Raw Tuna, Raw Tunes

It took them long enough, but the French have finally caught on to sushi in a big way. Sushi places were few and far between the last time I was in Paris, but over the last few years sushi lunch bars and Japanese grills have popped up all over the place, and even our local Franprix supermarket now carries simple maki rolls alongside the more standard refrigerated French appetizers of shredded carrot or balsamic couscous salads. This fishy dish has also become one of France's most popular delivery foods. While an American family might get a pepperoni pizza, bread sticks and a 2-litre Coke brought to their door, Parisians can expect a scooter-driving delivery boy bearing a sashimi platter and a bottle of white wine. I've yet to sample this approach, but on Friday I joined a big group of friends at a place in Belleville called Sukiyaki that was definitely anything but ("yucky", that is). In spite of not having my two favorites, spicy tuna and eel (the Chesapeake Bay is actually a huge source of the world's eel supply, so it might just not be as readily available here) the restaurant served up a pretty heaping, delicious plate of fish to satisfy my sushi craving.

We followed up our dinner with some Amorino gelatto (!) and a jam session cocktail at the Duc des Lombards jazz club near Châtelet. I sipped what was definitely the best mojito I've had in France and enjoyed the music and chill atmosphere. The night's line-up began with a few middle-aged jam regulars, including a pianist, a bassist and a pretty rocking drummer who apparently runs the sessions, then rotated through various other performers and music students (trumpet, flute, sax...) every few songs or so.

I know that jazz bars exist in big American cities, and that jazz is still a major part of the culture in places like Chicago and New Orleans. By and large, however, jazz isn't at all appreciated in the States the way it is here--American jazz legends from the 20s are still featured prominently in French music stores, free jazz festivals crop up all over the place during the summer months, and the regular scheduled concerts at the club are a nightly occurrence, pricey and well-attended.

From our seats on the balcony we had a great view inside the workings grand piano, and I was mesmerized by the playful movement of the pianists' fingers across the keys and the corresponding shudders of the hammers against the strings. The improvisation and expression, which would vary from sultry to peppy to bluesy, made me nostalgic for the taste of jazz I had near the end of my piano-playing career. If I were a musician, I would definitely play jazz; not that there's anything wrong with the classics, but jazz is such a living, transient music in comparison--it's like the difference between studying Latin vs. studying Arabic. As I battled drunk youth for space on the night bus later on, I renewed my vows that as soon as I'm settled somewhere I'll invest in a nice keyboard and start playing around again--I think music is, like blogging, one of those forms of procrastination that I could feel good about doing. (And now, on to homework...)

It's good to be a foodie

France is turning me into a foodie.

Maybe it's just finally having enough money to eat more than Ramen. Or being forced by the lack of American ready-made mixes and sauces to learn how ingredients go together. Or the exposure to different cuisines that comes with life in a city. Or maybe (likely) it's Tom.

In any case, I'm eating better now than I ever have. To start with, I'm eating out more often and more diversely. In the last week or so I've been to a French jazz brunch, a Vietnamese restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, and of course, several bakeries/brasseries for pastries, sandwiches, demi-pints and even a late-night rum & ice cream sundae. Delicious. And fairly affordable, too, if you do things wisely.

Even better than eating out, however, is eating in. Using the kitchen here is a social experience, and even if you're just boiling some pasta for yourself you're bound to run into a friend. The fourth floor community averages about two impromptu shared meals a week, which are a lot of fun and extremely tasty. The blend of nationalities and life experience means that everyone brings their own set of expertise and flavors to the stove. Tom has made fish n' chips, shepherd's pie and a mean curry, Alicia does Indian dishes, Maria has made a few delectable Greek dishes, Silvan brings some German to the table, Delphine does French quiches and cakes and Lucy specializes in desserts and Southern cuisine. As for me, I'm still learning, but I did manage to whip up a pretty hearty chili meal last week, complete with black beans and cornbread I had brought back from Christmas break.

