Un-continent

Gigi informs me that there are six continents on this planet. She swears this is what she learned in geography this past year. "What?!," I say. "Don't the French consider Antarctica a continent?"

I tell my French friends Béatrice and H-O that in the US, we learn that there are seven continents. "Comment?!," they say. "Do the Americans consider the Arctic a continent?"

It turns out the French consider the Americas to be one continent. I find this shocking, but no less shocking than Béatrice and H-O find it that we consider North America and South America to be separate continents. They correctly point out that the Americas are connected by the ithsmus of Central America -- an argument I rebut by pointing out that Europe and Asia are one enormous landmass arbitrarily divided at the Ural Mountains.

Their rebuttal of my rebuttal -- one that is very à propos at the moment -- is that the Olympic symbol is five rings representing all five of the inhabited continents: Africa, Europe, Australia/Oceania, Asia, and the Americas. However, my rebuttal to their rebuttal of my rebuttal is that the Olympic symbol was conceived by....a Frenchman. Baron Pierre de Coubertin was the father of the modern Olympic movement and designed the symbol based on what he had learned at school.

English-language map of the world:

 map from: http://www.wpmap.org/tag/world-map-continents/


French-language map of the world:

 map from: http://anglesqueville-eco.spip.ac-rouen.fr/spip.php?article186


The three things we all agree on: the Antarctic is a continent, the Arctic is not, and we don't want to live in either one of them.

Keyboqrd Proble,s

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History On Every Corner

And speaking of Bastille Day....visiting my friend's apartment, I am right across the tiny alley from the Procope, a cafe visited by Voltaire, Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, and a few other folks you might have heard of. It was an important meeting spot for planning the French Revolution. And just across the alley, in my friend's building, is where the guillotine was perfected. It's a tiny spot, not on many tours or special maps, but it certainly holds a big wallop in terms of historical importance.

  

One of the things that's so fun about Paris, especially as an American, is the history -- the old stuff, the really, really old stuff -- that is just everywhere. In the courtyard of this same building is a metal stool. By this point, it is quite unusual in Parisian architecture, but a couple hundred years ago, these would have been everwhere, as steps to help people mount and dismount from their horses or horse-drawn carriages. I am told there are only two remaining in public spaces in Paris.

 

All over Paris you'll see paddles with historical information (in French only). In the center of Paris where we live, in the 4th, 5th, 6th arrondissements, they pop up seemingly everywhere.

 

There are the old streets, the informative paddles, the hidden architectural gems, but history hits you in unexpected and more personal ways here in Paris, too. For example, there's the Piscine Pontoise where Pippa's class goes every week and where her friend is the fifth generation to learn to swim in the same pool.

...And then there's the law office of Jim, an American friend here in Paris: There is one e-mail address for the firm, and when the secretary receives the e-mails, she prints them out, then walks them over to each lawyer's desk. To respond to e-mails, the lawyers can type up documents at their own computers, then have them printed out and faxed back. Or, the secretary could re-key it all and e-mail it back. The lawyers in this particular firm are supposed to respond by fax or phone. They do have phones to call out, but they don't have direct numbers in: Each in-coming caller must be patched through the receptionist. Jim has just moved to a new law firm, where he has not only an office, but also an e-mail address, and his own phone. He's really excited, among other things, not just to have moved law firms but also to have moved centuries.

Not again....

We spend a fun day with visiting friends at Aquaboulevard. The experience is a huge hit, except for the fact that my wallet is stolen -- again. I have the locker open for a couple minutes while I make trips back and forth to the dressing room, carting handfuls of clothes and helping the girls. I am about 4 feet away, checking the locker repeatedly when not standing by it, and only for a few minutes. But, I am told, there are professionals at work there, and they certainly case my backpack out perfectly. I only seem to get robbed when I have just replenished both cash and metro tickets, so again I lose about 120E.

Luckily, my carte de sejour is not stolen this time, mostly because it had already been stolen 3 months ago and was therefore not in my wallet. But I do lose my California driver's license, which I had stupidly forgotten to remove after using it recently to rent a car.  At least they leave my backpack, which contains my house keys (and we have a very expensive door to re-key), my beloved home-made hula skirt (since I head directly to a class afterwards), and my cell phone.

Anthony has been on my case recently to get a pretty smartphone, but the beauty of having an ugly stupidphone is twofold: 1) it's a lot cheaper and 2) nobody wants to steal it.

Ironically, many of the performers outside my door leave their CDs and cash unguarded, amidst the tourists. I guess tourists are mostly the targets, not the perpetrators, but still....

 

Postscript: In an interesting twist, I am now rather happy to have lost my CA driver's license. When I contact the DMV in order to get a copy, I discover that as of November, somebody has, somehow, changed my address on record to someplace in Texas. This happened since we've been in Paris but before either of my wallets were stolen and before I lost -- or even used -- my driver's license. So this has given me the chance to put a fraud alert on my credit report and try to protect my identity. Had my license not been stolen, I might not have known this for more than a year, till it expires. So my Texas thief has been thwarted. As my friend Mike puts it, "One criminal is just screwing the other criminal."

