August 22

Yesterday I turned 30. Was it an epiphanal first day of the rest of my life? Or am I entering some nightmarish alternate reality of "30 and The Single Woman?" The jury is still out, leaning away from nightmarish alternate reality, but it's true that the initial euphoria did wear off a little in the days that followed. However, at least the actual day was amazingly pleasant.

Some of the highlights of yesterday were suddenly being struck by every sign that had 30 in it—lots of 30 km speed limit signs in my neighborhood that I never noticed until yesterday. Another highlight was a French karaoke singer busking on the metro who serenaded me with Dock of the Bay (it’s about San Francisco) and sounded very little like Otis Redding—instead of a bluesman growl he had a French accent and exaggeratedly perfect annunciation: "SittinG on zee duck of zee baie..." I felt like that was a good metaphor for my recent trip to CA and seeing that my friends were happy but also that we’d changed a lot in different ways, which wasn’t bad, it was just that my old California doesn’t exist anymore. I haven't heard the American version of the Dock of the SF bay recently, but that’s ok, since my inspiration doesn’t lie there anymore. This is the cultural hybrid French version of California on the Paris metro and it’s my version of it now.

I feel good about 30, oddly enough, possibly because I’ve spent the whole rest of my life having existential crises. That has to count for something and give you a pass for what is arguably the most stereotypically traumatic age for a single woman.

To celebrate yesterday evening, I went out for drinks and dinner with some of my favorite people in the entire world, a lovely international group of ex-pats who struggle to make their lives here like I do, and I thought, there’s nowhere I’d rather be and no one I’d rather be with.

We had drinks and went out for Indian food near La Chapelle and then had 1 more glass of wine in Montmartre. It was really the perfect way to celebrate and I know after my trip to the states that I don’t want to live anywhere else; I’m glad Paris is my home. I texted my friends the day after to thank them for a perfect birthday evening and they texted back that it yes, it HAD been perfect, hadn’t it? This is why I love them all. They brought me thoughtful quirky presents (they absolutely didn’t have to) that were all things I realized I wanted without even knowing it until then-- from books about the metro to a French translation of a Dutch novel set in California to green eye shadow and they even smuggled a birthday muffin into the Indian restaurant and lit a candle on top.

I brought them each a rose the color of a sunset just to say that I’m so glad we’re all friends under the soleil-challenged gray Parisian skies. If you can’t be sentimental on your 30th birthday, when can you be?

Viva Las Vegas

In the Vegas airport you can do the following:

-Gamble your entire life away as the airport is littered with slot machines and seems more like a casino where airplanes occasionally land.

-Work out. They have a gym there. Here's what their website says about it:

"Fitness Center: The first of its kind located inside a major U.S. airport, 24 Hour Fitness offers shower and locker room facilities, steam room and dry sauna, a cardiovascular workout area complete with big screen TVs, and a full compliment of exercise equipment. For more information, call 702/261-3971. Location: Terminal 1, Level 2, above north Baggage Claim. Hours: 24 hours, Monday - Thursday 12 a.m. - 11 p.m., Friday 6 a.m. - 9 a.m., Saturday & Sunday."

-The usual shopping, eating, checking your email.

-Shoot a machine gun. In all fairness, this is advertised in the airport but you have to take a taxi to get there. Even gun-happy America doesn't have shooting ranges in the airport. At least not while we are waging the so-called war on terrorism, anyway.

Read My Shirt

The main advantage to wearing t-shirts with words printed on them in France is that no one attempts to read them aloud, since their English isn't good enough and strangers rarely ever talk to you. No such luck in the US. Everyone here seems to read my t-shirt aloud within 3 seconds of seeing it. Maybe it's the American relational strike-up-a-conversation-about-any-old-thing mentality or simply the perfect justification for staring at a woman's upper body...

Only men seem to be the t-shirt readers and they always do it in a slow, evenly-measured, puzzled voice with obvious quotation marks. They also always just start reading, no "what does your shirt say?" or introductory framing question. Implicit in their reading is the need for an explanation or Funny Story Behind This Shirt. I should also point out that while never a fashionplate, most of my real clothes are in France and I mainly have my high school wardrobe available to me at the moment, which includes its fair share of shirts featuring complete English sentences. Here are some recent t-shirt reading experiences.

Stranger, shouting from across the sidewalk in San Francisco: "'The reason the world loves
me?'"
T-shirt actually says "The man who sold the world" and even those who read it correctly often try to strike up a conversation about Nirvana only to meet with polite yet withering scorn, as this is in fact a brilliant David Bowie song that Nirvana once covered.

