Monday, 27 October 2008
There's a new group on flickr called My Day, Yesterday, which features videos of < 90 seconds. The videos serve as a catalog of events. Here's my first go at "My Day, Yesterday," which I filmed this past Friday. You can click over to the flickr page to read more detail about its content.
Thursday, 23 October 2008
In recent months, I've stumbled across a number of pieces like this one
that accuse Paris and other history-saturated European
destinations of stagnation--that they are more like urban, city-sized
museums that cater to consumers than beautiful hometowns that color the lives of residents. In her article, Field writes: Surely residents of other European cities take history in one hand and the everyday in the other, but I have come to admire the ease with which Parisians do so. To breach the border of the city-museum when you travel as a tourist is difficult. Venice, especially, stands out in my mind as a museum empty of residents--like a kind of historical theme park that caters to adults. Prague, too, felt a little like this. The historical parts of the city--called "Prague 1" and "Prague 2" (similar to the arrondissement system of Paris)--seemed lacking in local life. I should pause to say that by "local life" I mean something like local business--places to shop, eat, or spend time that can't be included in a portrait of consumerism. In Staré Město (also called "Old Town")--the ground zero of historical Prague--many streets are lined with souvenir shops. Just off Old Town Square is a Starbucks. At one end of Wenceslas Square sits a grand pedestrian boulevard lined with shops: H&M, Lacoste, Mango, Zara, Deisel. During my visit, I saw a handful of KFCs and even a TGI Friday's. I hardly expect historical cities--especially those like Prague, founded as early as the ninth century with buildings that survive from the 1200s--to cease modernization. Still, it is strange to stand before the theatre where Mozart debuted Don Giovanni, then wander a few blocks into a six-floor shopping mall that could just as easily be located in Atlanta, Georgia. Though the city's facades remain intact, the streets are saturated with souvenir shops and restaurants. Prague is relatively new to tourism. I would guess that a good five years passed following the Velvet Revolution (the fall of Communism in Prague, November 1989) before many people traveled to see the city, which means that Prague has seen about fifteen years of increasingly heavy tourism. In the case of the Municipal House, the birth of tourism in the city meant that restoration could be funded, after years of falling into disrepair behind the Iron Curtain. A part of me is alarmingly appreciative of the kind of kitsch this environment produces. Prague's popular souvenir "Czech me out" t-shirt rivals the singing Mao lighter I brought home from China last year. The delight a seasoned tourist takes in kitschy souvenirs can be compared to the internet's love of LOLcats. Still, sometimes when traveling I long for the authenticity that I feel tourism destroys, which which will forever remain the tourist's dilemma. The existence of souvenir shops in any given destination probably began with other conveniences like airport shuttles, English-speaking waiters, and centrally located hotels. Many of these things are the reasons people visit places like Prague as opposed to remote villages in Tibet. That said, tourism is something I enjoy but also have a hard time wrapping my head around. I have such a strong desire to visit the unvisited places--to see local life and street markets untouched by consumerism. When I think of travel in the early 1900s--the cost, the difficulty--I find something of the travel I long for. Surely it was difficult, uncomfortable. But surely also it was more immersive, more awe-inspiring. Imagine visiting ancient ruins you had only seen sketches of, or standing as one of the first foreigners in the center of Lhasa, a forbidden city. Though the world harbors many tiny villages tucked into mountain ranges, or forgotten towns along riverbanks, they feel as distant now as they must have two hundred years ago, but for different reasons. Then, it was mostly the matter of getting there. Today, though getting there is easier, there is the issue of inconvenience. Is there a hotel to book? What sites are there to see? We tend to leave the inconvenient places to National Geographic. My idealization of this kind of inconvenient travel is slightly illogical considering my sensitive stomach, my lack of physical fitness, and my general disinterest in hardcore Patagonia-type backpacking adventures. But, you know...there's always the chance that some day I may blow a few thousand dollars making my way to the monasteries of the Himalayas to see the sun rise over Nagarkot. I suppose generally I like to be inconvenienced in the sense of being/feeling displaced--not passing McDonald's every two blocks, not finding a GAP around the corner--but I'd also rather not hike 300 miles to find things to eat that aren't in my knapsack. That is, I suppose, my personal dilemma, if not the dilemma of every tourist--that anything convenient will likely destroy some authenticity of a location. Rarely do inconvenient places entice visitors. During my weekend in Prague, I found myself wishing I could have visited within a year or two following the Velvet
