What a change from last year
Wow. No rushingraround, no packing suitcases, no impending transatlantic move. We're sitting around the fire at the grandparents' house in NJ and it's nice to be together.
We've been back from Paris now for as long as we were there, and as you can tell from the notes below it was a great time and a terrific experience. The kids are left with some French vocabulary, a prediliction for Kinder eggs, Tintin comics and Marsupilami cartoons, and an overall sense that it was a good trip. Come to think of it, Chrissie and I are much the same way. Work at AOL France was a succcess on a couple of levels, not least of which is that they launched the Voice over IP product (on which I worked) in October and it has been well received. Quite well received - in the first 4 weeks, AOL France gained more VoIP customers than AOL US has gotten in a year.
It's been a good year overall, for which we're very thankful. Chrissie's still working hard on her Master's in Library Science (almost halfway there!) and has been teaching a lot at the school our kids attend. Hannah has been taking riding lessons and having a lot of fun with Girl Scouts and dance as well. Liam's enjoying Cub Scouts and soccer and having broken his arm a couple of weeks ago is tolerating his Christmas cast very well. I've been finding work to be quite silly but am keeping sane with my usual fiddling with cars. I didn't make it to the race track this year - well, except for the Ring and that's was quite satisfying.
We're looking forward to 2006 and hope that the coming year is as good to you as last year was to us.
(I'll post the full-sized versions of the small pix on our card later this week for those who are interested.)
25 December 2005
Well I'm ramblin', ramblin' round, I'm a ramblin' guy!
Getting down to the last couple of days here, and I have Short Timer's Syndrome. My work is basically done, having finally gotten the business team to sign off on my requirements for the Voice over IP product they want to launch here. Maintenance on the requirements is being transitioned off to my French counterparts. Apartment is cleaned up, my stuff is packed, and there's not much left to do. I have to bring back my borrowed DSL equipment to work, so I'll be sporadically online til I'm back home on the 29th. I start a new gig at AOL when I get back to the office on 5 July, still working on Voice over IP and voice services, but now on the customer-facing side instead of the back office. I'm pretty excited about that, since I'm basically a customer-facing kind of guy. Gaining expertise in the back office has been very good, but not as much fun as building the things that people use. I'll be back in Marketing again, too.
It'll be great to get back to see the family again, Chrissie and the kids left about 6 weeks ago to head back to school and we knew 6 weeks would be kind of long - it is. Gives me a lot of respect for families who can't be together. I must say there's a lot I'll miss about this place - the people at work have been great, and it's been nice to live in a city again. We've got a great market in the neighborhood, with a couple of excellent cheese suppliers (surprise), a great butcher, and a great fishmonger. I'll miss the wine store on the corner and the choice of a couple of good boulangeries (Chrissie's right, though, there's not a huge difference between them, much as I'd like to think so). It's been cool to be able to visit London, Brussels, Barcelona, Germany, and the rest of the places that you can get to in a couple hours of travel. Speaking another language has been good brain exercise, but sadly it's harder than it used to be.
But for me, this trip taught me as much about what's great at home as it did about what's great in Paris. Home, after all, is where you make it, and as expected we can make a home in other places. But home in Virginia is pretty nice, all in all.
See y'all soon.
PS - one thing I should have noted about the Ring is that the fatalities are generally motorcyclists, for obvious reasons. The accident that occured when I was there was a car, not that it much matters when you're dead.
27 June 2005
The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here!!
The new Paris phone books are out, just in time for us to see our name in print. And to see that they Frenchified it into "Devinnet".
I've been on my own here for the last week or two, between my folks' visit and the arrival of the Bluhms a couple of days ago. I took the opportunity to celebrate my 40th with a motorhead's trip to Germany. Picked up a rental BMW 320d in Paris last Friday night and drove out through Luxembourg to Trier, Germany. Nice town with a ton of Roman ruins including an arena, baths, and a terrific gate. Trier also has a nice old city made into a pedestrian zone - very civilized. On the marktplatz I saw a jewelry store that called out for an advertisement, so I made one: Click for Christ Jewelers Ad
The Ring: The drive up the Mosel river valley was quite pretty, as was the trip into the Eifel mountains to my first automotive-focused stop: the Nürburgring - specifically the North Course or Nordschleife. The Ring is famous among enthusiasts but hard to explain. It was built in the 1920s as a road racing course and test track, and has always been open to the public. On "tourist lap" days you can buy a ticket, go through the gate and drive around the track. The Ring is a public road, I happened to have the BMW's navigation system on (well, it's impossible to figure out how to turn it off sometimes thanks to the iDrive user interface), and at the gate of the track was told "In 50 meters turn left onto the Nordschleife"... It is subject to German traffic laws, but it's not a regular road by any stretch of the imagination; while some people are just there to see the sights, others are taking it as fast as they can. There is no separation by skill level as there would be at any normal track - every 15 seconds a vehicle goes out, regardless of skill or speed. The variation of skill and speed are huge - on the night I arrived I heard that there was a Porsche Carrera GT out, and that same night a Trabant with 2 guys and 2 dogs went for a drive, too. The course is long (21km) and complicated (73 corners, compared to 10 at Summit Point or 20 for VIR). The steel barriers are very close to the track and while there are gravel traps at some corners the course is extremely unforgiving. Errors made can easily demolish a vehicle or a life - while the count is closely held, it's been estimated that about 1 driver per week dies at the track. On the day I was there the track closed for an hour to clean up and investigate a fatal accident. Even non-fatal accidents can be very bad, and can be expensive. In addition to any car damage that you have to cover, you're also charged for track damage and lost revenue for the time the track is closed!
