J'habite Metroland

Je rentre à ma ville de (re)naissance

2012-02-13T06:13:00.000-08:00

Juste pour une longue weekend. J'ai le mal de la ville des Lumieres depuis que je suis partie il y a sept mois. Je suis ici à la fac en Angleterre. J'étudie la langue, l'histoire et la politique de ce pays ou j'ai passé dix beaux mois, et des fois je me sens comme si je n'avais jamais quitté Angleterre. Ma prof de traduction se fache contre nous quand on ne se souviens pas comment utiliser le subjunctive; je passe mes soirées en étudiant l'usage correct des prepositions (quand je suis pas au pub, bien sur!) Mais j'avais une vie dans cette langue; des amis, des colocs, du travail, une petite amourette meme... Maintenant que je suis retourné en Angleterre, ma vie est mes études, ma famile, mes amis et la politique. J'organise des séances, j'écris pour mon autre blog qui parle plutot de l'échec du capitalisme que du dernier joli parc que j'ai visité. Il est tellement cliché qu'à Paris ma vie était plutot plaisir, et ici elle est plutot devoir...

A jeudi, tout le monde qui me comprends...

Over / Fini

2011-09-02T11:22:00.000-07:00

Here’s something I wrote when I first got back. I don’t know why I waited such a long time to post it.

I came back to England last Thursday, the day before my 21st birthday, and I'll be staying with my family until the end of September when university starts. Going out in Watford last night was a culture shock. I haven't been around people wearing that little and drinking that much since Christmas. It all seemed a bit depressing, honestly; conversation, flirtation and pleasure all seemed to be in quite short supply. Everyone was shouting and stumbling around; I left by 11, or else I would have seen the inevitable conclusions of a night out with repressed Puritans suddenly dissolving their social shackles in cheap, sweet alcohol. The police vans lay in wait up by the Horns pub. There was nowhere you could sit and have a quiet drink outside. It will all take some getting used to. I listened to some Arctic Monkeys on the bus home and thought, yeah, they do say it changes when the sun goes down, around here.

My last day in Paris was perfect. It included pretty much everything that made the city such a wonderful place to live for the 10 months I spent there. Before meeting Ally for falafel in the Marais, I went for a long stroll by myself around the Right Bank; starting off at Louvre-Rivoli metro stop, I went into the St.Germain-l'Auxerrois church and looked at all the art and architecture I've got much more of a taste for since reading up a little on what it's about, and then I walked across the Pont Neuf to the Louvre. I sat in the courtyard for a long time, thinking about the year I'd spent, thinking about leaving, thinking about what I had left to pack. I even stumbled on the Bibliotheque Mazarine, and looking at the gold-tipped dome that was being snapped by hundreds of Japanese tourists in a passing coach, I wondered if any other city in the world has so many public buildings covered in gold. I then crossed over the river again and wandered down past the Paris Plages, the public beaches that have been set up along the Seine for the month of August, and comprise banks of sand on the quais with deckchairs and sun umbrellas. There are also quite random free attractions like dirt biking, a swimming pool, a salsa band and an ice-cream stall, as if this city didn't already have enough to see, do, experience and reflect on to last the average person several years. But that's false, of course, by the time you'd done it all, it would have changed - there'd always be another exhibition, another cultural initiative, another restaurant you hadn't tried. So, it had started to rain, and I sat under an umbrella on the damp sand, watching the teal Seine wend its way under the Pont Neuf. I met Ally for falafel, which was predictably delicious, and then we went for a wander, and then I realised 59 Rivoli was nearby, so we checked it out. Every square inch of this artists squat is decorated with something; most of the artwork didn't mean much to me, but again, for the millionth time, how wonderful that a place like this exists. I'd love to say that the chocolate tart, coffee and wine that followed was because it was my last day, but quite honestly I ate what I wanted in Paris pretty much all the time, because I could afford it, and what would have been the point in not? We went to a café and then back to Ally's for an apéro with some of her French friends. We had white wine and blinis and salmon rillettes. I left reasonably early for dinner with my flatmates, which was a lot of fun as we quite uncharacteristically decided to se bourrer nos gueules, and at 3am I was playing Action ou Verité (truth or dare) with a Frenchman, an Italian, a German and my fellow anglaise Fiona. Crossing international borders with half of my possessions is, however, perhaps one of the worst things I've ever had to do with a hangover that bad.

So what I'm trying to say is that my last day in Paris was wonderful because it contained almost everything that made this year worthwhile. I had free time and a chance to appreciate the beauty of the city, a good friend, excellent food, patisseries and coffee, art, random cultural initiatives, an aperitif with some nice people, all in French with no problems, and then dinner with my flatmates, who always provided a safe and welcoming base for me to come back to after my adventures in the city.

I was happy in this city. I can easily analyse what it is that makes Paris so enticing, and it would basically go: its concentration of culture; its young and international population; the beauty of its architecture, the richness of its history, and a State that is willing to spend to keep all of these things in a pristine condition. And that's before you get onto the heady combination of being a foreign student with a very undemanding job and more money than you've ever had to spend before, with a nice gang of friendly Anglo-saxon assistants to get you going in terms of having a social life, and a city of young people from all over the world to get to know. Most importantly, reinforced by and reinforcing the country's cultural heritage, is the non-Puritan idea that the pursuit of pleasure is a completely worthwhile way to spend a day, a year, a life. It was interesting to me to live in such an intellectual country, a place where someone I knew mused over dinner, "I actually don't know much about Italian contemporary art" as if it was strange he didn't! I read an article about Rebekah Brooks that described her against-the-odds struggle in the macho newspaper world as "un mépris à la déontologie" (a defiance towards deontology). And that was in GRAZIA.

The culture is different; I can't get that across in a blog post. It always gave me something to think about.

Paris managed to remain both as iconic as everyone says it is, and special to me. I don't flatter myself that I had any experience that won't be repeated by the next batch of wide-eyed Anglo-Saxon students of French to descend on the city come autumn. How I envy them; how wonderful it was to see the city in every season. Autumn for me was summed up by the newness of it all, and the red and yellow flaming of the trees the first time I went to the Parc des Buttes Chaumont with Tiffany. Winter? The Christmas lights and the snow that froze my feet on a lonely afternoon I spent wandering around the Pantheon, feeling far fromhome and like I’d escaped from something for a year. And Spring? Oh, I can’t say anything original about Springtime in Paris. The city opened up like a flower when the warmer weather came. As for summer, I made like all true Parisians and left the city for most of it… being able to travel a little more in Europe was another wonderful thing about living in France. I have a feeling that returning to university next month will give me the strongest back-to-school feeling one could experience. The best thing is that I’ll be living a five minute walk away from a handful of people I can easily spend 10 hours with, including a few who were in Paris with me, and who get it. That’s the thing to look focus on.

To sum up through providing all that I ever could on here, snapshots, well, I went to Rouen and Le Havre, I went to poetry nights, I went to a writers’ group. The metro always smelled like air freshener at Bastille metro; I realised that I’m more attracted to teaching than I thought I was; I danced around the living room of a bourgeois French family whose kid I babysat; I went to a philosophy café at 10am on a Sunday just to see what it was like; I went to so many art galleries that the yellow walls of my bedroom were papered with postcards and ticket stubs by the time I left. It smelt just like lavender outside Shakespeare & Co after March, I used to sit outside on the steps eating ice cream sometimes, and once or twice I caught poetry readings that way. I went to a squat; I had a favourite dumpling restaurant; I wandered around the Latin Quarter on Saturday evenings in July after everyone had left. I went up to St. Denis by myself for an extreme version of the poverty + wonderful religious architecture you can find in Montmartre. I went to a classical concert at the Vincennes cultural centre with Tiffany one Spring evening, and to a friends house afterwards; and despite the fantastic Vincennes library, I rented almost nothing in French apart from Annie Ernaux’s 100-page volumes of autobiography. Oh, of course I had bad days, and I was lonely at first, and I missed my friends a lot, and I don't want to underestimate how much of a challenge I found it to have the social handicap of having to often speak my second language; a feeling that, ultimately, was quite similar to the general sense of social anxiety I've had for my entire life. Despite all that, je suis folle de la ville. I didn’t know life could be like that.

But from this distance, and writing from my parent's suburban home, it all seems magical. Paris était une fete; her parks, her museums, her people, her food, her quais, her churches and her bars. I never got bored of going into new, old, apartments with white walls and wooden floors; how lucky I was to live there for a year, how many beautiful things I saw. Yes, that’s what it was. I saw so many beautiful things in Paris.

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.” ~ Ernest Hemingway

Mal du pays

2011-08-26T08:09:00.000-07:00

I'm in England, watching "Entre les murs", and it's making me homesick for France.

My students were SO LIKE THAT. Although obviously I was no M. Marin.

I'm going to do one last entry soon - my blog should end with something more exciting that "Off to M. Bricolage to buy cardboard boxes".

The South

2011-07-25T03:35:00.000-07:00

All my jobs finished at the end of June, but I decided to stay in France until the end of July, to profite a bit. Earlier in the month I went to Brussels again, which was great, but I've been there before and didn't take many photos. Brussels is rainy and not very picturesque and we spent a lot of it eating deep-fried food and watching old Harry Potters. The only noteworthy thing we did was see the Deathly Hallows premiere which was ridiculously entertaining, even if having it subtitled in French and Flemish was a bit distracting. Then after that I went down to the South, to visit another friend from Warwick, who is spending the summer waitressing in Pezenas after doing a Year Abroad in Strasbourg.

We stayed in the offices of a charity (long story) which had two balconies!

Pezenas is an old town, and has rooftops like this.

The countryside outside the town looks like this.

Languedoc-Roussillon is full of vineyards.

The town used to have a train station but it's defunct now. It makes it difficult to get there, but it's more of a hidden gem. There is tourism, but not too much.

We went to a workcamp in the countryside with people Alice knew from volunteering, near to a tiny village called Alignan-du-Vent. Someone had decorated the fence around their property with shells.

Alignan was partying the night we went! There was a covers band in the village square, who covered everything from Rihanna to Metallica, by way of Lady Gaga and that French song with the chorus that goes "Ca! C'est vraiment toi!" I wandered around the village when I got bored of the music, it had a butchers and a bakers and a pharmacy and that was literally it. Then I went back and danced in a circle to Katy Perry's "Firework" with a bunch of 17 year olds from every corner of Europe. And I wasn't even drunk!

Look at this guy working it in an all-over Dalmation-print costume!

We also went swimming in a river one day.

Pezenas is pretty small now, but it was the capital of the region back in the day, hence why it has such beautiful architecture, and even a Jewish quarter, which was just one street.

Last thing, Pezenas is also famous for being the base for Moliere's theatre troupe for several years, the Illustre Théatre travelled around the provinces for over a decade, but it was at Pezenas where they really became famous before moving back to Paris. I think. We actually stumbled on the headquarters of the theatre troupe while out on a walk.

Je suis restée chez Alice, qui était la premiere copine que j'ai faite à Warwick - la semaine m'a bien rappellée pourquoi on s'est devenues des telles bonnes copines (basically we had TONS OF LOLZ). It's so strange to think that all of us Year Abroaders will be back on Warwick campus next year.

It was great to go to the South. The weather was wonderful, the accents were entertaining, and the people seemed so much more friendly than Parisians, it's bad how surprised I am now when a waiter/shop assistant doesn't treat me with active hostility, especially if I pronounce something wrong. I swear the woman at the CoinCafé in Vincennes RER station actually rolled her eyes when I stumbled over the word viennoiseries.