Revolution--that perhaps that could have offered a real glimpse into the heart of the city, the scars Communism left there etc. (nevermind the fact that I would have been three or four years old at the time...). A few things remain that, I think, are tiny relics of that earlier Prague. If you find yourself in the city, I highly recommend you try to experience them yourself. They are: 1) The metro. Perhaps comparing it with Paris's stations has a lot to do with my opinion, but there's something very Post-Communist about many of the stations, design-wise. Generally speaking, it's easy to lose yourself in the culture and local life of any place by using public transportation, and sitting in the car of one of Prague's metro trains surrounded by Slavic language, it's easy to imagine what the city might have been twenty years ago. Visual aids: 1, 2, 3, 4. 2) Walking the city at night. Like Paris, the city closes up around 6PM, save a few restaurants and bars. During my time there I didn't find any particularly hopping areas as far as nightlife was concerned, even though we stayed right off Wenceslas Square (where there are some clubs) on a street full of sex shops and cabaret theaters. The city is lit, of course, but something about walking the city at night felt especially dark and quiet, probably due to the high number of pedestrian areas. A dark, quiet city is something I've rarely experienced, especially as early as 8PM. It was more refreshing than eerie. 3) Trams. There is something very Dr. Zhivago-y about them, though I realize that neither the film nor Omar Sharif have anything to do with the Czech Republic. If you find yourself in Prague, I recommend taking the tram from Charles Bridge up to Prague Castle. Again, there's something delightfully Post-Communist about the trams, but unlike the metro, its in the most storybook "Hey kids! Communism!" kind of way. (Sorry. It's getting late, I've been working on this post for a long time, and my figurative language--and perhaps my general grasp of English--is beginning to escape me.) Visual aids: 1, 2, 3. 4) The post office. My room mate for the trip, Kristin, and I went into a post office to get stamps for postcards. The office was in what seemed like a restored train station, with pews for waiting customers, and a lot of open space. The postal workers behind glass along one wall. The environment really did feel more like a station than a post office. Kristin and I walked up to ask about stamps. The woman behind the glass was surprised and somewhat angry as she explained that we needed to take a number. A man in a very elevator-operator uniform approached us and showed us where to take a number. Once we did, we sat on a pew, and immediately our number appeared on a digital marquee above the woman we had asked for stamps two minutes earlier. Sunday morning, our last day in Prague, I woke early and ate alone before wandering through the city flâneur style. As the sun rose and bathed Old Town Square in pink, I strolled past the the clock tower and the statue of Jan Hus. Very few people milled through the square as waiters set up chairs and tables on restaurant patios. With so few shops open at the early hour, I decided to check out the churches. Sure enough, Týn Cathedral's doors were open, and I stepped inside to find a service in session. The church's pews were filled with Czechs, all dressed very casually. A priest at the altar chanted a prayer, and the congregation chanted in response. There was something quite ordinary, yet quite surprising about witnessing this, similar to the je ne sais quoi of Parisians walking their dogs outside palaces. Here were the locals that seemed to be missing all weekend, gathered in blue jeans and hoodies inside the Týn Cathedral, a church constructed in 1256. The interior is decked with gold and Baroque-style altars. Tycho Brahe, the famous astronomer, is buried there. Perhaps this curiosity and disbelief in mixing such rich history with the mundanity of daily life is uniquely American, since many historical buildings in our country have an entry free and roped-off rooms, or else have been privatized. I'm thinking specifically of early government buildings in Philadelphia. The more I see of the world, the less I know what to say about the places I have visited. Rarely have I thought of an answer to satiate my friends' curiosity when returning from some new city. More often than not, I settle on a few sentences that cannot be disputed, like "It was more touristy than I expected," or "The buildings are really beautiful." To capture the essence of a place after catching only a glimpse is like writing about love without platitude; it rarely happens. It is much easier to write about the nature of travel itself than the way a specific voyage has reshaped the traveler. Rarely can one describe transformation until long after it has occurred. And so, as ever, I return to the subject of Travel Itself. Many others have captured it better than I. Pico Iyer, in his essay, "Why We Travel: A Love Affair With the World," writes:But the worshippers these days are consumers, not creators. They are
mainly foreign tourists who come to see the eternal Mona Lisa,
post-modern American artists, the French Impressionists and Moliere.
