A stroll down rue Daguerre

Well, my master's exam is finally over (yay!) and my summer has passed with it (wah!). My feeling was that the exam went pretty well, but I'm still waiting on the results. In the meantime, I'm back at work at the study abroad company full-time until we get through new student orientation, when I will scale back to part-time to accommodate a couple of classes and some tutoring on the side.

As always, I'm struck by how tiring it can be to just sit at a desk for 8 hours. It's also a little annoying, after a year as a carefree student, to not be in control of my own schedule--to no longer have the ability to eat at odd hours or to take mid-afternoon naps. However, one thing that IS nice about a "real" job is knowing that when I leave the office, I'm done--no speed-reading novels, no 3am essays, no studying for exams. Throughout my years in university, the time I've spent on work outside of class has always far exceeded the time spent in class, and very few of those hours fell within the window of a regular workday.

Another benefit of my job is that it's located on the cutesy rue Daguerre, which is about a 15 minute walk from my front door and a microcosm of all shops/businesses that could be considered typically French. In celebration of my (relatively) new job and neighborhood, I thought I would treat you to a virtual "promenade" around the "quartier".

Here's the Tour Montparnasse, looking over the Montparnasse cemetery, just a block away from my work:

Rue Daguerre itself begins with a series of markets. First up are foie gras and cheese markets, as well as a handful of bakeries and pastry stores not shown. Next is a fish market:

(we actually bought a pair of those giant crabs, or rather Tom did, to try and cure my hankering for Chesapeake blue crab. Conclusion: tasty, but MUCH harder to open than my thin-shelled bluies, especially considering our lack of proper crab-cracking equipment. I had planned to impress Tom with my know-how of lifting the tab, popping the back off and cracking the body in two, but apparently that doesn't work so well with monster crustaceans. It took a good hour of butter-knife and rolling-pin chiseling to pick those suckers, which made a mess of the kitchen--and of me! Good thing they were delicious.)

Next is fruit and veggie markets:
And then Amorino's, my favorite gelatto chain, which does good business in the summertime (also, rollerblading is still popular in a big way in Europe):
This menu marks a cute crêperie that I've probably taken you to/will take you to if you visit(ed) me in Paris. At lunch time you can bask in the sunshine on the terasse (just visible at the end of the alley) and enjoy a "menu" of a meal crêpe, a dessert crêpe, and a ceramic bowl of Breton cidre, all for 10 euros:
Florists shops:
Epic stacks of ancient-smelling tomes in a used book store:
Rotisserie chickens, for sale to-go in front of kebab stores or quick-stop cafés:
My favorite little tea store, where you're invited to smell (and sometimes taste!) before you buy. I've been slowly tasting my way through their collection of (surprisingly inexpensive) loose teas. Current favorites are a grapefruit green and a chocolate and blood orange dessert black:
One of several wine stores, with bottles starting around 2.50 euros, staffed with wine enthusiasts who are only too willing to provide recommendations based on extensive personal experience:
A cute toy store, called "Alice's Cousins", whose decoration is based on characters from the popular Lewis Carrol books. It's one of those toy stores that sells eclectic little treasures. My favorite was a book called "Pablo le spermatazoïde" (Pablo the sperm) that was in their front window for several weeks, featuring the adventures of a little anthropomorphized sperm and his eventual victory in the big swimming contest...
A man smoking in one of the street's many brasseries (it's been illegal to smoke indoors for several years now in France, although as you can see, sometimes people barely make it past the threshold). If you look carefully you can also spy one of the graffiti Space Invaders, who has fallen victim to a street sign:
The shop across from our office, which is--I kid you not--an accordion store:

Its musical wares:
And finally, the two sets of iconic, ubiquitous yellow arches that mark the end of the street.

The Métro:
And the Macdo':

So chaud, fo' sho'

Il fait CHAUD à Paris--I'm talking in the mid-30s and drenchingly humid. And you know how forecasters always give that "feel" forecast, to describe how it feels in the shade, or with the wind chill, etc? In Paris, it literally feels like a sauna in the metro, except minus the health and relaxation benefits--it's more like you're riding along in a car where all air has been replaced by the evaporating sweat and the hot breath of your fellow, dripping passengers.

