Not visiting the International Agricultural Show

Perhaps the most attended show in Paris is the Salon International de l'Agriculture, which is held every year in Paris at about this time. The show is so big that it takes up the entire Parc des Expositions on the south side of Paris—about eight buildings, each with multiple floors, each floor the size of several football fields. Although it's intended (in theory) for farmers, it is very popular with the general public, including kids (who like to come to see the animals). It is running this week, until Sunday.

I haven't been to the show in years (the picture I've posted here is ten years old), mainly because it's too expensive. Admission this year is €12 (about $17), which is again too much for me, since I have only about €60 until the end of the month (I'll be paid mid-month, but all of that will go to rent). I had almost a full day free today and this would have been an ideal occasion to go, but there just isn't any money to do it. There never is.

Anyway, as I said, it's popular with kids because of the animals. Many city-dwelling kids don't have any opportunity to see farm animals outside of this show. There are cows, pigs, sheep, horses, etc., and some shows displaying prize-winning animals, as you'd expect at any farm show. There are lots of dairy cows, and since cows have to be milked every day, there's also a temporary dairy set up to process the milk, which you can buy after it is pasteurized, refrigerated, and packaged right on the spot in a state-of-the-art mobile dairy. When I go to the show I always buy as much milk as I can carry, since it's sold quite cheaply and of course it is very fresh (only about 30 minutes old when you buy it).

The show also features a ton of government feel-good displays about the environment and how much government is doing and how wonderful or terrible things are (depending on the interests of the government agency in question), along with displays by various industry groups. Some of these are interesting, most of them are a bit too political and self-serving.

Some of the exhibits at the show are borderline creepy. For example, you can see entire steers hanging from racks—essentially dead cattle intact with skin removed. These carcasses look way too much like the animals from which they came. You can also see exhibits of slaughtering equipment, such as devices that shock and kill poultry. It's enough to make you a vegetarian, if you aren't already (although I'm sure that's not the intention of the exhibits).

The agricultural show makes me sneeze, too. I left my hay fever behind when I left my hometown to move to Paris, fortunately, but there's hay at the agricultural show, and after hanging around the hay for a few minutes, I start to sneeze. Moving on to another area fixes it.

The show also has a lot of food. There's a section with foods from around France that has all sorts of tasty but pricey stuff (well, at least it's pricey for someone with no money, like me). I like the kouign amann, which is a sinfully fattening cake from Brittany, made with bread dough, sugar, and butter, all of which are pressed together and cooked for hours until the butter soaks through everything and the sugar carmelizes. Mmm. Best with fresh whole milk!

In past years I've done without the show because of budget restrictions, as I've said, but for some reason I had a hankering to go there and take some pictures for my blog this year. Alas! That is not to be, thanks to the insurmountable barrier of the admission price.

The other big show that is immensely popular and also takes up the entire Parc des Expositions in Paris is the Foire de Paris (Paris Fair) around the month of May. However, I usually can't afford that, either, and this year will probably be no exception.

Dregs on the Champs

While passing one of two Quick fast-food restaurants (the main competitor to McDonalds) on the Champs, I was surprised to see that it was closed, with a notice on the windows that said it had been closed by police headquarters for nine days because of “noise and disorder.” I'm not exactly sure what that means, but I suspect the restaurant was being haunted by various scum from the suburbs, now that the Champs is increasingly becoming a meeting place for gangbangers and other losers in the wee hours. I also suspect it's not the restaurant's fault but purely linked to the fact that Quick is one of the few places that stays open after midnight on the avenue.

The area around the Champs is deteriorating because of the dregs that ride in from the suburbs on the express subway (RER) at night and especially on weekends. After laying waste to their own neighborhoods, they apparently want to make a shambles of one of the world's prettiest cities as well. They like to fight, and I guess they need a pretty stage on which to do it. I've already mentioned in other posts some of the changes that have taken place. On parallel streets I see more and more clubs of questionable reputation, too. They look suspiciously like the bars you used to see in Pigalle. I'm surprised that the city is not doing more to prevent this kind of deterioration, as the Champs is very popular with tourists.

