Home for the Holidays

I'm home for the holidays. While New York doesn't feel like a strange or foreign place, a couple of things have caught my eye after being away for so long:

Elevators here are really, really big.

There are more SUVs, and they are bigger, than I remembered from before. (This, even after the year's oil shocks.)

New York streets are wide, ugly and noisy. Parisian drivers and traffic are about as bad as New York's, but they don't honk their horns the way New Yorkers do. There is also little to no audio pollution of public spaces from Christmas carols there.

I love the extended shopping hours of most stores here.

I didn't realize how used to kissing on both cheeks I had become until everyone at the party I went to last night got confused when I tried it.

I really, really missed reading the New York Times on paper. But it looks quite small in comparison to some of the European papers I've been reading this fall.

And it's bloody cold here. But at least the buildings are overheated.

This is probably my last post till I get back to Paris, so please check back after Jan. 7. Have a great holiday yourself, wherever you are.

Architecture, part deux

When you think of Parisian architecture, you probably think of something like this:


Well, OK, not the Gap store at street level, but you know what I mean: the grand stone buildings with the wrought-iron railings overlooking wide boulevards.

This is a relatively recent development in the city's history. In the Middle Ages, Paris looked more like this:


These buildings in my neighborhood -- which you'd imagine come from England or Germany -- date from the 1500s. A historical plaque on one of them says this style of building was outlawed shortly after 1600 by one of the King Louises because of the fear of fire (a real fear; a half-century later London, still full of these buildings, burned to the ground).

Even older is this building, in one of Paris's mini-Chinatowns, which dates to the late 1200s:


If you want your very own part of history, that green sign on the building advertises an apartment for sale. I went by the realtor and there it was in the window, a three-room apartment with separate kitchen, fireplace, half-timbered walls: yours for just 320,000 euros.

The posting notes one flaw to the building. There is no elevator.

Random thoughts

Two random thoughts from a shopping trip at lunchtime today:

Not only haven't I seen any creches or Santa Clauses this year, I haven't heard any Christmas carols. Until now, when a French translation of "Jingle Bells" was playing in the big supermarket near my office. And you know what? I haven't missed them.

Also, the French are rather proud of their different approach to the whole subject of liability law. Unlike in America, you don't have to plan everything you do with one eye on the lawyers. Which probably explains why the outside entrance to the supermarket is a smooth marble tile that gets extremely slippery in the rain. I hate to think of how many old ladies have slipped and fallen on it. Lawyers or the fear of them would have put a stop to that in America long ago.

Bomb Scare

A package of dynamite was found today at one of Paris's ritziest department stores. It did not contain a detonator and no one was hurt. I don't live, work or shop in that area, so no danger there.

This sort of thing shouldn't be a surprise, I suppose; Britain, Spain and Germany have all been targets of Middle Eastern terrorism, so (assuming the package was in fact placed, as claimed, by someone linked to Afghanistan) why not France?

In general, though, this city seems far less on edge about security than London or New York. It's extremely rare to see armed security guards or even uniformed police officers walking a beat. They make very occasional announcements about not leaving belongings unattended in the Metro, but far less frequently there than in other cities.

My office building is a bit more secure than my company's office in the U.S.; you need an electronic tag to get through not only the street-level door but to enter the offices on each floor. I don't know how that compares to other French office buildings because I haven't needed to go to any others.

Residential buildings do generally have an extra layer of protection that you don't see in the U.S., however. Most buildings have a locked door that you have to get through before you can even buzz an individual apartment; this door is opened by a numeric code that the host has to give you before you can come in. It's quite common to see these "door codes" on invitations.

But whether this arrangement is for security purposes, or just to maintain people's privacy, I'm not sure.

EDITED 5:15p Paris time to reflect that it was a package of dynamite without a detonator, ergo not really a bomb ...

1,000 Bottles of Wine On the Wall

Before too much time has passed, I did want to tell you about France's largest wine show, which Joey and I attended a few weeks ago. It is held in the Paris convention center, a complex of 7 or 8 buildings on the southwestern edge of town. Each of these buildings is as big as the Javits Center in New York, so the whole thing is just mindblowing.

