I have not done a lot of work on my dissertation in the past week. But I have done some other productive things.

On Thursday night, Laura and I went over to B’s, where Laura practiced her upcoming conference paper for our working group. That was pretty fun. We drank too much wine, and then Laura and I decided to get late-night sandwiches while we were still in B’s neighborhood, because no such thing exists near our apartment. B and Sam had invited us to a hip-hop show that started at midnight, but we declined. (Oh, their band Blutschwester now has a myspace page. My favorite song of theirs is “Reise.”)

We went out to a bar near Odéon on Friday, with Britt and Elise. They were leaving on Saturday. They told us about some of the characters doing research in the Archives Nationales. One guy wears a tuxedo, and another guy dresses in nineteenth-century costume (presumably the period he researches?). I once saw a woman at the BnF who seemed to planning to go straight from there to a gala ball of some sort.

On Saturday night Laura and I went to the early showing of La Môme, a biopic about Edith Piaf. Apparently it’s going to be released in other countries as La Vie en rose. Which is kind of stupid, because there’s already a French movie called La Vie en rose, and if this movie is going to take its title from an Edith Piaf song, it should be called Non, je ne regrette rien. I’m glad I saw this movie, but it was not so great. It was way too long and repetitive, in a way that was very similar to De-lovely. There was all this jumping back and forth in time that didn’t seem necessary. There are so many characters (and they enter and exit so haphazardly) that it’s often hard to tell who’s who. The biggest problem is that the movie’s thesis is, “Edith Piaf channeled her suffering into her music.” And there’s one scene where they really beat you over the head with that thesis. Of course, this is exactly how French people think of Edith Piaf, so I don’t know if it would possible for a French director to do her biopic without having that as the thesis.

In our Textual Analysis class at UMass, we had to write a three-sentence summary of the action of each play we read. And we often used this exercise outside of class. My friend Danielle’s three sentences for Lorca’s Yerma were: “Yerma doesn’t have a baby. Yerma doesn’t have a baby. Yerma kills her husband.” My three sentences for this movie would be: “Edith Piaf suffers. Edith Piaf sings and suffers. Edith Piaf dies.” And there’s morphine addiction and triumph of the human spirit and a cameo by Gérard Dépardieu. Oh, and the actress who plays grown-up Edith Piaf (from 20 until her death at 48) is phenomenal. Anyway, if you decide to see this movie I would highly recommend reading a detailed biography of Edith Piaf before you go.

On Sunday Katie hosted a pancake brunch, and afterward I went to the Musée Carnavalet with K. and P. The Musée Carnavalet is my new favorite museum. It’s devoted to the cultural and intellectual history of Paris. And admission to the permanent collection is free. The first few rooms are devoted to shopkeepers’ signs from the 17^th-19^th Centuries. I was also very excited to see the famous portrait of Molière, and a painting of the Champs-Elysées before the Revolution (with no Place de la Concorde, or Arc de Triomphe, or neon lights, or department stores, or cars).

But now I must go work on my chapter, which I promised to send to the Early Modern Group this month. And this month is almost over.

It's funny how Paris keeps bringing back people from my past. This weekend I went out to dinner with my friend Angela from high school. She is living in Zurich, and came to Paris for Chinese New Year. She didn't go to the parade, though. She said the important thing is to have good food, and Paris has better food than Zurich.

Angela has a number of friends in Paris, so there were seven of us who went to a restaurant called Chez Paul, in the Bastille. (I had rabbit thighs stuffed with goat cheese and mint, followed by "tarte tatin" for dessert. All was very tasty.) After dinner we had planned to go to bars on rue de Lappe. The bouncer at one bar did not find us sufficiently cool to merit entry. Jason tried in vain to talk him into letting us in. My philosophy is that any bar that would deny me entry is not a bar I want to go to, so I was glad that the bouncer did not relent. We ended up at a place called "Wax," where we had one drink and then called it a night because we wanted to catch the Metro. But it was great to see Angela. She invited me to come visit her in Zurich, so I will have to find a long weekend to do that.

Today Laura and Thomas and I went to the Catacombs, which are very close to our apartment. It's shameful that we hadn't been there yet (almost as shameful as the fact that I haven't been to the Musee d'Orsay yet). But now we have. At the end of the eighteenth century, it was decided that some of the cemeteries of Paris needed to be emptied for reasons of public health. But where to put everyone's bones? The underground quarry near Montrouge, naturally. So the bones are stored in well-organized stacks, with decorative touches here and there. And there are quotes engraved on plaques, with appropriate sayings about death. I almost wonder if it wasn't designed by Martha Stewart's ancestors.

I found the descent down a really long spiral staircase, and then wandering down long hallways to be a little eerie. But once you get to the rooms with the bones, it's not so much creepy as solemn. Well, except that sometimes there are security guards sitting in dark corners, and it can be surprising to come across them. At the end, you go up 83 winding steps. There's a sign that suggests taking the stairs slowly, which is good advice.

I had forgotten about this picture that Jacob took when he was here. I'm standing in front of the movie poster in the Metro at Alesia. The roof curves up, which is why the angle is funny.


I also noticed the graffiti "Kari" on the poster. The French word for "graffiti artist" is "taggeur." Kari seems to be fairly prolific, as I have seen his/her work in a number of locations.

I spied an interesting comment last night on the Metro. Across three white Comedie-Francaise advertisements was written, "Sarko n'est pas le probleme. Il est le symptome." Meaning, "[Right wing candidate Nicolas Sarkozy] is not the problem. He is the symptom."
Laura bought a universal remote control today, so now we can watch TV again. We are pretty excited about that.

Laura and I just got back from seeing the utterly fabulous film Moliere, directed by Laurent Tirard and starring Romain Duris. Now, obviously I am predisposed to enjoy any movie about Moliere, but Laura also really thought it was pretty great.

The premise of the movie is similar to Shakespeare in Love or Dick in that it is an imaginative rewriting of history. Moliere was imprisoned for his theatre company's debts to a candlemaker in 1644. His debt was paid by a bourgeois artisan named Leonard Aubry, apparently out of the goodness of his heart. (But eventually Moliere's father repaid Aubry.) The following year Moliere joined up with most of the same actors and toured in the provinces for about 13 years.

The first ten minutes are kind of a cheesy mess, with a lot of "Look, we're actors! At Versailles!" (in a theatre that wasn't built until nearly a hundred years later, which annoyed P. but didn't bother me so much). And Moliere wanders around all moody and says eight thousand times that he really wants to be a grand tragic actor.

But then we flash back "thirteen years earlier," and we see the imprisonment and the strange circumstances of Moliere's debt being paid. And this is where the film starts to be genius, because Moliere walks into a palimpsest of every play he ever wrote. The name of Moliere's benefactor is Monsieur Jourdain (the title character in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme). He asks Moliere to coach him in acting in two plays he has written in order to impress Celimene (the leading lady from The Misanthrope). All this must be kept a secret from M. Jourdain's wife, Elmire, so Moliere poses as a clergyman under the codename Tartuffe. Meanwhile, Jourdain's older daughter Agnes is tossing notes over the hedge to her suitor as if she were in The School for Wives, and there are subtler references to The Imaginary Invalid and The Learned Ladies in the tutelage of younger daughter Louison. The plot is basically The Bourgeois Gentleman, but dialogue and situations from other Moliere plays abound. There's a great scene with Moliere/Jourdan doing the Alceste/Oronte argument over Oronte's poem from The Misanthrope, and a delightful entrance into Celimene's salon that is straight out of Les Precieuses ridicules.

