Spring is here!
That was my first thought upon stepping out of the dorms today. Spring is here! Which is the first line of a Tom Lehrer song that I get periodically stuck in my head, so I’m once more compelled, naturally, to embed the appropriate Youtube vid so one may get the proper impressions and connotations of this phrase:
So, yeah, it’s all flowery and whatnot and a bit warmer and the coolness that remains is softer-edged and so on.
Went on a pleasant little walk around the southwest bit of the 18th, around an area I’d sort of skirted around on several previous walks, to Sacré Coeur. The church itself is neither here nor there, I mean perfectly nice church-type building; the impressive bit is that it’s at the top of a rather large hill, with a splendid view of most of Paris. I’d first gone there earlier in the week, at night, actually, which might have made for more dramatic pictures if I’d brought my camera; during the day, among other things, the place is irritatingly flooded with people, mostly tourists. Anyway:
View down a stairway. Such a very Parisian thing, these streets of stairs.
View up a stairway. This one is, if possible, more Parisian than the former. There was a lot more of this but I figured more pictures would get redundant. One section had a guy running around up and down the non-step slope-y parts, vaulting over fences and whatnot, all Jason-Bourne parkour-style.
From Sacré Coeur. Taken mostly to show the itty-bitty Eiffel Tower in the distance. Again, more dramatic at night, when it’s got the rotating spotlight.
Sorta amphitheater-type thingumy.
Straight line of steps; you can’t see it too well, but there’s also a tram thing that goes up and down.
And the view from the place in front of the church. Nice, no?
These people clearly did not want anybody to park in front of their garage, no matter what language they might speak.
Chocolate bell found at the Franprix with the Easter bunnies and whatnot, purchased mainly because it reminded me of the title chapter in David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day.
I’ve started to get irritated by professors’ habit, here, of tu-toiing their students when we’re expected to use vous for them. I don’t mind being formal with professors; I prefer it to the false chumminess you sometimes come across. MICEFA’s little welcome packet mentions this, with a line or two about how it’s related to the French teacher-training system, and the fact that they feel they’ve earned their positions of respect, yada yada. This seems reasonable enough, up to a point. It’s true that French democracy likes to fancy itself quite meritocratic, whereas American democracy claims a certain egalitarianism, and those attitudes can clash a bit. But I don’t really mind, even, that teachers are accorded more formal pronouns. What I mind is the direction in which the imbalance falls. Vous, after all, is the default setting, the term you use for anybody you don’t know that well. If there were some other term, denoting greater respect, that we were supposed to use for professors, that would be fine. Instead, however, it ends up that they’re allowed to use pronouns that fall below the default setting of common courtesy. The implication, then, is not that they’ve earned our respect, but that they’ve earned the right to not respect us. Interestingly, from what I can recall, French teachers at Hunter tend to use vous; this would indicate that it’s more of a cultural attitude than a linguistic habit, and thus that even native speakers are fairly aware of the differences of usage. I think. I suppose it’s one of those things that you either don’t understand if you’re a foreigner, or don’t notice if you’re a native speaker, or both.