The city chemistry that produced rawness, dynamism, change and
challenge seems absent.
As a resident of Paris, I will admit that
parts of the city are museum-like, but there remains a
large portion of Paris's character tucked away in quiet
neighborhoods--pieces of the city rarely written about in travel books, and rarely noticed by visitors who skip from one site
to another via metro. While those producing cutting-edge work in the art world may have moved elsewhere, Paris is still a hometown. The daily market, the tiny bakery, the ateliers in Haussmann-style
apartment buildings: to an outsider, these things seem picturesque, if
not fantastic. To Parisians they are relatively quotidian, though not
unappreciated.
Parisians adore the city's parks, if only because their well-groomed dogs can trot along behind them as they stroll past former palaces. I once stood in line at a bakery as the pâttisier helped an old woman remember which was her favorite cake. Vous ne vous souvenez pas ce gateau? Ça c'est le gateau que vous avez acheté pour l'anniversaire de votre fils le mois dernier! Je crois que vous aimez ça. When he had finally convinced her that it was, in fact, the cake that she liked (she continued to disagree with him, even after sampling a piece), he bid her goodbye and told her he'd see her tomorrow. Only in Paris do bakers help senile old women stay finicky (and on a daily basis, at that). The way the French embrace and disregard their history simultaneously--the way they respect and grow weary with their oldest living generation--will remain for me the je ne sais quoi of life in the city. Maybe a photo can explain better than my words can. This photo was taken in the library of École Militaire, Paris's military academy. The library houses hundreds if not thousands of antique volumes, some dating back to the French exploration of China. The painting pictured is authentic and original--not like the cheap copies and modern imitations we're used to seeing in America's dentist offices.
I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast Asia more than a decade ago, how I would come back to my apartment in New York City and lie in bed, kept up by something more than jet lag, playing back in my memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and paging wistfully through my photographs and reading and rereading my diaries, as if to
And:
extract some mystery from them. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion: I was in love.
For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can't quite speak the language, and you don't know where you're going, and you're pulled ever deeper into inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you're left puzzling over who you are and whom you've fallen in with. All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning--from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament--and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity--and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the other.
Prague was, indeed, a bit of a love affair, and offered more than I expected in mulling over ideas about Travel Itself. Walking the dark streets under the tram cables of such a sleepy city, or strolling through Old Town Square at sunrise, I found a bit of the terror and wonder I always hope to run across in exploration.
Thursday, 16 October 2008
Had a small celebration with some friends just beneath the Sacre Coeur, despite the rainy weather. Thanks to everyone France, State-side, and globally, for all the pleasant birthday wishes. Here's a video to keep you occupied while I spend the weekend gallivanting through Prague. And yes, I know. Take lots of pictures.
The birthday baguette from glynnis on Vimeo.
Tuesday, 14 October 2008
For Julian's birthday, a bunch of us met at the Champs de Mars--the lawn in front of the Eiffel Tower. It was a mess of languages, to be sure, but we had a good time.
Bon anniversaire, Julian! from glynnis on Vimeo.