But I don't know if you need to get all of that to enjoy the movie. (It certainly helps, just as knowing more about the Watergate scandal might increase your enjoyment of Dick.) There is a very poignant aspect to the ending that is true in spirit to the mingling of comedy and tragedy in Moliere's life. And we get to see a lot of the scenes from earlier played out on stage by the troupe (in Marie-Antoinette's little theatre, with Philippe d'Orleans, the troupe's patron, front and center in the audience).

All of the acting is really fantastic. Romain Duris gives an acting lesson about how to act like a horse in which he explains that different horses have different personalities, and proceeds to show three very different possibilities, with total commitment. And everyone else has the difficult task of playing all of Moliere's types in one character. Ludivine Sagnier as Celimene and Laura Morante as Elmire are particularly delightful.

I really hope this movie comes out in the U.S. It would be a shame if it didn't. I'm going to have to find a way to own it on DVD someday. I think it would be a really useful teaching tool, at least for the way I teach.

My sister Anna came to visit this weekend. We had lots of fun. She is studying abroad in Cork, Ireland this year. So she flew on Ryan Air, which means that she got to experience the joys of the Beauvais Airport. Not for nearly as long as I did, though. Her flight to Beauvais was delayed by about half an hour, so I ended up waiting at the sad little bus parking lot at Porte Maillot for a little while for her. The guy who rounds up the passengers for the buses asked me where I was going (in English). I explained (in French) that I was waiting for my sister who was arriving from Shannon and said, “Mais les arrivées sont plutôt par là?” (“But the arrivals are over there, right?” or to engage in a more Benjamin/Spivak translation style: “But ze arrivals, zey are more over zere?”). He gave me a nice nod to show his appreciation for my knowledge of his ingenious arrival/departure system, and I went and waited on the grass, away from the crush of passengers trying to get on buses to spend two hours waiting at an airport where there is no source of entertainment.

Anyway, Anna arrived and we got on the Metro (the 1 to the 6 to the 4, rather than the 1 to the 4, because the 1 sucks, and the 6 is above ground and goes right by the Eiffel Tower). And we had gnocchi for dinner. The next day we went to the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and Notre-Dame. We had dinner at a place called “Flagrant Délice,” which had a very good 10 euro menu (but the wine was really expensive). On Saturday we went up to Montmartre and then back to Notre-Dame so that we could tour the inside.

One thing we noticed was that everyone around us was speaking English. And yes, we were in tourist areas heavily populated by American and British tourists. But for a lot of the people we heard speaking English, it was not their native language. So even in Paris, English is apparently the global language.

Saturday night we went to B’s punk show. He is in a band called “Blutschwester” (Blood Sisters), which started as a girl band, but he auditioned to be their drummer and they liked him. The show was a lot of fun, even though (or perhaps because?) the band was sort of not very good. I particularly enjoyed the songs “Reise” and “Go Fuck the Bitch,” their closing anthem.

On Sunday we tried to go shopping, which we should have done on Saturday because everything is closed on Sunday. Anna wanted to buy a scarf in Paris. Near my house, the little discount stores were open. One of them had some scarves, but these were not ideal. So we walked around for a very long time looking for any store that was open. The Galeries Lafayette at Montparnasse was closed. Everything on the Boulevard St. Michel south of the Sorbonne was closed. We finally found one store open, “Miss Coquette” or some such, on Boulevard Saint-Germain, right after the Sunday afternoon rollerblading crowd passed us. Anna found a perfect scarf, and then we saw a bunch of solid-colored scarves behind the counter for a good price, so she picked up one of those for good measure. And we found a souvenir store open at the end of Saint-Michel. So we felt good about the shopping excursion.

And then we had dinner at Buffalo Grill, which is a French simulacrum of an American steakhouse, down to the polite waiters in cheesy cowboy outfits. The minute we sat down, our waiter brought us two “Welcome Salads.” The place has a cigar Indian outside, faux swinging saloon doors painted on the front, a totem pole immediately inside, a popcorn machine, a selection of cacti, and several video game machines. On the wall above our table was a map depicting Buffalo Bill’s tour route through Europe. The food was good, and the prices were reasonable. I think it’s my new favorite restaurant in the neighborhood.

We had our seminar with M.C. on Wednesday, at his apartment. His children’s cat kept poking her head into the room, with much curiosity about these six morning guests taking notes. That’s about half the group that was going to S.W.’s seminar, but it was quite convivial and collegial. We went to lunch at a sushi place afterward. I had the futo maki, which was cut in enormous slices. Katie confided to me that she had almost ordered the futo maki, but had been concerned about her ability to eat it. It was pretty challenging.

Then on Wednesday evening we hosted P’s birthday dinner at our apartment. That was fun. We had steamed artichokes as an hors d’oeuvre, followed by scallops with noodles. And K. had made a lemon cake, which we ate with raspberry sorbet.

Laura and I watched two movies this week: Brokeback Mountain (the French title is Le Secret de Brokeback Mountain) and In Her Shoes (the title was left untranslated). We watched them dubbed in French. Laura said that the first time she saw Brokeback Mountain she didn’t like Anne Hathaway’s acting but did like Michelle Williams. This time she felt the opposite. I thought maybe that had to do with the French actresses who dubbed their voices.

On Saturday I walked around the Montparnasse Cemetery. It was very peaceful, but with much less open space than a cemetery in the U.S. (Even if it occurred to someone to go running in this cemetery, you just wouldn’t be able to because the paths are so narrow.) They have some signs that map out the location of famous people’s graves, but by the time I found one of those signs I was ready to go. I decided I will have to go back another time to pay my respects to Tristan Tzara. (How does one pay one’s respects to the founder of Dada? Perhaps a ritualistic dance involving a toothbrush and a hard-boiled egg would be the most appropriate gesture.) I did see the graves of publisher Honoré Champion, aviatrix Maryse Bastié, the Citroën family plot, and Eugene Ionesco. Ionesco’s grave had an interesting epitaph: “Prier le je ne sais qui. J’espère: Jesus-Christ.” It’s not easy to translate, but it roughly means “Pray to whomever you want. I hope: Jesus Christ.” The second half could be taken as “I hope you will pray to Jesus Christ” or as the speaker’s own prayer to Jesus Christ. And possibly several other ways, but those are the two most appropriate possibilities for what it could mean on his tombstone. It would be interesting to find that quote in context, as it apparently comes from Ionesco’s journals.

Sunday afternoon I was invited to lunch at Vicki-Marie’s, in Fontenay-sous-Bois. I met Vicki-Marie at Thanksgiving. She has a charming little apartment. The other lunch guests included the daughter of a Hungarian scholar named Peter Nagy, who wrote a book entitled Libertinage et Revolution in the 1970s. Vicki-Marie sent me home with two big hunks of cheese, quite a few grapes, and more litchi fruit than I could eat in a year. I have been looking for litchi recipes online, but I’m not coming up with anything interesting. Well, there was a litchi lasagna recipe, but that sounds kind of ridiculous.

On Friday night, Laura and I had some friends over for burritos. Laura had found tortillas at the supermarket, but refried beans are evidently unavailable in Paris. So she bought red beans and we looked up a recipe for refried beans online. Now, the recipe said to mash the beans while frying them in vegetable oil for five minutes. So I heated the oil, and put the beans in oil. And we thought it would be good to add onions to the mix, and some spices. And I mashed the beans. Forty minutes later, I was tired of mashing the beans and decided they were done. And they turned out very tasty. But it took a lot longer than five minutes.

