Time-Lapse Photography

As I prepare to head back to Paris today, a few more observations about New York.

Returning to your home after months away is like seeing your life in time-lapse photography. Not just the obvious things that I noted in my last post, but more subtle changes in people and places.

My 12-year-old nephew's voice has noticeably changed in the last four months, for example. One friend's substance abuse problem seems to have gotten worse. Many more nightclubs have closed and the mood at those that remain is distinctly subdued. At the stores, I have never seen such sales in my life (50% off everything at Bloomingdale's Soho!).

(There were no such sales when I left Paris, but that's because French law prohibits sales except at certain times of year. They should be going when I get back; stay tuned for details.)

I also noticed, as the days went on here, how subtly different my consumption of alcohol and caffeine has become while living in France.

The French drink lots of coffee and wine, but at any one sitting they drink less than Americans do. Coffee comes in single espresso-size shots, for the most part. A 12-ounce cup of coffee at my office cafeteria in New York -- the smallest size they offer -- is huge in comparison, and wired me way too much for the day. Yet I used to drink even more than that in the morning, sometimes.

French restaurants serve wine by the bottle, of course, and bottles are the same size everywhere. But most also serve it in carafes, which come in standard sizes of one-third and two-thirds of a standard wine bottle. It turns out that one-third of a bottle is the perfect amount of wine with a meal. Half a bottle, as one would have if sharing it with one's partner, sends one over the edge from contented to sleepy.

What this means as far as changes in my life when I get back for good next month, I don't know yet. But I'll be glad to get back to the right amounts of these things starting tomorrow.

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 ...