Paris Newsletter #4 - Heather Stevens and Bob Thomson, 29 January 2006Greetings and Bonne Annee.
It has been some time since we last wrote about our activities in Paris. Luckily enough we've saved a few notes to help recount our comings and goings.
My visit to Ottawa and Orlando in September/October went really well. I stayed with my Mom and we spent a lot of time together. I visited with family and friends, or at least tried to call as many people as I could. As the saying goes, time flies when you're having fun.
One of the highlights of my visit was going to Orlando to stay with James, Zaheela and my precious granddaughter Alexis for four days. It was quite an experience holding my granddaughter for the first time and I have the pictures to boot. As well as changing my first diaper, we did little outings, including lunches, shopping, and visiting my favourite spot, a town called Winter Park. Just regular family things. It was wonderful.
Fast forward 3 weeks and I was back in Paris with all the Fall activities in the city just a buzzing.
I must start with three unexpected things that happened to me since I last wrote.
As most of you know I am not shy about being in front of a camera. So on Friday, November 4th, I volunteered to be part of a 20 second TV ad by "Friends of the Earth France". (Where Bob has his office.) There were about 25 volunteers and about 15 technical people (director, cameramen, etc) We headed out to the country (Isle de France) to film the ad. It was a blast (no speaking required). We had to wear black or grey because we were going to be in a funeral march with a tree (representing the death of the environment). A few people were cut from the production but I managed to stay to the end. They referred to me as "La Canadienne". It actually made me feel a little special, as if I really belonged to the group. We were served a hot lunch, and even had a trailer for us to get warm in and go to the bathroom. It was a cold, dark, grey, day (perfect for a funeral). I got home at about 6 p.m. very tired , but happy. We opened a small bottle of champaign to celebrate the beginning of my french acting career. They also did still photos, so maybe there will be a poster too. I'm in the poster, but I don't know when the ad will be on T.V.
Next, I bought a ticket for the Paris Masters Tennis Tournament held in November (a lot of the top players were not there but it still was good tennis). Daniel Nestor (Canadian) was playing doubles so I made sure to watch his game. The crowd was small and I met Nestor's wife. After the game she invited me to join her again. On the Saturday she called and I joined her in the players box for the semi finals. I got to see singles and doubles up close and personal. I was in seventh heaven. Daniel and Mark Knowles won again, so she asked me to join her for the finals on the Sunday. It was great. Daniel went off to Shanghai for the end of the season championships (no ticket for that). Unfortunately they lost. Maybe I'll run into them again at Rolland Garros (French Open) in May. I did actually hit a few tennis balls for an hour last month with a Canadian woman living in Paris. We met through a Canadian from Toronto who I met at Roland Garros last May watching, guess who, Daniel Nestor. She is very nice, but indoor tennis is so expensive that I don't think I will join a Winter club.
My third "special" experience came while buying a pair of hiking boots at Au Vieux Campeur. (An outdoor store much like MEC.) While I was waiting to pay, a young, very attractive French gentleman started a conversation with me in English. We chatted awhile, then he asked me to join him for coffee. Bien sur I responded. He is off to Chile for a year, lives in the southern part of France, has travelled, very interesting and knew about fair trade. He asked me if I would be interested in going to a photo exhibit at the Louvre. His aunt was in charge of the press for the exhibition as well as the free tickets. This was an exhibit I was going to go to the next day. It was a major exhibit and sale of photographs from dealers from around the world. I accepted avec plaisir. The photographs were spectacular, the people, the clothes, the buzz. It was great. While we were sipping champaign, he casually mentioned that his family owns a wine vineyard and the wine in available from Monoprix, a big supermarket chain. I checked it out on the way home and bought a bottle. It is a Gamay, not expensive. Now I can say I know a wine family in France. The name is "Valentin Fleur", produced in the St Georges sur Loire area. I will check out some of the wine caves in Paris to see if they sell other types of wine. All and all it was quite special. I was home by 8 o'clock (Bob already knew where and who I was with).
