Vacation plans for the first part of may

Hello all, a few quick updates. First, I posted a few pictures on my flickr of my trip easter weekend with my landlords to Étretat, Normandy, where we stayed in an old Norman-style family house. It was an amazing weekend, a mix of solitude and family interaction, and I can't imagine having been any more welcome. And I really needed this escape from the city.

Second, my contract ends at the end of this week. Perfunctory and heartfelt goodbyes to come, but don't expect me to offer a synthetic understanding of my experience teaching quite yet...

Third, I'll have basically from next Saturday to some time in June to travel, which I plan on taking advantage of. I wrote out a tentative schedule for the first half of May, so I'll type that up for you and, and feel free to send recommendations. I'm going to get a one month Interrail pass, which means unlimited train travel in all of Europe, except France, my country of residence :(. So here's around April 25-May 16:

- Fly to Istanbul in late April (note: thinking of working there next year, so I'm visiting to see how I like it), plan on staying until May 1

-Train from Istanbul through Serbia and Austria to Stuttgart, Germany (arrive May2- 3) where I have a friend who I'll stay with until May 6.

-Train to Hamburg or somewhere in the Germany countryside for one day (May 7) on the way to Berlin.

-Arrive in Berlin on the May 8 or 9 (depending on whether I want to stay in another area a bit longer) and stay for 4 days, until May 13.

-Take train to Amsterdam and then on to Brussels between May 14-16

-Take bus from Brussels or closer to France border to Paris on May 16.

There it is, in very rough form. Will be couch surfing and maybe accompanied in Germany and the Netherlands. I'll be back in Paris for less than a week, and then I'll head to Spain and Portugal! Stay tuned.

An Episode: The Conspicuous Brioche

Being not from here, and being not fluent in the language or fully adapted to the culture(s) I'm amidst all the time, I often either feel serious self-consciousness (see comments on cheese in previous post) or the opposite. I missed the opportunity to pick up breakfast stuff at the store last night because I was at the movies (seeing My Winnipeg, an amazing film), so I was super hungry all morning and didn't have time to eat anything until 11:20, when I leave my first school. I had 1.30€, which is enough for a snack at the bakery, and I got in line. I hadn't had a brioche yet in France, so that's what I ordered. I would eat it while walking to the bus stop - I should have had enough time. I was surprised when they gave me this spiky mass of bread that looked like an unwelcoming flower or an ocean creature, and I was worried about honks and other trouble on the way. This is not the nicest area. The thing was big enough to hide embarrassment behind, and the pleasure of its cartoonish size and good taste got me by. As usual I passed through scenarios in which I get mugged or threatened in some way, and this time the brioche was both a shield and a mace (and when I was halfway through: boomerang). The weight of the pastry turned my pace into a saunter. Things were getting protracted in all the bread, and I lost my sense of time. I rounded the corner for the bus stop right as the bus passed me by, and I knew I would have to run in order to make my next class. The brioche looked like a half-eaten starfish, and I tucked it under my arm like a stolen souvenir; as I started to run, my chewing sped up in proportion, and I was trying to keep the glazed crust from touching my jacket (I hate inappropriate stickiness). Would I have to throw the bread? The bus was starting to leave the stop when I arrived, and my fingers were so sticky that when I slapped at the window, they glued there for a second and left a print. My presence was not concealable, and I'm sure it was queer to behold. I was breathing heavily and so probably showing too much of the chewed bread in my mouth. My metro pass held to the tip of my finger like a magnet, and I almost fell over when the bus took off while I was taking another piece of the bread. I was conspicuously eating a large, garish pastry, and everyone could see that I made no effort to dispel this. How could I? Could I even explain the pseudo-reasoning leading me to this moment? The only hope for recognition in this situation is shared uncontrollable laughter, which no one seemed interested in. This is normally a thing that would make me sick with embarrassment, but I think my always-already-foreign existence made me comfortable with it, and I felt about as anxious as a dog rolling in the grass with a disgusting bone; I also felt like a human watching the dog enjoying itself, feeling glad at least an animal can let itself go.

A list

Here are some things I eat or consume on a regular basis here:

- plain yogurt-stuff called fromage blanc. this stuff is not to be confused with creme fraiche, which looks similar but tastes like butter and turns into a very fattening delight when mixed with anything sweet. I made the mistake only once, without much regret.