OK, so with all that, why drive it? I guess for the same reasons that mountain climbers go up: because it's there. So I screwed up my courage and bought a five lap ticket, figuring if it was fun I'd do a couple and if not I'd give someone a ticket with 4 laps left on it. Halfway through the first time out I was positive that I had made a mistake, but of course once you're out you have to get back! By the end of the lap things didn't seem so bad, so I took a break and went out again. Lap two was better, enough that I dropped into the banking on the carousel (yeah!) instead of going around. Lap three was a stinker, I went out immediately after two and lost my concentration early. Took a break to think and relax, then went out for lap four. Four was good, so good that I went for five right after and called it a day. The diesel BMW was all that one needs for the first day at the Ring, since it's fast enough, handles pretty well and is a competent car for an incompetent driver (first day is mostly a time to check out the track rather than bomb around). Someone was taking pics, you can see me about to get passed here.
The Ring Taxi: Being a trackhead, I felt a strong need to drive it myself, but even with a couple of thousand miles at other tracks I found the Ring to be enormously dangerous and not something I could really run fast and enjoy. Fortunately I was able to arrange a ride in the Ring Taxi at the last minute. The Ring Taxi is a service of BMW Motorsports, who have two modified BMW M5 sedans (545 horsepower, 4 seats) and drivers who can hustle them around the Ring in under 10 minutes, which is a feat. When I booked it I was told 175 euros, and gulped and said yes, thinking that was pricey but when do you get the opportunity? It turns out that the Ring Taxi works like other taxis in that you don't buy a seat but rather the whole trip. Two English guys on the waiting list were happy to share the fare and we all hooted our way around the track together. I highly recommend a Taxi ride if you ever have the chance, although not everyone looked so happy getting out as we did!
The Porsche Factory: With five laps at the Ring and a Taxi ride to cap it all off, I pointed the navigation system to Stuttgart for my pilgrimage to the Porsche factory. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon and the roads were fairly clear for a good autobahn run. I wish we got the 320d in the states, as it accelerates well, cruises along at 180kph/112mph and gets almost 40mpg doing it. It'll make 135mph, too, but there wasn't enough visibility around corners, etc, to really go that fast given that there could be a traffic jam or a truck in the left lane. I overnighted in the small town of Bad Rappenau and set off for my factory tour on Monday morning. The Porsche factory was interesting as I'd read about their work trying to change to modern production methods. They seem to have a very Japanese production system, although with people doing the assembly work. There may be robots in the body shell process but after paint there's only one, used to fit windshields and backlights. That was cool to watch as the robot is fairly adaptive to accomodate minor differences in car location on the work cell. The use of kanban and other just-in-time production was evident, as was a poke-yoke system of labeling the parts carts so that only the right parts are put in each place. But never is the word "Japanese" used in the tour, it's always "modern". All in all the factory tour is most satisfying - well, if you're like me and enjoy watching parts go around and turn into cars.
The museum at Porsche was interesting but small. The factory is really cramped on its site and I suppose there's no real room for a museum. Still, I'd have been disappointed if I had come just for the museum and hadn't gotten on the factory tour. Fortunately the museum is also a loading dock and they were bringing in a Carrera GT, which was just excellent to listen to! I drove over to the Mercedes museum, but they were closed on Mondays. Mercedes is building an immense museum, if I were a Daimler-Chrysler shareholder I'd want to know what the payback was, given then company's current economic suckiness.
The Bodensee: Going to Stuttgart meant I was pretty close to our friends Wolfi & Susi, who live near Konstanz and the Bodensee. I drove down to see them and spent a couple of days hanging out with some of my favorite people. Wolfi remains the very funny mad scientist he's always been, even in his new role of industrialist ("Hello, I'm Joe Walther and this is my factory"). Susi should be a general contractor by now, having done or overseen all the tasks in a very nice reworking of their house. Their boys Andi and Nicki have grown into pretty much what you'd expect if you know their parents (that's a good thing). We don't get to see them often enough so this was a treat. The Bodensee is right next to Switzerland but I didn't go because it turns out you need a highway tax permit, and they're expensive since they're annual. Too bad, but that also meant I didn't have to figure out the passport game - French plates, Virginia license, do I use the Irish or US passport? I was stopped by the German police at a checkpoint and used the US passport since it matches the license - but the US passport has no visa stamp. The German police didn't notice/care, but I think the Swiss border guards might ask more questions. It's all legal, but I like to avoid questions. Left Hilzingen early on Wednesday morning to make sure I beat the Paris evening rush hour, and with a nice run across the Black Forest I headed back to France - this time by way of Freiburg and Mulhouse, about 25 years after visiting those towns with my friend Dave Wilson on our bikes. The BMW was faster but I think Dave and I had more fun back then.