Back to my comings and goings. My volunteer work at Resto du Cour continues twice a week and I seem to have found my niche in giving out canned vegetables to the needy.
WICE lectures have started up again and I have enlisted in some Medieval Paris art lectures, as well as lectures at the Louvre. Last week we visited the apartment of Victor Hugo. I continue to visit other museums, galleries and scout about the unexplored parts of Paris. On one outing, I discovered the Bourgeoise ladies of Paris playing bridge in the afternoon on Rue de Blanche. On another day I discovered an art deco public toilet next door to the Eglise Madeleine in one of Paris' posh areas.
The Musee Picasso is celebrating its 20th anniversary with an exhibition of rarely shown Picasso drawings. There were even some of his cutouts made from paper napkins. (Saved by one of his lovers). Speaking of lovers, there was an excellent exhibit of sculptures by Camile Claudel at the Musee Marmottan. She was the mistress and muse of Auguste Rodin. We have really gotten into Russian buildings as well as Russian art. There are a few interesting Russian housing developments in Paris, with one just down the street from us on Crimee. The Musee d'Orsay had an exhibit of 19th century Russian art, of which we (Bob came with me that day) recognized a few painting that we had seen at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. The Centre Pompidou featured the greatest exhibition since 1966 on the infamous anti-art movement of the early 20th century, referred to as the Dada. The Petit Palais opened after many years closed for renovations and it is truly a beautiful building with many fine artifacts. The Grand Palais also had two very good exhibits on the Viennese Sécession of the early 1900s and an exhibit entitled "Melancolie".
My weekly walks with a group from Paris to Isle de France (the outskirts of Paris) continues even in this cold weather. Talking about weather, it has been freezing. The dampness is bitter cold, and of course my nice warm MEC jacket is in Canada. I had to buy a pair of warm mitts and a new Tuque. This week's walk was actually in Paris and I assisted another member of the group in the planning of it. It took in part of the 19th and 20th Arrondissments (my own backyard).
I am running out of steam so I will let Bob continue on with our Newsletter.
Love to all
heather
p.s. I did buy a new pair of boots during the Paris sales.
Well as I sat down to go over my calendar, it's amazing what we've seen and done since our last real newsletter on October 8th. Of course we did a little thing on Paris burning on November 6th in response to all of your enquiries as to our safety, and then a short Christmas note. You can find all of these stored on my website at http://www.web.ca/~bthomson.
On October 29-30 we spent a weekend in Troyes, courtesy of the generosity of my office colleagues on my 60th birthday in September. A fascinating town filled with 16th century timbered houses, a museum of hand and craft tools and another of the textile industry, and a market full of tasty sausages, cheeses and wines. From the 11th to 17th of November we were in Berlin, as I had 2 days of meetings on the 5th Anniversary of the release of the World Commission on Dams report (http://www.irn.org/wcd/5) and with Transparency International. A very bicycle friendly city and full of both modern and ancient architecture and museums, not the least of which is the Pergamon - full of Persian, Greek and Roman antiquities. We visited Potsdam and the Schloss Sansouci, ate a lot of good German food and of course saw Checkpoint Charlie and experienced at least a bit of the evolving and complex history of East/West German "integration". We stayed in the former East Berlin's Russian quarter.
Back in Paris, we've been taking great advantage of a book, "Unexplored Paris", which we found at the Red Wheelbarrow bookstore in the Marais. It's full of dozens and dozens of little known corners: like the Picpus cemetery (host of a mass grave of some 1300 guillotined prisoners of the 1794 Revolutionary Tribunal); a Russian Orthodox church and theological school full of amazing icons only 10 minutes from our apartment; the grave of a simple house painter who passed himself off as Robespierre's secretary and whose landlord erected a big bronze statue found in a scrap yard; the fanciest bank branch in the world housed in a manor built in 1844 for the Manager of the Bank of France; Balzac's house; a wine museum; the School of Medicine; the home of Auguste Compte (a founder of Humanism); and so many more I can't remember them all. And there are dozens more that we have yet to see.