-bread, usually a baguette cereal (wheat baguette) or a tradition (artisanal baguette, prettier). The thing about bread here is it's so cheap and so good. For the nicer stuff, you pay about 1.20€, which lasts a couple days depending on appetite and the presence of things to dip in.

-eggplant, which I usually just sauté and add to pasta or couscous. It adds a nice meaty texture, and, if I cook it well enough, slices become little flavor explosions of olive oil, basil, garlic, etc.

-tomatoes. Back over there I grew to like tomatoes, but I never liked to cook with them for some reason. They've now replaced both onions and bell peppers, which I've found don't taste as good here. The tomatoes are super yummy, and they are a fairly cheap item I can add to about any meal I eat.

-jam, or confiture (we know that word in the US, right?). Bonne Maman brand seems like something expensive and snobby and French back home, but here it's the cheapest. Comes in all sorts of flavors, though I keep hovering back to rhubarb, because, no matter how used to it I become, it always strikes me as new and worth trying (again). I mix this with fromage blanc (on Mom's suggestion) for an excuse to spoon this stuff into my mouth.

-cheese, duh. Also so much cheaper over here (wine is too, though I don't consume it as frequently as these other things). I eat a lot of goat cheese, camembert (stinky brie), emmental (basically swiss, but a little sweeter maybe), and comté. Though I really should, I'm too nervous to go to the cheese store around the corner, of a whole foreign vocabulary world that would lead me into spending 50€ on a cheese that literally writhes and farts the Marseillaise and then Gainsbourg's 'Requiem pour un con' and evacuates my building. On a side note, one thing I've noticed about stinky cheese is that the good taste never exactly makes up for the stink or makes it go away, but somehow renders it pleasant and deep and true.

That's the list right now, I'll add more as they come to me. It may be expanded at some point. I'll try to do another similar thing with people I see in Neuilly (such as, old woman in massive fur coat watches dog shiver and clench a spectacular turd [extremely regular sighting]).

Well, I really should make a post!

So first I'll give the most likely reason I haven't posted in a while: I spend too much time on my posts, for vanity-related reasons, i.e. I get self-conscious about writing. So writing posts gets kind of involved. Ironically, I had decided to do the blog for supposedly non-vanity reasons. And so let's keep with this idea: I'll write a blog post!

Since it's been a while since I last wrote, I'll keep things short and simple--i.e. not flighty, to avoid the vanity. I have been attending these things French people call 'aperos', which comes from aperitif (before-dinner drink), which aren't really related to dinner, and which turn into miniature apartment parties either before going to a bar/club or in lieu of that. What's nice about them is how informal they are, and the fact that they have given me an opportunity to speak lots of French with people my age (and to observe how my French gets better, then worse, then waaaay better--according probably to me and only me--as the night progresses). That's one thing that's been happening.

Also, my parents came to visit! They arrived the day before Christmas and stayed until New Years eve. One of the best things about their trip was the opportunity we all had to stay in my landlord's place, who let them stay for free while he and his family vacationed in Tunisia. So we set up in a very French home-away-from-home and had a great time. As the three of us tend, we walked masochistic distances and time-periods and always turned in at night with rolling eyes and saying, 'let's not do it like that tomorrow', but of course we did. We hit all the big places--the Champs-Élysées plus Christmas market, the Eiffel tower and the area around it, the Louvre, the Chateau at Versailles--as well as other areas like the Marais and the left bank from the Jardin des Plantes to down Boulevard St. Germain via about everything else. I encourage all who can to ask them for details and pictures. As for me, it was nice having them here both so I could show them the city I have gotten to know pretty well and so that I could reconnect with something deep-rooted after a rather fugue-ish few months. As with most vacations, I probably most enjoyed the space it gave for chatting with the parents while en route to some place or other.

What else is new and noteworthy? The winter is really here, it's snowed several times (kind of rare for Paris tout à fait), and I'm kind of getting OK with not going outside much, or going outside to get inside again in the most direct way possible. No winter blues yet, though those of you who have lived in cold places will probably gather a kind of perverse and infinitely unnerving self-satisfaction from telling me that, 'well, it's not REALLY winter in Paris after all, (i.e. why did you even start talking in the first place?).' To this, I don't care to stress a response. This said, it is pretty amusing to see how much people here seem really panicked when the weather gets bad or cold, and I got unanimous 'chapeau's at school the other day for actually showing up on a snow day. I of course accepted the compliments while noting that bad weather is a perfectly good excuse for me not to show up to work.

