Paris has been deserted until today, the last day before school officially starts. In other years, we noticed an increasing activity each day leading up to school day. This year though, things are different. Several hypotheses:
1. Many people without kids still have this week off and are Still lazing on the beach somewhere.
2. Those with kids did indeed come back, but are laying low, depressed about the end of the summer. They are sleeping in and only coming out after lunch.

What’s the story? Does anyone know?

Maybe I can live here, now.  Perhaps after almost two decades of coming here and traveling elsewhere, I’ve become, as John Berger once said, ‘a patriot of elsewhere.’  I don’t need to live in San Francisco anymore, though I want to have a home there.  I can now have a home here, rather than just a piéd-a-terre.  Or perhaps, I’m finding that Asian culture has completely infiltrated Paris.  There is now K mart, the new go to Asian supermarket in Paris for Korean food as well as Japanese products.  Our friend Laila introduced us to a great ramen place and took us around this gentrifying quartier.  I said ‘K Mart in Paris?”  She said, ‘Non, a Korean Mart in Paris!’

KMart is the only place I know of where one can purchase kimchi and soft tofu in Paris. Alongside the sushi grade fish and the fresh meat counters is the produce shelves with shitake, enoki and shimeji brown mushrooms, daikon radishes, shiso leaves, fresh ginger, red and green chillis… Also, don’t miss the supermarket cafeteria for a quick lunch or food to go.

K mart
6-8 Rue Sainte Anne
75001 Paris
tel: 01.58.62.49.09
Metro: Pyramides, Palais-Royal – Musée du Louvre

Are these the current postage rates in France?

Standard first-class letters (20g or less) and postcards within France cost €0.56; to continental European countries (from Scandinavia to Portugal), Baltic states, Greece, and the British Isles €0.70; to other European or Eurasian countries (Iceland, Russia, etc.), Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania (Australia, New Zealand) €0.85.

I’m consistently awestruck every time we visit our ‘Jardin.’  We’re so lucky to have le Jardin du Luxumbourg as our backyard.   Even after more than a decade and a half of coming to this lovely city each year, I have always found this park and its gardens magical.  Lately, I’ve found myself reading more about the planning of the space.

The Project for Public Spaces, a major urban planning think tank, considers the Luxembourg Gardens to be one of the most successful parks in the world, partly because it is so well integrated into the fabric of the city around it, which makes it easily accessible. There are also many things to do there, evidenced by the wide range of people who use it: children, older people, Sorbonne students, people cutting through on a lunch break, etc. People come to stroll, play chess, to sit and read, people watch, to sit at one of the cafes or to bring their children or grandchildren to one of the many attractions.  During the past decade, it has also become ground zero for French runners and athletes, who run/walk laps around the perimeter roads in the Park.  In addition, an organic fruit garden has sprung up in the southern section of the park, with pears, lemons, and oranges in full harvest.  Organized activities at the park include tennis, pony rides, puppet theatres, and toy sailboat rental (children float them in the large central fountain). We have used them all.  I just realized that visitors can also stop inside the Palais and attend a hearing of the French Senate, which is open to the public.

The Gardens also host innovative exhibits, such as one of aerial photographs from around the world.  Twice or thrice a year,  the exhibits are mounted on its perimeter gates facing Rue de Vaugirard and Blvd. St Michel.  In addition, it has an intimate Musée where we have seen some of the most memorable expositions, like the exquisite and rare Modigliani show we saw a couple of years ago.

I can imagine why Marie de Medici, bereaved after the death of her husband, could no longer live in the Louvre, and wanted to have this palace and the gardens built to remind of her childhood home, Palazzo Pitti in Florence.  We all want to be ‘home.’  My husband and I walk through the Jardin daily, and talk about whether indeed, this can or cannot be ‘a moveable feast.’

We will be in Paris next week. I can hardly stand the long times between being there, the place where I feel the most “at home.” Well, at home, because it’s all so familiar and doesn’t change like everything here does. Through a viewfinder of any type, it still looks like the black and white images from the first Truffaut movies I saw 30 years ago.

Good article here from today’s NYT on Paris in the movies. I don’t have a 16mm, but may bring a big Nikon for once, now that I’m not carrying little kids in my arms half the day.