We've also continued our weekend walks outside Paris on our own (apart from Heather's weekly Wednesday walks). They've included Crouy sur Ourcq (with our French friends Michelle and Daniel), Santeuil, the Bois de Vincennes and Dourdan. We've enjoyed the Musees d'Orsay, Carnavalet (History of Paris), Cernuschi (a Chinese art exhibit) and of course the Louvre, taking advantage of free first Sunday of the month admission and Heather's museum card to avoid the big lineups. A photo exhibit at the Luxembourg Gardens, the ice rink at City Hall, the brightly lighted Champs Elysee and a 1000+ booth wine fair (free tastings!) also bear mention.
Just before New Years, we had a pleasant few hours with friends from Ottawa on their way to Switzerland via Paris. We spent New Year's Eve on the foot bridge over the St. Martin Canal just down the street, where we watched the Eiffel Tower sparkle at midnight, along with about 40 other people. We met a Turkish student couple and chatted into the new year.
One evening I went to see a fair trade film at a "buy local" café in the 18th Arrondissment and ended up giving an impromptu lecture afterwards on how the international fair trade label works. I also made a presentation on fair trade to Michelle's business students' English class back in December. I've been reading a compendium of "degrowth" economics essays, John Ralston Saul's "The Collapse of Globalism" (which I highly recommend) and Mavis Gallant's "Paris Stories". Ralston Saul has some interesting observations on the issue of "guest" workers in Europe which are particularly relevant to the banlieu violence in Paris in November. On one of our neighbourhood walks in November (the first day we had some short lived snow here), we found ourselves in the middle of a demonstration of the "sans papiers" (long-term immigrants without residence papers) in front of the 19th Mairie. A small cardboard shack bidonville has popped up on the on ramp to the A3 expressway a few kilometres from my office and on my bicycle route home. As Heather notes above, it has been bitterly cold in the past week, although "only" around -3 at worst. The humidity makes it feel colder than the temperature would lead you to believe, and of course the news is full of much colder weather in other parts of Europe, exacerbated by Russia's oil export power games.
A December 13 meeting of the ECA network in Brussels, a major proposal for expanded terms of reference for the OECD's 2006 Review of ECA environmental standards, OECD anti-bribery proposals and a corruption consultation, as well as the regular monthly ECA Watch newsletter and website maintenance, have kept me busy at work. We're off to London for a long weekend in the first week of February and a conflict in project finance workshop for me, and I'll be going to a workshop on the role of export credit agencies in development finance in Washington in mid February.
We had an interesting experience around Christmas with the locks to the street door of our apartment building. We lost one of our two electronic swipe "keys" to the front door, and discovered in the process of trying to get a replacement that it's an outdated system, with no backup or replacement keys apparently to be had anywhere. We got locked out one night for a few hours when our collective efforts to repair the system shut it down and no one else was at home. There's a meeting of owners on February 9th to discuss whether they'll invest in a new system, as quite a few owners and tenants now only have one key left. It was an "interesting" encounter with the bureaucracy of landlords, tenants, commercial suppliers and "security" systems in a "foreign" environment. Some of you will know what I mean when I call it an AFGO.
Last night we went to a vernissage exhibition of Daniel's brother's paintings in the 15th century Jean sans Peur tower, the remnants of the Duke of Bourgogne's mansion. We had dinner with them afterwards at a nice restaurant. Tomorrow we're off to welcome in the Year of the Dog at a Chinese community parade at the Hotel de Ville and then dinner in the "Chinatown" of the 13th Arrondissment.
At bit late, but all the best in 2006.
Regards
Bob
P.S. Check out the photos at http://www.web.ca/~bthomson/paris_photos/index.html
