Various and sundry adventures

In the interest of not contaminating my post on Combray with less noble things like booze, I didn't mention the fact that Saturday was also an extremely important evening for another reason: I finally made it back to my favorite rum bar in the Butte-aux-Cailles! Yes!

The background to this story is that when I lived in the 13th last summer, I once met a friend in this neighborhood, which is known as a little commune in Paris that has kind of managed to maintain a quaint "village-like" feel. There's a main drag with all sorts of cute restaurants and bars, including a local farmers' cooperative restaurant that is supposedly one of the hottest tickets in the city. You have to make reservations well in advance, which I was never organized enough to do. That's definitely going to happen this year.

Anyway, Izzy and I were walking down the street last summer when we came across THIS window:



Oh yes, a whole row of imported rums from Martinique, all infused with different flavors, served in shot glasses but meant as more of a "dégustation" as the French would say (a tasting). A sipping rum, therefore. Once we saw this window, it was all over. We never went anywhere else. And we ended up sampling pretty much every flavor there is. Favorites include apple cinnamon, coconut, and vanilla. Fig is pretty tasty too. We were less thrilled with lime (tasted kind of like mouthwash, haha) and ginger (even though I adore ginger, it was too strong).

Anyway, I got a group together on Saturday night to hit up the rum bar. Jason and I struck up a conversation with two guys at the bar, one of whom was super fascinating--a guidance counselor for an elementary/middle school in the banlieues, who was telling us about the restructuring program in Paris designed to eliminate the divide between the inner and outer cities. All very interesting, and super controversial because it's coming from the top-down (Sarko is in charge, rather than the mayor of Paris). This conversation was going along just fine when the bar got quite crowded and we ended up having to spread out a bit to make room for more people. Jason and the interesting guy ended up in once place, and I ended up a little further down with the other guy, who seemed nice enough but less interested in talking about city politics.

So I'm chatting with Other Guy, who I quickly discover is only interested in one thing, namely getting me drunk and taking me home. I'm not an idiot, so I don't let him buy me any drinks. I wasn't particularly concerned, since I was there with a big group of people and also wasn't at all drunk so I wasn't about to let him drag me off. I'm trying to extricate myself from him when he leans in to say something (the music was getting progressively louder) and tried to lick my neck!

Needless to say, that was the dealbreaker on that one and I quickly went over to Jason and Interesting Guy, who were engaged in a philosophical discussion on what it's like to go back to Algeria (the guidance counselor was born in France of Algerian parents). Figures. Jason gets the philosopher, I get the neck licker.

I am a rock star

Just edited the post to get rid of the "spirals" in favor of "spires," haha. Paris points (or maybe Chartres points) to my father, for catching it!

Combray!

Given my proud background as an academic nerd, it was only a matter of time before I managed to make it to Proust's hometown. I mean, seriously, I've been to the Rutherford B. Hayes house and the Warren Harding memorial (both in Ohio), so I clearly had to get out to the birthplace of someone who's actually interesting.

I had tried to go to Illiers-Combray back during my year in Colmar, but it's actually kind of tricky to get there. It's hard enough to get there from Paris (even though it's not far away), let alone from Colmar. So it didn't happen back in 04-05, but when some other grad students announced they were going this weekend, I jumped right on that bandwagon.

To get to Illiers-Combray, you have to go through Chartres, site of the famous cathedral:


We had an hour-long layover in Chartres, which was a bit of a hassle in the sense that it made the trip out to Illiers a little longer, but we were actually quite pleased in the end because it allowed us to make a quick trip to see the cathedral. I had been there in 1998 on my very first trip to France but hadn't been back since. It was nice to see it again, just on general princple.

The Chartres cathedral is one of the more recognizable cathedrals in the world, thanks to the mismatched spires. In one of the more noteworthy cases of following the crowd, the second spire is different because the cathedral took so long to build that the styles had changed. So rather than keeping the second one the same as the first, the later generations of architects decided to be trendy and adapt, symmetry be damned. Love it!

The town itself is also quite attractive, this is the main square in front of the cathedral:


Anyway, from there we hopped on a little regional train to head out to Illiers-Combray:


A hilarious note on the name of the town: back when Proust knew it (late 1800s), it was just called Illiers. But then in 1971 in honor of the centennial, they changed their name to Illiers-Combray, based on the famous first half of Swann's Way, in which the narrator discusses his childhood in a fictional town called "Combray." But of course the whole question about what's based on fact and what's fiction is the big issue in Proust, so it's fairy clear that Combray was heavily based on Illiers. So yeah, the town totally took credit for it and added Combray to their name to capitalize on the Proust connection, haha.