The wine show used only one of the buildings, but even that was enough. It is a show for independent vintners -- no corporate wineries, like Lafite-Rothschild or Louis Jadot, are allowed -- and they filled the entire thing with about 1,000 different wineries, each offering tastes to the public. Admission to the whole thing costs just 6 euros:


Each white cardboard circle that you see in this picture represents a winery. The bottom part of the sign is color-coded for the region of France the wine comes from. Typically each of these booths offers tastes of between 4 and 8 wines.

Even if you spit them all out, you can't taste more than a small fraction of the wines on offer -- you'll get drunk just from the fumes you absorb through your tongue! So you have to have a plan, which in our case was to mainly to search out wines from the most prestigious parts of Burgundy.

Unfortunately, our plan didn't allow for either writing down the names of the ones we liked or buying any on the spot (we were heading from here directly to the train for our weekend trip to Burgundy). Most of the French people at the show had brought folding hand trucks so they could buy these wines by the case to restock their cellar. We will be kicking ourselves -- and the Homeland Security department; even if we could buy them, how would we get them home? -- for years that we were unable to do the same.

Obama, the Source of All Good in the World

Today at the cafe, I saw a story in a newspaper, Le Journal du Dimanche, that began: "France will not watch the Obama train pass without reacting."

The article was about President Sarkozy's effort to increase diversity in France's top public colleges. This effort is a French effort to solve a French problem (society here is rife with racial and class prejudice, particularly against Africans and Muslims). It has absolutely nothing to do with Obama, and probably would have happened in exactly the same way had Obama never been born.

But he's going to get the credit, just like George Bush took all the blame ...

Voulez-vous doucher avec moi?

Seen in a shop window: the latest in French bathtub design ...

Holiday Treats (UPDATED)

Buches de Noel -- "Yule Logs," rolled-up cakes filled with cream and elaborately decorated -- are a big thing here. Le Bon Marche, one of the best food stores in France, had a nice selection today:


I've even seen "buchettes" -- single-serving versions. Haven't tried one yet but probably will soon.

UPDATED TO ADD:

A couple hours after I wrote this, I did go out -- in the cold rain, all in the service of you, my dear readers -- to get a "buchette." It is a miniature Yule Log in every way (by contrast, the full-size ones are about 10 inches long and 3 in diameter):


Inside this cake, which is only about an inch tall, are three miniature cake layers:


And that green thing on the top, behind the mini-macaroon, is a little plastic model of a two-handled lumberjack saw.

It's an exquisite piece of art, French food at its finest. Yours for just 3.50 euros ($4.30).

Thumbs Up?

If you enter a restaurant in France by yourself, the maitre d' will often flash you a thumbs-up. It doesn't necessarily mean he's happy to see you.

French people who count on their fingers start with the thumb, so he's merely indicating that you want a table for one. Two would be the thumb and forefinger; three would be the thumb, forefinger and middle finger; etc.

It could be worse, though; elsewhere in the world, such a gesture with the thumb is equivalent to the American gesture with the middle finger ...

Why I love the French

Regular readers of this blog may remember the public service announcement I saw on World AIDS Day showing a straight couple using condoms until they got an HIV test.

Today I saw the same announcement, but this time depicting a gay couple. In bed using condoms.

On Eurosport, the local equivalent to ESPN.

Can you imagine that in the United States?

Why I hate the French

The Metro has gotten better in the last couple of days, but the French work ethic showed itself anew at the gym today.

All of the elliptical machines were out -- obviously a plug had fallen out, or a fuse had blown, or something simple like that. But of course none of the three employees present thought it was their job to fix it. The best response was from the manager, a lady in her 50s. Now, this gym has a small reception area at street level but the bulk of the facility is downstairs, on two levels in the basement. But its manager is apparently unable to descend the stairs.

(By the way, and contrary to the myth in the United States, it's not impossible to fire French workers. It's just very expensive. Even if you fire them for cause, you owe them severance pay, which can amount to something like 15 months' salary.)

The Chalkboard Test

William Least Heat Moon's book about rural America, "Blue Highways," posited the "calendar test" for roadside cafes. The number of calendars hanging on the wall was supposed to be directly related to the quality of the food. A five-calendar cafe was exquisite; a six-calendar cafe was the Holy Grail, in the sense that it had been searched for but never actually found.

