A Shortcut

I'm lucky to live very near Parc Montsouris, and when I come home on the train, sometimes I cut through the park. Today, when I got off the train, it had just stopped raining, and the roses looked really beautiful, so I wanted to share this photo I took,

Picnic Season

It seems to be picnic season in Paris, despite the heat wave. I've had four picnic meals since Saturday, with the opportunity to dine outside again this evening and tomorrow evening, and Sunday afternoon. The French Picnic seems to have several advantages over the American Barbecue. The French do without all the fuss of the charcoal grill, which is prohibited in Paris anyway. The French Picnic is incredibly portable -- in Paris, the smallest patch of greenspace can attract picnicking. Also, if you're French, a meal of cheese, liver paté, bread and wine suits you just fine and doesn't require everyone to have forks. Even better if someone brings some fruit or a homemade gâteau to top it off. The most important thing is to enjoy each others company, and no one is stuck at the grill flipping burgers or tending to the hot dogs. Here's a picture of some friends at Thursday's picnic dinner on the lawn of the Maison Internationale of the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris.

Etretat

Last weekend I finally escaped Paris by going to Etretat, a coastal town in Normandy famous for its white cliffs. When we (myself, a colleague Cécile, and her friend Florence) arrived it was raining and even chilly, a typical occurrence in Normandy, I'm told. It's difficult to capture the feeling of Etretat in a photo, but I tried. When Claude Monet went there, he tried too. In the photo, you might be able to see that there is a memorial, shaped kind of like a wing stuck into the ground, next to the church, marking the point from which a couple of early aviators could be seen in their failed attempt to cross the channel to England.The town is nestled between the cliffs, and the beach consists of pebbles rather than sand. There are trails all along the cliffs, and also a golf course. After had a dinner of mussels and fries accompanied by a sunset in Etretat, we went to a neighboring town, Yport (pronounced ee-pore), where we had a campsite. Yport was hosting some sort of Russian dancing and singing group, performing on a stage next to the beach, and they were actually pretty impressive. That was followed by fireworks set to the music of Mozart, similar to the Bastille Day fireworks in Paris.
We went hiking again the next day, which was completely sunny.

I'm melting!

I adore the long Paris evenings, when the sun doesn't set until 10:30, because picnicking (in French: pique-nique) is a great way to spend an evening, on the banks of the Seine or the Champ de Mars under the Eiffel Tower. That said, the heat is really beginning to wear on me. It's not that much hotter than it gets in New York or Chicago, but it is much more difficult to escape the heat, since ice cubes are a rarity in your drink and air conditioning is the exception rather than the rule. My brain feels like it's going to melt. David Lebovitz has a blog entry with some tips if you are thinking that a summer vacation in Paris would be good. I like that he uses the heat as an excuse to eat chocolate that might otherwise suffer and melt. I bet there's some ice cream somewhere that needs to be saved from melting...

Bastille Day

Bastille Day in France doesn't go by that name at all, it is either called 'Le Quatorze Juillet' or 'La Fête Nationale' and, at least in Paris, the parade involved only military troops. I shouldn't say 'only,' really, because they were every sort of troop of soldiers you could imagine. Of course, there were some on horseback and some playing marching music, but also the alpine units, firefighters, paratroopers, and others. I didn't get a good picture, but the Patrouille de France also did a flyover, as well as bunches of helicopters and other planes. After the parade, the military units dispersed to different neighborhoods to have closer contact with the public. I took this picture in front of the Opera Garnier. I wonder what they told that little girl about the purpose of that gun.

I watched the fireworks display at the Eiffel Tower, and it was the most magnificent fireworks show I've ever seen, partly because the music was great -- a tribute to the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birthday. I even took a video, which show some of the middle part, when they played one of my favorite Mozart piano concertos:



If you can't see the video as it is embedded, you can watch it here.

