Le Pantheon

August 30th, 2017

When Anna was visiting last week, we toured the Pantheon, conveniently located just steps from our apartment.  (Probably a couple thousand steps, actually.)  The building is grand and stunning.  It was interesting to learn a bit about its history---its religious birth and conversion to secular use in the 19th century---and it was also inspiring to see so many authors, scientists and other great thinkers honored in such a way:  Voltaire, Dumas, Rousseau, Hugo, Zola, Braille, Curie (Pierre and Marie).  

Many are awed by the architecture;  I focused my photography instead on small detail.  Here are some photos:

   

Cheese

August 28th, 2017

The cheese adventures begin!

Blues at La Grande Epicerie

Lunch yesterday

Since the first week when I said that we had not had any interesting cheeses yet, a lot has happened.  We've had a couple of fantastic cheese plates at restaurants, the cheese shop in our building reopened after August vacation, and we found the cheese counter at La Grande Epicerie.  (We haven't been to the cheese shop in our building yet, but that's only because we bought too much at La Grande Epicerie that we are trying to work through.  Update:  We have been several times now, and their cheese is fantastic, especially their Beaufort d'été.)  

For lunch yesterday, pictured above, we had a Comté, a Buchette Cendrée, and L'Occitan.  You can get good Comté in the US (e.g., Zingerman's), so I've had that several times before.  I'd never had the other two.  They were fantastic.  L'Occitan (also called Cathare?) was a very creamy, almost oozy, chevre from the south of France with ash on the outside.  Buchette Cendrée was also a chevre with a coating of all kinds of weird-looking stuff and an interior of rich, smooth, sweet chevre.  So good.

The cheese platter at Ferrandaise---all from the Auvergne region

• The cheese plate at Semilla

Above, you can see the selection of cheeses from Auverngne at a restaurant near our apartment.  Finally, the cheese plate at Semilla, pictured right, had a sheep's milk blue, le Regalis, a fresh chevre, la Bouyguette, and a Saint-Nectaire from fermier Morin.

My favorite so far?  Yikes, very hard to say.  Maybe the Buchette Cendrée.  I also loved the Beaufort d'été and Anna and Kate loved the Cantal Entre-Deux (neither pictured here). 

   

Street Art

August 23rd, 2017

I've been collecting photos of some interesting graffiti and street art.  Here are some of them:

Le Louvre

August 22nd, 2017

Anna, our middle daughter, has been visiting for the past several days.  It has been fantastic having her.  She and Kate have been going out on adventures while Glenn and I are working, which is getting Kate out of the apartment and giving her the confidence to travel around Paris on her own (we hope). Having Anna here has also been forcing us to explore Paris, too, when we haven't been working.

Glenn and Kate pondering art

We went to the Louvre on Saturday and had a lovely afternoon.  (One of Glenn's former students, David, has given Glenn and me annual passes to the Louvre.  We are so grateful and plan to get a lot of use out of them!)  Anna especially wanted to see Hammurabi's Codex, so we made a point of finding that.  We also hit a number of the highlights, like Winged Victory, Mona Lisa, and a lot of ancient sculpture.  Here are some beautiful and interesting things we saw: 

Here is one of the less obviously beautiful or interesting things in the Louvre: 

Prices

August 20th, 2017

Prices. I guess an economist can’t hardly go without mentioning the differences in relative prices in France and the US for a bunch of different products. An obvious example is wine, which is wonderful and cheap. We were in the Monoprix the other day and Glenn showed me a bottle of wine that we would typically not buy in the US because it would be too expensive. I balked until Glenn said, “only 9 euros.” “Ok, let’s get several.” Plastic hangers balance out the equation. Honestly? 6 euros for 4? Sometimes you just miss the Target. One surprise was a computer we bought for Kate. We got her a small HP laptop with Windows 10, MS Office, touchscreen, 2 gigs of RAM, 32 gig flash memory, etc., for 229 euros. I think that it cheaper than a comparable product in the US, but I don’t know why it would be. There could be a price discrimination story here because the computer came with a crazy French keyboard, which is not easy to swap out on a laptop.

