Relief at last!

The start of July was terribly hot. It has relented slightly but I still worry about the future. Fortunately, my mommy and daddy have gifted me with a new air conditioner, to replace the old one, which had more things wrong with it than I can count (broken bearings, loss of refrigerant, half-working fans, a leaking condensate tank, broken dehumidification, broken switches, etc.).

The new A/C is more powerful than its predecessor, and of course it's brand-new, so everything works. It seems to be very efficient. It's an Italian design, by DeLonghi, which has a pretty good reputation for appliances and A/Cs), although the Italian part worries me somewhat (I'd prefer German design). It was built in China, which worries me more, but it's the best I could manage.

The A/C has an unusual feature that takes water from a tank that you fill and sprays it on the condenser coils on the hot side of the A/C. If you know how A/Cs work, you'll recognize this as a very effective way to massively increase the cooling capacity of the unit. It appears to work really well, the only drawback being that you have to fill the tank periodically. It will still cool without the water, but not as efficiently. It is so efficient when the tank has water that it is exempt from certain EU requirements for energy efficiency.

The unit claims to accept tap water, and supposedly has a resin filter to soften it. Tap water in Paris is moderately hard (about two thirds of Parisian water comes from underground wells that contain quite a bit of minerals), and the A/C has a setting for this. However, just to be on the safe side and to extend the life of the unit, I've been using distilled water, even though that costs about €0.50 a litre. In typical weather, where I only use the A/C intermittently, it seems to go through a 10-litre tank filling in about 10 hours. Electrically, I've calculated that the cost of operating the A/C 24 hours a day would be about €90 per month, but since that (hopefully) will never happen, the real cost should be about €20 per month during the summer.

You can see that I'm obsessed with air conditioning. I grew up in a hellish desert climate, and there is absolutely no way that I'll tolerate hot weather ever again. Paris gets hotter every year, so A/C is a necessity now for some part of each year, and I can't live without it. Fortunately, thanks to Mommy and Daddy, I can sleep reasonably well at night in summer, without tossing and turning on sheets that are sopping wet with sweat.

Europeans still think that air conditioning is decadent, and “wastes energy.” They are such complete dorks sometimes! Well, they may prefer to live in the 17th century, but I'll stay in the 21st, thank you.

Weekly Heat Wave

The wonderfully cool weather (with pretty clouds—see my picture at right) of last week has given way to blistering heat again. The heat waves outnumber and outlast the cold snaps by a substantial margin. It's difficult to do much of anything when it's 95° F outside on the street (the “official” temperature is always lower, but it isn't measured on actual streets where real people walk).

I've had to turn on my rickety A/C, which doesn't work very well but is better than nothing. I thought of getting a fan to draw cooler air through the apartment in the middle of the night, but I can't afford a fan (the cheapest I've seen is €20, which is more than I can afford).

I notice that when the sun is out and there are no clouds, the temperature rises consistently by about 4° F each day. If nothing interrupts this progression, there seems to be no obvious limit to how hot it can get, which makes it possible for Paris to beat places like Las Vegas in temperature in some cases. And yet Paris is actually north of Montreal. I've heard it said that if the Gulf Stream stopped, it would lower temperatures in Western Europe by several degrees; perhaps that would be a good thing for Paris, where temperatures have risen by more than a few degrees in just the past decade or two. The historically “normal” temperatures for the city are often 15° F below the real-world temperatures of the city these days.

For several thousand years, Paris has had a cool climate. Why did it suddenly become hot only a short time after I moved here? It's like hot weather follows me around like a curse. No matter where I go, I find myself listening to air-conditioning units running.

Miscellaneous

I know that I have trillions of fans assiduously following my superlative Paris blog, and I'd hate to have them slit their wrists in depression simply because I've not posted often enough recently, so I suppose I should provide a general update of sorts, on various subjects.

The weather has been good and bad over the past few weeks. “Good” in my book means cool and cloudy; “bad” means sunny and hot. (This is the opposite of what most people prefer, but I was born and raised in a hellish desert climate, and I have no desire to return to that experience.) Some weeks have been well below average in temperature, and I've been (relatively) happy. Other weeks have been very hot, and I've been unhappy. Right now a new heat wave has started, so the weather is depressing me.