Stop Bush

At the Solidays Concert Festival, a benefit event for Solidarité-SIDA, and AIDS Awareness and Prevention Organization, I noticed this poster about French political courage. The statement is roughly translated as "We would like to be able salute the political courage of France in a new way. Sign the petition!" and, in the version I saw, included the following subtitle:
Nous sommes de plus en plus nombreux à refuser l'abandon de millions de malades du sida dans les pays pauvres. A un an des élections présidentielles, nous devons en faire la preuve.
Which is translated roughly as
"Increasing numbers of us refuse to abandon the millions of victims of AIDS in poor countries. In a year of presidential elections, we should prove it."
There was also an additional line which specifically pointed out the Bush administration's failure to make facilitating the distribution of AIDS treatments in Africa a priority, while preserving the profits of pharmaceutical companies.
I can appreciate that Bush needs to be stopped, but I found this sign a bit depressing, because the fact of the matter was that, despite all the courage that France can claim for standing against the war in Iraq, Bush wasn't stopped. A quarter million people died in the tsunami of December 2004, but 2.4 million people die in subsaharan Africa every year because of lack of treatment for AIDS. Courage is admirable, but it would be nice to have the power to change things.

Solidays

On Sunday, I went to the Solidays concert festival at the Hippodrome de Longchamp, a huge horseracing stadium in the Bois de Boulogne park just outside Paris. It was a terrific event with five stages and 60 different concerts over the course of weekend.
Here's the view from the south end, from the biggest stage (not pictured).



My favorite, and the reason I decided to go, was Maceo Parker, a saxophonist who also plays the flute and sings with his jazz/funk band. The only bad part was that the sound amplification kind of mushed up the music. The audience was better than I expected at appreciating him, considering that most of the acts there were pop, rock or techno. Here's Maceo Parker and his band:

Joy and Sadness

Last night, the French watched their venerable Zizou blow his top and get kicked out of the game and then saw the World Cup slip through their fingers into the hands of the Italian team. No parade, no riots in the street. Last night, people went home from the stadium by my apartment quietly, although I heard some people shooting off their fireworks anyway.
The principal topic of conversation this morning is about the Zidane-Materazzi incident. This Marco Materazzi character, who is nicknamed "Matrix," has quite a record of incredibly violent plays. Perhaps Zidane was just getting back at him for all of the nasty moves he's pulled on the field. Materazzi is also known for statements making fun of Marc Zoro, a player born in the Ivory Coast, who left the field at a game in Italy after fans chanted racial slurs and ape noises at him. Many people are guessing that it was a racial slur against Zidane, whose parents are Algerian immigrants, that finally caused him to lose his temper. He cheered up for lunch with Chirac, fortunately. No one seems to be talking about Frenchwoman Amelie Mauresmo winning Wimbledon!

La finale

Ah, la finale. Maggie and Tom left Paris this morning, bound for Bayeaux and the beaches of Normandy. It was really great having them here, I had a ton of fun and sometimes I can't believe that, despite long passages of time and distance, our friendship holds true. If you want to look at some of the pictures they took while in Paris, I've uploaded a couple batches onto Flickr, first my site and then the site of my dad. If you look at the sets you will see the pictures in the order that they were taken, rather than the inverse order, the way are displayed on the Flickr Home of each account. Both of those accounts are maxed out as far as uploads, so you'll have to wait for Maggie and Tom to get back to the US to get a link to the rest of the pictures they want to share on the server they use.

So, as for the other finale, Paris is really gearing up for Sunday's match. I hope they win! In a spooky coincidence, I accidentally stained my recently synthesized polymer with blue marker ink that refuses to come out. Allez Les Bleus!

I am thinking of going to part of a 3-day concert weekend that is part of a festival to benefit the fight against AIDS: Solidays. There are 60 different concerts over the span of the weekend, and people even have the option to camp out there the whole time. The weather is perfect right now, although it might rain a bit this weekend.

Happy Fourth of July! Well, it wasn't a big deal at all in Paris, but Tom and Maggie were generous enough to go with me to a chain restaurant called "Indiana" which serves American food. There were no fireworks, but there was an artery-clogging bacon cheeseburger and pommes frites, eaten on the Place de la Bastille, appropriately enough. I was satisfied to see that they put up some American flags on the Hôtel de Ville for the occasion.

We preceded this comfort food with a visit to Willi's Wine Bar, where we savored some great French red wines and stinky cheeses, so I think we did okay in the balance. It's a really great place to go for wine, with a kind of calm atmosphere that I have never seen before in Paris! The three wines we tried were a Nuit-St. Georges, a Domaine de Chevalier Bordeaux and a Chateauneuf de Pape. All were excellent.

Last night Maggie and Tom and I sat and watched the sun set behind Notre Dame de Paris, over some rosé and cidre, bread and artichoke paté. It was a warm summer night, but along the banks of the Seine it was breezy and perfect for a picnic, among Parisians and fellow tourists alike.