Thursday, 09 October 2008
A friend from my graduating class in high school is spending the semester in Europe studying Spanish in Sedona, Spain. We were never close, since at best we said hello in the hallways and sat at opposite ends of Mr. Bolus's Algebra 2 classroom. Despite this, he discovered that I'm living in Paris for the year and let me know via facebook that he planned to visit the city during a week off from school. I helped him find a hostel, and we met for dinner. Raclettes is essentially the French equivalent of fondue, but the burner and serving style differ. Click the picture above for a bit more of an explanation. Despite sitting down in a raclettes establishment, he ordered fondue, and I had coffee and dessert. Afterward, we headed to Shakespeare & Co. to find a dictionary for him. Notre Dame is just a stone's throw from the bookshop, which he noticed immediately. Dictionaryless, we crossed the river as it began to rain harder. We stood before Notre Dame huddled under umbrellas for a good twenty minutes as he stared at the facade in disbelief. My sneakers filled with water. As he marveled at the cathedral--the fact that he "could reach out and touch it"--I marveled at his reaction. Though moments of pure tourist delight still strike me several times a week, many of the city's monuments, in my eyes, have fallen from iconic status to mere historical landmarks. They still hold some magic, but when you study for massive art history exams in a library that's almost literally in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, the monuments begin to morph into a pleasant backdrop for everyday life. The longer I'm here, the more I understand how a number of Parisians have never seen their city from atop the Tower, or how New Yorkers have never visited the Empire State Building. The interstices folded into the relative mundanity of daily life still harbor moments of absolute glee--the same kind tourists experience during short visits to iconic cities. My room mate and I attended rescreenings of the Presidential and Vice Presidential debates at the Cinéaqua, an aquarium with several movie screens. The aquarium is situated next to Trocadero, so each night that we attend, we emerge from the dark of the theater to see the Eiffel Tower shining blue before us, the rhetoric of American political candidates still bouncing through our brains. The glee, then, manifests itself at a slightly different level. The sight of the Tower excites us, since we've just been flooded with images of home and the familiar via CNN. But the blue of the Tower also creates a surrealism that, if I stop to think about, exists in most of my daily activity. If the economic crisis we're experiencing really does make the sort of history everyone's predicting, years from now my grandchildren will interview me for homework assignments, and I will tell them that when the market crashed I was huddled in the corner of a Parisian café writing and sipping coffee. That for my twenty-first birthday, as the economy continued to slide, I flew to Prague for the weekend. Though there's no way to know today how the events surrounding the crisis will play out in the coming years, it's humbling and strange to compare my experiences with my grandmother's during the depression of the 1930s. I've interviewed, videotaped, and written extensively about her experiences as a child of the Great Depression and a teenager during the second World War. For her memories of pot liquor, I have memories of pastries for breakfast. For her friends enlisted in the war, I have friends dotting the European continent to attend its major historical institutions. It is an especially strange time to be a member of my generation, which, since its birth, has lived in the wake of the Baby Boomers. As many systems buckle or become outdated beneath the leviathan of our parents' generation, I often wonder how or when we will restore and create new systems. Certainly many of these issues crop up during election season--the depletion of Social Security, the failing health care system, etc.--but I think that ultimately members of our generation must hold offices before these problems will be directly addressed (at least in our interest, rather than in our parents'); the Baby Boomers still comprise an enormous part of the voting population, and not all of them will vote in the interest of generations that succeed them. Though many of these failing systems may be repaired to accommodate our parents and those that directly follow, it's possible that the same repairs might not last long enough for my generation to reap the same benefits. Combine this with the fact that the job market is extremely competitive, that there may be high rates of unemployment come graduation time, that the real estate market may still be suffering years down the road, and that it's harder (or at least less desirable) than ever to take out loans, and you have a strange picture of what members of my generation may face in the coming years. Certainly we will survive--compared to the Great Depression, we hardly ever hear anyone going on about the oil crises of the 70s, and our parents weathered plenty of economic dips during our youth. (My parents have been quick to remind me that I was born just a few days before Black Monday in '87.) But the bleak picture the media has painted in recent weeks creates a strange dissonance with the way many members of my generation are living. Many of us, for one, are studying abroad, as this has become the norm in many college curricula. Others live in the bubble of University Life, settled into large dorm rooms with kitchenettes, sorority houses with personal chefs, or apartments with satellite TV. Some of us can't remember our family's first computer, can't imagine life without text messages, and cannot comprehend how anyone managed to leave the house without a cell phone. It's possible for the less adventurous and more ignorant among us to arrive in a college classroom without knowledge that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict exists (I kid you not--in a UA class on social conflcit this summer, one student had never heard of it). Then again, I've met my share of Americans here, some younger than I, who speak four languages--scholars who make me feel I've been fumbling through life and studies with foolishness bordering lunacy. Yesterday I had lunch with a friend from class at the Sorbonne who gave our waiter a lesson on Farsi in French, and bid him goodbye in German. All in all, life as an expatriate is strange. Even without an economic crisis back home, my life wandering through Paris is so far from anything in Tuscaloosa, both figuratively and geographically. Though it's not my first time in Europe, it is the first fall since I began college that I've managed to totally escape football season, which this year is larger than ever. The idea of returning next fall to endure city-wide traffic jams, Wal-mart aisles emptied of beer and soda, thousands of intoxicated fans wandering campus mid-day, and the sounds of Bryant-Denny roaring with 100,000 people kind of scares me. Reverse culture shock, indeed. Still, though, there is something to be said for standing with stars in your eyes before Notre Dame in the pouring rain, nearly brought to your knees in disbelief. This kind of delight, this kind of displacement, this kind of reality check--it's something I'll never get tired of.
