etnobofin

I missed the big snowfall midweek, but we had a sprinkling last Saturday. I took some photos while out doing Christmas errands…

Pont des Arts

Pont du Carrousel

Ile de la Cité

It’s fair to say that France doesn’t have a international broadcast news service of the stature or popularity of the BBC World Service… and France’s international TV service in English, France24, (a pet project of Jacques Chirac instituted in the last days of his presidency) is worthy but rather under-resourced, and frankly looks and sounds like a struggling local cable news from Minnesota.

However, one of the small pleasures of living in Paris is tuning in to Radio France Internationale (RFI) on 89.0 FM. For news in the morning, I find it a much better source for a roundup of international news than the local news stations. Like the World Service, RFI is jointly funded by the state broadcaster and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and most of the time, seems to maintain its editorial independence.

France Inter, France Info and the private stations RTL and Europe1 are often thoughtful and interesting. But they are dominated by big-name media stars and an interminable analysis of domestic French politics that often leaves me longing for something that isn’t Eric Woerth’s latest scandal, more speculation on the imminent cabinet reshuffle, or wall-to-wall coverage of French sailors in the Route du Rhum.

By contrast, RFI seems refreshingly free of big-name media stars, and is just as likely to spend 15 minutes examining the US mid-term elections as it is to interview a foreign relations expert on Burma, or cut to live to a reporter in Ouagadougou to talk about their recent International Festival of Contemporary Theatre.

The Maison de Radio France, by the Seine in the 16th arrondissement

RFI broadcasts in 19 different languages overseas, but its French service is unapologetically focused on sub-Saharan africa, where it enjoys the largest audience of any Francophone radio station in the world – between 30 and 45 million listeners. Listening to RFI opens up a continent of politics that is rarely discussed in English language meda: for example RFI’s coverage of the recent elections in Guinea and Ivory Coast was fascinating.

Among Parisian listeners, the station caters largely to an audience in the suburbs. While France Inter often sounds like the 6th arrondissement arguing with the 7th arrondissement, RFI’s focuses on events happening in the often unloved swathes of le 93 and le 94:  film festivals in Montreuil, schools in crisis in Aulnay-sous-Bois, or the plight of the homeless in Chelles. It makes for fascinating listening, and provides a very different image of the city than one gets from most of the French mainstream press.

Today I visited Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a town on the western outskirts of Paris, at the end of the RER A.

St-Germain-en-Laye was the site of a royal palace, and was the birthplace of Louis XIV (the building where the birth took place is now a restaurant).  James II of England washed up here after he was exiled for being Catholic, and the town was also the birthplace of Claude Débussy.

But alongside all this history, the royal terrace in the palace grounds offers a wonderful view of the Paris region, which today stretched out under bright sunshine, skyscrapers on the horizon with the Eiffel Tower and Sacré Coeur standing proudly to either side.

The royal vineyards have recently been replanted in pinot noir, and offer an interesting foreground for a view of the France’s main business hub at La Défense – a horrible place to work in, but quite attractive when seen from a safe distance at the weekend.

The forest at Saint-Germain-en-Laye is the former royal hunting ground for the palace. Today it no longer gives much of an impression of wilderness, criss-crossed as it is by railway lines and roads, but neverthless offers a large and welcome green space on the edge of Paris, turning orange and brown as the season advances.

Coming home tonight from a concert of Senegalese sacred music (a last minute proposition by Klari, merci encore une fois!) at the Cité de la Musique, I encountered a large crowd blocking boulevard Saint Germain, outside Les Deux Magots. There were police and ambulances, flashing lights and plenty of angry motorists sounding their horns.

Uh oh, I thought, the lycéens are back on the street and the 6th arrondissement is going to be cut off for the rest of the evening… however the truth was soon revealed, as a squadron of police motorcycles set off down the boulevard, stopping traffic and letting the crowd of hundreds zoom off down one of Paris’ most elegant streets… on rollerblades.

