This is officially the final post in this bloggy-thingy

Last day in Paris can be summarized thusly:

There was some stuff I thought I might mail home, but I was too lazy to do that, so I stuffed everything into the bags:

The trash bags, obviously, are trash; the Ikea bag is stuff I took to the MICEFA office for their magic basement full of things for studentses to use.

The final incarnation of the showerhead:

Which was, of course, properly removed and cleaned up. Not a trace of adhesive left on the wall:

Aren’t I conscientious?

Well, the person doing the outgoing state-of-the-room assessment didn’t think so. I spent about 1.5 hours, all told, scrubbing away with a sponge and the Mister Propre wipes. No-go. I’m being billed €44 for cleaning, taken out of my room deposit. No, I didn’t get it spotless, but come on, people! What do you expect, I should go buy an industrial-strength mop and cleanser just to clean my floor this one time? Not that that would have satisfied them; the lovely lady filling out the form shook her head and muttered “Sale!” at the stains on my bathroom floor that have been there all semester and resisted several concerted efforts at their removal.

The plane rides from Charles de Gaulle to Heathrow and Heathrow to JFK were uneventful. I learned that it is much easier to go through airport security in the winter, when one has a coat and pockets to put stuff it. I also watched the movie of Watchmen, which was rather simplified from the book (which I’d read, way back, on my way to Paris), but pretty good. Though it did switch around one of my favorite lines, near the end, giving it a somewhat different meaning. Probably because they wanted the movie to have something sort of resembling a hopeful ending. Also watched The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, mostly to counteract the effects of the absolutely abysmal Robert Ludlum novel, The Prometheus Deception, that I’d picked up at CDG; I just wanted to remind myself that spy thrillers need not be absolutely idiotic, since Ludlum’s prose in The Prometheus Deception makes a compelling argument for scrapping the entire genre.

Anyway…

My room upon arriving and unloading all my bags:

It had been all nicely tidied up for me before arriving, too. Yeah. 5 months’ worth of stuff can rapidly un-tidy a place.

Unpacking garment bag. I didn’t have to wear anything in this bag (dress shirts, suit, ties) for the whole duration of my stay, but it was good to know the stuff was there, just in case, getting spectacularly wrinkled in the back of my closet.

So now I’m back. I’ve had fun riding the MTA subways again (I hadn’t noticed, while in Paris, that many French subways aren’t air-conditioned), walking around without danger of getting lost, and eating non-French food, and all those things that are hard to do in Paris. I haven’t taken any pictures of that. I have, however, taken a picture of my computer gloriously plugged in, directly, no funky adapter-thingy:

Innit grand?

That’s all, folks. Nothing exciting going on anymore.

I meant to update over the weekend, but there was no real internet. I’m actually back in New York and everything, but I’ve still got a backlog of stuff to put up, so I’ll, you know, put it up.

Last week, I took a trip into La France Profonde — The Deepest Darkest Depths of France. A full 2 hours from Paris by train.

Here’s a train station on the way there:

This is only notable because it is the town of Vierzon, which I kept thinking was Verizon.

I took the train to Bourges:


Which is a perfectly charming little town.

I proceeded thence on to La Borne, an incredibly charming little village full of potters. There’s a pottery museum there and all, though I didn’t get a chance to see it.

Me. In La Borne.

A building. Also in La Borne.

Totem pole. This is what you get when you cross a sock monkey, an Easter egg, and Godzilla.

Another building, all castle-y like.

Building that in the middle ages had pigeons and stuff. Still does, kinda. Also, people. With whom I was staying.

Snail!

Approach to the Feu de St Jean in a nearby town. This translates literally as “St John’s Fire,” no relation to St Elmo’s Fire. St John’s Fire has to do with the day of Saint John the Baptist, and involves that timeless expression of rural celebration and latent pyromania, the bonfire.

This celebration, on Friday night, was rather subdued compared to what was to come; there was a great big stack hay and whatnot, but that wouldn’t be lit till Saturday night. There were musicians, first a duo of an accordion and an electric hurdy-gurdy. I took video of them playing, and the locals engaging in some sort of traditional dance or other, but the files have somehow vanished in between the taking and the uploading to my computer.