Chrissie got many of our friends in Virginia to send me a card, and when I arrived back in Paris I had more mail waiting for me than we've gotten since January! That brought a big smile to my face and reminded me why we didn't extend this overseas gig - our community at home is pretty great.
All in all, a fine birthday for the single gearhead...
18 June 2005
Back in the saddle again
Better this time, only 10 days of no reports but a lot has happened since the last update. Chrissie and the kids are back in Virginia as planned, putting the kids back in school to see their friends before summer and allowing Chrissie to continue her grad school studies. The kids are already tired of being the kids who went to France. Hannah jumped back in and took the state's Standards of Learning tests with her class starting right when she got back - I think she likes being able to succeed again in ways she understands. Liam's just, well, being Liam.
My folks are here for a couple of weeks, they say to keep me company but I think they really do like Paris. They've been doing some tourist things and some not-very-tourist things, like gatecrashing astronomy lectures. Crazy semiretired people.
Our friend Alaina was here for the first two weeks of May, and flew back to VA with Chrissie & kids. Alaina was one of Chrissie's senior Girl Scouts and worked for us as a babysitter in high school. She's now a full-fledged adult and a very nice houseguest to boot. We've had all manner of very good houseguests on this trip, which has been wonderful.
In addition to the usual Paris tourist visits we rented a car and went out to Monet's garden at Giverny, where he painted his water lillies and many other subjects. It was better than I expected - a little commercialized, but the gardens were terrific. Even Liam enjoyed himself. On the way home we stopped at a classic tourist attraction: Mini France. Spread across about 4 acres of land are models of various landmarks - the French local equivalent of Belgium's Mini Europe. They have a good playground, too. The next day we took said car out to Parc Asterix, an amusement park built around the theme of the Asterix and Obelix comics. Not only was it a better experience than Eurodisney, but they managed to cook food that didn't incur major intestinal distress - two thumbs up! Parc Asterix has some good roller coasters, including a long, loud, shakey, fast wooden coaster that we all totally loved. If the wait hadn't been so long we'd have ridden it a couple of times.
To cap off the travel experience for the kids, they went with Chrissie and Alaina to Amsterdam for a couple of days. It's an easy train ride, although the TGV can't run flat-out past Brussels. For the first time we found a hotel that could accomodate more than 3 to a room and Chrissie didn't have to rent two rooms, which was nice. They cruised the canals, visited the Heineken brewery, and a couple of museums, and generally had a good time. All too soon it was time to come back to Paris and finish packing.
We arranged for a van to the airport, since we had two huge bags per person, and boy did we fill it up. With each suitcase weighing around 30 kilos we had about 500 pounds of luggage. An uneventful trip home, and there you have it, back to the usual in the USA - which is just fine.
26 May 2005
I'm such a loser
Wow, a month without an update - I am indeed a loser! Work's been busy, we've been traveling... there, done with excuses. This update is actually from 9 May, between visitors. I'll follow up with tales of Alaina's visit and the family returning to Virginia.
What a month, though. The kids finished up at French school, and while we've not heard any longing to go back we hear that it was *ok*. They know a lof schoolyard French now, can make out signs, and order their own stuff in restaurants. They also know their way around the metro and can live in the city, so overall I'd say the trip was a success!
With no school, we've been filling the days with travel and catching up on US school work. Hannah has worked on her times tables and US handwriting - she still writes pretty French Xs and Ps. Liam's been writing in his journal and that's been a struggle sometimes, he can talk a blue streak but isn't so interested in writing it down. It's all coming along but I'm betting the first week back at Mountain View is going to be almost as big a shock as the first week at l'ecole rue des Bauches.
First destination for travel this month was London. Chrissie packed the kids into the TGV and went off for over a week. They stayed at Baden Powell House, an International Scout hostel, and saw a lot of the city by train, foot and double-decker bus. A stage performance of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was well received, as were most of the usual tourist places. An overnight trip to Windsor made for a nice day at Windsor Castle and a visit to Legoland amusement park. As you'll see, this becomes a theme for the month.