A Mellow Storm

The mellowest storming of the Bastille ever. Possibly because we have had about 6 solid weeks of guests. And, possibly because our current guests have had about 3 solid weeks of being tourists, here and in London. Only one of our crowd (our 12 year old visitor) decides to go with some family friends to see the Bastille Day military parade down the Champs-Élysées in person. This involves a metro ride in which not only are they all crushed inside the train and getting out of the train, but also on the platform of the metro station. To add insult to injury, they are locked inside the metro station for a while, since the crowds outside are so dense there's no room for more. Somehow this seems like a major sweatshop fire hazard that would cause lawsuits in the States, but we're in France, so if they don't like it, well...Off With Their Heads.

The rest of us stay home and see some of the parade on the TV, play games, do arts and crafts projects, go shopping (there are a surprising number of stores open, even though it's a national holiday), tour the neighborhood, run around at a playground, and watch the aerial part of the parade fly almost straight overhead. My friend Daniela and I are both used to the Blue Angels flying over San Francisco, but we both agree that seeing them fly over Paris has a vaguely unsettling World War II feeling to it. We may be the only ones making this connection, though; mostly it's just exciting.

We celebrate our last night together with a simple dinner together accompagnied by champagne, a French patisserie platter that would make a lactose intolerant person cry, and a course of baguette and French cheese -- one of which I serve blue, white, and red style in honor of the day. [The Stars and Strips may be red, white, and blue, but the tricolor français is always blue, blanc, et rouge.]

 

In honor of Bastille Day, each arrondissement holds a neighborhood Firemen's Ball, but they don't start till 9pm and, we are told, they are more like outdoor nightclubs. We are simply too tired to head out for that level of festivities, especially with the kids in tow. Instead, as the kids and our friends head off to sleep, Anthony and I sneak out to walk down the Seine, to Pont Neuf, which is our nearest/best view of the Eiffel Tower, and join a few hundred thousand of our best friends to see the fireworks there. The sun doesn't set till about 10:30, so they don't go off till 10:45pm-11:15pm. We bring the big camera which takes better photos, despite the fact that it doesn't have the official "Eiffel Tower at Night" automatic setting.

We are home by midnight, and while I can't say we've taken Bastille Day by storm, we do enjoy relaxing and hanging out with good friends for the day.

Finding Your Way

A little tip for finding your way around Paris: Address numbers on north/south roads start at the Seine and get higher, the further out from the river you go. On east/west streets, the numbers start in the east and get higher as you travel west. I remember it as following the direction of the sun.

This can be very helpful when trying to figure out which direction to go when you come up from a metro station and try to orient yourself. Unless you travel up a vaguely diagonal street such as Rue de la Roquette, in which case you will believe you are going north and the numbers should get bigger, but in fact you are going east and the numbers are going down. You will not realize it till you have gone blocks out of your way, but will otherwise be saved oodles of wrong-directions by this simple factoid.

Going, Going, Soldes!

It's the annual summer Soldes -- from the end of June till end July here in Paris. This and the winter Soldes (in January) are the only officially approved time to advertise and hold major store-wide sales. To an American this seems like crazy over-regulation, and I must tell you that there are sale racks and various "promotions" throughout the year. But it's nothing like this...

On the first day of the Soldes, more than half the store might be marked down, 20-40 or even 50%. Then on the first Sunday of the Soldes, the stores are miraculously allowed to remain open for business. A couple weeks in, the stores go for their second markdown, tacking on at least 10 or 20% more. Eventually, they have a third and final markdown toward the end of the month. Most racks are picked over, but whatever treasure is left can be had for a song.

In a stroke of good timing, two families of guests have been visiting us during Soldes time, making their Parisian shopping sprees a whole lot less expensive. Even I have gotten into it, despite the fact that no amount of markdown will bring it to Goodwill prices. Still, Gigi needed some new summer clothes, and Pippa needed new shoes (Baby needs a new pair of shoes!), and we have been able to stock them up with some fun French fashions for really very little.

My favorite Soldes moment: My friend, who is not really a French speaker, is rifling through racks of pretty shirts. She looks up disappointed and moans, "but these are all sold!" Well, the word for "Sale" is "Soldes" (pronounced "sold") and the word for "sold" is "vendu", so that's another one for the list of faux amis.

We have shopped till we dropped. But now, thankfully, we've stopped.

