On Wednesday, my project team got to do our lovely educational walking tour of the 13th Arrondissement. Naturally, Wednesday was cold, windy, and partially rainy. Still, we managed to pull off the tour well enough. No pictures because I’ve posted just about all the interesting ones of the 13th and I didn’t bother taking any of the tour, really, since we were just going to the same places again–with the exception of the interiors of the Frigos:

Students by mailboxes.

List of artists/artisans posted on the outside of the building.

Students mounting the stairs–an actual spiral staircase that is not Of Doom by virtue of the fact that it’s suitably wide. See, French people can design sensible stairs. Sometimes.

The logo of Sacha Schwartz, whose workshop we saw. More on him to follow in a day or two. Rationing pictures and all that, don’t want to run out of Things Worth Posting after all.

I was expecting this Thursday to have even more students in the lobby and chairs blocking doors than usual, since they’d been escalating steadily and this was the last Thursday before break. But the lobby was rather bare:

Disappointing, no?

Grammar class was all about the subjunctive. Fun, that. We’re even using pages from the same textbook I used at Hunter. I’m confident I’ll forget it all again within a year. Which is, of course, frustrating, and more so than the usual quirks of French, because I actually rather like the idea of the subjunctive. Some parts of French are needlessly complicated, like the whole nouns-all-having-genders thing; talking of an object in a manner than connotes “male” or “female” adds little to no useful information, especially because the genders assigned don’t even correspond with cultural ideas of what is masculine or feminine. Subjunctive-vs-indicative, on the other hand, carries connotations of subjectivity vs subjectivity, which actually is does give you useful information, and adds nuances to the use of verbs beyond their literal meaning/denotation/definition. So I’d really like to get a handle on it, but apparently I can’t. Frustrating.

In my lit class, it transpired that apparently I hadn’t managed to email my corrected first paper, and the first draft of my second paper, to the professor. Of course, since the problem happened on my end, and there wasn’t even a record of it in my Sent Items, it would only be logical for her to assume that I hadn’t actually done the homework by the designated time; or rather, the only sensible policy would be to declare that it doesn’t matter what the reason is–since these things cannot be proven–and say that the burden of ensuring receipt of the assignment falls on the student. I mean, she apparently is relatively lenient with these things, so I don’t know if she’d actually penalize me for it, but I don’t like having professors think I’m lazy because that will unconsciously affect their perceptions of me, and therefore my grade. I mean, I did put it on my USB and go with her to the FLE office and print it up (learned lots of fun things about managing files on a French Mac, including that they apparently leave the error messages in English. So basically the user knows what’s going on until something goes wrong and they’re confronted with a bunch of night-indecipherable technobabble, in a foreign language, no less). And I was relatively aggressive in our in-class analysis of an excerpt from Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères. That threw me for a loop because I’d overheard a student remarking how in the original there’s a lot of interesting play with gender that isn’t evident in translation, and I couldn’t find anything remotely resembling that, until I realized that he must have been referring to the use of the pronouns ils and elles, which I suppose an English version might have translated as they, though I’d think one would really do better to go with the men and the women, to preserve the meaning of the words, albeit at the expense of some of the connotations (since one does, I believe, use ils to indicate groups of mixed or uncertain gender composition).

On the way out, I came across the students’ latest tactic: not ever-larger amount of furniture in the halls, but a relatively well-executed little skit mocking the government’s reforms. I presume it wasn’t the height of theatrical brilliance, though I can’t judge that so well in French as in English; at any rate, it included one guy instructing his stockbroker to buy and sell shares of different schools, and ended with the lot of them beating Albert Einstein to a pulp because he lacked proper qualifications for teaching. Let it never be said that French student humor goes for the subtle. Some pictures:

Cheery poster with stock prices of schools.

President Sarkozy addresses the crowd.

The cast end with a song. The gentleman behind Sarkozy is Carla Bruni. The fellow next to him is Mr. Einstein. I forget the others because I’m not terribly well-acquainted with the names of French political figures.

More pictures and whatnot later. As I’ve said, I don’t want to run out of things to post.