Luckily, since I walk to work I no longer need to take the metro on a regular basis (unlike Tom, who still has a half hour commute and consequently jumps in the shower when he gets home before he'll let me hug him). Unfortunately, the temperature of my office isn't much better. It's okay in the morning, but by about 3pm I've lost my ability to be productive at all, and instead contemplate which will happen first: will I melt, or fall into a drowsy sort of coma and be found later in a limp pile under the front desk?

Our apartment has the advantage of having several big windows, and therefore a decent amount of airflow. However, it also gets full sun and is in the heat-collecting top floor of the building. Even still, home is still far superior to work in terms of the amount of clothing I'm (not) required to wear (and the ease of access to iced tea, which I've been making by the gallon). I also LOVE the double bed, because it means that I can lie on the opposite edge from my human heater of a boyfriend.

After a week of searching (all the Dartys in the city were continuously sold-out almost immediately after getting new stock) I finally managed to track down a fan. It has since become my most precious possession, and he follows me around our three rooms like an obedient puppy.

See, there he is. Isn't he cute?

I can totally understand why the whole country takes off the month of August for vacation now--who would be able to get anything done? If Sarkozy really wants to go forward with his original plans of making French workers more productive, he should see to government-subsidized air conditioning units before he starts pushing longer work hours or less leave. Heck, if my office had AC I'd even consider working overtime...

Strike!

With the RER on strike (yet again) today, I opted to walk home from Denfert Rochereau. I started hearing Michael Jackson about half way along Rue Daguerre. I decided to investigate, and this is what I found:


Not far away, I ran into an awkward white dance party, rocking out to tracks from Grease:
(that's for you, Laura)


Block party? Festival? No, of course not. It's a strike!

Confused? So was I. It took a group of excited, costumed French workers and a few sheets of propaganda to explain it to me. Apparently the strikes are nationwide, against a new proposed law that would push the age of retirement back from where it is currently set at 60 years old. Their posters made me laugh: "6o isn't early enough, 40 years of working is already too much!"--not because I disagree with the idea, necessarily, but because starting work at 20 is pretty old by American standards, not to mention totally unrepresentative of French youth, who seem to linger around the house and mooch off their parents until their mid 20's.

Sticker of plebeian rage were everywhere:
As were banners and huge helium balloons strapped to cars:


There were a range of different career fields represented at the strike, from street cleaners, to industrial chemical workers, to nurses. This nurse was wearing a lab coat and a jester hat with syringes dangling from its points: Grève-ing starts young. Here, we see that even the students are invested in the age of retirement:
The magic words, it seemed, were "salariés respectés" (respected workers). For the French, retirement seems to be not so much a matter of resources (or lack thereof) so much as it is an issue of respect--or at least that's the way it is being framed in the reactionary rhetoric.
The parade started to move, and I moved with it, cheering and drinking in the excited atmosphere:
Many of the vans were equipped with loudspeakers and blasted music, motivational, anti-Sarkozy speeches or, most commonly, simple chants: (in this one, she's leading the paraders in a cry of "tous ensemble, tous ensemble--Grève! Grève!" or "all together, all together--Strike! Strike!" which is catchy, I suppose, if rather uninspired)



The MJ performance wasn't the only aspect of the strike that felt bizarrely party-like, as the drink menu on the ubiquitous food vans showed:
Ah. The abandoned, lime-filled cups and jolly strikers suddenly made sense.

This particular food van made me smile, because it seemed like the majority of its protest signage was general, revolutionary stuff (note the Che Guevera flag), which I assume means that it has been adapted for frequent use at this type of event. And you know what? That's probably a smart business move, because even if the economy plummets, France will still continue to strike (probably moreso) and those strikers will still want their 2 euro beers and baguette sandwiches. Even the French term "en grève" (on a strike) sounds to me like a habitual action, almost happy: "on vacation", or even comical: "gone fishing".
But maybe that's just because I've grown accustomed to hearing it with a casual attitude and a frequency that I never hear associated with its English equivalent. The French are often mocked for their eagerness to strike, but the American taboo on strikes reflects a cold, capitalist approach that values efficiency over workers' rights, and leaves the overworked and mistreated with little recourse. Striking in France makes these workers more visible, and as a result, more respected and more accommodated.

And even if the strike doesn't accomplish anything--if Sarko insists on dragging his 35-hr work week, early retiring country kicking and screaming into the modern world--well, at least the French got a good party out of it.

