16 December 2007
So I haven’t written in a while. Not really that many interesting things have happened; I’m torn between enjoying my last two weeks and getting excited about going home. It’s a dangerous dichotomy.
I finished my classes this past Friday and now I just have 4 final exams and 3 final projects. I have 2 out of 3 final projects finished, and then my last project to do and all of my exams to study for. I’m not anticipating it to be terribly difficult.
It is interesting, however, that while I am taking 5 classes this semester—just as many as I normally take—and 3 of these classes are in a different language, this has probably been my easiest semester of college. I think that’s mostly because the directors have placed so much emphasis on us learning things outside of the classroom. If you include some of the cultural adjustments and learning I’ve done, then this has been one of my harder semesters.
I’m trying to remember what I did this past week. I went to Versailles over the weekend, but it was so windy the gardens were closed down, and so I just saw the chateau which I’ve already seen twice before. That wasn’t terribly exciting. Afterwards I did get KFC though. There are actually a fair number of Parisians who eat at KFC, although I think there are less than 5 of them in Paris. Not so with MacDonald’s (or, as the French call it, MacDo). There are lots of those around.
My French family finally got a Christmas tree. It’s a little pine tree about 4 feet high and it’s got a couple of lights and some ornaments, but it makes my family’s Christmas tree look like major overkill. My host brothers and sister continue to get excited about Christmas, and they do a lot of the same things: buy presents, listen to Christmas music. But, they do not make Christmas cookies, so my friend N. and I took that burden upon ourselves and made some chocolate-peanut butter chip cookies. We followed the directions exactly, but something about the cookies just didn’t seem right to us. My host family didn’t seem to notice this however, because only 3 days later they were all gone.
What else. I got sick last week and spend 24 hours in bed in one long stretch. I was probably sleeping for 22 of those hours. After that, I got up, and the next day I feel completely back to normal. Strange.
Then on Wednesday my host family got yet another exchange student. I must be living in a bed and breakfast. He’s 14 and from Valencia (in Spain) and he makes 8 people in one apartment. 8 people, one bathroom, one kitchen. The table will only hold six people. Anyway, dinner was very interesting, with an American, a German, a Spaniard, and 3 Frenchmen, especially since the Spaniard didn’t understand French or English very well. Let’s just say there was a lot of miming. One point everyone did connect on, however, was The Simpsons/Les Simpsons/Los Simpsons/Die Simpsons. American pop culture has just pervaded the whole of Europe. I thought it was an ironic touch that everyone at the table watched the Simpsons except for the American—I don’t really like it.
Nevertheless, the amount of information that the Europeans know about American pop culture is just incredible, especially considering that we don’t really know that much about them. The German student spent over an hour showing me classic German party songs or popular songs and I had not heard of any of them before. Not a single one. How does that happen? Why don’t we access this incredible source of culture over here? Partly because we don’t like seeing anything that isn’t in English—not TV, movies, or music.
Anyway, I have 5 full days until I leave, which makes about 6 full days until I get home. I’ll try to post once more before leaving.
7 December 2007
This Tuesday I went to yet another play for my theater class. It was a vaudeville called Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie by Eugène Labiche and it was by far my favorite of the plays that I’ve seen this semester. It was just a great light comedy with a little bit of singing thrown in. I think it’s great that the French actually have a list of plays that they consider part of their national heritage, and no matter what time period the play comes from, they still play all of them fairly frequently and people go to see them as much as they would go to see modern plays.
France is really starting to get ready for Christmas. The Champs-Elysées is completely lit up, from the top to the bottom, and the majority of cafés have some kinds of lights or trees outside. St-Germain-des-Près—the neighborhood of my school—even has a little Christmas market, with all of these wooden booths set up and decorated. Still, though there are lights everywhere, it doesn’t really feel like Christmas. The weather is the same as it was in November and October. It’s a little bit cold, but it hasn’t even gotten anywhere near freezing. And, of course, no snow. How can it be Christmas without at least one snowstorm? The only place you can hear Christmas songs is in Starbucks. France looks like it’s ready for Christmas, but you don’t get the same feeling of the Christmas spirit that I feel you get in the US, or the same anticipation. Perhaps the lights are just a big show for all of the tourists.
