Paris and cosmic rays

I just stumbled across this Scientific American blog post, which describes early 20th century efforts to understand the source of a newly recognized and mysterious radiation: did it come from radioactive elements in the earth, or from the sky? The Eiffel Tower was crucial to the story of how one scientist obtained the first significant evidence that some of this radiation (what we call cosmic rays today) originates well beyond our atmosphere in cosmic events such as supernovas. I had no idea that Gustave Eiffel argued that the tower had potential as a scientific research station, but he was correct. (One of his suggestions was that an observatory be placed at the top of the tower. I love this idea, but the lights of Paris—not to mention the lights on the tower itself—would make observing most objects very difficult. I wonder if there are any efforts to make the City of Light more dark-sky friendly?)

Food in Paris

Before I went to Paris, I somehow gathered the impression that restaurant meals typically last a couple of hours, and that the American tradition of carry-out is not to be found. Maybe in the higher-end restaurants, meals do run long; the dinner hosted by Untours on the first full day of my stay lasted for three highly pleasant hours, from kir to raspberries with whipped cream (there were about 10 of us at dinner that night). But even our most expensive meal, the dinner at Ma Bourgogne (€91 for dinner for two and a carafe of wine, which is nowhere near the high end of luxury dining) didn't last more than about an hour and a half. Carry-out is everywhere to be found, and although it often was tourist food (sandwiches and crepes any place tourists gathered), it also seemed to be pretty standard Parisian practice to grab something at a bakery and eat it in a nearby park or maybe at a table outside. I enjoyed many such meals and came back with ideas for quiches I want to make at home. Spinach and goat cheese quiche seems to be a staple, as does salmon quiche. I had a very nice slice of quiche Lorraine in Chartres.

I lacked confidence in my French and thus missed some opportunities to dine in restaurants or visit wine bars where I would have been called on for something more complex than "Je voudrais une tranche de cette quiche, s'il vous plait" or my absolute favorite, "Un comme ça, s'il vous plait." (That's one reason I want to go back, so I can build my language skills and try out more of the food and wine on offer.) Still, I had some excellent restaurant meals, which I obtained by a combination of using what French I had and pointing at the menu. I had some great salads and omelets, and I noticed that ham seems to play a crucial role in many dishes. I read online that you can find vegetarian food fairly easily in Paris, but if you are asking whether a salad includes meat, you need to ask about ham specifically, as Parisians will sometimes describe a salad as meat-free even if it contains ham. Evidently ham is not always considered meat. I find this a somewhat sympathetic viewpoint; for years I have joked that pepperoni is not a meat but a condiment. At any rate, although I generally do not eat meat, I ate plenty of ham in Paris, and it ranged from OK to very good. Paris might be navigable for a vegetarian, but in my experience, being a vegan would take a fair amount of work. Most of my bakery take-out meals were either sandwiches with cheese on them (my favorite was a baguette with fresh mozzarella, tomato, and basil at the Tuileries Gardens) or quiches of all kinds, which of course contained eggs and cheese.

Regarding the menu: You must remember to call it "la carte," because "le menu" is typically a set course of dishes at a fixed price, which might or might not be what you're after. In my experience, it does not hurt to ask specifically for the menu after you are seated. One of the more perplexing moments in dining was at a place near the Musée d'Orsay. I think people stopped in there for drinks alone as well as for meals, which we did not grasp right away. We seated ourselves, and when the waiter came to our table, there was a moment of awkward silence until he asked, "Vous voulez manger?" We hadn't realized that it wasn't obvious that we were there for lunch, and were briefly taken aback by the question, but managed to say that yes, we wanted to eat.

I bought my wine at the Monoprix, which had a small selection of bottles out on shelves in the regular grocery area but also had a little cave, or wine cellar. I enjoyed everything I bought there. I also gazed into the windows of the wine shops, but never did go into one. Next time.

