I'm back in New Hampshire for Christmas, but will post a few photos I took this weekend in Paris. Here are some gorgeous Buche de Noel on the Rue de Bretagne. The line to purchase them was out the door.
I can't help but comparing the prices of things between France and the USA. In particular, I'm shocked by the prices for mobile phone plans and internet/tv/telephone, but for different reasons.
Mobile phones: The mobile phone prices here are really high! Surprisingly so considering how everyone has one, and seems to have had one for much longer than we have in the US. For example, the cheapest plan at Bouygues Telecom is 22 euros per month for a 2-year contract and gives you ... 1 HOUR (yes, 60 minutes) of talking time per MONTH. On the upside, all incoming mobile calls are free, so you only pay for calls that you make. Then there are all these terms about calling other mobiles versus calling landlines ... on the plan I mention above you get free calling to all landline phones from 8pm to midnight. But how much are people calling landline phones from their mobiles? I had a very cheap plan at Verizon in the US, for $35/month I got 400 minutes, plus unlimited nights & weekends plus free calls to all other Verizon members (which was all of my family). And Verizon is one of the more expensive providers (per # of minutes) in the US.
On the flip side...
TV/Internet/Telephone: These 3-in-1 packages are ridiculously cheap here in France. It's absolutely amazing to me. For 30 euros a month you get a digital cable package with a ton of channels, high speed internet AND a landline phone with unlimited calling to other landlines AND (in many cases) to the US and Canada. 30 euros!!! In the US to get internet, phone and digital cable would cost about $130/month (in Washington, DC at least). I guess the cheap cable costs can help you justify the super-high price of buying a TV set here.
An interesting and extensive blog post from Amerloque on French Holiday Traditions.
During my walk on Saturday night down the rue de Bretagne, I came across this shop selling chickens (correction, according to a french coworker, these are not chickens, rather they are Chapons, which are something special for Noel?)... with feathers on their heads and tails! I guess it's a special holiday thing. How does that work exactly? Do you cook the chicken with the feathers so your guests can see them? (I'm guessing not, I don't think the feathers would survive the heat). Do you pluck off the feathers and then do something with them as garnish? If your guests can't see the feathers, then what is the point of leaving them on the bird???
Then, this morning while I was uploading this photo I noticed one other interesting element. The round blue sticker on the right of each bird says "Vu a la TV". Does that mean "As Seen On TV"??? Are these infomercial chickens?? I think I'll have to go back to that shop and talk to someone behind the counter to get the scoop!
Last night I had one of those aha! moments that happen every so often when living in a new city. Every time I leave my apartment, I always turn left. My office is left, the shopping areas I knew were left, I always just walked left. Occasionally I would look right, but it didn't look too interesting, and I haven't taken the time to explore. Well. I was in for a treat last night.
I was heading to a friend's place in le Marais for dinner. Our apartments aren't that far apart, but it had been taking me forever to get there. I was intent on finding a new route. So I pulled out my trusty Paris Poche map, and found a new route to get there. One that involved me turning Right.
So I set off, not really expecting to see anything other than residential streets and voila! I stumble into Rue de Bretagne, which was buzzing with activity. There was an outdoor Christmas market going on, plus several great food stores (the patisserie, shown above, as well as a fromagerie, coffee bean shop and great meat store), and to top it off, an outdoor fruit & vegetable market!
All this time I've been trekking down to rue Montorgueil for a market, when there was one just a couple of blocks from my house. I just love moments like this - when I think I have everything figured out, and then I get a surprise. Ok, usually the surprises are bad ones (like, I didn't put the sticker on my mailbox right so of course I'm not getting any mail) - but little moments like this make it worthwhile.
Discovering this new street last night made me think about how quickly our lives naturally gravitate towards routines. I guess it's for a sense of normalcy and comfort, but within just a couple of months, I already have regular places to shop, regular lunch haunts, a regular route I walk to work, etc... I believe it's good to break your routine once in awhile to just expose yourself to something new, stay fresh, get inspired and maybe meet some new people. So perhaps for one of my New Years resolutions I'll try to avoid a routine for awhile, until I've really explored what my options are (although exploring options in Paris could probably go on forever...).
In a follow up to yesterday's post about my errant mailbox sticker, when I came downstairs this morning someone had removed my name sticker, and created a new one, on a nameplate in the "proper" location on the mailbox. Hmmmm... I have a feeling that my slowness in moving the sticker myself after getting that lecture made me an enemy in the building. We shall see!
I finally fell victim to the cold that seems to be going around Paris. Everyone is sick. My coworkers, friends I had dinner with last weekend, the lady coughing next to me on the Metro. Ugh. So I've managed to "attraper un rhume" (catch a cold).