Price of baguettes no longer government-mandated but still very low.

Three sketches of Paris in August

August 16th, 2017

Jardin du Luxembourg in the morning: The air is a little damp and cool, reminiscent of mornings in Palo Alto. The sun is filtering through the trees planted at regular intervals forming long parallel promenades. We walk over the pea gravel towards a collection of painted metal chairs, scattered around the park and moveable to suit one’s needs. A cluster of people sits in a pavilion several yards away. The pavilion is, perhaps, 20 by 50 feet, with elegant wrought iron posts holding a roof over a concrete base. I can’t hear their voices and might not understand them if I could. They all have similar or identical books open, reading and talking---rehearsing lines for a play, perhaps? Another group has a small picnic snack, and Sandy would like to investigate. I hold him back. An older woman walks by with a small white poodle. Sandy practices a “good quiet” as they pass, sitting still with the promise of a treat if he doesn’t bark.

Maria Luisa, an Italian restaurant, on a Sunday evening: It is nearly 8:30 when we arrive for dinner, but the sun is still far from setting. The day has been spectacular. The evening is soft and warm, perfect for eating outside. We wait a few minutes as a server readies two adjacent tables for us. After we’re seated, an older man sets up his violin near us on the sidewalk. He has a decent ear, a limited repertoire, and an odd idea of what vibrato is. He plays three songs, we give him a few euros, and he moves on. The next entertainment is provided by an astounding feat of parallel parking across from us. I say to Glenn, “No way he makes this.” Glenn agrees. Americans at the next table agree. We all wait in silence as the driver eases into a space just inches longer than his car with a large number of small adjustments. A thumbs-up to the driver, a smile and a small bow, a few discreet claps from the bank of tables watching. The final entertainment comes from the American father, American high-school daughter, and the foreign-exchange student boyfriend at the table next to us. The physical proximity of the couple shifts substantially when the father excuses himself to go to the bathroom and then shifts back upon his arrival back. We all smile.

In line at the Lidl on a Thursday afternoon: Lines are long and nerves are a bit frayed. I have plenty of time while waiting in line to extract the two reusable bags I have brought, ready them for packing, and take out my HSBC card for payment, so I will not need to fumble during the transaction. I finally make it to the front and start unloading the groceries (leaning down in a tight space to take them from a floor-level carriage) onto the belt. I stand, holding my two bags and my card, hands full. The checker starts ringing up my order and hands each item to me as it’s rung up, because the woman in front has not bagged her groceries yet. Yes, that’s what I said: he hands each item to me, one by one, even though my hands are obviously full. I clumsily and haphazardly manage to maneuver items into bags, milk on top of potato chips---that sort of thing. In terms of efficiency and ergonomics, the Lidl is no Walmart.

Sandy in Paris

August 14th, 2017

Sandy is settling in quite well. We weren’t sure about the move from his suburban, lots-of-grass, fenced-in-backyard existence to his third-floor-apartment-in-the-city life. Also, he was leaving behind a large group of dog and people friends: Katie, Lucy, Nellie, Rudy (dogs) and Pati (dog walker), Ruth (dog owner), Annette (housekeeper), and many others. He’s bounced right back, though. One thing he has decided is that he likes elevators. I don’t think there’s anything about the operation of the elevator that he enjoys. Rather, he is just lazy and prefers waiting for the elevator over walking up or down the stairs.  

Sandy, refusing stairs, waiting for elevator

Sometimes it’s quite difficult to get him to take the stairs. He digs in and leans as hard as he can backwards when I try to pull him towards the stairs. He also likes it when we open the windows in our apartment. We get a lot of interesting street noise (and street smells, presumably) with them open, much more than back in Newton. Finally, he likes the fact that he has moved up considerably in the dog size distribution in Paris relative to Newton. Many Parisian dogs are very small and, therefore, not a threat to Sandy’s self-declared status as King of Paris.

