Research politics

The "omnipresident", as Sarko is affectionately known to readers of Le Canard Enchaîné, recently gave a speech about reforming French research culture - more fixed term contracts, more involvement of the Ministry in assessment and setting programmes, more patents and engagement with the private sector, and as a carrot, higher wages for researchers. Several leading lights of French research have put together an open letter of reply which has been published in Le Monde, and made available on the web. It would be a lot more creditable if they hadn't put it in comic sans font - idiots.

Nancy

Thanks to the new TGV line, you can now get to Nancy from Paris in 1.5 hours - not bad for 350km. Compare this to the 4.5 hours it takes to get from London to Edinburgh (650km).. so I arrived at the Gare de l'Est at 7am in time for a coffee and croissant - the coffee stand actually has its own ovens for baking fresh croissants - and then did a full day of work in Nancy before arriving home at 7pm. It used to take just under 3 hours to get to Nancy and the train was a lousy one with no bar or anything, all the researchers at nancy are very happy about it.

We ate the pigs cheeks in the evening - they were very nice, tender and tasty after 3 hourse of slow simmering in wine. I now plan to return to the Triperie and work my way down from the head..

Dimanche

A successful morning's work at the market: some moules, mackerel and joue de porc. That's pigs cheeks. We cooked them very slowly in wine this afternoon, but we're not going to eat them until tomorrow evening when I get back from Nancy, where I'm heading slightly before the crack of dawn tomorrow. The mackerel were great again, and were 65 cents each.. the fish stall I go to keeps all the cheap fish round the side. they don't offer to clean them for you like they do with the expensive fish on the front of the stall, but we often fillet them anyway so it's maybe even better to have them whole. The moules were quite tasty but not spectacular. And we had some oysters as well which were great, form another different stall at the market (we're in the process of trying all of the oyster sellers). These were perhaps the best so far, large oysters inside relatively deep shells, and very tasty.

One of the stalls is a 'Triperie', which sells all the pieces of animals the British people are too ignorant to know how to cook properly - or are banned in the UK under BSE legislation (like beef cheeks for example). They had hearts of cows, which are huge, some really impressive looking liver, kidneys, white kidneys (which I think we call sweetbreads), brains, trotters.. I intend to try cooking at least some of these, if I can work out how you do it.

O Christmas Tree

The big Christmas tree outside notre dame is still there. Are they going to leave it up until easter?

Social life in a French lab

My lab doesn't have pub nights. However, you do regularly get emails like this one which I just received:

> Bonjour,
> A la demande d'irreductibles bretons, un goûter "Crêpes" est organisé
> Jeudi 7 février à 17h00 à la mezzanine.
> A vos fourneaux !


This follows on from a recent gallette-baking competition. One of the researchers is the daughter of a retired boulangere - all her entries are officially "hors concours"

Actualités

1. Velib station at the end of my road is almost complete - more than twenty bike points!
   
2. The French rogue Trader Jérôme Kerviel is now a national superstar - graffiti is appearing all over Paris and he's officially the nouvelle star du web
   
3. German beer sales are at a 15 year low - is there nothing we can rely on in this world any more?
   
4. We've discovered a good pizzeria close to the mairie - bon rapport qualité-prix
   

Bar de ligne

I went pretty early to the marché Richard Lenoir this morning and bought a line-caught sea bass: they're more than twice the price of the farmed or trawl-caught stuff unfortunately, but they look incredibly fresh and of course you have the pleasure of knowing that they're cuaght sustainably, without by-catch. In France they have a scheme where genuine line-caught fish are tagged around the mouth with a unique number which you can look up online and find out who it was who caught your fish and where. Mine was caught by a M. Rauol fishing from his 8m fishing boat around the islands off the pointe de Bretagne.. this has already added to my enjoyment of the fish without even tasting it.

Rogue Trader

Société Générale, the bank where I have my current account, have just revealed that a rogue trader has been discovered who has cost them 7 billion dollars! The fact that they will still announce a profit for 2007 just illustrates how uncompetetive banking is in France - it makes banking in the UK seem like great value. I have to pay a fee every month just to operate a debit card, and an annual fee to have an overdraft facility whether I use it or not.. then they take all this money from the customers and allow their incompetent and out of control trading staff to blow it on junk shares. Apparently it wasn't because of some complex misvalueing of derivatives backed by US sub-prime loans, just "plain vanilla futures hedging on European equity market indices" by one of its Paris traders. Brilliant.

Steak

Had our best steak-frites so far last night, in Café Charlot, at the corner of rue Bretagne and rue Charlot. It's a mixture between an old French cafe and a trendy Marais nightspot, with a 280gm entrecote at 19 Euros - not cheap, but the quality of the meat was excellent, it was correctly cooked and supplied with a generous helping of beurre du maitre d'hotel. Add a large pile of frites and a demi of the house Bordeaux and suddenly all is well.