“We’ll always have Paris,” Rick says to Ilsa at the end of “Casablanca,” and for movie lovers this is certainly true. Even as genre preferences shift and digital technology messes with our cinematic sense of place, and even among viewers allergic to subtitles or indifferent to the antique glories of the Nouvelle Vague, Paris is durable, indispensable, infinitely photographable.

…Paris is special. Its uniquely dense weave of narrow streets and broad boulevards — concentric rings reflecting state-of-the-art mid-19th-century urban planning superimposed on a medieval core, with barely a right angle or parallel line in sight — discloses an apparently limitless reservoir of perspectives and moods. The sun setting over the Seine; the swirl of traffic around the Place de la Concorde; the workaday neighborhoods on the eastern fringe of the Right Bank; the storied cafes and restaurants clustered around the Boulevard St.-Germain. Love, sophistication, eroticism, danger, class struggle, violence, tenderness, political intrigue — any effect, theme or motif you can contemplate is likely to have a Paris address.

[From Film - Movie Love for Paris, City of Klieg Lights - NYTimes.com]

To the dismay of everyone in the travel industry other than hotel executives, Gov. David Paterson of New York has signed legislation outlawing the rental of apartments in New York — which means primarily New York City — for periods of less than 30 days.

This is very bad news for family tourists everywhere who’ve recently discovered the joys of renting an apartment for the week, rather than a hotel room. As parents of two small children, I wouldn’t say that the availability of apartment rentals is the difference between going or not, but it is often the difference between having a good time versus a nightmare of four people crowded into an over-priced hotel. Not only do apartment rentals mean not paying for a lot of hotel amenities that go unused by families, they also provide a kitchen, which helps families stay away from hotel restaurants and the dreaded $10 glass of orange juice.

Sadly, this “crackdown” appears to be part of a trend, yet I don’t understand who is driving it. In Paris, some are making an argument that apartment rentals take real estate out of the market, therefore making it more unaffordable for locals. On the other hand, since apartments appear to be serving a need, wouldn’t a lot of these apartments turn into hotels anyway, following the same logic, especially since hotels would be charging twice the rate of an apartment rental?

Still, New York City, Maui and Paris will now be places where you can’t simply contact a real estate broker and rent an apartment for the week of your stay. Let’s all hope that this misguided effort eventually will be repealed through the political process.

From Frommer: New York limits apartment rentals to tourists MiamiHerald.com

We can only hope, a new “lobby” of owners will educate politicians on the error of their ways. And hopefully, fast, before they really crack down on what has become a very popular alternative for many vacationers, especially families.

The movement to more aggressively change admissions standards and affirmative action strikes at the very heart of what France is and will be. We in the United States, despite our seemingly endless racial issues and divides, are far more used to the pulls and pushes of the new global economy. Sure, we are all scared of losing what we thought we had in some lost golden time we remember, but we do have 50 plus years of addressing hidden inequities. That’s not to say that we have solved them, by any stretch of the imagination, but we have tried numerous approaches and most of us know as Americans that our history has and likely always will be in a diverse population.

At the same time, this evolution is fraught with with the same pulls of meritocracy versus affirmative action, “standards” versus opportunity. And this is felt the most strongly at the Grandes Ecoles in France, where accepted students are almost guaranteed a life of success, even more so than one would expect from a degree from Harvard or Yale. For years, students at these schools were social and economic class-selected because entrance exams were not only intentionally culturally biased, but because some kids just didn’t get the early education that would allow them to even be considered.

Very early on, in middle school, kids are selected for tracks. If at that time, you’re not considered to have the potential to eventually take the BAC, you are on a very different track. While in graduate school in Paris in the ’80s, at the decidedly not “Grande Ecole” Paris X Nanterre, I tutored kids like this at the Lycée Matignon. Many of the very bright kids there had been designated as “losers” in the game of meritocratic selection. This private school. for kids whose families could afford it, made up for bad choices and slow starts, and the kids were all destined for bigger careers than as butchers or assembly line workers.

In the debate recounted in today’s New York Times, we see the familiar tension over whether affirmative action will affect standards, or enrich the future of France by finally bringing non-White Frenchmen and women into the highest ranks of French education.

