Two weeks to go

I know, my lack of writing might be concerning. Vacation caught up with me, as well as the massive amount of work. Last week I spent each day perfecting a multiple page paper due each day. Yesterday was my first final, and today I am completely done with my academic work here in Paris. Since yesterday was also the two week mark till I return home, I wanted to make a few lists…

5 Things I Am Ecstatic About Chicago:

1) Food. While “gourmet” Parisian meals sound nice, the price is way out of my range, making me eat small sandwhiches mostly. Returning to a cheaper city, where you get free refills on a drink, large portions, and (most importantly) less attitude at any restaurant seems heavenly. I plan on having a deep dish pizza as my first meal, and then some good Mexican food, and perhaps dinner at…the Olive Garden. Yes, that place.

2) Like aforementioned, the cost. Chicago is cheap. As much as some people might be afraid to cough up $6 for an appitizer at home, that’s how much a Coke costs at a restaurant here.

3) Smiling. Living in Paris, there is an aversion to looking “too happy,” as it might mean you are senial or a tourist who is just dumbstruck by all he sees. A few times I’ve been caught in the act, and then given looks by people in supermarkets or on the metro. “What the hell are you doing,” kind of looks. After traveling to Lyon last weekend, it was completely different. People were smiling, and some even…laughing? It’s a very Parisian thing I think to hide your emotions, to guard yourself for those who might be worth guarding your expressions for. Strange for an American from Chicago.

4) Space. Paris is cramped, with two million people who live within 53 square miles (Chicago is 253 square miles with almost 3 million people in the city limits), space is expensive and people are stacked on top of each other. While it’s cramped lifestyle gives Paris it’s life, it’s also suffocating.

5) Taking advantage of home. Chicago has so many oppurtunities that I remember now that I either ignored or forgot about when I lived there. Bars where people talk to each other (gasp!), many more music venus, cultural institutions, huge museums, cafes, great restaurants, and all the random fairs of summer.

5 Things I Know At the Moment I am Going to Miss About Paris:

1) Coffee. While American coffee is usually served in boat proportions, French coffee is small and powerful. It also comes with chocolate, and upon ordering a small coffee, you can stay at a table at a cafe for hours on end, unhurried. Perfect.

2) Wine. Cheap, wonderful, and all I drink now. Going to Monoprix for a $4 wine and having it be better than many of the most expensive wines in the US. Or, going to Nicholas (the chain wine store) to have help picking out something sublime. All of the difference between restaurants which serve certain types and vintages, and the wine bars which are abound. French wine is expensive and not great at home, and California wine is too hyped up.

3)The metro. It’s fast, usually somewhat clean, on time, and takes you within 500 meters of any building in Paris. Chicago, frankly, cannot compare with its rusting decades/centuries old system that in some places is only now being updated. While the metro does close early here, the large system of night buses takes it’s place.

4) My love/hate affair with fashion. It’s generally understood that the Parisians are known for it, but it’s in the subteties that make things interesting. A scarf in a certain way, the usage of color in minute details, and the non-showy nature of well-made materials. I can’t wait for zebra pants, A&F clones, and people wearing lots of khaki.

5) The weather. It’s never too hot, never too cold. Always a nice breeze, and always a great garden to relax in. Lounging is a national pastime, and it’s well deserved. Americans need to relax much more than they do, and realizing that I worked almost every day last summer and barely took any time off seems almost foreign to me now.

On vacation

It´s late  night in Vienna, and I´m here visiting a good friend. Updating the blog has been a bit hectic lately, especially because of my internship wrapping up and associated items. Tomorrow I return to Paris, and after adventuring around Europe for the last week, my taste and feel about France and Paris in general seems not really melancholy. More of a sort of realization that perhaps Paris, perhaps France isn´t really everything I wanted, and perhaps what I´ve gotten from it has not been the “amazingness” that I expected.

I want space, I want friendliness…and frankly, I believe more and more about the stereotypes about the place I´ve been living at for the last few months than I do about tearing those stereotypes down. For the moment though, I´m enjoying Vienna, and I will go home tomorrow with a sense that I might not want to come back to France much after May.

Olympic Protests in Paris

Yesterday was a bit chaotic. I had read that the Olympic torch was going to be carried through Paris, so like a firechaser, I decided to go watch the mess which I thought would be in store.

Getting on Ligne 6, I saw the helicopter and the beginning of the procession through the window while the train crossed the Seine. The police camions as well as the people running along the sides made me…excited? As I switched to the 9 at Trocadero, a man on the speakers kept repeating how the station was closed because of a “gross manifestation,” at the plaza above. So, naturally, I wanted to see more. Getting off at Alma, I proceeded south along the river until getting to the Trocadero, where two sides had massed. The Chinese nationalists waved huge flags, both of China and of France, while the other human rights side had large Tibetan banners as well as flags of the Olympic rings as handcuffs.