The thing that's surprising, though, is that you'd think a town that would go to the effort of changing its name to profit from Proust would also do more to encourage tourism. In fact there's almost NOTHING THERE. Seriously. Here's the main square:


We arrived right around lunch time and were starving, so we started looking around for a place to eat. The grocery store on the square was closed for lunch from 12-3, haha. And we couldn't find any boulangerie to get sandwiches. We finally decided to ask a local (once we found one, there was actually no one around) where the nearest boulangerie was, and he was like, "oh, hmmm, there's really only one in town, and I think it's closed on the weekends, so I guess if you want lunch you'll have to try the local butcher..."

We went to the butcher and managed to cobble together a lunch, which was totally fine. But we thought it was pretty remarkable that the town immortalized by one of France's most famous writers ever would have almost nothing available for tourists, haha. The only other game in town was this overpriced kitschy salon de thé:


Totally lame, but since it was basically the only game in town for having a cup of tea and a madeleine, we had no choice. Obviously this picture had to happen, haha:


Needless to say, in the interest of not being miserable for the rest of the trip I didn't actually eat the madeleine, but I still had to have my picture taken with it, haha.

From there, we went to Proust's aunt's house:


I'm not going to engage in the narrator as Marcel/not-Marcel debate here, but the idea is that this is the prototype for Tante Léonie's house in the book. And of course it's the world described here that comes out of the encounter between the narrator and the tea/madeleine. The house is now a museum totally devoted to promoting the world of the book, complete with the magic lantern:


In the house I was also able to get a pic with the big man himself, haha:


From there we wandered over to the river and the gardens:



The funny thing about both the river and the garden is that we thought they'd be huge. But as you can see, they're actually quite small. In the end, though, this is totally appropriate. In the book, the narrator is always building things up to be epic, then is disappointed when he sees/experiences them in real life (the idea being that the world in your head is more glorious than the actual reality of life). Anyway, the fact that we were super excited to see Combray and then were somewhat disappointed by the real thing is as Proustian as it gets. So yeah, it was actually a perfect trip, haha.

Taking on the cultural experience of music in France...

Well, it has taken me a full week, but I think I'm finally somewhat recovered from last weekend. But only somewhat: how can life ever really be the same once you've seen a French mousse party? I think I'm scarred for life on that score. But I wouldn't have it any other way.

Anyway, I spent Monday and Tuesday more or less resting and reading in bed, since food poisoning is such a soul draining experience. It really leaves you astonishingly weak, I couldn't get through the day without a few naps.

By Wednesday I was starting to feel like myself again, so I went over to the BN and got my library card and spent two days getting reacquainted with my sources. Which was a highly productive experience, as it led me to a major methodological breakthrough that totally liberated me from some misdirected ideas I had on what I needed to do before I could start writing. Instead I realized that I had much more than I thought I did, and this discovery actually led me to leave the library early on Thursday to being writing. I spent a good portion of Thursday night glued to my computer, then returned to the library on Friday for more. This revelation was in fact so rich that I spent Friday night in my room, continuing to write. I was planning on reserving today for that but then I got an invitation to go to Proust's home town, which is about an hour outside of Paris. I couldn't resist the trip to Combray, which led to a moment of existential crisis, since I want to ride this inspiration wave as long as hard as I can. So I stayed up until like 1 last night and got up again at 6 to continue writing. Damn! But, I've gotten a skeleton of everything I have down, so I can polish it tomorrow before hitting the BN again on Monday. Writing is such a curious process, I was panicking about falling behind on my plan and then all of a sudden I just whipped up 17 pages in two days. Yes!

My other huge progress of the week is that I've gotten organized on the music front. I was having scheduling issues with the orchestras here at the ENS, so I finally decided to stop obsessing over how to work those out and find something else in the community instead. After a bit of googling and emailing, I got a few leads. One orchestra that sounds pretty good invited me to join (because, honestly, even though I'm nowhere near professional quality and am sadly rusty, I have a decent musical CV on paper so it at least seems like I know what I'm doing, haha), so I accepted on the spot so that I would have something. Their repertoire seems reasonably ambitious, so they can't suck. Then I got another invitation for some chamber music, which I couldn't turn down since I adore chamber music. I may have gotten myself into a group preparing the Mendelssohn Octet, which is totally hot. Not only is it a great piece, I've also played it before so it won't be as much of a stretch as it would be otherwise. Word.