There are a couple of hot spots that police have identified as being popular with gangs (some of which are now based in Paris, alas!), and the Champs-Élysées is one of them. The Gare du Nord train station is another, although that part of town has been rather seedy at night for years (unfortunately, it is also the train station that serves the Eurostar). The Forum des Halles is yet another spot that gets a bit weird late at night. I still wouldn't call any of these areas dangerous, but they seem to be gradually getting worse. I hope something is done about it. I prefer that the losers stay outside the city.

Poverty for the holidays

Well, Santa hasn't brought me anything but bills this year, as usual. Paris is a great city in which to live—even when you are poor—but it's even more fun to live in when you are rich (at least as far as my fading memory goes).

This year I'm behind on rent, utilities, food, etc., as usual. Or actually, I'm usually up to date on rent, since I pay that first, but this year I'm behind on everything. In part that's because the company that manages my building shafted me this summer with a fraudulent demand for payment, but also it's because my employer is trying to starve me. The weird thing is that I have a job, and yet I'm making less than some people make on welfare or unemployment benefits. My employer doesn't care what financial hardships it imposes on its employees, as long as they are abused in a way that makes maximum money. I wonder how my company's clients would feel if they knew that the “professionals” working with them can't afford socks or toothpaste.

Anyway, I don't pay any attention to holidays. There are days when I work (and for which I'm paid, even though it's minimum wage), and days when I don't work (and don't get paid). Other than that, I don't observe any distinctions … although some holidays are especially inconvenient because you have time off but not much opportunity to use it, since everything is closed.

Moving right along … the numbers say that tourism in Paris has actually done just fine this year, despite the economic depression started by rich, greedy bankers in the U.S. There are still quite a few people in the world with the money to go on vacation, and Paris is the world's number-one vacation destination city. This hasn't helped me very much, but I do see about as many tourists right now as I had seen before the depression. Even American tourists have only slightly declined. I guess it cheers me up a little bit to see that not everyone is struggling to pay the rent or buy groceries.

My main holiday activity has been dragging whatever personal belongings I can find to the eBay store to be auctioned off. I don't have much since the government seized almost all of it six years ago, but I've been looking around for anything that might sell for something on eBay. Unfortunately, the store only accepts things that are worth at least €30, and a lot of the stuff I've found isn't worth that much.

Strolling on the right side of the tracks

So I went for a stroll in the chichi Sixteenth on the way home—where the Good People live. It's one of the most expensive districts in Paris, along with the Seventh. The Seventh seems to be somewhat more popular with retirees, but the Sixteenth has a lot of residents who are still working.

By “Good People,” I don't necessarily mean people who are nice or fundamentally noble in any way, I simply mean that they have certain characteristics in common. They are fluent in French, they buy their major appliances—instead of carrying them through broken store windows—and they don't do illegal drugs (although they may be addicted to ethanol, nicotine, and prescription narcotics),. They also remained in school past their teens, and they have good jobs, which they've obtained by knowing people in the right places. They don't have criminal records, although they may be cheating on their taxes and standing knee-deep in malversation.

Thus, they don't kill each other or set fire to cars or sing rap songs about shooting cops and beating women. However, they are not all sweetness and light, either—the French invented snootiness and snobbery, and both are widespread in the Sixteenth. Still, it's a nice part of town, with nice stores, safe streets, and polite people. It's only slightly out of my way when going to or from school, so on this particular occasion, with a bit of extra time, I decided to walk through it. The residents are not necessarily keen on intruders who do not dress fashionably and haven't been appointed to lucrative sinecures by the old-boy network, but they don't say anything.