I went for a walk in the Parc Montsouris this afternoon. At 5:30 I started hearing loud whistles and I figured the police were trying to round up some hooligans who were up to no good in the park. But then the whistling continued and I realized the park was closing. I kind of wished the men who were blowing the whistles would also have announced, "Hey, the park is closing. Time to go." But all the French people seemed to know that the whistle-blowing meant it was time to go, and I followed their lead. On the way home I bought a baguette using all the change in my pocket, which amused the woman who sold it to me.

Tonight we returned to The Moose to watch football with P. The crazy model was there again, this time with two crazy model friends who were rooting for Seattle, against her beloved Chicago Bears. Apparently the Bear-fan model's name is Tanaze, and she speaks seven languages and has written a novel. I was struck by the excessive performance of American football fandom. I mean, they were really screaming at each other. It was like we were at the Cubby Bear, only there were some Seattle fans there, too. (OK, I have never actually gone to the Cubby Bear, so I'm basing my analysis on my imaginative reconstruction of what the Cubby Bear might be like. Most of my sports-watching in Chicago bars occurred at T's, while eating a $5 burger on Sunday afternoon. Oh, T's.) P's friend William invited me and Laura to join his "salon" and discuss Schopenhauer with him. We will see if that actually pans out.

There is a fancy Vietnamese restaurant not far from my apartment. Tonight I was walking home from a kind of boring lecture on Diderot, and I passed this restaurant for the umpteenth time and actually looked at the menu. They had Pho, but it was awfully expensive. It was raining, and I was cold. And I have also really been missing Chicago lately. I thought that a bowl of nice Vietnamese soup would cure both of those ills. But it was really expensive (8.50 Euro), so I decided to keep walking, in spite of my intense desire for Pho.

Then when I got to the corner the light changed, so I couldn't cross the street. I took this as a sign that I should eat Pho. Beef, so that I could have a pitcher of red wine with it. It was so good. It was just like being at Pho 777 on Argyle, except the decor was more like Pho 999. And it was fancier than both, with a much better cut of beef in the soup. And I probably wouldn't have been drinking wine in Chicago. Maybe bubble tea. Anyway, it was just what I needed. So now that I know that Pho is possible in Paris (hello, history of French colonization), maybe I need to look for some cheaper Vietnamese restaurants. I'm sure there are some in the 13th arondissement.

My friends Meghann and Jacob came to Paris this weekend and stayed with me. On Thursday we went to lunch at a pleasant bistro in the Latin Quarter and then toured Notre-Dame. There was a service starting when we were just about finished there, and Jacob and Meghann asked me if I wanted to go to Mass. I said that was fine. It turned out to be Vespers. There was an usher who handed out papers with the words to the songs in French. The tunes were all really similar, so it was easy for me to sing along even when there wasn't musical notation to guide me.

I also went to the Louvre with them on Saturday. We concentrated on Egypt, Medieval decorative arts, and Italian Renaissance painting. We felt good about those choices.

There were quite a few Americans in Paris last week. We had some quality hangout time with Salena and Julie, along with P. and his visiting friend J. Salena found a really fun bar in the Marais called Dandy’s, and a bunch of us went there on Friday night to celebrate her birthday.

On Saturday night Laura and I watched the film Caché (Hidden) by Michael Haneke, the Austrian director I mentioned before. It was really interesting. I liked it much better than Funny Games, even though it was somewhat thematically similar (raising questions about property, and family relationships, and the social games people play). There was only one image of shocking violence, and I didn’t see it coming at all. We then watched several hours of special features, where we discovered that Michael Haneke speaks really excellent French, but tends to have his hissy-fits in German. Which certainly makes sense. He said that Caché was about the lines between truth and fiction, and playing with perspective.

On Monday we went to two exhibits: the Hogarth exhibition at the Louvre and "Public Portraits, Private Portraits" at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais. Both exhibits were excellent. The Hogarth was especially impressive. They had a painting on loan from the Yale Center for British Art, of David Garrick and his wife. It was one of my favorite pieces in the exhibition. At the end of the exhibit were a series of photographs by British artist Yinka Shonibare, depicting himself as a Victorian dandy in a series that clearly draws on (and critiques) Hogarth’s serials like “The Rake’s Progress” and “A Harlot’s Progress.”

And last night Laura rented Almodóvar’s film Volver, which we thoroughly enjoyed. Today I finished my last external fellowship application, so now I can finally work on my dissertation some more! I think I’ll go to the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal tomorrow and Friday. I’m pretty excited about that.

Happy New Year!

Laura and I had a New Year’s Eve party. At 3:00 in the afternoon, we thought no one was coming and it was just going to be the two of us eating chocolate-chip cookies and watching Casablanca. But the tide turned when Salena called to say that she and her sister would be joining us, after all. And then Bernie called and asked if he could bring eight friends with him. All told, we ended up with 15 guests. There were three Spaniards who wanted us to eat twelve grapes for the first twelve seconds of the New Year. This apparently represents the twelve months of the year. You end up with a lot of grapes in your mouth, but it’s nice to wash them down with champagne. Oh, and someone broke a chair.

The next day we got a nasty note from our downstairs neighbors about the “constant, daily, and unacceptable” level of noise that does not contribute to “life in a community.” I initially thought this was directly related to the party, but I can’t really tell. I think their biggest problem is with the kitchen chairs scraping on the floor, so I went out and bought some “patins feutrés” to put on the bottom of the chairs. Hopefully this will satisfy them. Our landlords are in town right now, and we showed them the letter. They said that the downstairs neighbors are very nice, but never said anything about noise when the family of five was living here. So that’s kind of funny.

Laura watched this awful movie the other night, called Funny Games, by some Austrian director. It is a psychological thriller about a family on vacation and the sadistic antics of these two twenty-something boys who invade their vacation house. I was watching the movie with Laura until I figured out that the skinny boy in the too-short shorts had killed the dog. And I said, “He killed the dog. I am done with this movie. It is not going to end well.” Ten minutes later Laura came into the kitchen and said, “You were right. He killed the dog.” After she finished watching the movie she told me the whole story. It does not end well. Sorry if I ruined it for anyone.

My reaction to this movie reminded me of my friend Susie, who was really angry with me for showing her The Long Kiss Goodnight because Geena Davis hits and kills a deer with her car (thereby triggering the memories that launch her exciting dual-identity odyssey). I had totally forgotten that the accident involved a deer. And I didn’t really understand why Susie was upset, since she was the person who had explained to me that watching gory movies sometimes requires suspending your suspension of disbelief. Well, not in those terms. I’m pretty sure her exact words were, “It’s all ketchup and plastic.” We were watching The Thing. The 1980s version with Wilford Brimley.

Anyway, I have learned two things from my reaction to the dog in this movie. 1) I’m good at reading narrative cues. I guess I already knew that. 2) My tastes are becoming so fixed that I’m not willing to give a chance to a movie if I don’t think I’m going to like it. I wonder if this means I’ll start leaving plays at intermission if I don’t like them. Or stop reading novels in the middle. Or give up on my dissertation if I start to get bored with it.

Oh. It all comes back to the dissertation. Blogging is so therapeutic.

And now I have realized that if I had known what the movie was about before I had started watching it, I probably never would have started watching it. Laura told me it was about "a family vacation gone awry," which led me to believe it was a screwball comedy starring the Austrian version of Chevy Chase.