Stranger, selling me fruit at the farmer's market in Delaware: "'Happy dreams opium den?' Do you go there often, ha ha?"
Shirt continues, explaining that this obviously fictional place is "where good fiends like to meet." I mean, really, who would advertise an actual crack den?

Stranger, drug store cashier who looks about 16, ringing up nail polish: "'Tears for fears?' Is that a movie?"

American Customer Service

This really happened at a DVD store called FYE (For Your Entertainment-- and no, despite dubious-sounding name, they do not sell porn, more like Disney-Pixar classics) when I went to the register to buy a DVD.

Cashier (bubbling over with customer service enthusiasm) : Hi, there, how are you today?! Did you find everything ok today?!
Me: Yes, thanks.
C: Can I interest you in a subscription to our special new DVD and video game release magazine? It has the latest insider information on all the hottest new entertainment!
Me: No, thanks.
C: Would you like to join our frequent buyer program and get 10% off your purchase today?!
Me: Um, no thanks, that's ok, I don't live around here.
C: Would you be willing to donate a dollar to the children's literacy program we support? It's strictly optional, but the proceeds all go directly to underfunded public schools!
Me (unable to keep from laughing): Wow, do you have to ask everyone all those questions every time they buy something? You must be exhausted at the end of the day.
C (acknowledging that his series of questions is, indeed, ridiculous): God, I know, you must be like, get outta my face, I just wanna buy my movie! How would you like to pay for this today?!

Time flies when your airline doesn't...

I've been spending lots of lack-of-quality time in airports recently, having just flown across the world in a record 5 million hours. Ok, it was maybe 10 hours of actually being in a plane, but really an entire day of transit. Actually, more than that. It only fit into one day because the US is 6 hours behind chez moi. I had the logical flight pattern of going Paris-Chicago-Baltimore. Chicago is approximately 1,500 miles out of the way.

When I left Paris, not only had the airport bus fare gone up, but terminal one suddenly seemed like it was in no longer located in Ile-de-France, but in Metz. I feel like I have never inspired so much suspicion in airport security staff people. It seems that leaving France on a British passport to visit your family in the US is now the equivalent of announcing your intent to blow up the entire world, one airplane at a time. They also suspiciously examined the macaroons I was bringing as presents in my carry-on. No doubt to verify that they did not contain bombs cleverly concealed by fluffy meringue. They even asked before I boarded the plane what I'd bought in the one cafe waiting room after I passed through security.

If Paris Roissy was an ordeal, I really hate Chicago O'Hare.

For the rest of my life, I will only associate Chicago with overpriced airport food, endless gate changes, terrorist threat alert Orange (some good old eye roll-inspiring Patriot Act paranoia to try to strip Americans of the few civil rights we've still got...), nearly bankrupt airlines who would probably charge you per individual pretzel, if they could and delayed flights. Without fail, I always have a connecting flight here and it's always delayed, except for the times that it's cancelled. Since I always have plenty of time to wait at O'Hare, until they announce the lastest gate change, I went to some airport bar (not one of the Starbucks that they have roughly every 12 feet) where they carded me (um, I'm about a decade over 21) and charged me $8 for a glass of red wine made entirely of sulfite.

Welcome back to the US.

It's so humid here that I started doing hot yoga because then the outside temperature seems bearable by comparison, and at least, once outside, you no longer have to hold warrior pose.

The airport fun doesn't stop. Off to California this Friday for an overnight flight that arrives in Oakland at 1 am and to BWI tonight to pick up a friend of mine, but at least the parking towers and skywalks are fresh in my mind. And at least it's not O'Hare.

Greetings from Asbury Parc des Princes

"Je suis venu a Paris pour vous," Bruce Springsteen told me-- and thousands of other people at his concert Friday night at French stadium Parc des Princes. With these words, he then played a heartbreaking piano solo version of the song For You off my favorite album, Greetings from Asbury Park, which almost made me cry and I now count among my greatest musical experiences ever.

Whatever Bruce Springsteen means to you-- lyrical poet, symbol of America, documentarian of Americana blue collar struggle, hometown nostalgia or inexplicable New Jersey cult aging rocker, -- he is awesome in concert. He played for 3 hours straight. 28 songs. Not only was this the longest concert of continuous music I'd ever attended, but he also interacted more with the crowd than any other musician I'd ever seen and-- get this-- he took requests. He was ready to play any one of his songs that night. Fans held up hand-lettered signs with the titles of their favorite songs (sometimes in broken English) or shouted their requests. "Dites-le-moi," said Bruce, backed by the non-French speaking E Street Band, "vous voulez entendre quelle chanson?"

