It’s a foggy Tuesday morning here in Paris as I sit here and try to catch up with the events of the past few days. Last week started out well but ended rather poorly. (All the more reason to start this entry with a smile. Thanks Total!)
On Tuesday I headed back to Chinatown to check out their meat and poultry prices (sounds like the excitement is just non-stop here in Paris doesn’t it?). One of the (major) disadvantages to living in Paris, like most big cities, is the cost of living is pretty steep compared to say living in the Sudan or Vermont. Meat is generally very high. For example, the butcher across the street sells pork tenderloins for as much as €15 per kilo (about $11 a pound) and boneless chicken breasts for about €12 a kilo ($8 bucks a pound). In Chinatown however a sense of normalcy reigns over the meat counter: boneless chicken breasts sell for about $3 a pound and the same for turkey and pork tenderloin! Other meats follow suit. Vegetables and fruit are wild cards pricewise and you really have to spend time looking not only for good prices but good quality as well. But shopping at the large Chinese supermarkets (such as the Tang Bros.) not only provides you with access to hard-to-find specialty food and produce items but they are always running serious discounts on fresh items: lately it’s been huge heads of cauliflower for €1 each! Or about 50-150% less than elsewhere!
Plus we also found a place that caters to Asian-themed bars and restaurants, selling all sorts of supplies, dishware, cooking utensils, etc. and so we now go there for things such as napkins and such.
Chinatown is really quite a misnomer since there are many Vietnamese-oriented stores and shops as well Asian restaurants: Japanese, Thai, Chinese, and Vietnamese, all catering to a substantial Asian community along Avenue d’Ivry in the 13th arrondisement. For us it is an easy 20-minute walk before we get to Chinatown, just on the south side of Place d’Italie or we can hop on the no. 7 metro and get off at Porte d’Ivry and walk a block up to Avenue d’Ivry and we are right in the heart of things. There is even a huge store which carries just frozen Asian foods!
So naturally I had to go back there the end of the week – and this time Susan tagged along. We took the metro on Saturday afternoon. I wanted to show her the restaurant supply place and just let her feel the sense of the energy of the place; I mean everybody seemed to be shopping for the weekend. And of course we had to skirt the tour group huddled curbside across from the Tang Bros. As the guide yammered on about something the tourists looked at amazement and nodded their heads in unison, as if they had never seen either Asians or streets or buildings or all of the above together. Who knows?
Otherwise the week went quietly for us. Susan attended class and signed up for another 2 weeks of French lessons at Alliance Française. Beginning Monday morning she’ll do three mornings a week, 3 hours each morning. I will forgo taking French. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I will never really get this language – I never got Algebra either and have lived comfortably with that reality for many years now. And so it will be for French. I still work at speaking it whenever I can but as for lessons, no thanks, I’d rather take trigonometry.
Friday afternoon I met Susan at school and the plan was to jump on the no. 12 right at Vaugirard near school and go a couple of stops down to the huge Paris exposition center at Porte de Versailles to see the Paris Auto Show. (In fact it we walked down a stop and then hopped on the 12 at Convention, going just one stop farther.)
Neither of us had ever been to a major auto show before and this was pretty mind-boggling. The show covered some 7 or 8 different “halls” or exhibition buildings, of varying sizes: some halls were devoted to accessories and others to the tech side of the automotive world. We found our way to the entrance, bought tickets and went inside Hall no. 1, which was by far and away the largest and focused solely on “private cars”, that is to say, well, just cars. Anyway, we no sooner walked into the building than what was the very first booth we ran into? That’s right! You guessed it1 The Mini booth! Serendipity!
We spent the next couple of hours wandering around looking at all the cars – most of them regular production models and we couldn’t help but wonder if there was some sort of discount available to people who ordered cars off the floor since we saw a lot of folks interacting with sales reps as if they were doing just that – maybe they were just inquiring about wheelbase or horsepower. I don’t know.
Of course in some booths, one sensed a real class struggle just beneath the surface. At nearly all the booths people would simply open the door of a car and get in and start playing with the controls, checking it out. At BMW, Audi, Citroen, Renault, even in most of the Mercedes cars people were jumping in and out, opening and closing, checking things out; just as you or I might do in the showroom. However, this was not true everywhere. At the Ferrari booth a select few individuals – and they know who they are -- were “browsing” the cars, sipping champagne, asking questions, presumably about how fast it would go in the 1/4 mile that sort of thing, whereas the rest of us would simply ask the most obvious question: “so how much does this baby cost?” Uh-huh. Not a question that will actually get you into the car to play with the knobs and such. But at least at booths like Ferrari and Aston Martin the cars were outside, on raised pedestals to be sure, but they were part of the “show”.