About half an hour into this, I noticed a flickering red glow in my peripheral vision, and turned to see flames licking up from behind a rise on the other side of the stage. My thought process was as follows:
1: Hey, there’s the bonfire!
2: Wait, the bonfire’s in another place, and it’s not supposed to happen till tomorrow.
3: So maybe that fire’s not supposed to be happening– but if it was an accident, someone would have noticed, right?
4: Okay, I should be prepared in case it is an emergency. How do you say, “I assumed the fire was intentional?” in French?

Of course, the fire turned out to be just a smaller bonfire they were lighting on Friday. Perfectly contained and so on. The musical duo was replaced by a French Cajun band, which was nice.

And that was the Deepest Depths of France. Perfectly thrilling, no?

So I meant to post this on Wednesday but then I didn’t. Since then I’ve gone and done stuff, in the past few days, which I’ll get around to posting eventually. Like, tomorrow. Probably.

In the meantime, pictures.

From my last visit to the St Denis campus:

Mural thingy:

The stairs and escalators, without barricades!

This still was all blocked, though:

Hey, guess what happened to the showerhead?

A while ago, the fluorescent lamp in the kitchenette stopped working. So to thaw the meat to make fajitas, I had to use the bathroom one:

Speaking of those fajitas:

A bit blurry to see, but Francophones are instructed to pronounce fajitas as “fa-ri-tas.” This, I suppose, because French doesn’t have much of an [h] sound, so the more r-type sound in the Spanish j (which, incidentally, is represented as [x] in Spanish IPA) stands out more to French-speaking ears. Why, yes, I find this fascinating. Don’t you think about these things when you read the back of fajita-kit boxes? …you do read the back of the boxes, right?

Oh, and from the Porte de Clignancourt metro station:

See the little design just under the right end of the flag design? (by the by, in vexillological technical-speak, that’s the fly end, as opposed to the hoist end) That was originally penned over the face of Marianne Faithfull on a poster advertising some concert that she did a month or two back. It’s been entertaining to watch how the graffiti ends up placed over new posters. I think it works nicely on this one, with both the stark primary colors of the flag and the dynamic yet muted photographic background.

Why yes, I did write the above paragraph just to see how over-analytical I could get.

Next post will probably have stuff about the wonders of Deep Southern France (a full 2 hours from Paris!), complete with a quaint traditional celebration that combined electric hurdy-gurdy music and pyromania.

I thought it was probably worth noting that my stay in Paris has involved a lot of change. I don’t mean that kind of change, the stuff-becoming-different-from-how-it-was-before kind of change, which obviously has happened but really happens everywhere all the time and therefore isn’t particularly worth noticing in itself. I mean, you know, change. Pocket change. Coins. Euros come in €1 and €2 coins, smallest bills seem to be €5, so you use a lot of change. And then there’s the stuff you don’t use:

The taller cup is all the 1- , 2- , and 5-centimes pieces I’ve amassed over my months here. They’re just really not worth carrying around, you know? The smaller cup is the 10- and 20-centimes pieces, which I use to pay the laundry machine. I suppose I’ll pay for the last load or two with the smaller-denomination coins, just to use them up. That’ll be fun if there’s anybody in line behind me (it also reminds me of a lesson I learned when preparing to leave for France: when withdrawing money to buy a few thousand euros is travelers’ checks, don’t just automatically ask for it in twenties. Firstly, the poor guy at American Express will have to count it all; secondly, the nice lady at the bank will probably assume that you’re buying drugs or paying off a hitman or whatever else people do with large wads of unmarked lower-denomination bills).

Some pretty pics of the dorms — this is a nice walkway that is quite picturesque now that there’s actual green stuff on the trees and whatnot (pictures taken around dusk, so, you know, dark):

Some building in this dorm-y school-y complex:

Dorms, from walkway:

On that same stroll, I saw all three of the cats that hang around here sort of hanging around together. Well, not together, because they’re cats and they like to be semiantisocial, but on the same patch of lawn, eyeing one another warily. I took two pictures, one without night-shot and one with, neither particularly clear:

Finally, a movie poster that has been amusing me:

The title and the little subtitle are both in English. Which is puzzling. If it was originally titled The Hangover, why re-title it but still keep it in English? If it was originally titled Very Bad Trip, why subtitle it in English? Which one of these is supposed to be more intelligible to a non-anglophone audience? Is this, in fact, an imported anglophone movie, or do the French have nobody to blame for this but themselves? These are mysterious things.

