Dateline France, 4 Decemberr 1989 Report 8 Sweatshirt of the Week (pastel color with flowers around it): TUNA Random Observations: 1. I see spray-painted graffiti around Paris, some, although it gets cleaned off of trains quickly. "Stencil" graffiti is common, with the spray painting being done through a stencil. Some of it is artistic, and there is even a line of postcards featuring it. 2. I think I've seen one drinking fountain since I've been in France. We've learned to carrry a bottle of water with us on our excursions. There is an occaisional public spigot, but I haven't figured out if it is okay to drink from them. 3. French companies advertise cheese the way we advertise makeup or perfume in the US. The cheese you serve is part of the image you project. (I suspect the image that Velveeta projects is roughly that of dabbing Pinesol behind your ears or doing your lips with a Magic Marker.) 4. There has been a 10-day stretch of cold weather here (but clear days). Kaye and I both noticed that almost no French adults wear hats, even in sub-freezing weather. Maybe its because Germans wear hats. Last weekend we saw a women on the street selling papers who was so cold she was shivering, and no hat. Well, this is one case where I'm not going to try to blend in. 5. Lots of "exhibition" roller skating in public squares. The best I've seen is a one-legged slalom between 30 pylons about 4-1/2 feet apart, going downhill. It was pure Zen. Lots of skateboards, too, but the skateboarders are less proficient than their American counterparts. 6. We've had some extremely smokey weekends in Le Vesinet this fall. People are burning yard debris all day Saturday and Sunday. We are in a depression where the Seine runs, and it just doesn't disperse. I've even had my eyes water in our apartment. Three Saturdays ago we stepped off the train from Paris and the smoke was so thick it seemed like fog. We found out later that it was the Saturday that the local *hospital* burns its debris. I'm surprised there isn't any outcry over this smoke pollution. 7. We thought it was interesting when we found out Luke would be learning cursive in 2nd grade. It took him a while to get the hang of it, but by now it has actually speeded up his writing. The real surprise came after Toussaint break when Sarah started learning cursive writing in Kindergarten. 8. French telecommunications has made great strides of late from the horror stories one heard 15 or 20 years ago about poor service and long waits for phone installations. They lead us in several areas. Getting a phone is easy-- you go to the phone office and they give you one, you come home and plug it in, and your new number is operational, often in under a day. The phone system also offers an alternative to a directory called Minitel. This is a small terminal that the phone company loans you for free, and you can use to make directory inquiries interactively. It is much more versatile than a directory, as you have many modes of query. For example, I saw someone find a restaurant once, only remembering the general part of the city it was in and that it had "Jardin" in its name. There are also all kinds of services available through it: travel reservations, play tickets, catalog shopping, housing information, bulletin boards (including X-rated ones) and interactive games. The catch is that you pay by the minute for connect time. Another innovation is the pre-paid phone card. It's the size of a credit card, but it has an integrated circuit embedded in it (you can see the IC), and you purchase them in various denominations. You buy them in a tobacco shop, which is also where you get bus tickets, stamps and lottery tickets. (Cigarettes, too, I think.) Most public phones in Paris are set up to take cards. When you put the card in the phone, it shows how many time units you have left, and the card debits as you talk. The great advantage over coins or tokens is that no one has to come around to empty the cash box. There has been a recent suggestion for prepaid parking cards that would have a clock and tick off the time while you are parked. You would just start it and leave it on your dashboard (and hope you remember to turn it off when you return to the car). Telecommunications is currently part of the post office, but is scheduled to become a separate entity in a couple years, I believe. 9. In contrast, when it comes to paper communication, it is standard for forms to be filled out in duplicate by hand. Our lease had do copies, both done by hand, and in all our immigration dealings, multiple copies were done each by hand. 10. Sarah has become a connoisseur of French toilets. She is interested in how they flush, and is amused by squat toilets (and has learned to use them). At her school, there is one restroom for the boys and girls; the toilets for the girls have no seats (and no toilet paper half the time). Her favorite toilet to date is one with a square bowl at a restaurant we visited. 11. The French are accused by the Chinese of "cooking at the table." The Chinese, being more advanced, do all the cutting in the kitchen, so knives and forks are not needed at the table. But it goes beyond cutlery. At lunch I see people mixing their own salad dressing from the condiments on the table, mixing up yogurt with sliced cucumbers and shredded carrots, and otherwise playing with their food. 12. We had our first encounter with French medicine when Sarah recently got an ear infection. An office visit to the doctor (who lived and had his office 2 blocks away) cost about $14. A house call would be $20. The total for all Sarah's medicine (antibiotic, eardrops, children's aspirin and cough syrup) was $10. Plus I will get some of the $24 back when I get my French social security number. On to our various excursions: I spent a couple nights in Grenoble recently, when I went down to visit the people working on the ARISTOTE project at the IMAG lab at the universities there. It was my first close-up view of the Alps, and the furthest south I've been in France so far. While