A Model Child

I signed Pippa and Gigi with an agent in Paris a while back, and Pippa has recently landed her first two modeling jobs here. I am sure this makes me some horrible version of a stage mom, but the girls have been doing this since they were babies, and both of them love it. Some cousins I greatly respect live in Southern California, are "in the business", and strongly advised me against have the girls do this, since from their experience it leads to girls with self-esteem problems, eating disorders, and unhealthy egos. But I think that must be an L.A. child-actor thing. It's a whole lot mellower in San Francisco: parents are nice to each other, and to the other children -- sharing books, toys, snacks, and emergency diapers. It's a friendly group, and nobody seems to take the situation (or themselves) too seriously. And I have to admit that both the girls and I get a kick out of seeing them in the occasional catalog and ad (below: Potter Barn Kids, Hanna Andersson, Mervyn's, and Old Navy).

  

In Paris, there's the added bonus that at the end of each job, they give the models party favor bags including little toys and, of course, lots of candy. That's after trays full of candy and pastries and juices during the job. As we've seen, the French are not afraid to sugar up their kids.

 

My girls love the attention and performance aspect (now, who could they have inherited that from?), and they also love the process of having their hair and make-up done. It's a girly-girl's dream.

 

In an interesting coincidence, Pippa's first job (in May) is to model for the catalog and next year's collection of Lanvin. Besides being the oldest fahion house in Paris, dating from 1889, it's also one of the most elegant. That means that the outfits Pippa models are undoubtedly more expensive than anything I've ever owned, including my wedding dress! The people at Lanvin understandably asked us not to post photos of the fashions till the catalog comes out (the dotted shirt above is her own), so you're just getting a sense of the setting here, not the specific outfits. The shoot takes place at the Hotel de Crillon, which is a treat in and of itself, since it is transformed from a building constructed in 1758 under the auspices of King Louis XV.

 

 

Today, Pippa has a runway modeling job, which is something the girls haven't ever done before. Gigi and I are not allowed to stay while the show is happening, so all we can do is hear about it afterward. Pippa struts her stuff on the catwalk for Bonpoint, another very high-end kid's clothing line, in front of a couple hundred buyers. She dances, wears pretty outfits and some silly accessories, and, as she says, "walks back and forth a hundred times." She wakes up excited this morning for the job and, I'm happy to report, is not disappointed by the experience. The only ones disappointed are Gigi and me who wish we could see it, and also wish we could be in it! If she's still "in size" (meaning size 6), they've invited her back for the winter collection show in January. High fashion runway model in Paris -- not bad for a six year old!

[Author's note: I have often been asked about how (and whether) to get a child involved in modeling. I'll say this: I honestly think most kids this age are so adorable, they could be models. The main thing is whether a) the parents have the time and inclination to take them to occasional auditions and jobs (virtually always during business days and hours), and b) the children enjoy trying on lots of clothes and posing for photos. The photographers and stylists always make it fun, since it obviously makes their job easier to work with happy and playful kids. And while it does pay well per hour, when you factor in driving time, unpaid audition time, and the fact that the parent is sitting around not getting paid, it's not really for the money....unless you get a national TV commercial or something like that....which we never have and, given our low-level of commitment, probably never will!]

A Tale of Two Cities

When I was still in San Francisco, and I said that I was moving to Paris, I invariably got the same response: an involuntary gasp, usually accompanied with a hand to the heart, and the words, "Oh, I love Paris! You're so lucky!"

Here in Paris, when I tell people I am from San Francisco, I get....the exact same response. The involuntary gasp, usually with a hand to the heart, and a dreamy, "Oh, I love San Francisco." Sometimes followed by the quizzical, "Why did you move here?" I have had many Frenchies tell me that they would love to live in the US -- but only if it was in San Francisco. Sometimes they concede to New York City. But mostly just SF, even if they've never been there.

Why the love affair? Is it the common obsession with food and wine? The mutual predilecton for site-specific architectural styles, and a distinctive look to the streets? A certain tendency to left-leaning politics (so much so that being merely left is considered conservative vis-a-vis the more radical left)? A firmly-rooted belief that any city worth its salt has a large steel icon, ideally phallic in nature, and also très photogenic?

 

Whatever the reason, there was rarely a day in SF when I didn't hear some French being spoken on the streets (and I'm talking about outside my own little francophone world there), and there is certainly a hefty chunk of the California, and specifically San Francisco, population here in Paris.  And no, it's not just the Parisians being polite. I guarantee you that if I said I was from Minneapolis, I wouldn't get the hand-to-the-heart maneuver.

Last night I had a stress dream in which the troubling part was -- I kid you not -- that I bought veal, but it was not organic. This morning, I am buying something in "A Touch of Bio" which is a store whose name (which is in English, mind you) will give you a big clue as to its contents: "bio" being the code word in French for "organic". It is in the 5th arrondissement, which is one of the most international areas of Paris. I hear the owner speaking perfect American English to the customer before me, so I speak to her in English also (it always seems more than a bit artificial when I am speaking French with another native anglophone). She asks where I am from, and when I say I'm from San Francisco, she seems so stunned at the coincidence, because so is she! I haven't even been here a year yet, and I'm already jaded on this front. I deadpan, "We're in a natural food store, in the 5th, and I'm buying tofu and sprouts. I can't say I'm that surprised."