Oren's Visit

One of the great things about being in Paris is that lots of people want to stop by and visit! My first guest was Oren, who came up from his terrible beach-side life on the Riviera to spend his spring break exploring the wonders of the capital with me.

I met Oren at Gare de Lyon on Saturday afternoon and we embarked upon a very epic walk (in a pretty serious downpour) just about all over the city, crossing the Seine from Tuileries, then to Saint-Michel and Notre-Dame, then to Les Halles and through the 9e to meet a bunch of friends for a Senegalese dinner at Nouveau Paris Dakar. We've all been craving ethnic food for awhile now, so the flavorful sauces and big pots of rice seriously hit the spot. Plus, there was a furry zebra mirror and pictures of food pasted up all over the bathroom, and the owner explained to us in great detail the history of all the dishes we were ordering. Afterward, we had a petite soiree at my friend Claire's apartment and attempted to check out the nightlife in Bastille.

But we were still up bright and early for a stroll down the Champs-Elysees on Sunday, ending at the Arc de Triomphe. At a leisurely pace, the Arc de Triomphe isn't more than 25 minutes from home - I am still in awe. Lunch was unfathomable: my host family's oldest son, Alexandre, and his family came, and for the occasion we had deer (or, as my host dad says with major hand gestures: STAG) with some kind of plummy sauce. I didn't think I liked deer, but I have never had better meat in my life. Unfortunately, Alexandre also took little Pierre with him, so there is no longer an adorable 2-year-old running around singing Frere Jacques and Clair de Lune. To make up for this emptiness, Oren and I went to a free oboe and organ concert at the Eglise de la Madeleine just down the street. Not quite the same. We then spent the evening at Montmartre listening to a mediocre guitarist and watching as the lights of nighttime Paris -- including the glittering Eiffel Tower - illuminated the sky. I also stumbled into a conversation with two older Algerian men doing the same thing, and we ended up having a very long talk about the Algerian War (topic of my JP) and the prospects for political change in Algeria today. These men were very frustrated with the current government, whom they said had basically adopted the mantle of the revolution while belonging to the group of activists who stayed safely outside the country during the actual war. But they also said that they don't see the massive changes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya spreading to Algeria because people are too wary of chaos thanks to the civil war that is still very fresh in people's memories. After parting ways with our new friends, Oren, Allison, and I headed to Concorde to ride "la grande roue", the seasonal ferris wheel with a panorama of the whole city.

Montmartre, with Eiffel Tower backdrop

View from la Grande Roue (ferris wheel) down Champs-Elysees toward the Arc de Triomphe

Because one can never get enough panoramas, we hit the good old Eiffel Tower on Monday, braving the bitter cold. We scaled it on foot and had a nice view of a solid fog. Good times nevertheless, though, and we continued our day of highlights with a pleasant visit to Notre Dame. That was followed by mint tea at the Mosquée, in my valiant effort to make Oren feel like he was where he actually wanted to be, i.e. in the middle of the Egyptian revolution.

I'm trying to figure out ways to avoid the awkward rapport I can't seem to avoid with the jolly beggar who stands between me and the metro, without fail, every single morning when I am on my way to class. He has a big red beard, a backpack, and an array of colorful scarves, and is quite harmless but has now seen me so often that he greets me with "coucou!" Now expecting this, I can't help but start chuckling even before I reach his post, which of course he notices and takes to mean that we are now friends. Tuesday's lunch break happened at the Musée Rodin. It's pretty wild when you can just drop by and see 'The Kiss' in between classes. For free. Of course, I also have fond memories of this particular museum because it was the first thing I ever did in Paris when we came here as a family the first time over Valentine's Day weekend in 2000. This time, I managed to stay 100 percent, whereas last time I conked out for an extended period in the nice, sunny upstairs room that looks out on the magnificent garden. My afternoon Berber anthropology class at Saint-Denis was down to 6 students, which means fewer people to mock me when I give my exposé (oral presentation), on March 22, on the Kabyle politics and the "Berber myth" in France during the colonial era. (The Kabyles are basically the Algerian Berbers, though it's a bit complicated.) For dinner, my host dad's great-niece and her boyfriend, who is a somewhat famous DJ in France, came to eat. DJ boyfriend told us how he had brought back Cheese Whiz as a joke from his recent trip to Miami, and everyone explained to me that no one would eat anything as heinous as that in France -- that the lowest-brow cheese you can get is something that is almost as bad as (gasp!) cream cheese. I, of course, came to cream cheese's defense, but I was fighting a losing battle.

Wednesday morning kicked off with another art history class trip to the Louvre, this time to look at the "grand format" (i.e. big) paintings by David and his students, the '4 G's' (unfortunately, not gangstas -- Gérard, Gros, Girodet, and Guérin). Because we're starting to study the transition out of neoclassicism into romanticism, we also looked at Ingres's Monsieur Bertin (1832), which we've been studying because it shows a bourgeois businessman painted not in the stiff manner of neoclassical portraiture, but in a very human, rather tired and unmajestic pose. One of the big crowd-pleasers in the room, though, is David's Coronation of Napoleon, which we then compared to Veronese's last supper in the next room to see how David had been inspired to paint a large crowd scene full of real people. The Veronese hangs opposite the Mona Lisa, though, which my professor breezed past without a moment's glance (although it's pretty hard to miss when there are mobs of tourists trying to fit themselves, the tiny painting, and their peace signs all into a photo).