Not so the Maybach. The (one) car was in a glass-enclosed room and only a handful of “aristocratii scatti” were permitted to enter and actually touch the car. A pretty young woman in a plain print dress stood guard just inside the door and was in constant contact with the great Unwashed outside. She had a pleasant smile on face and kept the door cracked just enough so she could tell the people they couldn’t come in. As I stood there watching I imagined the conversation something like this:
Guy in t-shirt that says “ready to wear” says (in French): “Hey can I take a look at that car”
Pretty woman guarding door says (in French): “no you can’t come in here, it’s for special people only and, let’s face it you’re not one of them and never will be so get used to that fact right here and now and go look at the Dacia Logan or the little Renault Twingo because that’s what you are a Twingo! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
Anyway it was cool to see the concept cars by Peugeot and Citroen (above) and Citroen had a pretty imaginative bit of mechanical “performance” art using a full-size model of one of the old Citroen sedans which made this remarkable transformation into some kind of “power transformer” all set to techno dance music. Cool.
We also saw the new Audi R8 (below), as well as solar-powered cars (not available in Texas or Saudi Arabia) and of course the Lamborghini booth. That was disappointing: very nice cars but boring colors! White? Gray? Lamboghini?! What industry design giant came up with that concept I wonder. And what’s with car wheels today? The ones on the Lamborginis had hardly any tire on them the wheels are so huge! Frankly that cannot be good. And on a car that goes in excess of 250 kms/hour – well it should be interesting.
Susan and I continued our wanderings around the various halls – stopping at one point to take a break and sip some white wine while we watched the ebb and flow of humanity sweeping across the floors of hall 5. Or was or 4? Or maybe 3.2.
In between halls we couldn’t help but notice one interesting thing: the French Foreign Legion had a substantial display booth set up, with men (and one woman I might add) handing out literature, amidst tents set up and mannequins dressed in various styles of Legion outfits and even a couple of tanks; one which was in use in France around 1935 and other, the FT17 from, well, 1917 and made by Renault (below). I wondered why it was here and not at the Renault booth. Anyway Susan and I stopped and picked a recruiting brochure wondering if they would take couples – the answer is they don’t, single folks only; oh and the maximum age is 40. So we’re back to square one.
And what is square one exactly? That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out. If you have the answer please drop us a line and let us know.
The weekend had promised to be a beehive of activity: Paris “nuit blanche” (white night) was scheduled for Saturday night and so we thought we might try and catch an open museum or two and have a late meal somewhere. We also planned to go to Versailles on Sunday. But late Friday night I caught a virus of some sort (probably from standing too close to the Maybach booth) and so we stayed in; Susan studied French and we watched episodes of Seinfeld on DVD compliments of Christina (our niece).
Then came the Big Blow. On Sunday I discovered that somehow, I deleted all my Pere Lachaise images – hundreds of photos I collected during some dozen or so days of work out there, had seemingly disappeared. How it happened is anyone’s guess, but I can only assume I inadvertently deleted them. (I doubt I did it advertently.)
Anyway I set about trying to recover the files. I went online, Googled my problem and after a couple of false starts with two other programs I downloaded a copy of Prosoft’s Data Rescue II. (I use their backup software. Which is funny of course since I didn’t back of those images. Huh-huh.) After several hours I was able to recover nearly 78 gigabytes of files from the external hard drive where the images had been stored but sad to say only a fraction of my Pere Lachaise images were recovered. I have duplicates of most of my image files but unfortunately not my cemetery collections; I simply do not have the hard drive space. I know, I know – buy more space. That’s the next step believe me. So a word to the wise out there: “ya got images, ya got important files, back ‘em up at least in two places.” And don’t do it on the cheap. Remember, “you get what you pay for.”
The one bright note is that I do have online copies of my “favorites” so I can now plot my return to the cemetery in a more systematic fashion. It’s back to Pere Lachaise as soon as the weather opens back up. And hey I wanted to go back anyway after the leaves were off and the light spread out so this may be a blessing in disguise, which is exactly how my mother-in-law would see this whole thing, right Mom?
Wish you were here,
Steve
PS Tuesday afternoon. I just came back from Pere Lachaise with a batch of some 350 images and have completed 8 out of 97 divisions.
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