Waiting to get out of Paris

To be stuck waiting to get out of Paris is an experience with a long and storied history.  This should be a comfort to me, but somehow I don't think I am going to make it to Casablanca and Rick, at least not on this voyage...I will, God willing, eventually get out of here and back to California in time for Christmas, but it's taking a lot longer than I thought it would.

All week, while I was making my preparations to leave Cosne and Nevers for the holidays, everybody asked me, "Oh, quand est-ce que tu pars pour les Etats-Unis?" and when I said Sunday the 19th, the uniformly replied with something along the lines of "Euh, la neige aille poser une probleme pour toi, je crains!"  No, I thought, that couldn't possibly happen; there is no way the weather will wreck havoc on my flight plans--all these people are just being naysayers....Famous last words.   I got to to Charles De Gaulle airport on Sunday morning in the middle of a merry blizzard, and promptly joined a swelling crowd of would-be travelers, who were all trying to figure out what the hell they were going to do.  Apparently, while it was snowing in Paris, it was really coming down in London, and Heathrow was completely closed all day, and would be for part of the next.  My flight was, of course, on British Airways, which routes all flights through Heathrow, so I was not going anywhere.  I proceded to wait in line to try to get an alternative flight for the next six hours, all the while dealing with stressed-out fellow passengers and an incredible amount of missing information.  Finally, at 4 pm, after having been on my feet in various unmoving lines since 10 am, I made my disgruntled way back to Paris on a train that was, unsurprisingly, also delayed and overcrowded.

De Gaulle or the Louvre?

On the other hand, at least I had somebody to stay with.  It could have been so much worse.  My friend Hilary from Columbia, who has a charming apartment in the Marais district (i.e. pretty much close to everything) has generously been letting me stay with her for my unexpectedly-longer visit.  We have taken advantage of this opportunity to see some more sights, and yesterday we girded on our armor of cultural appreciation, and went to that bastion of the spoils of culture and empire--the LOUVRE (capitals are essential).

Festival de Lumières, and other excitement in Lyon

I can't even say that the holiday season is fast approaching...it's already here.  It's sort of unbelievable that I am two days away from Christmas break and three days away from flying back to CA, although I am more than ready for it.  The past few weeks--and really the whole fall--have gone by really fast, but I think it will be good for me to go home and fill up the tank a little bit.  Things have been fairly intense lately.

For one thing, there has been a lot of travel.  Coming on the heels of my weekend in Paris and then in Tours, I went back to Lyon last Friday to visit with Clara and see the Festival of Lights, an annual celebration in the city that centers around the 8th of December, the day on which--legend has it--the Virgin Mary saved the city from the plague during the middle ages.  Traditionally, the Lyonnais put candles in the windows of their houses to mark the occasion, but in the last hundred years or so, the festival has morphed into this huge outdoor spectacle featuring electric light shows that lasts a week and draws crowds from all over France (and, indeed, the world).  It was a sight to see.

so all these photos are from Therese.

Once again, I forgot my camera

I was glad to have gone, although I think that if I lived in Lyon, it would not be something that I would go out for every year.  I was somehow under the impression that it would be displays with candles, the way it was traditionally, and the displays of electric lights, while many were impressive (and some were truly bizarre--see below), were not really to my taste.  Having grown up with the luminarias of Albuquerque, I prefer lights that flicker to those that strobe.

Does this look like a giant desk lamp?  That is what it is.

I think that I was also less able to take in the glories of the light displays because it was the end of a long day.  The weekend was so packed with activities that we actually wrote out a schedule for Clara, me, and Therese to follow (I get a neurotic pleasure from checking things off lists).  Everything we did was absolutely worth doing, but the total impact was somewhat more than we had bargained for, especially since some of the individual events proved taxing.  Not everything went according to plan, but we did manage to do everything we meant to.

Case in point: part of the day's activities included cooking a fabulous dinner of new (tajine) and traditional (souffle) French recipes.  The piéce de résistance was to be the desert, crème brûlée.  Although our attempt this time was more successful than our previous efforts, there were still a couple setbacks.  More specifically, the torch Clara had bought for brûlée-ing turned out to be a bad bargain, since it refused, either to light easily or stay on more than a few minutes at a time.  We exerted ourselves, however, and discovered that, even when the sparker was not working, the butane was still coming out, so we were able to jury-rig a technique whereby we used an electric lighter and the torch with a two-man approach that worked, in a Macgyver sort of way.  Despite the unorthodox flaming, the brûlée ended up tasting delicious.

