Apologies in advance. This is a long and ridiculous post about a recent trip to France.... but not the one the President went on. This one happened a week before his. And, quite frankly, I wish the dude would quit following me around.
My high school French teacher was a caricature; An intolerable hippie-mom who devoted a staggering amount of class time to regaling us with the triumphant exploits of her darling and "well-rounded" son whom she had managed to send to a prestigious Ivy League college. And since the benefits of going away to a prestigious Ivy League college were a recurring theme of my French instruction, it should come as no surprise that I took an active approach to rejecting most of the other material covered along with it. And so I've always been a bit proud to say that, while I don't know much about the French I took, there are principled Ivy-hippie-hating reasons for this to be so.
And yet, as uniquely talented as I happen to be at closing my mind to the acquisition of knowledge, I have to admit that a certain degree of osmosis is inevitable. And one thing most foreign language students inevitably osmose is the idea that someday they will have occasion to visit a country where the language they study is commonly used. Your hippie French teacher is always saying things like, "When you are in Paris, you will have to..." or more accurately "When I was in Paris I... blah blah blah blah... and when my Ivy League son goes there he will... blah blah blah blah... and so when you go there, remember to..." So, I suppose after so much of this, it didn't come as a complete shock to me when the universe eventually made me go to France. (Although the universe also ended up sending me to a state school... for which I am forever grateful.)
Happily the experiences imparted to me by my intolerable hippie French teacher were not the only travel advice I received prior to my trip. There was also this from the drunken St Patick's day reveler at Fahy's who was... disproportionately excited to learn of a stranger's vacation plans. "No fucking way, man! That is awesome! Wait, dude, you know what you should do? Here's what you should do. You should totally fucking do this. You should get FUCKED UP IN PARIS! Tell me you're gonna get FUCKED UP IN PARIS, man!" I didn't promise anything but I told him I'd do my best.
I don't mean for this post to descend too far towards becoming a boring vacation slideshow. For that, you need only click here. Instead, I will pull only the following osmosed bits so that some day... when you are in Paris... you may know what to expect.
- The drive in from the airport was something of an eye-opener. The suburbs of Paris as seen from the highway appear much as one might imagine inner city Detroit or Trenton, NJ to appear. Except a lot of people still live there. With a considerably higher amount of trash, graffiti, and soot. We drove past two separate RV encampments right on the side of the highway complete with clothes strung out to dry and open campfires. "Gypsies" according to our cab driver who was himself a recent Cambodian immigrant. (More on the gypsy issue in a bit) He talked to us for a while about increasing problems with unemployment and homelessness in Paris the signs of which were in great evidence on the drive in but almost invisible in the city center... sort of a mirror image of most American cities.
Seeing all of this left me in an even less tolerant than usual mood to deal with Parisian pomposity on any and all matters "green". In the city proper, one finds a proliferation of highly dramatic anti-litter propaganda. Posters present a pristine environment (arctic wilderness or beachfront or such) besotted with plastic bottles and other garbage. The signs read "Unacceptable? In Paris also, then!" Having seen what is "acceptable" for Paris's less touristy poorer neighbors, one is not exactly moved by these advertisements. Instead, I kept thinking to myself how remarkable it was that the parts of Paris populated with the wealthy and the visitors managed to receive "Disneylike" sanitation services. Also, I don't know if these ubiquitous green garbage bags are designed to accommodate automated pick-up, but I do know that they practically shout at us to use PROPER VIGILANCE!
If Veronica White had the opportunity to write something in such blunt language on the city garbage cans, what would it say? "Store it in your living room!" perhaps? - But it's not just the anti-litter campaign that gets steeped in this combative, pushy, over-dramatic language. We also find it on signs which should read, "Please do not feed the pigeons" but actually say, "So you like the birds? Well STOP FEEDING THEM. This causes the birds to become savage and dependent upon man!"
And then there's the McDonald's issue.
Yes, that is a very Frenchy Ronald McDonald winking at you. In Paris, McDonald's is offering (for a limited time only) a sandwich it calls the P'tit Poivre. It's more or less a Kastleburger dressed in a bland McDonaldsy mayonnaise which gets charitably labeled as a "pepper sauce". These two bites of disappointment are available for 1 Euro and 75 cents which, on the day that we tried it, converted to about 45 dollars.
