Still quiet here. You probably guessed that, didn’t you? Here’s some pics I took going to the “Contreoverses” exhibit:

This is on a street next to the library, I forget which street, it intersects the Rue de Richelieu.

The library itself, from within the courtyard. Pretty, innit? Not to complain about my Analyse de Textes prof again, but she got on my nerves again when she said, “Which National Library is the exhibition at? The real one.” Of course, part of that is my irrational attachment to the Mitterand site, since I spent half a semester researching it, but it also cements my opinion of her as someone who really, truly has an apparent knee-jerk reaction against anything new. She’d already gone on a rather cliché rant about cell phones and email, which was of course entirely apropos the text we were analyzing, but the problem is I got the feeling she actually agreed with it. Which wouldn’t be a problem, except that this class was supposed to be about analyzing texts, not endorsing or criticizing particular opinions. If you’re going to teach analysis, teach analysis, and if you really believe in what a given text says, and can’t keep your opinions to yourself, either throw in other texts that you disagree with, or don’t teach that text.

The point, after all, is to analyze how an author says something, what methods they use. Not to evaluate their opinion. Not to argue for or against. A little opinion, a little snide remark every now and then, is entertaining. Too much is really, really irritating. If anything, you should present as wide a variety of viewpoints as possible, because people with completely opposing ideas on a given topic will be making completely different assumptions and implicit logical leaps; thus, you can make sure the students learn to analyze, instead of getting lucky because they happen to make the same assumptions as the author.

All of which reminds me of some random research I’d gotten to doing online — I don’t really remember why — about how people with Asperger’s Syndrome tend to have trouble grasping metaphors and figurative language. What struck me, reading explanations of this, was that everybody seems to treat metaphor and simile as some kind of code, a semi-random cypher. A is to B as x is to y and all that, where you just plug in things that “feel” the same and presto! insta-metaphor. Nobody gives any thought to all the assumptions that go into figurative language, and that’s a shame. It ends up being that people “get it” if they make the same assumptions as whoever coins the metaphor, and don’t get it if they don’t. I think there was an interesting discussion that sort of touched on this in Douglas Hofstadter’s Goödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. I think his example was the expression, “The Vice President is the spare tire of the government.” That one, of course, is pretty straightforward, because there’s only one real way in which those two things are alike. But when you get to stuff like “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” the analogy is so imperfect that it’s just begging to be taken apart and studied. And I get the feeling lots of people just sort of sit there and go “Oh, how pretty, roses, ooh shiny!” And language and logic just lie there, their potential unused, understanding bypassed just because someone couldn’t stop to think.

Right, where was I? That rant kinda got very tangential to itself. Whatever. More pictures:

This was security at the library. Real tough, huh?

Rue de Richelieu.

Somewhere nearby, pretty building. The 9th, I think.

My ingeniously duct-taped showerhead has been coming loose lately and threatening to fall off. Eventually it did, at about 6:00 AM yesterday morning, waking me up:

And today, I woke up about 6:00 or 7:00, I forget, don’t know what woke me up, but I checked the showerhead and found it thus:

So clearly I have to do something about it. I already tried adding double-stick tape underneath the duct tape, and around the edges, but the duct-tape adhesive is just about shot, so the double-stick stays on the wall and the duct tape comes off anyway.

About 9:30 this morning, the fire alarm woke me up. So yay. I got some clothes on and got downstairs, and literally just as I was walking out into the ground-floor hallway the alarm stopped. On the bright side, it got me up bright and early to do my laundry. And now I shall go to the American Express office, to cash some travelers’ checks to pay my last month’s rent. Whoohoo. But first, one last random pic:

Inside the Mysteries of the French Public Toilets! Oooooooohhhh……

I was logged on here to delete the latest spam comments and I figured I might as well post, since it’s been almost a week since the last one. Life has just been completely devoid of things worth writing. Even the laundry room has been in perfect working order. Nothing to complain about. Nothing new, really. I’ve taken approximately zero interesting pictures lately.