After waiting around, seeing a group climb the Eiffel Tower to release a protest banner, the snow (WHAT was it doing snowing) started to pelt, and the excitement ramped up. The groups kept moving to counter each other without the interference of large policemen in odd body armour. Eventually, a few protesters broke through the barricades and attempted to run down the underpass with flags to stop the procession. The camions started to move by, along with buses. People were throwing large items that they could find, as the chants intensified.

Then “the torch” passed, with lots of diversions. Protesters tried to break through, hitting the bus that the extinguished torch was in and making the police threaten them. I was a bit scared, but the excitement of slowing down the Chinese who at the moment wanted to show the world their advance into materialism seemed a bit fun. Besides a supposed goal of the sporting events, ads from major corporations followed the torch, as crowds booed and hissed at the people driving the cars.

What cemented more of the relationship between China and the sponsors was that the Chinese nationalists held flags of the sponsors, Samsung and Coca-Cola with their flags. This obvious paring did not help their arguement of “one world.”

The police had pushed a few protesters down, while others were screaming at them about the rights that the French had and that this was not Peking. I was pumped, so after the procession passed the Flame of Liberation, I went to Hotel de Ville to see the next part of the protests. Huge crowds had gathered in the main square, shouting and chanting as much as possible. With furor, the two sides kept arguing with eacch other. At one moment, some people were talking, the next, shoving, and the next, police were hauling someone away as the sides seethed and pushed.

The raw emotion of the crowd was almost tantalizing, the furor with the issues and with the elements made me feel a part of an issue that confronted the world. Just then, a window opened from the Hotel de Ville, and several Green Party government officials hung a Tibetan flag next to the Mayor’s human rights sign. The pro-Tibet crowd (mostly made up of caucasians) clapped and cheered, while the Chinese nationalist crowd (made up from what mostly chinese racial groups) booed and hissed. The protesters seethed more at each other, and a few cameramen and reporters were pushed to the ground.

Later that day, the National Assembly suspended their discussions to allow a broad coalition of Deputies (comparable to Representatives in the U.S. House) to go outside and hang a protest banner from the building. It was a bit moving, since a large amount of the French government stopped what they were doing to think about the situation. The Chinese authorities finally canceled the last leg of the tour, since the torch was extinguished four or possibly five times. Not only was it a catastrophic failure for the Chinese mission, but for their percieved image. The Chinese did not understand that bringing the torch to a politically fiery city such as Paris would have its ramifications, and the French tried to upstage not only the British protests, but the basic reasons that they were there.

In all, being a part of history such as this was inspiring, that I could make a difference with my prescence and my attitudes for change.

Two months left

This week marks two months before I officially return to the United States. Since I have been here, the feelings of a grand distance in time and pyhsical understanding have made me wonder where I am, and what I am doing. Paris was a dream, but in a way I am back to a certain reality that I didn’t get away from.

Adjusting to any new place takes time, and for me it has been days where I cannot understand things that are spoken to me, what I interpret as strange occurances, and many miscommunicated messages, making situations awkward. At the same time, thinking and acting in two different languages poses a challenge, something that I don’t know if I have completely accomplished. Meeting people has not been what I expected either, as some have come and gone, others relations seem to stagnate, and only a few become something more. My experience with the French so far is that in many ways they are the same as most Americans…they want to be polite when meeting you, lots to talk about, etc. But the differences have me second guessing my intentions and myself at times.

My desire to learn French is really not that storng sometimes. As much as I want to learn a complicated form of expression such as language, I am frustrated by French’s complicated rules and forms. Another thought has been floating aorund my mind this week…why did I want to leave Chicago so much? Was it because of the horrific weather that burned my mind? Perhaps it was just a general malaise. Whatever the cause, I am glad that I’m starting to reevaluate my realtionship with home again. Perhaps I didn’t do all that I should have with some friends, I didn’t take all the oppurtunities that I came across.

I met my friend Rachael who I go to DePaul with today at Montparnasse. After taking the metro to Chatlet, we headed to the Marais, and had a nice brunch. She still looked in shock that she was in Paris. Seeing her here was odd for me too, since it was a familiar face in a foreign land. Also, it reminded me of how long I’ve been gone, and what it was like when I first arrived. But in general, my transition has been going well, though not in the manner that I perhaps predicted at first.