By the way, is it bad that we washed our dishes with laundry detergent for the first two weeks?

France v. England

August 10th, 2017

Before we arrived in France, I had a mental model in mind for acquiring all of the necessities for our apartment and daily lives: buy what was convenient and not too expensive at local shops and use amazon.fr otherwise. I may need to amend my model. Package delivery here is a challenge. The complete address we gave to FedEx to deliver a box of work papers to us was apparently not complete enough. We finally received it after a week and half by calling FedEx and changing the delivery address to work. We did manage to receive three boxes we shipped from home, but only because we happened to be home when they arrived and the housekeeper for the building happened to be in the courtyard and willing to open the gate and the door to our particular building. That being said, I have placed a number of Amazon orders that have arrived. It may be that the key is ordering things that arrive in boxes small enough to fit into our mailbox.

I’ve had an interesting time contrasting my year in Cambridge England (1987-88) with this year so far. One obvious difference is that I am thirty years older. I think those thirty years have made a marked difference in how I have approached moving to a new country. Also, I did not come to Paris alone, as I did to Cambridge thirty years ago. (Cambridge was, in fact, where Glenn and I met, and I made other dear friends during the year, but I didn’t know a soul there when I arrived.) Somehow, I thought that language would make a bigger difference, that the transition here would be so much more difficult because none of us is very good at French. Not so---let me illustrate. When I moved to Churchill College in England, I was told that “this is a college, not a hotel, so there are not phones in the students’ rooms.” With a little further digging, I found out that I could, in fact, get a private phone line, but the installation would cost 300 pounds and I would have to wait a minimum of three months before the installation would take place. And the monthly fees were also extraordinary. So I resigned myself to go without, scheduling a time when my parents would call and I would post myself by the common phone in the hallway to answer it. (I could not actually initiate it myself because there was no way to pay for the call.) The lack of phone led to some local inefficiencies as well. When I played squash for the college team, the method used to reschedule a match was that I would have to cycle the two miles to the college where my opponent lived, put a note in her pigeonhole with a list of acceptable times for rescheduling, and she would then have to cycle out to my college to leave a note settling on her preferred time. We always hoped the rescheduling could be achieved in one cycle, but sometimes two were necessary.

Here in France, we were able to walk into an Orange, pay 80 euros for a smartphone, sign a contract for 12 euros a month to get unlimited calls and texts and 2 gigs of data, and walk out in about 20 minutes with a working phone. Obviously much of this difference is attributable to technological progress, but I wonder how much is attributable to the differences between huge city and medium-sized town and the differences between French (relative) efficiency and British love of bureaucracy. Whatever difference knowing the language made was negligible. (Note that technological progress cannot tell the whole story. The backwards situation in the UK was at a time when every college dorm room in the US had a phone which worked immediately upon arrival.)

I also recall that I had flown to England without packing a toothbrush, for some reason. I landed at Heathrow on Saturday, made my way to Cambridge, and didn’t quite get my act together to go out to buy a toothbrush until the evening. All the stores were closed, of course, as they were the next day as well. My teeth went unbrushed until Monday morning. Despite August closings, I’m sure that one can now easily buy a toothbrush in Paris any day of the week, well into the evening.

Our Apartment

August 8th, 2017

Our apartment is quite nice. It is pretty spacious for the three (four) of us, although nothing like what we’re used to in Newton. There is a nice living room/dining room, furnished with contemporary furniture in neutral tones. There are two highly-stylized pieces of art on the wall suggesting nude women. (Kate says, “What are we going to do with those?” “Nothing.”)

Artwork we did not choose

We have three bedrooms, all pretty small with minimal storage. The third bedroom will be our guest room/overflow storage room. I would be kidding myself to think that its second function will not be exploited extensively. The kitchen is decent, but not adequate for large cooking and baking projects. That’s ok---that’s what they make restaurants and bakeries for. Our dishwasher is tiny and our washer/dryer combination is also quite small. They will both receive a workout this year.