On Friday, I did go to a museum exhibit that my Analysis of Texts professor had recommended on the last day of class, since I had nothing better to do. It was titled “Controversies,” and I’d actually seen ads for it around the train station and such, but it didn’t look that interesting. Turns out it was, well, probably worth the €5,00 student admission, but not the most exciting thing in the world. About 100 pictures, I think, maybe less. A lot of the “controversy” was just copyright disputes, which is interesting to think about — especially the early bits when photography was emerging as an art form in the late 1800s — but gets repetitive after a while. There were too many variations on the “possibly sexually suggestive images of minors” thing, which is basically the same story every time; a lot of “was this photograph staged?” ones from various conflicts, and some interesting cases of censorship (Is there a guy in this photograph with Stalin whom Stalin doesn’t like anymore? Erase him! –and– Is that a French cop standing by while those Nazis go around doing their thing? Get rid of his cap, nobody will know he’s a cop!). Other than that, the usual stuff — a Robert Mapplethorpe, a picture from Abu Ghraib, the last picture taken by paparazzi of Princess Diana, that one with the starving kid and the vulture — all with their own attendant Issues To Consider but nothing terribly original. Some interesting stuff about the different standards used to judge things in different countries. And one picture from 9/11 of a dismembered hand lying on the sidewalk amid rubble and a melted Hershey bar. Apparently the Daily News published it shortly after the fact. Hey, they do that, not exactly a classy paper. A few years removed, of course, and it doesn’t really have that visceral impact anymore. Probably because it is so shockingly surreal. At this point, the emotional impact of 9/11 is mostly about triggering memories of the event, and not too many people actually saw a dismembered hand on the sidewalk, so I can’t see it would have the same impact as actual images of the towers and so on.

At any rate, suffice to say that the exhibition was interesting, but mainly from an academic/historical standpoint. I’d sort of expected to be somewhat more moved. But then the professor who recommended it is a bit of an odd one (aren’t they all?). The last few texts we analyzed, she kept on telling us to “Feel it! Don’t think, feel!” Which is very nice if you want to make-believe you’re being taught by Yoda or whatever, but of absolutely no value when you’re analyzing a text in a foreign language. As she’d even stated on the first or second day of class, connotations and allusions and all that can be very culturally specific. In order to “feel” a text, you first need to make sure you’re working with the same basic vocabulary. And anyway she went back and forth between telling us to “feel” the excerpt from Rimbaud, and berating us for not grasping the precise difference between dawn and aurora (apparently one of them’s white light, the other is red). So yeah.

Paris continues to be, as somewhat predicted, a bit dull, what with school being almost over. I suppose I really should go visit and touristify and so on. My last class of the semester is tomorrow afternoon. Honestly, the most exciting thing to happen recently is a fire on my stove last night, and that’s not even as exciting as it sounds. I was taking my frying pan off the burner when a bit of melted butter sloshed off and hit the burner and ignited. I put the pan back on to smother the flames, but obviously I couldn’t put it upside-down — which would probably have been better for smothering, all other things being equal — since it still had butter in it. I was going to toss some water on it, then I realized I wasn’t sure if water does the same thing to butter fires as to oil fires. Seemed likely enough that I didn’t want to risk it, so I went into the bathroom, soaked my towel, rung it out so it wouldn’t drip, and went back to the kitchenette only to discover that the flames had burnt out. So all I got out of the ordeal was a not-quite-dried towel the next morning. Oh, and yesterday morning the hot water was off, for some reason, while today a note in the elevator informed us that the people who pick up the garbage are on strike, or something like that. Whoohoo.

Some pictures I hadn’t uploaded yet:

A sign outside a bookstore. A reading tiger of sorts, if I recall. I kind of got it at a bad angle.

Last week for Discovery of Paris we went back to Bercy, as I’d said, and the pool thingy was full of water. Lovely, innit? Which reminds me, back then I also ended up musing on the joys of translating one grading system to another. The professor filled out MICEFA grade forms, just wrote in my grades and gave them to me, apparently not concerned that I might cheat if she didn’t send them directly to the MICEFA office. Didn’t even seal the envelopes and sign her name across the flap. At any rate, she has her own system of converting French to US grades: 0-10 = F, 10-12 = D, 13-14 = C, 15-16 = B, 17-18 = A, 19-20 = A+. I got a 16 for language, a 19 for research and so forth. Thing is, the class is officially listed as two classes, because it takes up two class periods. So I need to have one grade for each listed class, so I get B for one class, A+ for the other. Of course, if you average that out as most American schools would, that means a B+ average for those two classes, because A+’s count for as much as A’s. But if the language and research grades had been averaged, and that average given for each class, it would be 17.5 for each, so it would be an A average. Which it probably will be, once I get back to Hunter, since this was one class and Hunter, unlike Paris 8, doesn’t care if you have a class that’s twice as long as the others. Still, I am amused at how the same work, evaluated the same way, by the same person, using the same criteria, can give two completely different results depending on how one works with a bit of bureaucracy designed to aid in time-management. Kind of highlights the pointlessness of the whole grades thing. Of course, the whole grades thing sort of is the point of the whole exercise, so… yeah. Best not to think about it to much, and just laugh. To oneself. Because other people might not appreciate the humor.