When strolling through this part of town, I usually start at the Étoile (the roundabout where the Arc de Triomphe lives), and go down the avenue Victor Hugo. This is a shopping street, with a lot of clothing shops, especially at the upper (Étoile) end. My favorite stop is the Häagen-Dazs on the place Victor Hugo. I'm not a special fan of Häagen-Dazs, but it has no local competition, so that's where I stop for ice cream, if budget permits. If I'm pressed for time, I then turn down towards the Trocadéro, but if I have more time, as I did in this case, I continue on down the avenue towards some other shopping streets. There's a nice McDonalds restaurant further down the avenue, although I don't often eat there. One of the nice things about this restaurant chain in Paris is that every location is decorated differently, and the one on this avenue is no exception.

There are few pedestrian shopping galleries in this area, unlike some other parts of town, but there's one at number 111 on the avenue Victor Hugo. The gallery contains an eclectic mix of businesses with exceptionally bland signs identifying them (particularly when you contrast the signs with the architecture), ranging from a shop that produces dental prostheses to a “cell-phone clinic” to the Au Bal Masqué costume shop. The gallery is old, with a wrought-iron mezzanine and a frosted-glass roof. It's not usually interesting enough for me to step in and shop around, but the view from the entrance is charming.

Which reminds me (although I'm not sure why): Another thing that is almost totally lacking from the Sixteenth is sanisettes. I suppose the Good People don't want filthy hoi polloi gravitating towards free public facilities—“ça nuit à la bienséance”—and would prefer that they just hold it until they can crawl to some other part of town.

A little further down the avenue is the avenue de Montespan, although it's really just a small street, not an avenue. It's quite pretty … but it's a private drive. Probably populated by lots of Good People who don't want any contact with Ungood People.

(I should mention in passing that, while Google Maps has some excellent, recent, high-quality views of Paris, sometimes you'll find things blacked out. That's usually because one of the Good People with a rigid endoscope firmly lodged in his rectum has objected to himself or his car or his dog or his dog's déchets being visible on Google, despite their presence on public right-of-way, and has profited from the absurdity of French IP image law to compel Google to remove the view.)

Further on, after crossing the broad avenue Henri Martin, I walked along the dismantled railway that winds briefly through part of the Sixteenth. It is sunken below ground level but open, and it looks a bit like a tropical jungle. I've seen evidence that some homeless people are living down there. I imagine they have considerable privacy, despite their location in the midst of a densely populated city, since they are well below ground level, and they are hidden by all that foliage, and it's very hard to actually get down there (and a bit spooky to contemplate). And besides, Marie-Chantal would be racked by a strong frisson of disgust at the mere thought of encountering a person sans domicile fixe.

It's rather odd, with this near-rainforest in a huge ditch in the middle of the street (or perhaps between two streets, depending on how you look at it), and these wonderful residential buildings on either side. I suppose it beats a median paved with colored gravel. Only a part of this serpentine succession of streets has the jungle; much of it is paved over today. There's a bit more jungle further north, but I had bypassed that part earlier in my stroll. Line D of the RER somehow finds its way onto this path under the paved parts up north, but I'm not sure how. The open areas are abandoned and overgrown with vegetation and very incongruous in a city where bare dirt and grass are rarer than one might think, although I like the look of these mini-jungles … from a safe distance, of course.

Reaching the chaussée de la Muette, I turned east and headed down the rue de Passy, which is a nice shopping street. There's even a shopping center of sorts on this street, called Passy Plaza (Passy is the name of the neighborhood). One doesn't see many large shopping centers in Paris because there just isn't room, but there are some tasteful, small ones, and this is one of them. There's also a more traditional indoor market, with a very dreary 1930s facade, aptly called the Marché de Passy; markets like this often specialize in fresh food, whereas a place like Passy Plaza will be more along the American lines of shops and stores with clothing and things, most of which will be chain stores. The small shopping centers of this kind in Paris often notably lack identifiable anchor tenants—all the tenants are more or less equal.

When I got to the end of the rue de Passy, I just hopped on Line 6 of the Métro and went home. I've spent a lot more time on the Left Bank, so there wasn't much interest in walking through it, and it was getting late. Passy is the spot where Line 6 comes up above ground on its way from the Étoile terminus, and you get a nice view of the river and the Eiffel Tower as you cross the river to the next station. You also get a look into lots of people's apartments as you move further down the line. I guess the people who live there figure that nobody lingers long enough to be a nuisance, so they just leave curtains and shutters open. In the evening I'm surprised by how many apartments glow with the light of a computer screen.