I'm also learning secondhand how to manage French cooking, or cooking in France, at least. Many of the ingredients I rely on in the States are either expensive and difficult to find or completely nonexistent in Paris (examples: peanut butter, corn meal, black beans, anything spicy, baking powder, chocolate chips, brown sugar, canned broth, Bisquick, cake/sauce mixes, etc.). Instead, I'm discovering how to use foods like butter, tomato purée, cream, butter, lardons (cured bacon strips best translated as "lardlings") aubergine, butter, endives, fresh basil and herbs, and a range of cheeses. Oh, and lest I forget: butter. I've also been trying out a new sport of haphazard baking. Since I don't have measuring cups or correct ingredients, each time I bake I just approximate components and amounts until the batter tastes good and looks to be about the right consistency. So far I've made a batch of cake-like chocolate chip cookies and a banana bread which both turned out amazing well, considering.

Anyway, life is good, and tastes even better. If anyone has simple recipes to share I would love to have them. I might need to break down and actually buy some cooking utensils, though. Oh, and some new pants.

Ripples of the macabre

After my suicide and the Seine post, a friend of mine brought this to my attention. It's a series of still photographs of the Thames river, taken by American Roni Horn and currently on display in one of my favorite art museums, London's Tate Modern:

Her comments:

'I thought I would shoot the Seine or the Garonne, but these rivers don’t have the same energy. I don’t know how many people kill themselves in the Seine but it just didn’t look like a convincing suicide route to me. The Thames has the interesting fact attached to it that it is the urban river with the highest appeal to foreign suiciders. So you get people coming in from Paris to kill themselves in the Thames. So it has an incredible draw and one of the points about shooting the Thames was the fact that it’s darkness was quite real—it wasn’t just a visual darkness, it was a psychological darkness. Water is something one’s attracted to largely for the light aspect of it.'

Apparently I'm not the only one to find the topic eerily poetic.

(This is not a cry for help)

I learned today of a fascinating (at least to my morbid tastes) Parisian phenomenon that existed up until the early 1800s called the "filets de Saint-Cloud", a set of nets on the downstream end of the Seine used to recover the cadavers of suicide victims. Apparently jumping into the Seine was the #1 way to off one's self back then--between the lack of swimming skills and the high walls that made it difficult to climb back out, it was more or less surefire.

The reason I found out about this is that the Balzac book we read for yesterday, "La Peau de Chagrin," begins with its protagonist contemplating suicide-by-drowning. This got me thinking about how trends in suicide can reflect on a society. In the book, the protagonist's suicidal tendencies are indicative of both Parisian geography/culture and the bleak 19th century "mal du siècle" ennui. The same could be said of a lot of other literary suicides I've read through so far this year--sacrificial lovers' suicides at the tip of an épée in the medieval ages, which attest to a different perspective of honor, chivalry and passion; Madame Bovary's graphic death by pharmacist's arsenic, which could be seen as the product of strict 19th century marriages and oppressive gender roles and social codes and indicative of a new interest in/fear of science and medicine.

Yes! I thought to myself. Here's a gem to store away in that little jar labeled "potential thesis topics" in the corner of my brain. Unfortunately, a quick Google search proved that I'm far from the first person to have had this stroke of genius. *siiigh* However, my brief researching also turned up a few interesting statistics about French suicide--the non-literary kind, that is--that shed a little light on changes in French culture and differences between France and the U.S. and really got me thinking. It seems that as Seine suicides (more than 300 between 1795 and 1800!) became less frequent due to better swimming abilities and the improved precautionary measures of throwable emergency life rings, ladders, and regular police patrol of the water, Parisian suicides matched trends in Parisian life, switching to jumping from increasingly high buildings or under metro cars.

