J’aime mon quartier, mais je ne ramasse pas

A book came out not too long ago called A Year in the Merde. It was about an American’s year living in Paris, and his not-so-pleasant encounters with dog poop on the sidewalks. It’s definitely a problem. There’s a little sign right by my apartment that says, J’aime mon quartier, je ramasse (“I love my neighborhood, so I pick up [after my dog]”). Heh. Really? Things have gotten better since the city started imposing very heavy fines for those who don’t bag, but if you don’t keep an eye on the ground in front of you as you walk, before long you will find a very unpleasant surprise on the bottom of your shoe.

Of course, keeping your eyes trained on the ground means you miss out on seeing Paris. I’ve perfected a darting-up-and-down movement of my eyes as I go so I don’t miss anything. I might look vaguely like I’m about to have a seizure, but hey, at least my shoes are clean.

Thanksgiving the French way: no, there's no football

The place? A living room stuffed to bursting, crammed with every table and chair that can be found in the house. The people? Thirty of diverse ages and accents. The menu? Smoked salmon on sliced baguette, followed by a hearty cassoulet, and finished up with cheese platters, clafoutis d’automne, chocolate cake, apple tart, and boxes and boxes of chocolate. And don’t forget the bottles of red wine.

Welcome to the Fête de Famille, 2008 edition.

It’s the time of year when the enormous clan I call my family gets together ostensibly for lunch and spends the next six hours trying to get in as many words as possible into conversation. Tables groan under the weight of the food platters, and just in case we need the encouragement, Mamy Luce flutters around, urging seconds. Obama is topic of the hour, especially as the American branch of the family is actually present for the annual family celebration for the first time in four years. My mother and my uncle Benoit prowl around the room, gleefully snapping candids with their long-lens cameras.

In effect, it’s our French Thanksgiving. Of course, we don’t usually celebrate it anywhere near the end of November; the last Fête I attended was four years ago in August. With two European parents, almost all my family lives overseas; Thanksgiving, for me and my parents, is a holiday of three people and a capon, the turkey’s smaller cousin.

It’s always difficult knowing you’re an expensive plane ticket away from birthdays and funerals, always hard to watch your cousins grow up in photographs and not in person. Which is why it was truly wonderful to celebrate the Fête de Famille on the weekend before Thanksgiving for the first time that I can think of. It’s the closest I’ve come to having the typical American Thanksgiving experience.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I hope you’re all enjoying the break, eating too much, and getting some rest in!

Desperately Seeking Syllabi

There’s a moment I cherish at the beginning of any semester at Colby. To the musical rustling of crisp sheets of paper, the professor distributes a three or four page document of gloriousness. What percentage of my grade does participation count for? How many exams in the semester? What are page requirements for papers (double-spaced in Times New Roman font, of course)? Look no further. The class syllabus has it all.

Before you consider me too much of a Hermione Granger, “I just read through letters K to M in the dictionary for fun!” type, take a moment to imagine the horrors and chaos of life without syllabi. Unclear assignment requirements! Homework that springs up on you! No explanation of the edition of the textbooks you should get, so your page 16 is the professor’s 78! Makes you shudder, right? What kind of country’s education system would eschew the organization and centralization of a syllabus, a commodity as necessary to a student’s life as internet and running water?

Welcome to the French classroom.

I probably should have guessed it from the moment I found out French universities still don’t have online course registration, but I blithely assumed that at least when it came to printed paper the French had mastered basic classroom documentation. I assumed wrong. Instead, ten minutes at a time in each class are devoted to a review of the assignments: “What do you mean, you forgot you had to buy this obscure study packet unavailable at almost all Parisian bookstores?” the professors will ask us. “Didn’t you catch the offhand comment I made at the end of class three weeks ago?”

Perhaps worst of all – and here, I’ll allow any Hermione Granger comparisons – I consider the syllabus to be a contract. If I fail to do an assignment in the syllabus that was my responsibility, I deserve the consequences. Similarly, if a professor decides to lump in an extra exam with one week’s notice, I’m miffed. So it was with astonishment that I witnessed various students in my history class at the Sorbonne raise their hands and ask the teacher: “Do you think we can move the due date for the essay? To read all three books you’ve assigned will take a while.”

Any Colby professor would have raised the syllabus in the air with the implicit understanding of tough luck; you should have gotten started on your work sooner. Any Colby student would have at least known to phrase a request for an extension in different wording than a critique of the workload.

And that’s the beauty of the syllabus. It keeps both parties accountable for their part, and it fosters a genuine respect for the learning process you don’t find in a system where you can bargain your way to easier assignments. The challenges of the class should be about genuinely mastering the new material, not about trying to decipher exactly what line spacing and margin sizes the professor is expecting on the term paper.

"GRÈVE! GRÈVE!" "Keep your voice down, somebody might actually care!"

It was during the first week of orientation, way back in September, that some intrepid student battled jet lag enough to raise her hand with a question. “What do we do if there’s a strike?” she asked.

The Educo staff looked at each other, shrugged, and said, “Well, let's hope that there aren’t any. They’re quite inconvenient.”

“But what if it’s the metro?” the girl persisted. The rest of us started to wake up a little, six-hour time difference be damned.

“You walk,” the president of the program said, giving us an understanding grimace. We stared back at her, agog.

