Paris Journal 2008

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Some things, many things, have improved. This year, there is noticeably, significantly less dog shit on the sidewalks of Paris. A few years of enforcing the law and levying stiff fines against the recidivists has had an effect. This isn’t to say that there is no dog shit, but it is indisputable -- there is much less of it. (But Parisian dog owners still have a ways to go before they have caught up to the level of civility and consideration found in other civilized places. There is still plenty of room for improvement.) In January, France enacted a new law that forbids smoking indoors in restaurants. The smokers are now outside on the terrace, and the nonsmokers are inside. It is working. People are actually obeying the law! And I think they even like it. The other night we ate at the Bistrot du Septieme, and if smoking had been allowed indoors, the experience would have been unbearable. As it was, the restaurant was crowded, and the reason is that the price is right – something like 20 euros for three full courses. The food was good, but I realized later in the evening that I never do feel happy about the experience of eating there. I guess the place has bad karma for me. It just isn’t congenial enough, and there are too many tables of vacationers or convention goers in there. This restaurant just does not have a Parisian neighborhood feel or clientele. I will probably remove it from the restaurant recommendations, but if you really need a restaurant that accommodates you as a very hungry English-speaker on a budget, then you may wish to consider it still. For a few years in the middle of the decade-plus that we’ve been spending summers in Paris, I worried that too many of the traditional restaurants were disappearing and that the time would come when they would almost all be gone. Happily, that is not the case. There are “new” traditional restaurants, like Le Minzingue, moving in to replace those who have retired. The internet has improved and expanded its offerings so much in the past decade-plus that it has made life so much easier than when we first started coming here. For example, Skype.com makes international calls cheap and easy, and it even makes it possible to call American 800 numbers from overseas. With Youtube.com and CNN.com, I can watch events that I otherwise would have missed because of the time difference between here and the states. I’ve seen all the important summer speeches of the presidential campaign and the Democratic National Convention, for example. I’ve even seen Hillary’s fantastic speech from last night, and it is only 1PM here. Members of the Dixielanders band that Tom and I are part of during the winter e-mail us music files to listen to and consider for next season. It is great to stay in touch so musically. Tom’s publisher now sends the galley proofs via e-mail as Adobe PDF files (instead of paper copies in FedEx packages), eliminating the need for us to make so many pilgrimages to the FedEx office on boulevard Haussmann. Since we own the Adobe Acrobat software, Tom has mastered the art of using its features to make his comments and notations on the electronic PDF file, and then he e-mails that back to the publisher. We don’t even print anything out on paper anymore. Of course, we learned in 2004 that we can watch the local Fort Myers NBC station live on the internet when nasty hurricanes are threatening our home, so we are very well informed yet very safely far, far away from the storm. Yesterday, my parents were victims of the computer snafu that stalled air traffic all over the US. They were on their way back from spending summer in Milwaukee, headed home to Florida. When I saw the news of this snafu after dinner Paris time, I was able to go on the web site for the Fort Myers airport to see that their flight had not been cancelled. That was reassuring. I later learned, however, that they had to spend 3 and a half hours in the plane on the tarmac, waiting in Atlanta, before taking off. Now I find that I can watch/listen to CNN live on the computer, while I’m working on something else like editing photographs for web sites. Pretty cool. Online banking is cool, too. Being able to pay bills from anywhere is a definite plus. The weather in Paris is better this year. There has been no heat wave, and now that the days are so much shorter, no heat wave is possible anymore in 2008. There has been too much rain here for some people, but we really don’t mind that. Having been through a very long drought in Florida, the rain is almost enjoyable, and the rain makes it much easier to care for all these darned flowers and other plants on the way-too-sunny balcony. We’ve had to deal with less construction noise coming from the street than we had in the past few years. The street infrastructure improvements are, for the most part, finished. There are still shops here and there that must do their remodeling during the vacation month of August, and that will always be the case. Not having to listen to jackhammers hitting the pavement day in and day out is very nice, however. The only noise problem we have this year is coming from an apartment across the rear courtyard. There seem to be 90 or so people living in this one noisy apartment. Unfortunately, the room where Tom is trying to work gets the worst of this noise. Tom angrily refers to these noisemakers as “the peasants” because they seem to have come in from the country, and they don’t know how to behave in the city where lots of other people are living very nearby. This is somewhat understandable. I know that I have to tell visitors who come from suburban or rural areas that it is important to be very quiet in the stairwell and hallway of the apartment building here, and also in the courtyard of the apartment building in the 6^th. Speaking loudly in these areas does NOT endear you to your numerous urban neighbors. Ah, life in the city. This city offers so many beautiful parks, as I often say, but this year, with all the rain, the parks are better than ever. I offer you some photos of the most neglected of the parks we frequent, the Allée des Cygnes, as evidence. Even here, there are flowers this year. And the trees have many more leaves. In addition to the round-up and deportation at Vel d’Hiv, another horrible tragedy in France during WWII was the massacre at Maillé on August 25, 1944. This year, President Sarkozy went to Maillé on the 25^th to help dedicate a new museum to the massacre. The newspaper reports that he is the first president of the republic to ever set foot in the town. Sarkozy says that forgetting about this massacre has been a terrible shortcoming, and that in the future, an important minister of the French government should be in Maillé on the anniversary of this massacre every year. The massacre will now be remembered. That’s an improvement. We must never forget these things. Sign my guestbook. View my guestbook.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008 A lovely yellow rose in the park at the Monument to the Deportation, hear the Bir Hakiem bridge, in the 15^th arrondissement. Sign in the Allee des Cygnes says that “To limit the pollution from chemical weedkillers -- Here, the herbs grow freely and will carry on the respect for the environment. To preserve this green space, don’t throw your litter on the ground, use the trash containers; don’t throw out your full trash bags here – go to the garbage place or ask for the trash to be removed on http://paris.fr; pick up your dog’s shit; don’t trample on the herbs.” Herbs, in this context, is a real euphemism for weeds with a few wildflowers. Flowers growing on the bank of the Allée des Cygnes. The Monument to the Deportation is located near the former site of the Velodrome d’Hiver, where many Parisians were rounded up and sent to death camps in 1942. The Monument to the Deportation. Translation: “The French Republic, in homage to the victims of the racist and anti-semetic persecutions and the crimes against humanity committed under the so-called authority of the French government 1940-1944. Never forget.”

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