Language was really not all that much of a barrier when it came to food. It is worth noting that I experienced absolutely no rudeness. If you start out with your best French, at least a hearty "Bonjour, madame" or "Bonjour, monsieur" and as much French as you can muster thereafter, my experience is that people will meet you at least halfway. I have to admit that I didn't always get what I expected, especially when asking for bread, but I liked everything I got. And how often can you say that?

The logistics

There are probably as many paths through the City of Light as there are people who visit. My path centered on history, art, music, and literature, with an emphasis on walking. If you ever visit Paris, I'm sure your path will differ from mine. Still, it seems worth offering a bit of detail about the logistics in case anyone is interested.

Lodging. The apartment was rented through Untours, which arranges apartments for one- or two-week stays in various enticing parts of the world. The idea behind an Untour is that your path is smoothed considerably by the expertise and support of a local guide, but you are on your own as far as planning your itinerary and living your days as you like. The two-week stay in Paris came with transportation to and from the airport (reliable and cheerful even though our outbound flight left at 7:40 a.m.), 20 Métro tickets apiece for me and my traveling companion, a five-day Paris Visite pass each (this pass allows you to ride the Métro and the RER trains), a two-day museum pass apiece (we bought additional four-day passes), and the dinner I described on our first full day in the city. Untours has several apartments in Paris, and at the dinner we met everyone else who had just arrived for a one- or two-week stay in one of them. Our guide, Jennifer, met our plane and provided helpful information about food, shopping (of the everyday where-do-I-buy-soap variety), and riding the Métro; at the orientation before the dinner, she brought information about various day trips from Paris (Giverny, Chartres, Versailles, etc). Our apartment had wireless Internet access, and when we had trouble figuring out the password, someone showed up to help us before I realized my friend had even called for help. All in all, I can wholeheartedly recommend Untours if you would like a similar experience not just in Paris but in various other cities.

Day trips. We debated over the various possible day trips, reluctantly rejecting Giverny as probably too crowded at that time of year. We visited Chartres and Versailles on the same day, which is not advisable if you want to see Versailles in depth, but worked out fine for us; we were most interested in the gardens. It might be nice to go back for a full day sometime to see the Grand and Petit Trianons, but I was quite happy with what we did see. Although I enjoyed our relatively brief visit to Chartres, I also would not mind spending a full day there, visiting the stained glass museum and perhaps attending both of Malcolm Miller's tours (noon and 2:45 daily except for Sundays, €10 a head when we were there). He is said to never give the same tour twice on the same day, and at the end of the tour we attended, he promised to be there until the Judgement Day, so maybe I have another chance at catching both of them in one day.

Music, etc. My friend Jay is a music theorist, and he found a site that lists information about classical music concerts in Paris. We booked the chamber music concert in the Saint-Chapelle and the Orchestre de Paris concert in the Salle Pleyel before we left; the opera was all booked up. When you are in Paris, it is also well worth keeping your eyes peeled for posters advertising classical music concerts in Paris's many cathedrals and churches; I saw flyers up all over the place for various events that I wish I had had time for. Every Wednesday a new Pariscope magazine comes out and is available at news stands and book stores. (Jennifer gave us one at the orientation session, and I bought one for the second week; that second one led us to the free Chopin and Liszt at the Bois de Boulogne.) It lists not just music but also theatre, cinema, and other entertainment possibilities in the city. As far as music both classical and non-classical goes, the music festival on the solstice looks like a lot of fun from the little I saw of it.

Guidebooks. As I mentioned earlier, Rick Steve's Paris 2011 was an invaluable guide, and his free audio walking tours can guide you through the Louvre, the Orsay, Versailles, and historic Paris. (I did not use any of the tours while actually navigating these places, but I gleaned information from them before the trip. I did use the maps and commentary in the book for guidance at Versailles and Chartres, and consulted the book regularly while I was in Paris.) I also enjoyed the information and maps in Paris From the Ground Up by James H.S. McGregor. If I hadn't read this book, I never would have known about Philippe-Auguste's wall or the foundations of the towers of the original Louvre.