I was going to by Windex or equivalent to clean my room pre-move-out, but then I discovered Mr. Propre wipes. Seriously, how can you resist Mr. Propre? Not “M. Propre.” Which I find even more amusing. It somehow feels like it offers an insight into marketing and demographics and so on. At any rate, I bought it. Wonderful Franglais. Which reminds me of a new expression I learned from a Czech student: “On y go.” A combination of the French “on y va” and the English go.

The adventures of store-brand cereal! That yellow thing? A big lump of clotted-together cereal dust. Didn’t taste bad.

The park at Paris 8. All grassy now! With the cafeteria in the background. Those orange boxes up top, i learned this weekend, are dorms. So all those times I was in the cafeteria building and someone asked me where the dorms were, and I said they were somewhere else, this was just the cafeteria… my bad.

Colorful underpass.

Was intrigued by these statues. Went down to the level of the canal thingy there and noticed lots of other artsiness:

More statues!

Goose!

Peek-through sculpture thingumy.

Another statue!

Them pig things again from another angle.

Kings Cross. Had work going on. I wandered about a bit before going to get my train at St. Pancras station, next door. There was work going on at platforms 9 and 10, and a helpful sign telling Harry Potter fans where to go to find the Platform 9 3/4 sculpture. I considered taking a picture. Of the sign, that is, not the sculpture. The sculpture would have been out of my way.

In other news, I’ve scheduled my checkout time for the dorm. It didn’t cross my mind that I would have to, until I got a letter to tat effect in my mailbox here. It seems that the dorms do not have sufficient staff to check out everyone on the day that their contracts expire, so they require students to make appointments for checkout, first come first serve. I suppose I should have seen that one coming, since the dorms are run essentially like a rather high-security apartment complex; there’s no RAs or anything, just the front-desk and cleaning staff. I was a bit annoyed, though. I knew they let people check out before the contracts expire; I didn’t know it would be required for some people. Logistics. Always fun, no?

I said I’d post pictures. I am now posting pictures. This demonstrates what a good and trustworthy individual I am, no?

Apparently France is stalking me:

Ooh hey, isn’t this an esthetically pleasing building, in a low-key kinda way?

This would be Oxford:

The Oxford Tube shuttle-bus thing is very convenient, plenty of easy-to-get-to stops in London. Very comfortable. Also a victim of a peculiar procedural idiocy: the drivers don’t open the doors by default when they stop; they only open if someone’s waiting, or if you ask them to. There is no stop-requesting button system. You’re not supposed to be up near the front while the bus is in motion. So this means you have to get up as soon as the bus stops and dash for the front so that the driver knows you’re actually getting off. Which is a lot of fun when you’re in a new town and there’s a bunch of buses in front of you and you’re not sure if the driver has actually stopped-stopped, or is about to move forward, or what. The London Tube, for the record, has the opposite problem. Stops are announced ahead of time, doors open automatically (unlike the Paris Métro), but the interior is not comfortable at all. All right, the seats are nice, but as with most subway systems you’re likely to end up standing. The aisle between seats is narrow, the doors are small, and the ceiling of the cars curves down rather sharply; while the middle is, I’d guess, between 6’4″ and 6’6″, the sides are easily under 6′. This means that I had the pleasure of getting crammed against a low, curved wall for most of my trips, often having to push my way through a dense crowd to get to the minuscule door on the other side. I don’t think there’s hope of enlarging the trains in the near future, since the tunnels seem to fit them pretty snugly, but at least they could fit them with bigger doors and smaller, bench-style seats so people can at least move around.

Anyway.

I don’t know what the naked rusting person is doing up here, but there you go:

Amusing faces:

Dorms, if I recall?

Interesting tower-thingy:

Well hey, if it isn’t all architecturally juxtapositional:

London has these signs all over. They either mean “No Left Turn” or “Boomerangs Prohibited.”

These markings are nice, but they really confused me:

First, of course, I’m used to places where people don’t drive on the wrong side of the road. Then I see “Look Right,” and my brain is going “no, US driving is on the right,” and anyway I’m used to NYC “One Way” signs and reflexively look the way the arrow isn’t pointing, and I see “Look Left” across the street and end up hopelessly, utterly confused, whipping my head back and forth a half-dozen times before I start crossing. Also, pedestrian traffic signals are somewhat rare in London, and crosswalks are badly marked (often just a couple dashed lines).

I had to go on Wikipedia to find out what “Franked Mail” is. The article was too boring, though, and seemed like it would require work to suss out the exact details of the difference as used in the UK. I include the link here for the sake of completion only.

