Goats, Sheep, Pigs, Cows, Vanilla Milk, and Jacques Chirac

France is, in essence, an agricultural society. Never has this been more clear to me than today, when I witnessed thousands of French people of all ages and walks of life romping amongst sheep, goats, pigs, cattle, and horses, all while snacking on more varieties of cheese and charcuterie than one country should ever be allowed to lay claim to.
The International Salon of Agriculture seems to be THE hit attraction in Paris this week. I swear that half the Paris metropolitan area was there today - a Tuesday, I'll have you. It was an absolute mad scene by eleven o'clock. I even ran into Jacques Chirac, making his annual appearance (we crossed paths in the apple dégustation area, and I had to suffer through an extremely localized throng of reporters with dangerously swinging microphone boom poles)(He goes every year - and, according to my roommates, is known for patting the cows on the ass).


The salon takes up five buildings of Porte de Versailles exhibition park (to put this in perspective, the endless salon de chocolat reported in an October blog post took up only one such building). Two giant exhibition spaces are dedicated to food products, another to horses, another to livestock, another to gardening and vegetable lines... egad.
The highlights: vanilla flavored whole milk for 20 centimes, the endearing Angora goats, apple-filled boudin, Corsican jambon, fresh coconut sorbet, and the twenty-something French guys getting hammered on rum punch at two in the afternoon in the outre-mer section. I brought home Tahitian vanilla extract, mirabelle plums in eau-de-vie, fantastic pain d'epice, some unidentifiable cow's cheese, martinique bananas, a packet of milk from the salon cows, a mohair scarf, organic eggs, Ile-de-réunion cumin, and some booklets of recipes for lamb and horse meat.


The cultural shock was this: in America, we are generally uncomfortable with the fact that our meat comes from animals - from living beings that are mammals and have hair and fours limbs and give birth to live young (just like us!). We tend to hide the association between livestock and dinner; in France, this very connection is celebrated. Children happily interact with aisles of penned cows, feeding them straw or petting with clenched fist to avoid bitten fingers - and then cross the hall to a cooking "workshop" where they grill strips of raw beef on a special child-size cooktop. They didn't seem to be experiencing any cognitive dissonance, but I personally found it hard to stomach the thought of meat while facing the candid regards of so many fine bovine.

Carnival!

Today, Paris celebrated Carnival with the cross-town Promenade du Boeuf Gras (parade of the fattened cow). The promenade covered three arrondissements over the course of nearly four hours - I caught it in the middle, as it passed through the Place de la Republique. Camped out in a traffic island in the middle of the Rue du Temple, I managed to snap some decent photos despite poor lighting - here's a slide show of the highlights. This year's theme was Le Carneval Cosmic: Astronauts et Extra-Terrestres... keep an eye out for green men, a cute baby disguised as a purple monster, and of course the boeuf gras (it was rather skinny, actually. Sign of the times).

In the streets of Paris, business as usual

Today I had a wonderful "only in Paris" moment.

Coming home to Place d'Italie via line 7, I exited the metro a stop early, at Les Gobelins, in order to pass an ATM on the way to my apartment. Climbing the stairs up to the Avenue des Gobelins, I heard whistles and shouting that could only mean one thing: a manifestation. Protests in Paris are about as ordinary as rain, but it's not everyday that you stumble into the midst of one. This happened to be students manifesting in a show of solidarity for their professors (the enseignents-chercheurs who have been on strike for several weeks in response to higher education reforms which would restrict their academic freedom).


The tail end of the crowd was just passing me by, followed by the requisite herd of blue gendarme police vans, each one carrying about 20 policemen in full riot-gear (just in case). I turned back to gaze out over the crowd of some thousand demonstrating students, and felt myself overwhelmed by a swell of nostalgic pride. I was uplifted by the protesters' idealism and involvement, regretful of the apathy of my own country's youth, and reminiscent of the days when America too had student protests. For a split-second, I had to fight back tears.

Resuming my walk home, I turned to face the direction of Place d'Italie and nearly burst out laughing. Following behind the caravan of gendarme vans was a battalion of street cleaners. Six men with leaf-blowers attacked the few scraps of paper left behind in the wake of the protesters; assisting them were another six men with brooms or tongs and trash bags, collecting the refuse blown in their direction; bringing up the rear were three large street cleaning trucks (technical term: Gyrolave), each with a huge circular brush, squirting soapy water and scrubbing away at the perfectly clean pavement of the Avenue des Gobelins. Everyone (including the Gyrolaves) was decked in the unmistakable parrot green of the Paris sanitation department.


For me, the manifestation was special, meaningful, emblematic of one group's struggle for the greater good. For the students, for the gendarmes, for the sanitation workers: it was just another day in Paris, business as usual.

I found this NY Times article on "Why Paris Works" for those of you who want to read more about the obsessive maintenance of cleanliness and order in the streets and public gardens of Paris.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CEFD7153EF93AA25754C0A964958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1

And the point is...

