franco-anglo-mascots

One of my tasks at work this week was to make signs to post up around the center that will encourage students to speak French (because in theory, we're an immersion program, although the kids seem to stick to French for about a week before relapsing back in English). I was bored and took this as an opportunity to get creative with Photoshop, creating a few mascots of francophone/anglophone fusion to decorate my posters.

I called this one the Statue of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. She is armed with a (not-so-)Petit Robert, the classic French dictionary, and a baguette.


Next up, Oncle Sam wants YOU to speak French!
My last experiment in graphic design was a parody easily understood by Parisians, of the ubiquitous "Wall Street English" métro posters. The company has long been the most well known (and most obnoxious) business English program in the city, and the current campaign features, as Tom describes it, "terrible stock photos and slightly-too-old young people" with either American or British flags imprinted on their tongues:
For my version, I altered an iconic image of a more heroic smarty pants. I call him Freinstein:

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':

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.