Tours

I totally forgot my camera, again, this weekend

I just got back from another traveling weekend (my feet are really itchy this month--I am going to be going here and there pretty much every weekend until the middle of January, if you count going home to CA).  This time my wanderings took my to the city of Tours.  I like to think of myself as living in the Loire valley here in Cosne--and, indeed, I am right on the river--but Tours is in the valley proper, if you think of it as the place of expensive wine tours, medieval towns, and chateau that inspired Jean Cocteau and those crazy kids at Disney.

Minus the wine tours, which will have to wait until my ship comes in, I think we did a pretty good job of touring Tours.  I say "we" because I went with Therese, one of my fellow English assistants of the Nièvre.  We were only there for less than 48 hours, but in that time we managed to fit in tramping around the old-section of town--which is, as you can see, medieval and very nicely preserved--going shopping at the Christmas market, visiting a proper chateau, going to the local musée de beaux arts, and eating some really fabulous local food...

It had been very wintery for the past week or so (in fact, I had almost no students on Friday because the buses were not running and it was snowing like crazy) but fortunately we were still able to use the tickets we had bought in advance, and our train Friday evening was only slightly delayed.  It is now raining sloppily, and the weather was warm enough over the weekend that everything was sort of drippy, but that did not prevent it from being very picturesque.

Saturday afternoon we took another train outside of town to visit the local Chateau de Chenonceau.  Actually getting there was something of a misadventure, since we were just settling into our seats on the train when I looked at the guidebook and read the fateful words, "The chateau of Chenonceau is not to be confused with the village of Chenonceaux..."  Chenonceaux was of course where our train was heading.  Therese and I hurried off the train and went to ask the station agent which route we should actually take, and he assured us that we should, in fact, take the train to Chenoneaux.  We rushed back, only to have the doors slam in our face and the train pull off without us.  Turns out the chateau of Chenonceau is in the village of Chenonceaux.  Poor wording, Lonely Planet; poor wording.

so all these lovely pictures are courtesy of the internet!

When we actually got to the chateau by the next train, and hour later, it was quite lovely. The village was even smaller than Cosne, so the chateau was pretty much just surrounded by its own fabulous gardens, stretching out into and blending with the forested countryside.  As I said to Therese, I felt as if we should be strolling through the grounds in riding habits with our dogs, or else rattling up the long tree-lined approach in a gilded coach.  It was very "to the manor born."  The chateau itself was pretty impressive, since it is built actually on the river Cher, with a long, black and white paved gallery spanning the waterway.  The alternate name of the place is the "Chateau des Dames," since it is famous for having been the residence, and the design project, of a number of powerful women, including Catherine di Medici, who ruled France as regent during the minority of Henri III, and Madam Dauphin, a great salon hostess and society leader during the revolutionary period.  The whole place was very well-maintained; historically restored, but not to the point where it felt like a theme-park.  It was especially nice to be there when it was decorated for Christmas, since many of the rooms were filled with great aromatic bouquets and buckets of dried orange slices, cloves, and other spices.  The downside of going to such a fabulous and touristy place is, well, the tourists, though.  Therese and I had the misfortune to arrive at the same time as a huge bus-full of Asian tourists, which was a little overwhelming.... Even after years of dealing with crowds in New York, it is still a challenge to fight through them when you are on a spiral staircase!

The one part of the experience that was not crowded was the musée des cires, or wax museum, which was hidden off in a side building, away from most of the tourists, attention.  Therese and I went over to check it out before we left, and the whole thing was, as you might imagine, totally creepy.  There were no human attendants, just an automated turnstyle that let you in after you swiped your ticket, and then motion sensitive lights and music that played as you inspected half a dozen degenerate wax recreations of the various famous residents and visitors of the chateau, including such luminaries as Rousseau and Voltaire.  You could totally imagine them coming to shuffling life and chasing unsuspecting tourists through the woods.  "The return to nature," indeed!

After we finally got back to Tours that evening, we had dinner at a place called "Comme AutreFouée" (since bad puns in restaurant names apparently are not limited to California) which specialized in the local dish, a sort of little flatbread called les fouaces, which is baked in a wood-burning oven and then brought hot to your table, where you cut it open, put in butter, meat, or vegetables, and eat it immediately--yum.

I Open at the Close

I just got back from watching Harry Potter and les Reliques de la Mort, Première Partie (as it is called over here) at the local theater.  The last time I went to the Eden Cinema, to watch the La Princesse de Montpensier, I was the youngest person in the theater by about 25 years.  This time, with the exception of a few indulgent and long-suffering parents, I was one of the oldest.  I even saw a one or two really little kids there--which was a little shocking, since there were moments where I was scared watching it.  My ten-year-old self would definitely not have been able to take it.  Harry Potter the series definitely grew up with its protagonist, and with the readership that waited for each book to come out, and by now it is a far darker story.  The majority of the theater-goers tonight, though, were not children but teenagers.  I think I recognized some of my students, and it was definitely date-night for a lot of them.  I felt a little bit like this.

