close by. Also, the only way of not wanting to set this museum on fire is by visiting it in increments. So the first day I decided to see only the paintings. I walked through the French painters, stopping at my faves (Ingres, David), then to the Flemish and Dutch and German for a dose of Vermeer and Rembrandt and Durer and then to the Italians, where all hell breaks loose.
The Mona Lisa is still there, attracting throngs (and boy, are there throngs of tourists in this town). She is now encased behind glass and looks even more bemused than usual. This must be the most overexposed painting in the history of art. To its credit, and my amazement, it does wield a mysterious power when seen in person. What is it about her? Yeah, the smile. But because it is intelligent and mordant and slighty provocative and seductive and sardonic. There are zillions of women depicted in paint, and this seems to be one of the few with more brains than looks. Before you get to her, you go by the Fra Angelicos and the Filippino Lippis and the Boticellis and then there are other Da Vincis and Raphaels and Titians and Tintorettos and by then you are groggy with beauty and art and you want out before you pass out. Today, it was only the Egyptian Antiquities wing, which is fascinating and mindboggling in its scope, from tiny little objets, to huge columnns and sarcophagi. It makes the Met look positively tiny.

At the Grand Palais there is an incredible exhibition called Monumenta, featuring art and installations by German artist Anselm Kiefer, which blew my mind. It is open until midnight, which is so cool because during the day the lines are long but during the night it’s almost empty and there is a free audioguide with so much explanation (in several languages), it’s almost as if you are taking a Ph D in Anselm Kiefer. I’m very happy I saw this, because this guy is a major, major artist.

Tonight there was an organ concert at Notre Dame. The organist played Bach, Rachmaninoff, Cesar Franck and a rocking improvisation by lui meme. Organ music reminds me of Dracula, and so by the way, does Notre Dame. But somehow it’s registers or vibrations have a strange, powerful effect on the body. It’s awe inspiring and relaxing at the same time.

A little adventure

It was raining and we had just had a miserable dinner at one of the tourist traps in the left bank (it's a long story and it involves imminent starvation, so give me a break). Happy to go home soon, we go up the 5 flights of stairs only to discover we cannot open door because the other set of keys is stuck in the back of the door. It's after midnight. What do we do now? We're not going to wake the super. We're going to spend the night at a hotel. It occurs to us to ask for help to the owner of the restaurant downstairs, a surly man who owns one of those dogs that look like cats, who owns the place. I ask him if he speaks in English. Speak, he says, royally. I explain situation. I ask if he knows of a locksmith. He hears me conferring with roommate in Spanish. He switches to Spanish. In essence: there is no way in the capital of France, the city of light, that you can get a locksmith over a weekend. Not on Saturday, not on Sunday. Ces't impossible. There is, he explains, if you are willing to pay like 300 euros for somebody from SOS just to show up. He recommends we do that in the morning, when it will be like 250 euros. Or, that we find something with the texture of an X-ray and we try to force the door open with it. He's done it many times. Right. So we go in search of a hotel (not before trying his suggestion with my driver license and sundry cards in our wallets to no avail). The Hotel Colbert around the corner is four stars and costs 360 euros a night. But the guy at the reception desk looks at us and decides there are no chambres for us anyway. Which is good, because that's a lot of money. About a block away, on the Blvd. St. Michel, we find the Hotel Studia. There is a room. The clerk sees no baggage and very diplomatically asks in French, but you intend to stay the night, correct? You are not going out after? As in, this is not a one night stand kinda thing, okay? We explain the situation with the clef. This hotel is 89 euros with bath in the room. Excellent option for an affordable accommodation in the heart of Paris. Ugly but clean and the room not so small. I spend the entire night wide awake pondering the situation. Tomorrow we look for the super, who will save our lives, that is if he hasn't left for the campagne for le weekend. In the morning we ask the clerk if he knows of a cerrurier, a locksmith (very handy word to learn). They look in the yellow pages for one in the quartier. According to the yellow pages, there are many who claim to work 7 days 7 and who don't seem to be as finicky about their leisure time as the restaurant owner warned. But I wake the super instead, who at 8:30 am on a Saturday is deeply asleep, and this is what I say:
Je suis desole de vous deranger mais jai un probleme avec la clef. See? I already speak French.
But ever resourceful Bea finds a wire somewhere and just as the super is about to help, I hear music to my ears. Bea was able to drop the keys on the other side with the wire. No cerrurier. Happy ending.

Cafe Society

I have never been to Paris in the summer. It's always been fall or winter, when it's cold and there are far less tourists. Summer is great here because everybody's out.
One of the things that happen when you come from New York is that you have to adjust your pace. Because here nobody is in a rush. People sit in outdoor cafes for hours and hours and the waiters let you linger until you cry uncle. And if you don't cry uncle you may be stuck there until dawn. You may spend your entire vacation waiting for the check. Once you realize this is not incompetence or personal contempt of your touristy likes, you just sit and relax and watch the world go by, which can be oodles of fun. Yesterday we parked our tired asses at a cafe in the corner of Reaumur and Rue St. Denis and watched. And watched. And watched some more. I went to the restroom and someone had apparently puked the entire contents of a bottle of wine (or more), sprayed them that is, all over the stall (including the ceiling, methinks). I think this is the first time I ever see burgundy colored puke. The waiter, solicitously told me not to get in there (a bit too late, I had already witnessed the disaster) and opened a spotlessly clean loo for me. "It's new!" He tells me in English. It's clean, I retort.
Maybe I'm dreaming, but it seems to me that either the French are speaking more English with less agita these Sarkozy days, or I am delirious. They no longer seem to regard you with open contempt as you struggle to connect in their language and they switch to English instantly, without giving you much of a chance to shine in your "bon jour madame", which is the only thing you manage really well.
So far, lucky me.