Les elections municipales, part two

Yesterday finished off the second round of voting in the municipal elections.  After the first round, a general consensus in the press was a slight victory for the left, and a more jaded view of Francois Bayrou’s Mouvement Democratique (MoDem). Since last week, more of the press (especially the Canard with it’s headline “Bayrou opens a center…commerciale”) has shed light on how much empty wind Modem has, especially because even if they win, there is no guarantee that they would have sided with the larger left or right parties.

After this second round, the left’s win was clear. Several former UMP cities, such as Rouen, Strasbourg, Toulouse, Caen, Amiensm and Rheims all tilted to the left.  Only a tiny amount of towns within France voted for Modem, among them Pau, a small one in Brittany, and one in South-Central France. While the Parti Socialiste won many new mayorships and territory, the personages were not a large difference. No where was the race as tight as Marseille, where the city (much like Paris) was split geographically in a line, with the UMP majority on one side of town, and the PS on the other. Unlike Paris, which tilted much farther to the left, Marseille barely has a UMP majority. This is still dangerous for the UMP because of, what the newspaper Liberation calls, “the will of the people for change not only with the current political situation, but with the Presidency as well.” According to the New York Times, “4 of the 22 ministers who were candidates from Sarkozy’s government failed to win office in the municpals,” (3/17).

This is not exactly like a Midterm elections moment such as what occurred in the United States in 2006, but it is close. Because of this, the senators which will now make up the French Senate will more likely be left-leaning. This puts pressure on the Sarkozy government to tone down it’s rhetoric and plans.

In the end, this change of events was good, though because the second round of voting only had a 23% turn out rate, it’s legitimacy as a complete barometer of public opinion seems to not hold completely correct. Though it was by and large called by PS officials as a vote of no confidence for Sarkozy’s crazy American-styled image of money, at the same time it was the first of the cues that Sarkozy has started to react to calls for change. More trips to farms and the French rust-belt, less bling-bling.  But perhaps this is not all that could save his presidency, because it will be a change in action, a change in making sure that he isn’t alienating all of the people who voted for him, and the others who expect him to be the President of the entire French people, not just his imagined demographic.

Unis-Cite, Part 1

Last week was the introduction to my internship, which went fairly smoothly. Apparently, at Unis-Cite, I will be working on several projects during the next two months.

After arriving, I started to work with Emilie, who along with another intern, will be coordinating the GJV, la Grand Journee de Volontairiat. In English, the Grand Day of Volunteering. Set up by Unis-Cite in the past few years, there are two goals. First, to not only build on the sense of place with projects that the “equipes” or teams, do, but to directly involve themselves with finding projects that directly involve what they are learning. For example, after explaining to me this gigantic project to help organize, we did a site visit. It was at a Center d’Animation (community center for children’s classes and such…like a Park District), where the people were organizing a project to record the stories and the histories of people “sans papiers,” or what Americans might call illegal immigrants. Not only do they work on the project, but then they set up a day where they can help volunteer to do something with another NGO to help these people.

That is the second purpose of the day. Not only does it involve the volunteers, but organizations that already work with these issues. Knowing them and getting involved is paramount, since it is my job to organize and discover their structure to see what is best suited to attract more volunteers to the certain projects from outside our organization. So, I have to come up with a good form or something to pass out or mail to these organizations to remind them that we are doing this and attract other people to it.

Realizing this took a bit, since the indirect and implicit nature of French administration made my role a bit fuzzy. Monday, after meeting most of the volunteers from the city of Paris, I met with Bertrand, my boss, as well as the communications director and Emilie. It felt more like an inquisition and less like a meeting, because he wanted to know what I knew. After sweating a bit and giving a long explanation in French which seemed partially right, we moved on to how we were going to act. It was a bit intense, and after an hour (at 7:30 pm), we emerged and I promptly went home.

The organization seems to be doing a lot of good in the community, not just by its actions, but by bringing lots of people together. What makes me nervous is my huge role, and if I can get everything accomplished that they need me to. Hopefully, that answer is yes, and I think I will be working as hard as possible not to let some French people down. I already feel bad for going to Amsterdam this weekend and missing a day, so I’m making it up this week with three days of work instead. As a matter of fact, I need to go and get lunch beforehand.

Les elections municipales

The last month or so in Paris, and well France in general, has been a furious campaign by the political parties for the French equivalent for the midterm elections: les elections municipales. To understand this broad election, there first needs to be some understanding about the administrative divisions in France (ok, please don’t yawn).

France, unlike the United States, is a country where mostly everything is centralized, and power comes from the top down. The government and administration in Paris is followed by the power of the departments, and those departments are divided into the towns and cities. Well, I guess after putting it that way it seems almost the same as home.

