A Winter in Paris [january|february|march|april] Ryan Smith [ info | about this page ] [ go | record of games ] [ email | bixbyr@gmail.com ]

Heaven and Hell are both underground [30 Jan 2010] The Paris train system could best be described as having a multiple personality disorder. On one hand you have the numbered metro lines which are fast, very frequent, timely, and generally not so crowded that you can't sit down. On the other, you have the lettered RER lines, which would make for a good approximation of Hell. They come and go as they will, frequently stop between stations due to technical difficulties, and would even be considered 'mostly full' by Japanese standards (those who've read my description of the Japanese train system will understand the implications of such a claim). Even the Parisian students at the Poincare Institute recommended against taking the RER more than necessary, since Luxembourg station only lies on the B line. When I decided to visit the Eiffel tower this afternoon, my iPhone routed me via the RER lines. In the future I will know better and just go to a nearby station on the more trustworthy metro lines. First I ended up going the wrong direction on the C line since unlike the numbered lines there were no signs which showed directions. The adventure got underway when I realized my mistake and got off at a large and mostly deserted station with a great number of platforms and the dissatisfying habit of switching different train lines traveling in different directions to the same platforms. A careful comparison of the information listed on the monitors and the posted map of the Paris train system provided no recognizable points of reference, and the trains didn't give any sign of which line they were running on. After telling myself several times that real adventures are never the ones you plan, and bundling up in an extra layer since the station was open to the sub-zero temperature outside, I finally just picked a train which was traveling back in the direction I came. I reasoned that even if I really had no idea where I was going, I'd end up somewhere interesting and eventually be able to get back on the map at a station where I could change to a numbered line. Providence turned out to be a better guide than the monitors in the station, and I ended up heading towards the Champ de Mars as I'd intended. Unfortunately, by the time I arrived it was already fairly late in the afternoon and I had no desire to stand in line for an hour in sunny but sub-zero weather. The size of the tower is remarkable, make sure to look not only at the people in the foreground of the pictures but also those standing closer to the base of the structure. It was interesting to note the presence of soldiers, not policemen, around the tower. The French also deploy soldiers with military weaponry to look bored in major train stations, though I don't know whether they were there to serve any real purpose or to provide the illusion of security. In the train stations I can see some small rationale for having soldiers, since although guns are not common in France, the terrorist threat of someone using automatic weapons in the packed train stations would be more than the local police could be expected to handle. For everyones sake though, I hope they don't keep those weapons loaded or at least have some kind of double safety switch on them. Hopefully it's not always this crowded? It really is that big Asking for a close up seemed like pushing it I saw lots of runners at the Champ de Mars Shopping may be a universal pastime, but stores are not. French grocery stores are more familiar than Japanese grocery stores, but like so many things with French culture the underlying similarity seems to make the differences more apparent. Aside from a new constellation of brand names, one of the most pronounced differences is the lack of refrigeration for milk and eggs. The milk can be explained by the fact that the French are among the world leaders in irradiating food. The idea would be political plutonium in the US (no pun intended), but makes a lot of sense in my opinion. Food irradiation exclusively uses gamma radiation, which unlike alpha and beta radiation doesn't produce radioisotopes, ie things which are exposed to gamma rays do not become radioactive (how do you think your microwave works?). Cesium-60 is normally thought of as a gift to the environment which keeps on giving, but it can be put to work effectively irradiating food. The radiation kills most of the bacteria in food, even sterilizing it with high enough doses. Milk can be sterilized without boiling it beyond drinkability, and then stored at room temperature until it's opened and a new crop of bacteria from the environment set up shop in the container. I think this milk was irradiated but I'm not entirely sure Unrefrigerated eggs are the norm in all of the places I've been I've gotten some strange looks before, but nothing quite like the the reactions I got from fellow shoppers for taking pictures of milk. Another interesting difference is that eggs in France are not refrigerated. Unlike the irritated milk, I don't believe the eggs were treated in any way (since the practice seems common to a wide range of stores and markets). Rather, I suspect it reflects a different cultural assessment of the spoilability of eggs. What is hard to argue is that the shelf lives recommended in the US for eggs are very conservative, and eggs don't spoil quickly. In supermarkets in France, you are responsible for bagging your own groceries, which can be rather stressful since there is always a line behind you and most checkout counters have limited space for items after they've been scanned. The result is that most people, myself included, start hurtling items in plastic bags as soon as the cashier starts to scan their load of groceries to avoid holding up the line too much. The streets near my apartment, facing away from the Place de la Bastille The July Column in the plaza can be seen over roof tops and is a sign that I'm almost home