The fact the Bruce is back with his original band makes me oddly nostalgic for a time that I never knew-- when he and the E Street Band used to play my hometown. New Jersey and Delaware aren't very far away and I embrace all Jersey cult bands as representing Where I'm From. Hearing Bruce sing about Atlantic City in Paris made me wonder if French people had ever heard of AC, as we used to call it back home. Yes, to me it's a romanticised version of Americana that all of a sudden it becomes about my life, but it also made me think of Le Spleen de Paris, Baudlairean prose poem still-lives about unheroic parisians-- another example of a region described by romantically unromantic images.

Paris is probably the most frequently romanticised place in the world-- often by Americans, often in annoying blog entries that make people who really live in Paris ask questions like, well, remember stepping in dog shit all the time? What about the lack of any form of customer service at all in Paris? Did you love the city of light when you had to argue with France Telecom for 12 weeks to get them to turn on your phone line?

Do I have the same lack of perspective when I start to think the Bruce Springsteen songs actually accurately describe my life in America? I've always listened to him away from the east coast-- from San Francisco and now Paris, and he always represented on some level something I left behind but that at the same time never really existed. I wasn't born to run, Thunder Road doesn't appear on my American road map and I've never hidden on the backstreets. The word "nostalgia" comes from the Greek "nosteo," which means to return home. As the cliche goes, you can't go home again-- but as the film Grosse Point Blank added, you can shop there. Delaware is the home of tax-free shopping.

After the concert, someone accosted me and asked if I were lucky enough to be from the same country as Bruce Springsteen. I assumed (given the influence of French irony and inability to give sincere compliments) that the guy was making fun of me, but turns out he was sincere. I don't expect anyone in France to be pro-American in any way, so this actual admiration of something American shocked me. I spend most of my time criticising Bush and American foreign policy with the French, agreeing with them that I hope McCain loses and Obama becomes president and rolling my eyes at them when they ask why Americans are so fat and why they eat Mcdonalds for every single meal, every single day. I wasn't born in the USA, but contrary to what the average French person and Ronald Reagan might think, that song is not a patriotic anthem, but a criticism of the Land of the Free. Bruce also supports Obama.

Seeing Bruce in Paris was a bit of a collision of worlds for me. And small things irritated me in this car crash (I'm sure there's some relevant Bruce song about such a topic that I could quote here). When Bruce said he came to Paris for us, some French smartass yelled that we were actually at Boulogne (Parc des Princes is a little outside Paris) and I wanted to challange this precision-seeking loser to construct one coherent sentence in English. In the French press, they also kept writing about Bruce and the E period Street Band (they always write it E. Street) , and it makes an American realise that the old world and city of lights will never get modern urban basics like building cities on grid systems. In Paris, instead of a grid, they have a star-with-no-individual-lanes system under the Arc de Triomphe.

The next day, the French paper Le Monde had a concert write-up, complete with the standard poorly punctuated band name, but it warmed my French-influenced but American heart nevertheless when they described Bruce as "le plus grand showman rock de son temps." Notice that this sentence also contains multiple English words...

Why I Don't Update My Blog Very Often

Have you ever noticed that the average blog entry reads a little like this:

"Dear World,

I am insufferable and pretentious."


As Stephen Crane once wrote:

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,"
The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

Let Them Eat... Un diner presque parfait (an almost perfect dinner)

The perfect metaphor for France is a reality TV show called Un diner presque parfait. It unites some elements that characterize French life for me—obsession with food, conviviality over food, competition, severe grading, and a slightly cynical expectation of mediocrity. (The grading and competition elements make more sense if you know that I’m a professor at a French university.) The show would be a failure in the US and would never dare air on normal TV but would be relegated to the Food Network or some equally obscure corner of the cable universe. However, it’s acceptable daytime television in France.

The show works like this: the producers pick a city (it’s currently Dijon, where the mustard comes from), and maybe 5 contestants and each one has to prepare a dinner—complete with appetizers, a main dish and a dessert. They each create a menu and distribute it to the others in advance, so that everyone can comment on it to the camera. Each contestant is graded by the others on the quality of the food, the decoration of the table and the general ambiance. Included in the general ambiance is the expectation of after-dinner entertainment. For example, Marie-Antoinette’s rollicking after-dinner entertainment was playing some tunes on her hunting horn. This utterly charmed all her on-screen guests and left me completely baffled. However, even the hunting horn didn’t make up for her undercooked duck. The winner, who is obviously not Marie-Antoinette (French women with that name just don’t seem to win), gets general acknowledgement of his or her superior cooking skills and 1,000 euros.