Advertisements for "Le Poivre" (as I imagine the French kids are calling it... maybe "Le P'tit"? or better "Le P-P") are all over the subway stations. In true Parisian form, the ads all come with strongly worded health advisories. "For your health, you must remember to take vigorous exercise each day" appears just below "C'est tout que j'aime" (idiomatic equivalent of "I'm lovin' it"). This combined with the hyper-green posturing demonstrates the degree to which the French mastery of cognitive dissonance rivals our own.
And, as we know from our own experience, a society so practiced at nurturing contradictory notions can be a jittery and paranoid place. This is the only explanation I can come up with for the angry McDonald's manager who forbade me from photographing the P'tit Poivre signage in his restaurant. I had no idea it was such a closely guarded trade secret. Of course, I did manage to get the obligatory "Royal with Cheese" shot of the menu.
Keep in mind that 6 Euro 80 was running close to a hundred bucks this day since it was about the same time Geithner was running his mouth about this. - Of course, there's more to eat in Paris than just McDonald's. There is also pizza. On every block. Sometimes in multiple occurrences on the same block. We made sure to try the pizza in several locations since it was available to us at every fifth or sixth step. We decided our favorite was right down the street from our hotel at Pizza Cesar. Each pizza we tried was a quality gourmet meal with fresh ingredients none of which were pepperoni.... and many of which were egg. While we adjusted well to this aberration, we couldn't bring ourselves to eat it with a fork the way the French stubbornly insisted upon doing.
Other food you don't need a fork for included the grilled cheese and ham crouques and enormous hot dogs available from sidewalk stands and brasseries everywhere. That and these little pancakes slathered in a nut and chocolate spread type product based clearly upon the premise that stupid American tourists will eat anything you sell them from a cart.
- If you've read this far and concluded that we had no actual plan for dining while in Paris, you're not quite right. In fact, it's far worse than that. We had two plans. One plan had us exploring Paris like we would New Orleans. We would wander about the streets just letting the day take us where it would and leave ourselves open to discovering the city and its food via happy accident. The other plan had us making reservations at a restaurant some of us saw on the Anthony Bordain show one time and then fretting all day about how to get there and when to leave. And while the "planned" experience was delicious and meat-a-riffic, I much prefer Plan A.
And with good reason since Plan A yielded some good things. Walking around Paris, we found ourselves going for the Asian food more than anything else. I had an outstanding roast duck leg at a Chinese place in the Place St Michel, a soul-warming bowl of soup at Pho 14, and... probably the best overall experience at Dip Tandoori. We actually went back to Dip a second time. It was the kind of good that makes me want to bring the people who run Nirvana up on criminal charges for providing New Orleanians with such badly outclassed Indian food.
I'd like to say that I took the time to sample the chicken offerings of either the Chicken Corner...
...or the Chicken Family
But somehow there was just no time... or I may have been too chicken. - Besides the food, Paris is an easy city to do on foot. The Metro gets you anywhere you need to go. And, provided you avoid being flattened by the Parisian drivers who operate their little Renaults at idiotic speeds with little regard for even the most basic traffic laws, you can easily walk any neighborhood. What you find can be pretty interesting.
In the Place Pigalle, in the shadow of the Moulin Rouge, one finds a wealth of porn shops like these.
Or this one, which intriguingly features "Amateurs" on the marquee.
A million Fred Radtkes with a million buckets of gray paint could never relieve Parisians of the wacky political/UFO signage...
Or the graffiti that covers every available surface.
But, by far, my favorite signs in all of Paris were the ones advertising courses in "Wall Street English" from the "Wall Street Institute" Very amusing accounts of the Institute can be found here and here. I can't say it would surprise me if your tuition Euro ends up in a Madoff account somehow.
As a visitor, one is struck by the apparent "walkability" of Parisian life. There is always a pharmacy, a grocery, a bakery, a bar, a post office and seventy pizza joints within a block or two of wherever you are. The Metro is efficient and safe... even if it does smell like pee. One wonders why anyone drives anywhere at all except for the obvious joy the French seem to derive from terrorizing one another with the threat of vehicular homicide.