Still no luck in getting the paper with my grammar grades for the MICEFA. I went to St-Denis today, around 10:45, remembering that the FLE office closes early on Fridays. I discovered that “open 9:30-12:00” actually means “open 9:30-12:00, unless it’s after the end of classes for the semester, in which case we don’t bother coming in on Friday at all.” So whoohoo. I get to try again next week!

And now a fun half-translated sign in Montmartre:

It’s air conditioné! But is it also climatized?

Posted by the elevator:

Apparently their English-language spell-check is brocken.

And from Montmarte again, some artsy stuff:

This one from somewhere in the 18th:

I’m not sure if this sign has been modified officially, or whether it’s the work of some rogue vigilante duct-tapers:

And another pretty shot of Montmarte looking all summery:

In other news, I discovered earlier this week that apparently Leonard Bernstein wrote an operetta based on Voltaire’s Candide, which was the first book I read in Survey of French Lit II at Hunter. The operetta is all sorts of fun, with amusing songs about the syphilis and the Spanish Inquisition (sometimes, depending on the version, these songs are charmingly combined).

Also, I read an interesting little article in the Times about innovative cost-cutting measures at American universities. My reaction was something like this:

New York Times: “Colleges are cutting back on little things: eliminating free laundry for students–”
Me: “Wait, did you say free?”
New York Times: “–limiting students to $60 worth of free printing per semester–”
Me: “That’s 600 pages at Hunter prices!”
New York Times: “–and discontinuing free ESPN and HBO service in dorm rooms.”
Me: “Free cable in your room? You people are kidding, right?”

All of this makes me worry that Hunter might try cutting back on services at Brookdale. They’d probably have to start by eliminating luxuries like electricity, running water, and walls. Really, if you take away the walls, the place becomes much easier to manage. All the floors just kind of collapse into one, and then you only need a couple RAs, though floor meetings would be a bit hectic. This could be solved by eliminating floors as well, and turning the dorm into a large hole that goes straight through the Earth. Students could jump in, and fall all the way through to Australia, and you could count it as Study Abroad. Except, of course, they wouldn’t actually come out in Australia, but somewhere to the southwest of it:

(Incidentally, the Earth Sandwich tool thingy used to make the above graphic is quite an amusing way to pass the time, and to dash small children’s hopes of digging to China. Well, I suppose they could dig to China, but they’d need to brush up on their geometry first).

And I think I’ll stop before I go even more thoroughly off-topic.

Last week, I decided to ignore my room’s lack of microwave. This was a principled act of protest against a dorm administration that, clearly, wants to limit my access to cheap, fast, unhealthy foods. I bought a few frozen dinners at Franprix, and heated them in the frying pan. Naturally, I felt a need to document this with photographic evidence:

In case you’ve ever wondered what a slowly thawing block of spaghetti looks like, here you go.

I’ve discovered some interesting thing about the way my stove works. For instance, when one leaves a Nutella-and-marzipan sandwich in a frying pan, then goes to browse YouTube and forgets about the sandwich, the stove does not likewise forget about the sandwich, but instead neatly blackens one side:

(Incidentally, I highly recommend the Nutella-and-marzipan sandwich, a true culinary marvel. Properly prepared as illustrated below:


…And yes, it does work best with pink marzipan. Or green. Anything but the generic off-white color, which is far too austere and will give the sandwich crippling self-esteem issues as it fries)

I’ve also learned some fun things about plastic and heat. It seemed like a smart idea at the beginning of the semester to invest in only disposable cups and flatware, since I could just throw it out instead of cramming it into my luggage to go back. And everything went smoothly, at least after I learned not to stir boiling soup with a plastic spoon. And then yesterday I learned that it’s probably a good idea to keep track of where the plastic cups are when one is handling hot frying pans. I poured myself a nice cup of tea, and then stared at it wondering why brown liquid was spontaneously appearing on the countertop, and fridge, and floor. Then I noticed the neat little gash burnt halfway up the cup:

In other news, the front gate to the dorms has been malfunctioning, and 50% of the time doesn’t recognize the RFID badges. The high-tech, high-security solution was to prop the gate open with a bit of wood:

At least for a day. Now they just have us buzz the front desk if the gate won’t open. Which works great when the front-desk person is actually there (in fairness, they almost always are. It’s just that, you know, there’s only one of them at any given time, so there’s still the possibility that you’ll have to stand there buzzing for a while till they come back from the bathroom or whatever).

Next up, I think we have some odd Franglais and such.

I’m pretty sure I haven’t posted pictures of this previously. I kept meaning to take photos of this wall, which stretches out along one really long block near where the train lines head north from the Gare du Nord and all, not too far from the dorms.

Starting at the west end of it:

And then I got distracted by the little train…

…anyway…

“Rap is worthless.”

And here’s some pictures of the train tracks, which are pretty. Well, maybe not pretty. But kinda cool-looking.

Thataways lies the hinterlands of non-Parisian France, including (more or less in this direction) Paris VIII.

Buildings!!!

Bridge over tracks.

This is my shortest post to date, I think. Just felt I should make mention of an interesting little slideshow featured in today’s NYT headlines, regarding urban-planning concepts for Paris. Nothing strikingly unusual — every urban-design project these days is about building higher and/or greener, really — but short and worth a look.

Audio Slide Show: Paris Is Building
(apparently the Times doesn’t let one embed its videos, so you’ll have to go through the trouble of clicking the linky-thingy)

First, some utterly random, non-Parisian trivia that has been amusing me recently:

You know the song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”? Catchy little tune put together by some bandleader type guy in the Union army, about how everybody in [generic 19th-century town] gets all happy when their darling little boy comes back from war (Sample verse: “The old church bell will peal with joy, Hurrah! Hurrah! / To welcome home our darling boy, Hurrah! Hurrah! / The village lads and lassies say with roses they will strew the way, / And we’ll all feel gay when Johnny comes marching home” ).

Funny thing is, in the early 1800s, the same tune was used for an Irish antiwar protest song, about men coming back from fighting in Ceylon (that would be Sri Lanka nowadays) for the British East India Company (Sample verse: “Where are the legs what let you run? Huroo! Huroo! / Where are the legs what let you run? Huroo! Huroo! / Where are the legs what let you run when you ran off for to carry a gun? / Indeed, your dancing days are done! Oh Johnny, I hardly knew ye”).

So essentially you’ve got two songs, same tune, same basic premise, same generic-soldier-boy name, entirely different meaning. Which means it’s really hard to tell when the tune’s being used ironically, or seriously, or ambiguously, or what. Also, in case anybody was wondering, that does seem to be the source of the phrase “Johnny, I hardly knew ye,” via the title of some book about JFK. And this has now mutated into “[insert name here], we hardly knew ye,” which has replaced the old meaning of the word knew as “recognized” (e.g. “I hardly recognized you, what with all the missing limbs”) with the more current meaning of “learned stuff about you” (e.g. “I hardly got to know him before he asked me to lend him money”). Fascinating stuff, innit?

And now back to our regularly scheduled Paris-focused excitement. With Pictures!

Stuff from my latest trip to see if my grammar professor had dropped off my grade forms (she hadn’t):

Yes, i photograph this courtyard a lot. Mostly because it’s in the building where I had all my classes, and where the Foreign Language office is. But this was just a nice arrangement of colors, so I had to take the shot.

Stairwell w/ drawings!

I may be crazy, but I think that every time I’ve passed this emergency callbox type thingy (not entire ly sure what it does, it’s located in the above stairwell), there have been soda cans perched on top of it.

Pretty purple cage! Seriously, if you were going to be locked out of, or into, some part of a school campus, wouldn’t you want them to at least paint the cage lavender?

Irreverent graffiti on restroom paper-towel dispenser (empty, by the way; right next to the broken air-dryer, which is above the sink that doesn’t work). The French reads, more or less: “We didn’t ask him to!”