Today I got back my first actual graded assignment from a French professor (well, I’d gotten one back last week, but that was just a draft that I proceeded to revise, so it’s not final). My wonderful little mini-analysis of texts for — surprise, surprise — my Analysis and Comprehension of Texts class did not exactly go brilliantly. 12/20, or according to the handy little conversion chart I found online, this is about a B. So, yeah, I wasn’t (and am not) thrilled. Not terrible, of course, and I’ve got perfect attendance in that course and the professor keeps on reminding us that she prefers that we hand in work even if we haven’t done it properly so that she has something to grade. And I’m relatively sure that I’ll do better on the work handed in today. I wouldn’t really be too panicked if it wasn’t that, what with the strike, our grades are going to be based on just a few assignments.

At least I properly class-participated today, something I haven’t done in that class for a while. I was easily one of the more vocal students in the discussion and most of what I said, I got right. Which is how it’s supposed to go, after all. The week after we come back from Spring Break, we’re going to have an in-class analysis, joy of joys. On the brighter side, the professor said she’ll allow dictionaries in class. She’s railed time and again about the boundless sins of bilingual dictionaries, though I personally think her problem is more with the rampant misuse thereof; half the problems she’s cited as examples are things that wouldn’t happen if someone took the time to note that a word was a verb, not a noun, or that it was being used in the singular, not the plural. And she does have legitimate concerns about the utility of the more portable-sized translation dictionaries in a class devoted to in-depth analysis of the written word, which can really be summed up as such:
That’s not a dictionary…

THIS is a dictionary.

At any rate, I shall much enjoy coming to class with my Nouveau petit robert. 2500 pages of pure Frenchness:

In other news, my Discovery of Paris project team picked up our dossiers fresh off the press today:

Isn’t the cover pretty? I designed the cover. Well, I didn’t pick the color. But I did all the other stuff. Which looked quite a bit better on my computer screen, since I printed it out at the MICEFA office on a laser printer designed for quick, efficient production of documents; all the painstakingly calculated partially-transparent bits got converted into fields of dots. After being scanned into the school’s machine, the pictures behind the header (a lovely juxtaposition of a new block of the Avenue de France and the Frigos) is just about impossible to make out. But hey, considering we were flying pretty much blind, turning in material that came out the other end as a finished product without any mock-ups or anything in between, I think the results are pretty satisfactory.

Interior of the dossier. My section, of course. The pictures came out pretty well; I’d had a bit of trouble adjusting the brightness and contrast once I’d converted them to b/w.

On an utter non-sequitur of an unrelated note: I saw a woman in the subway with a tri-wheel shopping cart. This pleased me far too much. I am too fond of tri-wheel designs just because they are so darned clever. See for yourself, courtesy of some Wikipedia user or other:

See? They’re all “Don’t mind us, we’re just wheels” and a ditch/bump/flight of stairs is all “Hah, wheels will get stuck here!” and the tri-wheels are like “No, don’t think so.”

Also, I’ve been noticing a lot of people with crutches lately. I mean a lot. Like I pass at least 2-3 people every day who seem to be using a single crutch. Maybe a rash of relatively minor leg injuries? It’s odd, and rather disconcerting.

Oh, and I discovered that one can fiddle around with one’s profile on this Macaualay eportfolio site of ours. I promptly changed my avatar to a proper picture of myself, since I’d apparently been issued a bespectacled, nearly toothless, pink pentagon by the Powers That Be Deciding These Things.

There continues to be very little actually happening, what with the weekend and all, but there’s a few pictures I figured I might as well upload.

First, last Thursday’s grève-induced chair stuff (I’m not sure who decided Thursday would be The Day for strike-related demonstrations, attempted blockage of universities, etc, but it’s really become quite mundane at this point):

The escalators and stairs in the entrance lobby area, leading to the bridge over the highway to Bâtiment A.

A Japanese student photographs chairs.

The chairs said student was photographing. This is the left side of the lobby as you enter.

And this would be the right side of the lobby.

This is the innovative, high-tech method students have used to block doors.

This is the soda bottle which I use to brew tea. There are, in this picture, something like a dozen teabags in it, because while they can be squeezed in through the top, they’re just about impossible to get out again. Here, you can see the interesting results of my adding a caramel candy to dissolve in the tea: it messed with the density of the water, I believe, and all the bags floated to the top. This seemed, at the time, worth commemorating for posterity in photographic form, so I figured I might as well include it here.