I say good luck to them on this aggressive move and how they address standards and cultural differences. They are in for a rough road though, I fear. France is so monolithic a culture, so codified, that it will be even harder for them to determine what is and is not important for intellectual success. For a very good lens on the current challenges of integration in France, make sure to see Entre les Murs, or “La Classe”” in the American release.

PARIS — France is embarking on a grand experiment — how to diversify the overwhelmingly white “grandes écoles,” the elite universities that have produced French leaders in every walk of life.France is prodding schools like Sciences Po in Paris to set a goal of increasing the percentage of scholarship students to 30 percent.

Because entrance to the best grandes écoles effectively guarantees top jobs for life, the government is prodding the schools to set a goal of increasing the percentage of scholarship students to 30 percent — more than three times the current ratio at the most selective schools. But the effort is being met with concerns from the grandes écoles, who fear it could dilute standards, and is stirring anger among the French at large, who fear it runs counter to a French ideal of a meritocracy blind to race, religion and ethnicity.

France imagines itself a country of “republican virtue,” a meritocracy run by a well-trained elite that emerges from a fiercely competitive educational system. At its apex are the grandes écoles, about 220 schools of varying specialties. And at the very top of this pyramid are a handful of famous institutions that accept a few thousand students a year among them, all of whom pass extremely competitive examinations to enter.

[From Top Schools in France Pushed to Open Meritocracy - NYTimes.com]

Wow! This is like post-war inflation, just when the European economy can least afford it. When I see 10-!%% increases in gas and electric, i wonder how this will get passed on to the consumer. Already, these charges looked more like the utilities bill of a 6000 square foot house in the United States.

Pre-buying stamps in Europe is always a good investment.

POSTAGE

Buy your stamps today at a bargain — the ones with no monetary amount printed on them, because tomorrow, the postal rates go up (information thanks to Eric Tolbert):

Letters within France increase from 56 centimes to 58.

Letters/postcards to US increase from 85 centimes to 87.

Letters to other European countries increase to 75 centimes.

Pre-stamped envelopes (prêt-a-poster) will be good for whatever rates are in effect when they are used…so stock up on these today, too.

GAS

“Residential gas goes up 4.7% in July following a 10% increase in April. If gas is used only for cooking, the July increase will be just 2.1%. In 2008 GDF cut-off 10,000 customers for non-payment but expects to cut-off 300,000 this year because of the increases.” (Information thanks to Eric Tolbert.)

ELECTRICITY

EDF has received regulatory permission to increase electricity prices this year by 11.4% followed by a 3.5% increase in 2011. There is hope for the future in that EDF is going to increase investment in nuclear energy from 500 million euros per year to 2 billion euros per year.” (Information thanks to Eric Tolbert.)

From Adrian Leed’s very good blog and newsletter Parier Paris.

Wall and rock climbing in Paris, along the banks of the Seine?  Is this just at Paris Plage or hidden somewhere year around? I think this video I found (on a link farm site) was from 2006, but looks pretty cool. We’ll be in Paris in August, so we will look for it if it’s still there.  Paris is always an adventure.

What a difference a decade makes.

PARIS — France’s footballing fortunes were on top of the world 10 years ago, having added the European title to their world crown of 1998. On Tuesday in Bloemfontein it reached its chaotic and demoralising nadir.
A humiliating 2-1 defeat to South Africa, with a red card for young midfielder Yoann Gourcuff to rub salt into the wounds, sent Raymond Domeenech and his men scurrying for home with just one point and one goal from three games.
How that dramatic collapse happened – from the soaring heights of 2000 to the dismal depths of 2010 – will be subject of much soul-searching in French sporting circles over the next few weeks and months.

[From AFP: French football hits rock bottom]

But this is even worse:

Anelka à Domenech : “Va te faire enculer, sale fils de pute!”

Ce sont des mots à peine croyables. Selon L’Equipe, Nicolas Anelka aurait lourdement insulté Raymond Domenech à la mi-temps de France-Mexique.

Nicolas Anelka is a French footballer who plays as a striker for Chelsea in the English Premier League. Raymond Domenech is a retired French footballer and the current manager of the France national team.
France soccer is more soap opera than great ball these days.
I’ll be up early tomorrow and keeping fingers crossed for a US v. Algeria miracle.