Paris Week Deux

A word of warning to you all... I am going to come home from this experience fattened, beaten and battered. Work hard, play hard seems to be how the French live. They call it ‘ joie de vivre’, I call it suicide pact. The long hours of work and the late hours in the evening will take their toll on me soon enough. Last night was a pretty tame evening out with pre-dinner drinks starting at the late hour of 10, then off to another restaurant in another neighbourhood for dinner, then yet again to a new bar for after dinner drinks. Rolled into home sometime between 4 or 5 this morning.
Let me debunk yet another Paris myth... that the French hate Americans. Sure.. they hate some of them. Let’s start with George W and move our way down his administration... but they do in fact love everything American. In the metro last week I saw a man wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers cap and a NY Giants jacket. I don’t think he appreciated the irony there. I was also told of how French women love American men... oh.. and Canadian too, she said quite suggestively (well, there was really nothing suggestive in it but just let me live in my own little world here). Apparently, North American men are ‘true’ manly men in their eyes compared to the French who are quite feminine. I couldn’t be more pissed to hear this as I’ve been conditioned to attract Vancouver women all these years by being “ just gay enough”. Let’s not mention the proliferation of Starbuck outlets in the city that invented the cafe. You can see the attached picture to see the kind of lineups it gets. And then we move on to Obama. The French have rewritten the story of Creation to include an eighth day when God created Barack. His likeness is everywhere here. I’m not sure how they are writing about him back home, but the French press has him ending the war in his first week as president, solving the economic crisis in the second, then parting the Atlantic so he can make his way to Gaza to defend all the innocent victims of war by knocking down incoming missiles with his laser vision. Ok ... enough of my rant on that. A local jazz club is having an inauguration party on Tuesday and I’m not about to miss out on this. In support of stereotyping everywhere, they are also making this a hip-hop night.


Onto what I’ve been doing... work is going well. On Monday I was introduced to the routine that my female office neighbours greet me with the two cheek ‘bise’ or kiss. On Wednesday I decided that I should actually know their names. Apparently this is secondary to making sure that you don’t offend anybody by not saying good morning. Every morning between 9:30 and 10:30, there are a stream of people who walk through my office. I was naively introducing myself for the first few days thinking that everyone was coming in to say hello to me, but noticed shortly enough that no one introduced themselves back. In fact, I got a few strange looks. It seems that it is politically incorrect not to greet everyone within eyeshot on your arrival regardless of who they are. You never know who may be your next boss I suppose. Do not, though, make the mistake that I did of saying hello to someone later in the day. I came across a familiar face in the coffee room and said a polite hello and was greeted back with ‘but we said that this morning didn’t we?’
Spent the weekend as a tourist. There will be pictures posted soon. This city is amazingly small considering how big it seems. I pretty much hit the majority of the tourist attraction by foot in one day. From Sacre-Coeur, to Montmartre, to Pigalles, to the Arc de Triomphe, Champs-Elysees, Place de la Concorde, Tuileries, Louvre, walked the Seine to Notre Dame then metroed back home after having a coffee in a proper French cafe. Went home for a quick shower then headed out for the aforementioned drunken dinner (don’t think I aforementioned the drunken part but let’s call that a given for any evening that starts with 2 shots of infused rum and ends in a British pub)
Rambling on a bit long here so I’ll sign off for now. Hope everyone is doing well. Keep me posted on what’s going on these days.