In Paris bistros, there's the chalkboard test. It's not quite a guarantee, but your odds of getting good food increase if the menu's on a chalkboard rather than printed, like this:


Or this:


Cutesiness doesn't seem to matter; this one looks tacky, but is actually from a very good restaurant:


And the number of chalkboards doesn't make a difference, though some places do overdo it:


The point is simply that a bistro with chalkboard menus probably changes them frequently, depending on what's fresh and good in the market. (This rule applies only to bistros; fancier restaurants reprint their menu on paper each night with updates or specials.)

And if you're in a bistro that has both a paper menu and a chalkboard with specials on it, my advice is to always, always order the special. While specials elsewhere can be dodgy -- sometimes they seem like a way to use up about-to-expire food -- here they're almost always the dishes that a kitchen has put the most thought and effort into.

The Joys of Commuting

If you were ever inclined to think of Europe as a mass-transit paradise, you wouldn't be after enduring my commute for the last week.

I take the Metro's 1 line, which is the most crowded line even at the best of times -- it's the only Metro line serving the huge office development at La Defense, on the western edge of Paris. It runs at capacity at rush hour, and unlike in New York there are no express tracks or alternate routes here. Each of the 14 Metro lines has exactly one set of tracks going in each direction, so if a train breaks down, every train behind it has to wait.

On average, I've been delayed 10-15 minutes each day, each way for about the last week -- and when the train is delayed, of course it only gets more crowded, as more people arrive in the station and try to pile on. If you're claustrophobic or need your personal space, the Metro at rush hour is not for you.

They make announcements when these things happen, sometimes, but as in New York the announcements aren't terribly informative. Probably the train driver doesn't know what's going on any more than we do.

The Parisians seem to take this all in stride, with much less overt complaining than you'd hear in New York. I guess they're used to it -- at least I haven't had to suffer any of the strikes that France is famous for, except for a couple days last month when I didn't get my newspaper at home because the deliverers were on strike.

I do note that the French have invented a new verb since I was here in '96: "patienter," which means "to be patient."

French Architecture Lesson #1

Beautifully tiled roofs like these are characteristic of Burgundy (these pictures were taken in Beaune and Dijon). You never see them in Paris:





And now you know.

Le Poisson Cru

There are an insane number of sushi restaurants in Paris these days:


I've tried it once. I like the stuff you get in New York better.

It's Christmas Time in the Ville

Just as in New York, they are selling Christmas trees on the street in my neighborhood:


But unlike New York, these trees come with stands, of a sort:


I guess they don't water their trees here.

Public displays of Christmas decorations are all over the place as well:




As I've noted before, however, it is basically trees, stars, snowflakes and other innocuous symbols. No Santa Clauses, which isn't a surprise, and no Nativity scenes or mangers, which is. Although it may be that the latter are banned under France's separation-of-church-and-state law, which is far stronger than the United States'.

Dogs, and their Traces

One of the things I remember most vividly from previous trips to Paris was the "merdemobile." It was a street cleaning truck with a huge hose coming out of the top. From his seat in the truck in the street, the driver could manipulate the hose to vacuum dog merde off the sidewalk.

Since the French are all about letting the government take care of them, it was perfect.

I haven't seen any merdemobiles since I got here, though. Presumably they're no longer used. Instead, there has been a campaign to get the French to clean up their own messes. These signs, which read "I love my neighborhood/I pick up," can be found all over Paris:


And in the provinces, they've taken it a step further; the city of Dijon provides bags for people to use in cleaning up:


What effect this all has had, it's hard to say. Certainly there is still dog merde to be found on the sidewalks, but my impression is that the problem isn't much worse here than in New York. Whether it's as bad as it was 20 years ago, I don't remember. Perhaps I don't want to.

The Winter Darkness Arrives

We're heading into the shortest days of the year and it's becoming very, very obvious how short they are.

While sunset these days is not that different from New York, you really see it in the morning. Here is my neighborhood at 8 a.m. today:


And the same block, at about 8:45 (15 minutes after sunrise):


As you can see, the omnipresent winter clouds don't help.