I had other classes (Arabic and international relations) for the rest of the day. My classical Arabic lit class is really interesting: right now we're studying the Surat Al-Takwir, the chapter of the Qur'an that describes the apocalypse. Since the professor's specialty is music and pleasure poetry of the medieval Arab world, he knows a lot about different melodic ways to perform the Qur'an and played us various samples in class. We also discussed the linguistic evolution of different words for apocalypse in Arabic, and how they signify different shades of meaning relative to the English/French/Greek word. When my classes were over, Oren and I took another epic walk through the Jardin du Luxembourg, where children were playing with wooden boats in front of the Palais, all the way west to Invalides, then across the Seine, where we watched a beautiful sunset behind the Eiffel Tower. Then home.

On Thursday, I spent the morning trying to resolve a bureaucratic catastrophe involving my metro pass and visits to several offices of people who couldn't help. After my afternoon Arabic class, I hit up the library at the Institut du Monde Arabe, which just happens to have every book I could ever want for my JP research, in Arabic, English, and French. I stayed there into the evening and went to a panel discussion on female Arab politicians in France, which got pretty heated. The three speakers were Alima Boumediene-Thiery, a feisty left-wing activist/politician/academic, Bariza Khiari, a Socialist Party senator from Paris, who was a bit more restrained but still a tough cookie, and Bouchera Azzouzz, who helped Dominique de Villepin organize his "République Solidaire" party and opened by saying "I am a militant feminist." One of the best parts was when Khiari, who had been pretty restrained thus far, went on an eloquent tirade against the labels that have often been used to pigeonhole her and other women in politics. A guy in the audience had tried to tell one of the other panelists she was just a "bourgeois bobo" and Khiari said she had long been called "gauche tajine," an ethnicized version of "gauche caviar," a common criticism of the well-to-do left in France (as opposed to "droite bling-bling").

On Friday, all of us CUPA folks had our long-awaited appointment at the OFII office, which is basically the immigration medical exam. A lesson in French bureaucracy, it took 3 hours, which was of course totally unnecessary, but there you have it. Now I am officially ok to be here. Afterward, Oren and Allison and I went to the Centre Pompidou, my first time. Even though contemporary art isn't really "mon truc," it's a pretty cool space, and we dabbled in a little Picasso, a little Kandinsky, a little Braque. The best was actually an exhibit of works by Jean-Michel Othoniel, who makes beds and boats and abstract shapes out of glass balls and sometimes sulfur. Next we hit the Catacombs, where we saw... lots and lots of bones. But actually, I'm a fan of catacombs, and the ones here, which date from the 18th and 19th centuries, are filled with sober but poetic meditations on the ephemerality of life. Also, lots of the skulls are arranged in shapes -- crosses, patterns, skulls and crossbones, etc. -- which is more than a bit eerie. Thanks to Claire, we had dinner at a delicious vegetarian Vietnamese restaurant where every dish has some kind of "meat" -- "chicken" or "ham" (as they say here, <<entre guillemets>>). Then, Claire, Allison, Nathaniel, Oren, and I hiked over to the indoor ice skating rink at Pailleron19 that was featured in a New York Times blog not too long ago. It may or may not have involved a fog machine, a metal band, and a motown DJ. Right down to the colored lights, the man in the silver sequined skirt, and the other man wearing what may have been an entire sheep in vest form, this was a serious scene, in a great way.

Othoniel exhibit at the Pompidou

After all of this revelry, Saturday had to be a jour de repose. I finally made it outside for an aimless walk in the late afternoon and sat down to write letters in a charming park near the Eglise de Saint-Augustin. Then I accidentally took a road that brought me to the Champs-Elysees, which I followed back to the Tuileries. Somehow it had slipped my mind that it is Paris fashion week, however, and one of the main runways is at the entrance to the Tuileries. So I inconspicuously hung around for a while and watched people in absolutely ridiculous get-ups, like a woman with what was (I swear) a pink plate on her head, strut around and take pictures. A bunch of us tried to get tickets for Streetcar Named Desire (Un Tramway Nommé Désir) at the Comédie Française. But that failed and we ended up at an amazing restaurant/bar/live music venue in the 20th called La Bellevilloise, where there was a jazzy, '40s-style band playing. It's basically a big barn, which is obviously not a typical space in Paris, with some trees growing at the tables and a lot of chaleur to go around.



Today, Sunday, I trekked out to the hinterlands to the super-modern Bibliothèque François Mitterrand, aka the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, to register for an annual pass and get in some studying. All other libraries are closed on Sundays. Naturally. It's very weird to have to wait in line to enter a library, and to have to compete tooth and nail for a spot in one of the reading rooms. You get there an hour after it opens and you just may be out of luck. The weekend came to a close with a movie at Saint-Michel called "Toi, Moi, et Les Autres." It was a musical romance about a North African immigrant girl and a rich Parisian guy that was really not good at all, but involved a really fantastic mélange of chanson française, rock, Bollywood, rap, and immigration politics.