One other funny thing about Bulgaria was that Bulgarian tastes in pop music tend toward raspy voices. Almost every singer on the radio sounded like a chain smoker, whether they were singing in Bulgarian or in English. I joked to Stefka, "I bet Bonnie Tyler would be really popular here." And Stefka responded in earnest, "Oh, yes. But she was popular in the 80s." Once I was paying attention I started hearing Bonnie Tyler ballads everywhere, more along the lines of "It's a Heartache" and "Straight from the Heart" than "Total Eclipse of the Heart" or "Holding out for a Hero."

They also played this one Celine Dion song in French in heavy rotation--"Pour que tu m'aimes encore." I know it well, because I own the CD, and because it's an especially useful song for teaching the subjunctive while reviewing the future tense, because half of the song is constructed as [future+"pour que"+subjunctive]. ("Je m'inventerai reine pour que tu me retiennes./ Je me ferai nouvelle pour que le feu reprenne...) My background in foreign language pedagogy tends to ruin French pop culture for me, because I'm always noticing how teachable it is. Oh, well.

The "Grand Tournoi de l'Histoire" was entertaining. They had four categories of entrants: high school students, students at the Grandes Ecoles (sort of the French Ivy League), telespectateurs (i.e., viewers), and Celebrities, which was a very inclusive category that happened to include a playwright and filmmaker named Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt. Schmitt wrote a play about Diderot called "Le Libertin," which was later turned into a film. The film is hilarious and delightful, but not easy to find. My advisor had us watch it in his class after we read Les Bijoux indiscrets, Diderot's novel about a magic ring that makes vaginas talk. He also thought it would be a good idea for us to read Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's master's thesis on Diderot. I can't say I remember much of it. But I did like the movie a lot.

Anyway, there were video segments where the spokesmodel hostess gave voice-over while curators of various French cultural institutions discussed the historical relevance of, say, Marie-Antoinette at Versailles, which led to a series of questions about Marie-Antoinette. It was all very edutaining, as are most shows on France 3.

I am back from Bulgaria. I had a great time. Stefka’s family and friends took very good care of us. We did so much that I kind of feel like I need a vacation from my vacation.

Day 1: As in Poland, my arrival was hampered by fog. I had flown from Paris to Frankfurt, and was dutifully waiting there for seven hours until my flight to Sofia. I kept checking the board to see if the gate had been assigned yet, and eventually I saw a notice that said “Annulierien” or something that I inferred to be the German word for “cancelled.” So I marched up to the Lufthansa counter and said, “My flight to Sofia is cancelled.” And the woman said, “No, it just hasn’t been assigned yet.” And I said, “Are you sure?” And she said, “Oh…yes, it’s been cancelled.” So I said, “There’s another flight at 6:30. Can you get me on that one?” And she told me I had to go to a different counter. So I went there, and told the woman there was an earlier flight to Sofia, to which she responded, “Not on Lufthansa.” And I was like, “Duh.” But she got me on the Bulgaria Air flight. It was diverted to Plovdiv, which meant we had a two-hour bus ride to Sofia. Mind you, I had no idea this was going to happen until it happened, because they announced it in Bulgarian and German. On the bus they showed the film Little Man. I had avoided seeing this movie because it looked terrible. And in fact it was quite awful.

I eventually made it to Stefka’s parents’ apartment and drank lots of whisky with her father, who appreciated having a willing drinking partner.

Day 2: Jesse and Stefka and I went to the Archaeological Museum to see ancient gold artifacts and medieval icons and some Greek statues. We had a late lunch at a restaurant called “The Three-Legged Chicken.” In the evening we had tickets to a concert by an Italian ensemble specializing in medieval music. And after that, we went out for drinks with Martin. He talked me into having rakia, a Bulgarian liqueur made from grapes. Martin and Jesse had a big argument about some intellectual problem.

Day 3: We did some shopping in the morning, then met Stefka’s friend Elitza and had lunch at a restaurant called Mamma Mia. We all had soup, because we figured it would be fast. We were meeting Sophie, a religious art expert, to take tours of churches. Apparently Stefka had already shown some churches to Jesse, but was unable to answer all of Jesse’s questions about Eastern Orthodox iconography and so called in Sophie. It was interesting. When we went home, Stefka’s mother had made stuffed peppers for dinner. Bulgarians eat a lot of peppers. My father would either starve or have indigestion all the time. Emily would also have trouble eating, because there are nuts hidden in almost everything.

Day 4: We got up early on Sunday morning and went to Rila Monastery with Stefka’s parents. It was a very nice trip. The icon gallery had separate prices for Bulgarians and non-Bulgarians (or maybe Bulgarophones and non-Bulgarophones). Stefka told me and Jesse not to talk, so we could just pay the Bulgarian/Bulgarophone price. After seeing the monastery, we drove a little further up the mountain, from whence we could hike up to the cave of the hermit John of Rila (aka Ivan Rilsky). Once you go into the cave, you have to climb out through a tiny opening. Local legend has it that if you make it through the opening, you aren’t sinful. We all made it through. Apparently Bulgarians are particularly concerned with the sin of gluttony.
To celebrate our purity, we stopped for lunch at a cute restaurant. Stefka’s dad ordered buffalo yogurt with honey for dessert, and I tried a taste of it. It was a little too rich for me. In the evening we went to a restaurant called “Romance,” known for its cakes. I tried the “Éclair cake,” which was tasty.

Day 5: In the morning, Stefka had a dentist appointment, so Jesse and I stayed home and watched Star Wars with Bulgarian subtitles. In the afternoon we went ice skating. I am pretty sure I was doing that for the first time in my life. It was pretty fun, but I was worried about crashing into someone and not having any language to tell them to watch out. Fortunately, I only fell when there was no one nearby.

Kornelia had invited us to dinner, and that was lots of fun. We took a minibus to get there. The Bulgarian term apparently translates as “People’s Taxi,” because even though there are specific routes, you can ask the driver to stop anywhere along the route. So it’s a shared taxi. Very crowded. Kornelia also offered rakia for me to drink, which I was happy to accept. The highlight of the first course was quail eggs, but there were also several delicious salads and some nice mackerel canapés. For the main course, Kornelia had made delicious chicken with a kind of blue cheese sauce. And there was an ice cream cake for dessert.

Day 6: We got tickets to a performance at the Bulgarian National Theatre. It was in Bulgarian, but it wasn’t too difficult to follow. The play was an adaptation of the novel Couchove (“The Exiles”) by Ivan Vazov. It was the story of a group of 19th-century revolutionaries living in Romania and plotting to assassinate the Sultan. (Bulgaria was part of the Ottoman Empire until 1878.) It was very impressive visually, and many moments were very moving even without being able to understand the language. The adaptor/director is named Alexander Morfov. Keep an eye out for him. Mostly he directs classics in Bulgaria and Russia.

Day 7: We took a trip to Plovdiv, which I had seen briefly on the night of my arrival. It was a rainy day, but we were not deterred from our quest to see Plovdiv’s Ancient Theatre, a second-century Roman affair with stone benches and a few surviving statues in the scaenae frons. It’s interesting to see how the city has grown up around it. You can watch the traffic go by on the highway below. Apparently the Ancient Theatre is still used for operas in the summer, which would be cool to see.