Penetrating the System

So I've already written several posts about how stupid, stone-age, inefficient, unnecessarily complicated every piece of French paperwork is. Little did I know that I had only barely brushed Purgatory, and that I would soon be made to traverse all nine hellish circles of French bureaucracy in the Inferno that is the Parisian rental market.

I've spent the last few weeks balancing my normal life with the full-time job of hunting for apartments in Paris. The first step is the search, which is done mostly by Internet these days. I start with pap.fr, the French real estate website of choice, then browse through leboincoin.fr, vivastreet.fr, FUSAC (Paris' anglophones magazine) and even paris.craigslist.org. When I can, I repeat this browsing do this cycle about five times a day, except for pap.fr, which I leave open (set to my search terms: one bedroom apartments under 1000 euros/month in the 14th, 5th or 13th arrondissements) and refresh as often as possible.

Next comes the call. In a market as competitive as Paris, the tenant has absolutely no value. If you want a shot at an apartment you have to call as soon as an ad is posted (literally--no more than an hour later you're often already too late), prove you're serious (and have money--landlords often screen tenants by grilling them about their job and salary) and be persistent (follow up emails/calls/texts, whatever it takes).

Parisian apartments are small, expensive, and bare. If you're lucky (and willing to pay more) you can sometimes find them with furnishings, but that's more the exception than the rule. And when I say bare, I mean BARE. In France, appliances like fridges, washing machines, and even ovens and stoves are things that you lug around with you each time you move, meaning that an empty apartment literally comes with nothing but the kitchen sink.

Then there are the visits. Which, for whatever reason, are usually during the middle of a work day--thank God for my flexible student schedule. This is your chance to check the state of the apartment (mold? double-paned windows? collective or individual heating/water? carpeted or wood floors?) and the landlord's chance to judge evaluate you. This is also when you're expected, if you're interested, to hand over your "dossier"--a fat, expensive-to-have-printed folder, consisting of a lock of your baby hair, the rights to your first born child, etc. In other words, pretty much everything that has mattered, ever, in your entire life.

In all seriousness, a dossier should include: your ID (passport and carte de sejour, for foreigners), your last three pay stubs (from a French job), your contract (for the same French job), your birth certificate, a letter of recommendation from your current lodging, your bank account information, and even sometimes your previous two years' worth of tax summaries. Multiply that by two if you're a couple, and by three if you need a "garant"--a guarantor who declares their income in France, and who must provide pretty much the same paperwork (or, at a minimum, the pay stubs, ID and tax statements). Keep in mind that this is all going to a complete stranger, who is likely hosting about ten more apartment viewings that day and may not even consider you a potential tenant.

If you don't have the time (or sanity) to spare checking ads and calling and waiting on landlords, the alternative is to use one of Paris' many localized rental agencies. The convenience comes at a price, however--stricter paperwork standards, an upfront fee (usually around 200 euros) and often a percentage of the rent as a sort of finder's fee. In short, it seems like a bit of a rip off, not to mention a surrender. I'm still looking on my own. But I'm running out of time.

I did my 8th visit this morning. Out of the 8 there are only two possibles, and only one that I'm in love with. As foreigners, Tom and I are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to dealing with landlords. Even if I can muster good enough French to satisfy them, we are unable to provide the same standard of "Frenchness" as other candidates when it comes to our paperwork, in particular the garant. After trying to muddle through without one, we finally got Tom's supervisor to agree to back us. Unfortunately, he seems to be balking at the idea of all the paperwork he has to present (and I mean really, who wouldn't?)

I will end with the very high-tech graphic I made to illustrate the aggravation factor of this whole process. It shows all of the components involved in renting a residence. The arrows indicate the "price" needed to gain the "product" (i.e., the black arrow from the garant to the house indicates that you need a garant in order to get a house). The fuchsia arrows highlight the many catch-22s inherent to the system (i.e., you need a job for a residency card, but also a residency card for a job) that seem designed to weed out foreigners.
...mais, enfin, ce qui ne me détruit pas me rend plus fort...

I'm back, ol' chap

So I'm just back from our trip to London, which was (happily) unaffected by all the chaos surrounding English travel after the Eyjafjallajokull volcano grounded flights (I totally copy-and-pasted that from another site...I bet news rooms all over the world have reference notes posted on the wall reminding reporters how to spell and pronounce that ridiculous Icelandic name). I had a jolly old time across the Channel, and have revised my opinion of London from a sort of "meh" European city to "I would totally live there some day". I'll be making a few more posts this week to give some pictures and recap of various experiences I had, but for this first one I'll just give my general impressions of the city.