I'm leaving on Thursday & I don't know how I feel about that. It'll be exactly 10 months since I left Britain, and of those 10 months I've spent less than 2 weeks at home. France doesn't seem foreign anymore, although I don't know if my French will ever be as good as it was at the end of April. I'm actually a bit nervous about doing dinner in French tonight. Dinner with two friends tonight, Paris Plages (the beaches set up by the Seine) tomorrow, seeing Ally on Wednesday, and then home on Thursday. And then it's my birthday on Friday!

Last thing, the Tour de France also passed through Pézenas while we were there...

Off to buy cardboard boxes at Mr. Bricolage and start packing up my room...

Languedoc-Roussillon

2011-07-21T03:13:00.000-07:00

is full of beautiful things like this:

Even the name of this region is gorgeous.

Petit dej

2011-07-02T11:51:00.000-07:00

Ok, so the "blog post a day" thing didn't quite work out.

But this is worth noting: I had breakfast under this structure this morning! I stayed over at a party in the area last night, and stopped off at Monoprix this morning on my way back to the metro for some much-needed juice and pastry products. Where nicer to sit than on the steps of the Grande Arche, with a view over the trajectory which stretches down to the Arc de Triomphe, then onto the Tuileries and the Palais du Louvre? I could see all the way to the Champs Elysées.

La Défense is nothing like the rest of Paris; it's the business district filled with skyscrapers that they placed out of town because hello? Imagine this next to the Marais:

It's really impressive though. On a sunny weekend morning the esplanade feels like a cross between a gated community, full of healthy people wandering between food outlets, and a futuristic metropolis.

And this afternoon I did a treasure hunt in the 20th.

Marche des Fiertés

2011-06-27T03:44:00.000-07:00

Ok, a blog post a day until I leave France.

Lesson learnt from Saturday: don't wear black skinny jeans and high-heeled boots to a Gay Pride parade on the hottest day of June so far in Paris. Also, this is still France, so you probably will still get hit on by creepy straight men in their thirties, even while dancing in a huge crowd with to Bad Romance behind a float full of Spandex-wearing Chinese gay guys.

How these drag queens managed to walk three miles in these heels is beyond me. As is why you would attempt to pick up a woman at a Gay Pride march. Oh well! Fun weekend.

True story

2011-06-26T12:38:00.000-07:00

Today was over 30 degrees and without a cloud in the sky, and I bought a new pair of red shoes. Then I went to the Promenade Plantée, which is a walkway that runs from Bastille to the Jardin de Reuilly, and which, for one day only, was host to "Art en Balade", a series of installations and art displays from Parisian artists that you could discover while walking along. One was in a shallow basin filled with water, with tufts of lavender growing on each side, and an archway at either end of the basin. An artist that Ally knows had filled the pool with garlands of roses made from silver and gold foil, and someone else, a thin woman like a water-nymph did a dance down the length of the pool - she turned and pirouetted and sank beneath the water and hopped over each string holding the roses - and she ended up at our end, and we clapped and said "Bravo!" to which she replied "C'est l'instillation qui inspire" to the artist, both for modesty's sake, and to compliment the artist, a delicate woman in a big blue and stripy hat.

It was art for arts sake, it was art that also cooled down your feet, it was one of many strange & even magical moments that I've experienced in this city which holds such a place in my heart, this city which is artistic beyond belief, which is frivolous, which tastes of pains aux raisins and good coffee, this city which is tranquil on hot Sunday afternoons, this city where it stays light until 10 in June, city of open-air cinemas and exquisite cuisine, city of poetry and architecture which is also poetry, city of people sublime, sometimes, in their rudeness, city of a language that expresses sentiments impossible to say in English, fourmillant cité, cité pleine de reves...

Rouen/ Flowers

2011-06-20T03:52:00.000-07:00

First things first, a picture from the Flaubert and Medical History museum in Rouen. The stairs were decorated with quotes from Flaubert's Dictionnaire des idées reçues, which is an ironic collection of "received ideas". The bottom two here say "Imbeciles: People who don't think like you" and "Optimists: Equivalent to imbeciles". Yes, we did go to this museum to see the parrot mentioned in the book Flaubert's Parrot, and yes, it was a brilliant afternoon!

We even saw the man himself, in wax, at the Joan of Arc museum. Here he is, Gourstave Flaubear.

Skip forward a couple of weeks, and here is a photo I took in the courtyard of the Musée Rodin. It has so many beautiful Parisian features in it; the dome of the Invalides on the left, the Eiffel tower on the right, a mansion on the left that houses the museum, and the courtyard has sculptures and yellow roses. There are roses everywhere in Paris.

Speaking of flowers, look at what my neighbour gave to me a while ago. What a shame he's 84 and very senile. "Vous etes jeunes et belles, mes enfants!"

After a disaster where the wooden tub these cornflowers were growing in split and the soil and roots went all over the roof, I tried replanting them in new pots. Here they are looking healthy before the accident, but now they are withered and I threw them away. A flash of striking indigo while the flowers lasted, but it did lead me to conclude that if the cornflowers are anything to go by, you can't grow new roots.

Eden xxx

PS - Stick around for an update on the Trotskyite festival I attended last week.

Heavy with desire the sky/ To rain.

2011-06-06T14:42:00.000-07:00

The weekend: An afternoon wandering around Montmartre by myself, the Montmartre museum isn't really worth the entrance price, in my opinion, but it had a wonderful little courtyard where I sat for about an hour, on a bench, in view of the Sacré Coeur and thus a stone's throw from thousands of tourists, and yet the loudest noise I could hear was birdsong. A quick text around got me a dinner invite from a French friend, and with two hours to spare I tried to walk from Montmartre to St. Paul. I got as far as Galeries Lafayette, where I stopped for a while as I hadn't been there before. Verdict: beautiful architecture, and it's always fun to mentally gasp at the amount that designer clothes cost. It was full of Japanese people, and even the announcements were in Japanese. Dinner was interesting, even if my friend and her flatmate's very fast-paced discussion on the inevitable downfall of capitalism led me to be unable to contribute much more than agreement of certain points.

Fish in an aquarium in the Galeries Lafayette.

Eglise de la Trinité, near the Gare St. Lazare

Saturday: A trip to a lake in Torcy with my flatmates, a swim in the glacial water was the only way to deal with the sweltering pre-storm heat.

Sandra and Fiona

Baignade interdit!

I went out in the evening, although I had a pretty terrible time at a party and was glad to leave, and was glad when it started raining as we crossed the courtyard of the apartment block. It had been so hot all day that Tiffany and I happily walked through St. Germain and the Latin Quarter, down to Hotel to Ville, enjoying the freshness. We saw a clarinet player under a shop-front. We saw the café where Sartre and de Beauvoir went to write and to discuss existentialism. We crossed the river and saw the gigantic Hotel de Ville, still standing, still statuesque after centuries of Parisian upheaval have raged around it. Scratch everything I said about this being a city like any other, my resigned admittance that it's not where you live that's important. I don't want to go home. I don't know exactly what I'm doing this summer, but real life starts again on Saturday 1st October, when I move into a small bedroom on Warwick campus and have to start studying and working out what the hell I'm doing with my life. Needless to say, I'm in no rush for that date to roll around, although I can't deny that being on the same landmass as most of my friends and family is something I won't ever take for granted again.

Today: Taking 3 children to school in the rain at 8am, pronouncing Arthur's name the English way which he found very amusing and kept repeating, doing a pretty good job on the "th" for an 8 year old French child. Then I went home and slept till lunchtime. Homemade brownies. Tiffany and I went to Bercy Cinematheque this afternoon to see L'Ange, which was the most avant-garde thing I've sat through, and although I can't say it was entertaining, it was certainly interesting. It occurred to me that only in Paris would an hour-long piece of wordless, experimental cinema be full at 2pm on a Monday afternoon. Then I went over to Reuilly for more babysitting - Alexandre told me about the dinosaur exhibition he went to at the weekend with more excitement than most adults would use to describe the holiday of a lifetime. We played Piggy in the Middle while blasting out some George Michael, before playing Monsters, which becomes an imaginary battle to think of the scariest imaginary creature - "Je suis... une squelette... avec des doigts qui sont des allumettes, et des grandes ailes! Je fais l'attaque des tenebres!"

"I am... a skeleton.. with fingers made of matches, and big wings! I'm doing the shadow attack!"

Home for ping pong on the recently constructed table in the spare bedroom. Curry. A quick trip upstairs to get the can opener from Tiffany gave me a chance to admire the view from the roof, and 87 year-old Guy came out to repeat his usual phrases to us - "Vous etes mignonnes!" "English-spoken!" and "J'ai quatre-vingt-sept ans!" before chuckling away. Now for some reading in the bath, and an edit to the pantoum I'm writing (nope, I will never be brave enough to put my poems up here).

Days like today are peaceful and interesting, and I realise I have only scraped the surface of what this city has to offer. If I'm honest, I'm not quite sure what Hemingway was trying to say when he described Paris as a "moveable feast", but what strikes me every time I cross Place de la Concorde is Montaigne's quote, "Paris a mon cœur dès mon enfance. Je ne suis français que par cette grande cité. Grande surtout et incomparable en variété. La gloire de la France et l’un des plus nobles ornements du monde".

"Paris has had my heart since my childhood. I am French only thanks to that great city. Great especially, and incomparable in variety. The glory of France, and one of the most noble ornaments of the world".

Place de la Concorde, Eiffel Tower in the background.

Place de la Concorde, different angle.

I don't want to complain, and I don't want to come across as smug, but this is truly how I feel, or at least, how I feel at the best of times when I'm here - Paris is special. Paris is a magical city. That's about as original as something you'd find on a t-shirt in a souvenir shop, but it's how I feel - I can't think of any other city in the world that can compare with this one. I wanted to be small fish in a big pond, and if from time to time French culture makes me feel like nothing so much as bumbling clown-fish, well, at least it's in the most monumental pond in Europe. In my humble opinion.

Au Café

2011-05-29T02:48:00.000-07:00

Photo copyright Sarah Graham.

Yes, this photo is pretentious, but I really like it. Sarah did a course in Street Photography à la Robert Doisneau and took this photo of Tiffany and I doing something we do at least twice a week - drinking coffee and having conversations about, you know, the purpose of literature. And the Teletubbies.

P20RIS

2011-05-23T01:40:00.000-07:00

Reasons that Belleville/Ménilmontant, in the 20th arrondissement, are awesome:

- Culture Rapide, the "Cabaret Populaire" on Rue de Belleville, which does poetry slams on Mondays and Tuesdays, in English and French, as well as acoustic sets, literary quizzes and other such events pretty much every other night of the week. And I haven't even got started on the cheap (for Paris) cocktails served with Haribos.

- Belleville Park, with its terraces and shimmering view of the city from a hill. You can even marche on the pelouse.

- The graffiti/street art. There is this:

and plenty more, including, scrawled in pink outside Culture Rapide, "Poesie = Bonheur".

- There are lots of cheap Asian restaurants, including one where I ate a huge plate of prawn dumplings, an even bigger bowl of beef vermicelli soup, with mango and lychee juice, for less than ten euros.

- La Miroterie in Menilmontant, which was sadly closed last night but to which I definitely will return, because it's a squat in a former mirror shop that does free jazz concerts on Sunday nights, and paying concerts other nights of the week ie. exactly the kind of thing I came to Paris for.