Cathedral tourist [23 Jan 2010] I haven't fallen into the Seine, I'm still here. I am however struggling with a mixture of a light cold and the aches and pains of kettlebell ownership, which induce a general miasma of fatigue and soreness. It was good to get out of my apartment for a little while today, but until I get over being sick I can't go very far. Nobody realizes you're photographing them if you can frame something famous in the background I'm ashamed to admit that until I started walking around Paris I hadn't recently thought about how racially homogeneous most parts of America are. Despite being the origin of the pink hoards, in many ways European cities are more multiracial than their American counterparts. In a telling moment I found myself watching the body language of some Asian women in line for the metro and thinking how much they behaved like the French, until I realized the obvious: they were French. Being French is now a cultural identity, not a racial one. Watching the diverse, yet oh-so-French crowds stream past my front door, it's easy to feel optimistic about the new France as a model for what a multiracial society could look like in which immigrant populations can assimilate without forming permanently segmented ethnic sub-communities as seems to happen in the US. Unfortunately, the crowds in a trendy district in central Paris may not be a very good model of what's really going on in the rest of the city, let alone the rest of the country. It takes willful blindness to ignore the race riots that Sarkozy gleefully incited only a few years ago, or the slums on the outskirts of Paris where I suspect race is viewed somewhat differently. The west fascade of Notre Dame with its two towers The eastern end; it's just huge Long exposure and a timer so I wouldn't bump it Pointy arch and a quadripartite vault Ever since taking a class on Gothic architecture a number of years ago I've been interested in cathedrals. Like any kind of history of thought, it's fascinating to see the evolution and transmission of ideas over many years. So even though it's a classic tourist stop, there was never any question of going to Notre Dame. Many of the formative ideas which would later come to be called “Gothic” got their first large scale implementation in Notre Dame, and Canterbury (the starting point for English Gothic) was built as an English version of Notre Dame by the Norman conquerers. Flying buttresses Some of the buttresses have buttresses When many people think of Gothic architecture, they probably think of pointy arches, stained glass windows, and somber heating bills. But the architectural feature which really enabled the Gothic period of cathedral design was the flying buttress. When cathedrals started getting taller in the late Norman days, the architects faced a growing problem with torque. Gravity pulled the roof straight down, but with the exception of an occasional column, there wasn't anything underneath the roof to push back up, so the weight of the roof was transferred down and out to the walls. As the walls got taller, the force pushing the walls apart at the roof line got a longer and longer lever arm. To keep the walls from toppling outward like very tell and thin dominoes medieval architects set up braces called flying buttresses. Cathedrals were the skyscrapers of their era, and the late Gothic cathedrals even had buttresses to the buttresses to keep the whole construction from cascading outwards. It is hard to convey the sheer physical size of a major cathedral to one who hasn't been inside. It's a bit as if someone beached an air craft carrier on an island in central Paris. Inside of the cathedral there was a sign forbidding photography which everyone ignored, but the officials in charge of the church probably got the last laugh because flash photography carried so poorly in such a large space. The souvenir industry It would be the same picture with any background As a modern day tourist, I do rather poorly. I don't understand the need to take pictures of oneself at the famous monument, or to buy mass produced good from China which have the name or emblem of the place on it. Do the pictures prove that your were really there? Does the act of recording the experience make it more real at the time? As I said, I don't understand. Notre dame as seen from the bridge I take over the bridge I take each morning Someone took a Grecko-Roman design a bit too literally It would be hard to find quite the same appreciation of intellectuals in the US Notice anything in the background? I've had several requests for more pictures of Paris. To my surprise, central Paris actually looks pretty much like the postcards. The outer regions of Paris are newer, and I expect they'll be less picturesque. The walk to the institute isn't really all that long, it's just from Bastille to the Seine, across the Seine (with a brief stop at a mini-island), then up the hill on the other side. The Pantheon is one of the odder stops along the way to the Poincare Institute. Compared to the rest of historic Paris, the Pantheon is fairly new (only a couple hundred years old). Built to house the remains of famous Frenchmen (and eventually Marie Curie), it goes well beyond architectural quotation into full on plagiarism with an odd mash up of the Parthenon and a late Roman / early Italian dome.

