Paris Journal 2011 – Barbara Joy Cooley Home: barbarajoycooley.com
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Salad days have returned. The weather finally became truly summery. I actually walked in sandals yesterday. Today will be warm, too, and then tomorrow we might have a bit of rain and slightly lower temperatures. But then Sunday, oh Sunday, the temps are supposed to go above 90 degrees F! Don’t worry, it won’t last. The next day, and for the next week, it will be merely comfortably warm. The days are short enough now that a sustained heat wave is very unlikely. We cannot put up with being in Paris for another long heat wave, as we did in 2003. As in almost all Paris apartments, there is no air conditioning here. However, a few things have changed since 2003 which make the hotter days more tolerable. One of the important changes has been the addition of roll-out awnings on the two biggest sets of French doors. With the southern exposure of this apartment, this can make a very significant difference. Awnings are everywhere in Paris. Many apartments have them, and they are an essential feature of the façades and terraces of virtually all of the brasseries. Being southerners, we’re shade seekers. We also stroll quite slowly, and as the weather warms up, we slow down. People don’t think of me as a shade seeker because when I’m in Florida, I become very brown, especially by late Spring. People comment on my deep tan then. I tell them, “Thanks but I never try to get tan; I never just sit in the sun. This color comes from being a long-distance swimmer. I’m in the pool swimming for an hour, but then I get out and go home. A tan is not a sign of good health.” By June, my black friends tease me about my color. Then Summer in Paris makes me pale again. True Parisians, however, love the sun in Summer. They bask in it whenever they can, it seems. I think this tendency comes from putting up with the very short days they have all winter long. And then so much of the rest of the year, Paris has that English kind of weather. Apologies to my English friends, but you know what I’m talking about: gray and drizzly or rainy. Bone-chilling damp coolness. How many words do the English have for the different kinds of rain? I forget. We were delighted to hear from our English friends, Carol and Ron, yesterday by phone. They’re coming to Paris! They’ll be here starting on Wednesday! We are looking forward to their visit so much. I’m especially looking forward to dining at Axuria with them, because Carol is such a superb cook. I think it’s always fun to go to a great restaurant with a fellow foodie. Yesterday’s weather was perfect for the annual event put on each summer at the Place de la Bastille by a group called MODEF (Mouvement de Defense des Exploitants Familiaux) that organizes farm families to come to the city to sell their fruits and vegetables directly to the people, eliminating the middle-man, the corporations who, MODEF claims, jack up the prices too much without benefiting the farmers. Another group, DAL (Droit au logement), continues to organize homeless families. Two groups have been camping out in the midst of the elite – one group by the Banque de France in the 2nd arrondissement, and the other in the Square Boucicaut, by the Bon Marché department store in the middle of the 7th arrondissement. On Saturday night, the police evacuated the group on the rue de la Banque. DAL claims the police used teargas. The police deny that they used teargas, but they admit that in the evacuation, they had to take 5 women to the emergency room for “illness.” We’re talking about homeless women and children here in these camp-ins, not so much men. I notice a new word being used for “homeless” in the French newspapers. In addition to the traditional sans abri and sans domicile fixe (SDF), there is now mal-logé. While mal-logé sounds like it means “poorly housed,” in the context in which it is being used by Le Parisien, it is clear that it really means homeless. As housing prices in Paris have reached an all-time high, I can imagine how difficult it is to address the problems of the homeless and the poorly housed. A complicating factor is that now, when a new apartment building is built in Paris, it must include a certain number of below-market-rate housing units. Developers being what they are have decided that they just don’t want to do this, so they aren’t building much at all. Paris, by comparison with New York and London, had been a bargain for a long time. This past year, with a 22 percent INCREASE in per-square-meter housing costs in Paris (according to real estate sales records), the city is finally catching up. Housing was in short supply during the Nazi occupation of Paris, too. Families did amazingly callous things, like moving immediately into apartments vacated by Jewish families who were rounded up and taken to the Vélodrome d’Hiver in July 1942. I’ve written about that atrocity on several occasions now. A few friends have told me about the book and the movie, Sarah’s Key, whose plot lives in the midst of the Vel d’Hiv atrocity. Yesterday, I finally downloaded the book onto my Kindle. I stayed up very late reading it. In this author, Tatiana de Rosnay, I’m surprised to find someone who thinks and feels about Paris and its history just the way I do. Her clarity about the role of the French police and French people is much appreciated by me. She also makes me appreciate Jacques Chirac for his insisting that France own up to its responsibility for the horrible actions that were taken – actions that went beyond even what the Nazi’s orders included. Next on my reading list is going to be Hal Vaughan’s new biography of Coco Chanel, I think. Has anyone read it yet? What do you think? (Sleeping with the Enemy, Coco Chanel’s Secret War.) Sign
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Thursday, August 18, 2011
Dinner at
the end of a warm day at the Commerce Café was carpaccio
of beef with salad, cheese from the Auvergne, and fries for Tom; and a Niçoise salad for me.
It was very pleasant, and the café was doing a great amount of
business last night.
Parc André
Citroën has lots of shade for hot days, and lots of
sun for cooler, clear days. Its trees
and other plantings are now 20 years old or more.
During the
month of August, parking is free in the areas where a round yellow sticker
marks the stanchions where you pay for a parking slip.
Police
patrolling the crowd near the base of the Eiffel Tower.
The grounds
of the Palais de Chaillot. |