- The International, which is another bar we stumbled into last night (stumbled as in happened upon, not stumbled as in "could barely walk otherwise". I do the school run on Monday mornings with three very challenging children). The International does free concerts downstairs and yesterday we saw "Minor Sailor". It was half an hour or so of tuneful, mostly acoustic noise from a man who looked so indie it made me feel homesick (French men really don't go in for any of the following - skinny jeans, check shirts, oversized cardigans, hipster glasses, borderline anorexia levels of skinniness, two weeks of stubble, pained expressions and mumbling into microphones). Where was I? Jeremy Joseph, who is actually Icelandic, created ambient soundscapes with only a guitar, his voice, a child's handheld tiny keyboard and something to record these on loops and play them back immediately. He performed in front of projected photographs which looked a wee bit like they'd been edited with Hipstamatic. Perhaps the whole thing wouldn't border on cliché in Iceland, and perhaps it doesn't in Paris either. In any case, it was very nice Sunday night music.

So, in other words, the 20th is my new favourite arrondissement. I have a feeling in a few years it might be a kind of alternative Marais, with prices to match, but it's nice to have discovered it now.

6 weeks left of this city. People are leaving already. There is never enough time.

Horizons

2011-05-19T03:55:00.000-07:00

Life in Paris is now a mixture of babysitting and sightseeing. Seeing as I take the kids to the park most days now, my job has been transformed into a particularly high-stakes game of Where's Wally?, as they run around with the other children from school and I try to allay my fears that they've been kidnapped when I can't see them for more than 2 minutes.

My Mum & Nan came to visit last week, fresh off the train from the other Metroland. On a fait les trucs classiques, alors pas grande chose à vous raconter, mais regarde ce photo-là que j'ai pris à Montmartre. Sympa de les voir, comme d'habitude.

Apart from that, there's been a lot time spent drinking and eating by bodies of water and in parks (have you seen how much they charge for a pint here?)

And Tiffany and I went to Versailles last Sunday, which was one of the most impressive things I've seen in my life, especially interesting after having studied Moliere and his relationship to the court of Louis XIV last year, as well as some aspects of the French Revolution. I don't know whether it was that which brought the history to life so much, but as I was in Marie Antoinette's bedroom I could really imagine the pitchfork-wielding mob running up the drive as she fled through a hidden door in her ridiculously, offensively lavish bedroom. Seriously, it looked like a bomb made entirely of gilt had gone off in there.

All my photos are of the grounds, which were amazing. I don't think we saw even half of it. I didn't take any photos inside. In fact, I got really annoyed at the huge number of tourists snapping away at every last detail inside the Chateau. It makes me wonder who they think their 300 photos of the rooms inside Versailles are going to interest once they get home.

The entrance gates.

Rose trellis.

A fountain through hedges.

Wildflowers.

Marie Antoinette had a model farmhouse built in the grounds of her own private palace so she could observe farmers at work. The buildings seemed unreal, like a precursor to Disneyland. It's strange to think they were doing pastiche 250 years ago.

After all that excitement, it's been a quiet week. I need to buy a new teapot today, and then it's off to babysit. Now I think I'm doing OK, and I've even started chatting to the other babysitters in the park, which is companionable, and gives me more opportunity to speak French. Last time they were discussing DSK, and I had nothing to add about the situation, partly because I don't know as much about his reputation as they do and partly down to boring old language problems, which was really frustrating. I just managed to nod along and say something about how terrible the whole thing was. I can't work out if I'm looking forward to being back or not. I know I'll be more confident doing everything (everything!!!) in English again. But when I do feel like I'm managing to convey myself well in French, or when I'm talking about something I'm genuinely interested in, I feel like I'm mastering an instrument, and it's wonderful. It doesn't happen as much as I'd like though, because if I spoke as much French with adults as I do with under 8s now, I'd never be at a loss for words again. Oh well. The children are quite sweet, really. It's funny to think that before working for the agency, my main experience of childcare was when one of my Sims had a baby...

A bientot, blogosphere.

Ironic

2011-05-08T00:45:00.000-07:00

That this is the only country in Western Europe I've felt a need to wear a fucking burkha, just to limit the amount of sexual harassment I get on at least a weekly basis.

I've been told a lot of times that I look young for my age. As far as these arseholes are concerned, they are using the body of a girl who could be anything from 16 to 20 (I'm 20) for their pathetic male-bonding-through-sexual harassment-of-someone-who-can't-fight-back shtick.

Disgusting, disgusting, disgusting.

Carpe Diem

2011-05-06T15:21:00.000-07:00

Update: I am now a full-time babysitter. I get paid to sit in parks listening to my iPod while the kids play nearby. It's so unchallenging. I'm free until 4pm every day except Wednesday (and I'm still earning justenough to get by) and so profiting from the city has never been easier. So far this week I've seen a film (Norwegian Wood), had apéros with Alice twice, read a lot, mooched around on the Internet a lot, and slept in until 10 most days. Bel far niente, indeed.

I've been reading an excellent book on Parisian history called "Metrostop Paris" by Gregor Dallas. The author picked ten metro stops around Paris and wrote essays on each one about aspects of that area's history. The section on Trocadéro wrote about how the Chaillot Hill was apparently Hitler's favourite part of the city when he visited Paris. So naturally I had to go there (I have a lot of free time).

The Trocadéro is a building for exhibitions, built in a very neo-Classical style, and directly behind the Eiffel Tower. The courtyard overlooking the Eiffel Tower was filled with gold-plated lifesize statues. It was easy to see why this view appealed to a Nazi sensibility, weird as that is to say.

And as if that wasn't all morbid enough, today I visited the catacombs at Denfert-Rochereau, again on the inspiration from "Metrostop Paris". Thanks to reading that, I know that during the 18th century, the powers that be realised that Paris' various cemeteries and mass graves were full to bursting and that the remains of centuries of dead Parisians needed to be relocated. So for two years, carts transported the remains through the streets of Paris in the dead of night, to the sight of former stone quarries at Denfert-Rochereau. Apparently the actual ossuaries are much vaster than the small section open to tourists, but I felt like I saw thousands of remains anyway. Interspersed with the decorative displays of skulls and femurs are a lot of quotes in French and Latin on a fairly similar theme (see title). It's one of the stranger ways to spend an afternoon in Paris.

At the entrance to the catacombs is the following melodramatic inscription. "Stop! Here is the empire of the dead".

It was strange walking outside into the warm and alive afternoon afterwards. In another sign that I've read Metroland far too many times, I did just as Christopher Lloyd/Julian Barnes did during his walks through the catacombs, and "sweetly combined personal gloom and pre-Revolutionary history". This entry has been full of other peoples' observations, and I didn't take the photo above. What can I say, it's hard to think original thoughts when so many have gone before.

C'est une belle opportunité, quoi

2011-04-30T03:15:00.000-07:00

It's over. I've finished working at the school. In a years' time, in two months' time even, the whole experience will have already found its narrative; when people ask me how my year in Paris was, I'll say something about how interesting it was to work in a French school, how strange it was to teach students older than me, and how difficult it could be when their behaviour veered from hostile through to levels of enthusiasm for learning English more appropriate to coma victims. I'm glad I've done it, but I'm not too sad that it's over.

So before I leave, a series of anecdotes. What comes back to me now as I think about the seven months I spent as an assistante de langue in a school in the Marais?

- A terrible class that was dominated by two loud, thuggish boys who made it impossible for me to teach anything. I asked them to stop giving out chocolate in the lesson; they wouldn't, but they did offer me some. As I was eating it, I heard a "Mizz, he ztole zis shoclate". Right. Eating shoplifted chocolate with them - very professional.

- A class where I made them create roleplays based on random situations, where they got so into that I laughed until I cried. It was like an awesome GCSE Drama lesson, in English.

- My last lesson where I taught them the beautiful English expression "I don't give a fuck".

- Painful two-hour sessions on Friday mornings with a Terminale group who barely said ten words between them for the entire session. I would hand out an article, force them to read it out and then spend 40 minutes desperately trying to cajole them into giving any kind of feedback on it while they shrugged and acted like I was forcing them to do this because I wanted to, rather than because it was my job. I'm an introvert, I don't like speaking in front of large groups of people in the best of situations - this was like a personal form of torture and I am so glad it's over.

- Two-hour sessions of 10-minute conversation practice with 15 year olds, where I would ask the same questions at least twelve times in a row until I wanted to tear my hair out. "Ok, tell me one place you have been on holiday recently. Ho-Li-Day. Vacances." They weren't all that bad, although a lot were.

- On one hand, the librarian and my responsable were lovely, and I had the kind of relationship with them I've had with colleagues back home - random chats about life and what we were doing in the holidays, bitching about the students, as well as a few discussions about things like the education system, politics, current affairs and stuff like that. I'll miss seeing them, especially for the opportunity to speak at length in French, something I do much, much less than I'd like to. However, that was a contrast to the other teachers at the school, who barely spoke to me. One or two made my acquaintance when I first started; after that we stuck to communal Bonjours and Bonne Weekend upon entering and leaving the staffroom, and that was literally it. I don't know if it was a cultural thing, or if they were just busy people, but the workplace vibe seemed a lot more formal and a lot less sociable than I imagine, for example, the staffroom at my old secondary school was.

- Insane amounts of time off. Ultimately the entire experience boils down to "I was paid 850 euros per month to work, on average, 8 hours per week". I'm mentioning all the above about the pros and cons in case anyone finds it interesting, but I have no right to complain about any of it. Working for the French State is like working for your rich, indulgent grandmother who doesn't like to think of you working too hard. Better than that even, because the body responsible for paying me never once took any interest in how hard I was working; I was employed centrally by the Ministry of Education, and certainly the school never bothered to inform them if I took a day off (which I only did once or twice), let alone to mention whether or not I was working hard. France is so incredibly centralised - as far as I can see, the Proviseur (headmaster) at the school has no power at all - he doesn't employ any of the teachers as it's all decided centrally by the Ministry of Education. Anyway, because I was an assistante and thus not really necessary in any way, the teachers would often just give me days off because the class had something else to do. And that's before we even get into the number of strikes, teachers being ill, school trips, classes that didn't turn up etc.

- Last Tuesday, I had my last class with the very small group of BTS students who will be doing work experience placements in Belfast next month. I like this group, because obviously they are motivated to learn English. I ended up giving them a bit of a motivational speech before I left, along the lines of "make the most of it, make friends from lots of different countries, try and explore Ireland, you will learn so much about British culture, but you'll also learn a lot about your own culture, because it's only by going away that you realise that a lot of aspects of yourself are neither universal human traits, nor individual quirks, but linked to the culture you come from". Actually I didn't say that at all, but it was what I was trying to get across. I finished off with perhaps the most French expression ever to have left my mouth, as I described the entire living-abroad thing as "C'est une belle opportunité, quoi". It's French because I've heard belle (beautiful) being substituted for bon (good) on many occasions, which says a lot about the esteem they hold beauty in, but I think it worked here. And to finish with "quoi" is like tagging on "you know" to the end of the sentence, which I've picked up as well, not that it's a particularly beautiful use of the language.

