tourisme

the new york times had an interesting article on tourism today. specifically, on europeans coming to america and pissing people off. as an adopted new yorker (and before that, briefly, a resident of washington DC), i have had my fair share of uncomfortable encounters with tourists: italians failing to tip me, spaniards pushing me to the ground in front of notre dame (no joke), japanese students asking for directions. in paris, it's mostly the americans who make asses of themselves. the other day, i saw some older americans walk by a gelato stand and point out that "the ice cream is all melted!" (they failed to realise that it wasn't ice cream, it was GELATO, which is softer and wetter and certaintly more delicious than ice cream). in DC, we would make fun of tourists who didn't understand the metro systems and who failed to realize that you STAND ON THE RIGHT and WALK ON THE LEFT up the escalators because WASHINGTONIANS ARE RIDICULOUSLY BUSY. in new york, it's mostly high schoolers with their parents who can't believe that times square actually exists - and that there's an applebees AND a red lobster in such close proximity!

of course, i am a bitter, cynical city dweller who sometimes forgets that life is different in the rest of the world. but seriously, people seem to feel bolder when they're in a new big city or a country whose language they don't understand. maybe this is because we know that we might be embarassed anyways, so we're more likely to do embarassing things in the first place. or maybe it's just the thrill of something new. of course i fall victim to this (you should have seen us in barcelona...) en tout cas, i try to be a good tourist, and i can't withhold my frustration with those who aren't.

yet for some bizarre reason i cannot explain, the tourism industry appeals to me. eco-tourism, specifically, because traditional tourism is so destructive and ignorant that i'd probably quit out of guilt. i guess i like the idea of introducing people to new things and showing them sights beyond their cultural borders. it's long-established that americans in particular are uninformed about the rest of the world, which is a sad sad thing i want to change. on the other hand, if i have to spend my life explaining that not every country watches american idol or that many languages besides english are spoken across the globe, i'd probably quit out of frustration and move to iceland.

one of the best quotes from the above article is this:

EVERY summer, people all over the world become acquainted again with a deep truth spoken by the philosopher-tourist Steve Martin.
He was speaking for tourists everywhere, not just to France, when he said: “Boy, those French, they have a different word for everything!”...

To be an ugly tourist is to miss the fundamental truth in Mr. Martin’s statement. “It is to have an overall lack of understanding that there is such a thing as cultural difference,” wrote Prof. Inga Treitler, the secretary for the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology, in an e-mail message.

this brings me to another phenomenon i first heard about in turkey, from an american who'd taught english in japan for several years. every year, about a dozen japanese tourists have to be emergency evacuated from paris due to "paris syndrome." since japanese culture is much more reserved and polite, particularly in comparison to the oh-so-rude french, some tourists - particularly young women on their first trip abroad - simply can't handle it. they go into shock after too many rebuffings by rude waiters, ticket vendors and normal parisians. the japanese embassy has a twenty-four hour hotline to help their nationals who just want to get the hell out of france. the BBC has a quick article on this here.

(i must also mention that i've found japanese tourists to be the worst in terms of pushing, shoving, and blocking my way through the louvre; they typically come in large groups and can't stop taking pictures of each other looking miserable with great works of art... i think the fact that they often travel with such enormous tour groups insulates them from the fact that there are other people around who are not japanese, many of whom actually live in paris!)

but seriously, isn't the whole point of tourism to see something new and different? who wants to go to the other side of the earth and encounter the same kind of people?

i guess that's why i think i'd be good in the tourism industry. i want to see new things and i want to tell people about them. aristocrats used to send their children on the "grand tour" of the mediterranean; i feel like we all need to take a grand tour of the rest of the world. and do it in a way that helps humanity instead of making us hate each other even more. (as a side note, the french really don't hate americans... they just hate george w. bush.)

chômage

france has a national unemployment rate of about 10%. for certain age groups (under twenty-five), it's significantly higher, and for some other social groups, it's absolutely ridiculous (young men living from the suburbs with immigrant parents - up to 40% in some places).
i'm an immigrant too, albeit a white american one. plus, my student visa expires at the beginning of july... which isn't a problem in terms of living in france, but it might affect my ability to get a work visa for the whole summer. and then who's going to hire someone who can only work for one month?
getting work authorisation in itself is a pain. first i have to find someone who's willing to hire me. then, they need to give me a promesse d'embauche, basically a letter to the labour department saying they want to hire me. i bring this, along with my passport and some other papers, to the labour department in paris, who hopefully give me working papers.
the catch is that, at least according to this one restaurant owner who wanted to hire me, they probably won't give me a work visa that extends past my student visa. although i can stay as a tourist for up to ninety days without a visa, i can't work (legally). and finding something under the table is not as easy as i thought it would be (nor is it entirely safe). i'm having trouble finding a babysitting job, and besides, i'm not great with children anyways. i'm a good waitress, i speak english, and i have a charming smile. soooo why can't i find a job?