It's noticeably better than in London, which is at about the same longitude as Paris but keeps its clocks an hour earlier. When I was there a couple of weeks ago, not only did it get dark by 4 p.m. but the sun was at such a low angle in the sky it felt like late afternoon the whole day.

Paris is farther north than Montreal, and almost as far north as Vancouver, but it is a couple hundred miles south of London, enough that the sun (when it is out) doesn't feel like a refugee from another world here.

Still, every visitor I've had thus far has remarked on how late-rising the Parisians are; at this time of year, they have a pretty good excuse for it.

The Mysteries of Burgundy

Every decent French restaurant has at least six to eight red wines by the glass, most of which cost between 4 and 5 euros ($5 to $6, cheaper than in New York). There will always be a Bordeaux or two, a high-end Beaujolais, one or two Loire wines and a few from the Rhone or elsewhere in the south.

I have never seen a red Burgundy for sale by the glass. And the only white Burgundies have been the cheap kinds from the Maconnais. (Better wines, both red and white, are usually available by the bottle.)

I asked a Frenchman about this; he said the French consider Burgundy to be overpriced.

I've personally always considered it frustrating -- seven of every 10 Burgundies I've tried in the United States have been thin, light and unsatisfying. But the other three have been stunning, with haunting, sublime aromas of flowers, mushrooms, and autumn leaves. The problem is that even at $50 a bottle or so, you really don't know what you're going to get.

Joey and I set off for Burgundy this past weekend to try to solve the mystery.

We saw plenty of typical wine-country scenes like this:


And this:


But one thing was unexpected:


This shows a "grand cru" vineyard in the Corton-Charlemagne area, one of the best in Burgundy (alas, on a foggy morning). Anywhere else in the world, a vineyard like this would be owned by a single winery, which would bottle and sell the wines, and you'd be able to know exactly what you were getting.

Here, because the vineyards are so old and because French inheritance laws require estates to be divided equally among all the heirs, the vineyards have been drastically subdivided over the years. That strip in the center that looks more brown than the green strips to either side? Each strip is owned by a different person, and each owner has different ideas about when to plow, when to prune, when to fertilize. So the wine from each strip can be completely different.

How do you know which are the good ones? It's the same as anywhere else: you have to drink them to find out. How can you do this affordably? Go to Burgundy -- the wines can be had there for about half the price in the United States.

And drink up -- sante!

World AIDS Day, a la francaise

It's World AIDS Day today, and in France they actually notice: one of the local newspapers had it as the lead story (it helps that today is Monday and there isn't a lot of local news to compete with it). Most U.S. newspapers, by contrast, don't even consider it news.

On the French equivalent of MTV there was a public service announcement -- at 8 in the morning, no less -- that went as follows: A straight couple tumbles amorously into bed. A condom wrapper is discarded on the floor, and shown in closeup. You don't get to see the condom itself or the exact place where it is positioned (ahem), but it is clear how they are using it.

Then, the couple goes for an HIV test, which comes back negative, and leaves the doctor's office with the apparent intention of heading right back to bed. At the end, this tagline is shown: "Before stopping the condoms, have an AIDS test."

Couples who haven't been tested yet certainly have no excuse for not using condoms: they are sold in vending machines like this in public places (Metro stops, etc.) throughout the city:


They aren't given away free in gay bars here (that I've noticed, at least) but then that practice has largely ceased in America as well. I did pick up some free ones in both London and Hong Kong, however. Why there and not here? I have no idea.

A French Family Thanksgiving

Friends of ours who are French, but who lived for many years in the United States, invited us over for Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday night. Here's how the cross-cultural menu went.

We started with cucumbers topped with creme fraiche, followed by pate de campagne:


After this the turkey came out, accompanied by chestnut stuffing, mashed potatoes and roasted sweet potatoes (not casseroled, and certainly not with marshmallows, something I don't believe the French even have a word for):


Here's how the whole meal looked, with the turkey already carved (it was served buffet-style because this family has just moved to a new apartment and hasn't yet furnished it, not because it's a particularly French tradition):


There was, of course, bread:


And three types of wine:


Dessert was a pumpkin tart, made with canned pumpkin that an American cousin smuggled over in her suitcase. (You can actually get fresh pumpkins here if you look hard enough, but it's enough of a pain to turn them into pie that even most American cooks prefer to use canned.) Served with champagne.



