Saturday, June 29, 2002

La Vie des Cafés dans Paris (English version below) Il y a un certain temps de nuit que j'aime à Paris. Il vient juste aprés le coucher du soleil en été quand l'air frais commence à glisser dedans les nuages et se les fait coaguler à partir d'une tache floue douce aux contours distincts. Parfois c'est un ciel obscurément tourbillonnant contre un milieu pour le plupart pourpre comme une peinture de Vincent van Gogh. À cet temps de nuit, puis le ciel enveloppe tous les bâtiments et personnes qui regardent dehors ou marchent entre, il semble une peinture de la vie immobile. Les peintures de la vie immobile me rendent toujours sentimental. Quelque chose sur leur détail et distance permet la visionneur la liberté des émotions d'examiner l'image plus approfondie. 9:21 p.m. Il est mon temps favorit de nuit. La lumière vient de partir. Je m'assieds à Au Depart, un café enface du Jardin Luxembourg. Le café est presque abandonné. Une jeune, attirante femme s'assied dans le coin par la fenêtre, vérifiant ses messages de SMS sur son mobile. Je songe à que je sois elle - jeune, belle, avec de longs blonds cheveux et nombreaux de gens me poursuivent toujours. À travers de moi s'assied un homme d'affaires, toujours dans son costume d'affaires. Il me regarde profondément. Peut-être il imagine à qu'il soit moi - une étrangere, d'un pays étrange, pensant des pensées étranges sur les drôles gens qui j'observe. La tour d'Eiffel est maintenant allumée, ses lumières scintillent dans le crépuscule. Il y a l'air de langeur. Les gens se déplacent vers leurs destinations finales. C'est la période de la nuit où j'ai le plus sensation d'être étranger - quand j'observe chacun autre va "chez soi". Chacun revient à sa maison, sa famille, leur amis. C'est la période de la nuit où je sens je suis tout seul le plus profondément. Parfois je le savoure; d'autres fois je sens sa douleur. Je savoure que je peux observer d'autres détaché et voyeuristiquement. Je sais que je peux rester dehors et observe leurs nuits progressent. Je suis celui. Je suis chacun. Je suis celui qui que je veux être, celui qui je choisis d'observer. Je suis libre. Il est 4:25 p.m. - entre le petit café et le pastis, ou comme on dit entre chien et loup - un temps de vacance, de vide, de silence. Le patron a quitté la caisse, on l'entend besogner dans la réserve. Le grand garçon donne un coup de torchon, ou fume une cigarette, appuyé à la machine à café. C'est le moment que choisit pour entrer le quincaillier voisin (ou le boucher (ou le coiffeur)). Il ne dit rien. Le grand garçon pose soigneusement son mégot sur le bout du comptoir et verse un ballon de rouge (un blanc sec (une biére)). Sans un mot, le client d'aprés midi tient son verre à la main bien posé sur le zinc. Le tourne dans ses doigts. Observe sa couleur. Il ne dit rien. Il ne pense pas. Il est libre. Léve alors son verre et le boit d'un trait. Jette le monnaie sur le comptoir, salue d'un mouvement de tête et s'en va. Le grand garçon nettoie le verre vide dans le bac. Il s'essuie les mains, allume une nouvelle cigarette. Ils n'ont pas dit un mot. Reflets sur Ma Vie dans Paris Je rends souvent visite à ma propriétaire pour payer le loyer, les forfaits, etc. Je m'intéresse á sa vie parce qu'elle est aristocrate. Il y a plus d'aristocrates en France qu'aux Etats-Unis. Sa habitation est un étage entier d'un batiment en face de l'école militaire dans le 7ième. Elle est gynecologue á la retraite. Elle est en corps trois idées grands qu'elles me impresse. Premièrement, l'idée d'équalité entre des hommes. Mon appartment es trés petit, mais il a un balcon. Ma propriétaire a acheté pour moi une cafetiére, un cuvette, et un oreiller quand je l'ai demandé. Tout les gens en France vivent avec un bas niveau de confort. Deuxiémement, l'idée que chaque personne a sur sa profession. En France, chaque personne pense a son rôle. C'est différent aux Etats-Unis òu chaque personne pense au le travail - pas á son rôle. J'ai beaucoup d'examples raconter plus tard. Troisièmement, l'idée d'inevitabilité. Elle m'a demandé si j'avais eu besoin d'un médecin. Je lui ai dit qu j'étais eu bonne santé, mais elle m'a dit, "Tu sois, tout le monde a besoin de voir un médecin éventuelement." Ecoutez! Hear it! Café Life in Paris (Version français ci-dessus) There's a certain time of night that I love in Paris. It comes just after sunset in the summer when the cool air starts slipping in and makes the clouds coagulate from a smooth blur into distinct outlines. Sometimes it's a darkly dramatically swirling sky against a mostly purple background as in Vincent van Gogh's paintings. At this time of night, the skyline, enveloping all the buildings and the people looking out or walking between, looks like a still life painting. Still life paintings always make me feel sentimental. Something about their detail yet distance allows the viewer emotional freedom to examine the picture more closely. 9:21 p.m. It's my favorite time of night. The light is just leaving. I'm sitting at Au Depart, a café across from the Jardin Luxembourg. The café is quite deserted. A young, attractive female sits in the corner by the window, checking her SMS messages on her mobile. I wonder what it's like to be her - young, beautiful, with long blond hair and lots of people always pursuing you. Across from me sits a businessman, still in his business costume. He is eyeing me keenly. Maybe he is imagining what it's like to be me - a stranger, from a strange country, thinking strange thoughts as I watch strange people. The Eiffel Tower is lit up now, its lights twinkling in the dusk. There's a languid feel in the air. People are moving toward their final destinations for the evening. It's the time of night when I most feel like an outsider - watching everyone else go "home". Home to their houses, family, friends. It's the time of night when I feel my aloneness most keenly. Sometimes I relish it; other times I feel its pang. I