I've been thinking about how the psychological experience of my being in Paris parallels, in many ways, Oblio and Arrow's trip to the Pointless Forest. For those of you who are not my mother, father, or brother - so that you don't continue reading and assume that I'm on acid - note that I am referring to the plot of a 1970s musical/fable by Norwegian-American singer and songwriter Harry Nilsson. Our family used to listen to the album version of The Point! on car rides, often when returning home from a long day of sailing on the Chesapeake Bay. My impressionable child mind marinated in the strange, Zen-like message of the fable and Nilsson's characteristically whimsical-morose song lyrics. It's been floating around my subconscious ever since.

I arrived pretty shook up, had been goofin' with the bees. What am I doing in Paris? As the Rock Man says, I'm seeing what I want to see, hearing what I want to hear. Like Arrow, I sometimes feel as though I have disappeared into a hole of no return, and am looking for someone to throw me down a lifeline. Fortunately, I've recently been saved by my own merry cohort of fat sisters. And as for conclusions, I'm slowly approaching something like Oblio's revelation concerning the pointed nature of pointlessness...

If you want to better understand what I'm talking about, listen to Nilsson's narration of the story or watch the animated movie - narrated by Ringo Star (both are available on YouTube - search for "Harry Nilsson narrates The Point" or "The Point (1971)").

Tempests besiege Paris

Paris has been experiencing some apocalyptic weather of late. One day it will be too warm for a winter coat, and then literally the next day there will be a snowstorm leading to an accumulation of several centimeters.
The most startling trend in weather, however, is a recent string of tempests. The French word tempête simply means storm, but these are not your ordinary American "storms". They involve rain and gale-force winds... winds so strong that Charles de Gaulle airport has been shut down since last night (over 200 flights have been grounded as a result).
Living at the top of a hill (la butte of la butte aux cailles), with a large skylight in my bedroom, I experience the meteorological conditions quite intensely. There is never thunder - come to think of it, I haven't heard thunder or seen lightening since I arrived in France - but there's a sound that's far more terrifying: that of the wind wrecking havoc on the neighborhood.
These winds have been known to cause deaths, often due to falling tree branches or flooding. Two weeks ago, the January 24th tempête killed 11 people in western France. Granted, such damage rarely takes its toll on Paris - the storms usually die down as they head inland - but in 1999 such a tempête wrecked havoc on the Parisian suburb of Versaille. The famous chateau lost so many trees that witnesses to the damage could only describe it as "apocalyptic", a landscape ravaged by natural catastrophe.
Basically, these storms are the equivalent of a hurricane or a Nor'easter. What's frightening is that today's is the second such storm in a period of two weeks, and the French are describing them as once-in-a-year-type-occurences. The UK's unusual trend of snow storms is making it into the US newspapers, but in my opinion our tempêtes are just as good a harbinger of potentially disastrous climate change for Europe.

Picasso in the frozen rain

Today, with only 8 hours left to see the super-hyped Picasso and the Masters exhibit before it leaves Paris for London, I trudged over to the Grand Palais and spent 90 minutes waiting in the frozen rain. Imagine the above scene, but with slush covering the ground, a snaking line of several hundred people desperately clutching their umbrellas, and a street-performer's clarinet renditions of Puccini and Grieg floating upwards from the midst of it all. Only in Paris would the closing day of a painting exhibition cause such a stir - when the doors close at 8pm this evening, the museum will have stayed open 82 hours straight in an attempt to accommodate demand. (And yes, there were actually people waiting on line in the freezing rain at 4AM on a Monday morning to pay to see a bunch of paintings.)

I thought the exhibition was fun, but not mind-boggling. Plaster casts of famous statues (Venus de Milo, the Elgin marbles) were presented alongside a young Picasso's sketches of these works. Self-portraits by master painters known to have inspired Picasso graced the richly colored exhibit hall walls alongside Picasso's own self-depictions. The coolest juxtapositions were of famous classical paintings next to Picasso's "imitations" of these works, the painter's distinctive style making for something entirely unique from the original.


Such comparisons are not always in Picasso's favor (for instance, in the case of Courbet's Jeunes femmes sur les berges de la Seine and Van Gogh's l'Arlesienne, I strongly preferred the original over Picasso's adaptation). Moving through the exhibit though, one can't help but be impressed by the versatility and undeniable talent of Picasso. Most of the other painters on display have a single, recognizable style - Picasso has about five.

At the end of the day, it's a remarkable collection of paintings for an exhibit that only takes about an hour to view. Clever, and probably worth my 8 euro student-rate plus a few hours of frozen toes.

(my favorite piece in the exhibit was Manet's Olympia, on loan from the Musée d'Orsay, exhibited alongside Picasso's Nu couché jouant avec un chat)