For those who aren’t familiar with the time-tested French tradition of the strike, and maybe imagine, like me, that scene from Newsies where all the paperboys start dancing in the streets and ripping up newspapers, it’s such a common occurrence here that you almost have to wonder how the Parisians get anything done. (And then the subject of the 35-hour work week comes up). I wasn’t quite sure when I’d experience my first strike, but I had no doubt there’d be one. Please: world-wide economic collapse? Widespread French dislike for Sarkozy, who has fared especially badly amidst all the Obamania? Might as well put on your paperboy hat and dancing shoes now and get your strike on.

Of course, you might encounter a little problem: not realizing there’s a strike going on in the first place.

Yesterday afternoon, all the students in my literature class on the Algerian War waited for the teacher to show up for almost half an hour. When she didn’t come, we chalked it up to an emergency or last-minute meeting, and left. I found out today that there was a strike by the professors – but only some professors, and just for that one day, and who’s really paying attention, anyway?

Then today, a friend came into history class and announced, “The SNCF workers are pushing the strike back to Friday night. It was announced in Le Monde.”

My first reaction was confusion – had this strike been common knowledge? (No, she just has a French boyfriend). My second was horror – the SNCF is the public transportation system in France, which includes the train’s grandes lignes out of Paris to places like Toulouse (where I’ll be this weekend with my visiting parents). If the workers’ strike extended to Sunday, my parents and I would be stranded miles and miles from Paris, train tickets useless. That would be one long, costly, and eco-harmful rental car drive back to Paris.

A quick search on the Le Monde website shows that yes, indeed, the SNCF workers are going on strike for 24 hours (luckily, the strike ends before our train back to Paris on Sunday). Yes, the brief article states, the strike was originally planned for Tuesday night but was changed to Friday at 8pm (the reason was apparently not relevant to the article). Yes, of course the strikers have demands to be met, listed below in tersely worded French. No massive headlines, no analysts' opinions needed. Just a simply-worded understanding that you'll be shilling out your taxi money this weekend.

The fact that a grève (“strike”) would be so nonchalantly announced to the press ahead of time, and so calmly distributed to the French public, took me aback at first. But then I did a little Google search with keywords ‘grève, SNCF, 21 novembre’ to try and find out more details. Up popped pages and pages worth of articles. I looked at the dates.

In 2005, 2007, and now this Friday in 2008, the SNCF workers have chosen to strike on the 21st of November. As far as dramatics go, the Parisians seem to aim for quantity over quality. This is the second strike by the SNCF this month, one article told me; I didn’t even notice the last grève, though Le Monde assures me there were, indeed, a few perturbations. Disruptions, sure...but only of a hassled, resigned inconvenience. Not disruptions that led to photos in the paper with screaming mobs or a Gavroche-like street urchin raising his fist to the camera defiantly.

It was about at this point that I shut my computer, sighed, and let my theatrical image of the strike fade away.

(All this strike discussion is made even more ironic, of course, by the fact that I’m seeing De Gaulle en mai on Thursday night, a theatrical production about the famous month of May in ’68 where students and ouvriers put up barricades in the Latin Quarter and demanded reform. Apparently this is the extent of strike-related dramatics I can expect to see in 21st century Paris.)

Not to go too Gossip Girl on you or anything, but...

Spotted:

A quite elderly woman crossing the street at Place St. Michel, even though the little man was red. She was walking slowly and deliberately, a cigarette in hand, and the drivers facing a green light were clearly itching to hit the gas pedal. She was almost finished crossing when one frustrated driver honked. She stopped in the crosswalk, turned to face him, and took a long, deliberate drag of her cigarette before taking the final steps to the other side.

Ah, Parisians.

A Little Math Equation

This:


+
tight jeans,
gelled hair,
questionably shiny shirts & jackets

x
10

=
An American girl's life in Paris.

"Quand un Obama en France?"

It's a topic that's come up around my host family's dinner table a few times and that I've seen scrawled in neon spray paint on the metro. Quand un Obama en France? 'When an Obama in France?'

NYTimes just published an article on the issue. As a visitor in France of all of two months, I'm not really in a position to form my own conclusions on the claims and nuances of latent racism here. But I can hear and notice the French reactions, which have been flowing freely since the Obama victory.

One black man on a metro started a tirade against the 'lazy blacks' who weren't doing their part to combat French racism. My host mom's boyfriend started talking to me about the possibility of electing a black president in France, and then got distracted by logistics: "Well, he would have to be métis (mixed race), like Obama," he said thoughtfully. "Black black, he'd never get elected. A black black president will take much longer."

(Side note, but I love when topics from my Intro to Cultural Anthropology class pop up around me in real life. The fact that Obama is always described as, well, "black black" rather than mixed race is a perfect example of the Hypo-Descent Rule in American culture, where for a person to be considered black they need only one black ancestor. In the South, this rule became known as the "one-drop rule", i.e., one drop of black blood makes you a racial minority. Contrast that to the comment above and you can see the principle going the other way, at least for one French man. Okay, excited anthropology student speech over.)

I was having this conversation with my bestie Hannah last night, that for us students who voted Obama, we weren't really all that conscious of his race: we were far more interested in his message of hope and change and his kick-ass speeches. It's a little staggering, then, to be in Paris where it's Obama-le-président-noir all over the place. Oh well. If his election changes things around the world and not just the way thing are done in the U.S., I'll be even happier with how I voted in my first presidential election.