My tiny microwave broke, after long years of loyal service. Although microwaves are cheap these days, they were still beyond my budget, so my parents sent me money to buy a new one (my parents regularly save me from starvation with handouts, since my employer's abusive policies prevent anyone from earning a decent wage). I got a very cheap one that lacks the features the old one had, but I never used any of the features on the old one other than the timer, so I haven't really lost anything. I got the microwave at Darty, a very popular appliance store that is very good with customer service (making it an extremely rare exception to the French rule). That's where I've bought all my appliances over the years, since my experiences with them have always been positive.

The replacement of the microwave meant I could heat things again, so I've been able to eat warm rice and dehydrated apples, plus milk, which are about all the food budget allows these days.

Last weekend, there was a Major Media Event on the Champs, during which all sorts of plants were planted right on the street for Sunday and Monday (which was a holiday). Had the temperature not been at the level of a blast furnace, I might have gone to visit this event, but I can't stand to go outside in hot weather. The temperatures were in the 90s (Fahrenheit) on the street.

Earlier in May I missed the Paris City Fair (Foire de Paris), one of the two largest expositions to come to Paris each year (the other being the International Agricultural Show, which I also missed). No budget, and no time, as usual. It's unfortunate because this fair is often pretty interesting, especially the home-improvement sections (of which there are many), with their fully-built model kitchens and gadgets and other things. Come to think of it, I haven't been to either of these shows in years. Time passes quickly.

While walking across town to buy some curry paste for rice (the Métro is also beyond my budget these days) on a somewhat cooler day, I encountered not one but two demonstrations in the Latin Quarter and next to Notre-Dame. Living in Paris rapidly inures one to demonstrations, so I didn't even really take note of what they were about, but tourists were snapping away with their pocket cameras—which I suppose doesn't necessarily mean that they knew what the demonstrations were about, either.

Lately there has been much talk in France about banning the burqa (a garment that entirely conceals a woman, including her eyes) in public. I believe some legislation has been passed to this effect but I don't know its current status. I don't favor laws that impose dress codes on people on public right-of-way, even though the burqa is closely associated with oppression of women in some countries. If a woman really does want to be treated as property by her husband, and chooses to wear this exceptionally bizarre (by Western standards) garment, that is her prerogative. I do agree, however, that the garment should be removed to make the face and head visible when necessary for identification purposes (and that includes when driving).

Hardly anyone actually wears burqas in France, anyway. The estimates I've seen are around 1000 women for the whole country. Often they are either trying to advertise their religious beliefs, or they are simply tourists from countries where this attire is normal (and often required) for women. Black seems to be the favored color, which makes me wonder how women dressed like this in places like Saudi Arabia are able to avoid heat stroke (I note that the men dress in white, which makes perfect sense, so I wonder why the women would dress in black, which seems a bit morbid in attention to being conducive to heat prostration).

There are a lot of women who wear scarves in France, and do so because of Muslim beliefs, not because of fashion. The more elaborate the head or body covering, the more a woman is trying to advertise her beliefs. It's not really any different from a Christian woman wearing a gigantic crucifix on a chain around her neck to “witness” her devotion to Jesus, or a Hasidic Jewish man carefully dressing in order to satisfy every detail of the myriad requirements for attire imposed by Judaism. Part of it may be pure religious devotion, but part of it also tends to be advertising.

Anyway, not much else to report from the City of Light for the moment. High season for tourism is in full swing, and tourists are everywhere; even in a depression, Paris leads the way as a tourist destination. And I've been trying to sell things on eBay, but I'm running low on possessions. I've been wondering if I could get anything for books or a couple of DVDs—although the eBay store doesn't like to sell anything that is worth less than 30 euro.

Il faut que la voiture s'adapte à Paris !

Like virtually all European cities, Paris was founded and prospered long before automobiles came along, and many of its streets are designed only for pedestrians and the occasional cart and horse, not for SUVs and Hummers. Despite this, the city has gradually been forced into yielding to the automobile over more than a century, and the results are grim (in my view).

A typical small street in Paris has several lanes reserved for cars, and only a very, very tiny space reserved for sidewalks. There are many streets that have “sidewalks” that are only about 18 inches wide. Pedestrians are thus forced to walk in the street half the time, and that's dangerous, not only because of cars, but especially because of motorcycles, which routinely pass between lanes of cars at high speed (it's illegal, but this is France).