Anyway, the movie: I have an official position of lack of enthusiasm for the HP movies, since I believe that the books are by far the better experience.  There are things you can get from a book that you just can't from a movie--quality of language, complexity of plot and dialog, the power of your own mental images, etc., etc.  Further, nobody could know this when they cast an 11-year-old for the part ten years ago, but Rupert Grint, I am sorry to say, had not grown up into a well-favored young man.

However, despite my grousing, there are things to enjoy about the movies.  I have nothing but admiration for the cream of the British character acting academy who slum so impressively in all the Harry Potter Movies.  Alan Rickman, Bill Nighy, Timothy Spall, Jim Broadbent, Maggie Smith....I love you all.  Further, I don't just want to be Helena Bonham Carter, I want to be her hair. 

This particular installment of Harry Potter I thought fit better into the movie format than some of the previous ones--because they cut the book in half, they were able to fit in more of the plot, and away from Hogwarts (as cool a spectacle as it was) the movie hewed more closely to a character-driven story, and did not get bogged down in flashy special effects sequences.  Of course, as a fan of the books, I would still have felt a strong connection with some elements of the story, even if the movie had been far from what I imagined it should be.  I cried over Dobby when I read The Deathly Hallows for the first time, and I cried in the movie tonight.

One last note, going back to the idea of the generation that grew up as the Harry Potter books--and later the movies--were coming out.  I realized, as I was waiting for the lights to go down in the theater, that I had not been to see a Harry Potter movie on the big screen since number 2 came out at Christmastime 2002.  At that point I was living in Huston, and I went to see it with a bunch of ballet girls.  I sat next to my roommate Jennie Warnick, and I remember realizing, when I had to cringe and close my eyes in the face of the scene with the basilisk, that she was not a girl that you could grab onto for support.  That seems very long ago and far away, now.  Harry is not the only one who left old worlds behind.

Weekend in Paris

A thousand curses upon the absentmindedness that caused me to leave my camera behind when I went for the weekend to Paris, surely one of the most picture-worthy cities I could possibly have visited....!  I am not used to thinking of myself as a scatterbrained person, but I fear that it is a tendency I am growing into.  It may be a mark of how much I have been traveling around this fall, but I seem to leave a trail of personal belongings everywhere I go.  Not only did I forget the aforementioned camera, but I believe I left my toothbrush and toothpaste at Aurélie's on Friday night--at least I didn't have them when I got to Paris!  If I go on like this, I will have to keep all my affairs attached to my wrist on a string....

But I digress.  The point of this posting is to catch up on my trip to Paris over the last three days, albeit without accompanying illustrations.  It is well and truly winter here, now, and I arrived in the city of lights just ahead of a weekend of snow that was supposed to hit Cosne.  It did not snow in Paris (except for a little dusting of car-hoods on Sunday night) but it was f***ing cold nonetheless.  I had moments when I feared that I would repeat the unfortunate frostbite incident of last winter, which I had no desire to do (believe me, you never want to look down again and discover that your toe is black!)  Fortunately, I did not spend enough time outside for that to happen, although I did wait for almost an hour in the lowering dusk on Saturday afternoon to go up into the towers of Notre Dame.  It was kind of grueling, and there were rather a lot of stairs when I finally got inside, but the view from the top was totally worth it, especially since you got to see the gargoyles up close and personal.  They are by and large refurbishments from the mid-nineteenth century, but they are modeled on statues dating from the cathedral's original construction in 12th through 14th century (these things were not built on an accelerated plan).  It is amazing, looking at these creatures, which were shaped like monstrous dogs and birds, and panthers, and even an elephant, to think about the world-view of medieval Europeans, which included the threats of diabolical presences such as these (as well as miracles, divine interventions, and unknowable supernatural occurrences) as part of the expected experience of everyday life.  It's also interesting to think about the statuary on the great cathedrals as being a teaching tool, instructing visitors who could not read or write about the biblical stories and the structure of the cosmos.  I was particularly struck by this when I was looking at the facades over the cathedral entrance, which was as close as I got to the inside of the church on this trip. After all that waiting to climb the tower, I could not face the idea of waiting in another line when I got down, so I had to put that on my list of things to do when I come back.