Place des Abbesses. This is in Montmartre, I believe, which is rather trendy and touristy and whatnot; the combination of non-right-angling streets and lots of hills makes it feel a bit like Washington Heights. Except, you know, shorter. Anyway, that’s a pretty church and a metro station, with some kind of art class gathered around the station drawing it or something.

See? Pretty. Nice geometric stuff.

Pure wishful thinking.

Friendly scaffolding cover.

The big lot outside the St-Denis cafeteria is getting turned into a lovely garden. Yay!

‘Tis Spring! Flowers and students sprout on the grass. Isn’t that just picturesque? Of course, it’s right next to a relatively busy, noisy highway. But hey. You take what you can get.

So today I went to the Gare du Nord to recharge my Passe Navigo. Naturally, there was only one teller window open. The nice lady on the other side of the bulletproof glass decided I was a tourist when I didn’t understand her asking what zones I wanted the subscription for. She kindly advised me that it wasn’t a good idea to go around carrying large wads of cash on one’s person, especially in Paris, people were watching me even here etc etc. It occurred to me that this is one of the sillier pieces of standard-issue advice-to-tourists. I’m not contesting the validity of the advice in itself, mind you–I certainly don’t think it’s a great idea to walk around with large wads of cash if one can help it. On the contrary, it just seems too obvious to mention. It’s not a thing about being in Paris or New York or a big city in general, it’s common sense. Nobody walks around with large amounts of cash unless they’ve just gone and cashed their traveler’s checks or whatnot. You might as well helpfully remind tourists not to wander onto the subway tracks and touch the third rail; perhaps they don’t have to deal with subways in their hometowns, but some things are rather self-evident, yes?

So that was my deep philosophical pondering-on-the-nature-of-foreignernessicity for the day.

Back to Wednesday’s trip to the 16th:

I forgot to mention this cute little pulley at the Maison Balzac (also note old man giving sense of scale and charming atmosphere):

Ooh looky, you can see the Eiffel Tower from the street too!

Students flee the Maison Balzac:

Rue Des Eaux, one of those wonderful little very-Parisian streets:

Pretty old building!
(I mean that as a one-word adjective and a two-word noun phrase, not vice versa)

Ooh, park got steps:

With view of old archway thingy:

Say, you can see the Eiffel Tower from here too!

Ooh, vaguely Asian-type tree-shrub-things:

Hey, I know this guy!

Teacher: Julian, you’ll recognize him.
Me: Yeah, that’s Benjamin Franklin.
Teacher: People often don’t talk about how complex the French involvement was in the movement in America at the time.
Student: What movement?
Me: …
…
… Well, around the end of the 18th century, there was this little revolution…

Um, yeah, I don’t think it’s too americentric to expect people to know about when the American Revolution happened. Because, you know, if you talk about “what happened” in France in the 1790s, or Russia in the early 20th century, or Germany in the 1930s, or China in the 30s-40s, or Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Americans are going to know what you’re referring to. Just saying.

Moving right along:

Palais de Chaillot:

Where there were some guys breakdancing and whatnot, including lots of interesting stuff using soccer balls. Of course, I didn’t think to take video, and didn’t get any great pictures. They all kind of looked like the guys were falling:

Oh, and if you look carefully, you can see the Eiffel Tower from here too:

So that concluded the tour. I had a lovely overpriced ham-and-cheese crèpe and wandered about for a couple hours because I was meeting my MICEFA class at the Palais de Tokyo for a reading and there wasn’t enough time to go back to the dorms. Some highlights of the wandering:

Fire Escape Of DOOOM! seriously, the spiral-staircase thing is getting silly:

SuperDramatic angel-type statue shot:

Wheee, New York!

Really, the 16th should just be called The Arrondissement of Foreign Names. Avenue de New York, Rue d’Ankara, Rue Benjamin Frankling, Avenue du Président Kennedy, Palais de Tokyo, Rue (or was it Place?) Charles Dickens, Avenue des Nations Unies… I suppose it makes sense, what with all the embassies and the fancy vibe and the fact that they did a lot of stuff around there for the World’s Fair or whatever it was in the 30s.