Seemingly, Paris offers functional convenient urban life at its best. But as appealing as the lifestyle may appear, I get the strong impression that most of us could not afford to live in Paris. In addition to the unmistakable signs of teeming poverty on the city's outskirts, we also noted the ridiculous real estate prices advertised in agency windows all over town. The most reasonable offer was a "studio" apartment available for 120,000 Euro (call it $1.5 million that week). I don't get the point of building a "well planned" urban paradise if its benefits are available only to a select social caste. This is foremost on my mind as we await the adoption of the new Master Plan and Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance in New Orleans and wonder what it could mean for us... if anything at all. - And then there were the obligatory visits to the obligatory sites. We made most of them. The obligatory photos of the obligatory sites are available in the aforementioned boring vacation slideshow... which you are not at all obliged to view.
But with regard to the obligatory sites, I would like to call your attention briefly to the following passage from the 2009 Frommer's guide to Paris.The most common menace in Paris is the plague of pickpockets and roving gangs of Gypsy children who surround you, distract you, and steal your purse or wallet. They prey on tourists around attractions such as the Louvre, Eiffel Tower, and Notre Dame, and they can often strike in the Metro, sometimes blocking a victim from the escalator. A band of these young thieves can clean your pockets even while you try to fend them off. Their method is to get very close to a target, ask for a handout (sometimes) and deftly help themselves to your money or passport.
Amongst our party, there were two competing interpretations of this text. Some of us read this and thought, "Yeah yeah. Beware of pickpockets and loose women. The guidebook publishers want to make it clear to the rubes that they are in a city, I guess." Others of us, being cop's daughters and all, took it as a warning of MYSTERIOUS DANGER at every turn and made certain that all party members secured their possessions upon entering any crowd of more than three people.
In truth, there are indeed so-called "gypsies" (and other sorts of folk) hanging out near most of the major tourist attractions. They operate much like the "Got your shoes" guys in the Quarter. If you ignore them, you don't have to deal with them for very long. On balance, their presence is a positive as it allows one to make a string of hilarious Borat references whenever they approach. Every day brings a new opportunity to say "Do not test me, gypsy" or "I will look on your treasures, gypsy. Is this understood?" or "Perhaps we can harvest their tears to protect us from AIDS". This never ever EVER gets old. Trust me. - It turns out that even the most stubbornly unreceptive French students do, in fact, osmose enough of the language to get along quite well in Paris. To my great surprise, I found that I was able to make myself understood just about everywhere we went without having to resort to very many "Parlez-vous Anglias"es or even much pointing or impromptu pictionary.
Even better, I seemed to get better at communicating with people the drunker I got. I don't know if this is because I was less embarrassed about making Frenchy sounds after a few rounds or if alcohol consumption limits my perception of my own failure. Either way, on the night that we did manage to get FUCKED UP IN PARIS, I'm pretty sure that I vomited in a foreign language for the first time in my life. I believe this is where we Americans like to say Mission Freaking Accomplished. - We spent a hungover afternoon in the hotel watching a show on French television hosted by the Bogdanov brothers. It contained features on the threat to public health from cell phone towers and the possibility of an asteroid-borne apocalypse. The Bogdonovs wore outfits that looked like they were cut from Hefty bags and designed for female extras on Star Trek. Fun stuff.
- The ride out to the airport was every bit as glum and depressing as the ride in. When I noticed the words, "Le Pen for President" among the unbroken string of highway graffiti, I determined never to eat another moment's worth of superior sounding shit about the supposed backwardness of American politics. It was also during this cab ride that I resolved to never again complain about American drivers who at least appear to acknowledge the existence of concepts like "lanes" or "appropriate following distance". Trust me on this. If you think you have had cause to complain about negligent driving and have not been to France, you really need to re-think that.
I'd like to take a second here to thank the members of our party who insisted that we arrive at Charles De Gaulle International a good 4 hours prior to our flight time. It turned out that we needed every minute of it as the French are even less effective at organizing flight check-in than they are at highway travel.
In that vein, I would also like to take a second to thank the men and women of the American TSA who, compared to their French counterparts, are not at all thick-headed, inefficient, or dickish. I will never again feel belittled or insulted by their polite (though absurd) requests that I remove my shoes for screening.
After having run this departure gauntlet, I have no trouble at all admitting that receiving my exit Visa was from France was a far more satisfying moment than was the entry.
Escape from France was a relief. Escape from the dramatic French was not so easy. The first leg of our return journey was a scheduled 10 hour test of endurance from Paris to Dallas. About 7 hours into the flight, our happy viewing of Kung Fu Panda was interrupted by a flight attendant uttering some embarrassing cliches over the PA.
"Code Red in the rear of the aircraft. I have a Code Red."
