Toto, We're Not in Paris Anymore
Muscat is like Switzerland of the middle east (unfortunately I'm not the first to observe this). Everything is extremely neat, clean, tidy and regular. It has mostly been built in the last ten or twenty years, so it's not too surprising that there are no potholes on the highway. The people are friendly, and we have enjhoyed getting ripped off by the taxi drivers. As in Egypt, they seem happy to meet foreigners and have a chance to practise their English. Last night our driver insisted on giving us a tour of some Muscat highlights on our way to dinner (taxis are not metered), including the local shopping mall which he called the "clomps". We eventually deciphered this as "complex".
We've been diving every day, seeing huge moray eels, fabulous colour-changing cuttlefish and huge rays, as well as the usual range of colourful parrot, angel, lion, puffer and other fish. Way too many to identify let alone name.
We have now left Muscat and are at the Al Sawadi Beach Resort, where Janet found a very reputable dive shop at a decent price. It also turned out to be a real Western-style resort, which explains why we now find ourselves wearing bright green wristbands and listening to a Mariachi band at dinner.
Getting Ready to Go
It took six months, but I think I can declare a minor milestone: we're officially unpacked. I did a blitz on the office today, and any boxes that still have contents may be considered to be in storage.
I can't say I feel like I've earned a vacation - but Janet certainly has, and we're getting ready to take off tomorrow for our diving trip to Oman. We have a cat-sitter coming to take care of Emma, the daughter of a woman from Janet's office. And that means I have to deal with the TV cable tech support in French <shudder> so she'll have something to amuse herself other than our books (very few of which are in her language).
I'm not planning to add to the blog while we're gone, but if we find ready access to email, I'll transmit a short update.
Aix-en-Provence and Grenoble
Hard to believe it's taken us this long to escape the confines of Paris, but apart from my forays into the Bois de Boulogne (two blocks away but just outside the ancient boundaries of the city), and our trip home at Christmas, we haven't come out from behind the walls since I arrived here in September. But Janet had been asked to speak at the university in Grenoble, so we made a weekend of it, and took the TGV to Aix-en-Provence on Friday, before making our way to Grenoble on Sunday afternoon.
The old city of Aix is not large but one can still get lost in the random twists and branchings of the ancient streets. It's a very lived-in town with lots of mobile phone outlets and clothing chains amongst the antiques stores. And of course plenty of restaurants, from the extremely modest to the many-starred. With a little research, and wandering, we chose a place called
Le Ramus. Friday night in the off season found us the only customers that night. Our waiter took little encouragement to talk (in fact, my meal started to get cold), and we discovered that he had lived in Paris as well but had left because he found Parisians so cold. I had attributed this to a national rather than a municipal character, and am happy to be disabused.
Janet with our waiterWe had been a little concerned about what we'd find in the streets this weekend, since there have been extensive and sometimes violent student demonstrations against a piece of legislation that will make it easier to fire (and consequently hire) young workers. Both Aix and Grenoble are university towns, but the only demonstration we wound up seeing was a small one on Saturday morning, that (as best as we could figure out) had something to do with rights for passage through the countryside.
On Saturday we did some more cultured exploring, visiting the
Musée du Vieil Aix and the
Musée des Tapisseries (Tapestry museum). Both were fairly small, but provided perspectives of local life back to the middle ages.
We took a train (which turned out to be a train and a bus) to Grenoble on Sunday afternoon. Mum told me that when she and Dad were climbing in the Alps they would periodically come to Grenoble for supplies; but if I was expecting Banff, it was dissappointing. Certainly Sunday evening isn't the best time to be downtown in most cities, but we found it singularly unappealing after the charm of Aix. There was a lot of plain, boxy architecture, ugly storefronts and a dismal number of shops for rent. Unable to find a restaurant of character or quality open, we had an ordinary dinner in a restaurant remarkable only for the worst service we've experienced in France.
Monday morning, while Janet was delivering her lecture, I did a little more exploring, in particular talking to a young man in the
Maison de la Montagne. Their materials were mostly brochures for hotels and trips, but they had a fair number of reference books and maps, and were keen to answer any questions.