How was it? Excellent. The turkey in particular was remarkable, smaller but much more flavorful than American turkeys. I think the French treat their turkeys the same way they treat their chickens: with reverence for the breed and a free-range upbringing.

One more difference from the American version of Thanksgiving: we didn't start eating till around 9:30 p.m. It was a workday, after all, and the French never sit down to dinner till well after 8 anyway. By the time we got done, close to 1 a.m., the Metro had closed for the night.

Beginning to Look a Lot Like ... part 2

With no Thanksgiving to intervene, businesses here have been gradually slipping into Christmas mode. So far the decorations are similar to those in America: lots of red and green, evergreens and poinsettias. But no Santa Claus at all, and (so far) nothing overtly religious.

And then there's Open Cafe, marching to their own drummer ...

The Bagels of my Childhood

Continuing my investigation into the European roots of the bagel, I trekked over to East London, where one block of Brick Lane contains the city's few remaining "beigel" bakeries.

This part of London was an immigrant neighborhood, like the Lower East Side of Manhattan, not an area populated by native English Jews. (Now it is a mixture of Bangladeshi immigrants and gentrifiers.) Here the bagels resemble the New York bagels of my childhood: small and very dense and chewy, not like the pretzel-style ones you find in Paris or Krakow or the modern, crusty/sweet New York kind.

They serve the bagels with smoked salmon or with "salt beef," which has the flavor of corned beef but the texture of pastrami. But I also saw a woman order one with nothing but mayonnaise on it. No doubt this comes from the same culinary tradition that created the "chip butty," a sandwich of french fries on buttered bread.

Cream cheese, as far as I can tell, is a wholly American concept.

What a mixed-up world we live in ...

So I went to London this past weekend, went to maybe half a dozen gay pubs and clubs over two nights, and found English beer on sale at exactly one of them.

Kronenbourg, a French beer, was on sale at almost every one.

I have yet to visit a gay bar in France that sells Kronenbourg. Here, they carry mostly Heineken.

Sometimes world trade just doesn't make sense.

Other notes from London:

I hadn't been there in 12 years and was astonished at the changes. And not in a good way. It hardly feels British anymore, and not just because of the beer. The people on the streets, the shops and restaurants, the products for sale, are all sort of generically cosmopolitan/urban. In fact, it felt a lot like New York except for three things: the damp, cutting chill; the architecture, which includes a lot of new construction as in New York but is still generally lower-rise and lower-density; and the joy the English still take in the artful use of their own language.

Paris, for all the changes here over the last decade, still feels distinctly different from New York.

Londoners do still have their IRA-induced paranoia about public trash cans, which are insanely difficult to find in a lot of places. They still queue, for everything except alcoholic drinks. They still have the Thames, and have actually done a nice job with a riverfront walk, which does however resemble New York's Hudson River Park in places. The river seems narrower than it used to, but that may just be my memory playing tricks on me. It still is wider than the Seine.

And of course, they still use pounds sterling, rather than the euro. Though the current financial turmoil may make it more difficult for that to continue. And maybe it's just me, but the new design for pound notes makes them look somehow less impressive than they used to, more like a secondary currency like the Danish krone. How the mighty have fallen.

Cafes: A Dying Breed?

In light of my rave about cafes last month, I thought I'd point you to this article. It seems cafes are dying out across France, a victim of changing eating habits, a decline in leisure time and a recent ban on indoor smoking.

I have no doubt that the article's conclusions are largely true, especially outside Paris and in non-touristed areas. There are still plenty in the areas I spend time in, but those are areas that get an exceptional amount of foot traffic from French and foreign tourists and businesspeople.

Then again, there are still glaciers in Switzerland and Patagonia, too, for the moment.

Le Beaujolais Nouveau est Arrive!

I'm told it isn't what it used to be, but there's still a bit of manufactured hype here about Beaujolais Nouveau, which "arrived" last night. A number of restaurants near my office (which is not in a touristy area) were having special dinners, with decorations vaguely in a harvesty theme -- it struck me as, in a way, a French equivalent to Thanksgiving.

