Christmas In Airports
We’re off for a short Christmas holiday, meeting the parents-in-law in Southern California, sister-in-law in Washington State, and a fly-by visit to Toronto on the way home.
The flight crew of our LAX-bound jet were in the spirit of the season.
A Waif/Stray
S, my Brazilian classmate, has discovered that her fiancé is going to his parents' house for Christmas, and she's not invited. It sounds like racism to her, and another explanation is hard to find. Although the spineless boyfriend would seem to be a bigger problem. She will be all by herself in Paris at Christmas, on the other side of the world from her friends and family. I would invite her to share ours, were we going to be here; alas, the "waifs and strays" Christmas tradition is not a French one.
We went for coffee after class to talk about it, which for some reason she insisted on doing at McDonald's. Then I went Christmas shopping in the left bank. Nobody should get their hopes too high: it's very expensive, and mostly art galleries anyway. Most actual shopping has been done elsewhere.
Atchoo A Deux
Janet didn't escape this time, and when I brought a cold home from school, she succumbed a couple of days later too. I spent my birthday home in bed (I'm really just not any good at birthdays; thanks heavens those around me are), and today Janet came home early from work (before 7 p.m.) and curled up with hot lemonade.
These last few days have been increasing in intensity of preparation for our departure to California for Christmas (this will be my most snowless Christmas since Egypt). I did some more Christmas shopping today, incidentally taking another run by the Bon Marché Christmas windows.
Another Nuance In Phone Etiquette
Doing some more Christmas shopping this morning, I was one of half a dozen customers in a store that could comfortably accommodate two. I poised my phone to take a picture of something I wanted to show Janet, and was politely but firmly told not to by the proprieter. Flustered and embarrassed, I explained that I simply wished to show my wife, whereupon he smiled and said go ahead, I had only to ask. I gather I must have shown rather bad manners, and he made his point very pleasantly; but it seemed like a rather pointless exchange, especially when he was up to his ears in customers. I'm looking forward to our Christmas holiday back in North America where one can venture outside without fear of falling into such cultural traps.
Cultural Differences
Digressions in French class are a regular feature, since the teacher likes to lecture and is a tad opinionated. This morning we went around the room discussing the various Christmas/New Year's traditions in our home countries, again with Monique doing most of the talking. To be fair, I think she's worked at the Alliance Francaise for a very long time and she seems to have a genuinely wide knowledge of different cultures.
At the end of this, one of the Chinese girls wanted to know how the French articulate a dog's bark (anyone who has read Tintin books know that Snowy says "wouah"). So we went around the room and gave our national take on dog and cat noises. For some reason the North American "meow" cracks up Chinese girls.
Christmas Shopping
Now that it's too late to mail packages home, I'm finding some time to Christmas shop. Little villages of tiny temporary chalet kiosks have sprouted here and there, selling diverse gifty things like candles, hats, chocolates and foie gras. The ones in the picture are by the church at St. Germain des Prés.
Too Brocante To Fix
I walked with Janet part of the way to her office this morning, by a roundabout route that took us to a
brocante market that has been set up in our neighbourhood for the weekend.
Shops, shows and markets that deal in
brocante are fairly common. There is some effort to enforce that only genuine antiques (or "
antiquités") are so called; if your goods don't qualify, you use the alternative term, which is, as we learned this morning, a nice word for junk. We'd hoped to do a little Christmas shopping, but no treasures leapt out of this midden.
An Igloo In Paris?
Since I'm supposed to be painting again, naturally the weather has turned beautiful. Not everyone agrees, such as S from my French class, a Brazilian emigré who is all bundled up. After-class coffee in the cafeteria included a Brazilian geography lesson.
Sunny and mild, so I continue to procrastinate - well I had to go to BHV for masking tape, and Christmas shopping has to get done Real Soon anyway.
It seems that Paris' city hall also has a skating rink out front. The igloo seems to be for renting and changing into your skates.
Bachelor For A Few Days
Janet is on a business trip this week, allowing me some time to paint the bathrooms. Naturally, I've got the tasks well organized and am now procrastinating like mad to avoid starting. So this morning I bought a cable to connect my phone to the computer and I've now downloaded all of the pictures I've been taking with the phone for the last couple of months. I've copied several of them into the blog, so if you're interested you should scan the archives back to the beginning of October. (It seems many of the entries I drafted in my head as I roamed about town never actually got recorded, and there are a number of pictures that did not have a corresponding entry. Thus the location of a picture may not strictly correspond to the date it was taken, but they're reasonably close and are placed where they enhance the text without misleading.)
Last night the younger sister of an old friend of mine came to use our guest room. She's on an apartment hunting trip since she will starts a new job in Paris after Christmas. A recently-graduated Ph.D. in biology, she'll be doing research in gene therapy. And yet she seems younger than I ever remember being. It's satisfying to be in a position to offer hospitality instead of being the one looking for a couch to crash on - but also a little sad, or perhaps just nostalgic.
Our neighbour's wireless modem was only down for a couple of days, so we're back in business; but obtaining our own ISP has been bumped up the chore list.
The Language of Love
Yesterday I started another month at Alliance Francaise. This class is much the same as the last since we have the same teacher and most of the same students. We lost a few people and got three new ones to replace them, for a total of fourteen. Some of us have taken to ocassionally having coffee together after class, which in some cases devolves into English but more often is a low-stress opportunity to practise French.
With the new additions it seems that almost half of the class consists of women who have married Frenchmen to whom they cannot talk in their native language. In some cases, they now can only talk to their partners in English. The women aren't native English speakers either, but it's the one language they both know. So it seems not only is English the common language of business and academia, but romance as well.
At home, a minor disaster: the neighbour's wireless access point that I was using to access the internet has gone offline, so I'm back in the internet café until we get our own internet access installed.