in other news, we climbed onto my roof the other night. they're replacing the roof and the facade of my building, waking me up with a wonderful pounding noise every morning - anyways, so there's a bunch of sturdy scaffolding outside my window just begging to be climbed. the sun was setting and we could see all the left bank monuments.

the pantheon and la sorbonne



la tour eiffel



having nothing to do in paris is really not so bad.

elections

sarko and ségo posters are all over the city. royale's posters are mostly just a picture of her with the words "Presidentielle 2007;" sarkozy's generally say "Ensemble, tout devient possible" ("Together, everything becomes possible"). i'm not a huge sarko fan, and i found this altered poster online:



"TOGETHER
Without the poor, the foreigners, the RMI [a social program which gives money to the unemployed who are under 25], the Left, the extreme Left, the communists, the CDI [contrat à durée indéterminée, a open work contract for artisans, without a time limit to complete the work], the homosexuals, the intermittents [people who work in entertainment or art "in intermittence," alternate periods of work and unemployment, usually with a CDI], those who are HIV-positive, the handicapped, the Minister of Education, the Minister of Culture, independent journalists, the blacks, the arabs, the Noahs, the Thurams [two football players who are vocally opposed to Sarkozy], and the guy who screwed my wife [Sarkozy's wife apparently left him/had an affair before the elections and he won't talk about their relationship]...
EVERYTHING BECOMES POSSIBLE."

i showed this to my french friend marcello and he couldn't stop laughing.

also, sarkozy doesn't drink, at all, which for me is a reason in itself to be suspicious. seriously, a french person who won't have a glass of wine with dinner? what's up with that?

travelling + international events

bonjour cheries! i haven't written in a while due to school, travel, and sitting in too many cafés. here's what's been going on lately:

- french university vacation was april 8-22, possibly the best two weeks of my short life. i went to istanbul, turkey, and barcelona, spain. amazing! there is so much to recount that i don't feel i can really do justice to these trips; instead i'll share some nice photographs and encourage you to visit for yourselves.

ISTANBUL



inside the aya sofia, built as a christian basilica in 530 AD, then transformed into a mosque, now simply an amazing museum.



whirling dervishes!



emily, julia, and myself: we are standing in europe, but across the bosphorus behind us is asia.

BARCEOLNA



the sagrada familia, antonin gaudí's unfinished masterpiece.



me high in the towers of the sagrada familia. my beautiful scarf is from turkey (although apparently the design is uzbek).



standing in the cold, cold mediterranean sea!

- the first round of the french presidential election was on sunday. (in france, the election has two rounds, possibly because there are so many candidates. the second round is in a few weeks.) nicolas sarkozy (of the current governing party, the UMP; center-right) and ségolène royal (of the socialist party, which i guess is sort of center-left in france) will advance to the next round. i'm sort of disappointed; i don't really think royal can win and i would have preferred françois bayrou to advance, but hey, it's not my country. sarkozy is liberal by american standards, but some of his rhetoric is slightly disturbing (in terms of immigration and "cracking down" on crime especially, i feel he's especially harsh) - and he's friendly with bush. sarkozy wants to liberalize the french economy (which is good! thirty-five hour work weeks are not the way to increase productivity); royal's program is sort of ambiguous. since politics is sort of deathly boring to me, i will direct you to wikipedia for a better explanation of the election than i can provide: French Presidential Election 2007

- across the pond, my home state of new hampshire has taken a step towards extending equal rights to homosexuals by approving civil unions in the senate. from the new york times:

"To me this legislation is a credit to our state. We're making this move not because some court some place is telling us that we must," said Democratic Sen. Joe Foster of Nashua. "We do so today because it is the right thing to do."

- in washington, both the house and the senate have approved a bill that sets a deadline for troop withdrawls from iraq. bush is set to veto it, of course; still, the bill shows that congress has regained some sense and is trying to fix what we've screwed up beyond belief. also from the times:

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said the measure is “the only way to make Iraqis take responsibility” for their own destiny. Mr. Kennedy said the president has been wrong all along on Iraq. “Now, he is wrong to threaten to veto this bill,” the senator said. “We cannot repeat the mistake of Vietnam.”
Another Democratic supporter, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, said the conflict is “a war that never should have started, and on this president’s watch may never end” without a timetable for American withdrawal.