The St Denis Métro station. That’s a pretty sturdy windowpane, quite thoroughly cracked but still hanging in there.

The French lotto logo. Isn’t this just clever? It manages to incorporate 3 out of 4 card suits. Hearts, of course, in the clover petals; the big red diamond; and the clover itself (the suit of clubs is called trefles, or “clovers,” in French), with the requisite four leaves to suggest that, hey, you might get lucky.

Oh, and here’s what happens when I decide that maybe I don’t need to keep all my receipts:

They’re in the middle of being sorted right there. I just had a big bag full of them, and decided that perhaps when I was advised to “keep your receipts” for the Opportunities Fund documentation, they hadn’t meant “keep all receipts, including every time you bought groceries, ate out, or restocked on paper towels.”

Huh. Last time I remember checking, it had been 2-3 days since I’d last updated. Somehow, someone snuck in and stuffed a lot of extra days between me and the last post. The good news is that I now have something to write about that isn’t a rant about the French educational system (and really, those were becoming a bit forced, don’t you think? I’ve kind of been rehashing the same stuff over and over. Which is silly, since I’m done with the semester. Now I just have to make sure all my grades get to the MICEFA on time…)

where was I?

Oh yeah. It’s been a while (again) since I last posted, and now I’ve got stuff to post about. Which I blame on the latitude. Yes, I blame both my not posting, and the subject of this post, on the fact that I am approximately 8 degrees farther north than I’m accustomed to being (Paris is 48° 51′ 44″ N, vs. NYC’s 40° 47′). This means, you see, that the summer days are noticeably longer over here. The sun sets sometime around 10:30 pm (and in the winter, when I first got here, sunrise was around 8:00 AM). So I’ve been staying up pretty late, even without studying to procrastinate do, even without caffeine. It’s just kind of like “Surprise! 1:30 AM!” And no school to get me up early to make me tired, either. So the whole “day” thing sometimes gets a bit abstract, and next thing you know, hey, haven’t updated the blog in a while. I spent the first half of today thinking it was yesterday, and even almost forgot to check out my daily webcomics. So it goes.

This recent sense of time-dislocation is also responsible for today’s post. The causal chain is as follows:
1: “Hey, I should have lunch, or dinner, or whatever…”
2: “Huh. When was the last time I went shopping?”
3: “Plan B: Sandwich from one of the places on the corner” [there are 3-4 bakeries/sandwicheries within two blocks of the dorms]
4: “Wait, it’s 6:30? And they all close around 5:0…”
5: “Time for another foray into the exciting world of Parisian McDonalds’s!”

(as a side note, I’ve made it a bit of a habit to eventually visit, at least once, almost every McDonald’s or Quick that I come across. There have been 8 of the former, 2 of the latter in the neighborhoods I frequent. It’s just fun to compare the differences in atmosphere and clientele and the various decorative choices and layouts and so on)

Anyway, I got a 280. Not sure what it’s called in the US, if they have it over there. Apparently it’s something about “280 variations” on some basic burgerish theme. Personally, I think it’s just the French fixation with numbering things. I mean, if you’re going to give your neighborhoods numbers, why not your burgers? And so as I was reading the box (one must always read fast-food packaging materials, very interesting), I found the following assurance of cultural integrity:

Maybe a bit hard to read (I can only touch it up so much in iPhoto), but it says:
ON PEUT ÊTRE FRENCH ET BURGER À LA FOIS (one can be French and burger at the same time)
I’m not sure what amuses me more– the fact that this “don’t worry, your culture is not under attack” sentiment is something ad-copy people think of when putting together fast-food packaging, or the fact that the word French is written in English, which neatly subverts the message.

Of course, I might be reading too much into this. But hey, it’s fun to read too much into things. It keeps one’s mind creative.

In other news, a few days ago I bought some heavy-duty-ish tape, got out the scissors, and set about to take care of that annoying showerhead:

Work in progress, most of the old tape removed…

…Ta-Da!

That’s all, folks. Next post will probably have some random pictures from school, possibly some graffiti that I don’t think I’ve posted yet, and perhaps an analysis of the French lottery logo.