Anyway, that lead me to take action on renting a cello, since I had been having trouble getting one from a friend of my former cello teacher. We've been trying to connect without success, since he lives in Aix. I finally ended up renting a rather crappy one from a Paris luthier, but I'm hoping I can still get the one in Aix later since I'm sure it's way better. But any port in a storm, at least I can start playing this week.

The funniest moment of picking up the cello, however, was that I went over there with my checkbook, as instructed. I had to leave a deposit check that they won't cash unless I screw up the instrument. So we were going through the paperwork and I signed the documents, then I went to open up my checkbook, at which point I realized that I had NO FREAKIN' CLUE how to write a check in France! They're totally different. It's not clear where any of the information goes! This isn't my first bank account in France, but I guess I never had to write a check from my other one. It had just never come up, and I hadn't thought of it. So I was sitting there like a dumbass, and I figured the only solution was to make a joke of it. The woman was quite nice, so I was like, "well, the best part of getting settled in a foreign country is the stuff you learn unexpectedly, I have no idea how to fill this out!" We had a good laugh over it and she taught me how to write a check in France. You even have to write out the city where you wrote it, so there's a space to say that I wrote the check in Paris. I guess I lost some Paris points on that one, but maybe I've gained them back now that I know how to do it? In any case I thought it was pretty hilarious, haha.

I still haven't figured out how to deposit checks, however, and I already knew that's totally different. There's a weird machine you have to use, not the ATM. I'll be getting a check soon, so more on that later.

Oh boy this is going to be a good one...

So as many people already know, some of the stronger grad students in the group took on the formidable BEAST that is freshman orientation weekend at the ENS. It was open to all first-year students, so we fit the bill. And it was only 40 euros for three full days, all expenses included. So we all figured that despite the risks involved in committing to spending that much time with the kiddies, we might as well go for it. Besides, it would be a chance to see a region of France that we hadn't seen before (even if the destination remained a mystery until the last minute, haha).

We discovered early on, however, that this was going to be way more than we bargained for. This trip, called "le méga," was not to be for the weak.

The buses left Paris around 11 pm last Thursday night. Naively thinking that I would get some sleep on our ride, I brought my inflatable neck pillow and was looking forward to some rest. Like hell. Instead, they put on super loud Europop and proceeded to dance in the aisles of the bus. That's when I figured out that there was absolutely no adult supervision on this trip--it was quite literally a freshman retreat organized by other undergrads. So we were looking at an 11-hour bus ride run entirely by undergrads. ohhhhhhhh.

I thought the worst was over by about 1 am when things quieted down a bit. But then around 2 we stopped for a rest stop, where they passed out bottles of Kro. I was so wound up at this point that even a beer sounded great (plus I was yet again naively thinking that it would help me sleep). But then we got back on the road.

And that's when bus rugby began.

Bus rugby, for those of us who have never seen such a thing, involves putting a contestant in the back of the bus, who then tries to get to the front. Important detail: this was a double-decker bus, so all this was going on upstairs where the driver apparently didn't know what was going on (or else could ignore it). So the bus rugby contestant is trying to get to the front, and everyone else is trying to stop this person from making it. This leads to crowd surfing and general horseplay. I was sure someone was going to go flying down the stairs to the lower level or something equally unfortunate. The winner, after multiple contestants, was the one who made it to the front the fastest.

My friend Emily, another grad student, observed that the bus ride was like being in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. I couldn't have said it better myself.

We finally got to Capbreton around 9 am, where we promptly passed out in bed for a few hours. It was pouring anyway, so we weren't concerned about missing anything other than more antics in the resort's rec room. This will become a theme of the weekend, antics in the rec room, that is.

When we finally emerged from our rooms, it was time for the cocktail competition:


Like a good American, Jason organized a team to make a Long Island Iced Tea:


It was absolutely vile...why they thought it was a good idea to put OJ in it I don't know, but it was deservedly undrinkable. From there it was time for the Mr. and Ms. Méga competition, which basically just involved dancing in the pool. Again, as a reminder, we're talking weather in the 60s and pouring rain:



As Amanda (far left) observed, in terms of cultural experiences, it doesn't get any better than this. Ben (next to Amanda) looks a little less impressed, haha. Nonetheless, we did all agree that when we're profs someday and these French kids are government ministers (many of whom are alums of this place), we'll be able to tell our students we remember meeting the political leaders when they were dancing naked in a pool in Capbreton in 60-degree weather. hahaha.