- and in my adopted home of new york, new york, our mayor bloomberg is working to green up the city by charging vehicules for driving below 86th street. i really believe nyc is a walking city and a subway city. and as the greatest city in the world, it is wonderful that new york is among the first places in the US to actually deal with its transportation problems. i love love love new york, but i don't love that it has the worst air quality in the country. the only part of the plan that makes me worry (and this is something the city will address) is the effect on people in the outer boroughs who have to drive into manhattan. perhaps the tax will be lower for registered new york workers? even better, the subway system and the eco-friendly bus fleet will be expanded to give those people better, easier, cheaper commutes? (there is progress on the second avenue subway, but that's in manhattan. another interesting article: this guy is working on his own easier-to-read version of the subway map; i had to have the system explained to me multiple times before i finally got in. now i mostly have it memorized.)

i'm sorry for the length of this post! but sometimes recounting my travels becomes a bit tiresome... plus, assuming anyone actually reads this anymore, hopefully some of you will check out those stories and think about what's going on.

à bientot!

dublin, eire

two weeks ago, i spent a weekend in dublin by myself. ireland is amazing: i have never seen so many shades of green as i did while flying over the island. irish history is fascinating and i wonder why more people don't study it... i don't think columbia has a single course on ireland. and it was nice to be in an english-speaking country for a couple days! (still, i think i prefer the francophone world...)



st stephen's green is REALLY GREEN.



in the national history museum they have an exhibit on bog bodies. these are mummified
prehistorical remains found in peat bogs. amazing! also sort of disgusting. when i was in the museum, a group of schoolboys was visiting and, as little boys are apt to be, they were simultaneously fascinated and repulsed...



"shop while the dollar drops," ie, come visit new york while you can afford it, europe!! these ads were everywhere.

the national gallery has my two favorite paintings ever:



The Taking of Christ by Caravaggio



and Woman Writing A Letter by Vermeer.

both have incredible histories: check out The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr and The Irish Game by Matthew Hart to read about them.




this is the interior of christ church cathedral. as my guidebook said, it's sort of strange that such a catholic country would have two protestant cathedrals in its capital city. unfortunately the church is now more of a tourist attraction than a functioning place of worship; it cost me 2E to enter and it didn't seem like there's a real congregation. (in contrast, notre-dame de paris, despite its touristic attractions, is a functioning cathedral with a devoted congregation. i went to mass there a few weeks ago, took communion, heard some archbishop give a sermon... it felt much more authentic.)



then i headed over to st patrick's cathedral, which is near the spring where the said saint baptized many irish pagans. jonathan swift is buried here. this church was even more touristy; 4E to enter and it's basically set up like a museum...



but it's still beautiful!!



fish and chips for lunch: delicious but so heavy, i could not finish it.



the natural history museum smells like old books. a lot of the animals are from the early 20th century (or late 19th century), so it's like walking into the minds of the early naturalists.



a skeleton of a dodo bird!



so why don't we have sex education like this in the states? you tell me. this billboard is brilliant (bonus points to anyone who knows which artist's work it's based on).



the liffey at night: it looks like a river of guinness.



the irish coast from my airplane...



and then back to paris.

la grosse pomme vs. the city of love

as much as i love love love paris, i'm really suffering new york withdrawl. here are some of the many things i miss:

- 24-hour subway
- 24-hour supermarkets
- 24-hour EVERYTHING
- falafel carts everywhere
- hearing spanish, mandarin, arabic, hebrew, french, english, and a dozen other languages i don't recognize within fifteen minutes of each other - and not even taking note of it
- MEXICAN FOOD. and mexican people. and mexican beer.
- columbus circle/battery park/the village/fifth avenue/fourteenth street/soho
- the flatiron building
- central park. parisian parks are beautiful but they're rather sterile... (an example of french design in new york is bryant park behind NYPL, which i actually love.) i can't wait for spring!!
- efficiency/doing things in a rational manner/generally making sense

but then, there are so many things you can't find in new york, like...

- true café culture
- comté, the most amazing cheese ever
- so many varieties of wine, and people who appreciate them
- pain à tradition. the french have laws regarding how to make "traditional french bread." that is how important bread is in this country.
- a sense of history that extends backs centuries (as opposed to weeks)
- beautiful churches, beautiful buildings, beautiful everything!
- being multilingual is sort of expected
- universal health care (haven't taken advantage of this yet though)
- vespas
- EVERYONE HERE IS SO BEAUTIFUL.



my newest career aspiration is to go into (eco-)tourism, because i love to travel and to help people. i used to want to work in a museum, but in tourism i could basically do the same thing in terms of "guest services" except ALL AROUND THE WORLD. maybe then, i can jet-set between paris and new york and not have to pick one to live in for the rest of my life.