The wine (which interestingly is called "Beaujolais Primeur" more often than "Beaujolais Nouveau") represents a bit of a profit center to the restaurants -- the one we went to was charging 4 euros a glass, which is a bit more than they charge for most of the better-quality wines they serve.

For Beaujolais Nouveau, it wasn't bad, but it's still basically alcoholic grape juice.

And with that, I'm off to London for the weekend, without my laptop, so blogging will resume Monday.

Scallops in the Raw (or Not)

Here's something you won't see in North American food stores:


This is what scallops look like when they're still in the shell.

Why they're not sold this way in the United States I'm not certain, but possibly it's because they're not caught locally (any shellfish still in the shell needs to remain alive until it's sold), or possibly because shucking them before sale allows them to be adulterated and watered down.

Scallops here are much tastier than most of the ones you find in New York. But I've only had them in restaurants -- shucking raw, live ones isn't something I'm quite ready to try yet ...

Chestnuts, part 2

Just in time for fall, the roasted chestnuts I wondered about a few weeks ago have made their appearance on city streets. The sellers all appear to be of Middle East descent, and the ones I approached strongly objected to having their picture taken, which makes you wonder ..

Euro Sports

Watching the French equivalent of ESPN every morning at the gym has given me a look into what European sports are all about. Some of it surprised me.

There is soccer, of course, first and foremost. French television follows not only the French league, but also the German, British, Italian and Spanish leagues; assorted inter-European matches; and even found time to tell us this morning that Egypt had beaten Cameroon for the championship of the African league.

(Oddly, despite its unquestioned high quality, Latin American soccer is rarely mentioned here. United States soccer, of course, is universally considered a joke.)

After soccer, the most popular sport seems to be, of all things, rugby, which apparently has a professional league here, although it's still a good deal more informal than American football.

Third would be a tie between tennis and something called "handball," which isn't the inner-city sport New Yorkers know but rather a team game, played indoors, that's sort of a mash-up of soccer and basketball. Players handle the ball with their hands and try to throw it into the goal, but the goal is a soccer-style net and the players are positioned like they are in soccer.

Of the major American sports, NBA basketball gets almost daily attention here, and more air time than the European basketball league does. In fact, one day last month, the station spent about a minute going through early-season game scores in the NBA before giving 10 seconds to the Phillies' victory in the World Series.

Yuppie Food Stamps

French law requires that businesses above a certain staff size (I'm not sure exactly what the number is, but somewhere near 50) provide their employees with either a cafeteria, or coupons to buy lunch in a restaurant.

Government interfering with private business, you might say, except that this has created a private industry of its own. Several companies compete to supply these coupons to cafeteria-free employers. The competition includes trying to get different restaurants to accept your coupons and not the other guys'. And thus, restaurant doors are festooned with stickers announcing which of all the competing sets of coupons are accepted therein:


At lunch in business areas it is quite common to see people using these. We joke in the U.S. that $20 bills are "yuppie food stamps," but here it's the real thing.

Res Ipsa Loquitur, part 3

I guess I'm going out dancing again in a couple of weeks.

And doesn't his resume sound nicer in French?

What Is "Manana" In French?

Leisurely service is a good thing in restaurants; there is nothing worse than being hustled to finish a good meal quickly (except, maybe, a bad meal).

Elsewhere, not so much.

And while the French tend to operate reasonably efficiently when you're standing in front of them -- walk into a store and you will be waited on promptly -- behind the scenes, it's another story.

You may remember that I needed to call the cable guy when I moved in because the Internet wasn't working. He came in mid-September, fixed a broken wire in the jack, and in passing noted that the set-top box was old and offered to get me a new one. It would be ready in a few weeks and the company would e-mail me directions on where to pick it up.

A "few" in French apparently means seven or eight, as I just got the thing today.

And it's even worse when the government is involved. I applied for my work visa in June, came here to live full-time in August and was told just yesterday that the visa is now ready for me to pick up -- at the French consulate in New York.

At least it will make a nice souvenir.

Restaurant Seating Etiquette

One of the most annoying things about restaurants in New York is that, by and large, they will not seat you unless your entire party has arrived -- even if you have a reservation.