Other highlights of Plovdiv included a lovely sculpture park and the Ethnographic Museum, which was fairly similar to the Ethnographic Museum in Krakow. I highly recommend these Ethnographic Museums in Europe. The first floor mostly displayed tools for weaving, locksmiths, and agriculture. The second floor had furniture and clothing, arranged to give a sense of how people lived in the mountains and in the cities. The one in Krakow had slightly larger collections on its first two floors, and it also had a third floor with contemporary folk art. The museum in Plovdiv was clearer about its narrative; you had to go through the more informational rooms to get to the more eye-catching stuff. The Krakow setup is more like, “Wow! Peasant costumes! Ooooh, look at that. What’s that? It’s so colorful! Oh, look at all these Easter eggs! Hmmmm, Polish Easter rituals. Oooh, what’s that over there? A Nativity scene? Oh, interesting…”

Day 8: On Thursday, Stefka hung out with Elitza in the morning while Jesse and I stayed home and watched The Lord of the Rings with Bulgarian subtitles. (This was not so helpful for the scenes in Elvish, though it was otherwise fun to read the name “Frodo” in Cyrillic letters.) We had lunch with Elitza, then we did more wandering around Sofia and had dinner with Viktor and Diana.

Day 9: It was my 30th birthday. We had the same tasty breakfast we had every day, bread with cheese and sausage. Then after breakfast Stefka and her Dad brought out this enormous cake and they all sang “Happy Birthday.” It was very nice. Then it was time to go out and meet the translators at Stefka’s old translation agency. They gave us wine and cake and lots of other food.

Stefka had spent much of the week planning an outing for her name-day, which is December 27 (the Feast of St. Stephen). Since she was heading back to Chicago on the 25th, she decided to have it on the 22nd. So my birthday coincided with Stefka’s big reunion with all her Bulgarian friends. And some of them brought me presents. Kornelia’s gift was particularly thoughtful. She gave me a book on French Theatre. I remarked that I was surprised, and Elitza explained that birthdays are very important in Bulgaria. She posited that this was because religious holidays were not allowed to be celebrated under communism. Martin bought all my drinks. It was a very nice birthday.

Day 10: Stefka had suggested we go hiking one day, and Saturday was to be the day. She had invited other people to join us, and Viktor had accepted. We took the ski lift part of the way up the mountain, but as we headed to the trail there was a guy who warned us that it was too icy. Apparently we looked a little too citified for the rugged mountain trails. He suggested we take the second half of the ski lift up to the easier trail. So we did, and it was very nice. We decided to hike to the chalet at the top of the mountain. It was going well for a while, but then the snow got really deep and the going got a little tougher. Jesse was blazing a trail with the serious hikers, and the rest of us were very far behind her. But we all finally made it to the top. We ordered some tripe soup, which was pretty good, especially with lots of red pepper. I don’t think I would order it anywhere else. We had to run back to catch the lift, which was supposed to close at 4:00. We made it.

After hiking, we were invited to Viki’s house, which had a nice warm fireplace. His mother had made a very good Romanian dish with cornmeal and cheese and some kind of hot sauce. And we drank red wine.

Day 10: Because we had not gotten through all the churches in Sofia on our first trip with Sophie, she met us on Sunday for the follow-up tour. We saw the Russian Church, the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, and Saint Sophia. We had coffee afterward, then went back to Stefka’s parents’ house for Christmas Eve dinner.

Christmas Eve in Bulgaria calls for a feast of seven vegan dishes. We had bread, beans, dolmas, fruit compote, sweet rice, and two other things I can’t remember right now. All were delicious. A coin is baked into the bread, but no one found it in the first go-round. Then Stefka and her mother suggested that I check my bread again, and I found it. So I’m supposed to have a good year fiscally. Sounds good to me.
After dinner, we were invited to Stefka’s cousins’ house. They were very amused to have to Americans over. They were even more amused that we had picked up Bulgarian phrases for “Thank you” and “Good-bye” during our stay.

We were supposed to go to bed early, because Jesse and Stefka had to leave very early in the morning. But Jesse and I stayed up pretty late talking.

Day 11: I got up at 5:00, when everyone else was leaving for the airport. My flight was not until 3:20, and Stefka’s dad was going to drop me off in the afternoon. So I went back to bed. I had a dream that Jesse woke me up and told me that their flight had been cancelled. Then I had another dream that Jesse and Stefka were both talking to me. Stefka was saying, “This is just a dream. Our flight wasn’t cancelled. Go back to sleep.” And Jesse was saying, “Our flight was really cancelled. Get up and socialize!” Anyway, I got up around 10:00, and Stefka was sitting at the dining room table. So the first dream was actually not a dream, but the second dream was. Lufthansa had just cancelled the flight because there weren’t enough passengers for it to be profitable. I guess Jesse and Stefka had to spend the night in Munich, because they missed their connection to Chicago. Apparently Lufthansa was going to pay for their hotel and offer some sort of compensation once they got back to Chicago.

My trip back to Paris went pretty smoothly. The Frankfurt airport was even more boring, because I was in Terminal A, which has fewer shops than Terminal B. And most of them closed early. That was the worst thing about traveling on Christmas Day. I mean it was a little sad to drink beer in the airport bar by myself, but it was really sad when the airport bar closed at 6:00 and I had to kill two more hours until my flight. But the flight from Frankfurt to Paris was fine, and I managed to catch the RER back to my apartment. I was glad I had bought a round-trip RER ticket when I left, so I could just get right on the train without dealing with buying a ticket.

And now I’m back in Paris. This is the first time I haven’t spent Christmas with my family, and I miss them very much. So today I did some laundry and cleaned the microwave and watched my favorite French game shows. There was a commercial on for the “Grand Concours de l’Histoire” (The Great History Competition), which is on tomorrow night.

I hope that everyone is enjoying the holidays.

I am heading to Bulgaria in the morning and will be there until December 25 (it was cheaper to travel on Christmas Day). There are lots more Poland stories to tell, and some Paris stories since my return from Poland. I hope to be able to catch up when I get back.

In the meanwhile, here is a Paris story. I went to the craziest event at the Sorbonne on Saturday. It was a professor's "habilitation" to become a "directeur d'etudes," which I understood as akin to being promoted from Associate Professor to Full Professor. A jury of six professors spent five hours publicly responding to his scholarly portfolio and then left the room to vote. Since all six of them had told him how great he was, it wasn't very suspenseful. But there was lots of pomp and circumstance.

While chatting with some people afterward I used my phrase that every French person seems to love: "On ne fait pas comme ca aux Etats-Unis." (We don't do this in the United States.) I'm no't sure if they appreciate the lesson in cultural exchange, or if they read me as a wide-eyed "We're not in Kansas anymore " type.

The thing that amused me the most was that in the Ascoli Library at the Sorbonne, above all the shelves of books, the words "Ne Pas Fumer" (No Smoking) are painted on the wall in a very neatly stenciled font that is vaguely suggestive of the 1970s. So when I got bored with professors telling this guy why he's so great, but that he should use more iconographic evidence, I kept looking up at the "Ne Pas Fumer" sign, because I just found it hilarious.

November 29-30: Because of the travel nonsense, I had missed the first day of the conference. Apparently a lot of people did. I had sent an email to the conference organizer. He had said only to call his cell phone if there was an emergency, and I didn’t really see my missing Wednesday afternoon’s sessions as an emergency. So I sent him an email, but I doubted he would get it. In any case, Jenn was there to tell everyone that I was on my way, taking the train through the Polish fog that was conspiring to keep sex researchers from reaching Krakow by plane.