A statue on a bridge:

View of the Passy Metro station from across the river, juxtaposed charmingly with a tree that refused to get out of the way:

Palais de Tokyo, southern entrance. Lovely neoclassical statue retrofitted to make an audience-participation piece:

The reading at the Palais de Tokyo was interesting enough. One Mr. Kenneth Goldsmith, an American fellow, dropping by on his way to accept some prize or other. Essentially verbal readymades: he did two sets, both radio transcripts, the first of 1010 WINS traffic reports on some holiday weekend, the second of reports on 9/11. He does a wonderful impression of radio announcers, their rhythm and momentum, complete with all the ums and aahs. Afterward there was wine and potato chips served, which struck me as an odd combination.

Oh, and one last picture, evening view from the Barbés-Rochechouart stop on the Line 2:

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?

So today, all the lovely chair-barricades (chairricades?) were gone. Even 2/3 of the overturned tables in the lobby, which had been there forever, were gone. So much for impact. I dunno, I’d kind of expected that if the students were prepared to drag around all that furniture, they were going to assume it would be cleared away overnight, and that they would redo it again the next day, and the next, and so on. I’m frankly a bit disappointed. I mean the whole thing was already more symbolic than anything else–and a cliché symbolic at that–but the least they could do is show some real dedication. I’m beginning to think that the students involved haven’t done much in the way of researching the history of this sort of movement. They certainly aren’t coordinating well. It’s almost as if they don’t situate themselves in any greater historical or social context, they just respond without analyzing their own responses. Not sure what their aim is now. If they wanted to actually shut down the university, they could simply glue windows shut and paint them over, remove light bulbs and put superglue over the lamp sockets. That would surely only take a few more people than it took to stuff chairs in every nook and cranny. If they brought along some screwdrivers, they could even dismantle furniture, possibly reassemble it with the chair back interlinked and whatnot. That would be a real pain, a chain of linked chairs stretching down a hallway. Closing off the restrooms–a line of heavy-duty sealant along each door, I’m sure you can find something effective at a hardware store–would also wreak havoc with the school’s normal operation. There are dozens of things they could do if they really wanted to shut things down, even things as simple as holding sit-ins in classrooms playing loud music. So that, obviously, is not their goal. I just am lost, at this point, as to what their goal is.

Okay, that’s getting a bit too rant-like, so I’ll stop. In other news, a couple pretty buildings in the 18th:

and

I’ve also noticed that, for whatever reason, I apparently cannot pronounce the word palmier. I order one at a bakery and they think I’m saying “pain de mie.” This is odd only because it’s one of those words I’ve known since forever. It doesn’t have the French r sound on an unstressed syllable, which often trips me up; nor does it involve a stretch of sibilants/fricatives/affricates, which I also have trouble with from time to time. So I don’t know what’s up with that, but it gets me rather frustrated and leads to my repeating myself at a slightly impolite decibel level to the nice lady/gentleman behind the counter, eventually degenerating into spelling the word and/or emphatically pointing at the pastry in question. So it goes.

Hey, did you know there’s still a strike going on? In France? Same as the past month-and-a-bit?

Yeah, it’s still getting on my nerves. At least this week I haven’t had to endure self-righteous foreign-exchange students debating the matter. Each of my professors is clings to her previous attitude, only moreso; one is ever more passionate about the justice of the strike, one makes ever-more-acid comments about Sarkozy, one laments how it shortchanges us poor little students, one mentions in vaguely then goes on to subjects like reincarnation or the power one feels in the air during the Spring Equinox.

Oh, and this is my 24th post. 24 is an important number, what with being the number of hours in the day and all. And, of course, it’s 2 x 12, and 12 is like 10 (which is important, since we like decimals), but 12 is cooler. And zodiacs like 12. And 24 is a TV series with Kiefer Sutherland, and who doesn’t like Kiefer Sutherland?
You see, this is the sort of babbling to which I am reduced when there is really nothing much to report.

The promised pictures of grèvified St-Denis:

On Wednesday, all these chairs were lined up in the big hallway that goes over the highway. Whatever could they be there for?

Hey, that’s what they were there for! In the morning, there were students standing among the chairs, and clustered by the doorway, handing out flyers. The doorway itself had a table in front of it, positioned to reduce the clearance to about 5’6″. The whole thing was rather endearing, but it will start getting old fast.