This show has a lot of faux suspense—like “will Marie-Antoinette’s duck be too dry?” Or “The guests arrive in one hour—will Claire finish her sauce in time?” Or “will the others appreciate an entirely vegetarian dinner?” There are also little interviews with each person—little play-by-play reactions from both the chef for that night and the dining patrons on everything from the pattern of the napkins to the escargot appetizer to the chocolate covered pear and clementine pudding for dessert.

The last time I watched, Claire was in the lead with her entirely vegetarian dinner—which excited me to no end to learn that there is at least one other vegetarian in all of France. I wanted to call Claire up to talk about ways to cook lentils. However, I think someone knocked her out of top position—not Marie-Antoinette with her duck of shame, but Claude the retiree who never finishes all the food on his plate and consequently makes all the other contestants nervous or maybe Xavier, who in a rare confessional moment, told the camera that he’d decided to pretend he knew all about food and lie to everyone all the time and say things like, “I only buy fresh snails and then freeze them myself; I’d never buy frozen ones, quelle horreur.” Because of his arrogance, everyone believes him that he’s a great authority on French cuisine and he always looks very pleased with himself when he tells the camera for the umpteenth time that he just can’t believe that the others are falling for his act of gourmet chef expert foodie.

The average grade so far for our gang of wannabe chefs in Dijon is a 6.8 out of 10 and none of the contestants ever expect to do well—which we know since they are always asked to predict what grade they think the other will give them and they always expect a lower grade then they actually receive. They do, however, tend to grade each other severely as they have all survived the French school system. They give a lot of 5s and 6s since this is la moyenne (the average). Although they tend to be more generous with the decoration grade. Claire the vegetarian draped vines all over her table to highlight the evening’s organic theme and they liked this immensely. Marie-Antoinette had matching china and mystery gift envelopes containing a small shiny piece of paper you used to create a funnel and pour a cocktail. I’m not the greatest interpreter of French culture, but she seems pretty bourgeois, that Marie-Antoinette. Besides her hunting horn and paper cocktails, she also has a white poodle that she brought to Claire’s house for dinner without asking first, which Claire revealed to find slightly horrifying in an exciting play-by-play reaction to the arrival of her guests.

Unfortunately, I somehow missed 3 episodes of my new favorite program—it’s like the new Seinfield where nothing ever happens but everyone always eats… I didn’t see Claude, Xavier and Bertrand’s dinners, however, I caught the end of Real World (of Food) : Dijon this morning and learned that apparently for the first time in Un diner presque parfait history, 2 contestants were tied with the French all-time high score of 7.3 out of 10 and both won 1,000 euros. The winners were dainty-eater Claude and know-it-all Xavier. I hope their episodes will be rebroadcast every hour on the hour so that all of France and I can witness an outstanding 7.3 dinner on the Richter dining scale. The other contestants probably all killed themselves with shame. No, just kidding, they probably just said, “bof” and shrugged. And went to go have something to eat.

En Attendant Godot

Life in France often feels a little like Waiting For Godot. By that, I mean, surreal and uncertain (if you want examples, see every other blog I’ve ever written). I think it’s no accident that Beckett wrote this play in French. The caprices of the French bureaucracy, for example, usually have a Beckettian logic (meaning none at all, really) about them. You also tend to wait in line in Paris all the time—to go to the movies, exit Chatelet, get into any museum, get a table at a restaurant, buy your groceries, etc. The latest in French bureaucratic surrealism: my friend Angela recently went to a bar where they asked patrons to make a deposit if they ordered a certain kind of beer called Kwak because apparently you have to drink it in a special glass that is expensive. Seriously—you purchase beer, but it’s like you’re renting the glass you drink it in and you have to pay a “caution.” This is the same word you use for the deposit you make on your apartment when you move in. You probably also have to wait in line to make your beer glass deposit.

Lately for me in France, there’s this perpetual longing that makes me feel a bit like I’m waiting for an impossible Godot-like miracle, which would be, in my case, a sign that moving to Paris was the right thing to do, that I fit in here, I can make a life and long-term plans here, rather than just going from year to year, and that I have many important and convincing reasons for staying. Maybe it’s restlessness brought on by spring, or the fact that I’m on vacation and so I now have plenty of free time to worry about the future, but lately, I feel like I’m waiting for the future to start. I’m moving in a week, the semester ends 2 weeks after spring vacation, and I’ll have the summer off. I’ll visit my family in the states and I’ll celebrate my 30^th birthday (gulp) in Paris in August, I’ll have the same job at the university next year and hopefully it’ll be easier the second time around. But like the Bruce Springsteen song goes (it’s off his new album, Magic), we’re livin’ in the future and none of this has happened yet.