France's most (in?)famous tall building, the Eiffel tower, has had more than 350 successful jumpers since its construction in 1889, with the annual rate down to about 4 or so in recent years due to new precautionary measures. (Most Parisians still remember a high-profile incident last year, in which tourist plunged to her death on the glass ceiling of the same Eiffel Tower restaurant where I spent Thanksgiving...eesh). The most recent statistic I could find for the Parisian metro was from 2006, and it puts annual metro suicides at either 70 or 150, depending on who you ask, with definite spikes after holidays and vacations. (In comparison, the D.C. Metro got flak from the media for having a record-high 9 suicides last year. Granted that's comparing D.C.'s 5 lines and 2 million riders to Paris' 19 lines and 3 million, but still.) In fact, Parisian suicides outnumber Washingtonian suicides in general. The rate of suicides in Paris is 23 per 100,000 residents, higher than the national rate of 17, but MUCH higher than Washington D.C.'s 6 per 100,000 and the U.S. national rate of 11. (The method is also different; while firearms don't even figure in the statistics here, they are overwhelmingly the most-employed method in the U.S., which only proves that we REALLY need to get our gun regulations under control.)

So why are so many more frogs croaking ? Theories out there include a lower rate of religious fervor (which would account for less of a spiritual support network as well as less moral interdiction), racial/economic tensions in the urban suburbs of Paris, and, most recently, an increasingly oppressive workplace environment. What I didn't discuss in my previous post on the workplace in France is that finding a job in France is much more difficult than it is in the US. The economic crisis has pushed America's unemployment rate to where France's has been for a while--around 10%, and unlike America, France isn't expecting it to go back down. With many service positions filled as careers, part time/temporary jobs are much harder to find here, and with an education system that pushes you to make a vocational choice early in life and a regimented system of competencies/requirements that makes it difficult to switch careers, it's easier to feel "trapped" in a job you don't like (which you then don't want to surrender to unemployment).

Or maybe it's something different entirely. To come full circle with this post, modern French literature is marked by a series of rather depressing philosophical/literary movements that reveal a bleak worldview. Is the outlook of this literature descriptive? Or just intellectual? Making ties between real life and fuzzy fictional universes always gets tricky. In any case, this research was enough to sober me and turn me away from such a depressing thesis topic. I'll stick to women's rights and courtly love from now on.

Dragons and Valentines

This year's Saint-Valentin weekend was as much a celebration of my love for Paris as of my relationship with Tom. Although we did nothing particularly spectacular, we spent a long, leisurely weekend together, taking advantage of all the city has to offer. On Friday we met up at the legendary "L'As du Falafel" (recommended by Lenny Kravitz, apparently) for lunch before spending an afternoon amongst the orthodox Jews and drag queens of the Marais, visiting a museum, stopping for hot chocolate, and generally enjoying the unseasonably sunny day. Dinner was a French-inspired collective effort with Lucy, an artist-in-residence whose cooking skills rival Tom's: basque prawns and rice, a Roquefort/walnut salad, and an apple tart and custard for dessert.

Saturday: stroll around the Alesia area and a visit to a vibrant weekend flea market to pick up extra plates and cutlery. Dance at the Canadian House, which was small but delightfully goofy and Valentine's themed (because who doesn't associate tea-light candles, lasers and shitty American pop music with February 14th?). Sunday: Chinese lunch in the "ethnic" Belleville quarter, in a packed restaurant with a street-side window to afford a view of the the slightly lame Chinese New Year parade. Happy year of the Tiger!

Working out the world of work

Relative to the U.S., French business hours and practices are extremely inconvenient and, from an American perspective, downright rude. To start off it can often be difficult to even make it to a business while they're open. France works a 35-hour week. Shops and services open late, then close again shortly thereafter for a two hour lunch break. (Fortunately, some of them stay open later than they would in the U.S.--for example, the Cité Universitaire Post Office is open from 2pm-8pm, which makes a lot of sense when you realize that the French start their days later and don't usually eat dinner until 9pm or so). By law, most of France shuts down on a Sunday, and many stores opt to take a Monday or Tuesday off as well.