This is one of the reasons I love this city. Earlier in the week, the region was paralysed through lack of petrol and there was rioting in some of the suburbs. And yet tonight, a hundred police turned out so that Parisians could rollerblade through central Paris…

The eastern suburbs of Paris are not generally reputed for their beauty or their sehenswürdigkeit.  One exception is the town of Joinville-le-Pont, sitting astride the Marne river just on the far side of the Bois de Vincennes.

The town includes the Ile Fanac, a wooded island in the middle of the river, on which stand a number of fine fin-de-siècle homes.

The calm, regulated waters of the Marne make this area an ideal place for rowing, and Joinville-le-Pont has become something of a French Henley-on-Thames, with rowing clubs sprinkled along the riverbanks.

Joinville-le-Pont was an early centre of French film production, and just across the river you can still see the studios of Pathé Frères, regularly used by film-makers such as Jean Renoir and René Clair in the years before the Second World War.

Finally, a wander up the river and under the A4 autoroute brings you to Chez Gégène, one of the last guingettes still operating in the Paris region. These riverside restaurants and cabaret venues were originally set up outside the city walls to escape the taxes and prohibitions of Paris itself.

From the end of the 19th Century until the 1950s the guingettes were popular places for eating and dancing. But today, like the old brick Pathé studios, they stand as memorials to an earlier age of  entertainment…

It is a rare and exciting day when you hear a musician of the calibre of Eddie Palmieri in concert. One of the founding fathers of New York salsa and a great innovator in the Latin jazz of the 1970s, Palmieri brought his Afro-Carribean All-Stars to New Morning in Paris last Friday, and they blew the roof off.

Eddie Palmieri, Concert Pique-Nique, Reims France, 17.07.2010. Image: Eulsteph

Two hours of music stretched out over a pair of sets, suffused with humour and generosity. It was hard to suppress a giggle when Palmieri threw a quote from Salt Peanuts into one of his famously overblown solo passages. The grinning complicity between Palmieri and his bass player, Luques “Salsa” Curtis was evident throughout the gig.

Brian Lynch, Concert Pique-Nique, Reims France, 17.07.2010. Image: Eulsteph

The presence of trumpeter Brian Lynch in the touring band was a particular pleasure – an incredibly technically accomplished player, Lynch has been a regular collaborator with Palmieri since 1987, and directed the Grammy-winning album Simpàtico in 2006.

The music traversed Palmieri’s jazz catalogue (including tunes from Simpàtico and 1990′s Palmas) and included a steaming Latin version of Monk’s In Walked Bud, a nod to one of Palmieri’s own stylistic influences on the piano.

Palmieri apologised that the band wouldn’t be playing his salsa hits (Vamonos pa l’Monte, Cuidate Compay…), because of a lack of vocalists in the group. But with the energy on show last Friday, nobody went home disappointed. This is a gig I’ll remember for a long time.

I wrote last year about my chance meeting with Leanna Mills and her family in Montpellier. I was particularly moved by their story and have kept in touch with the family since.

With more surgery upcoming for Leanna and her sister Bethany, the family arrived back in France this week. They passed through Paris briefly on their way to Montpellier.

On Thursday evening I caught up with the girls and their father Nic for dinner. Afterwards we went down to the Eiffel Tower for some sightseeing. I’m still not much good at driving a wheelchair, and the evening crowds didn’t make it easier! Their little sister Olivia came with us, and had a lot of fun with the souvenir sellers…

Bethany, Nic, Leanna and Olivia in Paris

Bethany’s surgery is routine but still dramatic – she is getting the batteries replaced for the brain stimulator device that keeps her alive. The technology is slowly improving, and doctors  hope that her new batteries will last longer than two years. Bethany uses a wheelchair, but thanks to continuing surgery she remains fairly mobile and independent.