The next day was more of the same crappy weather. During a VERY brief break in the action I managed to run over to the beach:


Very pretty, as you can tell, but rough surf due to the monsoon. There was so much rain that a bunch of the local little towns were flooded. Despite that, we were suffering so thoroughly from cabin fever that we decided to walk into town anyway. We got absolutely soaked.

Niamh and Emily look pretty good (keeping in mind we're all dripping from the waist down or so):


Ben and I, on the other hand, not so much:


And here's the town:



Again, very cute. Would have liked to see more of it, but I just walked a few blocks so I could say I'd been there. And in the process my shoes got so incredibly soaked that I was just walking around in puddles. This was a problem given that I had only brought one pair of shoes. I even tried to buy a pair in town for later, but as always, they didn't have my size in anything.

Anyway, from there we decided we did in fact want to get back to the resort. We were soaked and of course wanted to change, but we also wanted to be back for the mousse party. Now, being the naive foreigners that we were, we thought we were heading over to a chocolate mousse party. Everyone was pretty excited (well, except for me, since I figured I couldn't have any anyway, but whatever). Imagine our surprise when we discovered that in France, THIS is what a mousse party is:


Oh yes. There's this machine overhead that sends out this foam. Here it is when it's not active:


And here it is in action:


Wow. We stayed on the side dancing, as one of my favorite pics attests:


But this was dangerous too, as Rachel got thrown in:


You can even see mousse in her glass of wine. Yeah.

Emily's comment on the party was, "it's like a party at the playboy mansion, and I'm Hugh!" Niamh argued that she wanted to be Hugh too.

Anyway, that was enough fun for a Saturday afternoon. The mousse party lasted all the way to dinner, which was served in the resort cafeteria. From there my pictures pretty much stop, because THIS IS WHEN I GOT FOOD POISONING. Oh yes. I don't even know what could have got me...it hit like 10 minutes after dinner, so perhaps that was too soon for it to have been dinner's fault. But I didn't eat anything remotely iffy before that, so I don't know. All I do know is that I wanted to die. It obviously killed my Saturday night. Niamh was a true hero and spent the whole evening with me and went to get the organizers to call a doctor. We decided I could sleep it off, as I started feeling better once there was nothing left in my system.

Needless to say, after spending Saturday night like that, the thought of spending Sunday night back in the Hieronymus Bosch painting of bus rugby and the like was enough to send me running to the train. Jason, who had had his own Odyssey of epic proportions to get down to Capbreton, had rented a car and was planning to drive to San Sebastian on Sunday. I was planning on going with him, but instead I hit him up for a ride to Bayonne to catch the train back to Paris. I'm pretty bummed about missing that extra trip, would have made the whole voyage worth it. But instead Niamh and I went to Bayonne, which is gorgeous. It was the best part of the whole journey, not in the least because it was our ticket home, haha. We agreed we'd love to go back under better circumstances someday.



Finally, a trip that starts on an overnight bus with screaming 18-year-olds, proceeds to a weekend-long nonstop bad frat party, and culminates in food poisoning is obviously not going to end smoothly. It just couldn't happen that way. Oh no, there were no seats available on the TGV home, so we had to sit on the floor in the aisle between two cars for about an hour and a half until some people got off at Bordeaux and we could snag their seats. If we hadn't gotten lucky and snagged those seats, we would have been stuck between the cars for a full 5 hours. Oh, and as a reminder, my feet were soaking wet throughout all this, since blowdrying my shoes hadn't done enough of the trick to really dry them out. Just had to note that, as icing on the cake.

Needless to say, I was ready to kiss the ground at Montparnasse when we finally pulled into Paris. Hallelujah!

Surviving daily life at the ENS

Daily life in a French university is always going to be an adventure. My two big projects of the week were surviving the computer lab and the dorm laundry. Which I successfully navigated, but not without some serious effort and wasted time.

The building where the computer labs are located can only be described in one term, and it's not a nice one. I tried to think of a more polite way to say it since this is a family blog after all (haha), but there was really only one word that could possibly do it justice: clusterfuck. It's a new-ish building, and the labs are in the basement. But there are no signs on how to get to the basement, nor where the labs are once you finally find the stairs. I wandered around two different floors in the basement, literally took me 20 minutes of wandering two hallways before I even found someone to ask. Turns out I was right near the labs but that I had to walk down one more dark hallway to an unmarked door. Obviously. Who could miss that?