I haven't seen that happen even once here in Paris. In fact, I've been stumped on more than one occasion, waiting outside for my dining companions to arrive when in fact they were already seated way in the back where I couldn't see them. (Embarrassingly, this even happened to me at lunch with a high official in my company. My only excuse was that he was way in the back, in a room I didn't even know existed.)

But a dinner the other day showed me for the first time why New York restaurants do this. And I have to say, I've got a bit more sympathy for them now.

It happened at a well-known steak-frites place, Relais de Venise. Though it's a one-trick pony -- the only dishes available are a lettuce-and-walnut salad, steak, frites and dessert -- it's quite a popular place. It opens at 7 and by 7:05 all the tables are full. And they turn them fast; even though they serve a three-course meal you are out of there in under an hour. (Very un-French, that.)

I got there at 7 and asked for a table for 2. The friend who was meeting me there hadn't arrived yet but I figured he'd be along in a few minutes, so I went ahead and ordered a bottle of wine and told them how we wanted our steak.

As time passed and my friend had still failed to show up, the manager kept shooting me dirty looks, and it soon hit me that even though I had ordered (the table was earning money already, not simply sitting empty), the longer it took for him to arrive, the longer we'd be sitting at the table and the longer it would be before they could give that table to someone else.

Or so I thought, anyway. He arrived at 7:20 and we were still out of there at 8:05.

Armistice Day

Ninety years ago today, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, World War I ended.

In the United States it's marked by the half-hearted holiday Veterans Day, but here, it's a major holiday. Most stores and businesses are closed, the Metro is running on a holiday schedule and the streets are quiet.

It's more like Memorial Day than Veterans Day, and not just in the degree of holiday-taking. Because while people are treating it as a real holiday, there's little in the way of commemoration of the war.

I went to the Arc de Triomphe, site of France's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, but saw very little out of the ordinary. There were flowers and wreaths on the tomb. There were people there, but not many more than on an average weekend day. There was silence. There were no public officials -- the president usually attends the ceremony here, but this year he elected to do it at the Verdun battlefield.

I was in London 20 years ago on Armistice Day and was struck by how many people were wearing red poppies on their lapel in commemoration of the Flanders battlefields, but I saw only a handful of those today. I'm not sure whether the tradition is dying out or whether it's mainly a British tradition -- the French army fought mainly to the south and east of the British, in areas that might not have had a huge poppy population.

World War I arguably was responsible for much of the tragedy of the 20th century: it directly led to the establishment of Communism in Russia and to Nazism in Germany (and thereby to World War II and the Cold War). It deserves to be remembered.

In a few places in northern France, the battlefields are preserved as monuments. I visited them earlier this fall. Here is a part of the Somme battlefield, where 19,000 British soldiers died in just one day of fighting, with trenches and shell holes still visible. The clump of people to the left of center is at the first British line; the other group, by the trees to the right, are at the German front line:


At Vimy Ridge, sheep mow the grass because unexploded shells in the mud make it too dangerous for humans to enter:



And finally, the Canadian war memorial at Vimy, overlooking the coal belt of northern France that remained in German hands throughout the war:



Happy Armistice Day, everyone.

A random act of beauty

(from Chartres Cathedral)

Obamamania continues

Seen in my neighborhood tonight (sorry, I wasn't carrying my camera at the time), outside a pizza shop, a sign reading:

"Pizza au Moment Obama"

It went on to explain that an Obama-moment pizza consisted of bacon and pineapple chutney.

Why they think that's an Obama pizza I have no idea, unless maybe it's the Hawaiian connection.

Still, as off-the-wall as it is, nice to see the French welcoming our new leader ...

Kebab Diplomacy

The Turks and Kurds have been at war for decades, but the French think they know how to make peace between them:

It's beginning to look a lot like ...

Christmas decorations went up on my local department store a couple of days ago:


It seems a bit early by American standards, but then they don't have Thanksgiving as an intervening milestone ...

More from the French press

Seen on newsstands this morning ...

Liberation (a leftist daily) -- "An American Dream"


Le Canard Enchaine (an alternative weekly): "America isn't afraid of Black anymore!"


Le Figaro (conservative daily): "What Obama is going to do"
Le Monde (well-known liberal daily): "America chose Barack Obama" (how boring)

And my favorite, from Les Echos (a business daily): "Barack Obama president, America in a state of grace"