I’m also waiting for more impossible things that the future might or might not hold—like the perfect job at an NGO so that I can speak French and save the world simultaneously—or for my current job suddenly to become more satisfying, or the discovery of some well-hidden talent that chooses to reveal itself in Paris, like cinematography, writing or oil-painting that would make my life fulfilling and would remove all my doubts about everything, or, finally, the perfect relationship-- which would more or less do that same thing. To some extent everyone lives in the future and hopes for things like these and this is the human condition— just ask Samuel Beckett. But this phenomenon suddenly seems way more intense in a foreign country where you live with more uncertainty in your life than you did back home and you’re culturally more on the periphery (or péripherique) of Parisian life looking for the right exit to get into town, and not in the center of the city where all the museums, theaters and restaurants and clubs are.

There’s this Portishead song that I love (Glorybox off the Dummy album) and it goes: “give me a reason to love you…” and I feel like the lyrics should be: “give me a reason to stay in France.” I want France to convince me to stay forever. I want feel like I belong here. Guess I’ll have to wait for that song to be released. And then they’ll probably want a deposit before you buy the album.

"Le meilleur vrai réseau" or How Weird is French Advertising

It often arrives to me-- ok, I'll recommence and try to sound like a normal human being instead of a franglais-speaker who has a tortured relationship with both the French and English language. Thanks to the horizon-broadening experience of living abroad, I can now no longer start normal-sounding sentences or spell in French or English. But lingusitic confusion pales in comparison to cultural confusion. I usually find myself completely baffled by French advertising. This is due to the simple fact that it is completely baffling.

First of all, the most frequently advertised products on French TV are cheese and perfume. I'm not kidding. I've never seen so many cheese ads since moving here. Dairy products in general are well represented in French marketing. Yogurt, especially and there's this one freakishly weird ad-- I'll try to download it, since otherwise no one would believe me-- for dairy products in general the features little skeletons dancing around a giant cow whose udder explodes and bathes them in a fountain of milk to an aggressive club remix of Stayin' Alive and then one of them jumps on the cow and starts drinking the milk. It was actually kind of disturbing to watch. ads involving miniature skeletons, the BeeGees and cow udders are pretty unusual, you have to admit. This doesn't seem to scream Winning Marketing Formula to me...

I saw this other bizarro ad yesterday for the metro. So this seems odd, since the RATP owns all forms of public transportation in Paris, so they pretty much have a monopoly. Even Velib, the rent-a-bicycle service is affiliated to the RATP, I think. I mean their competition is what, taxis or people who decide to walk? Or not go out at all?

And this ad seems like it advertises a video game at first. You see a digital image of a man-- he has pixels and he comes in and out of focus, and he's walking around outside in the "real world". You see him marvel at the sky above, the heat of the sun on his skin, singing birds, etc. and he looks intently at the real people who pass by. Oh, how he longs to be a real boy, you can almost hear him say. Then you see him go down into the metro-- St. Lazare specifically, because we recognise that weird glass igloo/pyramid thing, and he puts his hand on the escalator railing and marvels at its feel beneath his hand. Then his train comes and the doors open and-- surprise!-- he's face-to-face with his human, flesh-and-blood alter ego. The ad ends here and then gives the tag line, RATP, the best real network. Or the best network that really exists. To explain, the word network in French can mean a transportation network or a communications network, like for wireless internet or your cell phone.

So, I find this a strange ad. It's kind of post-modern in the message, take the metro because it's real, it exists, unlike a computer network or a video game. I described it to my friend Josie, and she thought it was a mistake to stress the realism of the metro. It's true that often the tactile or sensory experience in metro stations is fairly unpleasant. In other words, you generally smell urine and vomit. Why didn't they just say, "the metro: come smell the vomit for yourself," Josie joked. Who knows, maybe this is the next ad campaign for the best real network that actually exists.

No Exploding Cars, or the Surrealist French Highway System

If you saw the above image on the road, what would you imagine it meant? This was all over certain French highways. My American friends and I wondered, does it mean your car isn't allowed to explode on this highway? Does is mean beware of spontaneous combustion because other cars DO tend to explode on this road? Beware of car bombs? Is it a really dramatic warning against overheating your engine? The Exploding Car Sign baffled us completely and seemed like a slightly inauspicious beginning to our Great Alsacian Roadtrip Adventure. We had a cute little blue Peugeot rental car and I really doubted that Europecar auto insurance covered us against French highway-induced spontaneous combustion...