Politique

According to the latest sondages, the prime minister, Francois Fillon, is now slightly more popular (50% approval rating) than Sarkozy (47%). According to the satire column in today's Le Monde, aware of the consequences of being rated above Sarko in the polls, the prime minster has called a crisis meeting. Unable to improve the president's poll rating in the near future, he has decided instead to reduce his own. Unusually, the Elysee palace civil servants have shown enthusiasm in assisting this minsiterial initiative. Plans include taking free holidays on rich friends' yachts and bringing his private life into the public eye. But as Le Monde notes, sometimes there is a lag of time before these measures start to take effect..

Soldes

Sales are a big deal in France, since they're regulated by law to only take place twice a year, between certain dates. On Sunday, I went into Loft, a very 'marais mec' type clothes shop that sells a lot of stuff I like, to find they're reduced their shirts from 80EUR to 20EUR and trousers from 180EUR to 40EUR. So I bought one of each and left feeling very pleased with myself. Then we saw BHV were selling big oval Le Creuset casseroles for half price - bigger than the one we have, only in lime green but still.. so Sam just went to get one and they're sold out. Win some lose some.

Important Velib news




They're building a new Velib station at the end of our street! It's just opposite the end of Rue des Ecouffes on the other side of the Rue St. Antoine. Looks like a decent sized station as well - maybe 20 terminals. This will shave another few seconds off my journey to work.. I've recently decided the fastest way to get to st michel RER is not to cycle over to the rue st jacques and then leave the bike at the back entrance, as I was dong before, but instead to cycle to the station at the marche aux fleurs and then walk to the little hidden entrance next to the hotel Dieu. This also avoids having to cycle the wrong way down the rue de la Huchette, which is usually deserted when I'm cycling to work anyway, but sometimes has a dustcart or a large delivery lorry in it. If you've ever been to Paris as a tourist you'll probably remember the rue de la Huchette - it's the narrow street parallel to the river packed with cheap restaurants of variable quality.

Squid

We're currently waiting for our dinner to cook. It smells excellent, as well it should since it contains so many delicious things. Unfortunately we won't be able to taste the squid for another hour (we went to a bar for a drink instead of coming home to prepare it) but I am anticipating great things. We took the recipe from H. F-W's Fish book and he hasn't let us down yet.

Rendre visite à quelqu'un

Jenny and Sidsel came for the weekend. We met them for Sushi on Rue st Paul after they had visited the Arcimboldo fruit faces exhibition in the Musee du Luxembourg. On Saturday we went sale shopping, and ate oysters and mackerel from the place Baudoyer market. The oysters were particularly good ones in fact - and a decent price (8.80 for 13 Normandie no.2s). The fish stall at place baudoyer is pretty good - they give you free lemons and parsley for your fish which is a nice touch.

On Sunday morning we subverted the lucrative Parisian cafe brunch scene by buying our own champagne from Nicolas along with a pile of viennoiserie and eating them chez nous before Jenny got the eurostar home.

Sam and I then cycled over to the 16th to the Musée Galliera which was showing 1920s dresses. The pieces were interesting but the exhibition was very poor, badly laid out and lacking any kind of stuff to put the things in context. There were no men's clothes, nothing about contemporary achitecture or art or other design, no dresses from just before or after the period, and only a very trivial analysis of the Zeitgeist of the time. A bit disappointing, but the Velib ride over there was great.

Velib update

Just before Christmas I registered for an annual Velib subscription, and I received the confirmation letter when I got back here after new year. It was supposed to have been registered to my Pass Navigo that I use for the metro, but it didn't work when I tried it - the Velib station computers reported that no abonnement was associated with my pass. This evening I finally got around to calling their call centre. The guy asked me to read the second number on the back of the pass, and then said 'Maintenant il marche'. I was highly suspicious so I nipped out to try it and it does indeed work. I'm not sure what the problem was but it might have been something to do with having a new annual Navigo pass issued at the end of December (you can't put an annual subscription onto a regular pass Navigo - one of the shortcomings of the Paris system). Anyway, the upshot is 1) I am Veliberated and can use my metro pass to take out bikes for the whole year and 2) I feel pleased with myself for handling a French call centre after being here only 2 months. As I recall, after I had been in Germany for two months I was still having a lot of trouble..

Some New year party photos thanks to Johanna.

Edited to add: and some more and a few more - thanks to Chris and Rosie

Free musée day

The first Sunday of the month is free museum day in Paris. We decided to give it a go today, and started with the Museum of the Middle Ages, which is just over the river in the Hotel Cluny. It turns out that it's free every day from Jan-July 2008, perhaps because of the restoration work that's going on inside. Either way, it was pretty crowded, and you can still see the 'lady and the unicorn' series of tapestries, the most famous exhibit. They're pretty good, very vivid colours considering they're over 500 years old, and kind of mysterious since nobody really understands the iconography. My other favourite exhibit was a pre-reformation wooden jesus on a donkey on wheels, used in palm sunday processions.

