Not Much To Report Except Maybe the 13eme
I haven’t posted in almost a week, mainly because, well, the title says it all. The most exciting thing that’s happened in my never-ending quest to make sense of this city is my going to the 13eme Arrondissement again to check things out for the upcoming class project thereon. On Wednesday, the teams met to discuss their projects with the professor. When our turn came, it seemed her idea of “discuss the projects” is “ask the students vaguer-than-vague questions (e.g. ‘What interests you in life?’) and then give them advice on how to wander about the neighborhood in question.”
Okay, when I put it like that it sounds a bit patronizing, which I don’t mean it to be; I appreciate this professor’s relatively low-key style, since I have to deal with more intense stuff in other classes. Her approach to research is a bit more touchy-feely than I’m used to (not that I’ve got anything against an emphasis on direct interviews with people, but when she started bringing up reincarnation…). And I’d already decided I wanted to take a look at how the Bibliothèque Nationale and the newer area as a whole does or doesn’t integrate itself into the existing neighborhood, so when she started asking very vague questions I had to answer very specifically and pedantically in order to nudge her towards telling me to do what I had to do in order to do what I wanted to do.
In the end she did advise going to the mairie of the arrondissement and getting information on what went into the planning of the development. I’m also interested in knowing what went into the choice of street names, after discovering the following assortment:
I think you can tell a lot about a place by what it names its streets.
Anyway, we did end up going to the mairie, and even found a nice man at the information desk who spoke English; during this outing, broken English started replacing broken French as our lingua franca, since apparently the 2/3 of my teammates who were there speak English a bit better than French. It’s certainly easier for me to understand English with a Finnish accent than French with a Finnish accent, though I’m somewhat depressed at the loss of this opportunity for practicing my French, which is seeming more and more inadequate every day.
Some more pictures:
The thing above the door makes me think of carpenters’ plumb lines; it also makes me think of the sort of thing that falls and impales people in CSI: Miami.
This apparently is the largest Chinese supermarket in Paris. I think it even has its own Wikipedia entry, but I’m too lazy to go check.
A rather adorable little passage off of Rue Jeanne d’Arc, which is otherwise notable for taking street-theme-naming to an extreme. At least 2/3 of the businesses on said street incorporate its name into their title, including — if I recall correctly — the Joan of Arc Bakery, Joan of Arc Hardware Store, and Joan of Arc Creepy Beauty Salon With A Window Display Consisting of Disembodied Mannequin Hands Sporting Disturbing Fake Nails and Covered in a Thin Film of Dust.
In another Wacky and Entertaining Misadventure, I tried to cash my traveler’s checks after school on Tuesday. I took the #13 to Opéra, the closest stop to the American Express office; I didn’t have an exact address, but I’d seen where it was on Google Maps, right at the end of the Boulevard Lafayette. After I found said Boulevard, i walked along it looking for the trademark blue-and-white sign of American Express. In doing so, I learned a Deep and Significant Truth about Human Existence: apparently, every second business on the Boulevard (or was it Rue?) Lafayette has a blue-and-white sign.
Question:
Can you find the American Express sign below?
Answer:
No, you can’t find it, because it turned out that Google Maps — when zoomed in just a little bit more — reveals that there’s a tiny little street right by the end of Lafayette, hidden behind the Opera House, created for the purpose of concealing the American Express office; it also turns out that you can’t find this out until you take the Métro back to your dorm room, since the sign on the park gate saying “Wifi Accès Libre” turns out to be French for “We like to see foreigners sit on a bench, open their laptops, and spend five minutes trying hopelessly to access one of the unlocked networks that flickers in an out of existence in a cruel and sadistic dance of flickering-ness.”
We were not amused.
But we did end up finding the American Express:
And we cashed some of our checks, and we were happier.
I talked to my grammar professor after class to get up to speed on what the deal was with the in-class presentations people were giving. I figured it wasn’t the whole class doing those, since there’s 40 of us, but I wasn’t sure if people who weren’t giving presentations had to turn in extra written work or something. She opined that my level of French was good enough to give a presentation, so I said I would, since I know I can do that and it removes any issue of having to make up for it with other work or whatnot.
There had been a number of students waiting to talk to the professor before me. The fellow immediately in front of me had given her a paper on some early-20th-century French film version of Antigone. At some point when I was talking to her, the professor apparently conflated me with that student, because she suggested I do a presentation on Antigone since I evidently knew it pretty well and it’s a story with universal themes about stuff. I was too busy frantically attempting to recall what I did know about the play to realize she was getting the two of us confused, until she started writing down the other guy’s name in her schedule of presentations instead of mine, an by that time I’d already agreed that it was an absolutely splendid idea.
It shouldn’t be too hard to pull off. I’m thinking a brief summary of the play, addressing the themes of duty-to-conscience-vs-duty-to-the-state and including a lively and humorous account of all the deaths and convoluted familial relations, possibly accompanied by a chart on the blackboard (because anything involving Oedipus’s family tree is good for a laugh), before launching into the universal-themes stuff, mentioning that everybody from Carl Orff to Bertolt Brecht has done stuff based on the story, then getting into the shifting notions of the role of the post-Enlightenment state and the parallels and differences found in cases such as conscientious objection. Last year’s Religion and Public Policy class notes should supply everything I need.
Oh, and speaking of Oedipus makes me think naturally of Tom Lehrer:
Huh, so I didn’t really have much to say in this post, yet I managed to use over 1100 words to say it. I’m talented, aren’t I?