Once back in Paris we had a couple of days by ourselves and my sister Eileen came to visit from Alaska, courtesy of her frequent flier miles. It was a great visit, and fortunately we'll see her again this summer since she'll be visiting the parents in New Jersey. Eileen and I had fun as kids when we got the rare chance to go to Disneyworld, and when Chrissie and I took the kids to Disney in Florida a couple of years ago we invited the Bean along. With that history and kids who really wanted to go, we hauled off to Disneyland in Paris for a day. It was an odd sort of experience - it's so consistent that it felt familiar, but when a ride went high you could see France past the fence. Overall quite fun, but I got a terrific case of food poisoning that took some of the gloss off... 24 hours later it was gone, which was good since we had a whirlwind trip to the coast planned. We rented a car and drove to Rouen for a couple of days in Normandy. Rouen has a stupendous museum of wrought iron, with pieces dating back to the 1200s, some terrific art, splendid locks & keys, and many items of daily use. There's also a great ceramics museum and a museum of beaux arts with a great collection. We did the tour of the Beaux Arts in reverse, and that was good since we ended with the Impressionists. The older paintings were wonderful and in many cases surprising with unexpected brightness and color, but after a bunch of that the Impressionists were like a breath of fresh air. It also made for a very clear lesson of just how much they broke from mainstream art.
Day one in Normandy took us to Juno, Gold and Omaha beaches, which now are peaceful and pleasant places to enjoy the sea. To see them in person put a lot of context to my book knowledge of the invasions of 1944. It was very sobering to think of hundreds of thousands of men on both sides, some as young as 17, fighting tooth and nail over difficult terrain. The stories on both large and small scales were pretty amazing: entire harbors shipped across the channel. 150,000+ men moved and supported by 3,000 ships. 13,000 aircraft. I've always used the invasion of Normandy as an example when people start thinking they're working on big projects. Amid all that vastness, there was a lot to see on a human scale - roads, towns, the remains of strong points. The men are gone, the stories fade out, but but the history remains.
Day two was spent at Mont Saint Michel, which I was later told wasn't crowded since we were actually able to move! It's very touristy but another place to consider the lengths to which people will go to achieve a mission: 500 years of construction to put an abbey atop a rock in the bay. Touristiness aside, it was a lot of fun. Once again, the audio tour was the big winner for the under-10 set.
Day three took us to St. Malo for breakfast and a walk around the walls. The kids wanted to play on the beach but it was just too cold, although sailing school was in session. They say the St. Malo area breeds great sailors and if you've seen the waters around the town you'd understand why. The non-great sailors are just never seen again. In the afternoon we went to Cancalles in a special visit for Hannah to the Musee des Huitres (The Museum of Oysters). This is a working oyster farm in an area known for producing good oysters, and it was a neat visit. There is of course an oyster market in town and one lady running a stall was kind enough to open and serve a kid's portion of oysters for Hannah, who loves them. I enjoy them from time to time, but wasn't ready for treif so soon after the swordfish-induced post-Disney barfarama.
And with that to end our whirlwind trip to Brittany and Normandy, we headed back to Paris. Eileen returned to Anchorage and we waited for our friend Alaina, the last visitor before Chrissie and the kids leave.
16 May 2005
Cliquez ici for latest pics
Cliquez ici for pics that didn't fit in the first link
Tourists Invade!!
Yes, tourists! Just like in DC, lots of people with maps trying to figure out where they are and where they're going and speaking their foreign languages. We hear lots of English these days. They're all well and good except at rush hour on the metro. I concluded tonight that a camera bag is the metro equivalent of out-of-state plates on the Beltway - it allows you to stop anywhere you want, turn into people, and generally get in the way.
We did our own tourist dealie last weekend, with a quick 3.5 day jaunt to Brussels. About 1.5 hours to zip across France and Belgium on the very fast TGV train, and there you are. The kids liked riding "one of the fastest trains in the world!" and we were joined by Cathy C who was finishing up a few weeks with us and by my Dad, who dropped in for the weekend. Brussels was quite excellent, with beer and chocolate in abundance. Yum. Did all the touristy things including Mini-Europe, wherein you can see models of the major cities of the EU and gaze on the majesty of a scale model of the formerly asbestos-laden Berlaymont building, seat of the European Commission. Oooooooooooooooh. But it was actually fun overall, and the Atomium next door was cool to look at even if it's closed for renovation. Other than that, there are great museums for trams, lace & costume, chocolate (of course) and beer (likewise). Also some very fine art deco and art nouveau buildings. Plus it's a friendly city, not as self-conscious as Paris.
The kids are down to their last week of school next week, and then off to London by train for a week of Mom-plays-educational-tour-guide. Then a week or two here in Paris and maybe a train trip to Amsterdam. My sister Eileen comes from Alaska to visit for a week - that should be very fun indeed. Finally it's May - our friend Alaina comes to visit for a week and everyone but me ships out mid-month.
They're pretty happy to be near the end of their time here even though it's been a generally positive experience. Liam's already getting wound up for CHEESE PIZZA EVERY DAY FOR LUNCH AT SCHOOL. Hannah is looking forward to having class in English again, when she can understand the assignments. But I think they'll miss some friends, and the toy store down the street, and maybe most of all, being able to watch TV in the name of learning French. I'm sure we'll hear a variation of "I wish we were back in France" pretty fast once they're back home.