Walking tours. Our walking was all self-directed. Jay downloaded maps to his iPhone, so I could enjoy gawking at the buildings or the river or the people to my heart's content without getting lost because he consulted his iPhone and kept us on track. On my days on my own, I memorized a few key points of the route (Métro stops, street names) and winged it from there, consulting my Frommer map as needed. I wish I had had the time to take advantage of the Paris walks organized by Peter and Oriel Caine. These English-language walking tours come highly regarded, are not expensive, and offer many opportunities to explore particular neighborhoods or themes. When I go back, I definitely want to take the chocolate tour.

Favorite memories of Paris

So many memorable things happened on this trip! Some moments big and small stand out as being particularly moving, amusing, or enjoyable:

• First catching sight of Notre Dame from across the river
• Seeing a small boy chasing a peacock in the Parc de Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne
• Eating a warm Nutella crepe (my first crepe) on a chilly gray morning in Montmartre
• Eating lunch on a Sunday afternoon on the Île Saint-Louis with street music going on all around me
• Sitting in the Arènes de Lutèce, the remains of a third-century Roman amphitheatre, which I believe is the oldest structure I've ever sat in
• Seeing the foundations of part of the 12th-century fortress from which the current Palais du Louvre eventually grew
• Emerging from the Église Saint-Merri and being amused to see a shop selling sex toys directly across the street
• Walking in the Latin Quarter, spotting a remnant of the 13th-century wall built at Philippe-Auguste's command, and being able to guess what it was before I read the sign
• Conducting an entire, if very brief, conversation in French on my last day in the city (it was about where the restroom was, but still)
• Walking into a large bookstore (Galignani's) on the Rue de Rivoli
• Offering a crumb to a little brown bird that hopped up onto the table when I was eating a flan outside a bakery on the Île de la Cité
• Seeing the Eiffel Tower at night from the river
• Negotiating my first relatively complicated subway station on my own
• Seeing the Seine flowing beneath my feet as I climbed the stairs on the lovely footbridge, the passerelle Léopold-Sédar-Senghor
• Coming across some of my favorite Monet and Renoir paintings in the Musée d'Orsay
• Spotting the telescope dome at the Sorbonne on the Rue Saint-Jacques
• Joining the crowd following a group of drummers around the Places des Vosges on my last night

I'm sure I will think of many more as soon as I post this, but c'est la vie.

Back home

I said in my last post that it would be around midnight when I got back to Bloomington, but it was actually nearly 3 a.m., around 29 hours after I woke up in Paris. The last flight of the day, New York to Indianapolis, was delayed by a couple of hours, for reasons I never did entirely understand. (My overall impression of JFK last night was that no one really knew what was going on.) If any of the six flights making up the trip had to be delayed, that was the best one for it; it didn't involve missing any connections or missing out on time in Paris. But still, JFK is not a place that makes you feel like it's good to be in the U.S.

The European part of the trip was great, though; Finnair treats its passengers very well, even the ones in economy. Despite a glimpse of Iceland and an excellent view of Greenland on the long haul over the North Atlantic, the afternoon seemed to go on forever (we left Helsinki at around 2:00 in the afternoon and arrived in JFK, seven time zones to the west, around 3:15 3:45 or so). I was very grateful when, about two hours before we reached New York, the flight attendants came down the aisle, plucking piping hot wet paper napkins out of a basket with a pair of tongs and dropping one on each passenger's tray. Next came a sandwich; this was in addition to a tasty hot lunch at the beginning of the flight. If you are going to spend 8 hours or so at 30,000 feet, Finnair seems to be a good option.

Helsinki again

Well, the homeward trek has begun. I left the apartment slightly before the crack of dawn this morning and left Paris around 7:45. Now I'm in Helsinki awaiting my flight to New York, which leaves in a couple of hours. Traveling east to west is always easier than traveling west to east in terms of the time change, in my experience, but it will be a long day (arrival in Bloomington about midnight tonight, which is 26 hours after I woke up this morning).

