Parc de Bagatelle and uneventfullness
Wednesday, the Découverte de Paris class went on its first lovely field trip, to the Parc de Bagatelle. Naturally, this was the first gray day after two weeks of happy pretty sunshine. The professor maintained that she’d telephoned the Cosmic Weather Department and asked for clear skies. As proof that this worked, she offered the 15 minutes, towards the end of the trip, that the sun was actually out.
Photos, of course:
Walking down the highway to the parc.
Entrance to the parc.
From a pagoda, the world is so tidy. Or something like that. Apparently these parks were designed to transport people to lovely faraway places in the comfort of their own nation. Ergo, a bit of pseudo-Chinese orientalism.
Professor + Peacock.
Peacock sans Prof.
Paons sur banc.
Ducks in row.
Back to the allegedly international aspect; this is apparently supposed to be an alpine stream.
Me in front of aforesaid stream.
A rather more impressive specimen of the streamlike variety.
We had lunch here. I think. Might’ve been another cave.
I suppose I’ll post the second half of the tour tomorrow or such. It seems if I don’t ration out the photos I really have nothing to post most of the time, and then I go somewhere and end up with a glut of striking pictures.
The university strike continues, of course. At lunchtime on the tour of the parc the professor decided what we really needed was to talk about it. This boiled down to her and an Austrian student arguing for 20 minutes. If we’d been speaking English, or if this had really mattered as a class-participation thing, I would have jumped in and pointed out a few dozen logical fallacies being committed; but that, really, would only have encouraged them.
I’m getting quite tired of people on both sides of the issue saying that Sarkozy’s reforms would make the French system equivalent to the American system. I suppose the error is understandable. In the US, people pay more for college than they do in France at the moment; under Sarkozy’s plan, people in France would pay more for college than they do at the moment. So it is perfectly natural that the casual observer would mistake one system for being identical to the other, just as a casual observer might confuse a house cat with a buffalo because they both have four feet.
Personally, I think that if a country insists on making political discussion the national sport, it really ought to do it right. At the least, they could acknowledge that being woefully uninformed about other nations’ political/economic/educational systems is supposed to be Americans’ shtick, and it’s really rude to steal our act like that.
At any rate, the grève continues, and Paris 8 gets more and more demonstrative as time passes. Apparently they’re traditionally the most into this kind of thing. On Thursday there were students walking around the dining hall carrying broken chairs to use as drums, announcing the demonstration that was happening that afternoon, just in case we’d missed the posters or the flyers. They did this just about as long as the dining hall was open. Of course, that wasn’t very long–for whatever reason, it’s only open from 11:30 to 2:00. I’m sure people with 12:00-3:00 classes are thrilled at this arrangement.
So anyway, the current front of St-Denis:
And I’m assuming this web of red string was either a guerrilla art installation or some form of protest:
That’s it. I told you things have been uneventful.