The street where I work is no exception to this rule. Three lanes, two for parking and one for driving, are reserved for cars. The tiny sidewalks are barely a yard (one meter) wide. You can see from my picture that there are lots of pedestrians struggling to walk on the sidewalk without stepping into the street (where they might be killed by an illegal motorcycle), whereas the vast expanse of pavement reserved for cars is largely empty.

The current mayor has tried hard to reduce vehicular traffic in Paris, but I don't believe he has attacked this problem yet. I wish he would.

Pain in the Ash

Some days ago, a volcano erupted in Iceland. That's not especially unusual, nor even very newsworthy, since volcanoes erupt in Iceland all the time; Iceland is somewhat the European capital of volcanoes (with Italy probably running a close second). But there was a bit of a problem with this erupted, in that it was spewing out hundreds of tons per second of particularly nasty volcanic ash—and prevailing winds aloft were carrying the ash directly towards the rest of Europe.

Aviation authorities did the prudent thing and halted air traffic over the Continent. That's something that routinely happens everywhere when huge plumes of volcanic ash threaten aviation. The difference here, though, was that the ash was drifting over an area that is home to 600 million people, with some of the busiest airspace in the world. Stopping air traffic in this area thus became very painful financially to many companies within a short time.

Safety dictates that aircraft not fly through volcanic ash at all. Ash of the kind being coughed up by Ejyafjallajökull isn't like sand or ordinary dust: it is made of microscopic, jagged, sharp pieces of glassy rock that can chew through just about anything far faster than ordinary sandblasting. Worse yet, the ash has a relatively low melting point—lower than the internal temperatures in jet engines—so first it chews away at engine parts, then it melts inside the engine and clogs it up. Sometimes the engine stops. Even if the engine doesn't stop, it may suffer millions of dollars worth of damage and fail shortly thereafter.

The damage doesn't stop with engines. The ash can sandblast windows, turning them opaque within minutes, making it impossible for pilots to see outside the aircraft. It can block pitot tubes, which are essential for determining the speed of the airplane (failing pitot tubes are one possible explanation for the crash of Air France Flight 447 not so long ago).

Anyway, it would be foolish to fly through this ash, and the few aircraft that inadvertently did so suffered great damage (historically, there have been many incidents of engine failures and damage from volcanic ash in aviation). So air traffic had to be more or less grounded in Europe, given the way the wind was spreading ash all over the place, like spreading frosting on a cake with a spatula.

In theory, there's nothing to be done about this. It's nature, and it's something you just have to try to put up with. But in this case there was too much money at stake to just sit by and accept reality. Lots of greedy airlines wanted to restore their revenue streams, come hell or high water, and they put pressure on government bodies. Eventually, the authorities decided that safety wasn't that important, after all, and that money should be given priority, and so the airspace over Europe was reopened.

Fortunately for everyone, the ash cloud was beginning to diminish at about the same time. This gave airlines the mistaken impression that they were right, and that the authorities had been too cautious. In fact, we were just lucky. The planes are flying again now.

I didn't actually see any ash clouds over Paris, even though high-altitude ash plumes swept over us. I didn't see any ash falling on the ground, either, nor did I smell anything. However, since my reasoning is not crippled by greed, I know that the mere absence of visible ash doesn't mean that anything is safe. I was somewhat concerned about breathing the ash (which can cause lung damage), but fortunately the ash stayed high in the sky and didn't fall over Paris (although it certainly fell in places in the U.K.).

I worry that the fact that airlines got away with being careless this time may encourage them to compromise on safety in other ways in the future. Airlines care only about money, not safety. They remain safe only as long as it is economically expedient to do so, which means that they remain safe mainly out of a fear of being heavily fined for any lapses in safety, as well as out of a fear of scaring off passengers if they have accidents. But if those two factors weren't around to twist their arms, the airlines would cheerfully operate with zero safety. Some of them are still taking chances as it is, as they have with this ash cloud.

Anyway, it's over now, provided that Ejyafjallajökull doesn't start spewing a zillion tons of ash again and provided that the winds remain favorable. If Ejyafjallajökull wakes up its neighbor, Katla, then these recent ash problems will seem trivial in comparison to what may come.