Pay-by-phone parking! Innat clever?

Some park or other. Reminds me of the stuff by the Seine and Central Park.

Yes, they got so desperate for names that they started calling streets after building materials:

Doesn’t this just make you want to chain up a unicycle and a tricycle and then argue with them when they come to take them away?

Sadly, some UK phonebooths are just dull:

In the US, we don’t bother with signs like these. We just let the tourists stand up on the double-decker buses and see what happens.

Another rusty naked person!

You know what this reminds me of? The penultimate episode of the second series of the new Doctor Who, when the Cybermen’s transdimensional imprint thingies are just standing around waiting to materialize and invade. Maybe because seeing Star Trek had already put me in a knowingly-silly same-show-as-forty-years-ago-but-with-a-real-special-effects-budget sci-fi mood.

Okay, this is actually even grammatically correct in American English, but it still sounds silly. Who startled the poor scaffolding?

A lot of signage in the UK is much chattier in diction than in the US. They don’t have many “exits”:

And they don’t “yield” the road:

Their equivalent to “If You See Something, Say Something.” Rather minimalist, semi-abstract, Modernist quality to it:

A London public toilet. Apparently, restrooms in the UK are important enough to get coats of arms on them:

Contrast the French approach:

There will follow, at some point, lovely pictures of various artistic stuff seen around London.

And here I go again with the rationing of the photos. Really, I’ve got enough for 2-3 posts, of London and Oxford and all that. And they’re even uploading as I write this. Thing is, I know that tomorrow the Discovery of Paris class isn’t going anywhere new (we’re having an end-of-class picnic-type thingy, same place as we were just last week, Bercy). And the end of the semester is approaching, so I’m not going to have irritating French-teacher things to write about for much longer. And since “here’s pictures of somewhere new I went” and “here’s something I don’t like about the French educational system” are basically the two things I do most often here, you know, I feel I really should be watching my supply carefully. I will, of course, be going to all sorts of new and exciting places in my remaining month or so here. But I don’t know precisely where yet, so, you know, best to be on the safe side.

With that in mind, here’s some more pictures of Paris 8 en grève! This was the total blockage of last Thursday:

Hey look, they added cardboard boxes:

You know, if it were me doing the blocking, I’d leave the down escalator un-blocked, and keep it running (maybe heavy-duty epoxy over the little emergency shutoff switch control panel type thingies). Because that would be really kind of humiliating for anyone who wanted to go through, right? They couldn’t just slip through politely, they’d have to run. You’d be forcing them to make more effort, take a stand, not just ignore some people handing out pamphlets. And that’s just counting, of course, the people who are in good enough shape to outpace an escalator, which would be most but certainly not all of the people trying to get in. I think, psychologically, it would be interesting.

After last week, I’d assumed that they would move to block all side entrances as soon as possible; I only checked them out because I knew my Thursday-morning professor is a stickler for attendance. And behold:

Hey, sculpture!

Aforesaid prof leads class out car entrance:

Students have wised up, block other entrance (doesn’t take much, really, seeing as it’s already about 10′ of fence):

Okay, so I’ll put up a few photos of London, from my wandering about looking for my hotel. Here’s bits of Hyde Park and whatnot:

Congestion Pricing! I have fond memories of debating this in my last two Honors College seminars. If I recall correctly, I usually came out as either for or against.

Achilles, I believe. Or one of them types, at any rate.

They encourage green building practices.

Yes, they really do have these things. For real. All enclosed like that. You keep expecting Superman to pop out or something.

London street signs: combining the stark style of New York with the high-visibility placement of Paris! Okay, so they were actually for the most part pretty good, when there was nothing blocking line-of-sight (I could read them from half a block away, which is a pretty good distance). But still, nothing beats signposts on corners for ease of navigation.

There were variations on this sign All. Over. The. City. It’s creepy.

And I’ll stop there with London. Oh, I just realized that I never uploaded the crêpe pictures! I can make crêpes, see? From a real authentic French instant crêpe mix:

Didn’t have enough milk for a whole packet, so I eyeballed the measurements:

Okay, so geometrically it could use some work. But it tasted goodly.

