Visiting VIPs and diplomats

Well, elections came and went, although there’s a second round now coming up for any election in which a single candidate didn’t win by an absolute majority (that’s how elections normally work in France). I haven’t been keeping track of it, although I note that several candidates seem to have a platform that consists mainly of being passably cute this time around. Women are still rarer than men in French politics and somewhat of a novelty, although that is improving.

The weather turned a bit chilly again, but today it was seasonal. A bit more pollution because of another inversion layer.

It took forever to get to work this morning because the entire area around the Champs was blocked by police for the visit of the Chinese president. Why the whole area must be blocked for two days just for the visit of His Highness is a mystery to me. They wouldn’t even let pedestrians cross the avenue at street level yesterday, which is unusual. But the president was nowhere to be seen. It delayed me by an hour, since I must cross the Champs as part of my daily commuting.

It’s interesting to see how much more elaborate security is for visiting heads of state than it is for the French head of state. I’m not sure whether this represents wildly exaggerated courtesy for the former or simply a tacit acknowledgement that the latter is not one of the world’s major movers and shakers. (Although France has the second-largest economy in Europe, after Germany and is technically a leading world power.) An entire neighborhood is sealed off for the Chinese president, but apparently the French president gets around on a scooter sometimes, at least while visiting his girlfriends, according to media reports I’ve encountered.

One nice thing about the Champs being blocked is that it’s incredibly quiet. All you hear is the myriad footsteps of pedestrians on the avenue—minus the deafening traffic noise that usually afflicts the city (the one thing that the travel guides don’t mention about Paris is the noise).

It’s also interesting to see how the security around embassies reflects the importance of the countries they represent. The greater the influence or the higher the profile of the country, the more paranoid the security of the embassy tends to be. So naturally embassies of the United States and Israel are fortresses of paranoia, while some other countries are so insignificant that you can walk right past their embassies without noticing their existence. In some cases I suspect that the cost of running the embassy in Paris represents a substantial portion of the entire government budget for certain small nations.

Sometimes the diplomatic corps of the smaller nations are manifestly stuck up as well. You can just see it in the way they carry themselves. Apparently a post in Paris is a tremendous perk, and actually living in a country with running water and electricity counts as life in the fast lane for the foreign service of these banana republics. Every country in the world has an embassy in Paris, no matter how small. Even if the country must sell its entire yearly crop of bamboo or borax to pay the rent, it will still have its pint-sized embassy, filled with corrupt diplomats with egos so large that they can barely fit through the front door. You can bet that the used Mercedes out in front probably cost the country half of its yearly GDP.

Anyway, I should try to take more pictures, but it’s still usually dark outside by the time I head for home. Spring is here, but I work late. The useless move to summer time (DST) will occur on Sunday, so it will be a bit lighter in days to come.

Spring is here!

The pollution is gone. Thursday, the first day of spring, brought weather that very much seemed in tune with the season, with bright blue, sunny skies, warm temperatures, and a constant breeze that blew away all that nasty particulate pollution that had caused alerts on previous days. The weather has since veered towards cooler temperatures and a constant alternation between sunny skies and brief showers, which is typical for Paris at this time of year. The pollution has remained low, which is where it is most of the time.

Today there are elections in France, mostly municipal. As a foreigner, I can’t vote … but I’ve never voted anywhere, anyway. All candidates tend to be ambitious liars in any election, so it’s hard to distinguish among them, unless one of them is very obviously more evil than the others. As a result, voting is often just a roll of the dice. I don’t know who will become mayor of Paris, but hopefully it will be someone who won’t do too much damage to the city.

On the equinox (Thursday, that is), I spent about half an hour getting something to eat at lunchtime, and I took a few pictures of the area around the Champs, which is also the area where I work. The trees won’t be green for another month, but the weather was magnificent, and it was nice to see blue skies again, instead of a brown haze. In this post you can see a panoramic that I shot at around 3 pm on the side of the Arc de Triomphe opposite the Champs (the avenue de la Grande Armée). The nature of the pano shot distorted the moving cars a bit, but it’s still interesting.