And now? Well, I still have my babysitting job with the 8 year old and the 3 year old, who are sometimes delightful and sometimes infuriating. On Tuesday we spent half an hour playing Pokemon School, whereby the 8 year old made us decide which Pokemon we were, arranged into the "Class of Fire" and the "Class of Plants" before making us practise attacks before we could evolve and thus move into the next class. When I asked who was the teacher, he informed me that the teacher was invisible. At times like that I actually start to get what people say about children being whimsical and charming. Roxane also told me I was belle yesterday (yes, the fact that a 3 year old has started conflating the concepts of "beautiful" with "things that I like" does annoy me, but in any case, I could see she was trying to be nice). On the other hand, yesterday I paid out of my own pocket for her to ride on a carousel, just cause I'm nice like that, and all I got afterwards was a load of whinging about how she wanted to ride it twice. Alex can also be vile towards his sister. Oh well, c'est la vie.

I should be starting another babysitting gig on Wednesdays, although I'm going to meet the family first before committing to anything. It's pretty obvious that childcare is not really my thing, but I'm lazy and it's very easy for une Anglaise to pick up childcare work here. I'm also applying for jobs in shops, which would be more interesting, I think, and might give me the chance to actually meet some French people before I leave. I intend to stay for June and possible July.

Tonight I am finally getting around to going to the (English language) writers group at Shakespeare & Co with my friend Tiffany. I haven't posted a photo for a while, so in honour of that here's one I took a while ago, when the whole city was garlanded with pink, outside of that bookshop.

This has been a summation of sorts, even though I'm not leaving Paris for a while yet. You know what conclusion I think I'll come to? Wherever in the world you live, the same kinds of things affect you. It's a beautiful city, and I was still bored sometimes, and lonely, and had headaches and hangovers and arguments among other, better, experiences. Of course that's what it was going to be like - if life didn't offer a similar palette of emotions no matter where one lives (excepting war zones and North Korea and such), then what would be the point? It's still your relationships, your work, and your material quality of life that stay as the deciding factors in your happiness. A change of location doesn't offer the promise of a change of self, but nonetheless... it's been interesting. I can't put it any more eloquently than that - it has been interesting to live here, and to do this.

An Observation

2011-04-24T10:43:00.000-07:00

Although it was never a serious conviction, I've realised that part of me vaguely assumed that after having lived in France for a while, I would, in some way, become French. I know that's ridiculous, but firstly I underestimated the cultural differences and overestimated my fluency in the language. I still don't get at least half of the jokes. Secondly, it made sense somewhat because a lot of personal changes in my life were precipitated by a change in location. When I worked in a bookshop, I felt like a bookseller, it fit me. Most significantly, when I went to university, I became a student. I am a student. These attitudes have become part of me. So it's very strange to have come to Paris and the only change I've felt in myself is a further reaffirmation of an identity I've always had and barely thought about - that of my nationality. As well, being English is a defining part of my identity to every French person who meets me, and consequently that affects how I see myself. Something happens to remind me of my foreign-ness every single day.

(Although having said all that, it has rubbed off on me a little bit. Biting into a pain au raisin yesterday, I thought disapprovingly, "This doesn't taste home-made" and made a mental note not to patronise the boulangerie any longer. I also no longer see anything ridiculous in spending over 5 euros on a box of tea).

Les voyages forment la jeunesse

2011-04-22T06:55:00.000-07:00

So, I went to Barcelona for the first few days of the Easter holidays. We got cheap Ryanair flights and stayed with friends of my friend Erin, so it was pleasingly unexpensive.

Barcelona is an amazing city. It completely exceeded my expectations. In no particular order, the city has:

Fantastic Modernist architecture:

The Casa Battlo, perhaps the craziest and most beautiful of all the Gaudi buildings.

An Arc de Triomf, which was built for a World Exposition. Our guidebook suggested the only thing it had be triumphant about was having been built on time!

A close up of one of the decorations of the structure, which we could only conclude was a vampire bat with breasts. Seriously.

A port, with a little buoy looking up at the sky:

A shopping centre on the port. I wonder where else you can go to a department store a stone's throw away from the sea? The shopping centre has a strange mirrored wall, I'm in the bottom left-hand corner.

Seagulls and sunlight on the pier.

As if all that wasn't exciting enough, Barcelona also has several beaches.

This hideous fountain in The beautiful Parc de Cuitadella. More gaudy than Gaudi... it looks like it belongs in Las Vegas.

The park made up for it with orange and jasmine trees. Honestly, the weather was mid-20s with a slight breeze, and the whole place smelled faintly of jasmine and orange. One of the many reasons Barcelona is contending with Paris for my favourite city.

Just when I was thinking that the Parc de Cuitadella was my favourite park in Barcelona, we hit Montjuic, which is a collection of gardens and a large park just outside the city. It has a Greek amphitheatre!

And a series of fountains in a walled garden. Gosh, it was lovely.

Barcelona also has

Lampposts like this

Lunging gargoyles overhead in the Gothic quarter.

We also went to the Joan Miro foundation, which was a gallery dedicated to an artist I'd never heard of, but who I really liked. Here is a statue of his in the courtyard of the museum.

View of the city from the Joan Miro Foundation.

And in a temporary exhibition about (as far as I can see), local Catalan bands, here is Erin and I listening to music...

Any city with a square named after my favourite author wins points.

Plaça de George Orwell also had this inspiring/bullshit message.

And I haven't even mentioned the two biggest tourist attractions (according to Lonely Planet, anyway). Here is a house in the Park Guell:

And here is the Sagrada Familia, which I didn't go inside cause it cost over ten fricking euros, even for students, but it was nice to see the outside anyway. I thought I'd try and get an unfamiliar angle.

I haven't even covered half of what happened, a birthday party all in Catalan, explaining the meaning of the song "All Rise" by Blue to some girls with very limited English, sangria and tapas and excellent conversation, sunburnt feet, meeting Roser and her friends and family, learning about Catalan history, eating lots of ham, drinking lots of beer and staying in a little village outside Barcelona in a flat with a fluffy white cat and a very hospitable host. It was honestly one of the best trips I've ever taken.

The place we stayed, Les Fonts, (pronouned Less Fonts and not actually Lay Fon, as it would be in French) also had... a castle.

And last of all, because I rarely post photos of myself, here is a photo of Erin and I, the friend I went with, sitting on the pier just before we left to go back to Paris.

After that I went to Switzerland for my friend Shona's birthday, which was like something out of The Great Gatsby! My flatmates looked at me a bit strangely after I'd told them that, it must seem odd that I've left the country twice in the past month for extravagant 21st birthday celebrations, what can I say, like the trip to Barcelona itself, it's been a series of happy coincidences.

Annoying thing

2011-04-08T05:29:00.000-07:00

When you are talking politics with French person and you make the complaint that our Cabinet has a ridiculously high number of men who went to the same £30,000 per year private school (Eton) and they reply with "Aah, it's the same here, they all went to ENA*".

Although I do love the way they say ENA. (Ennarrrrr)

*Ecole Nationale d'Administration, an extremely prestigious graduate school that turns out graduates for very senior civil service posts, and is FREE and EXTREMELY MERITOCRATIC.

Partir, c'est murir

2011-04-05T12:54:00.000-07:00

Cerisiers

2011-04-03T04:36:00.000-07:00

The area where I babysit is very residential and not particularly interesting, but it does contain the beautiful Jardin de Reuilly.

This is a pretty courtyard with benches and a canopy of cherry-blossom.

So green!

Sepia-tone statue against Haussmanian architecture.

"The recent buds relax and spread"

Two women, tricky composition.

Using flash against these blossoms makes them seem super-imposed on the photo. I like taking photos of trees from this angle!

I then came back to Vincennes and took this photo of the town hall.

Feet in Blossom

2011-04-01T14:07:00.001-07:00

More photos from the Jardin de Reuilly to follow...

Savoir-vivre?

2011-03-27T10:38:00.000-07:00

Ever since reading The Secret History, by Donna Tartt, I have been fascinated by the idea of having a bacchanalia, which is a celebration in honour of Bacchus. Now, Bacchus is the god of wine and revelry, but a bacchanalia as presented in the novel is not so much a giant party as an occasion that, with the help of wine and any other intoxicants that might be useful, can lead one to a proper loss of self. It tended to involve things like bonfires, animal sacrifice, flaming torches, and insane amount of wine and hallucinations. Now, Isabelle and I had plans to run around Kenilworth Common in white bedsheets before sacrificing a goat on a bonfire, but we never got round to it, what with exams and all. But I'm making up for it here, Paris has been full of bacchanals.

We're not fitting in well with the locals.

The logical explanation is that the reserve of British culture leads us to seek in the liminal states such as that induced by binge drinking, the self-expression and loss of reserve necessary for psychological balance. When in that state of course, it never seems that prosaic. It seems like a totally normal way of viewing the world through oil pastels rather than watercolours. It's ironic it's all happening in Paris, a city whose inhabitants are renowned for their reserve and moderation. Well, in most cases. I am so used to the Puritan ideal of pleasure as something that must always be paid for (wine/hangover, chocolate/exercise/, a shopping trip/a few days of frugality) with an activity linked to guilt, it's unreal. It is no coincidence that the French use the word plaisir approximately fifteen times more than the English use pleasure, and that profiter de has nothing to do with money (and is also used constantly). Christ, I'm starting to sound like Elizabeth Gilbert (not a good thing). I wonder what I'll occupy my brain with when I'm back in Britain and no longer have Interesting Cultural Differences to dwell on.

So. I've been meaning to write for a while about specific events, but didn't get round to it. Generally I prefer that each entry should be focused on one event or place, as this isn't some kind of journal that I need to "fill in" on a daily basis regardless of what I've been up to. It's just snapshots Usually I just take a lot of photos all the time, then look back over them when I feel like writing a blog entry and post the most interesting ones, so here goes.

Tiffany and I took an unintentional daytrip to the banlieue, which was rather pointless but I did score the above photos as we sat by a stream, in a field, a half-mile from the indifferent apartment blocks and grimy supermarket complexes of Roissy-sur-Brie. I have no idea where why went there, but it was a nice day nonetheless.

I saw Black Swan twice.

It was Mardi Gras and we briefly joined in with the parade before finding a place that did 2.50 Kirs.

American, Brit, American, Brit, Brit, American/Brit.

A few weeks ago, a night of blossom and Bach.

Street art in the Butte aux Cailles, now that the evenings are light almost until the end of Happy Hour, this is an excellent place for an after-babysitting drink or two.

And then I went back to London for the weekend! It was my birthday party of (one of) my best friend(s) and a chance to see my family as well. London actually seemed cheap after Paris, although I've completely lost any sense of how much money it's normal to spend on a cup of tea and some cake/ a night out. At the party, we had delicious food and drink at someone else's expense, lots of people from university were there. A few people made speeches in her honour, if I had been brave enough I simply would have said "I've travelled over a hundred miles for this girl's birthday party because I have never met anyone who makes me laugh so much". Apart from the hundred miles bit, I'm sure I wouldn't have been the only person in the room to think that. What can I say? I love my friends. I was reminded of the infuriating, fascinating, hilarious, supportive, transient community I was a part of for my first two years at Warwick. Home is where my friends are, and they keep getting more and more displaced. I'm lucky in that I haven't been too homesick while in Paris, but seeing so many of them was a huge rush of nostalgia, lovely and sad.

And next morning, a walk in the woods with Mum & Bethany. My sister loves photography too! Although for her, it's not the apotheosis of her extremely limited creative skills as it is with me, she's actually an artist.

My shadow over crocuses, in a field near to my family's house/home.