In other news, I saw the new Star Trek movie with my friend at Oxford. It was quite entertaining. Of course whenever you get a reboot thing like that, people are all wondering about whether it will or won’t conform to series canon, whether the new actors will live up to yada yada yada. The plot amounts to: “Screw canon, we have time travel!” The movie takes every ridiculous thing about the franchise and just runs with it, giggling maniacally as it goes. It takes guts to have your characters basically lay out, on screen, why you have license to change anything you want (see above re: time travel). The plot, if taken seriously, would require Starfleet to be run by idiots. I don’t mean this in the way some people do when they get into the whole Enterprise vs Star Destroyer type of thing; comparing Starfleet and the Galactic Empire is absurd, since one is basically NASA with a few guns just in case, and the other is an ancient-conspiracy-backed militaristic authoritarian regime. Sorry, I had a valid point to make before succumbing to a geekiness… oh yeah. The plot has Starfleet command acting like a bunch of idiots, or it would if you were supposed to take it seriously, but the movie doesn’t ask you to. Instead, it just seems like everybody is in on the fact that the universe really does revolve around the main characters. The audience isn’t expected to believe that, say, alien species — even those not on the best of terms with humans — are going to let themselves be identified by names ripped from human mythology. Three guys parachute onto a planet: two Main Characters, one fellow in the unfortunate red tunic of the Engineering crew. Yeah. We all know who’s going to die. And the scriptwriters know that we know. So they make Mr. Redshirt an unlikeable, blindly gung-ho idiot who’d have a Darwin Award with his name on it no matter what. And I swear some of the lines were just written as “Insert technobabble here, preferably but not necessarily including a reference to the original series.” In short, I’m impressed with the net result. You just watch this and part of you goes “Wheee!” and the other part can’t help but stand back and admire the craft that went into it. It’s one of those few times when being acutely aware that what you’re watching isn’t real is a good thing.

Wow, did I just write almost 400 words on Star Trek? I’m not even a fan of the franchise. Nothing against it, you know, just never really watched it. Hm.

I had things all nicely planned out, see? On Friday night, I’d post the rest of the pics from Bercy, along with witty captions and biting comments about French people’s frenchness and all the usual stuff, perhaps go into a rant along the way, who knows. And I’d have pics from Thursday as well, where the university was again blocked. Etc. Etc. Etc. And then yesterday (Saturday) morning I’d hop on the train to London, get there, visit my friend in Oxford, and have a lovely time in England, which I’d post about on Monday. Lovely plan, no?

Then on Friday evening, I went to the Gar du Nord jsut to see if I could get my train tickets ahead of time, and started running into serious complications, mostly stemming from my having missed a bit of fine print buried in the middle of the confirmation email and allegedly also featured somewhere on Eurostar’s website (I link to this so that you too can, if you so desire, attempt to book tickets there. It’s a fun way to pass an afternoon, and is more or less financially risk-free; the system usually derails far, far before you get to the payment-information bit, and even after you’ve gone through that, it’s liable to tell you that for some reason or other it can’t complete the transaction, you have to start over, dreadfully sorry, have a nice day, so long, and thanks for all the fish). At any rate, Friday was not spent posting, but was spent frantically attempting to figure out the details of how exactly I could obtain my tickets, and I left my dorm room Saturday morning mostly expecting that I’d have to come right on back. I did get the tickets in the end, and ended up running full-tilt down the escalators for the train and only got on about three minutes before it started moving.

I compounded the logistical errors once I was safely checked into my hotel room. Given that it’s about 1.5-2 hours by bus form London to Oxford, and that checkout for the hotel is at 12:00 pm, and my tickets for Paris departs at 8:30 pm or thereabouts, and that I brought a relatively large suitcase (a bit unnecessarily, really, since I actually can stuff everything I brought into my backpack), the obvious course of action would have been to spend Saturday explroing London and going to the various museums and things people had recommended, and then to check out on Sunday morning, head down to Oxford, hang out there, and come back to London in time to catch the train. Yeah. Instead I headed directly over to Oxford, had a lovely time, came back last night, and am now going to have to check out in the next 45 minutes, and will end up wandering about London with a big duffel bag. In a mild rain, to boot. Though on the upside, that mild rain has led to a very nice ambient temperature, and it does seem a lovely city to wander about.

At any rate, um… I suppose the point of the above paragraphs is that… well, there’s really no point, but I had to write something and that’s what’s on my mind. Hey, if anything, it’s proof that I’m an equal-opportunity complainer; it’s not just French people’s inability to plan things well that irritates me, it’s my own as well. Aren’t I wonderfully egalitarian?

And now the rest of the pics from Bercy, mostly from the Musée des Arts Forains, without captions or such because that would take too much time. Yes, all the video is of me grinning like an idiot on merry-go-rounds. We rode three in all. It was entertaining. It also leads me to ponder why “grinning like an idiot” is such an idiomatic expression. I mean, I’ve come across plenty of idiots who aren’t particularly cheery, you know? I guess it’s the inverse of the ignorance-is-bliss idea. Anyway: pictures!