This past Wednesday (5 December) was some kind of holiday in the Netherlands and in Germany, called Sinterklaas. According to the lore surrounding this holiday, I guess that someone, who we would call Santa, comes and gives the children presents. It’s like Christmas, but the Germans and the Dutch appear to have separated the birth of Jesus from the celebration of the Santa-related holiday. That’s an interesting way of doing it. I think that might be nice, to separate the two holidays, because they really have nothing to do with one another.
Then Thursday I went to the Musée d’Orsay with my Art and Architecture class. I can’t express how wonderful it is to have an art class where we look at slides of these paintings or buildings, and then just go visit them. This time we spent most of the time on Manet, and then moved on to Monet. I’ve definitely learned a lot about art, but the most important thing that I’ve learned is that I am not an art historian. Check that off my list of potential professions.
Later on Thursday my entire program had a meeting with French university students for a discussion of cultural differences. This week the topic was a recent Time magazine article about the death of French culture, and a Frenchman’s rebuttal to it. We spent the evening discussing if French culture was dead, if Americans even have their own culture, and what culture is. I ended spending the majority of the discussion trying to convey the viewpoint that American culture is not equivalent to capitalism. The French students seemed to think that they were the same thing, but I had to remind them that at the base of everything else, our culture is not only our art and our way of doing things, but also our fundamental values, which at the bottom of it all are just like the other occidental cultures—we believe in liberty, equality, social mobility, etc. Some of the values in America are different from those in France, obviously. For instance, the Americans (on the whole) are more religious, more capitalist, and more individualist than the French. I think that the French (or maybe Europeans as a whole) have this idea that American culture is our movies and our music, but that’s just a part of the culture.
Anyway, that was pretty interesting. Being in France has really enabled me to see the other side of the argument, and to see in some ways how the rest of the world sees us, but I think there are some things I’m still too close to see “clearly.” American culture might be one of those topics.
3 December 2007
Wow. I can’t even believe that it’s December already. I’m also having a hard time realizing that I only have 3 weeks left here. There’s still things I want to do! And I’m not talking about monuments or museums or anything like that, I’ve pretty much seen my full of those, and I’ve hit all of the major highlights. I’m talking about restaurants that I want to go to or clubs I want to check out. These are the things I will leave Paris not having done.
This past Wednesday I went to see a play with my theatre class. We went to see Le Seconde Surprise de l’Amour by Marivaux. I quite liked the mise en scene (which is basically the direction of the play) but one of the actors so forcibly reminded me of Jack from Will and Grace that it was almost impossible to separate the two of them in my head.
Then on Thursday my Art and Architecture class took a tour of the Musée d’Orsay. We started with Ingres and Delacroix, then moved on to Millet and some early Degas. It’s absolutely amazing how much I’ve learned in this class. Don’t get me wrong, if you put me in front of any painting and ask me to give a formal analysis of it, I’ll still give you a pretty blank stare, but I’ve just learned so much about architecture and painting than I ever knew before. Compared to those of my classmates who have actually taken art history before, I know nothing, but I’m learning stuff I have never studied before, and I think that’s pretty neat. Also, I’ve just learned so much about the history of Paris as a city, you could take me to almost any major monument/museum in Paris and I would be able to tell you something about it. That alone has to justify my time abroad here. My French has also improved by leaps and bounds, which is incredible.
Then later I was really dragging so I thought I might have a frappacino at a Starbucks that I had seen last week near l’Opera Garnier. It was the most beautiful Starbucks I have ever seen. There were marble columns inside, with floor to ceiling mirrors, chandeliers, and gold-gilt ornamentation. Even the Starbucks here are uniquely French.
On another subject, I don’t know if I have yet talked about the French phenomenon of customer service. This is because it doesn’t exist. The French are not so into the consumer culture as the Americans are, and they definitely don’t have this idea that “the customer is always right.” This is why it took me and my host sister a full 20 minutes to exchange an item of clothing she had bought for a different size. This also explains why, when I found a dress at an H & M store that I really liked, but wasn’t in my size, I went up to one of the store clerks to ask if she could call the other H & Ms in Paris to see if they had the dress in my size or if she could look this sort of thing up online, she simply said, “We don’t do that.” She went on to explain to me that if I wanted to see if these other stores had this dress in my size, I either had to call them myself or go to these stores and go searching myself. I’m fairly confident that I would never discover this situation in America.
