Carte de Sejour

I'm finally a legal resident of France! Today I finally received my titre de séjour, the visa-like document that acts as a national identification card and which allows me to stay in France, unemployed, for up to a year. It's a dinky little thing, looks a lot like a driver's license, and doesn't in any way seem appropriate to the enormous amount of effort I had to go through to obtain it (as is apparently the case for most official titles in France).

Today is December 15th. I started applying for my carte de séjour in early September. That's four months of démarches before I can finally, say, open a French Bank Account. I can't imagine what it must be like for people trying to move to France for good - for people who need the carte de séjour before they can be given a job or health care and other such niceties.

Not to mention how frustrating and time-consuming the process was... lots of waiting in lines, only to discover that it's too late in the day and I must come back tomorrow, or that no, this isn't the office you need to speak to, or that sorry, your documents aren't ready yet, try back in a few weeks. And for the privilege of experiencing that painful inefficiency, they charge you a couple hundred dollars.

In America, we don't think of the French as tedious bureaucrats. Our image of them is more Laissez-faire and such... but REALLY. It's sort of like the Anglo-Saxon love of order and rules was co-oped by well-intentioned Latin types who care enough to insist on process, but have a general disregard for time or for carrying through what they started, because - Hey, Ciao. But I'll stop bashing the French - they did, after all, just agree to let me hang around for another 12 months.

Strasbourg, or The Joys of Travel

I just got back from three days in Strasbourg, "The Capital of Noel" - a city in the Alsace region with a complicated history of being passed back and forth between the French and Germany governments. It now houses the European Parliament and European Court of Human Rights.

Christmas markets in Strasbourg are "legendary", meaning that they are now flocked to by American, Canadian, French, German and Italian tourists by the thousand each December. I was looking forward to a break from Paris and a chance to enjoy some of the Christmas market charm that I had experienced in Hamburg when I visited my brother for the winter holidays four years ago.

Fate was against me, sadly, and between forgetting my carte 12-25 at home (the card that allows me to use my youth-rate, 50% discounted train tickets), selecting the camera battery without any power, and having my trip coincide with a cold-front that brought freezing rain to the Alsatian region, I almost didn't have a good time.

Strasbourg is a beautiful city...it's historic center encircled by the narrow river Ill, with low, grassy banks that have a sort of primordial charm about them. On my last day, I took a trip around the city on a glass-covered boat (heated, with clean toilets and Mozart playing in the background of the audio tour!). We got to go through two sets of locks as we navigated different levels of the river, and although bumpy it was fun. Probably the most enjoyable part of the trip.

Also cool was the astronomical clock in the Strasbourg Cathedral. It goes off around noon each day (you must buy tickets and wait in line for about half an hour and then get inside the church and stand around waiting some more). As I sad, my camera was nonfunctional, but here's a picture from the web.

The Christmas markets themselves were kind of a disappointment. Lots of kitsch, and about a billion varieties of vin chaud and tarte flambée (a kind of pizza-like item that the French Strasbourgeois consider a meal... take a baguette, slather in cream, top with shredded cheese and lardons, and then grill until melted. I could feel my arteries hardening just watching people eat these things.)

Fortunately, there were enough other delights to prevent the trip from becoming a total failure - a choral concert of English carols, sung by French women in an overly-colorful protestant church; the bredel market, where hopeful vendors offered me bites of gingerbread and other cookies; an exposition on French photographer Doisneau, with photos of Alsace taken by the artist on his trip of the region in 1945; the utter joy of a spinach-and-cheese galette from Bertani, an outdoor crêpe stand in the Place Broglie; the utter joy of a vegetarian galette consumed on the same spot the next day.

My shoulders may still be sore from toting around a useless camera, and there's a good chance that I'll have caught a cold from spending the good part of three days outside in the freezing rain, but I'll never forget the taste of those Bertani crêpes, or the beauty of the Half-timbered houses along the River Ill.

Salon Saveurs des Plaisirs Gourmands

Today I went to another salon, this one entitled, quite promisingly, the Salon Saveurs des Plaisirs Gourmands - which, roughly translated, means the "flavors of gluttonous pleasures exhibition show". Admission was supposed to be 8 euro, but like at so many french salons, there were free admission cards strewn about the entrance - and so I filled out my name and mailing address and strolled right in without giving up a single centime.
Much like the salon du chocolat, this event was centered around the attempt by a few hundred artisan producers to sell their edible, gourmet products to Parisians - the group of people with the most discriminating palates in the world. In addition, the French are not prone to enthusiastic feedback. Whereas in America, people might respond to samples of free food with an "Oh, it's delicious!," the French believe that they are being generous if they concede a simple "c'est pas mal' (it's not bad).
All this adds up to a rather uncharacteristic show of good salesmanship on the part of the French vendors. Customer service is never a given in a Paris - whether you are shopping for shoes, jewelry, makeup, or food... it can often take 20 minutes to get the salesclerk's attention, even when you are the only customer in the store. Here, by contrast, people try to catch your eye, and thrust at you plates of foie gras, cheese cubes, bread crusts smeared with tapenade, the words "une petite dégustation?" hopefully fluttering from their lips.
I sampled various meats and cheeses, olives, fruits, chocolate and other confections. There was a ton of alcohol to be had as well, but the vendors are more stingy about it - you need to initiate contact and to at least fake an interest in purchasing before you are invited to sample their wares.
Today, my accent garnered me a lot of attention: the knife salesman whose friend made fun of him for using such an unoriginal excuse to dragger (flirt); the guy who kept offering me sheep's cheese while he asked about my romantic availability; the marzipan seller who shivered in joy and complimented my "petit accent de rêve" (rêve = dream). Americans may think that English with a French accent is sexy, but the French think that French with an American accent is adorable, in a sort of charming, kittenish way. "Don't loose that accent!," I've had French men admonish me for simply wanting to sound like a native.
After an hour or two of grazing, I grew tired. Before heading home, laden with gifts, I had to get some coconut "sorbet" from a Caribbean food stand that was enjoying a great success - it seemed that nearly everyone was walking around with a small white solo cup, overflowing with creamy white glace. The ice cream was fresh, being churned as you watched in an old-fashioned barrel by two able-bodied émigrés from the outre-mer. And it was delicious: smooth and cold with a strong but creamy coconut flavor and little specks of spices - vanilla and perhaps some lime zest?. It was the perfect finish to a flavorful, pleasurable, and maybe even somewhat gluttonous gray December afternoon.

You know you're in Paris when...

Last night I was walking along the arcade de louvre, the covered sidewalk across the street from the Jardin des Tuileries and Musée du Louvre. I had just spent the last hour curled up with a book in a coffee-and-dessert shop in the Marais, and was on my way to meet a friend for a book signing event at W.H. Smith, the large Anglo-bookstore located near Place de la Concorde.

I could just catch glimpse of the Eiffel Tower - with it's bizarre blue lights - shining over the tops of the trees in the Jardin. I looked away for a minute, distracted by something in a shop window, and when my gaze returned, the steel lady was doing her shimmy-dance, sparkling up a white-and-gold light storm. Ah, I thought, it must be seven o'clock. The strange decadence of this thought then struck me.

Here in Paris, we tell time by the illumination of the Eiffel Tower. It's true though, we can - at least at nighttime. Every hour, on the hour, after dark, a thousand mounted flash bulbs go off in an unsynchronized manner, and the steel lady sparkles evocatively for about 3 minutes. A little bit like a showgirl on the nearby Avenue des Champs Elysées. Ah, Paris...