I have a friend who lives near the Eiffel tower, I was a bit early for a soirée (ha!) at hers last week so I wandered around and attempted an interesting take on the tower, along with hundreds of other tourists. It reminds me of the best photo I've ever taken, that one was greyscale with a flash of yellow as well. While I was there, I overheard one American guy saying loudly to his friends "Oh my God, doesn't it make you want to waterslide down it?!" to which my answer would be - NO OF COURSE NOT YOU FUCKING IDIOT. Ahem.

Last of all, my friend Dhruvni came to stay with me for a week. The weather was sunny all week, and we had fun. To commemorate her stay, here is a picture of her sitting on the butte (hill) of the Parc de Buttes Chaumont, enjoying her new favourite vice. Because if there's one thing cooler than smoking, it's smoking two cigarettes at once!

She left yesterday, leaving behind only wilted roses, baked beans and a vague haze of Vogue Menthols. Ma vie est pleine de bonnes choses, j'ai de la chance.

Chartres

2011-03-19T09:29:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the photos I took in Chartres. It's a pretty little medieval town, about 80km south of Paris, just on the edge of the Loire Valley. Tiffany and I took a spontaneous day trip there on the last day of the February holidays, which turned out to be an excellent idea.

It was so quiet when we first got there. It felt like the place had been deserted. As soon as I said this to Tiffany, I realised how silly that was; it's Paris that is the exception for constantly buzzing with a million people for about 22 hours per day. Chartres was just a small town on a Friday morning.

We went to see the cathedral, which is famous (at least, I'd heard of it before I got there) for its stained glass windows, which I'm told are the best preserved medieval stained glass in the world. They certainly were beautiful, as was the cathedral itself. I felt I was in a tall cave with ornamental stalagmites, with beaten sheets of jewels for windows.

We saw pretty streets like this.

Dog out of a window.

This all happened weeks ago but I didn't want to waste the photos.

Over-

2011-03-05T09:08:00.000-08:00

Children, queues, cartoons, junk food, piped music, souvenirs everywhere, annoying English teenagers shoving into each other in the aforementioned queues... yes readers, I went to Disneyland Paris. It wasn't really my thing, but my sister wanted to go while she was visiting me, and my German flatmate Sandra who works at the hotel there let us in for free, which saved us a cool 80 euros, so vielen Dank Sandra.

It was very, very strange. I felt like I'd eaten 56 blue Smarties in one sitting and spent the first two hours just buzzing with the visual over-stimulation of it all. It must be what the real world is like to people on LSD, or perhaps just how children see everything. Everything was over-designed; simultaneously minutely realised and totally inauthentic. Under a freezing blue sky, we saw ponds with piped waves to make the water lap against the shore like they were huge, tranquil lakes; a fake Colorado-desert style rock formation that towered fifty metres into the air; a cartoonish version of a jungle clearing complete with Landrover, a cartoonish version of a German castle, a cartoonish version of a frontier-era saloon bar. Everywhere were structures that with slightly weaker contact lenses would have almost looked like what they were representing. No, not representing, I think, but embodying, in an alternate Disney universe, for example - a Southern mansion with verandah, an African tribal hut, a Mark Twain-era steamer. And the hotel! A confection of pale pink clapboard, fairy lights, turrets and cute wooden balconies, like the whims of a 5 year old, realised by a billionaire architect. It could have almost been pretty, but like everything to do with Disney, it just tried so hard to force a desired reaction from a viewer that it failed in its aim.

Disneyland is like a futuristic Earth-themed amusement park. I imagined I was in year 5607, on the planet of an advanced alien civilization for whom Earth was the home of many long-dead cultures and societies, only now good for providing decorative inspiration. It is the least French cultural space I've been in whilst in France, I felt like I was in America. At the end of a long day, we exited the park by walking down Main Street, its booming marching music bidding us farewell, its fake barbershop and fake ice-cream shop and fake theatre lit up with thousands of too-bright fairy lights. Everywhere, there was piped music. It was relentless! I have never understood the appeal of Disney. Obviously the place is for children, and I liked theme parks when I was a child. But that was because of the rides! I don't think I ever would have been into that saccharine ideal of happiness, no doubt because Mum never really liked Disney either and trips to the cinema to see the films were never a part of my childhood. Oh well. I have heard that for those who did see the films, they feel the same way about Disney now as they did when they first saw them. Lacking this emotional connection, I just find it saccharine, and moralistic, and verging on creepy.

Sorry, Bethany.

Pretentious whining aside, the rides were good! Especially Space Mountain. And the Indiana Jones one. We screamed like children and bought photos of ourselves on Space Mountain pulling stupid faces. I had fun.

And I did take photos. Curly trees; sunset from Space Mountain; shadows through bamboo.

Snapshots of odd details from the most over-designed playground in Europe.

Magic city

2011-03-01T14:32:00.000-08:00

The lights almost always go out on metros on lines 6 and 2 as they pull into Nation. The carriage goes dark for several seconds, it's enjoyably creepy.

Verlan is a form of slang created by inverting the first and last consonants of a word. I can't possibly describe the effect on a French speaker of hearing someone say teuf instead of fete, or keum instead of mec, but it's the language of the banlieue that has slowly gone mainstream to the point where pretty much everyone under 30 can get away with meuf. I think. Like I said, it would take me years to really get the tone of language being spoken, as opposed to thinking vaguely "Aah, teuf, that's the verlan way of saying fete". I have a huge urge to use it myself, even though as a white English girl I'd sound utterly, utterly ridiculous. Got a text from Alice today saying "Safe keum" which I thought was pretty jokes; I guess it's another thing I can only use around French-speaking English speakers. It's interesting though; the closest thing I can compare it to in English is cutting edge Cockney rhyming slang.

Once I finish my job here, I can legally, as a European citizen, sign onto the dole.

It's going to be 12 degrees and sunny tomorrow!

I amused myself for ages this morning trying to get my students to pronounce "hungry" and "angry" different. It just comes out as "ahngree" each time.

Daffodils and mint are planted on the roof in pots, and I found some more pots on the street yesterday that someone had thrown out. I am planting seeds on our building's odd flat roof to make a little garden, hopefully soon there will be herbs, flowers, chairs and maybe even a little tree...

Spring is coming! Purple and yellow crocuses poke through a lawn in Pere Lachaise cemetery, taken about a week ago.

Les trucs classiques

2011-02-25T14:08:00.000-08:00

I've just got in from a tiring but fun day trip to Chartres, where Tiffany and I saw a beautiful cathedral, wandered lovely medieval streets, and I was reminded of the existence of France outside Paris. I would say the only Parisian traits I possess are a love of sushi, an addiction to thé vert à la menthe and a slight sense of pity towards anyone unfortunate enough not to live here. Of course, my love of the city is in itself an a foreigner's trait; a true Parisian is impressed by nothing. LOL FOREVER at this sticker I saw the other day:

Rien meaning "nothing".

Rambling aside, I want to document the five days I spent with my family, because as usual when I have visitors, I end up going to the more touristy sites that I might otherwise avoid. I don't intend to bore you with shots of the Arc de Triomphe, but I still think the weekend yielded some nice photos.

On Sunday we went to the Marché des Oiseaux near to the Notre Dame. In one cage there were two birds who looked like they'd been painted with acrylics, tastefully placed among six albino birds. Birds are extremely hard to photograph, but after some editing here is the best picture:

Gorgeous! Apart from the Bird Market, we did a lot of classic things - we climbed the Arc de Triomphe, went inside the Notre Dame, wandered around the Latin Quarter and ate a lot of steak. Here's another view of Paris I love - a jumble of roofs and chimneys.

The Notre Dame, that"Gothic masterpiece whose style of architecture radiated out like a rose across the whole of Europe" (badly paraphrased Julian Barnes - I can't find the original quote). I don't know much about architecture, but it strikes me every time I see this building that churches all across the continent, from tiny chapels in rural Slovenia (or wherever), to the church down the road where my cousin was baptised, have been influenced by a style of architecture of which the Notre Dame is the earliest coherent example. How can I say anything original about this structure? The pinhole effect makes it look pretty.

We wandered up the quai, past the bouquinistes and into the Latin Quarter for some lunch. I think my family are pretty pleased that I'm in Paris for my Year Abroad, to be honest. Not sure that visiting me in rural isolation would have had the same effect.

To the left, the quai next to the Notre Dame, and to the right, a smile from my sister, also taking a photograph. She's asked to do a guest blog about her holiday here, so stay tuned! I also took a lot of nice photos in Chartres, which I'll post soon, and I'm planning some kind of comment on the surreal day Bet and I spent at Disneyland.

As always, if you do read, please leave a comment. I'm getting a pleasing number of page views, but it's always nice to be appreciated. And if you randomly found this on Facebook and are embarrassed about stalking me - don't be! Seriously, that's why I put it there.

It's been a long day, and this blog post could not have been created without the help of MINT TEA in my lovely new cup and saucer. Mmm.... bliss.

Bon nuit tout le monde.

Eden.

Les arbres se couvrent des feuilles

2011-02-17T11:00:00.000-08:00

The stages this week went so well! I know I bitched about the students a little on Monday, but luckily, because the stages are voluntary, the students with terrible levels of English and no enthusiasm didn't turn up after Monday, and I was only left with the good ones. I can honestly say that after leaving the school at lunchtime today, I seriously thought about training to be a teacher. Only for about five minutes, of course, I don't really want to spend my life cajoling kids into conjugating avoir (or maybe reading Of Mice and Men with GCSE students every year until I retire). But there is something very rewarding about building a rapport with a class, and having them leave a lesson with some skill, some knowledge, some understanding that they didn't enter it with. It helps that a foreign language is an academic subject, but also a practical skill, as well as a conduit for things that they are already interested in. By which I mean the lyrics to "Billionaire". I planned the whole week myself, which meant I only had to teach what I was interested in.

Highlights of this week:

Introducing my students (half of whom are training to be electricians) to the poetry of Philip Larkin and THEY WERE INTO IT!!! I did The Trees ("it is a beautiful poem") and This Be the Verse ("I think it is funny... and provocative"). They all grasped the meaning of "They fuck you up, your mum and dad", even if finding a French translation was nearly impossible.

The Post-It Note game, where you have to stick a Post-It note with the name of an unknown celebrity onto your forehead, and ask questions about them to try and guess who they are. We had a 17 year old studious Algerian guy with "Lady Gaga" on his forehead, and a stoner guy in a Slipknot T-shirt guessing "Amy Winehouse".

Discussing the differences between the British and French education systems. To summarise, the French system is rigorous, incredibly centralised and theoretical, and practically everyone, from trainee electricians and hairdressers to future accountants and lawyers and teachers, does a year of Philosophy in Terminale. I happen to think that is amazing and idealistic and wonderful, but not all of them agree.
An activity where they had to produce a translation of some song lyrics, and where Slipknot Guy translated a heavy metal track called "Adoration for No One" by Gojira. I put the English version on the projector and he had to read out his translation in French; it was unexpectedly hilarious (to me) to hear a mild mannered 19 year old metalhead read out (in French) to his class such lyrics as:

   "The stones and dust bite hostile
   Devours flesh and bone
   The weakest lost in hatred
   Consequence is upon my door"

   The lyrics really were terrible - "The wolves are back and crave to kill" was another gem.

After covering the basics of the tuition fees situation in the UK, I got them to research various arguments on the topic and stage a mock debate whereby one side supported the rise in fees and the other didn't. Those who did support it used their limited English to insist "But err... good job mean... you can... err.. pay ze money for ze university, it is not a problem" and it really didn't sound much different in tone or sentiment to hearing the Tories defend the proposals. Yeah, take that, Clegg. Of course, when I asked their actual opinions on the subject, they were as socialist as I expected (paying?! for university?!) I'd like to think all the Philosophy lessons have given them an idealistic view of the value of education, but again, that could well be my own projection.