Brussels and other pix later this week. I've got to edit down a bunch of video, too, and should have that up in a week or two.
31 March 2005
The Train To Spain Stays Mainly Near The Seine
Well, we're at week 12 or so, and it seems like everyone but Chrissie has hit the Wall - we've seen the place, now we're ready to go home. That means it's really time to stay, since getting over the hump is a key part of the experience. So we'll hear a lot about how French school lunch is yucky, and that school in the US is better because you can talk to people, and so forth, and then hopefully we'll get past it all. In any case the kids have only another 5 weeks in school before vacations and then they're back to the US. Time does fly. Chrissie being the consummate traveller, is not nearly at the wall yet - I think she could live anywhere for a good long time.
We went to Barcelona for a whirlwind 4 day long weekend. Took the overnight train, which was fun for adults but Big Fun for kids. We left Paris about 3 hours late, and never did figure out why. But no matter, since we had nothing planned in Barcelona on our arrival. Stayed at the Hotel Catalonia Aragon, which I like to think of as the Hotel Fawlty Continental - nice enough people, but not a paragon of the hotelier's art. But they provided beds and shelter, and even better it was the hotel that the Grandparents Devinney would arrive at on Saturday, along with the Schmelzers and Hoffmeiers. Before the arrival of the Good Life Coop we made it a point to see some kid-focused thingies, including the Tibidabo amusement park, which is on a hilltop overlooking the city. Since we only had a few hours I ASSumed that a limited ticket would be just the thing, until we found out that it DIDN'T INCLUDE BUMPER CARS! Ah well, I may be forgiven when the kids are in their 40s. Also saw the chocolate museum and some other fun spots. We spent a nice Sunday with the Good Life Coop, getting Gaudi'd out at the Sagrada Familia and La Pedrera. Even the kids liked these, and they soaked up the audio tours like sponges - on a couple of occassions we were corrected by small voices when making an incorrect comment...
The Good Life Coop introduced us to a wonderful concept for communication: Desperanto. Desperanto is the language you speak in foreign countries after your high school and college language courses have faded into phrases like "Ou est la plume de ma tante?" and the ability to remember the Spanish word for spoon. The Desperanto theory is that any combination of Romance languages, when spoken in earnest and with a smile, will be understood by people around the Mediterranean. Amazingly it works well, even better than speaking English slowly and loud.
I caught a great virus in France that I carried through Spain and then back, turning into a magnificent case of bronchitis that I thought was so nice I gave it to Chrissie. By Tuesday I figured I needed a doctor, but the two in my neighborhood that our relo folks found were both closed on Tuesdays. So I called SOS Medecins, who come to your house for 60 euros. Not bad. The nice thing about being sick in France is that you get a very satisfying handful of prescriptions, some of which might even help. At this point we're recovering.
Visiting for the next couple of weeks is Cathy C, Chrissie's perennial roommate and boon companion in places like Belize, Japan, and a variety of other locations.
Lastly, we've been spending time here with the Brownies and Cub Scouts, who have been kind enough to welcome the kids into their organizations while we visit. Yesterday was Cub Pack 112's Pinewood Derby out at the American School of Paris, and Liam and I had a fun day. Liam was very pleased that the car we built pretty quickly (sanded to shape and axles processed the day we left the US, then painted & finished here) was pretty quick - he got 3rd place in the entire pack, among a good 30+ cars:
12 March 2005
More reasons that the Metro beats highway commuting?
Marnie and Erin A are here today, staying til next week. Tammy B and her friend are in Paris this weekend, too. Then C take the night train to Barcelona (there's almost a song there) for a couple of days visiting. Cathy Cleveland comes in after that, then Pa Devinney, and who knows after that. I think we have 2 weeks without houseguests from now until mid-May when Chrissie and the kids go home. We're glad to have the visitors.
Snow earlier this week, sticking and everything. The sidewalks here are blacktop, which I thought was a great idea since they're easy to fix when they get torn up for repairs, etc. However, they're slick as all getout when they're snow covered - reminding me why we don't pave our gravel driveway at home.
So I've ranted about the Metro not being a rolling cafe, but there are things that make up for the crowds. First, I've started taking a different train in the mornings since I can get on right near the kids' school. It means more walking but that's a required part of the wine, chocolate and french bread weight loss program: get rid of your car, eat sensibly, and lose weight. Coming home I take the Metro, and it's just great for people watching. Most days it's all normal people.