All day, every day, at a math institute [8 Jan 2010] So what do I do all week? The Galois trimester at the Poincare Institute was my reason for coming to Paris, so naturally most of my days are focused around math at the institute. The organizers laid out a very ambitious plan of lectures from a variety of speakers which take up most of my time at the institute. Most of the lecturers are speaking for three or four lectures, and to my relief almost all of them have been in English. Although all of the talks are within the broad outlines of Galois representations, some of them are a lot more related to what I'm doing than others. The Institute itself is a think-tank which organizes conferences and trimester long gatherings of mathematicians around different topics. To the best of my knowledge it has no permanent faculty, so all of the professors there are on sabbatical from other institutions (often with a grad student or two in tow). I've met several “math celebrities”, and for the most part they behave humbly, though people go to great length to emphasize when they're citing from the work of the handful of really famous mathematicians who are in attendance. It's almost as though everyone tries so hard to behave casually around some of the best mathematical minds of the late 20th century that they feel the need to overdo it when they acknowledge the source of seminal results in the field. The institute is within a couple blocks of the Luxembourg gardens Several small specialized colleges cluster together The institute itself A proper old fashioned lecture hall The title is a bit of a lie since I don't have an office at the institute and we're forced to check our bags at the entrance to the library, so it's actually more convenient to work from my apartment. Although many of the lectures are interesting, some of them are a lot easier to follow than others. It's encouraging that the talks which I can't follow as easily tend to be the ones which are further removed from my sub-specialty; a year ago none of them would have made any sense. I quickly got over my initial pangs out guilt about skipping those talks which aren't beneficial to me when I realized that the organizers had planned 30 hours of lecture per week, and I was never going to get anything done on my research if I spent more than 40 hours a week in or around the lecture hall. Place de la Bastille, the hub of my neighborhood Sticking to ones footware is a matter of principle A nice park lines the canal on its way to the Seine The Bassin de l'Arsenal, a glorified ditch Unfortunately, the weather has been so cold that I haven't explored most of my home district of Bastille yet. Originally this was the home to Bastille prison, a small and secretive prison which was famously stormed by a mob of disgruntled Parisians, marking the start of the French Revolution. Of course, historical revisionism tells that the mob was outraged by violations of human rights surrounding the prison, but they were actually after a cache of weapons stored in the prison and proceeded to ensure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by beheading most of the upper class. The original prison was located along the rue Saint Antoine (my street), and part of the foundations are covered by the Starbucks a few doors down from me. The architects of Bastille built a canal (later call the Bassin de l'Arsenal) from the Seine to the prison in order to fill the moat, but once the prison was overthrown it was put to use for shipping, before finally turning into a place for boats to rust in peace as the area gentrified in the 20th century.

