16e Arrondissement Part I: Maison Balzac
So yesterday involved a fun and exciting class trip to the 16ème Arrondissement. At the Charles de Gaulle – Étoile metro station there was a fellow playing the first movement of Winter from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on a xylophone. It was rather interesting. A trio of tourists went about asking people for directions to the Eiffel Tower in English, with some sort of Germanic/Slavic accent. It was somewhat disorienting, because I started responding in English, then went to French because they were clearly not native English-speakers, then it registered that they probably knew less French than English, so I went back to English.
Anyway… the class rendezvous was at the Passy metro station, which juts out of a hill like so, which is rather picturesque though I didn’t get a terribly good picture:
The buildings here are largely all fancy-like and take full advantage of the slope, e.g. this lovely lobby-with-a-view:
The Maison Balzac is labeled, inventively, “Maison Balzac”:
There’s a rather nice staircase:
And a pretty garden:
Ooh looky, a statue! Hey, it’s Balzac! Fancy that!
This one, presumably, is not Balzac, but it is also a statue:
Aww, now doesn’t this look picturesque? And, hey, you can see the Eiffel Tower from here!
So we went inside and got a lovely student-led tour and were not allowed to take pictures and saw all the fun rooms and Balzac’s desk and cane and candle-heated coffeepot and that wonderful diagram of all the characters in the Comédie Humaine and excerpts of letters and sample manuscripts and lots of paintings and pictures by artistically inclined acquaintances of his. And then we had a break for lunch in the lovely aforementioned garden. I walked around a bit, to investigate a building across the street one level down:
Can’t see it too well in any of the pictures, but that seemed to be the Turkish flag, so my first thought was that it was the Turkish consulate and then I remembered this isn’t New York and they actually have embassies here.
So I went down and discovered that the street the building is on is the Rue d’Ankara:
This led credence to the whole Turkish-Embassy theory.
I also took pictures of the wonderful little bitty street that the lower levels of the Maison Balzac are on:
Here’s the front gate to the house:
And here’s the street the upper level access is on, which has a very Upper-West-Side vibe:
Old building forecourt type thingumy:
New building ditto:
And I took a picture over a wall by the Maison Balzac because I thought there might be something interesting on the other side. There wasn’t. Just some green roofs:
And then we all regrouped in the garden, more or less on time, and were treated to a lovely little informative speech on the Turkish Embassy by one of the students. So, yeah, that settled that question. ‘Twas indeed the Turkish Embassy. I congratulated myself on my deductive abilities. I also was conversationed-at by a pleasant woman who apparently lives in one of the buildings across the street and had come to the garden to read the paper and was wondering what all these young people were doing here. She complimented me on my French, which is always nice, though of course nobody compliments you on your French unless they can tell you’re not a native speaker. Still, I managed to be relatively coherent and understood. I think.
More on the rest of the trip later. Don’t want to use up all the pictures in one post, after all. Today they were doing the whole all-out-strike thing again. Haven’t uploaded pictures yet but it was all blocked-like. The new tactic is to have dozens of students in the lobby so that you have to ask people to move out of your way to get to class, while they informed you “It’s your choice, strike or go to class.” Standard guilt-trip sort of tactic. Polite, at least.
One wonders at their logic, however. The only department, to my knowledge, that isn’t completely on strike is the French as a Foreign Language department. They decided to teach half-length courses. That was their call. If they’d decided to strike, I wouldn’t have any problem with it, so long as CUNY understood when the time came to talk about credits. And the professors in the FLE department who are striking have made it clear that they’re not going to penalize students for not attending. They’re being very thoughtful about the whole thing. But my Thursday-morning grammar professor is has (as she puts it, increasingly self-righteously as the strike continues) taken pity on us poor little studentses, and is teaching her course, 1.5 hours a week, maintaining strict attendance requirements. Unless the FLE department changes its decision and goes on strike completely, she has every right to do that.
So, essentially, what the students in the lobby are asking is for foreign students to take it upon themselves to dictate the policy of a French university department. Umm…. okay? Can we vote in your elections too? I mean we’re not the ones to talk to, we wouldn’t be coming to school unless someone was teaching, and I doubt there are many maverick anti-strike professors at Paris 8 who are going to be teaching against their department’s/union’s decision.
At any rate, it seems that they’re going to vote today or tomorrow on whether to call off the strike, or totally shut things down. Apparently they’ve realized that the sorta-kinda-mostly strike isn’t having much effect. And I can see the benefit of starting out at a moderate level; it’s hard to get people to mobilize quickly on a shut-down-the-universities scale, and besides it looks good to fire a warning shot or two, as it were. But it would seem somewhat more effective to hold the little-bitty strike for a couple weeks before going all out, instead of dragging it on, and on, and on and getting slowly, progressively more serious about it. Unless they really thought the little-bitty-strike tactic would have an effect? I dunno. The movement seems rather disorganized. Well, I suppose that means it’s no properly a movement, is it? Its goals are too limited to be really considered on the same scale as the Civil Rights Movement in the US, or Gandhi’s thing in India. Higher-level organization is limited here. You don’t have that sort of dedication and discipline that one finds in really serious groups; I suppose it really helps to suffer a few centuries of oppression, that motivates people to organize. This isn’t a social movement, just a reaction to some less-than-popular government policies. Can’t judge them on the same level.
Oh, and I was wrong in my last post about the possibility of dismantling chairs. They’re mostly one-piece metal frames. The tables, though, are just held together with nuts and bolts. So I still contend that, in a truly committed group, it should have occurred to someone to take apart the furniture instead of just moving it around. Even duct-taping chairs together would be more effective than stacking them. Creativity, people! Creativity!
In other news, I had fun in a grammar class dedicated to relative pronouns. The professor did that thing that professors do, where you think it’s obvious and you’ve got the right answer, then they start taking things apart and working out the answer step-by-step so you think you’re wrong, but then they reach the end and it turns out you were right all along. It’s annoying when they do that. But I made about 5 mistakes in 40 problems, which is good enough for me, since a lot of them were stupid things I’m not likely to do in real life. So that was good.
Wow, I ramble too much, don’t I?