After a lunch break in a nice bistro at the top of the rue mouffetard (I had bavette, sam had boeuf bourguignon) we tackled the Pantheon - also free today, though you can't go up to the top of the dome until April. Apart from the reconstructed demonstration of the earth's rotation (Foucalt's pendulum) hanging from the central dome, which is enough to justify a visit in itself (the original is in the Arts et Metiers musuem apparently), there are the graves of lots of famous frenchmen - Zola, Hugo, Moulin, Dumas, and at least one woman, Marie Curie, though the flags left on her grave suggest that many visitors are aware of her Polish ancestry.

We just had time to get in to the Musee d'Orsay before closing - the impressionist collection was mobbed with irritating tourists videoing or photographing the works from point-blank range, but there was nobody looking at the wonderful collection of art nouveau furniture. I've decided I want to live in an art nouveau house - you can still occasionally buy one in Nancy apparently, provided you have good connections and rob a bank first.

Bonne année!

Apparently you have to say this to everyone for the first few days of the year and then on some particular day, it stops. I suspect epiphany might be that day - we'll see what happens when I go back to work on Monday.

We saw in the new year with a dinner party on our flat: 10 guests, 5 cheeses, 2 terrines, 1 risotto, several tarts, desserts and petits fours, 3 bottles of champagne, 6 bottles of table wine, one bottle of dessert wine, one bottle of port. At midnight we went running down the street to the pont neuf to catch what we expected to be a spectacular firework display. Turns out there isn't one in Paris: the large crowd on the pont neuf was in fact there to watch the eiffel tower start to flicker to mark midnight. We popped the champagne cork into the river and celebrated anyway. Hopefully some of the guests will post some photos to flickr..

Since then we've spent an excellent few days with jenny, julia, chris and mark, eating well (bistrot l'oulette was still the best), velib'ing to the Eiffel tower, and doing other tourist stuff like visiting the Rodin museum, which was great. There are definite advantages to a musuem dedicated to a single artist: you can see his style develop, see his study pieces, his antique collection (Rodin had lots of little Egyptian sculptures) and see which pieces of other artists work he bought (the only artist he had two paintings from was van Gogh).
The best thing there though was the Burghers of Calais - as well as being visually very powerful, it has a nice story behind it, both in terms of the original story and the story of the Calais council initially rejecting Rodin's proposal for the monument - which seemed to be a recurring theme of all of Rodin's state commissions. The original stands in Calais, but at the Rodin musuem there's a whole room full of studies, casts and trial versions.

Back

I still feel like I'm on a pitching boat after a jersey-st.malo crossing on seas described by the captain as 'très agité'. The TGV ride was much smoother though and we've just had dinner in La Tartine. I tried parmentier for the first time - essentially cottage pie with high qualty lean meat and lots of thyme.

Le Grand Départ

Sam has wrapped the Jersey presents, the Croydon presents have arrived safely, and we're about to start packing. If all goes well with trains and boats we'll be in Jersey early Saturday morning - blogging will recommence in a week or so. Today on the way home from work the RER broke down at Port Royal and I had to walk the rest of the way home - I'm hoping this isn't a bad omen for tomorrow's voyage to St Malo...

Bonnes Fêtes à tous!

Brunch

On Sundays thousands of Parisians queue up outside the best places to spend the afternoon eating brunch. So, in order to avoid our cold flat and spend the afternoon in a warm café, we went into a nearby place "Le Bucheron" to see what all the fuss was about. We had a 3 course set brunch of fried eggs with pancetta and salad, and lasagne with charcuterie followed by crêpes with tiramisù and fruit. It was very good and we had a glass of champagne which certainly helped us get into the Sunday mood.

Keys, cards,...

I finally got an RFID badge for the doors to our lab today: I applied on the day I arrived but it seems to take them a while. This is good: in order to feel at home in a foreign country, you need to get all of the keys and cards you can get hold of. I now have a Carte Bleu for paying for things, a pass Navigo for Velibs and for the transport system, and I will soon have my annual pass. This is another slightly irritating aspect of the Paris transport system: for an annual pass they have to issue you another card, you can't just have it added to your pass Navigo like the London Oyster card system. Add to that the fact that you can't put credit for ordinary tickets on a Navigo, and you have to start monthly passes on the first day of the month, and you can see that the Navigo pass is a distinctly second-rate version of the Oyster card. I don't know why they didn't just buy the Oystercard system. It irritates me when things (particularly things involving IT systems) are crap when they could so easily have been so much better.