relish being detached and able to watch others voyeuristically, knowing I can stay outside and watch their nights progress. I am the one. I am everyone. I am whoever I want to be, whoever I choose to watch. I am free. It's 4:25 p.m. - between the petit café and the pastis, or as the French say, "between dog and wolf" - a time to let down, a time of emptiness and silence. The boss has left the cash register, one hears him working hard in the cellar. The manager swipes the bar with a cloth or smokes a cigarette, resting on the counter in front of the coffee machine. It is the moment that the neighboring shop keeper (or the butcher (or the hairdresser)) chooses to enter. The client says nothing. The manager carefully balances his cigarette on the edge of the counter and pours a glass of chinon (a chardonnay (a belgian beer)). Without a word, the customer of the afternoon holds his glass in a hand posed over the bar. Turns it in his fingers. Observes its color. He says nothing. He does not think. He is free. He takes the glass and the drink in one movement. He throws the coins on the counter, says goodbye with a movement of the head and leaves. The manager washes the empty glass in the sink. He wipes his hands, lights a new cigarette. They didn't exchange a word. 2:22:49 AM

Back in May... I'm up to 1/2 bottle of red wine per day now. It's so easy to do and the wine is so cheap and good. I'm also in the middle of this weird transition stage where I think I want something non-French to eat, so I go find Asian take-out (eating it there of course to save on unnecessary packaging), but when I come home I have to fight the urge to eat some bread & cheese and drink some red wine in order to feel like I've really eaten. I remember Tracy, my Chinese friend, telling me how her Dad would go out for an Italian dinner with pasta and still want to come home and eat rice. Wow, this French food really grows on a person! I'm consoling myself with passages from Edward Fitzgerald's original translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám where the Persian mathematician, astronomer, and sufi allegorically extols drinking red wine. I always thought I was well-qualified to write something like George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London for the Central Valley California since I managed to live there comfortably for $5/week when I was an undergraduate including $14/month plot rental, utilities, school supplies (tuition was free due to scholarships), medical expenses, taxes (my parents still claimed me as a dependent even though I paid for everything myself), and incidentals. What struck me about his book was that it was written just shortly after Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, but it sounds he lived a much more miserable life on a higher daily stipend than Hemingway did. Being an OR person, the goal is maximum quality of life for minimum cost. From my limited experiments so far, I have concluded you can live on practically nothing in Paris if you want. The biggest expense is lodging. (But I saw some permanent shelters under various bridges along the Seine. These wouldn't be allowed in the U.S., so I noticed them particularly here thinking one could actually live there comfortably and maybe even receive mail there. Imagine an address like: Mme Christy Bergman, sous Quai de Tolbiac, Paris 75013, FRANCE.) After that is food. I experimented the first week I was here: scrounging after the open-air daily markets for left-over produce and eating bread and butter. It seems possible to live a healthy existence that way if one wants. I managed that on less than $1/day. On the other hand, you can live lavishly for about $15/day with a multi-course french meal at most any common restaurant and a daily stop at a café. Considering that at my age I don't want to live on the rough if I don't have to, I've settled on a $9/day schedule (including tuition) which lets me live comfortably but not extravagantly by French standards. Taking advantage of my student status, I get 1/2 day in the classroom, access to all the Sorbonne facilities, medical insurance (I was uninsured in the USA for the last year - welcome to a socialist society!), 2 3-course meals per day on campus, as much chocolate as I want, a daily visit to a boulangerie, occasional visits to cafés, and red wine and coffee at home. That's my optimum for now. I'm still exploring different lodging options, but don't want to go into them publicly. Elections 2002 in Paris, France I'm sure you've heard, the big deals in France these days are the elections. The 2002 Elections were the first time France faced a serious chance of a far-right extremist group gaining political power. This is the story. April 21 were the 1st round Presidential elections. In these, all presidential candidates ran. Since no one candidate got more than 50% of the vote, there was a run-off election on May 5. Surprisingly, Lionel Jospin of the Socialist party and the current prime minister came in 3rd behind Jacques Chirac for the Gaullist party and Jean-Marie Le Pen for the Front National party, FN. Le Pen raised national consternation because his following was unexpectedly strong, especially among the unemployed and in small towns with large immigrant populations (Le Pen got 38% of the unemployed vote and 26% of the blue collar vote in April). His shocking platform consisted of: taking France out of the EU, reverting the currency back from the Euro to the French franc (taking France out of the EC), and sending all foreigners out of the country. His message was that the reason for France's hardships were foreigners taking jobs and resources away from French people. He also made public anti-semitist comments and referred to the German 3rd Reich and the fact that one concentration camp was actually located within the borders of France as mere historic details. I had a sort of Rosa Parks experience on the metro where I felt these