Rudeness in the Métro

While taking a trip in the Métro to the north side of town (too long a walk for the time I had), I observed a group of people heckling and harassing a young woman with a drum. She had a large drum on a little hand cart, not protected by any kind of case, with a colorful design around the edge. The people I observed harassed and ridiculed her continuously all the way to the platform. I was amazed. Normally, you'd expect people behaving in this way to be clueless, angry young males, but in this case they were all “adults,” at least in a legal sense—in fact, two of them had gray hair!

It's unusual to see people being so mean. They weren't Parisian, as far as I could tell. They were made bold by numbers, I suppose, and perhaps by alcohol, since such a large percentage of the population in France keeps a steady level of ethanol in the blood during waking hours. Still, it was exceptional and rather depressing. The woman with the drum was obviously unhappy, but there wasn't much to be done. It's not strictly illegal to make fun of someone, I suppose.

Their provincial status might have had something to do with it, if indeed they were from outside the Périph.’ People tend to be bold when in groups and far from home. And people from the provinces don't necessarily know the rules for the Big City. They might also be from some low-level scum social class where abusing strangers is the norm. In any case, their behavior was inexcusable.

Fortunately, the woman with the drum got off at a different station from the losers, so she managed to escape them.

I continued up to my destination, my favorite Indian grocery store near the Gare du Nord, where I spent 13 precious euro buying malted milk and psyllium husk, both of which are hard to find in Paris outside Indian groceries. I like malted milk and cream, and the psyllium boosts the fiber content of the sinful malted drinks I make with these ingredients. It's cheap and it tastes good. I don't know what effect it has health-wise, and I can't really say that I care.

Versailles, again

I went to Versailles recently, with visitors in tow. I haven't visited Versailles on my own in years—it doesn't change much, so it's not like you have to see the “latest” Versailles each season. However, I do see it a lot with visitors, particularly in summertime. This visit was exceptional because it was in the winter.

Winter in Versailles is somewhat different from summer. The palace and buildings look the same, but they are comfortable inside, instead of stiflingly hot and humid and stale as they are in summer. This makes visiting the palace much more pleasant. There are also fewer people, although the tourists never go away entirely. At least the crowds are not unmanageable, and you don't feel you're going to be trapped and crushed while walking through the palace. Finally, the temperature outside is nice, too (read: cool). Summertime is exhausting in the gardens. The only real disadvantage is that the gardens aren't as green as they are in summer, and the statues outside are covered to prevent water and freezing temperatures from damaging them. (All the statues look the same to me, but each one is an individual work of art—the royals did not buy their sculptures at Wal-Mart.)

We took both the lengthy guided tour of the private apartments of the royals with a museum employee, and the self-guided tour of the Grands Appartements. The latter I know well, the former I don't often take because of time constraints. We took the English version of the guided tour, which isn't as informative as the French version, since the guides are typically much more fluent in French, but it's still interesting and lasts for about 90 minutes.

We passed through the Hall of Mirrors right at magic hour (magic hour being the hour just after sunrise or just before sunset when natural light looks especially flattering). The light was great and I got a few nice photos of the grounds outside, as well as the room itself. There were far fewer tourists than in summer, which helped, and the temperature was low enough to keep people from passing out, whereas in summertime many people just want to get out as quickly as possible after seeing the Hall of Mirrors.

I've seen most of the palace before, of course. The decor is elaborate and beautiful, albeit a bit busy for my tastes. There is very little furniture to see, however, since most of it was sold (legally) during the Revolution. Buying it back from whoever owns it now isn't always an option, and even when it is, it's expensive. One piece of furniture that the government did buy back at auction, a sort of small dresser, cost $15 million! Not exactly IKEA prices, I'm afraid.