Other days it's a sideshow. Jesus rode on the #1 line with me a couple of weeks ago. At the Franklin D. Roosevelt stop there's a French version of National Lampoon's Politenessman - he barks out "bonsoir" and you must reply. A woman of a certain age, dressed impeccably and in a fur coat. She needs to get new light bulbs at the makeup table, though - her makeup has a distinct greenish cast in the Metro's fluorescent lights. Some nights the pan-handlers are coming home with the rest of the workers, it's interesting to see just how much change they're counting out! Finally, earlier this week I rode across from a well dressed woman in her 20s, good hair, careful makeup, Louis Vitton handbag, listening to music, and ... sucking her thumb.
There are real bright spots, too. The woman in FDR station who plays harp and sings is quite excellent. There was an Andean group of about 8 guys at Montparnasse who were great. I read in the paper that the Pillow Fight Club of Paris held a meeting outside of Notre Dame one night recently, hopefully they'll be coming to a train near me soon. But I'll never tell, because what goes on in Pillow Fight Club stays in Pillow Fight Club.
DSL is working now! We're back to the 20th century and are Skype-able, for those of you who have a broadband connection and a computer with a speaker & mike (or a headset). Download the app from www.skype.com and add mcdevinney or ejdevinney to your contacts. Voila! Free phone calls and excellent quality. I wish regular VoIP was so simple...
25 February 2005
How do you say "telemarketer" in French?
Ah, Valentine's Day in the City of Light... where it hailed yesterday in big buckets. Valentine's Day here doesn't seem to be quite as commercialized as in the US, but it certainly gets the marketers out, mostly to sell lingerie (not that there's anything wrong with that). Hannah and Liam gave out American-style Valentine's day cards at school, which are probably still baffling classmates and parents alike. I'm not sure what I'd make of a French card with a smiling giraffe and an untranslatable pun.
I wrote a note to the kids' teachers, asking permission to pass out Valentine's Day cards. At this point I can speak sort of adequately, but writing is another matter since you can't fake the verb tenses and such. Between the dictionary and google's language tools a 6 line note took me only 45 minutes to compose - woo hoo! I got some great results translating back and forth to check my work; if one knows that the adjective "religieuse" is also the name of a pastry it's not too surprising that "fete non-religieuse" gets google-translated into "festival non-chocolate eclair"...
The title of the site today comes from a Monty Python sketch that I think of a lot when I'm in a long meeting. The sketch is about the joint French-English development of a flying sheep, which isn't as important as the fact that it progresses from reasonably accurate French into total nonsense. I can do about 1 hour of French meeting, and after that it all starts sounding like sheep bleating. Unfortunately they like 2 hour meetings here.
We got our first telemarketing call. Unlike their American cousins, French telemarketers don't call at 6:30 to interrupt dinner. That's because no one's eating at 6:30 - the telemarketers call at 8pm so they can interrupt dinner. It sounded like insurance and I was tempted to tell her to go away, but was afraid that I might be dissing the French equivalent of the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. So I asked to have stuff mailed to me. Sure enough, it was a pitch for insurance. Next time I'll just start speaking English with a deep Southern accent. "I'd like a shoe with cheese on it, and shove it down my throat please!"
Still no DSL in the house - well, it's here but the connection won't send any data down. Have to work with Pierre in the office to figure that out. One of our neighbors is nice enough to run a Linksys wireless access point right as it comes out of the box - that is, completely open, with no password. So we can at least get a connection in the back room.
I picked up Liam's new passport this week, now with his right birth year and everything. The Irish embassy in Paris turned it around quickly and at no charge. I went to hand in the paperwork looking forward to a nice bit of craic in English and ended up speaking entirely in French to the guy up front. Good thing I opened in French and not the 5 words I remember how to speak in Irish.
I'll try for pictures next update.
14 February 2005
Spaghetti with the Sardinians
My dad sent this pic from their recent trip to Italy, menu from the restaurant Il Cedro, in Siracusa. Once upon a time you could get great mangled translations like this all the time, but in the last decade or so people have been more careful. Now that there are free translation tools on the web I look forward to seeing more of this sort of thing.
19 January 2005
We're in the phone book - we're somebody! !
News du jour: The kids are in school, at the public school on the rue des Bauches. After the runaround last week, Barbara Prudhomme from in'pat made some calls, and she and Chrissie visited school number 2. The director was happy to see them and he and the staff have made Hannah and Liam very much welcome. There are two hours of French-as-a-second-language class per day and the kids spend the rest of the time in their regular classrooms. They're troupers, these kids - jumping right into a school in which they don't know anyone and don't speak the language. They've made fast friends and the first couple of days have gone pretty well. Hannah had a rough morning today, I had told her math would be easier than other classes since it's numbers. That's true, but those numbers are called by different names here... I think this was just too frustrating.
After lunch at home she dove right back in and had a good remainder of the day - I'm sure we'll see good and bad days as time goes by. Both Hannah and Liam are starting to learn French and I think they'll soak it up like sponges. School here is on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, with Wednesdays off for primary school kids and a half-day on Saturday a couple of times per month. Lunch and break is about 2 hours, allowing time to eat and play. Hannah & Liam stay at school for lunch on Mondays and Thursdays.