Before coming to Paris I bought a couple boxes of each of my favorite US medications, thinking that if I was really sick, I might not want to worry about finding the French equivalent. Well, apparently I forgot the Sudafed, because there was none to be found this morning while rummaging around my private drugstore (aka, the bottom drawer in my bathroom).
I love French pharmacies, but I've never been sick here before and needed a real medication (usually I just frequent pharamacies for various beauty products).
What a great experience though! You just walk in, and one of the friendly (friendly?!) women behind the counter will ask you what your symptoms are (cold with a stuffy nose), and then she asks some follow up questions (ok, do you have a headache? A fever? What medications are you on?) and voila! a medication is selected from the shelves behind the counter. And then she proceeds to tell you how to use it, and even offers some other health tips (like I should be irrigating my nose with saline or something ... not sure about that one). 4 euros later I was out the door and feeling quite happy about the whole transaction. This experience was definitely better than standing in the immense "cold and flu" section at Target, and trying to decipher active ingredients and brands, and match them to your symptoms when you're feeling under the weather!
Progress! Today two big things happened:
1) I received my first piece of mail, addressed to me, at my apartment. This is very reassuring that the little sticker with my name on it on my mailbox is "official" enough for La Poste to deliver mail to me!
2) I had my immigration medical exam and got my carte de sejour (or at least the temporary one, the real one is coming in the mail).
Excellent. I finally feel like I live in France.
Now, a few interesting details. I have read on other moving to France blogs about major problems with La Poste. Specifically how a random name sticker on a mailbox isn't official enough to actually receive mail. Apparently it's official enough for my mailperson (although I was a bit concerned because I recently ordered a new mobile phone, and while the website said "delivered", it was actually delivered to the wrong zip code and a different town all together! Still battling with that one.).
BUT, apparently my name sticker is not "proper" enough for the other tenants in my building. I was in the elevator the other day with another tenant. We were going to the same floor, so she said (all in French, but I'll summarize): "Oh, are you Mme X, the new tenant?" To which I said yes, and I think she heard my charming American accent "And you're the one who put that sticker on the mailbox?" Yes. "Well, Madame, you may not know this but we just got new mailboxes so that they would look nice and not have stickers on them. Would you be so kind as to move your sticker to a different location on the mailbox?"
I'm sure she thought - Ah, an American! Of course she would do something so improper as putting her name on the front of the mailbox, not with a proper nameplate but with a (gasp!) sticker!!!
I think that was my first run-in with snooty neighbors. Everyone else has been quite friendly and even tries to speak a little English (not that they need to, but it's a nice gesture.)
Now, one point about the medical exam, and I'm sure I'll go into much more details the first time I have a real doctor's appointment. But there are no gowns... you just take off your shirt and your bra, and wait around in this little room for them to call you, and then you follow them around, naked from the waist up, while the xray tech is tinkering around and talking to you, and finally takes your xray. I'm not too weird about nudity, but I have never been just wandering around a medical office topless before. From what I've heard from other expats, it gets much worse than this, so I can't wait for my first physical!
This post by La Belette Rouge about her own "baby step" preparations getting ready for a move to France, got me thinking about how I prepared myself.
I had about 6 months advance notice to get myself ready for the big move. Some things that I did:
- Took a french conversation & grammar class at L'alliance Francaise in Washington, DC.
- Joined French Meetup
- Subscribed to every francophile blog I could find. A few of which are listed in the links on the side of this blog.
- Filled my iPod with podcasts in french to work on my comprehension. Some of my favorites are "BFM Gouts de Luxe" and "RFI Journal Francais Facile", both of which you can find for free on the iTunes music store.
- Listened to all of the back episodes of the Katia & KylieMac podcast to get a bit of a feel for being an expat in France. (Listening to all of the episodes is a bit more of a challenge now that they've hit episode 100, congrats girls!)
- Read a big stack of books on France, the French, and being a young expat. Some were more helpful than others.
- Started reading French news sites daily like Le Monde and 20 Minutes.
- I looked weekly on online classified and apartment hunting sites to get familiar with what was available: Craigslist, FUSAC, Particular a Particular
- Answered a lot of my questions on banking, taxes, living in France etc by reading Expatica.com
In my own preparations I was most concerned about improving my level of French (since that is so key to being able to function in daily life here) and then some navel-gazing to make sure I was mentally ready for all of the changes ahead. (Really trying to get through my head the fact that I will feel foreign, frustrated, overwhelmed, and sometimes lonely, and that it is normal and okay!)
Oh, and speaking of working on your french, I recently came across MangoLanguages.com, and really enjoyed using their free online language course. This site is better for beginners, so I was using it for Spanish & Portuguese, but I did some of their French lessons just for kicks and they were good too.