Did I say it will start getting old fast? It already has started getting old. Look, here’s another doorway:

Side view:

View from inside:

And another doorway:

Can we say “fire hazard”? I’ve mentioned it before and I’m mentioning it again–even for a nation that builds one-lane spiral emergency stairs, the blocking-emergency-exits thing demonstrates a striking disregard for basic principles of wanting-to-minimize-ways-in-which-we-might-all-die-horrible-painful-deaths. I’m sorry, it’s just stupid. If you want to block entrances, put people in front of them. People can move if the building catches fire. Granted, there’s so few people actually in the building that, except at morning rush hour, it’s not likely that you’d have much to worry about even if someone truck-bombed the place. The risk of a life-threatening emergency is quite low, as it generally is. I just get the impression that the possibility hasn’t even been considered, and that bugs me. I don’t like the thought that people do things without considering all the possible effects of their actions before undertaking said actions. Also, I don’t like the haphazard way the furniture is thrown in there. Yes, it’s probably harder to disentangle that way, but it offends my aesthetic sensibilities. I’d rather an arrangement that did not look so chaotic, and that went for maximum efficiency by using a minimum of pieces of furniture to fill the space.

Oh, and here’s a totally random windmill:

And the view of a courtyard and outdoor passage from my lit class window:

Yeah, haven’t posted in a while. Same excuse, not much has been happening. Have walked around a bit. Last week the Discovery of Paris class took a field trip to the Museum of Fashion. No photography inside the museum, of course. Took pictures of the building and garden and stuff:

Statue of Hercules and someone-or-other with some real classy graffiti.

Ooh, garden!

Guess what, you can see the Eiffel Tower from here too!

And other stuff:

Me + tree all flowery.

At the Place Vendome there was some kind of protest-y thing going on last weekend. Well, when I say “at the Place Vendome” what I mean is at the intersection of two streets a block away from the Place. You couldn’t really notice it for more than a block or two in any direction.

Lots of cops, seemed a bit overkill-ish really:

Managed to take a bit of video before my camera decided to die:

And speaking of video, this is from Sacre Coeur. Not the best quality on audio or video; suffice to say this involved some guy with a Spanish flag draped over his shoulders leading a sing-along of some song in English, which I forget at the moment.

Walked across the Jardins des Tuileries. Odd encounter on the way in with an older woman who stopped in front of me to bend down and pick up a big gold ring from the ground, and was asking if I thought it was really gold or something or other. Similar encounter with younger man at the other end of the park. His technique wasn’t as smooth; he just abruptly stopped and bent down and came up holding a ring, whereas she had glanced down at the ground for a split-second first. I presume this interaction, if pursued, would lead to Gullible Foreigner Losing Money in some manner or other. Not sure the exact process, have no desire to find out. Anyway, some pretty pictures from the gardens:

(huh. Didn’t notice those three guys being there. How rude of them. Ignore them and look at the lovely monuments)

Hey, they’ve got a pyramid! Who knew?
No more for today. Some lovely pictures of St-Denis totally grèved-out, which I’ll post over the weekend.

For whatever reason, I’ve noticed that when this blog gets spam comments, it’s overwhelmingly targeted at the “American Food Chains In Paris” post, which must have some oddly alluring combination of keywords for spambots. Anyway, some pretty pictures of Paris in the Springtime:

In the dorm complex area by the street.

Closeup of grass, note pretty blue flowers somewhere.

I’ve been, for a while, amused by the not-quite random use of English or English-esque words in advertising here. Movies, of course, often keep their English title, subtitled in French (e.g. Watchmen (les gardiens)); then there’s the odder stuff like LOL (laughing out loud), which seems about the equivalent of titling something for an English-language market RSVP (Répondez s’Il Vous Plait). I mean aren’t people going to be more familiar with the terms that are actually used than with the words they stand for?

Then there’s the signs and ads. Some of them go for a kind of thematic approach that doesn’t actually say much:

Others are even more cryptic. I’m not really sure I want to know what this sign is supposed to mean:

And then there’s my favorite, Nike’s ad campaign for its new jacket:

And the annotated version:

A: French for “Really, we speak English!:
B: Too small to read clearly, this is a little footnote to (A): “Le Ve de la victoire,” French for “All right, we don’t all actually speak English.”
C: French for “We want to evoke Winston Churchill and/or Japanese tourists, but we didn’t quite do the research.”

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.