So to fight staying inside, I've started to take little 1.5 hour French lessons every week with an old woman who is very friendly. I still use the formal 'vous' form with her, which is good practice more than anything. I'm going on my third week, and the program is we meet and talk about a text from a newspaper that came out over the past week, then we talk about vocabulary words I have come across that I want to work on, then we discuss and edit something I've written (still yet to do this one, see above reasons for hesitation), and finally we work on grammar. It's money and time well spent, and I think it gives me just enough structure to make significant leaps in my French, rather than the kind of functionality-improvements that I've seen so far. Learning a new language is one of the strangest experiences but most rewarding experiences of my life so far, and I think that everyone can hugely benefit from those strange moments when you understand something in a new language that is untranslatable into English. Ok, I'll not get too flighty. More to come, hopefully. Thanks for staying tuned.

New computer!

So sorry that this blog has almost fallen by the wayside. I failed to explain in my last post that I had been trying to sell my computer--and since I sold it, I could not motivate myself to write an entire blog post on my little ipod touch. But now I have a new netbook, which is tiny but it works well, and it is perfectly minimal, and I fell like I can fit it in my pocket.

So what's been going on recently? Well, the time between the end of the vacation and now seems really short, and time is starting to go by much faster in general around here. The most memorable thing: I finally had my day of walking around to small, private art collections in le Marais (3rd and 4th arrondissements). This was, to say the least, a great experience. I was a little worried that it would be more like scanning the pages of an Artforum--where there's just so much art and so many names that to stop and consider and submit everything to memory would take an eternity. And indeed when I read in my guidebook about the number of ''vibrantly international'' and ''essential'' art galleries (18 were listed in the Marais alone) I was sure that I would be left thinking that art is silliness, fashion masked as depth, the empty coffer of cultural meaning. I'm very glad that I was surprised. I minimized the number of galleries I visited to about 5 or 6, and I think that ended up being a perfect number. Many of these places were devoted to the work of one artist's work, like Galerie Maria Lund, which had works by the Korean artist Lee Jin Woo (I can't find info on the internet about him)--all I can say about his stuff is that it succeeded in making abstract expressionism appear like the product of natures sombre decay. At the Musée des Arts Derners, I saw the work of contemporary African artist Soly Cissé, whose work combined fantastic animals--somewhere between cave painting and Basquiat--with scientific note-taking and measurement.

(Sorry the image isn't much big enough, but you can get a sense of it) Other notable things were a video of the hands of someone reading braille (ok, maybe a little trite, but when I realized the conceit, I was really moved and found it surprisingly effective--something about the recognizable effort of reading conveyed by the hands, the speeding up and slowing down, the excitement and concentration, combined with the idea that we who can see can't read precisely because of this fact...) and paintings by a young German artist named André Butzer which I swear could be on the walls of Domy books in Austin or Houston.

Ok, so I could go blabbing forever about this, but I'll stop. I have also been working a fair amount, though I've missed two days recently due to train problems--once due to a strike and once due to a malfunction on the rail that stopped all traffic. Teaching has been so-so. I execute things well about half of the time, and I usually feel prepared enough for every class session. Sometimes I leave feeling like the students are incredibly well-behaved and motivated, and other times I feel like they couldn't care less and would prefer to just ignore me. Often times a single class class can be both over the course of a few sessions, and often their attention slackens if the head teacher isn't there to whip them into place (I'm not kidding, either--the teachers are harsh!). The nice thing about the job is that I don't have to take the student's fates as English-speakers into my own hands--if they want to work, I'm there; but if they don't, I have neither the power nor the time to force them. Also, I have too many classes (9) to take any one of them home with me, so the stress says entre les murs. This job does still leave me in awe of the power of certain teachers to fully transform a classroom. Indeed some of the teachers I work with here have that ability--no yelling, but a kind of calm command--though many of them bludgeon their way through it. Another good thing about school is the amount of French that I get to speak and absorb, both from the kids and from the teachers. I'm not sure how much English I could get away with with the latter--sometimes they speak with me, usually in single mauled phrases like, ''see you on the next Friday'', or ''where have you come from?''. Once a week I host a poorly-attended English conversation session, and we talk for a little bit about the weather or food in very slow English, and then we just speak in French for the rest of the time. However, I cannot hold myself too high above their heads, because when it's all the teachers around the table for lunch, I have an incredibly hard time following along. I always get the topics of conversation, and the general feelings of most people, but the details always escape me. Oh well, I will let this kind of thing be the test of my fluency. Maybe others will agree that poetry and chatter express the opaque secrets of a language.

