Dateline France, 10 April 1990 Report 16 This report will not report much on travels, but rather on bits and pieces of life in France. Sarah's recent loss of her first tooth brings up the topic of modern mythology. In France, there is no Tooth Fairy. Instead, the Little Mouse comes and leaves a present (which can be money) under the pillow with the tooth. (The Little Mouse does not remove the tooth, so he has to be careful about double billing.) At Christmas time, Pere Noel (Father Christmas) brings presents to kids on Christmas eve, but leaves them in shoes that are placed by the hearth or near the door if there is no fireplace. Pere Noel is tall and thin, and his costume looks much more like the cardinal's vestments of the original St. Nicholas than does the costume of the American Santa Claus. However, in asking around to people from other countries, I have at last figured out the answer to a question puzzling me since about first grade: How does Santa get to so many houses in one night? He doesn't! He does different countries on different days. The range I was able to find was almost a month for the date that the Santa-analog comes: 10 December in Holland to Epiphany in Spain. So there, you doubters! For Easter, there is hunting for Easter eggs in France, but they are not left by the Easter Bunny. Instead the church bells of Rome fly up to France, and their pealing causes eggs to drop out into peoples' gardens. It at least has the advantage over our custom of some religious connection. Closely related to those topics is Poisson d'Avril, or April Fish Day, on April 1st. Like our April Fools' Day, the idea is to play tricks on other people. The standard joke is to stick a cut-out of a fish to someones back. Unfortunately, Fish Day was a Sunday, so I didn't get to see pranks in action at work. Last week in the train station under the Arch of Triumph Kaye and I spotted a vending machine for business cards. For 50F, you can type in your name, address, etc., select a font, and get 50 small business cards or 25 large ones. Looking at the samples, they seem to come off a laser printer. Maybe for a little extra money it will also print you fake ID. Strikes are common in France. Unlike the US, most French strikes are for a short period of time, with the time and duration announced in advance. 24- and 36-hour strikes are common. They don't seem to coincide with sporting events as much as the half-day strikes in Italy do. There have been some open-ended strikes while I was here, one long one against Peugot in Mulhouse, and a national (I think) strike by doctors and interns working in emergency rooms. Recently, there was an interesting combination of strikes. There was a PTT (Post, Telephone, Telegraph) strike that kept our newspapers from coming, which kept you from reading about the audio-visual (Radio and TV announcers) strike, which kept you from hearing about the mail strike... There are often dishes served in the INRIA cafeteria that involve parts of animals I am not used to eating. I usually don't get them, and it doesn't bother me much to see someone else eat them. But there was an exception recently. Watching someone eat head of veal is an instant appetite suppressant. As prepared, it is a gelatinous mass that truly looks like it belongs in a specimin bottle in a medical museum. Perhaps if the guy eating hadn't exhibited so much gusto in digging in, in wouldn't have affected me as much. Recently I accompanied Kaye on the monthly stocking-up trip to Carrefour, the nearest hypermarket. For those of you in Oregon, a hypermarket is something like a cross between Fred Meyer and Waremart, only three times the size and it sells household appliances as well. Furthermore, there is no divison between departments. You pay for paint, potatoes, pants and paper all at the same checkout. We stock up on water and milk (ultra- pasteurized) there. Two things that impressed me. The first was a laser scanner set up in an aisle that you could use to read the bar code on an item, if the price on the shelf was unclear (or you weren't sure it was in the right place). People had left several items lying around the machine, so I tried scanning them. It knew what most of them were and what each cost, but for two items it informed me that "This store doesn't sell that item." The other impressive thing was the rack of shrink-wrapped 10-speed bicycles. There is also a nice cafeteria there. Rather than going down one long line and getting food out of steam trays, there are four or five separate stations where the different main dishes are being separately prepared. Spaghetti carbonara, a carrot/onion/egg tart and a spinach and bacon salad were some of the choices the night we went. There is a style of tree pruning common in France that seems totally radical by US standards. It has a very simple algorithm: Every three years, cut off every branch less than two inches in diameter. Amazingly, this doesn' kill the trees. It keeps them at roughly a constant shape and size through their maturity. The large tree behind our apartment just had such a haircut, and I'm not sure if it going to have leaves this summer or not. Lots of visitors coming through. Jim Clifford is living in Paris now for part of his sabbatical. Peter Buneman was here for a couple weeks about a month back, and Harry Porter passed through on his way to a conference to Italy. Had them all over one night for dinner. Kaye's folks have been here, my folks are here now, my aunt is coming in May and Kaye's best friend from college is visiting in June. We expect Becky Lakey for dinner on Easter. At INRIA, Scott Danforth has arrived from MCC for a years' stay, and Brain Hart and Rick Cattell visited recently. About my favorite thing to watch on TV are circuses from France and Monaco. These are one-ring circuses, but the variety of acts greatly exceeds that of US circuses. My favorite act I've seen for far was a jump-roping team from Russia. In their finale, A is turning her own jump rope. She is also jumping two ropes turned by B and C together. A, B and C are also jumping a rope turned by D and E. Meanwhile, D is jumping a rope turned by F and G, and E is jumping a rope turned by H and I. If you've been following, you see this implies F or G must be jumping the rope turned by D and E, and likewise for H or I. It was like a Dr. Seuss book come to life. I need to head home for dinner; this one will be short.