Maybe this says more about me than the inherent douchebaggery of organizationally mandated procedural terminology, but if my employer ever required that I refer to an event with a phrase culled from a second-rate cop drama, I might have to just quit our of general principle. I was contemplating this very problem when the flight attendant came back with a line that I KNOW I would have had to have someone else deliver for me.
"Is there a doctor on board?"
I almost needed one at that point. I still can't believe she actually said that. The absurdity would have been too much for me.
It turned out that there were actually three doctors on board who determined... presumably by impromptu medical review committee... that the passenger in need of medical attention would need further attention on the ground. Once our "emergency landing in 20 minutes" was announced, it fell upon the more frazzled and decidedly more French flight attendant to make the subsequent announcements. I found this very entertaining.
HEAVY FRENCH ACCENT: "You know... people are asking me... 'Where are we landing?'... and I.... I don't want to do too much of bothering them in the cockpit because... you know... they are very busy right now but... we ... we are landing at an airport. That's all I know right now."
TEN MINUTES LATER: "Okay you know.... so I am hearing now we are going to land in Montreal... and usually okay this is what happens. The doctor comes on board to look at the... this gentleman and then... if he has to go then they get the paramedics... and okay the paramedics come and get the gentleman and... the whole thing probably about 20 30 minutes, maybe."
TWENTY MINUTES LATER ON THE GROUND: "Okay so now... we uh... I think now because you know... we reported that there was blood involved... that now the Canadian Health Minister is not letting the doctor come onto the plane until... you know... we get the all clear so we are... we wait for the Canadian Health Minister to come and look to see if it's okay"
THIRTY MINUTES LATER THE CANADIAN HEALTH MINISTER BOARDS WEARING A SURGICAL MASK. AT THIS POINT I AM WONDERING 1) I HOPE THE "EMERGENCY" MEDICAL CONDITION IS NOT TOO TOO TIME SENSITIVE AND 2) WHERE THE FUCK IS MY MASK, LADY? THE FRENCH VOICE COMES BACK AFTER A FEW MINUTES MORE: "Okay so... if everyone can please stay seated and not to block the aisle when the doctor comes on board... we... okay so you know."
TEN MINUTES LATER, THE DOCTOR BOARDS. A FEW MINUTES AFTER THAT: "So we are... Okay so they have told us that we will open the back doors of the airplane... you know like when we do to get the food on board... so that the paramedics can come and get the gentleman and to take him out from the plane.. So you know please not to block the aisle for the paramedics."
PROBABLY ABOUT A HALF AN HOUR LATER: "Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your patience. They now say to us that we have been approved to leave Canada. It will be maybe another five minutes so we can push away... and ... okay so we have to show you the safety video again now."
SAFETY VIDEO PLAYS. PLANE DOES NOT MOVE. A FEW MINUTES LATER: "Ladies and gentlemen... they are... we have... they say to us now that we... because of the blood we cannot leave until the blood can be cleaned and taken away from the airplane. And so they are coming to do this... and so we wait for them."
THIRTY MINUTES LATER A HAZ-MAT CREW BOARDS AND BEGINS REMOVING CONTAMINATED MATERIAL FROM THE PLANE. WE RECEIVE PERIODIC UPDATES FROM OUR FLIGHT ATTENDANT SUCH AS: "Okay so it is getting a bit cleaner now I think. Yes they are definitely getting it clean now."
And so it was that, after many hours of delay added to an inhumanly long trans-Atlantic flight, we arrived in Dallas. We missed our connection and so had to wait another three hours before catching a late flight home. But man was I happy to be back in the U.S. even if it was Texas. Actually Texas was the perfect antidote to the cramped spaces of Paris. After a week of Peugeots, Renaults, tiny sidewalks, and communal dining tables, it was a luxury just to be in an airport terminal with widely-spaced extra-large bucket seats. We enjoyed a celebratory repast from the DFW International Taco Bell.
And though our surroundings were back to normal size, I think my world became a bit smaller as a result of this trip. And by that I mean the portion of the world in which I am potentially suited to live became smaller. This visit abroad demonstrates to me that there likely aren't many places in the world where I can live comfortably other than in the U.S. And, while I love my country, I've long understood that I can't live anywhere in the U.S. other than New Orleans.
But I suppose, in a roundabout way, the narrowing of one's options is sort of what this entire month has been about anyway. And besides, even if I can't stand to live most places, I am finding out that I can still get FUCKED UP just about anywhere.
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