I stopped at Marks & Spencer on the Champs to buy some lunch—specifically, some tikka masala. It wasn’t very good, especially given its €4.50 price tag. But then I noticed that it was the “low-fat” version, which people back at work told me was vastly inferior to the “regular” version, which I had somehow missed. Maybe I’ll try again sometime. The price is a bit high, though. Oddly enough, the food hall at M&S seems to be much more popular than any other part of this relatively small store. You wouldn’t expect French people to flock to a British food hall to buy their lunch, but that’s what seems to happen. Maybe it’s just snobbery. What I tasted did not impress me—I can get better tikka masala at Carrefour.

The Tiffany & Co. store on the Champs is still under construction. One wonders what exactly is being done to it that has required so much time. I could not be less interested in the types of merchandise sold by Tiffany, but I’m sure it will appeal more to all those nouveaux riches Third-World tourists than the fast-food restaurant that it replaces ever did.

I still see identically dressed hobos in front of Abercrombie & Fitch. Only they are not hobos, they are salespeople. They wear all wearing the same torn jeans the last time I passed. The tears were even in the same locations on each pair of jeans. And yet people buy stuff there. There’s a sucker born every minute.

It is said that Parisians themselves avoid the Champs like the plague, because it is considered to be just for tourists. That’s an exaggeration, though, since there are indeed Parisians on the avenue, including myself. They are hugely outnumbered by tourists, however. I’m on the avenue every weekday, in fact, but that’s mainly because of the proximity of my workplace … I doubt that I’d go out of my way to visit the area regularly were it not on my commuting route. There are some interesting stores on the street (such as the FNAC, traditionally one of my favorites, even if it’s slipping a bit nowadays), but a lot of tacky, overpriced tourist traps, too, like A&F, Banana Republic, Lacoste, Cartier, Louis Vuitton, and so on. I note that the parallel side streets show an increasing number of sketchy clubs and such; I’m not sure to which category of tourists they appeal, but I’m pretty sure that it’s a category I’d rather not encounter myself.

I learned a few days ago that Burger King is now going to come back to France, following the spectacular success of the store they reopened by the Saint Lazare train station. I’ve also learned that Chipotle has two stores in Paris, so one of these days I’m going to visit one of them and check it out. I still wish Dunkin’ Donuts or Krispy Kreme would come to Paris.

Gasping for air in Paris

For the past week, air pollution in Paris has been at record-breaking levels, thanks to unusual weather conditions. The pollution has been off the scale several days in a row. Unseasonably warm, dry, calm weather has trapped fine particulates in the atmosphere beneath an inversion layer that refuses to go away, choking the entire metropolitan area in dense smog. It’s hard to even see the Eiffel Tower. I feel like I’m living in Shanghai. Although, to be honest, the pollution doesn’t seem to be any worse than what I endured in Los Angeles back in the day. This is very exceptional for Paris, but that doesn’t make it any more tolerable.

I don’t walk a lot these days, and so the severe restrictions on walking that the pollution might impose are not too much of a problem. Still, I have more headaches than usual, and my eyes and throat burn a bit.

A good rainstorm and the return of normal March weather would help a great deal. Nothing of the kind is currently in sight, however.

The government, in its well-nigh infinite wisdom, made public transportation free starting on Thursday, for the duration of the pollution alert. Unfortunately, since the politicians didn’t really think things through, this only made things worse. Most people who drive cars do not do so to save money over public transportation, and so making the latter free provides them with no incentive to abandon the cars. Furthermore, the prospect of other people taking public transportation makes them chary of using it themselves, and encourages them to assume that the streets will be less clogged with traffic as Someone Else gives up his motor vehicle for the Métro. But that’s not how it actually worked out, and traffic and pollution have been worse than ever.