I feel like driving is the one area in which I really cling to my Americaness, where France really does seem foreign to me. I'm used to signs that hang above lanes of traffic that give maybe one or two pieces of information at a time, not clusters of 5,000 different arrows pointing in the directions of 5,000 different towns that are displayed only along the side of the road where you often don't have time even to read them all. Even glancing at speed limit signs and my spedometer was a foreign experience at first, as it's all in kilometers so speed limits tend to be 130 (if it's not raining), instead of 65 and the spedometer went up to 230 instead of like 130.

I come from the land of freeway systems with colverleaf pattern on-ramps, where exits are well marked as are the ROADS themselves, and where you have a map of everything. Everyone in CA had these spiral-bound notebook maps (the Thomas map, I think it was called) that show all roads in the state. Such a thing doesn't seem to exist here and even the 15 maps we brought along were somehow all inaccurate and useless. And a waste of paper, as they don't print maps double-sided in France. Navigating downtown San Francisco, tolls on the Bay Bridge, highway 1 along sheer cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean-- these are all easy and logical driving maneuvers to me. The French highway system, however, was a little like driving on another planet that somewhat resembled my own.

On Planet Autoroute Francaise, tolls were very different. They're called peages, which made all us non-native French speakers think of pieges (traps). In CA, you only pay tolls for bridges. In France you seem to pay them every 5 feet on the major highways, maybe to pay for all the exploding car signs which might be expensive to manufacture. We saw some pretty shocking driving and indulged in some, too. We had this one toll plaza experience where everyone started backing up an changing toll lanes. It was total chaos and I ended up changing my lane, too, since there was a tractor trailer engaged in a customs battle with the toll attendant. After waiting 10 minutes, I, too, reversed across 3 toll lanes in front of about 15 enormous trucks to change gates. This remains to date one of my sketchiest traffic maneuvers ever... However, roadside rest areas are pretty similar to what we have in the states and we felt almost shamefully at home at the gas station mini-mart where we stopped somewhere between Metz and Paris.

In the French countyside, they didn't even really label the roads. The Alsacian wine route is actually 3 roads and looking for the little wine route sign made this drive a bit of a scavenger hunt experience... There was also this very misleading sign advertising parking, and I foolishly believed it and ended up more or less driving into the courtyard of an orange monestary converted into a winery. We also sometimes lost track of the main road and ended up in front of cathedrals in little French towns smaller than the average Parisian metro station.

I do have to admit, though, that I really enjoyed driving in France-- it made me feel like I was conquering France to speed down the autoroute in a Peugeot at 130 km/h. We spent most of our time at first being lost, but figuring out the signs and trying to navigate this strange system succfessfully was definitely like a big puzzle to figure out. I felt like we were lab rats slowly learning to negotiate the maze successfully and then we would be rewarded with cheese, which we were in Strasbourg where everything edible is covered with delicious munster cheese.

And the actual answer to the exploding car sign? It means that vehicles carrying flammable materials aren't allowed on that road. Which never occured to us, in all our various attempts to interpret it and makes me wonder exactly how many explosive materials are transported in France, considering how often we saw this sign.

Lonely Planet

People are like planets. Sometimes they're aligned and going the same direction, then sometimes one-- or both-- abruptly changes course and returns to its own orbit.

And sometimes when one of these planets tries to find direction again, it feels like, for the moment, the universe is composed of nothing but dust and empty space.

Le chien qui regarde en bas

Ok, I don't really know how to say the names of yoga poses, as my French yoga teacher doesn't often name them and is very non-new agey. He doesn't dwell on aligning the chakras or anything but is more mater-of-fact than Californian zen crystal moon goddess yoga instructors who play ritual chanting music by candle light and whisper profundities like "be mindful." Of your chakras, I guess. French yoga instructor's main comments on finding inner peace are, "do yoga. It'll calm you down and it won't piss you off."

This is one rare instance where French understatement and restraint is welcome, although I generally don't appreciate it in life outside the yoga classroom. Like, for example, in the French way of giving very backhanded restrained compliments, if they give any at all. Like, "she's not stupid," actually means "she's highly intelligent." Or, "he didn't leave me indifferent" means "I really like him." I'm irrationally pleased when my French boyfriend speaks English with me and starts to use my vocabulary and says something like "amazing," instead of "not bad." I'm still not foolish enough to expect any actual compliments, though.

The family discovers macaroons from La Duree

"Each one is like an epiphany in your mouth."