On this tour I did see one of the royal toilets that I had not seen before. There's one on the tour that is a flush toilet of sorts, and another (the new one I saw this time) that isn't a flush toilet—meaning that a servant had to empty it by hand (ick!). Both were cleaner than the handful of filthy public toilets that are at Versailles—although one new set of toilets in the Petit Trianon were amazingly clean by French standards. Anyway, the toilets are kind of fascinating in a way, because you never hear much about how the king and his entourage went to the bathroom back then. It's kind of like movies and TV shows, where no character ever uses a toilet unless it's part of the plot.

The guided tour is much more interesting than the walk-through, self-guided tour, but it is only available at certain hours. Although furniture is scarce even on the guided tour, there are a few nice pieces, such as a huge clock that will remain correct for dates up to the year 9999 (Louis XVI in particular was very fond of gadgets). Versailles also still has the king's private desk, which he used for secret stuff—it was never auctioned off by the revolutionaries. One or two rooms are almost fully furnished, and some of the furniture isn't half-bad, compared to the very over-the-top decor elsewhere in just about every room.

The guided tour also shows you the opera, which was built entirely of wood for one of the king's son's weddings, but was retained because it was so handy. It served for both performances and parties, and is still standing … and it's still used for performances.

We were also lucky on the self-guided tour because it included a temporary exposition of Louis the Various art, some of which had not been publicly displayed since the royals were still alive. It was very interesting, although not very well ventilated. Unfortunately photos were not allowed because of the poor condition of some of the art (paintings and tapestries, mainly).

Anyway, the palace tours were nice. Then came the gardens. You need a lot of stamina and good walking shoes to tackle the gardens. I usually skip almost all that with visitors, but a few want to go out and explore. The Queen's Domain—with the Petit Trianon, the Grand Trianon, and Marie-Antoinette's little park and faux village where she played pool and partied with her friends—is especially interesting, although now you have to pay to visit it, whereas it used to be free. You can spend hours in the gardens.

We managed to see her Disneyesque play hamlet, plus part of the Petit Trianon, and by then fatigue was setting in. Altogether this was a 7.5-hour visit to Versailles. I've done Versailles with other visitors (particularly large tour groups) in 40 minutes flat. Needless to say, we leave out a few things on the group tours. But not everyone has seven hours to spend at Versailles, and, more importantly, not everyone is interested in spending seven hours at Versailles. I usually don't even suggest Versailles to people who are staying in Paris for less than a week, as there are many things to see in Paris already, and Versailles tends to consume at least half a day and often a full day unless the visit is very carefully orchestrated and very condensed.

Versailles is highly deficient in restrooms and places to eat. I did manage to find a pasta salad and some banana cake, which were quite good, although there's no place to sit down to eat them.

My feet were a bit sore when I got home, which is quite unusual. However, I spent a lot of time standing rather than walking, and while I can walk for enormous distances without my feet objecting (thanks in part to excellent hiking boots), standing seems to make them tired fairly quickly.

Attack of the Eiffelians

Tonight while walking home I saw the Eiffel Tower partially shrouded in fog, which isn't unusual. For some reason it looked like a giant alien spaceship looming over the city from where I was, which is a bit unusual. My imagination must have been especially sharp tonight.

When the weather is like this, it's useless to go to the summit of the tower. All you see is mist, and it's cold and damp. The searchlights at the top of the tower managed to pierce the mist a bit, but most of the time the summit itself was completely hidden. Once in a while it would briefly peek out of the mist.

My aviation-oriented brain notes that this would be a full overcast at 1000 feet AGL.

If you know Paris really well, you'll be able to figure where I was when I took the picture.

Another leak!

There have been too many unpleasant coincidences lately. It's very eerie.

Only a few days after getting the mysterious leak in the kitchen fixed—the one that appeared simultaneously with the visit of the water-meter man—another leak appeared in the bathroom, in the pipe that leads into the toilet. The meter man had never been in the bathroom, so it could not have been his fault. I had not touched any of the plumbing in question, so it wasn't my fault, either. And yet there it was. At first it was only a drop every two seconds, but it accelerated rapidly, and soon was filling my 5-liter bucket (the same one that I had sacrificed only days earlier for the other leak) within an hour or two.