Of course, in two days I was only able to see the merest fraction of everything there is to visit in Paris.  I made it to the Musée Nationale du Moyen Age yesterday morning, which was a good intro to the museums of Paris--small enough that I could go through it in and hour and a half (although I was a little pressed for time at the end, and I could probably have spent more like 2 or 3 hours there), and I got to see the tapestry of the lady and the unicorn, which is superb.  You understand why it is so famous.  It's beautiful, and mysterious in a way (since the symbolism of the different figures is not totally clear).  It made me think of Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn.

This morning I made my final museum trip of the weekend to see a special exhibit at the Musée de l'Arte et de l'Histoire du Judaisme.  It had been recommended by a friend of the friend I went with, and I took her advice, although I had never heard of the artist, Felix Nussbaum, before.  I'm really glad I went, as it turns out.  Felix Nussbaum was a young man in the early 20th century, who tragically never had the chance to be more than a young man, since he died in Auschwitz in 1944, but he--amazingly, in the face of all the hardship he suffered--kept painting as long as he possibly could, all through the years of conflict and persecution, recording and transmogrifying the terrible things he witnessed into paintings that are incredibly powerful.  His work reminded me at different times of Picasso, Magritte, and Chagall, and it was definitely a product of the modernist era in which he lived, but it was also very personal (lots of self-portraits, a bit like Frieda Kahlo).  One of my favorites (which I wished I could have found a copy of), was one of his earlier works, one that seemed to be making a rejection of the traditional inheritance of western art, but also expressing an powerful and spooky imagination.  It was an image of the Colusium in Rome, isolated in a sort of a barren space, with nearby the figure of a man embracing a woman with her back to the viewer.  Her head was covered with a scarf and she was sort of see-though, although she threw a dark shadow, and the man's face, looking towards you, was haggard.  It was like he was trying to embrace a ghost.  Not all of Nussbaum's paintings were equally grim; his earlier work had flashes of this very lively dark humor, that got darker and darker and finally disappeared the farther into the '40s his paintings got.  By the end of the exhibit, the artworks were responding to such terrible things that they were difficult to look at.  Many of these things, it is important to see them, but the experience is not an easy one.  I was glad to have gone, though, and I think it's fortunate (and not at all guaranteed) that Nussbaum's paintings, which were only rediscovered in the 1970's, are still here for people to look at.

Likes and Dislikes

I am just shy of two months in France right now, and have advanced through the stages of culture shock--past the romance and novelty of the first weeks (walking down the street: "Oh, the French shops! Oh, the French old men buying baguettes in the shops! Oh, the French mustaches on the old men buying baguettes!), through the frustrations of delayed-onset homesickness and frequent miscommunication, and I find I am gradually approaching that hazy locale known as "getting used to it."  In honor of that progression, I bring you the ten best and the ten worst of my first two month's impressions of life in Cosne-sur-Loire, France.

Caveat:  These things, rated in order of greatest to least, are not life-changing conditions of deep significance, and my reaction to them does not say anything about my feelings about French culture, or even French vie quotidienne as a whole (I do not yet, and may not ever, feel equipped to pass that kind of judgement).  These are just the sorts of trivial things that you notice when you start to settle into a place, and my reactions are along the lines of "La mère d'Amélie Poulin n'aime pas: quand les gens inconnus lui touch par la main"

That said, here goes:

Chloé aime:

1) In France, it is perfectly normal to have dessert after every meal.  For someone with what I have often described as a sweet tooth like a walrus tusk, this is what I have been waiting for my entire life.  I have always felt that a meal is not finished without a little something sweet at the end, and now I have an entire country backing me up.

2) There is no culturally sanctioned anti-intellectualism here the way there is in the states.  I don't ever feel like I have to use fewer big words, or avoid talkiing about concepts and ideas in everyday conversation.

3) Hanging out in cafes, one of my all time favorite activities, is big here.

4) It seems like almost everybody has a cat, and I have yet to visit and apartment building with a no-pets policy.  It is very cozy to go visit someone and end up with their cat on your lap, although it does have the unfortunate side effect of making me very much want to get my own.

5) There's a reason they call it French bread.

6) Cheese.

7) Dining in general is a very social occupation.  People take their time with it, and use it as an opportunity to enjoy each others' company.  When I first moved away from home at 18, I was horrified and saddened when my new roommates admitted to me that they did not expect us to eat nightly dinners together since they had never done that with their families.  That would not happen here.

8) Comic books/graphic novels are not just the province of pimply, black-clad adolescents, and you can find a good BD section in most bookstores.

9)  The onstreet culture, at least in my town, suits my temperament in that it is pleasant but not overly familiar.  Unlike in, say, Jaipur, you don't have to take care not to look people in the eye, but meeting someones' eye does not necessarily mean that you want to stop and have a conversation with them.  You can acknowledge people, without getting into awkward social interactions.