Once I got to the lab, I discovered something that's going to be the biggest hassle so far: the computers don't run on Windows. It's a PC lab running on some bullshit program, the name of which I couldn't even figure out. Must be a funding issue, that they couldn't afford the licensing or something. Now, I'm no fan of vista (or of PCs in general), but running an entirely different operating system is an even bigger pain. Their version of word can open word docs, thank god, but there are formatting issues that it can't seem to handle. Like the reformatting from an 81/2 x 11 page setup to A4, which like a dumbass I forgot to do on my mac. So I had to print everything on A4 paper even though it was formatted for American paper and hope for the best. It worked out fine, other than for the stupid 3 inch margin at the bottom and slightly narrow margins on the sides. What I haven't figured out yet, however, is what it's going to look like to print PDFs formatted for American paper, since I didn't think of that issue when I made a few PDFs of microfilms back in the States. I suck.

The laundry facilities are equally noteworthy. I live in a dorm of about 80 people, and there are...drum roll please...two washers and two dryers. One large-ish one and one microscopically tiny one, of each. So to do two full loads of laundry you pretty much have to rely on the one machine that can actually fit a full load. I finally got my stuff in there and ran it through, and there was a girl using the small machine for two towels. Her load finished a few minutes before mine, and she literally put one towel in each dryer. I called her out on it, and she was like, "yeah but they won't dry otherwise." I was like, "um, yeah, but that's two towels, can I at least use the small dryer since we have to share the space?" She said no, I made a comment about how rude that was, and she was like, "je m'en fous" (literally "I don't give a fuck," although it's not quite that severe...but it's bitchy nonetheless) and slammed the door behind her. I was pissed, particularly because I had to leave for a meeting an hour later and therefore couldn't wait. What a bitch. I'm clearly going to have to do my laundry at 6 am from now on. It's worth it to do it in the dorm, though, because it's free. Laundromats are super expensive here, so sucking it up and doing it in the dorm will save me easily $30 a month. humph. In the meantime, I'm pretty down on the French 18-year-olds who are supposedly the best and the brightest of the country but who apparently have no social skills and have never had to think about anyone other than themselves.

Speaking of which, tonight we're leaving for the freshman orientation field trip. ohhhh yeah. We actually have no idea where we're going. The school is trying to be all cool and generate buzz by not telling us, but it's really just rather annoying because we can't look up the weather report, haha. They tell us to bring a bathing suit and a beach towel. We are taking an overnight bus (ouch...), so it has to be fairly far away. Rumor has it that we're going to Les Landes in southwestern France (just above the border with Spain on the Atlantic coast), but that's unsubstantiated. It should be pretty cool, though, since it's a part of the country I've never seen before and the international grad students are all going. So we figure we'll hang out together and make the best of it. In any case, I'll be offline until Monday, but I'm sure I'll have some good stories when I do get back, haha.

In case you were wondering, freshman orientation parties are EXACTLY the same everywhere

...the only difference in France being, of course, that the alcohol is provided as part of the event, haha. Well, and the other difference being that the alcohol was actually rather classy. Clearly we were not at your average American freshmen party, seeing as that the wine of choice was real dessert wine, of both red and white varieties: porto and muscat. Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore.

But before we ever got to the party, we obviously had to pre-game. I started with the ever-so-girly French invention (beer purists beware), beer with a flavor syrup. This time around the flavor of choice was strawberry:


You can appreciate my drink's pinkness in comparison to all the others, here:


From there, we went over to the "new student" dance party, held in the gym of the school. Obviously. If we're going to pretend to be 18 again, where else could the party be???


Complete with the ridiculous stage thingy in the middle:


And by "ridiculous," of course I mean that I ended up there, hahaha. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First it all started with innocent hanging out in the gym, with Emily (from Oxford), Ben (from Princeton), and Niamh (also NYU):


This is one of my favorite pics from the evening:


Along with this one (the new addition on the right is Basia, from Warsaw, Poland):


But then things proceeded in their natural course and Mehammed (Columbia) and I ended up on that dopey stage...this is my real favorite pic from the evening, haha:


From there we joined up with Jason (Classics at Princeton):


As you can see, the expat contingent was kind of grouped together. We did indeed meet some nice French people, but again...they're very young. Friendly, but young. Plus we're nerds, we were actually talking about surrealist literature, Greek epic poetry, 19th century realist novels and the like at this thing. hahaha.