Fun game. I placed about 3rd in the first round even though I joined in late and the guy next to me (who got first) had been using both our controller thingies on his little racing waiter. Clearly I have useful skills).

Started drizzling when I went into the metro. By the time I got out, there were crowds of people trying to get down the station-entrance stairs, the bottom of which was a big puddle, and there was hail. Little hail, but hail nonetheless.

Wednesday as usual was a lovely class trip for Discovery of Paris. In this case, to Bercy, in the 12th. Here are pictures:

Sculpturey whatsit by the Metro station.

Ministry of Finance building.

The Palais Omnisports. Apparently the turf on the sides wasn’t added till a good while after construction; it had metal or something there, and people weren’t too keen on that, so grassy stuff was added. And it was alleged that these lawns are mowed by lawnmowers lowered on ropes from the roof. You’re welcome, by the way, for the previous sentence’s subtle interplay of assonance and consonance.

Shiny building. Once more I managed to totally not notice a person who ended up being kinda prominent in the picture. Irritating, throws off the composition. Bad passer-by!

Hey, those towers look familiar…

It seems this was supposed to be a fountain/pool, but it was too high-maintenance.
It has since been repurposed:

Water!

And now with moving-ness:

Statues!

Closeups of some:



(ah, the old subway tokens! Insta-nostalgia right there. I don’t think I ever actually used one, mind you, but I saw some way back when)

More sculpty-ness:

The Cinémathèque / Bibliothèque des filmes. Or something like that. I forget the official name. At any rate, here’s where my camera accidentally got set on some b/w mode.

Cool building they’ve got, no?

Probably the biggest, most elaborate restroom sign I’m ever seen.

Park. I believe this bit is where wee French children can come learn about gardening things.

More in same park. Wow, I really had the camera in the wrong mode for a while without noticing it, eh? A shame because the colors here were good, a lot of green, brown, tan, contrast-y terracotta, you know.

Teacher leads students into the mysteeerious tree-path-thing…

The frog. Which reminds me of something my grammar teacher said this morning– according to her, the French have a lot of slang terms for other nationalities that are completely neutral; familiar but not pejorative. Which I find a bit odd. I mean, it’s not really something English does much. The idea of having a familiar way of referring to national groups outside your own just seems kind of condescending by default; how can you be on familiar terms with an entire nation? The only one that comes to mind, really, is Brit. And even that feels weird, really.

Shops and such.

Front of building (refurbished former wine cellar, I believe)…

…and inside (ooh the pretty effects of the lighting through windows)…

And ou the other side. Supposedly this is, for whatever reason, not a really touristy area, despite its appearances.

And in this complex is housed a bakers’ and pastry-chefs’ school. We walked by gawking in the windows, and were offered free samples of fresh bread. A light sourdough. I’m not a huge sourdough fan, but it wasn’t bad. And it was fresh. And if was free. Which makes it better. The instructor came out and talked a bit about the whole baking-school thing. Apparently bakers get up at 1:00 AM and work on 5 hours of sleep. Fun!

Then we arrived at a cool museum.

Entranceway of said museum…

Didn’t take pictures in the first building we went to, which had a composite merry-go-round (French, English, German pieces) in one hall and automatons and opera in the next. Wasn’t sure what their photo policy was and all. But then it turned out they didn’t mind. So I started taking more. Here’s a few of the courtyard:

And a video:

And more will go up tomorrow.

So there I was at the Quick by the Barbès-Rochechouart Métro station, enjoying the atmosphere — which is basically the European equivalent of Wendy’s, non-McDonald’s fast food with a generally red-and-white color scheme — and determined to be glum and preemptively mourn my GPA, which stands currently at 3.988 and is definitely going to take a beating at the hands of those inscrutable French professors. Yes, I worry too much about these things. Anyway, there I was trying to do the whole glum thing when I started reading the signs hanging from the ceiling, which appeared to be total gibberish. I mean, I’m getting better at deciphering French abbreviate-y webspeak-y stuff, but either this was a meaningless collection of letters or I’d developed a weird form of insta-dyslexia. It took me a few seconds to figure out that I was looking at English song lyrics, transliteraed into French:

Aïe biliv aïe quann flaïeuh
Aïe biliv aïe quann teuch ze skaïeuh

Aïe ouil sur vyve

Yeah. So that killed the glum mood. I would have taken pictures, but you know, it’s weird to go around a fast-food place snapping photos of the signs hanging above people’s heads. They’d probably think I was going to come back and rob the place.