When I got off the train into the waiting arms of the gypsy caravan (as Meghann dubbed our happy trio), I was very hungry. Meghann tried to take us to a basement-level restaurant, but we were denied, so we went to a similar restaurant that was not in a basement. We browsed the menu. I had decided on the variety bowl of pierogies when I saw the page of seasonal dishes and figured out that it was mushroom season. So Meghann and I ended up splitting the pierogies and a plate of mushrooms in a lovely sauce. And it came with lovely bread that had two spreads. And we drank beer. Afterward we went to Camelot for another beer. The bar in Krakow, as opposed to the congenial spot for happy-ever-aftering. Though it was rather a happily-ever-after occasion.

We took a cab back to Meghann’s digs in Polish student housing, and I was very sad when we got up to the room because I had forgotten my wonderful Monoprix gloves in the cab. It was very fun to stay in the dorm. Apparently Jenn and I were there illegally, which turned walking across the lobby past the registration desk into an adventure every night. My favorite part was walking down the long hallway once we got to Meghann’s floor, because there were makeshift ashtrays every ten feet or so. Sometimes we came across groups of students smoking and chatting in the hallway, but more often it was just the evidence of their having been there. As Meghann liked to say, “You can just feel the socialism.”

In the morning we took the tram to the Pugetow Hotel for the conference. Meghann facilitated that entire adventure, and she planned to pick us up at the end of the day. The conference was good. It was billed as an Interdisciplinary conference on Sex and Sexuality. Mostly the inter-disciplines were sociology and literary criticism. According to my participant-observation in this situation, sociologists and literary critics seem to have trouble talking to each other. Jenn’s paper was the highlight of the first day. She had enlisted me to help by unfurling a poster of an erotic painting at a strategic moment during her talk. Her presentation went over very well.

At 5:30, Meghann was waiting on the steps for us, doing her best street urchin impersonation. She took us to Wawel Castle and told us the story of the dragon whom no one could kill until some wily citizen filled a sheep with sulfur and set it out as a trap for the dragon. The dragon at the sheep, got a stomachache, drank some water, and exploded. Meghann tells the story much better, so I hope I haven’t ruined it for future visitors to Krakow. Then we walked through Rynek Glowny, the market square, which was all decorated for Christmas. There were a lot of angels. The angels that were facing left looked like Minnesota. Seriously, it was like someone had taken a cutout of Minnesota and stuck an angel head on the northwest corner, and the tips of the wings were the northeast and southeast corners.

Anyway, Meghann took us to this great bar, and she got a mischievous smile on her face as she went up to buy the first round of drinks. She came back with “tatanka”—buffalo grass vodka (zubrowka) and apple juice. They were tasty. We drank a lot of them during the course of our stay.

Thursday night was also our trip to “Cocks,” the Polish version of Hooters. There were leggy, voluptuous blond waitresses in skimpy outfits. Jenn claimed that she spied one brunette waitress. We had cheeseburgers. I had not had a cheeseburger in a long time, and I thoroughly enjoyed mine. There were a lot of televisions playing sports and Polish advertising.

And then back to Meghann’s. I think we were early enough for the tram that night.

I just got back from my whirlwind trip to Poland. It was a lot of fun, after an inauspicious beginning.

Last Tuesday, I got up to get on the Metro to Porte Maillot, where I was to take a bus to the Beauvais Airport to catch my flight from Paris to Katowice, followed by a bus from Katowice to Krakow. Well, I got on the Metro and there were huge backups on line 1, so I was almost late for my bus. But I made the bus and arrived at Beauvais in plenty of time to check in with Wizzair (cheapie airline based in Poland) and have a snack before going through security. Once you get through security, the Beauvais airport feels like purgatory. Everyone is waiting, and since a flight to Rome had been delayed, a lot of people had been waiting for a very long time. There is one waiting room, and they only load one plane at a time, so it is very frustrating to wait there.

After I had waited until after my flight was supposed to have taken off, there was an announcement that Wizzair’s flight was cancelled. I eventually learned that this was because of excessive fog in Poland. They told us to wait in line to have tickets reassigned or to get reimbursed. I was near the end of the line, behind a lot of angry Poles. One of the workers came out and said that if we just wanted to be reimbursed, she could take our tickets and start that process. I knew that there wasn’t another flight until Thursday, so I asked how long the train would take. She said, “At least seven or eight hours.” And I figured I had already been trying to get to Poland for five hours, so the train was the way to go. And I handed her my ticket.

I then attempted to pick up my bag, but it turned out the airport was in lockdown because someone had left a bag unattended and it had to be imploded. Security guards told us it would only be another twenty minutes, but they kept telling us that for three hours. So clearly they were lying. I tried to find a public telephone and learned that there was one “800 meters” away, across a field. So I went over there, but I didn’t have a phone card. I tried to use my French bank card, but it was rejected. I walked back to the airport and waited some more, then decided to walk past the cabine téléphonique to the town of Tillé. I was hoping to find a Tabac and buy a phone card. (In France, you go to the tobacconist to buy stamps, phone cards, lottery tickets, and all sorts of other things, in addition to tobacco products.) As I walked through the town, I noticed a butcher shop that was closed for lunch. Then I went by a Pharmacy that was closed for lunch. So when I got to the Tabac it was not surprising to find that they were closed for lunch.

So basically I was stranded in Beauvais with no way of communicating to anyone that I was not going to make it to Krakow that day. Eventually they did reopen the baggage claim, and I got on a bus back to Porte Maillot. When we got to Porte Maillot, the American woman sitting next to me said, “Parlez-vous anglais?” to which I responded, “Yep. I sure do.” And she asked me where the Metro was. We walked over to the Metro together. I had the brilliant idea of switching from the 1 to the 6 to the 4, rather than taking the 1 to Chatelet and switching to the 4 there. The 6 is above-ground and usually less crowded than the 1.

I got home, and Laura was surprised to see me. I tried to call Meghann and couldn’t get her, so I sent an email to tell her I wasn’t coming, but that I was going to try to catch a train. I did some online research and discovered that the fastest train to Krakow would get me there in 19 hours, but didn’t leave until 3:30 on Wednesday. But then I figured out that I could take an overnight train to Berlin and then transfer to Krakow, and it would take 22 hours. (In a way I’m glad the Wizzair lady stretched the truth to get me out of her line. I think if she had said “20 hours,” I still would have done the train, but the decision wouldn’t have been quite so instantaneous.)

So I drank three beers and had a quick bite to eat, and I headed up to the Gare du Nord to buy a train ticket. This was perhaps the best customer-service interaction I have had thus far in Paris. I said, “Je voudrais un aller pour Krakovie” (I would like a one-way ticket to Krakow). The response was, “C’est en Pologne?!!?” (That’s in Poland?!?!) He sounded a little suspicious. I said, “Oui, c’est en Pologne,” confirming his geographical knowledge and indicating that I actually wanted to go to Poland. He couldn’t find anything direct, so he said, “via Berlin, peut-être,” and I said that sounded like a good idea. He got me on a train that was leaving at 8:46 PM, which meant I only had to wait about twenty minutes. He also gave me great seats, which may or may not have been intentional.