The key difference is that while we in the United States have state and local elections at different times and for different terms depending on the local laws, in France all of the mayors and heads of government that are not for the national government are elected at the same time. Hence, this is why it’s the municpals. They happen every seven years, making the mayor and the regional government last longer than that of the President of France. The first round commenced last weekend, and according to Le Monde (the journal of repute), and Liberation (a more left-wing paper), the gauchists (the leftists) gained a slight majority.

Party politics in France differs in many ways. The two largest parties, the Parti Socialiste (left) and the UMP (right), are just a sliver of the other parties, including at least two different communist parties, the national front, and Francois Bayrou’s (in my opinion formidible in rhetoric but wimpy in actual positions) Mouvment for Democracy, or Modem. Many of the races were predictable, such as Brittany and Limousin going for the Socalists, and Nice and the Cote d’Azur for the UMP.

What was of contest were many smaller cities that did vote for the UMP in the last elections, and turned to the Socialists this time. Rouen, several cities in the Loire Valley, and some cities in the heartland of old UMP terrirotry decided to give a majority to either the socialist candidate, or to a leftist majority. While this was only a slight change, it might be for good when it comes to the next round this Sunday.

Securite

Every once and awhile, a topic of conversation seems to come up with French people that I meet…one of how they could not have imagined how September 11th affected me, or my mindset. It’s odd, seeing that this comes up usually as a sense that I am still a victim of an attack that hit me personally. In a way this is completely true, but in an ideological sense. Many of the French react to this with concerns for their own safety.

 For me, having to explain that yes, such an event was catastrophic in some terms, but can’t be the be-all and end-all of a foreign policy bewilders a few people, as I almost expected. One man told me that the French could never imagine something like this happening to their own country, and that because of this, they could not see the choices we have made, right or wrong.

 It’s hard because I already have my strong opinions about those choices. That the reactionist, security blanket movements of my government which chose to blindly lash out against anything that could be a threat was not only morally wrong, but chose to steer the world in a downward spiral. While many of the French do not agree with American policy in general, I get the impression among many people that the current security measures are fine.

 Paris, and perhaps France in general, is currently under the Plan Vigipirate (I laugh cause it almost sounds like “vigilant pirate”). In translation, this is RED ALERT! Hence, the government has authorized soldiers in many public places, usually carrying large automatic machine guns. This comes as a surprise, as the last time I entered a mall near the La Defense skyscraper district, I saw these soldiers parading around with the myriad of shoppers. The same situation happened when I was on the subway one night, as four soldiers appeared on the train. Everyone stood away from them, and from what I could tell, not trying to make eye contact. I was staring most of the way because of the oddity for an American to witness armed soldiers parading around a public space for no apparent reason, especially in a country that was supposed to have the same rights.

Well, that is not entirely true. French citizens are all issued national identity cards, which for any reason, could be asked for by an official or by someone such as security personnel (i.e., these soldiers). For a foreigner like myself, it means carrying a version of a national identity card, and in an American’s case, a passport with official government documentation and photograph. If you do not have one and are asked to present it, you could not only be fined, but put in jail.

For an American, where movement and general annonimity seem to be unwritten rights, it’s contrary to the guarantees of expression, the guarantees of voice. I asked a few people why this was, that they had to keep such a card on themselves at all times, why the soldiers with big guns and no pretense to appear at random anywhere you might be is this way? Well, a few people said, it was for “security.” What kind of security? “So we don’t have an attack like what happened in your country.”

What perturbes me about this response is that people assume this is going to happen. That it is perfectly fine for soldiers to control the public order, to watch to make sure that all is well and no one is misbehaving or acting out of place. France was rocked a few years ago by angry youths destroying their neighborhoods in protest of the miserable living conditions and lack of oppurtunities within the supposed egalitarian system. Since the London Bombings and these events, I have not seen the police and soldiers leave the streets or large public spaces. But why? Where has the threat come from and from who?

This question still dogs me. Is it really better to have armed people parading around as a way to deter crime and possible attacks? Or is this just a masqarade for a correct social and politcal order, especially for a president who is not only vastly unpopular at the moment (36% of the French approve) but seems to not have a firm grasp upon the issues?

Link to First Flickr Photo Set

Hey…I know some people don’t have access to where I post many pictures, so I put a smaller collection up on Flickr. All you have to do is click on this link.

Egalite

The past week was difficult, in some personal ways, hence my lack of posting for awhile.