The student who said he didn't want to change groups because he didn't think he'd find "une autre prof qui est aussi sympa que vous" (another teacher as nice as you). And after hearing today that there was no class tomorrow, I distinctly heard "ah, c'est dommage!"
When the favourite books of the class turned out to be 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Agatha Christies' mystery novels and Lord of the Flies. I want this class all the time!

It was a good week.

After finishing work today I walked around the Parc des Buttes Chaumont again, and found a waterfall which tumbled into a shady cave. It was thundering, if artificial. It got me musing on baptism pools and being reborn, coming back to Paris, Heroclitus, stepping into the same river twice, a city in bloom, une jeune fille en fleurs... but that would better suit an entry filled with pretty flower photos, I think.

Maybe I could photograph the purple primrose I bought on the way home, which is currently sitting prettily on my desk. It's well-watered, but needs a bigger pot. No one in Paris has enough living space.

The title is the French translation of the first line of "The Trees", which I will quote here because I love it and because it's apt.

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf,

Like something almost being said;

The recent buds relax and spread,

Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again

While we grow old? No, they die too,

Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain.

But still the unresting castles thresh

In fullgrown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Paris, je t'aime!

2011-02-13T11:27:00.000-08:00

Some thoughts:

My French-speaking English friends and I have a habit of using French words in conversation quite unconsciously, when we are using words that are far more concerned with our French than our English lives. Sentences like "I love working in a lycée, there were grèves for pretty much the whole of November", or texts from Alice about "you should have come to the apéro, it was super sympa", or hearing that someone lives in a colocation in the dix-neuvième arrondissement. I've found myself talking about élèves (students) and profs (teachers) while in English. But they are different - a student is, to me, a university student, probably in Britain. An élève is one of the 18 year old multiethnic kids who I attempt to cajole into telling me about their holidays in English. Similarly, a teacher is a committed authority figure intent on handing out detentions for untucked shirts; a prof bitches with me about the awfulness of the élèves and is outraged they might have to work until age 62.

Is this an interesting dialect born of cross-linguistic fertilization, or does speaking this way just make us sound like Del Boy?

Questions, questions.

I know it would seem pretentious if we did it anywhere else but Paris, but I find it quite charming. Last night I was speaking English and suddenly used the word rue instead of street, no doubt because there was a strong image in my head of the street I was talking about, which I always think of as Rue de Whatever. This happens occasionally, and I imagine it will happen more and more the longer I live here.

I made people laugh in French last night! Multiple times! It is coming, it is coming. In a strange way, speaking and thinking in French is harder than I thought it would be, and I'm always interested in how I must come across to a native French speaker. While I can express myself fine most of the time, I'm aware that my phrasing and choice of idiom must sound foreign, and that I still have an English accent. All accents and dialects give context to what someone is saying, and I'm conscious that, for example, the English teachers at my school have perfect RP accents which can't be connected to any actual location. I find it interesting how language is both personal and communal, the tool you use to think your most personal thoughts is also a huge collaborative project with strongly embedded ideas, values and judgements. Language is first and foremost a way of thinking, and I still think in English.

So, after a soirée last night in La Défense, this afternoon I went for a stroll around the Parc Floral, listening to The Gaslight Anthem and seeking out signs of Spring.

But most impressive of all were these PEACOCKS WANDERING AROUND RANDOMLY. I've no idea why, I didn't know there were peacocks living in the park. There were four, but it was this alpha male who kept showing his plumage. I took so many photos.

In this one he is rattling his plumage at a nearby pigeon, I guess just to prove that he is alpha male of the group. Look how sad and small the pigeon looks next to the peacock!

I then experimented with some different modes on my camera, to see what would best show off the extraordinary colours. First is pinhole, which, as ever, makes a photo look washed-out but nostalgic.

Pop art! An almost scary neon tinge to the eyes.

And the other three peacocks, just chilling.

Well, it's Valentine's Day tomorrow, and as indifferent as that holiday leaves me whether I'm single or not, perhaps it is time to declare something. Je suis amoureuse de cette ville, de cette langue, et de ma vie ici aussi. I have no complaints; living in Paris is... for me, the closest thing to contentment that I think I have any right to expect from life. I wake up, there are things to see and do, I rarely feel sad. I like the friends I've made here, I like having free time to explore the city, to take photos, to read, I like having a job, I like feeling that my French is improving every day, I like going to parties with French people, I like the multiculturalism of it all, it's not boring. Paris is fascinating and beautiful.

More Marais

2011-02-10T01:43:00.000-08:00

It's taken me a while to get around to writing this, but last Wednesday I went to the Photos Femmes Féminisme exhibition, which was in a small hotel particulier in the Marais. I was at a loose end following the cancellation of my afternoon lessons, so texted Sarah seeing if she felt like doing something; what followed was a happy afternoon of excellent coffee in my new favourite café in the Marais, visiting the exhibition, discussing feminism and other things of importance, and then wandering the streets before heading back to the café and reading together in companionable solitude. Paris, je t'aime.

The exhibition was eclectic and brillliant. There were lots of and lots of photo portraits of accomplished women throughout the 19th and 20th centuries; not all of them were particularly involved with the feminist movement, it was just nice to see a rebuff to that old misogynist argument about women not having acheived anything throughout the history of humankind. In the spirit of that, I took a self-portrait of my own. It's a shadow, cause, you know, it's like, symbolic? Of... how I haven't acheived anything yet. Or something. I don't really know why I took it.

What followed were photos, videos, posters and memorabilia from the French feminist movement of the 70's. I'd forgotten how much I love learning about the women's movement. Even including the misguided who don't see feminism's continuing relevance, surely we can all agree that the history of womens' liberation is inspiring, powerful, and just generally really fucking cool. Part of me wishes I could have been there in the 70s; organising marches and consciousness-raising groups, singing in the streets with the MLF (mouvement pour la liberation des femmes). But then another part of me remembers how much worse it was then, and how much inequality it took to spark that anger, and I think that perhaps I'm idealising that time. But in any case, I feel so proud of how much these women struggled against, and it makes me want to be a worthy heir of the movement.

I took a few photos of some of my favourite posters and photos, with translations underneath.

International march of women for freedom of maternity: freely available and free contraception and abortion.

I love the pregnant Statue of Liberty, excellent concept.

Badges.

THE RIGHT TO WORK. Housewives: register at the ANPE.

Education without discrimination.

We condemn nationalism, ethnic purification, and the use of the female body as political territory.

La lutte continue.

Even

2011-02-05T01:28:00.000-08:00

in January, this has to be one of the most beguiling views on the planet. I love the colour scheme; greys, greens and yellow stone.

Belleville

2011-02-02T10:13:00.000-08:00

On Sundays I like to take my backpack, my guide to Paris, my iPod, and of course my camera to visit a quartier I haven't seen before. This week I went to Belleville.

I got off at Belleville metro and walked up Rue de Belleville, which is a steep hill. The area is very multicultural, a bit down at heel, but there was lots to see and photograph.

The blue sky tempted me out of the house.

Graffiti.

"One must distrust words".

Close up.

Man in hat.

Eventually I came to Belleville Park, which was nice enough. It's on a hill, so is really just a series of terraces.

Exploding blossom.

Light through bamboo.

Despite this shop being named after the two most French words in existence, it was actually a Chinese bakery. Belleville has a huge Chinese population. I bought myself two little cakes from here and went home to eat them with a cup of tea.

And last of all, a passing cat in the park.

I find solitary Sundays very relaxing.

Expo / Shakespeare & Co

2011-01-30T11:46:00.000-08:00

Peurs sur la ville: An exhibition of urban violence in Paris, from the Occupation, to May 68, to burning cars in the banlieues. It culminated in a roomful of imagined photographs, where scenes of urban warfare in Belfast, Beirut and Sarajevo were transposed onto Parisian street scenes. Tanks in front of the Arc de Triomphe, dead soldiers in front of the Trocadéro, the Montparnasse Tower exploding. A very disturbing collection.

I wouldn't say this was my favourite bookshop, but it may well become it. I spent two hours curled up in an armchair reading a book full of fascinating observations on the French, from an English writer. I'd really recommend buying it, the name is "The Secret Life of France", by Lucy Wadham. The genre is packed, yet this was as hilariously anecdotal as any English satirist, and as theoretical as any French textbook.

I really intend to write some more myself on the differences between these two cultures, but for now I'll leave a set of opposites that seem to me to be generally true.

Protestant/Catholic

Happiness/Pleasure

Hard work as a virtue/Hard work as a necessary evil

Realistic/Idealistic

Music/ Art

Fuel/Flavour

Pragmatic/Theoretical

Individualistic/Solidarité

Irony/Charm

Flowers and trees.

2011-01-23T12:47:00.001-08:00

Proud of this photo.

A grey Sunday afternoon in the Parc Floral de Vincennes.

Le Marais: Part 1

2011-01-20T02:01:00.000-08:00

I work in the Marais. It's sad how easily you can get accustomed to the most interesting circumstances, and often when I'm trudging up the Rue de Poitou at 7.55am in the darkness I don't exactly appreciate how incredibly lucky I am to work in this particular area of Paris. So yesterday after work I wandered around the area taking photos like the perpetual tourist I am. It was sunny and I wandered around listening to Carla Bruni (I cannot believe this woman is married to the President)... I love living here.

The Marais is narrow, winding streets and buildings of honey-coloured stone. It has lots of hotels particuliers, which were built as homes for aristocrats in the 16th and 17th centuries. They are typically like small mansions with large interior courtyards, which now house museum or art collections. The Marais also has a large Jewish community centred on the Rue de Rosiers, and it's also the gay quarter of Paris. The Marais is full of gay bars, falafel vendors, boutique clothing stores, tiny workshops and small warehouses, pretty cafés, synagogues, wrought-iron balconies, winding streets and hidden squares.

A selection of photos; mostly pretty buildings and other accidental glimpses of street life.

Un beau chat dans un jardin.

"Little pleasures" (or to be more precises, "happinesses").

Close up of the previous photo; this statue is surrounded by rose bushes and should look
beautiful come summer.

Woman in café

This weekend I'm going to my first social occasion without any other anglophones. My French friend Estelle is having a little dinner party chez elle, and has invited some others over partly, I think, because I kept saying how much I wanted to meet some actual Parisians seeing as I live in Paris (as opposed to the Brits and Americans I socialise with otherwise). It's pretty terrible that it's taken me four months to get here, but I'm looking forward to it. This doesn't feel like a year out from my life. Sometimes I feel like returning to Warwick will be the 8 month sabbatical from where I really should be, which is here, in this magnificent city.

Bisous!

Bruxelles

2011-01-13T02:01:00.000-08:00

This weekend I went to Brussels to stay with my friend Isabelle and her family.

We saw the old part of town and I took photos of it with my pinhole camera. Très belle!

Isabelle went riding and I wandered around chatting to these horses.

We visited the EU district. Here is two bright umbrellas near to the Council building.

This is the Cinquantenaire arch, a monument to Belgian national unity. With a van selling waffles in front of it!

More waffles. I'm not a big fan.