In other news, I went by one of the little French Pizza Huts today. I am quite impressed with them. All right, so they seem to be almost exclusively delivery/takeout places, pretty small, but they’ve got two things I have not encountered in the US. First is these packets of spicy sauce, about the consistency and color of olive oil, that are great for adding to just about anything that isn’t already spicy (with the possible exceptions of Tootsie Rolls and kittens). Second, they’ve got these really clever plastic bags. You know how pointy hard things tend to punch right through plastic bags? They noticed that too! And they preempted it! See:

Isn’t that clever? Totally distributes the weight and stress on the bag well, and makes it less likely to actually break. Oh how clever.

Oh yeah, and here’s that synagogue I said I’d taken a picture of. Not a terribly good picture, but I found it, so here it goes:

I said I’d have pictures of the inside of the church, didn’t I? Here we go! First, a helpful sign at the entrance. I kinda misunderestimated when to take the picture as I was walking by following the professor, but the cut-off letters can be deduced with relative ease, I hope.

Nice old wooden statue of St. Vincent, whom I of course associate with St. Vincent’s hospital in the Village, but who’s apparently also the patron saint of vintners:

Approach to The Crypt:

Itty-bitty-window-thingy:

Interior!

Inside the chapel in the crypt place. A statue of some cardinal, I believe, presenting Sacré Coeur to Paris. It’s symbolic, see? Either that, or it means he had a hobby of making model buildings of which he was very proud.

Same room, different stone guy. More bishop-y, in this case.

St. Denis, after whom the town and university are named. It seems that this fellow made quite a stir after he was decapitated by the Romans, when he proceeded to pick up his head and walk a good long way to the current site of St. Denis. [insert your own joke about how he could keep his head in tough situation, how he helped the church get ahead, etc… then there was the time he tripped on his journey and dropped his head, he was quite beside himself… ]

Didn’t take pictures inside Sacré Coeur, because the nice helpful sign there asked us not to. There is a very nice mosaic there, with all sorts of saints, including St. Denis, who gets one halo around his head and one around his neck. Some nice stained-glass windows, from the fifties, in pseudo-medieval style. And some statues, including one of St. Michael killing that dragon, as he’s wont to do. Or at least I assume it was St. Michael. The only other obvious contender would be George, and as he’s the patron saint of England, you know, I wouldn’t expect the French to be overly fond of him, what with several hundred years of military history between the countries.

Yesterday I had to get to the Place des Abbesses, which was a lovely opportunity to photograph the artwork in the stairwell at the subway station. Saw another helpful sign:

Except that this turned out to be Caulaincourt, not Abbesses; I’d gotten off 1 stop too soon. I spent upwards of 6 minutes wandering about and ended up getting back on the train and arriving only 6 minutes early for my appointment, which is more or less my equivalent of running late (actually running late is cause to doubt the integrity of the time-space continuum).

Anyway, I got pictures of the paintings on the up staircase, which (according to Wednesday’s student tour leader peoples) were painted by some of the people who have stuff at Place de Tertes.











Okay, so I cheated. I didn’t photograph all of the first bit, the red flowers, and I omitted the last bit entirely, because it was just a field of yellow flowers that is absolutely as thrilling to look at as the red flowers. If you really want to get the full experience, just copy the red-flower one into Photoshop or iPhoto or whatever and fiddle with the color adjustment.

And going down, photos! I only took pictures of the least boring ones, because the whole picture-taking thing was getting old:

So that’s that.

In other news, my bathtub drain decided to show its solidarity with the students, professors, prison guards, etc, by going on strike a few days ago. Thus I got to have lots of fun unclogging it, which was a wonderful learning experience in a can-do DIY ethic.

The high-tech tools of self-administered plumbery: a plastic butter knife and a wire hanger. Also featured: your friendly neighborhood bidet. I believe the bidet was invented when a French plumber got high and decided that what the world really needed was a bathtub the size of a sink that looks like a toilet. It’s sort of plumbing’s answer to the duck-billed platypus. It’s also a handy place to store random items in a little dorm bathroom that has no cabinet.

Because the hanger was one of the ones with a cardboard tube, I felt compelled to ripe said tube in half, peel away the layers, and turn them into a lovely pseudo-floral thingy:

This is what us hard-working Honors College kids do when we should be working on our Comprehension and Analysis of Texts essays.

