East of West

7 October 2007

So I didn’t actually end up doing any of the things that I was planning on doing, except for my homework.

            Wow. The most incredible thing just happened. The floor next to my table at the café here just opened up, and a big trashcan just came out of the floor on a miniature elevator. WHAT?! How does that work?! I just don’t understand that at all. WHY IS THERE A TRASH ELEVATOR IN THE FLOOR AND WHY DID NO ONE WARN ME THAT THERE MIGHT BE SOMETHING COMING OUT OF THE FLOOR RIGHT NEXT TO ME?!

            Sorry. Just sort of found that bizarre.

            Anyway, after my classes on Friday I went with my friend N. to Montmartre (the place where Sacre-Coeur is, as well as the breeding ground for the Bohemian Revolution, the Moulin Rouge, and Post-Impressionism). We found the art area, where anyone in Paris who has any artistic talent at all goes to try to sell their art in a never-ending tourist trap. Conviently enough for the tourists, all of the artists are rounded up in one square and categorized—the painters are in one area, those who will draw your portrait are in another, and those who will cut your silhouette out of black paper are in another, and so on and so forth. While I love and appreciate street artists, I really do, most of these seemed to lack originality simply because they cater to the tourists, and tourists only seem to want paintings of Paris or of themselves. So, that’s about all that these self-styled Picassos paint. At least it’s a living.

            Later that night, N. and I went to see the movie 2 Days in Paris. It’s written and directed by Julie Delpy (anybody seen Before Sunset or Before Sunrise?) and it’s about her and her American boyfriend visiting her French parents. It’s in Franglais (half French half English) and is absolutely hysterical and very poignant for any American who has even been to Paris.

            Saturday I went shopping on Avenue des Ternes in the seventeenth arrondissement. Then I did my homework, ate dinner, watched Desperate Housewives on my laptop, and went to bed. I was just too tired to do La Nuit Blanche.

            However, since I went to bed early I also got the opportunity to get up earlier and go to a Philocafe. This particular café is on the Place de la Bastille, called Café des Phares. It is the best philocafe in Paris. This means that every Sunday morning at 11 there is a two hour open mike discussion of a philosophic question that one or another café-goer proposes at the beginning. I thought it was a lot of fun, but it took a heck of a lot of concentration to try to understand two hours of philosophy in French. Sort of exhausting actually. What amazed me the most was its success. People were engaged, and it was clear that many of them came habitually and knew one another. People from all walks of life were there, mostly from the generation above mine. It amazed me that there weren’t any scarf-wearing cigarette-smoking intellectuals from the Sorbonne. It was really sort of philosophy for the people. Socrates would have been proud. All of the people there seemed very friendly, and I bet I could have talked to quite a few of them afterwards, feigning foreign-person ignorance to make some friends, but I had told my host mother I would be home for lunch, so I had to scurry off. Next weekend though, they don’t have a chance. Well, actually, next next weekend, because next weekend I will be in Normandy with school.

            That’s all for now folks! Tune in next time for further adventures, and my thoughts on why the French don’t do leftovers.