Medieval People

Wooh, it's been a while! No time for blogging when a girl's school is not on strike and no fun trips are being taken! That said, i did find the time to procrastinate long enough to put together this shoddy lil' video filled with winter-road-trip-idleness from last February.

It all began when i missed the last metro home on the eve of our departure. Tired, I opted for taking a 10 Euro cab ride from Concorde to Montmartre (that's expensive!), so i thought i should try to catch some footage along the way. 4 measly hours of sleep later, i met a friend for breakfast, which required taking the metro something like 9 times. Finally, it got to be road trip time. Over 4 days (that's slow!), we drove along the Loire, to Rennes and up to the coast to see Mont Saint-Michel, and then through the fields of Normandy on the road (to Rouen) and back to Paris. E. missed her flight home due to CRAZY outskirts of Paris traffic (horrible!) so we decided to console her over crème brûlée from "Les Deux Moulins." Proof:

Magic Gloves

One year on Christmas morning sometime in the late 80s, my stocking was stuffed with a pair of black magic gloves (most likely from Zellers or some place equally thrifty), that also happened to be sort of sparkly... Though magic gloves tend to be lost and replaced quite easily and frequently in the great white north, I saved my sparkly gloves (which I always called my Michael Jackson gloves) for my weekend figure skating classes and wore them without ever losing them until they fell to pieces. How magical is THAT? Other precious memories include spinning around on all fours as a toddler on my neighbours' slick parquet floor monotonously chanting: breakdancing, breakdancing, breakdancing...

I snapped this photo at the Jeff Koons exhibit at the Château de Versailles last December. Michael Jackson lives!

I sometimes forget...

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Mardi, 13:27. Beep. Vacances transat bonjour?

Oui bonjour, j’appelle pour devancer un billet d’avion?

Alors il faudra rappeler dans une demie heure madame, en ce moment nous sommes tous en pause déjeuner. Au revoir!

J’oublie parfois que je vis dans un monde où le déjeuner est le repas pris en milieu de journée, où les employés mangent tous ensemble en famille et que cette heure de lunch durera jusqu’à ce que le dernier collègue de travail aura fini son dernier petit raisin. J’oublie parfois qu’en France, notre lieu de travail ne diffère pas vraiment de notre lieu d’habitation, et que si le téléphone sonne pendant ce premier repas pris en plein milieu de journée (mis apart le croissant matinal, bouffé dans le métro avec café express, bien sûr), nous répondrons d’une manière des moins chaleureuses. Si une cliente désire changer son billet d’avion en plein après midi (quelle horreur !) nous sommes polis, mais notre ton sera juste assez glacial pour communiquer à cette cliente qui ose nous appeler qu’elle a effectivement oublié dans quel pays qu’elle se retrouve, qu’en France, nous ne savons pas afficher nos heures de DÉJEUNER sur nos horaires, que nous ne savons pas nous servir d’un RÉPONDEUR, que nous ne songerions jamais à prendre nos pauses à des heures différentes afin d’offrir un service continu pour compenser pour nos piètres heures d’ouvertures malgré que nous soyons ce qui semble être un CENTRE D’APPEL, que nous sommes précieux, quoi.

I sometimes forget that I live in a world where lunch is not only the first meal of the day, but is also taken very late. I sometimes forget that coworkers all tend to eat together as a family, and that said lunch break will last until the very last coworker has finished that very last grape. I sometimes forget that in France, one’s workplace is no different than one’s home, and should the telephone dare to ring during this first meal of the day (discounting any croissants that might have been scarfed down during that crowded metro commute to work) taken in the very middle of the day, we shall respond in a manner that is dry and curt. If a client should wish to change her plane ticket in the middle of the afternoon (the horror!) we shall be polite, but just icy enough to let her know that she has indeed forgotten just where she living, that in France, we know not how to advertise our lunch hours on any documents advertising our opening hours, that we have zero use for automated messages, that we would NEVER think to take our lunch breaks at different times so that we may offer continuous service throughout the day as a means to compensate for our meagre hours of operation even though we are what seems to be some sort of call centre. How precious.

Days three and four: Brittany.

Rennes was everything I had hoped Paris would be: French and beautiful, populated but not overcrowded, vibrant yet personable.

Brittany is known for its crêpes, not pancakes! Baken on Demand!

The town of Dinan was even more compelling in the morning light.

The coffee that accompanied this sugar tube cost 6 euros. Talk about a Freudian slip!

And then we went home.

Day two: castles and parapets and unicorns

Japanese tourists at Château Chenonceau, where lived Henri II, Catherine de Médicis, and some other people too. I photographed myself in their mirrors, I did! The drizzle got me grumpy as we ran through the maze escaping the Queen of Hearts screaming, off with their heads! Living in France has given me new insight into Alice's adventures in Wonderland: English girl crosses channel (hello, long dark tunnel?) and finds herself in a land filled with beautiful gardens where everything is just a little bit off and doesn't always make sense...

At the end of the day, we spotted another castle from the highway and drove towards it for a wonderful dusk themed photo opportunity. Mary Timony would have dug it.

Roadtrip: day one

We had fully intended for an early start, believe me, but an angry squeegee man threw us off track causing us to spin around a plethora of roundabouts as we tried to make sense of some of the most flawed maps of Paris ever created. Lost in the 16th, Paris can be a difficult city to escape! We spent the night in Tours, which is said to be the town with the most neutral, international French accent there is. We only spoke to a few people, but why yes, their accents were most pleasant! Kindergarten teacher TV French, voilà quoi!

Friday the Thirteenth!

Friday the thirteenth comes but twice a year! My friends and I celebrated with a roadtrip to the north west French coast visiting tiny old towns along the way. More photos soon!

Jeudi Noir

"La France est un pays de contestation perpétuelle," I was once told. The French are always striking about something. Sarkozy even went so far as to state that the French protest so much, it has become an ineffectual act that goes unnoticed most every time. But now that the man is threatening to cut jobs and funding from various sectors due to the economic crisis, half-assed picketing just will not do! The SNCF got involved, the national library, the Opera! What, May Day in January? Why, no! It's Black Thursday! While the Media predicted mayhem in the streets and on the metro, I found commuting to Bastille from Montmartre surprisingly easy today. How come? Well, it would seem that by the time I reached my destination, 2 million other people had already arrived...

Want to read more? Here is an article from The Telegraph.

Obamarama

Despite not being American, and despite being halfway across the world, in FRANCE of all places, my friend Katherine and I had a little Obama inauguration party right at home, in my hovel. Here is a photo of an excited Canadian taking a photo of Bush flying out of DC in his shiny green helicopter. Bon voyage, Dubya!

We shifted back and forth between CNN's coverage of the event and the French version we were able to capt on the airwaves. Image and sound quality were, hands down, better on the TV than on the broadband, but we are only human, and there's only so much interpretation of one's own language that one can take before losing it and renouncing said second language altogether.

Our celebration of Obama's inauguration meal, made possible by the countertop in my new hovel.

In other news, remember hypercolour? I do. But hypercolour tables? WTF!?!

Only in France, my friends. Viva Obama!