Tucson to Paris [1 Jan 2010] Like it's predecessor, this blog will be a place to keep in touch with family and friends while I'm in Paris. I don't expect that I'll write as often as I did while I was in Japan, or venture as many conclusions about French society as I did with Japan. To the extent that I can keep it from getting banal it'll function more like a mass email update for those who want to see how I'm doing during my three months in the land of the French. The airlines these days are real sticklers about the weight of each bag. They're don't seem overly concerned about the total number of pounds of baggage per person, probably since they wouldn't be able to charge fees as easily. Unless one has a large scale on hand, this poses an interesting question: how does one check if a bag weighs more or less than 50lb? Naturally one just compares it to a 53lb kettlebell. Vlad (my 24kg kettlebell) served an unusual role My problems on this particular journey started when I missed my connection from Heathrow to Charles de Gaul airfield (the main airport in France). According to the schedule my flight was supported to take nine and a half hours and but ended up taking ten and a half. My guess is that I missed the connection because the computer which scheduled my trip didn't take into account the greater variability of longer fights when planning layover times. By itself this wouldn't be much of a problem, but it set off a rather remarkable cascade of events. Although I got the new flight information to my contact person at rental agency, it seems to have never made it through to the taxi service so I ended up sitting outside of the arrival gate in CDG for several hours. I still remember the endless rows of dark customer service desks at Heathrow when it (incomprehensibly) shuts down for the night, so I waited with growing unease as parts of the French national airport gave similar signs of closing down for the night. Eventually I was able to get in touch with Susie Holland at the rental agency and we agreed that I would first take a taxi to her apartment to pick up the keys to my apartment, then go on alone to the apartment to crash for the night. My limited ability to mangle French had gone away completely at that point due to jet lag, so after several unsuccessful minutes of trying to communicate with my French-speaking taxi driver, I called Susie back up and handed him the phone so she could explain. When we finally reached her apartment, we naturally couldn't raise her on the phone, so I dug around in a pile of paperwork I brought with me to get the door code to the outer door so I could get buzzed in. Her family's apartment is on the fourth floor... as the French count them. So after stumbling up a stairwell with absolutely no illumination and trying to work up the courage to knock on the door to a dark apartment, I heard her on the landing bellow me. Now that story ought to have ended there, but when I got down to the bottom I couldn't get out. After several minutes of fumbling I found the button on the wall which opens the inner door... only to get stuck behind the outer, keypad guarded door. No amount of fidgeting with the door itself seemed to work, so finally my friendly driver got out of his taxi and tried to enter the code on the outside. Unfortunately, he didn't have his glasses on to read the code on my print out, and his ability to recognize numbers in English through a thick door wasn't so good, so I eventually settled on reading off the door code from my print out in Spanish so he could let me out of the building. The tension and frustration of the growing travel mishaps finally gave way to hilarity at the absurdity of the situation, and after that it was comparatively easy (the apartment has no street number, the wrong floor again, you get the idea). The last time I visited Heathrow was in 2001, and back then it seemed a rather dingy, city sized, complex. Nine years later it's unrecognizable, with vast spaces that seem large even by the standards of mass transit. Perhaps the old Heathrow still exists in some forgotten suburb? Everything in the new Heathrow is glass and steel, with a very professional but cold feeling. By contrast, Charles de Gaul airfield has a dirty, worn feeling until the public announcement system comes to life with the sound of classical music, which seamlessly transitions into a female voice which makes unattended luggage sound like an intimate personal confession. The two things which got everyone to stare in Heathrow: My Vibrams My tea thermos One of the ladies who manned the x-ray machine actually exclaimed “what the hell is is that?” when examining my shoes. Customs in France were a joke. I'd expected to have to explain why I was staying for such a long time on a tourist visa, justify that the tea I was bringing into the country wasn't an agricultural product, and provide an address where I would be staying, so it was anticlimactic to have the customs agent glance at the picture on my passport, stamp it, and pass it back to me in one motion. Even the Argentines went through the motions of a proper customs booth, with several different forms they wanted me to fill out detailing specific information of my stay; in Paris no one asked me anything and I just wandered out the exit. My first impressions of Paris was that it shared the worn and grimy feeling of New York, but with wider boulevards that had to the result of central planning. I believe it was Napoleon who enforced the creation of the wide streets which make Paris distinctive (note to city planners: totalitarian power gets things done a lot faster than committees). The side streets are still cozy and the tolerances for driving are frightening, cars rarely clear each other by more than six inches. My taxi driver was a nice fellow, but he would have favorably represented his city against the famed New York taxi drivers. It's remarkable how quickly my iPhone has gone from a gadget of uncertain value to a lifeline. When I got up this morning I decided to make my first quick venture outside to buy some form of breakfast. I went down a careful checklist and make sure that I had my keys, I knew which turns I'd taken in the stairwell, and I was ready for anything – and then promptly forgot the piece of print out which contained the door code! Without my dear little iPhone I would have been in a lot of trouble. The kitchen is somewhat limited The dining room / living room / sitting room / study / guest bedroom The bed is rather literally a nook The view faces the rear of the building complex

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