Shopping

This weekend we are going to go shopping for goodies to take to Jersey for Christmas. They have a Christmas market in the nearby municipal hall which should be worth checking out. I also need to buy some more conventional presents. I expect BHV will be as Rammed as the end of Ramadan in Ramallah, so we might have to stick to the local boutiques.

Le Ciel de Paris

On Tuesday we went to Le Ciel de Paris for cocktails - that's the bar on the 56th floor of the tour montparnasse. Ignacio took a beautiful picture of us watching the Eiffel tower flickering.

Cadeaux

I posted my Christmas presents to England today in a carefully wrapped box. Wrapping presents is a good way to get into the Christmas mood. Unfortunately, I have another whole week of work left..

Tube Strike Off?

The militant CGT union has downgraded its call for a strike tomorrow night to a call for 1 or 2 hour stoppages. As a result, the RATP reckons 60% of RER B services will be running, so I should still be able to get to work on Thursday.

Ignacio is in town for work - we met up with him last night for dinner at Café Med, the best of the nearby €12-menu restaurants, and then took a little walk along the river so Ignacio could take some photos. Expect to see the result on his flickr page soon..

Fish

Managed to get up at a record early time for a Sunday (9:45) and get to the marché Richard Lenoir a bit earlier than we'd managed before. I was rewarded by the presence of a new fish stall, which previously I'd only seen being hosed down and packed away. The stall owner's business plan is very simple: buy a large pile of only 3 or 4 kinds of fish. Price them about half the price of the other fish stalls (who offer 30 or 40 different kinds). Offer no cleaning, no gutting and no scaling: the customer can do that himself. Sell the lot. Go home in time for lunch. I bought two dourade royale - the French equivalent of sea bream - for €3.16. I reckon they would have cost at least £15 in Edinburgh (that's pretty much what I paid last time). Sam and I just ate them, baked with white wine, fennel, onions and garlic, and they were fantastic. We finished the meal with a couple of little cakes from the excellent Yiddish deli on our street. Happy hanukkah!

Haircut

Got my first French haircut yesterday from Sing, the nearest coiffeur to our flat. It looks pretty good I reckon. I feel quite French suddenly when I look in the mirror.

Steak

I came home from work exhausted, Sam's away for the weekend, it's pouring with rain, so what to do? Cross the road to the very nearest cafe of course, and order steak. Typically, this being Paris, the very nearest cafe, La Tartine, turns out to have been the major hangout for Guy Debord and the situationists (that's a 60s political/philosophical movement, not a 60s garage band). The interior looks unchanged from the 50s, like a cafe from a Truffaut film. It has a narrow front onto rue de rivoli, and runs all the way through to a convenient (for me) back door onto rue du roi de sicile. There are about 20 wines available by the glass, along with a vast assortment of cheeses, and a selection of savoury tarts which looked good value. However, having just regained my appetite having had a cold earlier in the week, I was in no mood for savoury tarts, and went straight for the entrecôte au sauce poivre. As usual I ordered it medium and as usual it came medium-rare, exactly as I wanted, only instead of coming with frites it arrived with a mound of beautiful mashed potato and a small portion of vegetables. Outstanding. Together with a glass of bordeaux it cost €20. Funds allowing, I can see myself becoming a new-wave situationist..

Shalom

The Marais is full of festive cheer this evening because Hanukkah began at sunset. We sampled some delicious pastries from a Jewish bakery on rue des Rosiers in order to get into the spirit of things!

Back to School

Today was my first day of French classes. I had to do a test so that they could assess my level and it brought back unpleasant memories of school. Needless to say I haven't done a French test for about 10 years, and my written French was certainly a bit rusty. I'll find out tomorrow how I did, but I couldn't remember any subjunctives... il faut que j'apprenne.

French radio

I've been trying to improve my French listening skills by tuning in to France Culture. However, it doesn't have many talk-only programs - there are some news and current affairs shows, but often there are programs that feature mostly music. The worse thing though are these sort of live poetry features, where the presenter gets his guests to read out poems they've written. That's not a bad idea per se, but there seems to be this convention that while the poems are being read, other guests are allowed to gasp and go 'mmm.. oui' every time they like a word - and you tend to get about three or four of these interjections every line of poetry. Eventually I decided I had had enough and switched back to podcastfrancaisfacile..

Food Update

Last week I had three great meals: first in Le Train Bleu on Monday night, where I ate cheek of beef for the first time (delicious), then in L'Oulette, a little bistro near our flat (snails followed by mackerel fillets), and the yesterday lunchtime in La Truffière, an old-school gourmet restaurant in the 5th arrondissement (main course was skate wing on a celeriac puree). Fortunately, due to the propensity of French academics to secure project funds for nice dinners, I only had to pay for the second one, which was very good value - in particular, the wine we had (a Marange) chosen by the waiter to go with our meal (quite tricky as Sam was having cassoulet) was excellent..