Here is the national symbol of Belgium which is........ wait for it........ a small boy peeing. There is a TINY statue of this, called the Mannekin Pis, and the souvenir shops around are filled with trinkets based on this bizarre image. The funniest one I saw was a life size bronze statue of the Mannekin Pis, for a mere 50 euros. Quite who this is meant to appeal to is beyond me - Belgian nationalists? Extreme souvenir collectors?

A good time was had by all. I think.

I would like to thank Isabelle's family for their hospitality, not least two lovely dinners. On the first night I had my first galette. It's a puff-pastry pie filled with almond paste that is traditional to eat during January for Epiphany. I had a vague idea of what it was before coming to France, but had never eaten one before. Baked inside the pie is a fève - the word literally means "broad bean" but it is more often now a small trinket or figurine. Our galette was Narnia-themed, which I found quite adorable. There was a tiny Reepicheep baked inside! I kept it, but unfortunately I think it fell out of my pocked and I can't find it anymore. Anyway, the person who finds the fève in their slice of galette gets to wear a paper crown and be the King or Queen for the rest of the evening. I'm pretty sure the tradition has its roots in Saturnalia, the Roman festival during which servants and masters swapped roles for a limited amount of time, and one of the servants became the Lord of Misrule (this is also the plot of Twelfth Night, which also refers to the 6th January - the 12th night after Christmas and official end of the festivities).

When I returned to Paris, there was discarded Christmas trees all over the streets. I have started two new babysitting jobs, and the incongruous pines on the streets of Vincennes particularly delighted the 3 year old Victor that I escorted to nursery on Monday.

And as for the city? It's not Spring, it's not even nearly Spring, but at least the snows are over. It's exciting to think that deep in the branches of trees, and deep in the soil of flowerbeds all over the city lie the potential for blossom. In a few weeks time Paris will burst into flower - my camera can't wait.

A tout ailleurs

This post is long comme un jour sans pain*

2010-12-05T11:55:00.000-08:00

Paris is freezing, and as such, je m'habille comme un oignon (I am dressed like an onion). By which I mean I've gone for a spherical beige outfit. Not really. It's a new phrase that my language partner Estelle taught me, which describes the state of being bundled up in hundreds of layers in an attempt to alleviate the cold.

So.

Lots of things have happened. Including the discovery of a "pinhole" function on my camera, which renders photos all nostalgic looking, regardless of the content or context. But look how pretty it makes the Sacre Coeur! I took this a couple of weeks ago.

I was walking to the Metro Station last night, and this peeked at me from between two rows of buildings. I hadn't realised it was so near. I love Montmartre.

Other events of interest...

I learnt how to make espresso at home!

Tiffany drinking said espresso in our kitchen.

This is a sticker which says "In French, please!", stuck onto an advert whose slogan is in English. I'm inclined to agree. So many adverts have random English slogans ("Are you Ready?" "Hide yourself", "I love to Party") which is just a lazy way of making them seem edgy and interesting.

Mint tea for five, poured from a beautiful teapot. Paris = form over function (and paying through the nose for it)

Christmas tree in front of the Notre Dame.

After-school walk around the Marais.

And this weekend I went shopping for the first time in Paris. I went to a few vintage shops and bought a bag and jumper, and then today I found some super-cheap jewellery shops.

10 Euro vintage bag. I am very pleased with this.

These were two euros!!!

*This post is as long as a day without bread. Another new French expression.

Pendaison de cremaillere.

2010-11-14T05:22:00.000-08:00

Paris' flaming trees are slowly being doused in an endless drizzle of rain; grey cloud banks cover the sky. Paris is beautiful in every colour but less than charming in this stormy mood. Saying that, the rain has abated for today, so I might turn my errand-running into a little walk. Sadly my memory card is stuck inside my computer, but a friend has promised to lend me a new one so come Tuesday, there will be more photos.

In the past week, I went to the theatre on Sunday to see Le Diner des Cons, which was very funny. Perhaps not as side-splitting as the Frenchies around me seemed to find it, but entertaining nonetheless. It was such a nice atmosphere; to be in a gorgeous theatre on a Sunday afternoon; high up and level to the vast chandelier, surrounded by people laughing in red velvet seats. Le Diner des Cons is known in English as "The Dinner of Idiots" and it's a farce based on the premise of a dinner where every guest brings along an "idiot" for entertainment value. Marrant.

Hmm, aside from that, the most interesting place I have visited this week was the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. Everyone says how lovely it is, and I wanted to see for myself. It is on the site of a former quarry, hence all of the hills (buttes is hills or heights).

It has a lake, two waterfalls, statues, and a big island with a belvedere on it (pictures to follow because clearly no one knows what a belvedere is without seeing it).

Belvedere on a hill

Trees with a statue of Pan, the Greek god of nature.

Pan in a classic Facebook pose.

Leaves, light and water.

Last night I went to a party with people from all over Europe - French, English, German, Italian, Colombian and Spanish. One girl I was talking to came from Palermo, city of le mer et le Mafia. I keep meeting hundreds of new people, and often never see them again after an evening's conversation. It is very strange. No doubt a time will come in my life when I very rarely meet new people, but I can't help but think at the moment it would be compensated for by being around the friends I have already. That's a fancy way of saying I feel a bit homesick. Oh well.

I attempted to speak and understand some German last night, and it was terrible! I can't believe I got the best mark in my school and now remember almost nothing of it.

In any case.

Auf wiedersehen, au revoir & arriverderci.

Il pleut des cordes

2010-11-07T05:10:00.000-08:00

It has been raining all weekend. I learnt a new idiom to help me out with describing this - "Il pleut des cordes", which means literally "It's raining ropes". It will hopefully be more help than the supposed English idiom of "It's raining cats and dogs, which I have never heard used outside of English language textbooks.

Anyway, I spent this weekend... pottering around house. I found an old coffee table in the garage, which is full of old furniture people don't want, and decided to rearrange my room. Et voilà.

Newly painted furniture and bedside lamp.

New (old) coffee table, with coffee and computer.

The view from my door, looking inwards.

My sofa bed.

My American penpal is coming to visit in less than three weeks!!! It's hard to believe that the sender of emails, - some one line long, some going on for paragraphs, some arriving within hours, others taking weeks - is going to appear in my life as a real person. We've only spoken on Skype once, and I saw a blurry picture of her about a year ago, but there's no way I could recognise her. But... I love showing off Paris. I feel proud, as if I have some claim over the city. I plan to be a tourguide par excellence.

A bientot.

Eden.

Automne à Vincennes et à Paris

2010-11-03T15:03:00.000-07:00

Paris is on fire. The trees are red, and yellow, and orange, and maroon.

We went to the Parc Floral in Vincennes:

We went to the Pere Lachaise cemetery, although couldn't find Oscar Wilde's grave:

We went to a poetry reading at Shakespeare & Co

Alice impressed up by playing Mozart and Beethoven from memory

Life continues as usual. I had visitors over the Toussaint half-term holiday, but it's back to work tomorrow. I've got classes in 9 hours, and I haven't finished planning them yet, so there's no more time to write.

Soft shock

2010-10-21T03:53:00.000-07:00

My timetable for this week so far has been:

Monday - Nothing

Tuesday - 8am - 10am

Wednesday 10am - 12pm

Thursday - Nothing

Friday - ???

I have two hours of classes scheduled for tomorrow, where I have to lead groups of final year students in conversation practice. However, I doubt anyone will turn up. Every day this week the entrance to the school has been blocked by wheelie bins, although a second entrance about five metres to the left renders the blockage rather symbolic. As far as I can see, a few students are hanging around outside the entrance next to the "STUDENTS ON STRIKE" banner, but most of them seem to have stayed at home. This is compounded by the fact that as half-term draws nearer, fewer students attend lessons.

It's a culture shock, to say the least.

Talking to my responsable (who I will subsequently refer to as Dave) about the political and education system in France this morning, I asked whether there was any consequences for students choosing not to attend classes. I should point out that this is in a lycée, where the students are aged between 15 and 21. Schooling is compulsory until age 18. There are no consequences, because

1. Most of the teachers support the strikes.

2. Half of the teachers are on strike anyway.

3. There's no register taken.

4. There are no detentions.

Detentions aren't run because (duh!) the teachers aren't interested in staying after school to run them. Teachers have 18 hours per week of timetabled lessons, although class preparation obviously takes longer than that.

Coming from a school where an untucked shirt could results in a detention, this was obviously a shock to me. My school had uniforms, playing fields, tennis courts, PE, music, art, technology, sports clubs, pictures on the walls, assemblies, PSHE lessons, common rooms, careers advice, an identifiable ethos implemented by the senior staff, school plays, productions, an orchestra, a school hall and religious education. The school I am working at now has none of the above, and that is typical. It is a building with numbered rooms, white walls and a canteen. The staff are appointed by the Ministry of Education.

The system is fairer here. I doubt any of my students will retain either allegiance or resentment towards their secondary school, unlike at home. Beyond the fact that certain schools have a different atmosphere depending on their catchment areas, there is no diversity in the state education system. I don't know whether it's better or worse, it's just different.

France is the country I know best after my own, but I am still experiencing a lot of culture shock. The people seem to be threatening to take down the government thanks to the raising of the retirement age to 62 (and full benefits until 67). I'm not entirely sure what's going on at home, but I don't think there'll be a million person march through London despite the fact Gideon Osborne has just driven a stake through the heart of our welfare system.

Essentially, I marvel at the socialist munificence of this country at least twice a day (rent subsidised to the tune of 200 euros/month by the French government, my Navigo pass half reimbursed by the school, a full-time salary for 12 hours per week work on top of an ERASMUS grant, free museum entry, wonderfully maintained parks and libraries, free cultural events, a metro that runs for 21 hours per day). But all I keep hearing is about how Sarkozy is transforming France into a neoliberal hellhole.

It's all very strange.

A bientot

Ten ten ten

2010-10-10T10:53:00.000-07:00

It's been a nice weekend, again. I was trying to work out just now how long I have actually been in Paris. I couldn't work out if it was two or three weeks; turns out it has only been 10 days. It feels like much longer.

So, my five day weekend (I only start full-time this coming week) has been blessed with amazing weather. Yesterday it was 27 degrees and I was walking around in a dress sans tights. I was actually getting burnt whilst sitting on the roof on Thursday afternoon. Let's see, on Friday I wandered over to the Parc Floral with my flatmate which was really nice. She invited me to a party in the evening, which was in one of the coolest apartments I've seen so far; all exposed piping, modern art and bright painted walls. I met a few other assistants and ULIP students there; unfortunately nearly all of my socialising so far has been in English, but I had a great time nonetheless. On Saturday I wandered around the floral park which was gorgeous in the autumn sunlight. I would taken so many photos but GAH! my camera has broken.

On Saturday night I met up with a fellow Warwick student, Sarah. I think blogging etiquette involves me linking to her (very interesting) blog; she is at http://sarahparis365.tumblr.com/, and posting a photo a day for her year in Paris. We had a few glasses of wine and a good chat before deciding we really wanted some crème brulée. Luckily she had her camera with her so I can post here at least one photo of the evening. Me with a creme brulee the size of my FACE.

Seriously, I couldn't even finish it. It was very nice though. After that, we tried to meet up with some fellow assistants who were on a night out on the Grands Boulevards, but it turned into a bit of a wild goose chase. After a drink with a few other assistants/random people I didn't know, we headed home. It was good to get out, nonetheless.