This school week will be a little short, the postal workers are striking and so many teachers are out in sympathy. Fortunately the metro is supposed to be running - we'll see. Speaking of the metro, it's nice to be reminded that the grass is truly greener on the other side. At home I sit in traffic, grousing about the packed roads and stupid other drivers and why don't we have good public transportation, dagnabit, so that one could read the paper or do something useful in that commuting time. Now that I'm actually using good public transportation at rush hour, I realize that what I and maybe many others want is not so much public transport in general, but specifically a nice, spacious rolling cafe that happens to take me to work. If I get to the metro at the wrong time, it's packed to the gills - I'm waiting to see the uniformed Japanese men come out and push us in the doors. A couple of times the density and motion of the crowd was enough that I felt like I was in a moving sea, and was reminded of the bit from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
"It's unpleasantly like being drunk"
"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
"Ask a glass of water."
We have a landline phone now - +33 01 45 24 34 10 . I'd have hooked up a phone tonight but of course the French do not uniformly use the RJ-11 connector - have to get an adapter. But a phone line means I can order DSL, assuming I can get one of the providers to take a non-French credit card. The providers all claim to be able to provision a 5 to 8Mbps down/1Mbps up DSL line here, for about $20/month. Over 4x the speed of our cable modem at home, for almost 1/3 the price - vive la France. So soon we'll have a network connection in the house and will leave the dark ages. There are a couple of wireless networks in the surrounding apartment buildings but the owners have actually read the manuals and the networks are somewhat buttoned down. Alas I wouldn't use company-owned equipment to look at the network traffic and sneak in so we'll wait til our own DSL comes.
19 January 2005
We really do live here now.
Still no blogware, so you get the facts, only the facts.
Big news is that we actually have an apartment! We're reasonably permanent now and have a real address:
Famille Devinney
88 avenue Mozart
75016 Paris
FRANCE
We were very fortunate to have had a nice selection of good apartments put before us - it's apparently hit or miss, sometimes there's just nothing. Big props to the relocation company and AOL for working up a decent budget, it rented us a fairly palatial 3 bedroom apartment in a nice area of the city. See pix by following the link at the end of this section.
We've had some hitches in finding school for the kids. There are many bilingual schools in the city, but mid-year admission is tough, especially on short notice. The one that indicated it was possible considered Hannah & Liam for quite a long time before concluding that they would need to know more French before diving into their mostly French program. So we're off to the next one, which is 50-50 French-English, and we hope that it works out. Plan C (or Z, I guess) is for Chrissie to home school them, but that makes it a lot harder to meet people and learn the language.
Another option is the public school, which in our arrondissement (district of the city) often have sections of non-French speakers since many furriners live around here. Right after we signed the lease for the apartment, I went with our intrepid guide Martine to the mairie (district hall) to register for school. We were prepared to be asked tfor all sorts of things, like translations of medical and school records - note that the word
It was not to be. At the school we were told that the non-Francophone class was supposed to be 15 students, was already 17, and couldn't be 19 mid year. The school director asked how many years of school Liam had, and gave a very funny look when I said it was his first, after 2 years of maternelle (kindergarten). She asked "But he's 11, yes?". Uh oh. The form says birth year 1993. Worse, his Irish passport, applied for and issued in the whirlwind before moving, says 1993! So, two problems and back to the mairie. There we show his US birth cert and Irish citizenship papers and all is well, although I now must go to the embassy and fix that. Madame mairie sets us up with another school and Martine and her relocation team are off to make sure that this works a little better.
So two steps forward and one back. We're good shape - have figured out where many things are in the neighborhood. Chrissie's plunging into yet another culture without knowing the language - compared to Japan, at least there are Roman letters that you can try to make something of, and many people speak enough English to help. My French is getting better, but I still need to ask people to speak slowly; here it's like New York City, people speak fast. So far I don't think I've asked for Steve Martin's "a shoe with cheese on it, and shove it down my throat", but I've gotten some weird looks. Yesterday I asked M. Suarez, the gardien (super) of the building where the trash goes, and at least I got that across without making some famous Devinney family French errors...
The French are by and large very helpful, again like NYC things are fast and impersonal but that seems to be more city than French. The office culture is interesting, I was very glad that Chrissie bought a pile of life-in-France books or the custom of handshakes and clearly not heartfelt greetings all around in the morning would have seemed much more strange. But don't smile. The French don't smile without a damned good reason. I got to hand it to them, though. Lunch last week included steak tartare if you wanted it, and a raw egg in the shell to be mixed into the raw meat. After that we had cigarettes (no, not me) and strong coffee (yes!). 3 out of 4 of those things would be illegal in a restaurant at home. Even if maybe you could sign a waiver that the steak was under 160 degrees the eggs would need warning labels (300 raw, only 100 warnings if cooked). Or you'd get steak tartare with EggBeaters(tm). I could do without the cigarettes, and in fact this week the cafe in the atrium was voted to go non-smoking.