10)  The shower heads.  It took me a while, and a lot of soaked bathmats, to get used to having a free-floating shower head on a cord, but once I realized that there was a way to hold it directly over your head, so that all your features are smothered at once in a rushing stream of falling warm water, there was no going back.

And now, the other side...

Chloé n'aime pas:

10)  There is no peanut butter.  You would think that in a culture where Nutella has such pride of place, peanut butter would not be far behind, but no.

9) The Sarkozy government, and the strikes it inspired.  While I appreciate the importance of a country's population voicing their concerns to their government, the grévès went on long enough during most of the past month, and I spent enough time stuck in various train stations, that I ended up wishing that both the strikers and the source of their dissatisfaction would give up and call it a day.

8) It is very hard to find dental floss here, at least of the kind I am used to.  It seems silly to order such a minor thing from home, but I do like to clean my teeth.

7) If you haven't done your grocery shopping before Sunday, and you don't have a big-box store near you, good luck.  Most small and midsized towns are like nuclear-attack drills from the 50's all day on Sunday.  The day of rest is practiced very assiduously by shopkeepers here.

6) I miss instant oatmeal.

5) The public transit system, specifically the train system, is laid out like a star, with Paris in the center.  This makes it difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to make lateral voyages that do not take huge detours up to the capital city.

4) The culture among teachers at French public schools is very independent and self-directed.  Every prof is the ruler of his or her own classroom, and there is not really much of a unifying curriculum across any given level.  I can see the advantages of this, for the teachers themselves, in that they are not tied to a system that does not work for them, but it can be very frustration for someone like me who is trying to work with several teachers.

3) There are approximately 5 unmarried people between the ages of 18 and 40 living in my town

2) Bureaucracy had a whole new meaning for you once you have dealt with the process of applying for a visa, setting up a bank account, and registering for social security.  I never realized before the true power of a piece of paper with an official stamp on it.

1) Not being able to better speak the language.  I know this is a problem with me, and not with the environment I am in right now, but I do get very impatient with my limited comprehension abilities.  I know I am probably making progress I am not aware of, but still...

The Good The Bad and the Immigrant Community

One of the side effects of living alone (and having a generous friend with a good collection of DVDs to lend) is that I end up watching a lot of movies in the evenings.  I am slightly ashamed to admit that not many of them have been in French, which is no doubt not the best way for me to immerse myself in the language, but Aurélie's collection is mostly English-language films, and a number of them were titles I had had on my list of things to see.  So it goes...

Most recently (i.e. tonight), I watched Gran Torino, a film which I had been meaning to see for a while, but had somehow not gotten around to it.  I'm glad I finally watched it, although it was sad--not as sad as Million Dollar Baby, but still dark and heartfelt, about people struggling out of bleak and desperate situations and trying to find a way to live their lives as best they can.  The film was not dark like a war-drama is dark; rather the bleakness was that of the ordinary lower working-class life, where the dangers of crime, violence, and loss of family hover just below the surface.  For what it was, I thought the film was a success.  Clint Eastwood is a great actor (and full of virility, even at 80), the character he played was a compelling one, and the relationship between him and the family of Hmong next door was portrayed in an affecting but not saccharine way (assisted by some good work by the supporting teenage actors).

However.  I said Eastwood's character was compelling.  That's not the same as his being likable.  He was more or less an awful, racist old man.  Although he always did the right thing when the situation called for it, I think that the question that I was left with after the movie was, where do you draw the line between the big character flaws and the little ones?  How much prejudice can you get away with when you are moral about the big picture?  And who defines the big picture?  When should we ignore the differences in perspective between ourselves and other people, and when not?

Ultimately, the answer that the movie gave was that the important issues, the questions where your responses really matter, are those about maintaining your family, protecting the innocent, and doing right by your own life.  Those are principles I can go along with, although I am not sure what the movie says about the importance of being armed in your own home.  Parts of it were a little cowboy for me, but I was impressed with the twist at the end.  I thought he was going to go all Death Wish in the final scene, and was pleased that he did not.  It made the ending very poignant.

One last word about big versus little character flaws, and then I'll move on: Although Eastwood's character slung around a lot of racist epithets in the screenplay, during his one interaction with Afro-American teenagers, he did not use the n-word.  I think if he had, it would have changed the way his character appeared, in terms of his ultimate moral make-up, at least to an American viewer.  I am not sure what that says, that that is the prejudice we as a culture cannot look beyond and cannot forgive a person for displaying openly, or that it is still powerful enough, and the shadow of that particular oppression is so long, that that form of hatred cannot come up in movies without the entire movie having to be about it.  Probably both.