In the last day or two in Paris I started reading Edmund White's La Flâneur, a copy I picked up at the Red Cross book sale and had no idea I would be reading in Paris a few years later. I finished it on the plane. White says a number of things that I am mulling over, particularly as I compare my experiences in Paris with my life in the U.S. (I'm really trying to understand why I felt so much at home in Paris; I expected to enjoy it there, but I didn't really expect to feel so comfortable right off the bat.) One thing that struck me in particular this morning is a point he made about identity politics. This was in the context of a discussion about why France was so slow in the 1980s to recognize the seriousness of AIDS and to begin educating the public to slow the spread of the disease. He associates this phenomenon with the absence of a recognized gay activist community and goes on to talk about the French attitude toward interest groups in general.

The French themselves would argue that their rejection of all ghettoization, far from being a sign of closetedness or cynicism, is in fact consistent with their 'singularity' as a nation. The French believe that a society is not a federation of special interest groups but rather an impartial state that treats each citizen—regardless of his or her gender, sexual orientation religion or colour— as an abstract, universal individual. For the French any subgroup of citizens is a diminishment of human equality.

He goes on to point out that the only problem with this attitude is that the rights of particular groups are not always defended. It's a good point, particularly in context, but I think I can still see things to admire in the French viewpoint as he portrays it. For all my interest in women in science, for example, when I was studying astrophysics I didn't like being seen as a woman scientist. The label seemed to imply that it was somehow important to note that I was a woman, whereas in my view a scientist is a scientist, and the useful labels are things like "botanist' or "astronomer" and adjectives like "theoretical" and "experimental" (perhaps nationalities are useful labels if particular countries or locations are known for working in a specific area?). (Roughly the same idea applies to the labels "woman writer" or "woman blogger.")

I can see the need for people (men and women both) to encourage not just women but other underrepresented groups to consider a career in science if they're interested in it, which I suppose is a form of community action, but I've always been leery of identifying myself as a female anything. What I really needed when I started back to school at 23 to study science was financial aid directed toward returning students with children and advice and help for those coming to astrophysics poorly prepared in high school; women are not the only ones who need these things. Are women scientist interest groups the best way to get this kind of support for women? It's arguable, but I don't really think it's the only way. (Also, you have only to look at the history of feminism to realize that just because people are women and interested in women's rights doesn't mean they all agree on a common identity or platform. I think it says a lot that many people hesitate to use the word "feminist" to describe themselves, or they say, "I'm a feminist but...". Is there a way to rally together for common causes without falling prey to stereotypical images, often derogatory, that most definitely do not do justice to the complexity of human individuals?)

I'm not sure how applicable any of this is to White's argument about HIV/AIDS education and prevention, or to the French attitude toward identity politics, but what he said struck a nerve with me, and here I sit in Helsinki with some time to write. I'm muddle-headed from the dramamine and not sure this will make any sense to me tomorrow, but what the hey. You can all tell me what you think anyway.

Music!

Today was a relaxed but somewhat bittersweet day: breakfast at a sidewalk cafe, a walk to one or two new spots in the neighborhood, and a visit to some of my favorite places, including some time spent sitting and watching the river go by. I also made a few last purchases (mostly chocolate to bring home for friends). Then it was back to the apartment to pack and clean the place up a bit.

This evening when I went down to take one last stroll through the Place des Vosges, I found the place bubbling with activity. I knew there was a city-wide music festival today to celebrate the summer solstice, but I didn't realize there would be so much music in this neighborhood. Instead of taking a slow quiet walk, I wound up following a marching percussion band around the outside of the square with the rest of the crowd and then moving from band to band (klezmer, a drumming circle, what sounded like American folk and several types of French folk, etc.). I would guess there were 6 or 8 different groups around the square. The park emptied out peacefully at its normal 9:30 closing time, but the music continues on the streets surrounding the Place. There are amplified rock bands at either end of the street the apartment is on (I just heard an energetic version of "I Will Survive"), so I suspect it will be a noisy night here. We're leaving for the airport at 5:30 a.m., but I don't really mind the ruckus. My last memories of this visit will be of my borrowed Paris neighborhood ringing with music and of people singing and dancing and enjoying the long summer evening. What a perfect way to end my stay here.