A very odd (but gorgeous) Paris sky this afternoon when it suddenly went from sunny to extremely cloudy and ominous...
I'm mildly in love with Brazil. I won't say "completely obsessed", as that is a designation solely for France at this point, but I'm definitely feeling a strong draw south of the equator. I went to Brazil twice this year for business. And ever since then, I've been seeing Brazilian culture appearing more and more frequently. In fact, when I arrived in Paris, Brazil was everywhere! My landlord had been to Brazil and had a huge collection of Brazilian music (Bebel Gilberto, ahhh.) and art in the apartment. There is a popular club here in Paris called Favela Chic. And everyday I walk by this store (pictured above), filled with Brazilian clothes, accessories and the ubiquitous Havaianas flip flops.
Something I absolutely love about Brazilian culture is their adoration of the curvy female body. This is So Refreshing after growing up in the United States where thinner is better. On my last trip to Brazil, I was watching some television before falling asleep. I know about 20 words of Portuguese, so I didn't really understand much of it, until this infomercial came on: The Brazilian Secret. What is The Brazilian Secret? Well, whereas in the USA we have control top tights, body shapers that slim the body, and push-up bras, in Brazil the idea is to give yourself more curves. Think a padded bra for the bottom. I love it. And in skimpy Brazilian cut underwear style too. Really, click on that link and check it out, what a fantastic concept.
A blogger that I read regularly is living in Brazil and wrote this lovely post about what it means to be gostosa (delicious and fleshy).
And to top it off, TAM airlines has plastered the Paris Metro with advertisements for their new direct flight from Paris to Bahia in an easy (?) 10 hours and 20 minutes. I'm very thankful for my 5 weeks of French vacation right about now...
French life is filled with Champagne.
It's lovely. Actually, I'm not a huge fan of champagne. (Well, ok, I love one glass of champagne. But don't let me have more than that! I've learned my lesson. New Years Eve 2006. Blue* champagne cocktails. Enough said.)
At a housewarming party I went to a few weeks ago, many of the guests brought champagne. My French friends typically have it on hand for gifts and celebrations. I know someone who's family makes champagne. And, at a my first work tradeshow in France, we had champagne at lunch. Every day. This is in stark contrast to the American "just get some chips from the vending machine and scarf them down with a soda while no one is looking so you don't miss one potential client!!" At this tradeshow in France around 1PM everyday, someone would bring out a couple bottles of champagne and a selection of finger sandwiches. All work would stop. After all, it's lunchtime. The champagne would be drunk, sandwiches eaten, a quick coffee, and then work would resume as usual. I could get used to this. La vie est belle.
*I have a rule (one of many): No Blue Drinks. I don't know what came over me that night. Oh wait, it was probably the fact I started talking to this professional hockey player and got distracted. Of course, he stopped talking to me after 15 minutes. And unfortunately, I also remembered another one of my rules: "Don't change drinks mid-evening." et voila! a night of blue champagne cocktails ensued. UGH.
More on food today. I walked home from work last night through the Thursday night marche on rue Montorgueil and was completely inspired to start cooking. When I got home, I made myself a big pot of homemade tomato sauce, most of which I'll freeze for nights when I'm too lazy to cook. Anyway, I've always been a big fan of the food in France, and the quality of the ingredients you can find. Today I picked up rhubarb yogurt (whether this sounds good to you depends on whether you're a rhubarb fan, I guess. I am!), inexpensive but delish camembert and butter with crystals of sea salt.
This butter is amazing. Is it bad if I start eating buttered crackers for dessert? It's this really rich, smooth, creamy butter, studded with big crystals of sea salt. The flavor is amazing. I've always been a fan of French President butter, but this brings butter to a whole new level. Creamy goodness and then a Pop! of salt.
One of my favorite food & Paris bloggers, David Lebovitz, wrote this post about butter in France.
Now that I'm feeling slightly more confident about grocery shopping in Paris, I'm looking forward to trying all of the foods available. The tisanes (herbal teas) in the tea aisle are overwhelming. Tonight I saw a tisane specially formulated for people with jambes lourdes or "heavy legs" (I have never heard of this phenomenon in the USA, but in France they have teas, creams and all sorts of things to cure heavy legs. Hrmmmm.). I love the concept that a food can also be a beauty product. More grocery store discoveries to come!
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you will soon learn that there are several things I'm obsessed with:
1) Interesting Doors
2) Beauty Products
3) FOOD! (including and especially, ice cream).
One of my favorite memories from traveling around France & Italy as a university student, was trying everything, especially the gelato and various ice creams.