I hate baguettes

I made the mistake of buying baguettes—those long, skinny loaves of French bread—again a few days ago, against my better judgment. Sometimes it's hard to find any other type of bread. Of course, by the time I got home, they had turned to rock. Stale baguettes (that is to say, baguettes that are more than 3 hours old) are among the hardest objects known to man, after diamond and corundum crystals. The bullet-proof crust cannot be broken by normal mammalian teeth, and the interior tastes like cardboard. Any attempt to break the stale baguette into pieces produces a shower of bread crumbs that scatters in every direction. Freezing does not arrest the hardening process.

I had to look around for a store that had some sort of bread that would keep for longer than a few hours and was soft enough to actually eat. This afternoon I found a bakery that had something that looked acceptable, so I bought some of that and threw the remaining concrete baguette out.

I have come up with a useful idea, though: baguettes could conceivably be put to work as a dual-use technology, and could be shipped to Marines in Iraq. They could be frozen, ready to bake, and all the Marines would have to do is put them into an oven. Once they were baked, they could be removed, slathered with butter and Brie cheese, and eaten to provide a delicious lunch. However, any baguettes that were still uneaten after two hours could be mounted into special launchers on Apache helicopters and used as armor-penetrating missiles to break into reinforced concrete bunkers, which any three-hour-old baguette should be able to manage with ease. Thus, first it's lunch … then it undergoes a Hideous Transformation into a deadly weapon!

That would make the disposal of uneaten baguettes less of a problem. Currently, they are thrown into the trash and they end up in landfills, where they eventually become embedded in the Earth's crust and block the movement of tectonic plates. So it would be good for the environment, too.

More proof that spring is here

The last day of March brought weather that is nearly typical of the season, and today was textbook seasonal.

Yesterday was slightly chillier than normal (about 6° C), and very breezey, with very big, fluffy clouds, some of which had angry dark bases that produced fleeting, brisk rain showers. This was not perfectly typical of the season but it's extremely common. I rather like this type of weather. The rain is a nuisance but it is always brief, since it comes down from specific, fat rain clouds that are moving at high speed in otherwise scattered cloud cover without precipitation. One moment it's cloudy and pouring, and the next it's sunny and dry with blue skies. And I like the coolness of this kind of weather.

Today, the weather was absolutely textbook April in Paris, with little fluffy white clouds, a brilliant blue sky, and no precipitation. The temperature was around 11° C (52° F), and there was a light breeze. Excellent weather.

The area around and across from the Eiffel Tower was clogged with tourists, as is usual for this time of year. The Depression has not reduced overall tourism much, but the demographics of the tourists have changed, with fewer Americans, and more Chinese.

Unfortunately, the Eiffel Tower itself had some sort of technical problem, and the line to get into the tower was more than three hours in length, winding back and forth below the tower. I'm amazed that people were willing to wait that long. The weather was great, though, and anyone actually going up into the tower would get quite a nice view.

While I was waiting to cross the street in front of the tower, I was nearly trampled by street vendors sprinting to escape the police. The innumerable vendors selling tiny Eiffel Tower key chains and other junk at the base of the tower and on the Trocadéro plaza are all operating illegally, and they are often illegal immigrants as well, so the police periodically try to clean them up. Many of the vendors have a sixth sense that warns them when the police are near, and those who display their junk on the ground place it on a sheet with strings at the corners, allowing them to instantly gather up their merchandise and run when the police show up. When the police do come, it's like lions chasing water buffalo: the slowest and stupidest among the “buffalo” are caught by the LEOs, and the others escape, as there are too many to round them all up at once.

Anyway, the police were chasing them as I stood on the corner, and several of them barely missed me as they ran past. I worried a bit that they might knock me down and hurt my little camera—this camera is not nearly as fancy as the ones I used to use, but it's still far too expensive to replace on my budget. And not only did some of these dregs nearly knock me over, but the cops managed to tackle one of them and get him on the ground right next to me. They handcuffed him, carefully collected his junk, and led him away to the police station.

'm not sure what happens to vendors caught like this. In theory, they can go to jail or be deported, but I don't know how often that actually happens. They can be quite irritating since they try to sell their junk to everyone they see, and they are often persistent. Since other merchants around them have taken the time to wade through French bureaucracy and pay their taxes, I don't see why the losers should be allowed to get away with doing neither.

By the way, security at the Eiffel Tower is getting more and more paranoid. Now they have glass-walled walkways from the security checkpoint to the entrances. That's a recent addition. I wonder how those are going to feel in the summer time when they turn into greenhouses.