View of Luxembourg Palace outside our window

As I mentioned before, we are directly across from the Odeon Theater. It has posted its 2017-18 season, and there are a few plays I think we will see. Macbeth will be performed in English. Chekov’s Three Sisters will be in Russian with French and English subtitles. There was some other play performed in English, and they also have both Moliere and Racine plays in French that we may attempt. I would like to go to the opera and ballet, too, but I haven’t researched those at all.

Initial Thoughts on Food

August 5th, 2017

Ah, the food. I’m sure I’ll have plenty to say about the food over the course of the year. We have already had lovely sandwiches on baguettes, croissants and brioches for breakfast, and Neopolitan-style pizza for dinner last night. We have tried a number of cookies masquerading as chocolate chip. None have, in fact, been classic American chocolate chip cookies, but they’ve been delicious nonetheless. (Instead of semi-sweet chocolate, they tend to use bittersweet dark chocolate, which makes a noticeable difference. There also seems to be a distinct lack of brown sugar.) We’ve gotten ourselves set up to make iced tea at home, so our frequency of Starbucks visits will likely go down.

We do not have any interesting cheese adventures to report yet. There is a dairy co-op on the ground floor of our apartment building, but it’s closed for the month of August. (Many things are closed.) I am hoping that it turns out to be a good source for local cheeses. So far, we’ve just picked up some cheese at the grocery store, which has been fine, but not spectacular.

Finally, let me mention some oddities we have encountered: the take-out pizza place that doesn’t open until 7:30pm and the ice cream shop that closes at 7:45pm. I think literally the only time I have ever been to an ice cream shop in my life has been after dinner, so the combination of 7:30pm opening for dinner and 7:45pm closing for dessert seems a strange choice from that perspective. The strangest? The bagel shop that doesn’t open until 10am.  (Update:  It's horrible.)

Paris Arrival

August 3rd, 2017

On August 1st, 2017, we landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport to begin our adventure of living abroad for a year. The “we” is my husband Glenn, our daughter Kate, our dog Sandy, and me, Sara. The last days before our departure were filled with lovely dinners with many of our friends and relatives as well as the stress of completing a dauntingly long to do list: wrapping up research projects temporarily, readying our MIT offices for visiting faculty, packing up most of the artifacts of our home life to either bring to France, give away, sell, donate, or store, in preparation for renting our house in Newton, completing the proper procedures and paperwork for our and Sandy’s stay, as well as a million other smaller tasks. (The house has never looked better, by the way.)

Still jet-lagged, we are starting to settle in. We have a lovely apartment in Paris in the 6th arrondisement, across the street from the Odeon Theatre and the Luxembourg Gardens. We are a close walk to a few Metro and RER stops, so transportation is very easy. We don’t have a car, so we will be relying on public transportation. We even used it to make a trip where we bought more things to outfit our apartment than we could carry: glasses, dishes, a coat tree, hangers, storage bins, etc. (We mostly used public transportation. We gave up and took an Uber for the final leg.)

Sandy lounging in our new living room

Our first impressions of the apartment and neighborhood are very positive. There are dozens of restaurants within a close walk that we are interested in trying. There are interesting shops. The Luxembourg Gardens are lovely. Sandy’s first impressions of the apartment and neighborhood, however, may be somewhat less positive. (Some of this might be colored by eight hours in the hold of an airplane, locked into a little crate.) He loves walking in the Luxembourg Gardens, but there is only a limited part where dogs are allowed. Furthermore that part does not include any grass. (I saw two dogs today violating the prohibitions, though.)

Map of Luxembourg Gardens identifying where dogs are 
allowed---note the conspicuous absence of grass-
covered areas.

There are also a lot of metal grates on sidewalks. Sandy does not walk on metal. He will learn soon, though, that dogs can sometimes come to restaurants, which I hope will compensate for the other Paris-based canine indignities. Also, he’s allowed to ride on the Metro in a “carrier.” We’ll try to figure out the definition of a carrier and report back.

Chiens interdits