Overall I’m not a big fan of warm weather at any time of year. It’s 20° F above normal right now, and of course people are cooing with pleasure for the most part, but I wonder what the weather will be like in July or August if it’s still 20° above normal. Heating is cheaper than air conditioning, and dressing for cold weather is much easier than dressing for warm weather.

Groceries in Paris

Most Parisians go to supermarkets to buy groceries, and I'm no exception. There are plenty of open markets in the city with fresh foods, but they are expensive, and you need to have time to visit them, as they typically run from the early morning until just after noon. If you have to work for a living, there's no time to shop in the open markets. So the supermarket steps in.

Supermarkets in Paris and France are better than those in the U.S., though, in terms of the foods they have on sale. A typical supermarket in Paris would have relatively upscale merchandise by American standards. But there are still many similarities, and French supermarkets have less sophisticated display techniques, even though the foods on the shelves are better.

The Carrefour supermarket I regularly visit is typical of the breed in France. (Carrefour is the second-largest retailer in the world, after Walmart, even though you probably haven't heard of them.) The prices are reasonable, no doubt because the employees are underpaid, the expiration dates on food are not always respected, and for other reasons—just like American chains. Carrefour means “crossroads,” incidentally.

The supermarket is open until 11 PM on weekdays and Saturday, and until … well, until a certain hour on Sunday. See, French law requires that supermarkets close at 1 PM on Sundays, but many take a really, really long time to close, not actually closing the doors until around, say, 8 PM. The official hours posted for supermarkets often say "from 9 AM" for the Sunday hours, conveniently omitting the closing time. Since essentially everyone wants to be able to get groceries on Sunday, nothing is said. That's part of the body of French legislation putting artificial restrictions on when businesses can operate, but that's the subject of another post.

When you walk into the supermarket, you hit the fresh produce and sandwich aisle, with fruits and veggies, prepackage sandwiches of excellent quality, and so on. Then there are refrigerator aisles with microwave meals, a huge selection of dairy-based desserts (yogurt and pudding) and cheeses, milk and cream, butter, etc. And there are cereals, snack foods, lunchmeats, frozen meat, fish, and veggies, and so on. Other aisles provide basic household goods like soap and paper plates. It's pretty much what you'd expect to see in any supermarket, but the overall quality of the foods on offer is higher than what you'd get on average in the U.S. While the French are not averse to cheap foods and packaged, industrially-made foods, they still have a higher standard than Americans do, and really crummy food does not survive in the French market.

There are different sizes of supermarkets. The Carrefour I go to most of the time is mid-sized. Across the street from this supermarket is La Grande Épicerie, a huge, famous, upscale supermarket with a fabulous selection of foods, rather like the food halls you see in fancy department stores. The prices aren't much different at La Grande Épicerie, but they are a little bit higher, and they carry a lot more high-ticket items that you don't find elsewhere, such as freshly prepared foods like egg rolls or curried chicken or thin-sliced ham or whatever you want.

Larger supermarkets like La Grande Épicerie (regardless of their price range) have fresh fish departments and butcher departments. There's a Monoprix not far from where I live that's like this, a tiny bit more expensive than Carrefour but somewhat cheaper than La Grande Épicerie.

There are also hypermarkets, which are essentially department stores with a large food section. And there are tiny convenience markets, usually run by families, that have very high prices but carry all the essentials and never seem to close. Within a very short walk from my apartment there are at least a dozen supermarkets in all these categories except the hypermarket; hypermarkets are very large, so you don't see them much in central Paris, but they are common in the suburbs and on the periphery of the capital.

Some of the specific differences about French supermarkets are interesting. The selection of cheeses and alcoholic beverages is always huge. Even a tiny family-run market will have a dozen types of cheese on sale, and maybe ten different wines. Dairy products like yogurts and shakes are also well represented. There's always a little bit of fresh produce, even if it's only a few shelves near the entrance. And in French supermarkets, you put your own stuff in bags at the checkout, which tends to be rather awkward and time-consuming.