There is also little to no concept of "customer service". As I discovered through my Hertz battles a few weeks ago, the customer is NOT always right in France, nor even valued. Part of this is due to the fact that many of the retail and food service jobs that are snubbed as low-class and low-paying in the US are salaried careers in France (with the notable exceptions of the "Arabe" 7-11esque stores, kebab vendors, Asian traiteurs--basically anything minority-run), meaning that hostesses and waiters don't feel compelled to debase themselves for tips, and to the contrary are often very proactive in maintaining a mutual power/respect balance. The benefit is that people take a lot of pride in their work, are good at what they do and are generally recognized as such. The bad news is, well, let's take the example of my friend Barclay. When we went out to get a post-class pint, we opted to sit at one of the outdoor, street-side tables underneath a heater. As the waiter was placing our pints on the table he got bumped from behind by a pedestrian, spilling most of Barclay's beer onto her lap. Although he apologized and immediately ran in to grab a towel, he left most of the clean-up to us and didn't offer anything in the way of compensation (a pint on the house, or a discount, for example). This would have been totally unacceptable in the US, but in France no one near us even batted an eye.

And yet, most of the people I interact with on a daily basis are, if not more polite, at least a lot more competent and knowledgeable than their American equivalents. After an episode of intestinal angst this past weekend I found myself visiting a string of pharmacies. Never did I wait longer than three minutes in line, and I was extremely appreciative of the medical expertise expected of pharmacists here, who are able to evaluate symptoms and distribute mild prescription drugs without the hassle of doctor involvement (or inflated US prices). I also love bakery or open air market staff, who exude quality, from their food, to their promptness, to the care they put into the wrapping of their products. Apparently I'm not the only one--here's a BBC piece about Parisians that seems to agree (and reads like what my blog aspires to be).

I've been spending a lot of time lately considering this system, browsing job listings and trying to imagine myself as an employed woman in Paris next year. As an employee, the late starts, long lunches, frequent vacations and short work weeks would seem luxurious rather than irritating. Until my own country sorts things out, the health care would be lovely. And another year here, this time as a "real" adult with an apartment in a cosmopolitan city wouldn't be too shabby. First task: tackle the French formatted CV, which is surprisingly different...you're expected to list hobbies and "competencies" and to attach a photograph, which surely invites racism/other appearance-based prejudice, but hey, it's France. If customer service is in its infancy here, the idea of political correctness has yet to be born.

Song of sixpence surprise

My Mondays are hell this semester. One class in the morning, then a brief break to haul my butt across the city and grab lunch before a grammar tutorial and a literature tutorial. I then have half an hour to incorporate edits from the earlier grammar tutorial into the mini-paper for my last course before reading it out loud in front of the class, to be picked apart by the prof. It's an incredibly stressful day, but in a way it's nice to have some of my schedule concentrated; it makes the rest of the week a little easier. Additionally, that last class of the day with the out-loud reading is definitely going to be my most challenging this term, and it's actually really ideal timing. At the end of a long day of French immersion, my speaking abilities are at their peak, and seeing as how I'm naturally at my sharpest, intellectually, in the evenings, it should all turn out alright (with a little help from espresso, of course).

The problem is that this 8am-8pm Monday means I have to reform my procrastinating ways and be disciplined about getting a lot of work done in advance. I also have to make sure I get enough sleep Sunday night to function, which can be difficult to do after adjusting to a late night/late morning weekend sleep schedule. I failed at the latter goal this week, which meant that I worked about three times as long as I had slept and was super strung out when I finally got home.

Luckily, there's Tom. In one of our many Oxford conversations I mentioned to Tom that I really miss my favorite pub dinner: steak and ale pie. When I got home he had pie surprises (surPIESes?) waiting for me--complete with pastry monograms and minty "mushy peas"! (Feel free to go "awwwww"). I couldn't resist a few photos before digging in.