Recently I was in Crema, Italy, a town outside of Milan. After a nice panini for lunch, I was tempted by a gelateria. The gelato in Italy is amazing. Super smooth and creamy, and oh so gorgeous in it's big presentation case, with every imaginable flavor. I had a cup of gelato with 3 flavors: nutella, tiramisu and crema (not sure what this flavor was, but it tasted like nutmeg). And the best part - it was 2 euros! Compared to a $5+ cup of Ben & Jerrys, this was a deal. YUM.
Just last week I noticed that my apartment (on the 5e etage) doesn't have fire alarms. Having been raised an overly cautious American, I have it ingrained in my head to have fire alarms all around the house and to change the batteries when you change the clocks. Well, after asking my landlord and a couple French colleagues, apparently not having fire alarms is the standard. They just don't think about it, they said. Fire alarms only exist in office buildings.
What?
Well how do you wake up if there is a fire in the middle of the night? To me, that is the huge benefit of fire alarms. They are not for when I'm awake; they're for when I'm sleeping, and I need to be woken up to get out of the building! So, I've been somewhat paranoid about this for a week now, and had been thinking I'd go on a quest to find some battery operated fire alarms to stick on my wall.
So fast-forward to this morning: I'm sleeping and for some reason I wake up, and all I smell is smoke! First, I think maybe one of the wall heater units has overheated, but when I check those, I don't see anything out of the ordinary. So then I check my kitchen - no smoke there. I must be imagining things. So I go back to bed. But as I lay there, I really smell smoke, I can't just be making this up. So I go out to my balcony ... still don't see anything ... then I look up over the building - and there is lots of thick black smoke!
AAAH! So I proceed to Officially Freak Out. There are no fire alarms - how do I know if the smoke is from my building or another one? How would anyone contact me to let me know? How do you know if you should evacuate or what? So I grab my coat and figure I'll just go outside and see (thinking that if I stayed in my apartment and had my breakfast, and there really WAS a fire in the building, I would be eternally kicking myself.).
So I go outside, and find a whole bunch of firetrucks across the street behind my apartment, and lots of smoke pouring out of the roof of that building, and some people on their balconies in their pajamas not seeming to know if the fire was in their building or not.
At this point, I think I have the right to be paranoid about this whole fire alarm situation. If you have any insight into this phenomenon, or how one is alerted about fires in France, please let me know! This also reminds me that I need to look up all of the emergency phone numbers here, because my instinct of 'Call 911' is not going to be of much help in a crisis.
This weekend I went to my first Expat event in Paris, which I learned about through Meetup.com. I highly recommend checking out Meetup.com for your local area. It's a free site that has Meetup groups on a huge variety of subjects, in locations all over the world. While living in Washington, DC I participated in the French Meetup Group which had a bunch of social events and language discussions in French & English. Anyway, so when I found out I was moving to Paris I immediately joined some meetups in Paris to start meeting people.
On Saturday night I went to an Expat meetup event between the American, English and Canadian expat meetup groups. It was a scavenger hunt around Paris organized by a company called RavenChase (If you like scavenger hunts, definitely check into having RavenChase plan your next one - I've done more than a few hunts in my life and this one was quite good! They organize hunts all over the US and just started in Europe.)
I'm still in the honeymoon phase with Paris, so almost everything here seems interesting or charming to me. I realize this will change in a year or so, but I'm just trying to enjoy it now, and not annoy everyone else with my lovestruck ramblings about the city. The best thing about the event was running all over the center of Paris - we went to Les Halles, Notre Dame, Hotel de Ville, Ile de la Cite, all at night, all illuminated - beautiful!
I had a realization though. I haven't met a ton of people here yet, but the moments I've enjoyed most are when I've been invited to parties at people's homes with mostly French people (even though those events are not relaxing, and are even somewhat stressful, and I'm a bit of a curiosity with my accent and all...). So, I was standing around this bar after the scavenger hunt, and it was just like being back in America - you could speak English freely, there was American music - it just so happened that we were in Paris. And I realized that as a personal goal, I want to spend the next 3-6 months or so trying to meet French people and integrate into the culture (as much as possible, which I realize will never happen fully.). But these expat events are a great resource for when I start feeling homesick and just need to spend an evening gabbing in English.
On Saturday, I took a trip to the amazing department store BHV (they really seem to sell everything I could conceivably need for my apartment). Among other random things, I bought myself this shopping caddy. Life in Paris revolves around walking, so going on a shopping trip and carrying all of your purchases can get quite tiring. (Although I suppose I could have also seen it as a money-saving strategy...but alas, I just realized that now). Anyway, while out and about you see everyone with these little shopping caddies - not just the older ladies, I swear! I found this shopping caddy particularly attractive, and it folds up into a sort-of shoulder bag (or so it says) for easier carrying before shopping. Can't wait for my first trip to the market to try it out!
