Still Hard to Believe

We've been enjoying a long string of sunny springlike days. The temperatures have been reaching the low 50s in the afternoon and the days are noticeably longer than a month ago. Some trees are budding, and I even saw a few daffodils pushing up out of the ground.

It's days like these that make me want to get out and walk, even when I don't have a destination in mind. And it's also a time to be struck anew by the fact that we're actually living in Paris. Crazy but true. Maddening sometimes but mostly amazing.

Holy Grail for Shoppers

In a twist on You-Are-There-Reading, we did some You-Are-There-Viewing over the weekend with the DVD of The Da Vinci Code. I read the book awhile back on a beach vacation, long after all the sensation had died out, and honestly, I did not get too engrossed in the details. Watching the movie was fun, though, with so many scenes shot in Paris, including those eerie night scenes in the Louvre and in St. Sulpice. (If you go to St. Sulpice, you'll find disclaimers from the Catholic Church explaining all the things in the movie that are so wrong from the point of view of church doctrine.) I had to laugh out loud at the end, however, when Tom Hanks realizes that the final resting place of the Holy Grail is the inverted pyramid designed by I.M. Pei. This pyramid is not in the museum itself but in the shopping mall next door, directly in front of the Virgin Megastore. Coincidence? (I think not!)

Sticker Shock

Six months into our stay, I'm pretty adept with the euro and can even give a cashier exact change without too much trouble. Getting used to the high price of living in Paris is another thing. To give you a sense of what I mean by "high", here's a list of some of the things you might buy while in Paris, whether as a tourist or resident, and the typical prices in our well-to-do neighborhood(assuming the euro is about $1.46):

• two liter bottle of milk(just a bit more than a half gallon): $3.73
• Starbucks tall coffee (actually, here the smallest size is called "moyen" or medium): $3.77
• cup of coffee in a local café: $3.51
• cup of coffee on the Champs Elysées: $6.58
• sandwich at your local bakery: from about $5.40 to about $8.00
• chicken: $1.96 per pound for the whole chicken and up to $5.14 per pound for split breasts; roasted whole chicken from the butcher's rotisserie: about $12
• baguette fresh from the oven: a steal at $1.31
• bottle of wine from the corner market: from $2.07 (which looked questionable) to about $15; many bottles can be had in the $4-$6 range.
• the least you can probably pay for dinner in Paris in a non fast food restaurant (for two courses, not including wine or coffee but including tax and tip): $36.57
• two Snickers bars out of a vending machine: $2.92

The good news: walks through the city and most museums are free for those under 18 and free for all the first Sunday of every month.

Encore la Grève

Strike time again! Somehow we missed last week's grocery cashier strike. Today, it's the taxi drivers who are in fit of pique. They are protesting proposed deregulation that would, among other things, get more taxis on the road by making licenses (akin to the medallions they have in New York City) free. Not a good thing if you saved up and took out a loan to buy one the old-fashioned way. So today, "operation escargot" is in effect with slowdowns on the freeways and on major roads coming into Paris; as of noon, there were 68 kilometers of traffic jams (bouchons) throughout Ile de France (the greater Paris area). We rarely take taxis since public transport is so good but today's mess is wreaking havoc with the school bus schedule. Both kids go to school in the suburbs (one closer in and one farther out) and judging from the number of calls and e-mails from both schools, it's a mess out there.

Super Tuesday

It's Mardi Gras today but Obama and Clinton have top billing.

French (The Language, That Is)

I guess I should have figured that this would come back to haunt me. I took four years of French in high school (écoutez et répétez!), chose a college with no foreign language requirement, and squeaked out of graduate school with my Ph.D. just as they lifted the language requirement. The result, duh, is that my foreign language skills are pretty much nil. Oh sure, I've done some foreign travel but for a week or two, you can pretty much fake it. Even if you feel embarrassed, you realize that there's no way you're going to learn French (Italian, Dutch, Chinese, pick your destination) by the time the trip is up and you just soldier on, smile wanly, and hope people take pity on you.

But if you're living in a foreign country, it's pretty hard to justify faking it past the first couple of weeks. I'm taking four hours of French a week, dredging up that stuff Madame de Jaham tried to pound into my head in the 1970s, and doing my best.

Digression: How does this stuff stick in your brain? Why can I remember this dialogue I learned over 30 years ago in its entirety and yet still find myself walking into the kitchen and have no memory why I was headed there in the first place?

Michel, Anne, vous travaillez?
Euh, non, nous regardons la television. Pourquoi?
Les Duponts arrivent dans une heure.
S'il te plait Maman, encore cinq minutes.
Pas de question, il y a beaucoup à faire.
Mais nous manquons toujours la fin.

Returning from trip down memory lane: Some days, I manage okay. Hooray, I used a pronoun and actually got the gender of the noun right! Whoopee, I actually managed to put together a coherent sentence in the future tense. Other days, I get completely kicked to the curb, confusing which verbs are followed by à and which are followed by de, mixing up être and avoir in the passé composé, and totally forgetting which verbs are reflexive. Truth be told, my vocabulary is increasing and my comprehension too. Suppose I should take to heart those words I see while I wait for the ATM to spit out some cash: veuillez patienter. (Please be patient.)

Just Married

This just in: President Sarkozy and Carla Bruni tied the knot today, finally ending the coy game of cat-and-mouse the two have been playing with the media. Whether or not it will improve his plummeting poll numbers remains to be seen. Mrs. Sarkozy #3 looks eerily like Mrs. Sarkozy #2 (whom he divorced in October). No clue what the first wife looked like.


Cecilia

Carla