Then again, I’m pretty sure that the waiters wouldn’t be able to flirt with the young women in the US as they do here. In France, waiters are probably 75% male. They will flirt with you, no matter what you look like or how much older he is than you. They’ll pay you compliments and flirt with you incessantly, but that’s about it. They just consider it a form of appreciation, while an American male might express this simply through looking or smiling a lot. While this is great for my self-esteem, it is difficult to be able to draw a line with them. So when a waiter is blatantly ogling you, he doesn’t have to worry about you asking to see his manager and getting him fired. This, however, is a legitimate concern in the US, somewhat tied to our trigger-finger legislation. I’m just saying that the customer service mentality is almost non-existent here. This doesn’t rule out the possibility of getting good service, but it does make it so that I will go to this café as opposed to another, simply because I like the staff better. The staff of a restaurant or a café will not even figure in my mind in the US, because they pretty much all treat me the same way. The reason I go to this café almost every day is not only because it has WIFI but also because the waiters are always so nice and personable with me.
Enough of that though. Friday night my whole study abroad program went to see Les Fables de La Fontaine at la Comèdie Française. To write these fables, La Fontaine basically took Aesop’s fables, translated them into French, and then made them rhyme. Anyway, they’re more like poems than a play—in fact, they aren’t a play at all. La Comèdie Française is supposed to be the best theater in France, and though I think the actors are probably really great, fables just shouldn’t be made into something you would see at a theater. It wasn’t really my favorite.
Then Saturday I went to Père Lachaise (better known to Americans as “the place where Jim Morrison is buried). There are other famous people buried there, like Chopin, Edith Piaf, Molière, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, and then of course tons of un-famous people. I kept hearing that it was a really cool place to go—it’s supposed to be the third most visited place in Paris, but it wasn’t really my style. For one thing, I thought it would be more like an American cemetery, but there is absolutely no grass. None. Then, also, I would say at least half of the gravestones weren’t actually gravestones but family crypts. I’d never really seen a family crypt before this, so I’ll explain it to those others who also have no idea what this looks like. Picture a telephone booth made completely out of stone, with one door in the front, and then an inscription above the door saying which family the crypt belonged to. In many instances, the crypts were really no longer looked after, and the doors had fallen off and you could see spider webs and dead leaves everywhere inside. Really all that’s inside them is a little shelf, and that’s it. I supposed their ashes must be put in the floor but I’m not really sure. It was kind of interesting to just wander around and see what different people had chosen for gravestones or who had flowers and who didn’t. I didn’t actually end up searching out any of the famous people buried there because I thought that would have been too morbid so I just strolled through. The eeriest part was when I was walking down the rows of some of the tombs and started to hear music…It turned out that someone had taped open a musical card on someone’s tomb and it just kept playing over and over.
After this I went to le Parc des Buttes-Chamont (which is basically just a big grassy park) and took a stroll. It was pretty but nothing really special.
I had a late/early night and so I slept in Sunday and didn’t do anything really interesting.
Then today I went on a field-trip with my European Union class to Jean Monnet’s house. Jean Monnet is not the Impressionist painter with all the water lilies (that’s Claude Monet), but was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community back in 1951 (the ECSC was the predecessor to the current European Union). There, someone talked to us about the EU today and about the role that Jean Monnet played in all of that. What I thought was fascinating was that the EU is still changing so rapidly, it’s almost like watching a country get born, and I’m right in the middle of it. For instance, we talked about how the Lisbon treaty is currently on the table (to create the Lisbon Treaty back during this October, the European Commission basically took the proposed European Constitution from 2005—which was vetoed by France and the Netherlands—and took all the “constitutional” aspects out of it so that it would be easier to ratify). Also, in the beginning of 2008, Malta and Cyprus—the newest EU member states—are going on the Euro. Turkey, Croatia, and Macedonia are currently being considered for EU membership. All of this is going on and so few people in the US are at all aware of it. One of the girls in our program is a Turkish Cypriot, so it was really interesting to see her point of view of the EU as compared to our teacher’s French view and our American views. For those who don’t know (and I didn’t), the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is a country not recognized by the United Nations, and takes up the northern 1/3 of the island of Cyprus. The other 2/3 is has Greek inhabitants, and that part of the country was recently admitted to the EU while the Turkish part was not. The Turkish Cypriots were told that they could enter the EU if they unified the island, but the Greek side refused unification while the Turks were for it. Thus, it makes the situation really tricky (and much more complicated than this little explanation).
In any case, I got to learn about the current state of the EU, which is a completely new subject for me.