On the way to Berlin, I read Le Diable s’habille en Prada (The Devil Wears Prada), which I had borrowed from Dominique. He was right, the book was a lot better than the movie. I got to Berlin at 8:15 and had an hour there before my train to Krakow. I was hungry, so I got some apple cake and a large coffee, which was exactly what I needed. I found an internet kiosk and emailed Meghann to tell her I was arriving at 7:15 PM. I bought a salami sandwich, which I meant to save for lunch. But I ended up eating it shortly after I got on the train to Krakow. After that, I slept most of the way there.

When I arrived in Krakow, ten people greeted me with “Are you looking for a place to stay?” and I kind of freaked out, so I left the train platform and went to the station. Then I realized that Meghann was probably waiting for me on the platform, so I went back. I couldn’t remember which platform had been mine, so I just picked one at random and walked up. And I saw Meghann and Jenn on a different platform and started waving at them. Jenn saw me first, and then we all ran downstairs and had a joyful reunion. Meghann’s reaction to my tale of traveling woe was something along the lines of, “Well, if getting to Poland isn’t an adventure, it really isn’t worth it.”

So that is the beginning of the trip to Poland. The rest of it went much better, but I think I will have to write about that later.

Thanksgiving was perfectly delightful. I ended up having two Thanksgiving dinners! Laura's parents are in town, but her Dad had some other dinner engagement last night, so I had a vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner with Laura and her Mom. We had lentils, beets, potatoes, green beans, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Laura was a little sad because she had really wanted pumpkin pie, but they had not been able to fine canned pumpkin. The store "Thanksgiving" in the Marais was sold out of it.

The first dinner was around 6:00. Then I was invited to K's, where we had "un Thanksgiving europeen" with her French roommates G. and N., along with P, and V-M. Katie had not been able to find a turkey, so we ate "pintade," which is apparently guinea-fowl. It was good. We also had sweet potatoes (with orange and ginger, which I really liked), wild rice with almonds (P's family recipe), cornbread, and brussels sprouts with lardons. And for dessert, pumpkin pie! K. and P. had found canned pumpkin at a store called "The Real McCoy." The pumpkin pie led to a lengthy discussion about the French word for pumpkin, and what was the difference between "citrouille" and "potiron." Nicolas consulted a French-English dictionary that translated both words as pumpkin, but the French dictionary insisted that a "potiron" is bigger than a "citrouille." So there you go. The rest of the dinner conversation was a lot about Thanksgiving memories. It reminded me of another nice memory of Thanksgiving with Jesse's family--waltzing with Stefka while Jesse's uncle played the piano. And that made me really excited for my trip to Bulgaria with Jesse and Stefka, which is now only three weeks away.

I asked K if I could bring some pie home to Laura, who had gone to bed early because she had to be up this morning at 6:00 for a trip to Belgium with her parents. When I got home, she was awake. I told her I had pumpkin pie, and she got right up and ate it. I think it was 11:30, so it was even on the holiday itself.

I went to Amsterdam for the weekend. I left on Saturday and got back yesterday. I had ordered my train tickets online and they were supposed to be delivered to my house, but they never arrived. So I called SNCF earlier in the week, and they said, “Well, the tickets were mailed the day you ordered them.” And I said, “OK, but they never got here.” So I was told to go to the train station with my reservation number and my credit card the day of. I was not told that I would have to re-purchase tickets and wait a month to be reimbursed until I got to the train station on Saturday morning. The man at the train station started out being all superior and said that I should have just come to the train station to buy the tickets, since I live in Paris. After I made a big fuss about how inane the SNCF reimbursement issue was, he wanted to be friends. I guess my performance of indignation was French enough for him.

The impetus for the trip was that my friend Rich was visiting Amsterdam, along with his friend Michael. They were staying at the Golden Bear Hotel. Rich had gotten an international cell phone for the trip, which was smart of him. (I still haven’t bought a French cell phone, but I think such a purchase is very likely in the near future, possibly after my December travels in Eastern Europe.) I had some trouble getting a hold of Rich on Saturday, so I wandered around the city on my own for a while. I managed to call him on Sunday morning at 10:00. As he did not quite sound ready for the day, I said that I would call him back in the afternoon.

While I was walking around on Sunday morning, I passed the Bible Museum (Bijbels Museum) and decided to go in. I was very glad I did. The collection was fascinating, primarily because it was so eclectic. Inspired by one of the former owners of the house who had been obsessed with building a model of Solomon’s Temple, the museum houses several models of Solomon’s Temple, plus a model of the Tabernacle in Jerusalem that housed the Ark of the Covenant. There are also Egyptian artifacts that the owner had collected, to elucidate the time the Israelites spent in Egypt. When I was there, the museum was hosting an exhibition called “Rembrandt and the Bible,” with some eighty etchings of biblical and quasi-biblical scenes by Rembrandt. There is a garden with biblical plants, and a room by the garden with biblical scents. The basement houses a multimedia exploration of Bible publishing. My favorite aspect of this was a set of bookshelves designed to depict the Bible as a library. You could open some of the books and see images inside. The Plague of Frogs from Exodus had a whole bunch of little rubber frogs inside it. The story of Joseph from Genesis had a bright swath of amazing technicolor fabric. And the book marked “Creation” had a mirror inside, which was just too cute. What makes the collection eclectic is that they have also opted to show some of the features of these two canal houses, including two seventeenth-century kitchens and a number of eighteenth-century ceiling paintings of mythological figures, by Jacob de Wit.

When I got out of the Bible Museum, I met up with Rich and Michael for stir-fry at “Wok and Walk.” We decided to make our way south to the Heineken Brewery, because I had heard that the tour there was good. But on the way we ran into a parade. Now, while I was walking around in the morning I had noticed an unusual number of children dressed in festive attire, so I had deduced that it was some kind of holiday. It struck me as early for Saint Nicholas, but it was indeed the “Sinterklaas” parade. The strangest thing about the Sinterklaas parade was that the majority of participants were done up in colorful Renaissance costumes and blackface, portraying Sinterklaas’s problematic sidekick, Zwarte Piet (Black Pete). Apparently Zwarte Piet does much of the gift wrapping before he and Sinterklaas travel by boat from Spain, or perhaps Turkey, to the Netherlands. Upon their arrival, Zwarte Piet gives candy to good little boys and girls, but stuffs bad children into a sack to bring them back to Spain, or perhaps Turkey. Later that night in a gay bar we saw a fascinating music video called “Sinterklaasboot,” which I managed to find on youtube.

The parade ended shortly after we got there. So we proceeded to the Heineken Experience, which was pretty great. Michael kept pointing out that it was basically a two-hour Heineken commercial. But for ten euros, we got three beers and a fun tour. The highlight of the tour was the seeing the bottling process “through the eyes of a bottle,” which meant standing on a platform that moved and viewing one of those films that is designed to make you feel like you’re on the roller coaster. Or conveyer belt, as the case may be.

On Monday, I met up with Rich and Michael around noon, and we went out for some very tasty pancakes, followed by a trip to the Anne Frank House. I had not been excited about the Anne Frank House, because I thought it would be depressing. And it was depressing, but it was possibly the best-designed museum I have ever experienced.

By contrast, the Sex Museum (Venustempel) was a total mess. It could be much better organized. A lot of the exhibits are kitschy, which sometimes works really well and sometimes doesn’t. The kitschy Marilyn Monroe exhibit is interesting, and there is a silly “Sex through the Ages” exhibit, which we thought was a lot of fun. But the kitschy prostitution exhibit was just bad. Obviously the collection is heavy on kitsch and photographs because it’s geared toward stoned frat boys. There are some really interesting objects. If they would label them correctly and display them more effectively, they could do a better job of engaging historians of sexuality…and maybe teach the horny frat boys a thing or two along the way. It was definitely worth a visit. For three euros, it’s worth a visit even if you aren’t studying history of sexuality. Possibly more so if you aren’t.

