Nice weather

Excellent weather today, not too hot and not too humid (although still a bit much of both for my tastes. I took a simple photo at the top of the Champs on the way home. Blue skies with fluffy clouds and a breeze.

Most people think of Paris in the spring, or indeed April in Paris, as being the best time of the year for the city, but the fall is just as nice. Spring and fall typically last for quite a long time in Paris, so there's lots of very nice weather.

The nice weather almost made me forget that I had only €2.50 to my name. I should be paid soon, though (my employer takes weeks to pay us each month, for some reason).

Groceries

I've been living in Paris for quite some time, so I don't really know what prices are like elsewhere. I thought my non-Parisian readers (if any) might be interested in seeing a typical grocery bill from a large supermarket in Paris. This is what I spend on one recent visit (I've converted to U.S. dollars at the current exchange rate on the assumption that the reader is in the U.S.):

Qty            Description            Unit Price  Total Price

6 whole milk 1.5 liters             $    3.07  $     18.42
1 caffeine-free Coke 1.5 liters          1.93         1.93
5 pound cakes 200 g                      1.59         7.95
2 chunks of pre-grilled tuna             4.70         9.40
1 box of 18 fish sticks, frozen          5.21         5.21
1 twin pack of paper towels              2.60         2.60
2 twin packs 25 cl heavy cream           3.59         7.18
2 medium bags Bugels (crispy snack)      1.47         2.94
1 twin pack plastic dish-scrubbing pads  3.43         3.43
2 mini sausage snack packs               3.26         6.52
2 hachis parmentier frozen meals         4.44         8.88
1 three-pack dish sponges                4.84         4.84

TOTAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $  79.30

This represents about five hours of salary. The milk will last almost a week (I like milk), the other foods will last for a few days. I have to buy a similar amount of groceries almost twice a week, so that's about $120 a week for food, or about $520 a month (roughly two thirds the amount of my rent). This does not include things like eating during lunch at school, which can cost from nothing (if I skip it) to $15 or so (one hour's wages).

Most of my money thus goes to food and rent, with the rest (if there is any “rest”) going to utilities. My tax burden is minimal because I'm now below the minimum taxable income level.

If you think that my choice of foods seems nutritionally questionable, I agree. However, I'm constrained to pick based on price and preparation time, and that tends to favor nutritionally unbalanced, calorie-dense foods.

Noise from where?

For some time now, I've been hearing music reverberate through my building at all times of day and night. Only the louder bass parts get through, but it's typically the boom-boom-boom type of beat that you hear in the bulk-purchased background music played in hair salons and trendy clothing boutiques.

It's not so much the sound that bothers me. What bothers me is that I cannot seem to localize it. I don't think it's coming from either of my immediate neighbors. It doesn't seem to be coming from an apartment in the hallway. And I can hear it well at some points, but not others. If I go outside the building, there's no noise, which is unlikely if there were an open window near the source of the music (as there is likely to be at this time of year). It's quite a mystery.

I do wish that whoever is playing it were interested in a wider variety of music—what I'm hearing now sounds like that kind of disposable pop music that no one will remember six months from today. And he or she must have some pretty substantial speakers, perhaps the massive kind of speakers favored by people who have had their hearing damaged by a massive kind of speaker.

Oh well, maybe I'll eventually figure out where it is coming from. It just started this summer, which implies a new tenant, or someone renting something for the summer (we'll see if it disappears in September).

Is it the full moon?

A few days ago, while I was enjoying the cold air from the air conditioner, a bus rolled into the Seine River. Yup, that's right, a tour bus, parked at the Bateaux Parisiens (one of the excursion boat companies on the river, this one very near the Eiffel Tower), just rolled right off the parking lot and into the river. The bus was unoccupied, its load of Austrian tourists and driver being on the excursion boats. The driver swears he set the parking brake. Very strange, and a first in recent memory.

The parking lot is on a very gentle incline, but I'm still not clear on how the bus could get rolling like that, especially if the parking brake truly was set. I wonder what became of all the shopping bags and luggage that were probably stored in the bus. Oh well.

There's a video of the bus on YouTube, which you can see here.

That's not all, though. A few days after the bus rolled into the river, a barge going upriver sank. That, too, is a first in my experience. Here again, the crew claims not to have any idea why the barge sank, but my guess is that it was overloaded, as many of the barges tend to be. It was carrying sand, and it was probably loaded down all the way to the water line. A few waves probably washed over it from passing boats, and put some water into the sand, which of course made it heavier. From there on it would be a vicious circle, with the boat sinking deeper and deeper and taking on more and more water.

The moon was full during one of these days; maybe that had something to do with it. Lots of weird things seem to be happening lately.

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.