After asking several people for advice, since I cannot afford a plumber and don't know anything about plumbing myself, I decided to try to fix the leak. It should be simple, or so I was told, since I only had to unscrew something, put in a new washer, and then screw it back together.

I went to the BHV, which has tons of stuff for do-it-yourself fanatics (like Samaritaine, in the days before LVMH destroyed it). In the plumbing section I located a little pack of washers of all different sizes (I didn't know what size I needed), and I got a small wrench and some Teflon tape. I already have one wrench, but I suspected I'd need two (I was right).

Returning home, I gathered my resolve and entered the Lair of the Leak, after turning off the water at the meter (something I had learned to do the hard way quite recently). I had to guess at which parts of the fittings I needed to fix were mobile, and which were not. Fortunately, my guess was correct, and within a few seconds I had separated the toilet tank fitting from the supply fitting. The fiber washers inside came apart in my hands. (I don't understand why the French have such an affection for crummy fiber washers). I found two new washers in my pack that looked the same, and installed them. Then I screwed everything back together. I turned on the water, and sure enough, the leak had stopped.

I accidentally tilted the flush mechanism inside the toilet tank a bit as I turned the supply-side fixture, so I had to move it back to the vertical. Later on, I discovered that this seems to have greatly reduced the incidence of the flush button on the tank getting stuck and letting water run endlessly through the tank and bowl—a problem I've had ever since my neighbor broke a hole through my wall and knocked chunks of plaster into the toilet tank. Now it hardly ever gets stuck. I don't know exactly what changed, but it's nice to see an occasional sliver of good luck separate from the tree trunks of bad luck that I usually have.

Real vandals, no ghosts

Although it hasn't been covered much by the media, the Paris Catacombs were vandalized more than a month ago (mid-September). Someone managed to sneak into the underground galleries during the night on a weekend, and did a huge amount of damage, tearing out the centuries-old bones from their neat stacks and sculptures, smashing them, and tossing them onto the floor, “with a pickaxe” according to some reports. The Catacombs will thus be closed at least until the end of the year, so that things can be cleaned up. Some of the damage is permanent, of course, since the bones cannot be replaced.

These vandals apparently did not enter the Catacombs through the official entrances … which requires some explanation. There are some 300 km of underground galleries under Paris, many of them formerly serving as stone quarries for the buildings above. (I'll refrain from commenting on the wisdom of quarrying stone for buildings from locations right beneath their foundations, apart from pointing out that the practice was stopped nearly two centuries ago.) There are innumerable entrances into this underground maze, the vast majority of which are closed and locked by the government. However, some people make a hobby of breaking into the network and exploring it, which is both illegal and dangerous. There are no lights, there are many areas that are underwater or otherwise hazardous, it's very easy to get lost … and nobody can hear you scream.

It seems that the vandals broke into one of these locked entrances and then somehow made their way into the very small portion of the galleries that make up the public Catacombs that are normally open to tourists during the day.

The public portion of the Catacombs consists of a clean, relatively roomy, and relatively well-lit path some nine stories underground, running for 1.7 kilometers (more than a mile). Security gates with locks block every detour from the one path open to tourists, preventing people from wandering off or getting lost (voluntarily or involuntarily). The vandals got past this in order to do their deeds. The Catacombs are protected and locked at night, but it's only reasonable security, not bank-vault security—the possibility that someone would break in and try to destroy them out of sheer malice had apparently not occurred to the authorities, which is somewhat understandable.

I suppose that now many of the careful stacks and sculptures of bones respectfully created by those who originally carted the bones into the Catacombs will never be the same now. I suspect that they went after the most famous areas, too. We'll see when the Catacombs open again.

In the movies, a ghostly hand would probably reach out from the bones, grab the vandals’ ankles, and hold them until they were dead and transformed into bones themselves, in retribution for the desecration of the site. Unfortunately, in real life, nothing happens to stop them, so they just make a shambles of the entire site with impunity. The police have no leads.

