elise

abandoned thoughts

January 23, 2009 by krisis

We have yet to see a single obese French person in Paris. Even the roundest, jolliest French-speakers we’ve seen look healthy.

We still have yet to be served anything with ice. Elise cannot figure out what lattes are called here. My club sandwich at Louvre was not club in the American sense, and came on the whitest white bread ever.

There is a distinct lack of disposable stuff, in general. Paper towels are petite compared to their American compatriots – like a single liter of soda next to a 2-liter. The toilet paper is thin and perfunctory.

Our flat has no apparent heat; it’s warmed by a radiator and an installed wall plate at either side of its length. Is this typical of French buildings?

Every single restaurant/bar has the same facade, no matter what they serve.

French cable has a channel for every possible iteration of nationality. We watched Romanian and Armenian television earlier. Does US digital cable get a lot of Romanian channels?

I always thought it was amusing that different languages have different words for the noises animals make, because animals don’t obey language. Children, though, that’s interesting. All of their little wheezes and whoas are completely different. And, I have yet to see an awful mess of a child, the sort you constantly find yourself sitting next to on SEPTA.

We haven’t yet had an opportunity to order escargot. At the Franprix they have a frozen dinner of them, but that’s not how I imagined my introduction to them.

Louvre, pt. 1: Getting There

January 22, 2009 by krisis

Today brought our first proper excursion, and perhaps our most daunting: Le Louvre.

We managed to wake up prior to nine (local), although for me this involved a few hours of a.m. restlessness. We ate a brief breakfast from our assembled groceries (Elise, cereal. Me, fresh bread with strawberry preserves and six month gouda), and bundled heavily against the dreary weather that will be following us for the remainder of our trip.

The jaunt to Louvre involved our first interaction with the Paris Metro. We had already scoped out our three neighborhood stops, all on the 11 line, which we could take almost all the way to the Louvre. To give you a sense of the scope, the statistic goes that every building in the city is within 400 metres of a Metro stop.

The Paris underground feels roughly equivalent to New York, though I don’t find it nearly as overwhelming as NYC (or London, from our brief excursion). For Philly folks, in practice it felt like a triple-sized version of SEPTA’s Regional Rails, especially because each stop has its own name and specific identity. You can form your own opinion by playing with RAPT’s fascinating interactive map.

Despite studying the site in French and English prior to our departure we were absolutely stymied by their ticket machines – and they actually speak English! They wouldn’t take our American credit cards or any bills, which severely limited our purchase options. We settled for one-way tickets, as that was all we afford without hunting down a change machine (I though I had found one, but it was actually a condom dispenser, which are ubiquitous in the Metro stations).

Print nerd alert: Stations are plastered with huge advertisements in three primary sizes – the oversized European movie posters, long station cards that are effectively mini-billboards, and massive square sheets (4 metres square?) mounted on the curved walls of the platforms. Not only are all of them bigger than what I’m used to, but they conform to a much higher design standard – especially the super-sized ones. There was more pedestrian graphic design to be seen on the actual trains, but I think the larger pieces must go through an approve process on the RAPT side of things, because they were universally pretty impressive.

(I wasn’t keen on whipping out my camera at the local stop, but I’ll endeavor to snap some photos at some point before we depart.)

The trains themselves are petite compared to Philly or NYC subways – head on they give the appearance of being a sort of trolley. The interiors of the ones we rode were universally marked in graffiti, as is much of the north side of the city. Seats are relatively tiny compared to the El, maybe owing to the specific lack of obese people here (more on that later). Curiously, the seats adjacent to the doors snap down to be used when volume is lighter, but passengers are expected to abandon them when its crowded. Amazingly, people actually did this with regularity – even younger, punkish kids.

We passed a fascinating stop – Arts et Metiers – that was sans advertisements, and was dressed rather like a Jules Vern submarine. We’ll have to investigate that more at length on our next jaunt. Our line terminated at Chatelet, where we wandered through a maze of catacomb-like tunnels – passing a phenomenal classical guitarist and a full-scale acoustic band with an upright bass and accordion singing standards in four-part harmony.

The maze was well labeled (way better than the mess at Philly City Hall, which is shamed by comparison), and without much consternation we boarded another train, which deposited us just outside the outer walls of the Louvre.

With that I think I’ll break for a hunk of cheese, and maybe to swipe a few photos out of our 300+ to illustrate the next few posts.

ps: infiltration has begun

January 21, 2009 by krisis

Despite being sussed out by our waiter (there is some subtle restaurant etiquette we’ve yet to master), I was dressed just like a French person tonight. People stopped me to ask directions!