I’d taken a picture of a synagogue today, first one I’ve come across in Paris, but I don’t seem to have uploaded it. It was in the 17th, I believe, an area with a vaguely Upper-West-Side feel. Quite charming. I noted it mainly because it said above the door “Aime ton prochain comme toi-même,” which I assume is the standard French version of “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Notable in the slightly different wording; prochain is, literally, next, and I think though I may be wrong that it feels slightly closer than neighbor, given that neighbor basically means “closest entity still separate from the most basic group” (e.g. the person in the next apartment over, not in your own apartment; or the country that shares a border with yours, not your own country), whilc prochain comes from proche, French for close. Also, I just can’t get used to the use of tu and toi as anything other than familial or familiar/condescending. Thee and thou are just so archaic in English that they come off as formal, since they’re only ever used when quoting or blatantly alluding to something (“Thou shalt not [verb phrase].” “Shall I [verb] thee to a [noun]’s [noun]?”). You don’t get this with the French equivalents. So to anglophone ears, you end up with this jarring combination of Divine Pronouncements on Stuff To Do, and Pronouns You Use With Friends And Family. It’s kinda weird. To me, at least.

Personally, I think the different levels of pronouns are more or less a waste of time. They’re really only useful for establishing/reinforcing various forms of social status, and French society is already too obsessed with status. And yes, when I say “French society” I mean “the French educational system,” which is irritating me right now. They’re not as bad as, say, medieval Japan; they place only slightly more emphasis on hierarchy than your average military chain of command. The trouble, I think, is in the self-styled meritocracy of it all. The French put way too much stock in their precious exams. I’m sure there’s more to becoming a teacher in France than passing one test, but that does seem to be a big focus of the process. Of course, standardizing testing that way means that, at least, all public-school teachers will be relatively similar in their approaches. It’s the same flaw you get with a lot of standardization: one way that works becomes The Way That Works. Not that all my French professors’ pedagogical styles have been completely interchangeable, but there’s definitely a French style of teaching that’s far more pronounced than any “American style” I’ve encountered at Hunter. Authority is very top-down. I’m not even sure if they have the students do evaluations at the end of the semester. Honestly, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if they didn’t. And professors seem to consider class time their own personal fiefdoms, essentially. My grammar professor likes to rant about her own sociopolitical views as if they were established fact. I tend to agree with her on more things than not, but it’s still rather annoying. I’m there, after all, to relearn how put together sentences in French, not to hear some random teacher’s opinions on swine flu or the Bodies exhibit. French professors are there to pass down knowledge to the next generation; their authority is derived not from their ability to answer to the students’ needs, but from their having passed whatever fancy exam and studied their subjects extensively. I swear they’re this close to claiming the Mandate of Heaven. Of course, knowing your subject and being passionate about it (which they tend to be) are good starts, but they only go so far.

Really, I think France and the US basically invert the prestige of one another’s educational and medical systems. American doctors get a very pragmatic sort of prestige: they operate in a very capitalist environment where their services are essential, thus they make lots of money (and, implicitly, face tough competition in order to make more money than their peers). French teachers get a much more symbolic prestige — the whole We Are Keepers Of Knowledge shtick — operating in what seems to be a practical government monopoly. Symbolic prestige, I think, gives people more of an attitude problem.

It’s telling that, whenever you hear talk about the bit of Sarkozy’s so-heavily-contested reforms that would make universities more independent of one another, all you hear about are the drawbacks or the benefits of competition. Either it’s teachers lamenting that a disparity in quality would arise between rich schools and poor schools, or it’s the pro-reform types proclaiming that competition will encourage each school to do better. Never is the possibility of variety really brought up. It seems that in the French mind, the quality “good” in an education is rather like the quality “does not blow up upon ignition” in a car; you might do it better or worse than someone else, but you’re all trying for the same thing. For the French, “variety” in schools means that some specialize in sciences, some in humanities, some in medicine or law.

Yeah, you know, I didn’t actually start this post intending to go on a rant against French professors. Really, they’re basically well-meaning people and they do know their subjects and I have nothing against them personally. Their general style can even be quite entertaining. It’s just getting tiring, especially because the strike has basically polarized people into pro or con and rendered the professors quite defensive about their precious prestigious employee-of-the-state-with-automatic-tenure status. American professors don’t seem to identify quite so much with professor-ness or teaching in general; their identity seems more related to their particular subject. They’re linguists, writers, physicists, activists, researchers, so on. Again, I blame the French Revolution. Since they weren’t forced right off the bat to deal with the competing interests of 13 separate political entities, the French basically replaced one System To Authoritatively Decide What Should Be Done with another such system. A more rational-legal one to be sure, and one that settled down into a pretty decent exercise in democracy once they got done with the revolutions. But they never seem to have caught on to the idea that there might exist multiple, equally valid answers to a given question. Thus you get stuff like the headscarves-in-public-schools freak-out a few years ago, which is just silly. You get some Americans like that too, of course, who are way too invested in their own ideas of a certain Americanness, but it’s less pronounced.