ST-RI-IKE Two...

Sorry to disappoint if you were expecting a blog on Euro-baseball— not that it exists… If Parisians have a national pastime, there are probably many possible nominees like chain-smoking, pouting, constructing 3-part abstract philosophical arguments, drinking 17 cups of espresso and/or glasses of red wine per day, soccer (to name an actual sport), riding motorbikes in very fast and dangerous ways so as to kill as many bicyclists as possible or going on strike.

Paris public transit is on strike for the second time in the past 2 months and we’re now entering week 2 of this strike. It’s strange to think that I lived here for an entire strike-free year last year—what a sheltered and protected existence never to have experienced the Parisian grève! Now, I’m getting to know it well. For the first strike, my French friends advised me to stay home and not waste my time, but rather than take their French word for it, I dutifully checked the RATP website to see if my RER train would be running the next day and got the confusing message that is was ‘quasi nul.’ What was nul, exactly? It seemed to be missing a subject— did that mean hardly any service or hardly any interruption? I called a friend to ask and she reminded me that I lived in Paris and that if there were ever 2 possible interpretations for anything—especially relating to the service-industry—it was always the more negative and inconvenient one.

Why is the rail industry on strike, you might ask. I don’t really know all the reasons and I think there are some legitimate complaints like salary cuts despite the rise in the cost of living, but I’ve also heard that it’s about retirement benefits. SNCF employees used to be able to retire at age 50 and then the president seemed to realize that although it was nice for former train conductors to have time (like 25 years) to garden at their country homes and build model trains with their grandchildren, such a young retirement age was also INSANE and costing the république tons of money. I hate that in France when I oppose something like retirement at 50, I sound like an American republican since they are against social welfare, retirement benefits, and the poor in general. (I’m extremely left in American politics—Bush and American foreign policy regularly horrify me, socialism and national healthcare are great, etc., etc), but when everyone you know back home will be happy if they can retire at 65, I can’t get excited about the right to stop working when you’re only 50. My parents are both older than that. Also, At the risk of sounding reactionary once more, I’m also not entirely sure you can have a successful national economy if no one works more than 35 hours a week and they go on strike all the time, but I do appreciate the quality of life here and Americans definitely work too many hours with too little vacation. I am secretly a little impressed that a strike in France can really paralyze the nation. And that the SNCF does it despite all the money they lose. My experience of strikes in the US is usually just a small picket line of maybe 5 or 10 guys who work on the assembly line at the local Chrysler or any other automobile manufacturing plant standing around drinking coffee outside in the cold with a few hand-lettered signs about unfair management. It only affects me in that I’ll honk my horn in vague support as I drive past.

For the second strike, it’s prevented me from going to work for the past 2 days. It’s been on for a week now and I’ve never walked and biked so much as I did this weekend, so at least the strike is good for my health and the motorbikers seem less fixated on trying to kill cyclists, mainly because they now ride their motorbikes exclusively on the sidewalk— to avoid traffic, of course. Now there are other messages on the RATP website like ‘strongly perturbed traffic’ and ‘1 train out of every 6.’ I’ve actually forgotten that other things besides transit can be perturbed in French—it took me a few minutes to realize that the news broadcast I was watching earlier was about the weather perturbations (that seems to mean cold fronts) instead of public transit ones… Despite feeling like a big slacker this morning, I didn’t go to work, figuring that one train would come like every 2 hours and I’d be trampled alive by the Parisian crowd trying to take it with me and if I even managed to get to the suburbs alive, I would have no students. Tomorrow I will probably also stay home. France is slowly robbing me of my Protestant Work Ethic, but I have to admit that when the RER is perturbed, I feel ok—very unperturbed, in fact— about staying in bed…

Paris is beautiful in November- despite strikes and rain

Le bonheur, c'est peu de choses.

"Hi, my name is Taylor and I'll be your waitress today..."

I'd forgotten that restaurant staff in the US really said that. And spontaneously refilled your water glass multiple times and were generally friendly, cheerful and smiley.

In short, I was ready to sponsor Taylor for a French visa should she ever wish to work in a Parisian cafe.

A Supermarket of One's Own

I never really saw the French supermarket as worthy of much consideration, let alone respect or prime blog material. They're all tiny, they all close at 8 pm and don't open at all on Sundays. Sometimes I just long for a 24-hour Safeway the size of an entire Parisian arrondisement. "Who goes shopping at 2 am?", the French will ask disdainfully as I fill their heads with nonsensical notions of 24-hour shopping. Me, I will tell them, just because I can.