For dinner on Monday we had an Indonesian Rice Table, which was really, really good. My train left around 1:00 Tuesday afternoon, so we had time for brunch and some shopping before I headed back. By the way, across the aisle from me on the train was a guy with a very large bag of pot. He rolled a joint on his tray table all the way through Belgium. No conductor said a word to him, and Customs didn’t stop him.

I arrived back to learn that the money I wired on Friday has not yet arrived in my French bank account. My French bank told me today that if it isn’t there tomorrow I should contact my American bank. But since tomorrow is a holiday in the US, I decided to call today. They were so patient and helpful and pleasant on the phone. To be fair, my French bank teller today was also very patient and very sympathetic.

I gave my presentation on Chapter 3 of The Politics of Friendship in seminar today. I was saying to Laura that if I had known we were only going to get to Chapter 3, I probably would have signed up for a later chapter. But it was kind of fun.

And now I have to write my paper for this conference in Poland next week. I am supposed to email it to the conference organizer by Friday morning. I am not sure that will happen.

Well, I turned in my ACLS application, so I feel good about that. If nothing else, at least I have a chapter to show my advisor. Onward to writing the paper for the conference in Poland!

Today I got my residency permit. The last hurdle was the medical visit, which consisted of sitting in the outer waiting room before being called to the inner waiting room. Then they call you into a room where you take your shirt off and wait for them to call you for the chest X-Ray. Running the chest X-Ray today were one male doctor and one female doctor, and they were having a blast. (I think they were mostly laughing at people's names and how incapable they were of pronouncing them.) So then you go back into the inner waiting room and wait for one of the other two doctors to read your X-Ray results and take your blood pressure. The doctor I had said, "Everything is fine, but you have a weight problem. You need to see a nutritionist." And I guess my reaction was not sufficiently grateful or excited or something, because she then said "You're going to have back problems and knee problems. You'll see." So she gave me the chest X-Ray to keep, but I left it on the table, and she brought it out to the waiting room to give to me. (I didn't leave it on purpose, but really, what am I going to do with this chest X-Ray?) And then I went down the hall to stand in line to get my carte de sejour.

There were two people in front of me. The woman giving out the cards got really angry with the first person in line because she had said, "Check the front and the back of the card to make sure everything is right." And I guess the girl did not check carefully enough for her taste, because she yelled at her to check it, and said a couple of words in English to drive her point home. So when she gave me my card I looked at it for a very long time and read my address aloud undermy breath before I told her it was OK. She was pleased with me.

I called STA Travel in Evanston about my return flight to Chicago the other day, and the person I spoke to was so nice. It really made me miss American customer service.

Now I'm really tired and I'll probably actually go to bed at a reasonable hour tonight.

Everyone I know in Paris has a cold. Our household is drinking lots of tea. I'm really glad my mother made me buy cold medicine at Happy Harry's Discount Drugs. Happy Harry's was recently bought by Walgreen's, so the "Premier Value" line of generic products were selling at severely reduced prices when I was in Delaware this summer.

I have been working on fellowship applications for next year. The one that is due on Wednesday requires a chapter. I have eleven good pages and nine bad pages written. The maximum they want to see is 25 pages, so I feel good about the possibility of finishing.

I have also done a lot of procrastinating. Last night Laura and I watched The Name of the Rose. I had read the novel but I don't think I've ever watched the movie before, at least not in one sitting. It was long, and more violent than I thought it would be. I was a little disappointed that they didn't really explain how the library is organized, which was my favorite part of the book. But I guess that might have been boring for most viewers.

Youtube is fabulous for procrastinating. I found the Reading Rainbow "Teamwork" dance number. I sent it to my friend Sheila first, but now I am linking it here to share the joy. I first saw the Reading Rainbow "Teamwork" musical number when I lived in Northampton with Dottie. It must have been around Thanksgiving, because I went to Sheila's for Thanksgiving dinner and I just would not stop singing the Teamwork song. Because really, isn't Thanksgiving all about teamwork? Teamwork to baste the turkey, teamwork to set the table, teamwork to wash the dishes, teamwork to play 500, teamwork to unload the Alaskan crab from the dry ice. Oh, now I'm conflating my Thanksgivings.

I've been a free agent for Thanksgiving for twelve years now, because I've lived far enough from my family (and had little enough money) that they don't expect me to come home. It's nice to spend Thanksgiving with other people's families. I have gotten lots of different things to eat, things like Tofurkey, Jell-O Pretzel Salad, flourless chocolate cake, and the aforementioned Alaskan crab legs. And I've experienced lots of fun digestive activities. I have fond memories of reading David Sedaris stories aloud with Sheila's family, playing cards with Laura's family, and sneaking cigarettes in the garage at the lake house with Leanne's father. Last year I spent the entire weekend hanging out with Laurie and Dave and their family--we went bowling, we had tapas, we saw Rent at the movie theatre, we played Pictionary.

The French don't celebrate Thanksgiving (they have subtler ways of memorializing colonization) , so I will be a little sad when next Thursday rolls around. Maybe we will plan to have our own renegade version.

Last night I went out to a bar called Planète Mars with Laura, Josh, Katie, and Gabi. We randomly met two of Josh’s friends who are art dealers. (Josh lived in Paris three years ago and is back until the end of this month. He attends our seminar.) Josh kept trying to persuade me and Laura to drink more and stay out until after the Metro stopped running. Even though it’s very difficult to convince me and Laura to continue drinking, somehow he managed to do so. The three of us stopped for a sandwich at this place where the two proprietors knew an awful lot about the recent elections in the U.S. After we ate, Josh got on the night bus and Laura started trying to hail a cab. This woman who was standing on the corner making no effort to flag down a cab got all pissed at us and said (in French) “I was ahead of you.” And we were like, “OK. Whatever.”

Today I had a phone call from my advisor (codename: The Belgian Waffle). He is locked out of his Northwestern email account because he didn't change his password in a timely fashion, so he hasn’t received any of the three emails I have sent him in the past month. It is a very good thing that I looked up his number in the “pages blanches” and left him a message yesterday. He asked me how I was liking Paris and he invited me to have lunch with him in a couple of weeks. He started out trying to think of places that would allow us to meet in the middle, but he clearly did not want to sacrifice cultural capital for geographical convenience. I told him that it would be really nice for me to discover a new part of Paris and that I would be happy to take the Metro to Oberkampf. He seemed really relieved that he wouldn’t have to slum it with me in the Latin Quarter. Seriously, it sounded like he wouldn’t want be caught dead there.

I told him I’m working on grant applications, and the ACLS deadline is coming up. He offered to read my proposal, even though it really all depends who is on the selection committee, and did I know who was on the selection committee? Because that’s really what matters. And he applied for one external grant and didn’t get it, but then he applied for an internal grant and got that one. And then he asked me if I was in touch with his other advisee, and could I send him the other advisee’s email address if I have it, or email the other advisee and ask him to get in touch with the Belgian Waffle?

He also advised me not to try to bring pot back from Amsterdam, which may be the single best piece of advice he has ever given me. Because I was totally planning to transport marijuana in a train across two international borders. Then he said, “If you must have it, you would be better off trying to send it through the mail.” A fountain of wisdom, this man.