I'm not a big fan of grocery-shopping, but at least it's more pleasant in France than in the U.S., simply because there's such a nice selection of stuff to eat. I usually buy a lot of microwave meals, gallons of whole milk, and snack foods. I concentrate on stuff that's easy to chew because most of my teeth are in bad shape these days (due to poverty).

There's another advantage to French supermarkets: they accept tickets restaurants, which are meal vouchers that employers provide to employees if a business is too small to have an on-site restaurant. They are mostly intended to help employees buy a lunch cheaply if they have to eat outside the office, but they are also accepted for groceries, and that's how I normally use them, saving substantial money in the process.

I have to buy some food almost every day, and most of it goes into the fridge. Sometimes I get two big bags and do some major grocery shopping and that holds me for several days—I often do this on a Friday so that I don't have to go out over the weekend. For most French people, Saturday is grocery day, as in much of the U.S. For me, either I stay home on Saturday, or I go out in the evening to do the laundry, if necessary.

Iridium flares over Paris

Last night I saw my first Iridium flare.

What's an Iridium flare, you say? Well, see, there's this satellite telephone company that sells telephone services all around the world, called Iridium. The telephones they use relay calls via satellite … which means that the telephones can be used anywhere on the planet, even in the middle of the Pacific Ocean or at the South Pole. The system depends on dozens of Iridium satellites, which whirl around the Earth in orbits about 400 miles above the planet. Now, these satellites have a couple of large, flat, shiny antennas on them, and when they are in certain positions, sunlight can reflect off the antennas and down towards Earth. And if you happen to be in the right spot at the right time, you'll see the sunlight glinting off the satellites' antennas. This produces a very bright light in the sky (bright enough to see in daylight, sometimes) that fades up and then fades out over the course of a few seconds. This glint of sunlight visible from Earth is called an Iridium flare. Other satellites produce flares by reflecting sunlight, too, but the Iridium flares are easiest to see because of their door-sized, flat antennas.

Anyway … I had to go to the laundromat, which isn't very far away. I have a washing machine, but my neighbor complains that water leaks from her wall if I use it, even though there's no leak on my side, so I use a laundromat (see my previous post on all the water problems in the building). I've been putting off this visit for a long time. But I had virtually nothing clean left, so I put all the dirty stuff in plastic bags and took it to the laundromat.

It takes about 90 minutes to wash and dry the clothes. During that time, there's not much to do. I bought a big towel for the floor of the apartment in anticipation of the mess that the plumbers will make tomorrow. Then I sat on a bench on the nice pedestrian median near the Montparnasse Tower to wait for the clothing to wash.

I had my handy iPhone, and it's chock full of cool apps (cool to me, at least). I decided to check the sky with my beloved astronomy app, Sky Safari. I had used it once before, a few days earlier, to kill time while waiting 2.5 hours for locksmiths to arrive to open my stuck door (see again my previous post). On that occasion, I had been delighted to correctly identify Vega and Altair, two of the handful of stars that are visible in the sky even in well-lit Paris. Last night I was able to do the same, only it was easier because the sky was very clear (although streetlights still got in the way).

After identifying a few stars, it occurred to me to fire up my Iridium-flare app, which gives me the details on all visible Iridium flares in my area, using information published by the excellent Heavens Above Web site. I was pleasantly surprised to see that a very bright flare of satellite Iridium 31 was due in just ten minutes! So I tracked the satellite with Sky Safari, which was just coming up over the horizon in the north, and scoped out the exact location, near the Moon, where the flare would appear.

It so happened that a friend of mine walked by just as I was doing this, and said hello. But I was so engrossed in looking for the right spot in the sky and so afraid of missing the flare, that I just kind of sort of waved in her direction and asked her to wait for 30 seconds or so. I'm sure she thought I had lost it, since I was looking at the sky in all directions and saying things like "any second now" as if I expected our new insect overlords to descend in spaceships and take us (or me) away. She was kind enough to indulge me, however, and waited as I searched around.