Let's start with the basics: the London Underground (or "Londerground," as it should really be called). If you read this blog often you'll know how much I both love and am critical of public transportation. The last time I was in London I found their system overpriced, run-down and not at all user-friendly. The improvements between then and now blew my mind. The Tube is undergoing major construction (or, for the Brits, "improvement works") and it is now cleaner, brighter and more efficient than the Paris metro. Stations don't smell like piss, ads come in flatscreen TV form, and "Oyster" cards facilitate the day-pass payment process in a way that ends up being pretty cheap (at least if you ride the metro a lot in one day). Trains have also come a long way towards being more accessible--"lifts" (elevators) are still few and far between, but their availability is well-marked on maps, and all trains have a clear voiceover reading out the direction and stops. The downsides: it's still unnecessarily confusing, with line transfers often poorly marked and maps not at all to scale. All the works also mean that they take advantage of commuter weekends to essentially shut the whole system down, leaving you without many alternatives other than the iconic if slow double-deckers to get around town. Whenever I started to get frustrated, though, I was able to find humour in the utter Englishness of it all--from the "mind the gap" and "this train will wait on the platform to even out the gaps in the line" warnings, to the strange names the lines carry. Rather than using colors (like D.C.) or numbers (like Paris), the English opted for rather more arbitrary system of names, some self-explanatory ("Central", "District", "Northern") and some place-based but hilarious ("Bakerloo", "Jubilee", "Hammersmith and City").


The stereotype of the polite Englishman is all too true, and it was charming to be apologized to instead of trampled during rush-hour. London is also delightfully diverse, however, and while it's easy to find pasties, meat pies, fish and chips and tea, they might well be served with a foreign accent. The number of French-speaking Londoners everywhere was incredible; language-wise it didn't feel that different than Paris. Judging purely by accents heard on the street, there also seemed to be a pretty sizable American population (which I suppose explains why the English don't find my accent nearly as 'exotic' as I do theirs). The availability and quality of foreign cuisine was also great, and we had delicious, non-English dinners pretty much every night.

Food and clothing seemed much cheaper in general in London than in Paris (although hotels and housing are apparently much more expensive). Since the pound is at a record low against the dollar right now I spent some of my time while Tom attended his conference on London's famous Oxford street, a shopping mecca with all the major chain stores represented (sometimes multiple times!). I bought some new summer wardrobe fare and also picked up a few choice items that are either non-existent or exorbitantly-priced in Paris (cheddar cheese, Crunchie chocolate bars, sunscreen, toiletries...)

Overall, my favorite part of London was the literary/film/theater associations it brought to my arts-minded brain. Passing through Paddington (the bear) or King's Cross (Harry Potter) stations made me smile, and walking around Fleet Street (Sweeney Todd), Portobello Road (Bednobs and Broomsticks), Notting Hill (the movie) and Baker Street (Sherlock Holmes) put me in the same sort of fantasy world (albeit not that of Madeline, Notre Dame's Hunchback, and Amelie) that Paris used to evoke before it became so quotidienne. Parliament had me pondering Guy Fawkes, and Big Ben Peter Pan, and I found myself chanting "oranges and lemons..." and "London bridge..." and other nursery rhymes under my breath almost constantly. I'm slowly realizing that I must be a little bit crazy to constantly be zoning out and making the connections that I'm so apt to. No matter, though--it's cosy in here.


(That odd-shaped building is affectionately known as "the Gherkin." Tee hee hee)