Cool again!

It turned cool and rainy again today. I'm relieved to see the temperature drop again. It was 5° C on the way home, which is just the way I like it. It did rain a lot today, which I wasn't too happy about (I prefer that it rain during the night), but the overcast was nice, and there was a breeze.

Stormy weather

While I was in class today, I heard thunder and saw pouring rain outside the windows. It was only an hour before the end of class, so I was a bit worried, since I walk to and from school to save money (Métro tickets are expensive—even with part of the price of a weekly pass paid by my employer, I still can't afford them). Fortunately, the rain let up before class was over, and I was able to walk home without an umbrella, albeit underneath a dense overcast.

I could see the thunderstorm to the east, still dumping tons of rain on the suburbs, with occasional lightning. Thunderstorms are rare in Paris, so they offer a change of pace, as long as the power doesn't go off (but it almost never does, since all utilities are underground). Most rain in Paris is light, misty rain that comes and goes.

This type of weather is a foretaste of April in Paris, when the skies are generally deep blue with white fluffy clouds, occasionally interrupted by brief rain showers. It's usually very nice weather (although it has been getting hotter and hotter in recent years), and if you visit at this time of year, you understand why people rave about April in Paris. But I'll let you in on a little secret: October is just as nice.

Indian grocery time

Today I went to buy some more paste to make rice with, and I had to go to my preferred Indian grocery up by the Gare du Nord to get it, since none of the normal supermarkets near where I live seem to carry it (they sometimes carry Indian curries and stuff, but not the specific paste that I want). This involves a three-hour walk, since taking the Métro would be expensive (about $3 round-trip, which is expensive for my budget).

Lots and lots of Indian stores line the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis above the Gare du Nord. The whole area is a bit seedy at night, and only so-so during the day, but that's where you go to get Indian stuff. The grocery I prefer has the stuff I want, which mainly means basmati rice, various curry pastes, psyllium husk (a very nice natural shredded fiber supplement), and Horlick's malted milk. I already had rice at home but I got some extra curry paste and another box of Horlick's.

As you walk down this street south of the Gare du Nord, the Indian stores give way to groceries and other businesses catering to other immigrant populations, such as North Africans, Turks, and so on. There's a lot of variety in the foods available, if you are looking for variety. There are a lot of “taxi phone” places, too, which consist of lines of telephone booths where you can call various countries at low rates. I don't know how much lower the rates are than standard telephone rates, but the places are popular, so they must be cheap (or the people who use them don't have phones at home, one of the two). I think Skype is a better deal, but perhaps the customers of these places don't have home PCs or Internet access.

As you get to the big arch of the Porte Saint Denis, built by Louis XIV, the exotic grocery stores disappear, and they are replaced by wholesale garment merchants and prostitutes. During the day, the garment merchants reign; after nightfall, the prostitutes dominate, although there are a few prostitutes during the day, too. This area used to have busted sidewalks and cracked pavement, but a few years ago everything was repaved, with the street paved in white marble cobblestones, and the sidewalks redone in carved granite blocks. Very nice, especially with pretty streetlights added. I rather wonder why so much was spent on this particular street, which is hardly the garden spot of Paris, but it still looks nice; I'm sure the locals appreciate it.

The rag trade blends with and then yields to sex shops as you move still further south. The sex shops then yield to trendy restaurants and clothing shops as you near the Forum des Halles. Then the restaurants get more numerous, the clothing shops wane, and a few jazz clubs appear as you go beyond the Forum, continuing south.

Soon you arrive at the twin theaters of Châtelet. Just beyond that is the Seine River, and when you cross the river you're on the Île de la Cité, the historic heart of Paris. As I passed this way, in front of the national law courts, I saw tons of police officers and police cars around the courts, along with a vast crowd waiting to get into the courtrooms. I don't know who was on trial, but it must have been somebody famous. There were more people waiting to get into the courtrooms than there were waiting to get into Sainte Chapelle (which is inside the law courts area), which is unusual.

And still I walked on, straight south (I told you that it took three hours). When you cross the river again, you're in the Latin Quarter, which is a very nice area indeed. That's where I took a right and made my way down the boulevard Saint Germain, and ultimately from there on home. No time to linger, alas! And no money to spend, anyway.