At exactly 18:30:47, Universal Coordinated Time, Iridium 31 flared in the night sky, just east of the Moon. Suddenly a point of light appeared in the sky and brightened until it was as bright as the Moon, then faded back into darkness. I pointed to it and yelled "there it is!" and fortunately my friend and her company saw it when I did, proving that I was not psychotic. I explained to my friend et al. what the flares were all about, as she nodded indulgently. But they saw it, too, so they knew it wasn't a hallucination on my part. Of course, experienced skywatchers and amateur astronomers know all about Iridium flares, and spotting them is a popular pastime.

It was pretty cool. It was interesting to be able to see something without a telescope and without binoculars, and even against the relatively light-polluted sky of a big city. The flare was very obvious and easy to see. I'll have to keep an eye out for more in the future.

Water, water, everywhere (well, not quite)

Someone on a floor above mine left a faucet open after leaving on vacation, at about the time of my last post. When I got home, I noticed a queer smell, and finally I saw streaks on one wall that suggested a strong but brief torrent of dirty water had coursed down it in rivulets at some point earlier in the day. The wall was dry, though, and I saw no obvious damage except for the streaks on the paint.

Then, after some days, I noticed that the door of the apartment was hard to open and close. This got worse over a period of a week or two, and eventually it required a superhuman slam to close or open (which elicited comments from several neighbors). On one occasion I had to spend €140 I couldn't afford on a locksmith just to open the door. 

It finally dawned on me that the leak at the end of July must have somehow caused something to swell, making the door hard to open and close.

As I was trying to figure out what to do about this (I'm not very good at solving household-type problems), another problem arose. Last Friday, I heard a hissing noise just before leaving for work. I looked carefully everywhere and saw no trace of moisture, and supposed it was coming from workers downstairs who had been working on replacing the building furnace for a week or so. But when I returned home in the evening, the building water was turned off and there was a note from my neighbor on the door.

She explained that a "waterfall" of water had been cascading into the disused cinema on the ground floor, and it seemed to be coming from my apartment. I looked inside and there was a little bit of water in the floor of the kitchen, and a wet spot on the carpet near the bathroom door, but nothing else, and no moisture near any pipes.

Today the plumbers came. They turned the water back on, and immediately water started squirting from a wall in my bathroom. The plumbers said there was a break in a pipe that leads to my 70-year-old water heater. So they were able to turn the cold water back on for all if us, but have left me without hot water until Monday, when they will spend the whole day replacing the broken pipes. I'm sure it will be a huge, slimy mess.

Meantime, I smell bad and my hair is matted for lack of a shower, but at least I have water to drink and wash hands.

I can see why insurance policies place so much emphasis on dégats des eaux (water damage). This is at least the fourth time that something like this has happened. And clearly the door has been affected, too. I don't what to do. Just calling the locksmith cost so much money that my parents had to help me out. It's such a pain being poor. Money is everything.

Needless to say, I haven't had much chance to walk around Paris. Just the difficulty in getting the door open and closed discourages me from going out.

Two rare cool days, La Défense, smart phones, holidays

Monday and Tuesday were unseasonably seasonal, that is, the temperature was in line with historical norms for this time of year. That’s unusual these days, because an endless succession of heat waves has been more common in recent years. And in fact these two days were just a brief respite between two heat waves. People thought it was chilly, when in fact it was just normal. It was nice. I even walked around a bit, mostly to and from La Défense, where I had to go on business. Today another heat wave is predicted to start, however, with temperatures 22° F above normal (which translates to over 100° F on the street).

Walking to La Défense is somewhat of a hike, especially since it is slightly uphill from the Champs, my starting point. It took slightly more than an hour. I didn’t want to waste the (relatively) cool, overcast weather. And La Défense is pleasant to visit on a weekday, because it’s a very popular business district with tons of people walking around. It has a lively, modern, upbeat atmosphere about it, since most of the people walking around have decent jobs and salaries.