Since that time, I have been discovering new museums (Rodin, Bourdelle, Middle-Ages, Chateau Vincennes, Basilique de Saint-Denis, and others), sleeping in parks (Belleville) during sunny afternoons, exploring new areas (Olympiades with its huge high-rises, eastern Paris with a myriad of ethnic neighborhoods, my own neck of the woods too) and trying not to get sick like mostly everyone else has. Maybe it’s the combination of classes starting, or the minute changes in weather which decide how many layers to wear, but stress is taking a toll on some. For me, maybe it’s been a change in my relations with the French.

Like I may have previously said, the French to me are about form and formulation of experiences into someone unique. What has intrigued me lately is the concept of egalite, one of the three pillars of la Republique Francaise.

These thoughts have been swirling around my head because of my recent quest to nail down the internship. At IES, I’m taking an internship class where the professor in charge listens to your interests and helps find you an internship that will develop them as well as build on the experience for the French employer. Several people who are in the program work for universities, a culinary school, a stock and trading corporation, and many others, such as me, who work for ONG’s (the French abbreviation for non-governmental organization). My work is with Unis-Cite, a now national organization which aims to provide national service for youths to not only create the sense of community between disenfranchised groups, but to create change for others.

It all sounded well and good, but I had to set up the interview with the Paris director. After repeated phone calls that were either not returned or answered, I resorted to contacting my professor in charge. She was a bit angry, saying that I had no choice and HAD to contact him as soon as possible…she then finally gave me his email address, to which he replied to. I had heard a few stories from other students that many French managers do not return emails or phone calls fast, and so far this well-shared issue seemed partially true. So, I set up the interview for last Thursday. Their office is in an isolated neighborhood with many Chinese residents in the 19th arrondisment, hidden in a court yard up a large flight of stairs. My business suit looked pretty crisp for being stashed tightly in a suitcase and not worn for months (the shoes are another long blog entry for tomorrow).

Then I waited for an hour. I had been 15 minutes early, in hopes that I could be done and out fast so I could attend the rest of my classes for the day. Nope. What was weird was that no one offered an explanation to where he was, or what he was doing. In the French work world, there seem to be many unspoken rules that run completely contradictory to those of America. Namely, a boss does not tell explicitly go around and tell the employees what to do. Yes, you kind of just have to be “pro-active” and do the work you think should get done, in the amount of time you see fit. When my professor explained this, she also said that because of this, the French were more productive than the Americans or Asians because they work in concentrated amounts with lots of padding for rest. I’m not really sure yet if this is actually true. But I do know that most managers invite you to lunch, and that is when conversation about work and the ideologies regarding projects and such are bounced back and forth, the manager giving feedback. Or, as my prof says, “they only talk to you when something may be wrong when it’s not at lunch time.”

But what I did notice during my wait was that each person who passed by greeted me and gave me one of those complete “French looks,”….something that includes a bit of a smile, a deep look (though brief) into your eyes, and a sense of judgement depending on how you respond to the greeting and look. The interview which followed was a bit drawn out, as he repeated a few questions since I don’t think he understood my terminology or the work ideology I had been accustomed to. He was very interested about my time with the government, and why I was making such a change from the big to the small…my response that I wanted to be part of something that wouldn’t be finished when I walked out the door at 5pm seemed appropriate, and we both proposed that I help do some research as well as working on projects with other people my age.

At the end, he surprisingly told me that my French was good, even though I was sweating and looked a bit confused. My ususal grasp of “correct” interview words that I has been indoctrinated with in the past had seemed meaningless, because it was more of an interview about personality rather than achievements. I liked this, because it’s more of a process of creative flow rather than overzealous counting of time by a micromanager (read last internship). So I guess I start this week, though I wasn’t given a time or even what I should wear. Once again, I guess you have to be “pro-active,” or whatever that might mean in France.

This concept of egalite in the workplace, of equalness in many senses, stems from the changes after the Revolution. Because of the different social order which rose from the bloody struggles throughout the last few centuries, there is one rule that is very unspoken in France: you never ask how much someone makes or of the social class that they might be part of. When I asked my host dad about it, he said he wouldn’t tell someone how much money he makes even if he had a gun up to his head. It’s a transgression that is seen to be rude in a country where richness of materials (the “bling-bling” culture) should not matter as much as richness of individual knowledge and experience. I was told that it was because many people who were nobility in the old regime had the right to not work, so asking how much money someone made was not only unnatural, but demonic for someone that work was not of their stature. This survives today, as I had no clue that the neighbor my host dad likes very much is a descendent of the Duke who owned le Chateau de Fontainbleu (read really famous and huge). Things about such origins are not readily discussed…for a segment of the population.

So the egailte that I see more and more is one of politeness for the differences in past stature as well as one of a humble regard for others who might not be of your disposition. This is incredibly different than at home, and frankly, I like it a lot.