To borrow a topic from Sarah, one of the negative things about this city (aside from the dogshit on the streets and obscenely high price of coffee) is the amount of sexual harassment. I've been here 10 days and already been harassed more times than I can remember. This has involved being yelled at from moving cars, but mainly random guys on the metro and on the street just come up to me and hassle me for a bit. It is totally fucking annoying, and it always in happens the same way. Some guy will come up to me and say "Ca va?", which is just on the boundary of "interactions it is OK to have with strangers". So I can't win - if I reply politely, they take it as an invitation to start talking, which I obviously don't want. When I ignore them, they become aggressive.

Today on the metro some guy just asked me "Can I talk to you?" to which I replied simply "Non". He then asked me why not, and I was only saved further annoyance by the arrival of the next train. Had this been late at night, and were I on my own, I would have been genuinely scared about my safety. As it was, I felt pretty comfortable giving him my most pissed-off glare and dismissive "Non". Anyway.

This behaviour is not a desire to interact with a girl, and even if it was, their desire to do that does not trump my obvious desire to be left alone, not to mention my right to feel safe whilst walking around. The chances that a woman of 20 would respond positively to a creepy 50 year old introducing himself by saying "T'es belle" are non-existent, and if they were truly just trying their luck, they would back off as soon as I made I clear I didn't want to talk to them. I see it more as a petty display of arrogance from men who, knowing they can't have something, decide instead to try and destroy it. Destroy is too strong a word, of course, but there is an element of trying to bring me down, ruin my day, make my time in this city just a little bit less enjoyable - because I exist, am presumably desirable (without wishing to be conceited - this goes for any woman between the ages of 15 and 50) and won't interact with them.

They are kids who, not being able to build a sandcastle themselves, decide to kick down somebody else's. That's a bit of a tortured metaphor I know, but it's the best way I can think to describe it. Of course, the idea that random men in this city see me as part of the landscape, to be provoked as they see fit without any kind of consequence, is infuriating. It's also a display of social dominance - they can afford to annoy me without the slightest chance of a repercussion, when they wouldn't dream of doing the same with a man, unless perhaps one who looked particularly vulnerable. I think the men who do it are those who feel weak and powerless in some way, and who like reminding themselves that no matter how powerless they feel, there is always someone around them with less power (in certain situations). Or maybe they are just entitled arseholes. Oh well.

Oops, I was definitely going to keep the feminist theory separate from my Paris tales.

The rest of Paris is wonderful, though. Especially in this weather (autumn leaves falling with a background of bright blue sky; zero clouds but a cool breeze), I can't get over the beauty of the city. There is something aesthetically pleasing at every corner; a beautiful building with wrought iron balconies; a fountain; a boulangerie with glossy patisseries arranged like artwork in the window. I wish so much my camera hadn't broken, or I would be posting lots of photos on here as well. I intend to get it fixed as soon as possible, though.

Oh, last thing - I have an interview tomorrow with a company called Babyspeaking. As far as I can see, it's an English-language babysitting service that also offers some tutoring for older children. The pay is pretty good, and it seems like you can choose your hours, so if I get it, I can fit the job around working at the lycée as well.

Wish me luck!

Books and the Cité

2010-10-07T14:18:00.000-07:00

There are no photos for today, because sadly I left my memory card in my computer.

Today I finished "Norwegian Wood" whilst sitting on the roof of my building. Then I went into the city and wandered down to Shakespeare & Co. I ended up hanging out with this guy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparrow_(American_poet)

J'adore cette ville/ I love this city.

Le Weekend

2010-10-05T11:55:00.000-07:00

The most eventful thing that has happened so far is the "Nuit Blanche" which took place in Paris on Saturday night. For those not in the know, La Nuit Blanche is a night dedicated to art and culture, where firstly large museums stay open until 1 or 2 in the morning, and are free for the night. Secondly, there are lots and lots of small exhibitions and installations dotted around the city. Some of them were in public places, like this one which was by the Pont d'Alma:

Some were hidden away inside buildings, like this giant rotating robot:

This was inside the courtyard of an old building somewhere in the Marais. I could give you the name of the artwork, or the artist, but really for me the interest wasn't the artworks themselves so much as the incongruency of seeing them at 4 in the morning, off a side street somewhere with hundreds of other people milling around.

Here's some more artworks that we saw - aside from the museums, which included everything from small galleries to the Louvre - all of the art on display veered towards the modern and surreal. I didn't "get" any of it, really, but I don't know much about art. Here's some more:

This was probably the most memorable. A room filled with hundreds of those plastic alarm clocks which were apparently all timed to go off at 7am. We didn't stick around to hear it, but the effect of having so many versions of the same object was quite disconcerting. Here is a picture without flash:

And with:

The Hotel-Dieu was covered in coloured lights. Each of them spelt out "Love difference" in about 20 different languages.

Sunday was a lazy day. I really wanted to try out the vélib, and go for a bike ride around the Bois de Vincennes, but the station wouldn't accept my debit card. For those not in the know, the vélib scheme is a public bicycle hire scheme available to anyone with a Navigo pass (vélib = vélo (bike) + liberté). Here is a picture of a cycle station with most of the bikes gone. As you can see, they are heavy, utilitarian things, all coloured beige. There are stations like this literally all over the city. After paying a small subscription fee (5 euros per week, or 30 euros per year), the bikes are then charged by the hour: the first half hour is free, then the second costs 1 euro, the third 1/2 hour costs 2 euros, the third costs 3, and any subsequent half-hours cost 4 each. The ascending charges are designed to keep the bikes in circulation, but seeing as there is a station nearly every 300m in Paris, it is easy to swap bicycles every half hour and thus pay nothing but the subscription fee.

Anyway, I sadly couldn't get it to work, so instead I decided to buy myself an apricot tart and sit on the roof of my building to do some reading. The weather this weekend was bizarrely warm for October.

Here is my book (Flaubert's Parrot), and the rest of the rooftop. It's a lovely place to sit.

Here are some more shots from the top of our building. I think it's most picturesque during twilight. I don't think I could ever get bored of this view.

I have Mondays off, and yesterday, again, I didn't do much. I ran a few errands and ended up walking to Bastille - a good few miles away. There are currently lots of posters up protesting the proposed increase in the retirement age. I know it's a cliché, but France's political system is very noticeably to the left of the British one, as shown by these posters below.

LONG LIVE THE STRIKE
They benefit
They get fat
They pollute
They lie to us
They exploit us
They "spoil us"
They give us nothing, they give in!
Striking is a tool of both defence and conquest.
It's a right!

Do not interfere with retirement at age 60!

The cartoon shows (I think) a working person telling a financier "Stock market money/a grant for retirement! Quickly!" (La Bourse referring both to the Paris Stock Market and a grant or bursary (source of funding))

This one says "Save retirement at age 60! Let's tax finance revenues!"

Although it seems crazy to me that people can protest having to retire at age 61, yeah let's tax some finance revenues.

Finally, here are some pictures of the Place de la Bastille.

Well, I had my first day teaching today, but that's a story for another day. I feel like it went pretty well. Beforehand I was terrified, but knowing that I just had to do it somehow stopped my worry. Sometimes it can seem there is a thick glass wall between what you imagine yourself doing and what you actually do, but, in my case, it seems like the nearer I get to the wall the more gauzy it appears, and when you get really close (like 3 seconds), it melts away. The secret is there is no barrier; this goes for everything from moving to a foreign city to jumping in front of a train. Or standing up in front of 15 French high school students saying "Hello, my name is Eden and I'm your English Assistant for this year..."

Oh, a little slapstick anecdote from this morning. I have a key to the staffroom that I hadn't used before today. As soon as I turned it in the lock, a really loud bell went off (obviously, of course, it was the school bell). In my confusion and nervousness, I thought I had managed to set off an alarm by turning the key the wrong way - Shona will know what I'm talking about here. Anyway, someone ran up to me and I started saying "Desolée, umm.... je sais pas ce qui se passe" and generally panicking like a mad person until realising what was actually happening. How embarrassing.

I'll leave you with one more classic Paris picture.

Premiers jours à Paris

2010-10-02T11:06:00.000-07:00

Bonjour mes petits and welcome to my blog. I've decided to keep a blog about my year in Paris, partly as as record for myself, and partly as way to keep people informed about my goings-on without having to write the same thing over and over again in Facebook messages! I'll also be putting up lots of photos of my time here.

So what to say about my first few days? I arrived on Tuesday and came immediately to my apartment to meet my new flatmates. Three of us are English, but there is also a German girl to ensure the flat isn't entirely anglophone. I really like the flat, and I like my room, which has bright yellow walls and a wooden floor - I've painted this blog the same colour.

Wednesday was spent waiting for a delivery, before heading out to explore the neighbourhood. In the evening I went to a bar in the 15ème to meet some other assistants, which was nice. There was a lot of swapping of similar information, but it's great to have made some contacts already.

On Thursday, I went to my school for the first time. It's a lycée (ages 15-18) in the Marais, which is a very central district of Paris - my responsable (mentor). It's kind of like a Parisian Soho; very gay, very bohemian, with lots of boutiques, chic cafés and Haussmanian architecture. The day was somewhat nerve-racking, as it dawned on me for the first time that I will be spending my time with people 2 years younger than me, but I am more akin to a teacher than a student in that environment. Before applying for the Year Abroad, I was certain I wanted to teacher older and not younger students as I thought it would be more interesting. Perhaps it will, but at least in a primary school I'd be unlikely to be mistaken for a fellow student...

My responsable is really nice, and I spent the day observing lessons, with a couple of small tasks. Firstly I had to read out a list of English words to help the students with their pronunciation, and then later in the day Dominique decided to walk out of the room and tell the students "This is Eden. I want you to ask her some questions about why she's here", and then there followed a five second silence where the students all stared at me, and I at them, before I said loudly "So, who has a question?" and thankfully, a girl asked me one. The idea of me having any authority over those students is laughable. Being in a school environment reminded me of being back at secondary school myself, and how much I hated that, so I don't think that I will especially enjoy the job. However, I think I'd spend 12 hours a week (the hours I am doing) cleaning toilets for the chance to live in Paris, so I'm not complaining.

Let's see, yesterday I had a welcome day for all the assistants which was incredibly dull. Afterwards I had lunch with another student from Warwick, which was nice. I will never get bored of eating Croque Monsieurs in brasseries in the Latin Quater... EVER. Which is just as well because I paid over 10 euros for the privilege of lunch and coffee.

All the photos in this entry date from today, when I properly explored Vincennes. I had a lovely afternoon and the only thing I spoke to was a dog... I swear I get more solitary as I get older. But anyway, Vincennes is a town in its own right, but so near to Paris (literally just outside the ring road) that it feels to me like a suburb. It's most famous for the Bois de Vincennes (Vincennes wood) and the chateau, both of which are a 10 minute walk away. The Bois de Vincennes is perfect for cycling, as it has lots of pavement trails and it's entirely car-free. Here follows some photos of the neighbourhood:

One of my favourite things about the building where I live is the view from the rooftop. My friend Tiffany is living in a studio up there, and this is the view.

Next door to Tiffany lives Guy, who is 84. This is his balcony. Perhaps I shouldn't have taken this photo without his permission, but seeing as he doesn't use the Internet or speak English, I doubt he will find this blog.

C'est moi. WIth the Eiffel tower just distinguishable in the background. It is seven miles away; the Ile de la Cité is 4 miles away.

Finally, here is my room, with Tiffany sitting on the bed.

Au revoir tout le monde. It's time for dinner and then I'm heading out to the Nuit Blanche!