Originally, this business district had a vast open plaza surrounded by high rises. The plaza is still there, but the organization that manages the district—no doubt motivated by the desire to make money, which is all anyone really cares about in the final analysis—has allowed the plaza to become more and more crowded will all sorts of junk: restaurants with vast terraces, special events, little kiosks of all sorts, and so on. Some of them are temporary, others are permanent. The openness of the plaza is gradually yielding to “monetization,” although I’m sure the EPAD (the aforementioned organization managing the area) would deny that money is the motivation behind the changes. It’s rather sad. But money is everything, after all, and apparently the lure of filthy lucre is irresistible enough to justify sacrificing the aesthetic environment of the district.

Today is the first day of August, and the period between mid-July and mid-August is the quietest time of year in Paris. The trend towards diversity in vacation periods continues in Paris, meaning that the city doesn’t suddenly turn into a ghost town during August as it did half a century ago, but there is still a noticeable decline in traffic and crowds during August. However, the influx of tourists makes up for the outflow of Parisians during the summer. You still hear some French on the streets, but often it is drowned out by English or (these days) Mandarin. If there’s no heat wave in progress, the sky is very clean and clear because there is less traffic, but during the repetitive heat waves, inversion layers tend to keep the air dirty despite fewer motor vehicles moving about.

Back in the olden days, just about everything closed during August, too. Today, that’s mainly true for small shops that don’t have enough staff to stay open during August. Bigger stores and most other businesses remain open. That’s fine with me, as I wouldn’t like being stuck in a ghost town for a month. The travel guides are always behind the times, and some of them still claim that Paris closes up shop during this month, but that’s no longer true, and hasn’t been for many years.

Because of the heat waves nowadays, I do spend a lot more time indoors in summer, listening to the air conditioner run. It’s noisy, but it’s no longer possible to live without it in 100° F heat. I can still remember the days when you didn’t need A/C in Paris, as they weren’t that long ago. But it seems that those days are gone now.

Paris Plages is in progress, too. It gets a bit more elaborate each year. I’m not sure that that’s a good thing. It’s intended to provide some relaxation for Parisians who don’t leave the city in summer (and more and more of them stay). It’s not a tourist attraction, although some tourists who know about it do visit it. I’ve not been there so far this year, because it’s just not fun once the temperature rises beyond a certain point. It’s nice when the temperature is seasonal.

Since I got a smartphone, I’ve been observing others a bit more in their use of smartphones. Paris was always an early adopter of wireless technologies, and today it seems that at least two thirds of the people you see on the street have a smartphone in their hand. The proportion seems to be even higher in places like buses, subways, park benches, cafés, or just about anywhere where people tend to sit down for a moment. I confess that I’m not sure what all these people are doing with their phones. Even though I’ve stocked mine with apps that I consider useful, I still don’t walk around with it in my hand all the time. I presume they are making calls or texting, which are things that, ironically, I don’t often do with my phone.

In Paris as in many other cities, theft of smartphones is the single largest source of petty crime. Both pickpocketing and snatch-and-run thefts of smartphones are common. They represent more than half of thefts in the Métro. But there are so many people using smartphones that the numbers still work in favor of those who carry them. There are tons of people with smartphones, and relatively few thieves. Indeed, I wonder exactly what thieves do with their stolen smartphones, since it seems that everyone who wants a smartphone these days already has one.

You’d think that in such a pretty city, people would look around and admire the environment around them from time to time. But in fact a lot of them are staring at their phones. Perhaps they are looking at pictures of Paris on their phones. I suppose that residents can be forgiven for this, since they live in Paris and see it all the time. But it’s a bit harder to understand when you see tourists peering at their smartphones as they stand at the base of the Eiffel Tower or in front of the Mona Lisa.

Anyway … in addition to Paris Plage, there’s also the summer carnival in the Tuileries Gardens. I go there sometimes to eat junk food, although I’ve only been there once so far this season. There are places with good gyro sandwiches and granites (slushy frozen fruit drinks). It can be a bit dusty if it hasn’t rained. But as usual, the main problem is that it’s often just too hot to walk around. On those increasingly rare days of normal weather, it’s fun to visit.