One more observation - no matter how much I say my name "Deh-VIH-nee" I am Monsieur Day-vee-NAY here and there is no effort made to pronounce it as I, the owner of the name, do. This is not a specific French fault, in Ireland I'm DEH-vinney and when I lived in the south I was going to change the spelling of my name to Ayd Duveeeeneee because that's how they pronounced it there. Still this gives me a new freedom at home: I will also localize French names ruthlessly. Hopefully I will get to talk to Mister Chee-rack some day, or a Monsieur des Moines (Dez Moynz) or Madame la Soeur (Lay Sewer) will come visit :-)
Enough drivel - on with the pix! CLIQUEZ ICI
13 January 2005
Day 2: Hey, we live here!
This is starting to look like a blog, but I'm too lazy to install any blogging software so I'm going totally old school. All the blog engines put a pretty "Powered by Blogsom" or something on the page to show people what a clever choice you made in using their software. How old school is this page? How about HTML edited in vi. From back when computers were powered by steam. I'd put a "Powered by Steam" on this page, but Steam is an actual useful piece of software so that's out.
Powered by Stones Knives and Bearskins
Ok, so maybe I need some software. Manana.
No pictures yet, but we've done a bunch over the last day or two. Arrived in Paris on Sunday the 2nd at 7am or so. Got through customs in short order and went to pick up our luggage. I had forgotten that the ability to queue up for something is genetically impossible in Europe. Jeez, what a mad house. To complicate things the designers of Charles de Gaulle airport engineered a lovely space in which to display the baggage handling equipment. The idea that a couple of hundred tired cranky people with no ability to line up would then be dumped into that space and try to access the equipment seems to have slipped their minds - there's about 3 meters between the conveyor belts and the wall, around which five thousand people careen luggage carts and listen to conflicting announcements about which equipment will produce their baggage.
The baggage carts are free, which is nice to have, especially when you brought as much crap as we did. However, those carts have to go somewhere. Place racks of them in the general vicinity of the baggage claim? Impossible, monsieur! They are best placed right at the conveyers - blocking access to a good 20% of the baggage claim space and making for a tremendous spectacle as two guys with a beeping electric cart-pusher attempt to push a train of 50 carts through the teeming crowd. I was humbled, I couldn't move one cart through the crowd, let alone 50.
So, minus 50 points for the airport. But, they get that back since they also don't have a 1 gallon flush toilet law here.
A word in praise of those who organize and provide corporate travel - I recognize your value after this trip, which was arranged by a number of very nice people but with no one in the middle. This left us with interesting arrangements like a flight which arrived at 7am but a hotel which had no rooms to check in until 3pm. A couple of other hiccups have shown up, none a big deal at all but the lack of a seamless experience makes me appreciate the ones I've had in the past.
That said, the hotel is about 50m from the Louvre, so we can't complain too much. With many hours to kill and very little sleep, we go off into Paris. The dog poo problem that many folks commented on seems to be getting a lot better, making the sidewalks mostly navigable. After some general sightseeing around the Ile de la Cite, we decide that we need to go ice skating. The kids were quite taken with a story they heard on the news about a skating rink set up on the first level of the Eiffel Tower, and it was a beautiful day. Most of Paris agreed, and the lines were fairly long, but in the end it was worth it and will make for great stories. No pictures of it, as I was trying to keep my butt off the ice and keep Liam from cracking his skull. Lack of fear is a great thing for children. Not so sure about for parents.
Went over to the AOL offices today to get my bearings and say hello. Nice place, nice people. I'll go in for real tomorrow (Tuesday 4 January) for half a day and then we go apartment hunting.
3 January 2005
So what's all that France stuff in your holiday letter?
Sheesh, where to start? Seems like one minute I'm talking to people about maybe doing some VoIP product work in Paris, and next minute we're packing our bags for a 6 month gig. As usual, initial discussions followed by a long slow time with no news until they come up with a firm offer on 1 December - can you be here on the first of January? Sure we can. Four weeks to get two adults & two kids packed and relocated? Throw in Christmas, too? Sure.
Like having another drink, it seems like a good idea at the time, but you know you'll pay for it later.
Well, now we're mostly packed and ready. Got a couple of Chrissie's now-grown-up girl scouts in to watch the house and cat. House sanitized for their protection. Fun cars mothballed in the barn. Bill payment arranged and friends with skills lined up to fix the various cranky parts of our old house. In touch with the HR and relocation folks in France - a good bunch, they're really responsive. We've got plane tickets, passports in multiple flavors, suitcases, a temporary place to stay and some appointments to see apartments.
We're scheduled to be on the ground in Paris on 2 January, and I'll update this ASAP with some photos and more drivel. Who knows, I may even get jiggy and un-lame-ify this site. Off we go!
26 December 2005