On the other hand, Leanna is facing a much grimmer challenge. In addition to her primary dystonia, she has recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease – terrible news for a 15 year-old girl.  Leanna now requires significant care, and the outlook does not look good for much improvement.

Mills Sisters Registered Charity

The Mills family currently need help raising funds to buy a block of land in Newcastle, Australia and to construct a disability-friendly home for the girls. They have a registered charity, and donations are accepted online at their MyCause page. These donations are tax-deductible in Australia.

In other developments, the sisters now have their own website. With permission of the family, I also have set up a Facebook page – so you can follow them if you’re on Facebook, and I hope to post regular updates there as I hear news…

The 14th of July (which NOBODY in France calls “Bastille Day”, by the way) dawned bright, promising a hot day with sun shining benignly down on the amassed weaponry parading down the Champs-Elysées. Shorts, sunglasses, sunscreen and digital cameras seemed the essential equipment to enjoy the day.

How wrong we were. As we took up our position in the roof garden of an office building just a block back from the Arc de Triomphe (friends with high places, naturally), and while snipers from the Gendarmerie stared at us through binoculars, clouds started moving in from the east, looming darkly over the Eiffel Tower.

The storm held off long enough for us to watch the French Air Force roar down the length of the Voie Triomphale, from La Défense to the Louvre. It was an impressive sight.

New Zealand’s airforce consists of a handful of Vietnam-era helicopters, a few transport planes that occasionally drop boxes of aid to cyclone-stricken Pacific islands and a part-time brass band. France has, er, a few more planes than we do:

And then, as soon as the jets got out of the way, the heavens opened. Paris was hit by a month’s worth of rain in three hours. We unsuccessfully dodged the showers and – strangely – found ourselves in a bar in time for lunch. We were wet, but seemed to be doing something right.

L’Ecluse specialise in the wines of Bordeaux. We ignored the bottle of 1979 St Pétrus on their wine list at €1227 and opted for a €25 Château Margaux instead. After drying out over a few glasses and an “Assortiment de cochonnailles” (a plate containing variations on pig), I sensed that the rain was easing and that I should make a dash for the métro.

My expectation of improving weather proved of course to be hilariously and liquidly wrong. As I reached the bottom of Avenue Georges V, another torrential downpour hit. By the time I took this video of a Leclerc tank rumbling onto the Pont de l’Alma, I was soaked to the skin.

The rest of the day was spent drying off, wandering around the Marais in the newly resurgent sunshine, and then heading up the tower of the American Cathedral (yes, more friends with high places) for a few drinks and to watch the fireworks over Trocadéro at 11pm. But that is another episode…

To complement our previous journey from south to north, yesterday we achieved the obvious second objective – to cross Paris from west to east, on foot. From Porte Maillot to Porte de Vincennes. It took us 6 hours, and we covered 14.2 kilometres.

We ignored the warnings of heatwave, and were surprised by lower-than-predicted temperatures.  A light rainstorm in the afternoon helped keep things manageable. The City of Paris, however, were taking no chances:  heatwave warnings were displayed everywhere on the public information screens.

The journey was documented in real-time via Twitter, but here are a few highlights in images:

Parc de Monceau, a welcome patch of greenery in the 8th arrondissement

Jeanne d’Arc defying the English outside Saint-Augustin (Paris 8e)

A very reasonably priced lunch at Bouillon Chartier

The Promenade Plantée offers a quiet green corridor for pedestrians and cyclists to cross the 12th arrondissement

As we reached journeys end at the périphérique on the eastern edge of Paris, the chimneys got more fanciful…

My blog is currently subtitled “A kiwi in Paris, sweating on the metro“, and this week I have fully lived up to this moniker. In celebration of the official heatwave in Paris, and faced with news it’s only going to get hotter, here’s a “really-can’t-be-arsed-writing-anything” post.

Have a play with this tone matrix (you’ll work it out), and think of all of us in Western Europe who are perspiring into the night.