the city has very old origins (pre-roman), there is not much to be seen of that era any more. On one of the bluffs near town there is a fortification from the last century, when Grenoble was at the frontier of France, and Savoy was another kingdom. Walnuts are a specialty of the region, as is the liquer Chartreuse, which is made by Carthusian monks in the mountains nearby. One night I joined Michel Adiba and family at his apartment for a supper of Raclette. Raclette is a Swiss chesse that is eaten melted (originally by the fire, but the Adibas had a special Raclette melter that fits on the table). You eat the melted cheese with boiled potatoes, cured ham and cornichons (little pickles). Napoleon passed through Grenoble on his way back to Paris from exile. Judging from the number of inns that claim "Napoleon slept here," he was in the habit of marching slowly and bedding down three or four times a day. Another trip took us to the "Salon de Gastronomie" at CNIT, a conference center in La Defense, a business center on the outskirts of Paris. The show was quite different from "Gastronomy Days" that we went to on our Loire trip. That featured competitions in different categories. The Salon was more of an exposition of products by regions of France. I think the main targets were restaurant and store owners. While there was an admission fee, Kaye flashed one of her Gracious Loser business cards and got the whole family in for free. In addition to the stands grouped by region, there were stands for other countries, for items one might use in a restaurant: cookware, crockery, wood boxes for offering cigarettes and cigars (that's all one stand seemed to be promoting), fake plants, plastic foundations for doing fancy food displays (shapes include dolphins and swans), and for hotel and cooking schools. Some of the stands were mobbed, like the one for Scottish smoked salmon. Some people seemed to be cruising just for the eats and the alcohol, not caring to learn much about what they were sampling. We hit it off with someone working a stand for wines and liqueurs from the Basque country. We tried three wines and seven liqueurs from that region. The gross thing was when people cruising by the booth started picking up our half-finished glasses and finishing them off. While we were sampling and talking, Sarah went off to make friends with a lady in the next booth and with two girls offering tastes of Basque sweets. Another interesting booth was one promoting Israeli products. We tried a new kind of non-bitter persimmon, called "Sharon Fruit", had some gigantic fresh dates, and came home with samples of 5 kinds of fresh herbs. The kids and I left Kaye to spend some more time at the Salon, to go topside and look around La Defense. It is the site of the newly dedicated Grand Arch, and also of a very large shopping center, in which we walked around a bit. Another trip into Paris took us to the Maritime Museum, the Eiffel Tower, and a Lebanese restaurant. There seem to be two grades of Parisien museums, well-funded, such as the Orsay Museum, and under-funded, such as the National Technical Museum. The Maritime museum seemed in the latter category. Many artifacts, but not a lot in the way of explanatory material and not organized in any enlightening fashion. There were some interesting things: A "pleasure barge" built for Napoleon in under a month, models of 19th century mines, a diorama of how the obelisks were moved from Egypt to Paris (wrap 'em in wood, tip 'em over, cut off the stern of your boat, and slide 'em in) and the workshop of a model repairer. The Eiffel tower is all done up with lights and banners, as this is its 100th year of existence. We took the elevators to the second level, which is where the best view is on cloudy or smokey days. On such days, you don't see anything far away, and going to the top just puts you further from local landmarks. Plus we're talking world-class acrophobe here. There are several cafes and restaurants in the tower, plus many souvenir shops and a small museum. The Otis elevator company had donated a bunch of plaques that described events in the history of the tower, such as the pilot who flew under the tower and the inventor who unsuccessfully tested his glider/parachute from it. (The good news is he died of fright before hitting the ground.) The Lebanese restaurant was one we happened across on another trip and decided to try. We made a dinner of a selection of 10 appetizers they do. The waiter was kind enough to ask if we would like to substitute something for the raw-meat dishes. An interesting touch was the platter of crudites: lettuce, cucumber, tomato, green pepper--all whole. On a couple of recent trips to the city we have gone to see the shop windows made up for Christmas at the big department stores. They feature various kinds of toys animated through the use of various hidden motors, solenoids and conveyer belts. Each of the stores we visited had a Barbie window: 30 Barbies vs. King Kong, Barbie and Ken on the Love Boat, Barbies on Parade in Rio (with Flying Barbie). Sarah's favorite window was Pink Panthers in Borneo (on stilts, dancing, beating drums), Luke liked 4-ft.-high Lego pirates, and Kaye liked Babars flying in balloons, helicopters and airplane made of pots, collanders and kitchen utensils. My choice was a model of the Tower Bridge (in London) made from Meccano (the British version of Erector Set). It's been an interesting time to be here, with all that is going on in Eastern Europe. Much of Western Europe is ambivalent on the prospect of a reunited Germany, now that it seems an actual possibility. As one French write remarked, "France likes Germany so much that she wants two of them." The best joke I've heard from it: Q: What's the difference between Sweden and Hungary? A: Sweden has a communist party. For you Portlandians (and Alohans, Huberites and Orencoese), I hope you all saw the piece on my dad in Willamette Week, talking about the "Math in the Mind's Eye" curriculum he's developing at the Math Learning Center.