Christmas in October, hijinks at La Défense, and poverty

The weather has been cooler lately, which is fine with me, although a few days have gotten relatively warm, in the sense that my apartment has overheated. If it's 64° F outside, the temperature may rise uncomfortably to the mid-70s or beyond in the apartment, thanks to the aggressive heating system of the building, which has now been turned on.

With the days growing shorter, I sometimes walk to school before dawn, and sometimes I see pretty pictures, like the one shown here.

Anyway, October had barely started this year when workers began putting lights up on the Champs-Élysées—the world's most famous avenue™—for Christmas. Granted, it takes quite some time to put up lights on all the trees of the avenue, especially at French speeds, but that still seems awfully early. It seems like they were just taking them down yesterday. I like Christmas lights, though.

Last year, a national celebrity was hired to ceremonially turn the lights on. As I recall, it was Marion Cotillard, a French actress who won an Oscar for her performance in the title role of a French film about Édith Piaf, La môme. Because the ceremony is a touristy thing, the officials who arrange it have to try to find someone in France who has at least some slim chance of being recognizable outside the country, and last year, Cotillard was an obvious choice, having been one of only a tiny handful of French performers who have actually won Oscars since the award was created. This year, I don't know whom they will ask to flip the ceremonial switch. Most people outside France wouldn't even recognize the French president, much less any other celebrity from the country. And if Édith Piaf herself, one of France's biggest historical claims to fame, returned from the grave to turn on the lights, I don't think anyone would recognize her, either. But they might manage to get eight or nine seconds of airtime on CNN, if they are lucky, and if they turn on the lights on a slow day.

In other news … there was a bit of an uproar over the candidacy of the French president's son, Jean Sarkozy de Nagy-Bocsa, for a juicy position as the head of the EPAD, the organization that oversees development of La Défense, a suburb of Paris that is one of the most prestigious business districts in Europe. Shades of nepotism clouded his candidacy, especially since he is only 23 years old and still in school, which are both very rare characteristics for someone appointed to this type of position. Some people actually believed that there was no connection between his potential election to the post and his father's position as head of state. But in a Latin country, there are always connections between people everywhere, because people are hired for jobs based on whom they know, rather than what they know.

As it turned out, Jean Sarkozy finally gave up his candidacy amidst the many accusations of favoritism.

La Défense is a nice place, actually, at least during the day. At night, it's deserted, except for a few shady denizens that one ordinarily wouldn't want to meet. In daytime, it's a very dynamic and quite pleasant place to work, with quite a few skyscrapers surrounding a vast, totally pedestrian plaza. Transportation is relegated to underground tunnels, and the area is well served by freeways, buses, taxis, and commuter trains. I used to work there in the old days, when I had a salary I could live on. It was especially nice in good weather at noon, because everyone from the surrounding towers would spill out onto the plaza to walk and eat lunch (lunch being quite a long affair in France, even in La Défense). In the old days, the plaza was a large open expanse; today, thanks to the continuing efforts of the EPAD to turn every square meter into profit, it's a lot more crowded. Still, it's nice, and it's quiet, too, since there are no vehicles around. All you hear are people talking and walking, unless the EPAD has set up some stupid noisy event, which happens often enough, unfortunately.

I've been trying to sell whatever I can scrape up in my apartment to raise money, but it's a very slow process. Everything takes forever in France, which is good when creditors are after you, but bad when you are trying to make money to pay them. EncherExpert, the store that sells your stuff on eBay, builds multiple delays into its payment process so that you wait at least a month for your money. Supposedly it sent me a small check on October 15, but it's been over a week and I have yet to see it. That money could buy some extra groceries. In the meantime, I'm down to five euro, so I couldn't do any laundry this weekend, and I lost the credit on my cell phone because I couldn't add any before the existing credit expired. Luckily I still have some milk and bread and other things to eat in the fridge, so I'm not starving yet.