At the French supermarket, there are often long lines, at some you have to buy your own plastic grocery bag if you forget your Special Grocery Bag you are supposed to bring with you each time you shop, there are no baggers so there are often checkout traffic jams when elderly patrons buy 5,000 groceries and carefully pack everything away in their little grocery trollies. Most people have back-up supermarkets in case G20 or Franprix or Monop or ED is out of what you want or if they have the food product you seek but the quality is dubious at best. It's normal to have one store where you go for vegetables, one for dairy products, etc. thus making buying groceries an ongoing project. It can be very decentralised shopping. (Decentralisation seems like a key part of the French experience). However, I now love Champion. Not that my 'hood is posh enough to have one, and not that I have ever bought actual food there more than maybe twice, but I love it because they have afterhours winetasting events.

It was by invitation only-- my friend made the elite guest list thanks to her membership card from last year when she actually lived near a Champion. Apparently, store loyalty counts for something, since she was allowed to bring a guest to this event. We dutifully checked the box on the invitation saying that Mademoiselle would attend and be accompanied by a guest and returned it to the supermarket. We wondered if we were supposed to dress up. And what host/hostess present to bring to the supermarket that has everything?

The night of the supermarket foire aux vins, shoppers (those foolish souls not elite enough to have received invitations in the mail and who actually wanted to buy groceries) tried to enter the store when we arrived and the ever-helpful security guard laconically informed them that Champion was closed "except for the wine." Unfortunately, we couldn't drink and shop for regular food, as they sectioned off the store and set up a bar in the frozen food aisle. But even if you couldn't pick up regular groceries, of course they had 5 percent off all wine purchases, so older French people duitifully arrived with their infamous grocery trollies to fill with discount supermarket wine. There was also cheese to eat and there were little catalogues and friendly French people explaining all the different wines. Everyone got increasingly drunk and therefore helpful and friendly to the American girls. Honestly, I've never had so many French people make spontaneous friendly conversation with me in a public place as at the supermarket wine tasting and it was much the highlight of my entire week. As Virginia Woolf once wrote, every woman needs a supermarket of one's own. Especially if they give you wine there.

Hugs and kisses

French friend of mine: Hugs are catching on here more and more. Have you seen those people giving "free hugs" in the street?

Me: Yeah, I've seen them, but I've never taken them up on the offer. I figured that if I did, they would probably just steal my wallet.

French friend: That's very cynical and Parisian of you.

Love Hate Relationship

So, in personal relationships I don’t look for a love-hate roller coaster of passion but prefer laidback drama free dating. However, geographically, it’s a different story.

Typical question from Americans back home: how's Paris? Even after being here a year, the answer still depends on the day and its various living-in-your-second-language challenges...

On Thursday, it was: Well, I thrive on hardship, urban misery and surrealism, so I enjoy Parisian life. It's kind of a similar taste to bitter espresso, dark chocolate or smoking unfiltered cigarettes. If you're neurotic, anxious, pessimistic and only happy when it rains, you would enjoy Paris. It rains a lot here, the summer of 2007 widely acknowledged as the worst June-August weather in French history and attributed to global warming. Paris is kind of teen angst but in a more glamorous and sophisticated form in your late 20s (latest possible 20s, if you’re facing your 29th birthday like I am) and that is why great writers, philosophers and pretentious intellectuals alike lived and continue to live here.

However, Friday’s answer was very different, as if the French national healthcare system that filmmaker Micheal Moore is so enamored with slipped everyone some government-subsidized prozac overnight: I feel like I’ve made so much progress—I can now read a French book in one evening and I'm starting to feel like I have some real friends here who understand my French and even claim that I speak it well. My students are all absolutely lovely and even though I speak a lot of English in my job, I now have more contact with the French than I did last year and we often discuss French culture. My students love explaining Symbols of France to me, like the car the deux chevaux and singer Michel Polnareff, and you have to admit that the Fete de Musique is one of the all-time greatest urban events. Paris in August is also incredibly pleasant because it contains fewer Parisians (even if more rain) since everyone is out of town on their European annual month of vacation, leaving the metro uncrowded and the supermarket checkout lines on Saturday afternoons remarkably short.

All I can do is enjoy the highs and try to be prepared for sudden rollar coaster drop off lows. I catalogue the good days-- like pasteries at Angelique’s and riding the ferris wheel at Tuilleries with Kim and Cory, champagne tasting in Reims, Music Day with Tiffany, swimming in the lake at Annecy with my cousins, Bastille Day with Kate, and every single delicious dinner I’ve had at my favorite Ethiopian restaurant-- to remember on the rainy days.