Paris Newsletter #1 - Heather Stevens and Bob Thomson, 22 April 2005Bonjour mes amis, I can hardly believe I have been in Paris 8 weeks and in less than a month I will be a grandmother. James and Zaheela are expecting their first child, a baby girl in May. I spoke to them a few days ago and everything is going fine.
I must thank everyone who helped me during the months of October to March to get me here in one peace and relatively sane. I arrived in Paris March 7th and Bob picked me up at the airport, so my first sights of Paris were via the Metro. I got my carte orange for the metro, which gives me complete access to the metro system for a month for 50 euros (C$80). As some of you already know our apartment is compact (another word for small) - a few pictures are attached. Bob spent a lot of time and energy cleaning it up for me.
Exploring my new community has been fun, and settling in has taken longer than I expected, but things are going well. We are about a 5 minute walk to the Crimée metro station on line 7. It takes me right to the centre-ville or connects me elsewhere very easily. I have many food stores to shop at within a few minutes walk. Monoprix, a very nice chain of grocery stores which sells a lot of bio groceries and very decent wine (I guess Allison will be the judge of that); a Leader Price grocery store with cut rate prices (but not junky); a number of patisseries, of which one I like the best, near where I pick up the morning International Herald Tribune; three butcher shops; and a few green grocery stores. There are four open markets every week within a few minutes walk. The market on Sundays is the best, except the stall keepers are very aggressive. I have a lot of problems with the euros and cents, but most people are patient with me. In fact, in my neighbourhood, for a lot of people their first language is not French. I try my very limited French and they respond in their much better English. I even have a department store (BHV similar to the old Eatons or the way The Bay used to be) at which I have spent a lot of time and euros. In my immediate area there are 4 bazaars, where I‘ve bought lots of household stuff, and they are fun to explore. The Basers (the other Heather and Bob) were very generous and helped us set up the apartment with a number of borrowed items for the kitchen, linens, towels and cleaning stuff, including a clothes rack for drying clothes. I enjoy putting the clothes outside to dry. The kitchen area is compact but I have made good use of it. Our living area has the added attraction on some art deco pieces (e.g. Ironing board and clothes rack folded up). It is almost time to be eating dinner outside, the weather is getting warmer and warmer and it is still light out at 20:00. I have fixed up our courtyard quite nicely and simply. There are two wrought iron chairs; a table on which I put a plastic tablecloth (colours of Provence) over the table; and I found a rack for flowers in someone’s garbage last week. I picked up geraniums (fusha) and impatience (combination of fusha & white) for the garden. Bob’s bicycle is out there too.
Bob and I have explored our community (19th arrondissement) together, as well as me alone. The Saint Martin Canal is just 6 minutes away. It runs right to the Seine and is still used for shipping cargo as well as sightseeing boats and kayaks. There is a lovely children’s park down the street on Crimee where I like to go and read. I am getting MacLean’s from home and am reading a book called “Almost French”. As many of you know, I’m not much of a reader, but this book is about an Australian women who goes to Europe for a work assignment, meets a Frenchman and never leaves Paris. I can relate to a lot of her experiences about living in Paris. One of the parks (La Villette) near by, has a huge science museum and music theatres, circus, green grass and old men playing botchi. I have found a community café on rue Flandres, which I go to regularly around 17:30 for a café avec creme (2.30 euros) and watch the world go by. And I mean world. Our community is truly made up of a mosaic of the world. I have just scouted out a community tennis club and hope to start playing soon. [News alert: tennis club did not work out but I’ll keep trying.] I’ve been watching tennis on TV so am keen to start playing again. I was happy to see Prince Charles and Camilla get married. It is good to see our generation getting that much attention in the romance area.
Pam was here for 3 weeks and we all got along very well. She met some interesting people to hang out with, but spent a lot of time with us too. I guess it helps that she’s a night person and we are day people, so there was never a problem with the bathroom. It also gave us an opportunity to assess our living quarters. Our landlady replaced our grotty flip flop double bed sofa for an Ikea single sofa bed and would not listen to Bob when we requested an equivalent double bed sofa. She is a very stubborn and somewhat unreasonable woman. We have since bought two bed boxes and a couple of containers to store clothes under it when people come to visit. We also have access to a floor mattress from one of Bob’s colleagues at Friends of the Earth France.
Not all my time has been spent in the 19th district. I have been to the centre-ville many times, visiting the Louvre (open free first Sunday of each month) with Bob, Picasso Museum with Pam, Musee de la Ville de Paris, George Pompadou Modern Art Museum, Napoleon’s tomb and yesterday, a Matisse exhibit at the Luxembourg Senate showing a series of this last paintings and drawings. I did an english tour of Notre Dame (very informative). I spoke to our guide afterwards and she asked if I was interested in conducting an english tour this summer. I would like to get involved in some volunteer work, but Notre Dame, I don’t think so. I have tried looking around here for a shelter or a food pantry, but no luck so far.