Ok, once again I cannot write a short post, but I should stop now. This weekend I'm going to go to a place in the 20th arrondissement that serves free coucous if you buy a drink and listen to the jazz music--sign me up!

I leave you all with my thoughts on an advertisement that is everywhere in the Paris metro for the Wall Street Institute of English. At first I was disgusted by these things, but in a flash of understanding I realized the subliminal genius at work here: it plays off of our desire to either bite or grab the literal tongue itself which is then cleverly sublimated into a desire to learn a language (another tongue). The secret lies in the French, where the word langue means both language and tongue--clearly the advertisement is punning on that--and the phrase 'to learn a language', apprendre une langue, is extremely close to the phrase 'to grab or take a tongue', prendre une langue.

And what could the stupid uneasiness of this guy's expression and the viscerally unsettling painted tongue express but that torturous feeling one gets when a stranger is so close to them that it would be almost nothing (and indeed quite exhilarating) to touch their face, tickle them, blow on their hair? And where does one feel this more than on a crowded metro? In the end, a brilliant slight of hand by the Wall Street Institute.

Fin des vacances

I've had a pretty great vacation, though I've passed it lazily. For instance, today I woke up at 9, went to the market down the street (the market wasn't as inexpensive as I had hoped, but they did have black beans!), and then came back and made some scrambled eggs and read all day. Ironically, maybe magically, I've just started an excellent book called The Savage Detectives by a Mexican-Chilean writer named Roberto Bolaño, which begins journal-style with one sentence for November 2 and then three pages for November 3–which was yesterday, and my birthday. I know I've commented before on how much I love just walking with friends aimlessly around Paris–and how, for a poor young person, this is how the city offers itself to my heart–so that's mainly what I did. We stopped at some English-language bookstores and a coffee shop on our way through Montparnasse and the Latin Quarter over to Chatelet and the Marais, and then over to Bastille and then to Belleville. I've made a little map, which doesn't include all of the little diversions, but it says we walked 7.8 kilometers, or about 5 miles:


Along the way, we stopped and ate some amazing Lebanese and, when the bartender found out it was my birthday in the process of flirting with one of the girls who was there, we got free drinks and little pastries. We went to Belleville to recover a scarf I had left at a Halloween house party–we got stuck in the rain, soaked, but I got the scarf. Belleville is much cheaper and less pretentious than most of the rest of Paris, so we stopped in at a bar to have drinks and chat, and that's pretty much how we spent the rest of the night. Despite the rain, it was a great day.

There's been less to growl about lately, thank goodness. The apartment is holding up pretty well, and I've been decorating a little bit with some birthday-gift postcards. I've posted some pictures on my flickr, so go check that stuff out. It's not as easy as I had hoped to post a set of pictures to my blog, so I will only have photo posts if they relate directly to the things I'm writing about. Otherwise, you know where to find them. Thanks to everyone for all of the birthday wishes sent my way yesterday!

Finally, some pictures

Hello everyone,

So, here's my first picture post. I haven't been taking very many pictures because, until earlier today, I was without the capability to take pictures off my camera and put them on my computer. Now I can do that. But this first set of photos doesn't begin to cover what I have seen. It's mostly stuff from my first few days in France, and then some pictures of my apartment. Here we go:

These first few are from the plane, flying over London and the U.K.
It is always so startling how an organism like London can be reduced to a texture of lights from this high up.



This is a Park in the 19th arrondissement called Butte Chaumont that I visited when I thought I might be living in the area. The whole thing is fake, the butte most of all.

These next couple are from my weekend in Pontoise, a town Northwest of Paris, in the old town at the top of 12th century (I think) ramparts.


Who would advertise psychoanalysis like this in the U.S.?




This is the view from where I stayed.

And finally, here are some shots of my new place, beginning with the cute shower curtain, which, because of my small hot water heater, I can only stay on the other side of for about 7 minutes.
This doubles as a kitchen and bathroom sink.
Here you can see almost the width of the apartment.
The building is very old, and I think these tiles have been preserved from the original construction.
That's about it for now, folks. I am starting a 1.5 week vacation (do I deserve this already?) and I will be taking my camera everywhere from now on. Tomorrow I'm going out of town a little ways to see an Le Corbusier house, so look for those pictures soon.