sentiments. I was mindlessly sitting down when I felt a thump of the seat, a strong hand push, and some loud French cursings. It was coming from an older, white, drunk (probably unemployed) French man who did not think an asian should sit down in the metro. I went to a different part of the car and sat down while he cursed at me from a distance. None of the onlookers interfered or showed any reaction to the incident. So, the May 5 run-off presidential elections were to determine between Chirac or Le Pen for President of France. There was lots of consternation because France is historically a liberal country and if Chirac won, it would most likely be because many voters chose to vote for Chirac as a vote against Le Pen and it was uncertain what voters would do. Rumor was many leftists wanted to vote for Chirac with clothespins on their noses as signs of protest that they were forced to vote for someone they didn't want in order to keep someone else they really didn't want in office. (Kind of like our Gore/Bush election.) However, if they did so, voting authorities warned that they risked having their vote disqualified. France is a democratic country and takes their democracy very seriously. There is no electoral college as we have in the U.S. It is not allowed to show your voting preference at the polls, the reason being there should be no doubt everyone voted of their own volition. Given this background, between the April 21 and May 5 elections, there were riots at the Bastille and marches between the Places Bastille and Republic. (Rightists traditionally march on the side of the street closest to Joan of Arc's statue in the Louvre pavillion, while leftists march on the opposite side of the street.) Leftists usually rally in the Place Bastille or Place Republique which are working class districts. Rightists usually rally near Pyramides which is in the haute shopping district. I also saw lots of rallies in the 5th where I live, the student section of Paris. May 1st saw 400,000 people take to the streets, blocking all traffic through the Bastille and Republic. Some people in the Place Republic got trapped by the crowds and couldn't get out either by car or by metro for 2 hours. After the May 1 show, Paris police ramped up. I stayed away from that area on May 1 because I had been warned and I wasn't sure how dangerous it really was for a foreigner. But I went there on following days to see what was going on. First, I noticed the squadrons of police vans. The police set up temporary mobile headquarters near the scenes including a catering van that dishes out hot, multi-course meals. (In fact, watch to see which boulangerie the police visit and be sure to visit that one yourself. It's probably the nicest in the neighborhood. No bad donuts & coffee for French policemen.) Second, my impression was French people get very emotional, but generally, like New Yorkers, keep an undercurrent of practicallity. I saw some funny instance where mostly students gathered in the Bastille and sat in the street to block traffic. An old man, seeing this, took it upon himself to direct traffic away from the students, standing in the middle of the busy intersection. Of course, no one wanted to hit an old man, and everyone obeyed his hand wavings. Eventually the police stepped in and shooed everyone away. The police stood shoulder-to-shoulder forming a wall, dressed in riot gear and pushed the people away from their beloved 'steps of the Bastille' (really the steps of the Bastille Opera these days because the original Bastille was destroyed in the revolution). The police gradually drove everyone from the Place, across the street, and down into the metro. About the most violent thing I saw was when the police grabbed a woman who was holding a videocamera, ordered her to stop, and tried to take her camera. She yelled, clenched her camera tightly, and kept on rolling. I hid my camera in my coat and took off then. These are the pictures I have on my site. A police captain spotted me taking off and asked me what I was doing with my camera. I showed him some nice pictures of the Bastille column and tried to look as Japanese as possible. He smiled and let me go. The big day, May 5 arrived. I went to a voting station to see what it was like. It was very quiet and hardly crowded. I guess because voting's on Sunday, they don't get the crowds between 6-9 p.m. like we do in the U.S. from everybody trying to vote after work. Separate papers each showing the choice of one candidate are prepared ahead of time . Each voter is required to pick up one paper for each candidate and take them all into their booth. In the booth, they put the paper of their choice into an envelope, drop the envelope into a slot, and discard the rest in the recycling bin. That way, there's no chance of "punching" the wrong hole or punching their choice incompletely. (Remember our last election fiasco? The final hand-count in Florida now declares Gore won after all.) The French ballots are counted by hand by the election officials on site. Election results were televised at 8 p.m. that night. (How did they do that so fast? The voting station near me didn't close until 6 p.m.) Chirac won 82% of the popular vote based on a voter turn-out of 81%. The day after elections is an implicit holiday (versus an official holiday. I noticed it because the student cafeteria was closed, but no had said anything about it). There was a sigh of relief that Le Pen and his FN party didn't get their 30%. However, the story's not over. Parliamentary elections happen in 2 rounds June 9 and 16, and it's still to be seen how many FN party legislators get elected to the National Assembly and what will be the final make-up of the Parliament. (The relationship President/Parliament is similar to our President/Congress. Also, the relationships Parliament/Senate/National Assembly are like our Congress/Senate/House of Representatives.) 2:05:28 AM

© Copyright 2002 christy bergman.