100 posts and going strong

This post marks the 100-post anniversary of this travel blog. Woohoo! I thought I'd celebrate with a photo post. Taken with the camera in my cell phone, here are some moments captured in my day-to-day life around Paris. To start off with, here's a picture of my friend, Lucy, on our walk home from a café and the grocery store. I thought she looked very French:
A weird iron grill on a building I found walking around the 7th:
An awesome hat, observed in metro hub Châtelet-Les Halles:
A view up boulevard Général LeClerc from Alesia:
And the nearby fresh fruit and fish markets:
A woman rocking some strange boots outside a café where I was reading and enjoying a café crème and a tiramisu macaron:
One of the best close-up shots I've been able to get of the ubiquitous Space Invader graffiti (most of them are too high for me to get close to):
A cool street musician band we ran into in the St. Germain area. Called "Texas CousCous", they feature 18 members, mostly on brass instruments, and play jazzed-up covers of pop songs:
A 100-euro bill. I should have taken a photo of it next to another bill. For anyone who hasn't handled euros before, the size of the bill increases with the denomination, so these are comically big:
A poster highlighting the gender wage gap. Woohoo!
An old Frenchman on WiFi outside a cafe:
A cute dad, giving his toddler a shoulder ride inside the Metro. He had the art of ducking when entering/exiting a car down...didn't scrape her little head once.
The NYU metro stop (Passy) in the swanky 16th arrondissement. Taken on my way home one particularly clear night:
Zombie baby:
This is kind of blurry, but I think it's funny that the regular type of Durex here (by far the most popular condom, like the Trojan of Europe) are called "jeans" (I guess to evoke associations of comfort? They're definitely nothing like denim) and that the XL size has a tape measure. Subtle.
And last, some cool cow art at a smoothie bar on the way to Paris VII. It says "Life is a dream: achieve it!" Why thank you, Ms. Cow. I do believe I shall.

Riding the wave of paperwork

As many of you have no doubt seen from Facebook photo albums (ahhh, the information age…allowing us to stalk our friends in such a multitude of ways) this past weekend marked by graduate orientation at Giverny—a small country village about an hour and a half west of Paris famous for being where Monet lived and painted. After taking a look around it was easy to see why; with lush greens and beautiful flowers everywhere you looked I felt inspired to grab a brush and canvas and try my hand at impressionism.

Alas, our orientation schedule left little time for artsy frivolities. It did, however, provide us with some really nice furnished houses to sleep in, each with our own rooms and as much bread, nutella, jam, cheese and coffee as a Francophile could ask for. We also had classy three-course French meals the entire weekend, which had the disadvantage of being attended by all the profs (meaning we had to speak in French and sound intelligent at the same time) but the advantage of good espresso and wine to accompany them. We had a guided tour of the Joan Mitchell exhibit at the local art museum (ironically, there are almost no Monets in the area, as they are all in the collections of famous art museums the world over) and got the opportunity to bike around the area a little bit in between workshops and meetings. Even the “boring” parts weren’t so bad…we had a really interesting lecture on the history of the French language from an old, very Oxford-esque (awkward vest, portly figure, nose hair and all!) French professor who I will soon have for textual analysis. We also had two very fun “gymnastics of phonetics” workshops with a phonetics expert that incorporated motion into pronunciation and made me realize how many subtleties of French I’ve been glossing over. In between lectures, I popped outside to pick a fresh apple in the apple orchard (I brought home a HUGE bag of them, too) or gave some attention to the aggressively cuddly resident cat, who would often curl up on my lap during lectures.

Before we left on Sunday we had the opportunity to explore Monet’s gardens, including the famous lily pad pond with its Japanese bridges, as well as his house (which was crowded and not so great: the garden was much more interesting). I took a deep breath as I got back on the bus, inhaling all the green that I could and stockpiling a dose of nature that will hopefully last me through the winter.

Since being back, I have been tackling French bureaucracy. On Monday, it only took me an hour waiting and about 50 signatures to open a BNP account, which means by next Monday I will finally have a debit card with the chip that is required by all machines here (next hurdle: transferring money into said account). I also applied for my student metro “ImaginR” pass (after exchanging my services as a computer techie for paper to print documents on with my new German friend down the hall), made a doctor’s appointment to get French prescriptions, bought a drying rack from a girl from Latvia (and FINALLY did laundry), and am in the process of applying for the CAF (state aid that most students are eligible for…supposedly it could knock 100 euro off of my rent! Yay France and socialism). Yesterday was an absolutely beautiful day here with temperatures close to 80 by the afternoon. I met up with Brittany from the Tunisia program for a picnic in the Luxembourg Gardens before heading over to the Université de Paris IV for my first lit class…only to have the teacher not show. Not entirely surprising--more on the French education system to come later. After waiting around for a while, Laura and I opted to go find a sunny, street side brasserie near Les Halles for a demi (half pint) and a pastry, which I believe was ultimately a much better use of our time.