When Janet rejoined me, we took a look at the local museum of the resistance. While I felt it was trying a little too hard to glorify the members of the resistance (and condemn the "collaborators") whose actual effect seems to be less strategic than simply morale-building, the exhibits were remarkably evocative of the experience of France during the war in that area, including the treatment of Jews and others who were rounded up and deported.
This picture shows the different stars and
triangles "undesirable" people were obliged to wear.The trip down on the TGV had been through grey mist; the trip back was brighter and clear. The countryside, whipping by at 200 kph, seemed to have progressed noticeably in the direction of spring in the three days since we'd left. Much more idyllic than the scene inside the car, which was choc-a-bloc with squalling babies.
In France, Turks Like Italian
Janet's work has been amply assisted by staff of the Turkish Capital Markets Board. They are in town for meetings this week, and we took them out to an Italian restaurant (pardon me, Sicilian), called
Convivium. In fact it was almost painfully Italian: all the waiters and bus-boys ostentatiously used Italian phrases and mannerisms, and I'm not sure the maitre d' even spoke French. But also characteristically, the food was excellent and the service attentive without hovering.
Wildlife In the Park
It was a beautiful day in the
Bois today, sunny and warming up a bit. I surprised a pheasant on the trail, a beautiful full-sized male.
A mile or so further on, there was another unusual bird, but one I have seen a couple of times before. This one stands guard at one of the less-used entrances to the park, behind the petanque pitch, in high-heeled boots and a wig of a shade slightly redder than the pheasant. In this case, despite the colourful plummage, the gender is less clear.
Bercy Bound
Having calculated that we could visit a museum every month throughout our sojourn here and still not see them all, we stirred ourselves yesterday - despite a fine drizzle and some inertia on the part of my poor over-worked wife - to continue our exploration of the city. We selected as our destination the
European House of Photography in the 4th
arrondissement, which, alas, turned out to be closed for the hanging of the next exhibition. Lacking a plan B, we instead went meandering in the general direction of the Bastille and found ourselves in an area that dubbed itself St. Paul Village. And here we stumbled across the
Museum of Magic.
This little museum focuses on the time, and to some extent the person, of Robert Houdini, and had exhibits of the devices used by Victorian magicians, including automatons and optical illusions. There was a magic show about once an hour with a very competent magician performing some close-up magic tricks. Unfortunately for us, his patter came a little too quickly, and we missed most of the jokes. The place was crawling with children and the staff played up to them so that there was more of a circus atmosphere than your usual museum hush.
Janet had read of a place called
Chai 33 that was a bar, shop and restaurant devoted to wine. It seemed likely we could have a tasting there, so we headed to Bercy, to the Southeast in the 12th, where it was located. There we found the Cour Saint-Emilion, a pleasant and lively area for shopping and strolling, too new to interest the tourist horde. The tasting aspect of Chai 33 was less in evidence than the bar and restaurant, and being still a little early for dinner, we settled in the lounge with a view of the park - where our snack wound up serving as dinner anyway.
One of Each
Apropos of the last two posts, Janet and I encountered a panhandler in our metro car on the way across town...
...and a busker on the way home.
And Buskers
As well as the beggars, there is another, more entertaining, sort of supplicant in the metro. As in Toronto there are the sanctioned buskers, who have designated spots in the stations. It must be that they hold auditions because, whether or not one finds them actually enjoyable, they always have some genuine ability. I've seen duos, quartets and ensembles of a dozen members. They play strings, accordion, pan-pipes, keyboard, saxophone, tuba, you name it. I've heard polkas, folk music, musak'd pop tunes, all the way to chamber music.
On the metro cars themselves there are unofficial, but enterprising, solo artists. When I was taking French classes in the morning I regularly saw one particular poet. He would address the car with a speech about his poetry, then move down the car offering for sale some stapled sheets. A couple of times I've seen a little puppet show. The puppeteer throws a curtain between two uprights with velcro, hits his tape recorder, and has his puppet sing the song for a couple of stations before passing the hat. Rather lame, really, but it beats reading the advertisements.