I waited in the pouring rain at the Saint-Michel fountain--a popular meeting place in Paris, since it's near a metro stop and in a neighborhood packed with restaurants and boutiques. When he emerged from the metro, we huddled under my umbrella and waded through the flooding pedestrian streets lined with restaurants. I asked what kind of cuisine he'd like, since in Saint-Michel you can find almost anything, and we settled on something traditionally French: raclettes.
Monday, 06 October 2008
I spent this weekend in the Loire Valley touring chateaus, tasting wine, picking grapes, and hanging out on vineyards. Plenty more to come, but I'm pressed for time tonight--more French bureaucracy to wade through early tomorrow. À bientôt.
Thursday, 02 October 2008
More photos of the parade on flickr.
Techno parade from glynnis on Vimeo.
Wednesday, 01 October 2008
There are several English language bookstores in Paris, a handful of which I've yet to visit. Each one seems to have its own specialty. The Abbey Bookshop, just down the street from the Cluny La Sorbonne RER stop (off Boulevard St. Michel), has the largest selection of travel books I've seen in Paris. The shop is floor-to-ceiling books. The owner, a friendly Canadian, makes recommendations based on my purchases each time I visit. I've never wandered the shop when he wasn't on a step ladder shoving books into tiny crevices, or rearranging large stacks of them to get to the shelves behind. Because of the narrow aisles, I don't recommended the Abbey for those with clumsy tendencies, great height, or especially round bellies. Though there's a wide selection of nearly every genre, I primarily visit the Abbey Bookshop to buy travel guides. See the Abbey's interior here and here. Information from the Abbey's website:
Shakespeare & Co. is another beloved Parisian bookstore that has been around much longer. The shop's history, in addition to a schedule of readings and a 360 tour, can be found here. The shop is across the Seine from Notre Dame, with the
Abbey Bookshop just a few blocks away, deeper in the Latin Quarter. Just inside the front door of the shop is an entire shelf of books on Paris and France, ranging from historical texts to novels that use the city as a setting. There are still some English-language bookstores in the city that I haven't visited yet, most notably the Village Voice where David Sedaris is reading later this month.
Shakespeare & Co. opened in 1951 after its owner, George Whitman, amassed a large collection of English-language books during several years living in Paris. The bookstore served as a base for many members of the Beat generation, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs among them. Its name comes from a previous Parisian bookstore (in a different location) run by Sylvia Beach, who catered to members of the Lost Generation -- Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, James Joyce, etc. Today's shop is now run by Sylvia, George's daughter, who is named after Beach.
The store hosts several readings every season, and also serves as a meeting place for small writers' workshops in the city. Next door in another store front, Shakespeare & Co. houses its collection of rare and antique books, which I've never seen open to the public. I suspect to see the collection one must know the owner or make a special request. There are a few beds on the second floor or the main shop where visiting writers can stay the night, or where "tumbleweeds" can sleep in exchange for a few hours of work.