(you can catch a glimpse below, but for the record: gray turtleneck, tight boot cut jeans, kenneth cole shoes, my faux-suede motorbike jacket, wool tweed dress coat, and knotted scarf)

If I could just pretend to be mute we’d be set. “Yes” and “thank you” just keep slipping out, though.

l’oeil d’Eiffel et les autres choses

January 21, 2009 by krisis

the eye, searching

the eye, upon us

the sidewalks alternate meat stores with fruit et legume stores every ten steps

then there was this tall guy who was maybe a woman?

this is the shot i saw in my head when we first spotted him/her

then we got slightly lost, because i think every arc is l’arc de triomphe

i am 3 for 3 on my meals abroad, much to Elise’s fascination

This waiter had no patience for our French, which only served to make Elise more persistent. he asked us if we wanted “water with ____.” Elise assumed it to be ice (“glace”), but the only ice cubes we’ve seen here have been supporting said piles of meat, so I correctly determined he had said “gas.” She said “oui, avec,” I said “no, without.” And, see, he subconsciously obeyed the request made en francais, and thus we wound up with an expensive bottle of lukewarm, gassy water instead of the free bottle of lukewarm, tap water I was looking forward to.

my wife, the spy

January 21, 2009 by krisis

This post has had about two dozen ledes in the past twelve hours.

As I expertly predicted, the exchange rate was greatly improved just hours after inauguration. Unfortunately, we had to change our money while the speech hadn’t yet started so we’d have cash for the flat. We lost out on about a meal’s worth of Euros in the process.

Our flat is situated in a small complex of condo-like apartments – a long hall off the street and through a small concrete courtyard with potted trees and recycling bins. It’s almost as deep as the first floor of our house, and half as wide.

Actual French people live on every side of us, through walls about as thick as crepe paper. Par example, last night I was awoken not by jet lag, but by the snoring of a neighbor.

True story. Luckily, the packing list was very effective when followed, which means I do have two pairs of earplugs with me.

Post-plugs, the jet lag took over – we arose brightly and without an alarm at 7 a.m. Philadelphia time, or 1 p.m. local. Pity, as from the forecast it looks like this will be the only dry day of our time in Paris. We nipped out for a walk around our environs in the daylight, snapping the daylight version of our view over Parc de Belleville from last night.

We’re in the 19ème arondissment, just a hop over from 20ème. It seems like every street in our neighborhood curves around to intersect with another street in an unusual way. After some gawking at Google street-view it’s starting to make sense. It reminds me of the one block in New York that Rabi and I always walk past where you can sit in the courtyard of one Starbucks peering into another one.

We located a grocery store on rue de belleville – le marche Franprix. To our obese American eyes it looked to be the size of a convenience store. What we did not take into account is that nothing in France is packaged at the massive size of its American counterpart, so what to us looked like a super-sized Wawa in fact contained just about everything we’d expect from an Acme.

View Larger Map

If I passed last night’s first verbal exam by the skin of of my teeth, today’s written was much smoother – between the two of us Elise and I are pretty good at food vocab in French (and like lots of French food). We also had the benefit of illustrative packaging, though the print professional in me was fascinated by the subtle differences in photos and headlines.

For every lack of ridiculous flavor iterations (the cereals were only about six feet wide) there was half an aisle of things we consider to be prohibitively gourmet. My sans pulp orange juice was next to a litre of guava-pineapple juice. The condiments aisle had an entire block of hand-jarred preserves, only half of which were fruits I knew the translation for.

Being the fat Americans, of course we had three times as many groceries as everyone else in line. Between the petite bags of groceries everyone was toting, the multiple fruit stands (in the winter!), and our teeny fridge (smaller than the ones at the wedding hotel!) we’re figuring most people in this neighborhood buy for just a day or two at a time. But, hello, if you had seen the cheese aisle you would understand.

Finally, we had our second near-arrest (the first being last night when the cabbie thought Elise was making a run for it). Once again, my international super-spy wife pulled an Alias getaway and left me holding the bag. Literally, in this instance.

The market has this giant wooden paddle at the end of the conveyor, and when you’re done buying they swoop all your stuff to the side and start checking the next person. Elise did not necessarily grasp this idiosyncrasy, and continued to bag from the right rather than from the left, and then took off like Roadrunner with her half of the bags while I was still performing my ritual pocket-check.

Suddenly I am being jabbed by an older French woman and regarded curiously by the checkout woman. This is not an instance where you want to be trying to recall decades-old French class. Apparently, Elise bagged the woman’s preserves in one of my bags. Thankfully, my expressive eyebrows transcend the barriers of language, and I got out with a muttered desolé.

(For the record, Elise is familiar with the wooden paddle concept, and… I don’t understand what comes after the and. And just felt like trying to get me arrested to see if the police would really call Gina’s number to have her meet me after my deportation? I’m not sure.)

Now safe, sound, and fed, we are going to take advantage of our one totally dry evening to venture down to the Eiffel. Also, just now we started planning a day trip to Brussels with Jem & Jan, which is going to be AWESOME.

(I didn’t get a chance to install Photoshop before we left, so these are all sans color retouch, for the moment.)