Beggars in the Metro
There are a lot more panhandlers on the Paris metro than on the Toronto subway. For some reason they seem to be tolerated, or perhaps they're simply too difficult to get rid of. Some start by entering the car and making an appeal, others just pass through with a hand out, trying to look pathetic. This morning on the way uptown there was a woman with a baby, jingling change in a supplicating fashion; on the way home, there was a young man who passed out little yellow cards to the passengers describing his circumstances and then returned in hopes of a handout.
Mostly they are ignored, but I've seen some change passed. And while I say they are tolerated, clearly some people can get fed up: the man sitting across from me crumpled his yellow note and threw it on the floor, and when my neighbour put hers on the seat, he crumpled that one too.
Coureur du Bois
I can see that the Bois de Boulogne is going to be a lovely place to run come spring. It's all mud, sticks and dead leaves now, but even so it's a lively and well-used place, with ponds, playing fields, and plenty of trees and bushy parkland with meandering paths. There are restaurants, two hippodromes, sports clubs, Rolland Garros (the tennis club where the French Open is playes) and more. Even at this time of the year there are people riding horses, running, strolling and playing games.
It's a good thing the Garmin seems to be having better luck with its satellites, because the Bois is big enough that it's going to take me a while before I know my way around. On Friday I managed to get a little lost, and was grateful for the little arrow that points back to the start. I didn't quite believe it at first since it was pointing directly behind me when I thought I was heading straight home; if it hadn't been for the top of the Eiffel tower poking through the trees (over my right shoulder instead of a little to the left), I might have come out the other side.
This evening there is a football match between
Paris St. Germain and Marseille at the Parc des Princes (a couple of blocks away). The paper states that there are 1200 police mobilized to see that things stay calm. So far it's more than calm - they've towed all the cars from our street, there is a gendarme for every two pedestrians and from our door I can see a couple of dozen police vehicles. As it happens, the Marseille team got angry about the tickets they'd been allocated so sent their second team and told their fans to stay home, thus there may not be much happening at all.
Lessons in European Business
My evening class, French for professionals, can often be a fairly staid business, correcting homework and working through the textbook together. It started out that way yesterday evening. We had reached a section on human resources, when something in the third question set our teacher off. She launched into a diatribe about the Alliance Francais management that lasted a good twenty minutes. It seems they've acquired a new director who is making changes. There was something terribly French about this young woman criticizing her employers at length to a captive audience of the company's customers, cloaked in the national self-righteous indignation.
Another lesson in local business culture came in a role-playing exercise we did later in the class. The subject was the offer of employment, the contents of which are prescribed in France. The exercise was to conduct an interview with a prospective sales person who is to be engaged to cover the fictional company's Asian market. I was paired with a Spanish woman, where she was the new hire and I was the HR person. She wanted us to reduce her commission in exchange for a higher base salary and regular paid trips back to France. I was offering a generous commission but expected her to pay for her own personal travel. The negotiation became a little heated (to the amusement of the rest of the class) because she thought I was being unreasonable for refusing the security and regular trips home; and I could not believe that someone applying for a sales job would be so plainly uninterested in actually doing the job of selling.
I and a classmate, DT, found a pub after class. DT (a tall, handsome Brit, with a keen mind and razor wit, who occasionally views this page) moved here a couple of years ago, and his now ten-year-old son became completely bilingual in a year, something I find a little frustrating as my own progress after almost six months seems to me nearly undetectable. Nice to have a drinking buddy again, though.
River Run
My running seems to be substantially back on track. I did a little over five miles up the Seine and back yesterday, looping under the Eiffel Tower. I was a little surprised to see how many tourists there were for a cold March day; but one of them dropped a 10€ note, to my benefit, so I can't grumble. I don't think I'll do that route too often, since it doesn't seem possible to follow the river without dodging a lot of traffic. Even cutting through a little park on the way back I collided with a cyclist who was coming blind around a corner.