Bob and I are going on a tour of the Comedie Francaise Theatre this Sunday (we tried to go with Pam but could not get tickets). I had lunch with a friend of Ann Dale’s who is living in Paris, but unfortunately is leaving in August. Bob and I spend our week-ends scouting about, visiting parks like the Luxembourg Park and the Parc Floral in Bois de Vincennes, bringing a picnic lunch and wine. We went to the famous cemetery Pere Lachaise, where we saw the tombs of Oscar Wild, Edith Piaf, Yves Montande & Simonne Simmoree, Sara Barnhart, etc. We went to an African street bazaar in Chateau Rouge, what an experience that was! There was a fair trade market close by on the canal last week-end and I bought a lot of specialized food stuff. Bob’s friend Pierre at UNESCO is moving back to Ottawa next month so there will be one less person to visit and see things with. A friend of Bob’s, Mark from the witness group, was here for the Paris Marathon and he and his wife came over for dinner one evening. The next day Carol and I went shopping at La Samaratine. Shopping in Paris is very expensive. I have only bought a few things. I spend most of my money on food, wine, admission tickets and the metro.
Bob and I were in Brussels and Maastrict the first week-end in April visiting the Basers. On the Sunday we went to the Ardennes in Belgium, where we scouted out the menhirs and dohmans (24 hundred year old stone burial sites).
My only major complaint is that dog shit is everywhere, and there is a lot of garbage on the streets. If I were to go on a crusade here (would I ever do something like that?) it would be to try and clean up the streets in my neighbourhood.
Well I guess that’s all for now - am looking forward to hearing from you and about what’s happening in Ottawa. Bob is going to add a few words as well.
Love to all
heather
From Bob
Well I’ve been here almost 6 months now. A different experience from Heather, but more parallel since she got here at the beginning of March. From the end of October to the end of February (with a break of a month in Canada over Christmas), I had a room near the Barbes metro in an apartment with a lovely French/Spanish couple, which made the transition from Canada to Paris easier. I say Canada to Paris, rather than Canada to France because I essentially don’t know France outside Paris yet. Paris is not at all what I expected in many ways.
First, I have a very demanding job in terms of the learning curve it required to really get in to it. It’s technical, in the sense that it involves monitoring how state or semi-state organizations called export credit agencies from northern OECD countries distribute taxpayer dollars to their national companies trying to develop markets in the “South” and “emerging markets”. Having accepted the model of neo-liberal economic development, they try to co-ordinate their lending, investment guarantees and export transaction insurance so that there is a “level playing field”, i.e. no one out subsidizes the other. In practice, they subsidize nuclear power, fossil fuel burning electricity generation, large aircraft, military expenditures, agricultural products and whatever else their national industries can convince them to support. They by and large don’t consult the communities where their projects are built and they support technologies and industries which are enormously destructive. And they’re big they spend over US$100 billion a year, 5 times the lending of the World Bank! There are all kinds of technical, accounting and economistic agreements and arrangements, and a longish (5 years at least) NGO history of lobbying in this area. I can almost jokingly say I’ve been hired by 40 NGO “sticks” (European, North American, Southern) to be their “carrot” at the OECD to try to engage them in a dialogue about reform, rather than constantly hitting them over the head. However, the export credit Secretariat of the OECD is a notoriously untransparent group (even to other OECD departments) and it hasn’t been easy to shmooze, to say the least.
I have an office at Friends of the Earth France (Amis de la Terre France) in a Paris suburb, on the 4th floor of a building which is occupied by about 6 environmental and solidarity NGOs. A really great group of people, which makes lunch hours around a common table very interesting, although I still have trouble participating in the political discussions because, while I understand most of what it said, it all takes place in rapid fire French which I still am not comfortable with. Now that the weather is nicer (it only rains a couple of days a week), I’m riding my bike to work. It takes only 30 minutes (7 km.) as compared to 50 on the metro and, while it’s a bit hair raising (I’ve been hit but not hurt by trucks twice now), it’s much better than the metro. I’ve learned to look 5 lanes across on a shoulder check, because Paris drivers have no respect whatsoever for bikes, or for other cars for that matter.
The big surprise for me about Paris has been that, while the Louvre (and most other museums) is free on the first Sunday of the month, and it IS after all the former home of Moliere, Sartre, Rousseau, Descartes, the French Revolution, les Comedies Francaises, and countless other historical figures and events, Paris is today a crossroads of the world in a way that I had never imagined.
Five minutes north of my room at Barbes and I was in Istanbul the language on the street is either Turkish or Kurdish. Ten minutes east, near the Gare du Nord, and you’re in Mumbai, with all the shops selling saris and everyone speaking Hindi. In Belleville it’s Chinese, on de la Chappelle it’s Algerian, and on and on. We’re constantly surrounded by and living with the Middle East, Africa, Asia and to a lesser extent, Latin America. They merge yet are distinct. I have yet to figure out (and may never) what this agglomeration of cultures and experiences of the world means for French politics, and we haven’t been here long enough to know what it means at a local level, in our quartier. For the time being, it’s fascinating and I’m enjoying it immensely.
While spring sprang a little earlier in Paris than Ottawa, the Italian restaurant cum Pizza take-out place around the corner still puts out their frosty the snowman mannequin every day. They’ve turned off the jingle bells tape however, probably much to the relief of the muslim deli next door. Virtually all the coffee shops, brasseries, pubs and even many restaurants have set up their outdoor tables and chairs and moved to the street quite a change from the “winter”. With freezing weather now past, they wash many sidewalks with high pressure hoses most days now, getting rid of at least some of the garbage, dog shit and other deritus of a big city that makes things less pleasant than they might be.
Well Heather is anxious to get this off so I'll end here.
Bob