Function Two: Goldfrapp live in Cologne

I spent three days in Cologne last week. This is why.

A few months ago, when being able to swan around Europe  seemed very distant, I got an update on my Facebook feed telling me that Goldfrapp were going to be headlining the Electronic Beats Festival Cologne. I love Goldfrapp – if you watch the video above, you may get some idea of why – and basically on a whim, I bought a ticket.

This was a good whimsical decision.

Other things done in Cologne: visited the Schokoladenmuseum on the banks of the Rhine (they had a chocolate fountain and gave out free samples), took a boat tour on that same river, climbed one of the towers of the Kölner Dom (over 500 steps!) and descended deep into its treasury to see Frankish burials goods and relics of the Magi. Time well spent.

Function Two: Petites pratiques germanopratines

A few days ago I went on a ramble on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. It seemed like the right decision, what with being in Paris on a warm and sunny afternoon and all.

Some pretty cool street art

Sculpture and architecture in the Jardin du musée de Cluny

The Café de Flore

The Église de Saint-Germain-des-Prés

These trees in the Jardin du musée de Cluny shed petals like rain when the wind blows

Jardin du musée de Cluny

This is the square outside Les Deux Magots

Things to see in every direction! A whole bunch of very pricey shops, beautiful buildings, interesting sculptures (the one in the Place du Québec was really cool – the pavement blocks slope upwards like they’ve been cracked open from below, and there are fountains underneath). Plus, of course, the solidly elegant Église de Saint-Germain-des-Prés and three of Paris’s most famous cafés just nearby (Les Deux Magots, Café de Flore, Brasserie Lipp).

Topping the list of things I was not expecting to find: a mediaeval garden, planted only with things actually found in France during the Middle Ages, on the Rue de Cluny. A very pleasant place to spend some time.

Function Two: Nearer to Narnia

It’s days like today where I regret that I don’t have a decent camera with me in Paris. This afternoon, I went out for a walk around the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, which is only fifteen minutes away from me in the 19ème. It’s hilly and lush and beautiful; and with its lampposts and European greenery, I felt like I’d stumbled upon a little Parisian patch of Narnia.

A very cute caterpillar

This was just too cute.

My immediate thought: ‘It’s Cair Paravel!’

It’s Narnia on the other side, right?

Un cheval à œillères

I almost walked straight past this waterfall.

View from the Temple de la Sibylle (see Sacré-Cœur in the background?)

Some things I saw of which I couldn’t get decent photos:

• A very elegant older woman up at the Temple de la Sibylle, extremely stylish in her green coat and heron brooch;
• Lots of children playing a sideshow game involving fishing plastic ducks out of a pool;
• Real ducks, of various sizes and colorations, swimming in the lake;
• An overpriced little café with some rather nicely-done street art painted on the side;
• Bumblebees! I don’t think I’ve actually ever seen them before.

Function Two: A cemetery

Père Lachaise is my favourite place in Paris.

I liked the flashes of colour on these panels.

A tiny plant grows from the gap between two marble slabs in a monument to the Dubois-Monvoisin family

Monument to Honoré de Balzac

I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen daffodil plants in bloom before

Light through a stained-glass window

The Proust family grave

I like the solitude. It doesn’t expect anything from you.

Function Two: Tous les enfants ont vu une sorcière

For me, studying linguistics in France is a marginally surreal experience.

This isn’t to say that I’m finding university in France to be a problem. All my teachers seem to be excellent, the course content is interesting without being unpleasantly difficult, and everyone’s happy to make things a little easier, when necessary, for the fish-out-of-water Australian kid. It’s just that, even though studying at Paris III is like studying at UWA most of the time, there are some small but consistent differences that get a little jarring.

Best example of this so far: a few days ago I had my usual Wednesday-morning formal semantics lecture. There have been a few drawn-out debates in this class over a number of topics, mostly because truth-conditional logic doesn’t seem quite so logical at 9 am on a winter morning, and these have slowed down the progression of teaching moments. So last Wednesday, with a week-long ‘semaine de lecture’ (read: ‘study break’) ahead, the teacher asked us to remind her how many teaching weeks were left before the scheduled date for the mid-semester exam; and upon finding out that there was only one, she said ‘Fine, we’ll push it back another week’.

This might not seem strange to you, but damn, did it seem strange to me. I mean, this mid-sem (the French term is partiel) is worth a third of the whole unit, and at UWA, its positioning wouldn’t really be that flexible; rooms have to be booked well in advance and test papers have to be submitted by certain deadlines. Here, apparently, teachers can move these things as they see fit. This isn’t a bad thing (another teacher asked us what date we’d prefer for his unit’s partiel); it just seemed odd because I wasn’t expecting it.

(The change of date doesn’t thrill me, but for a reason that has nothing to do with differing university practices; it’s now on the same date as another assessment for a different unit. Alas.)

Another view from the apartment, this one at sunset.

My French language competence varies dramatically from day to day, but I can at least follow all my classes without problems. (Outside the classroom… well, the less said the better.) Usually this comes down to the simple fact that linguistics terminology in English is pretty Latinate and therefore tends to have exact French equivalents (if I hear about systèmes phonologiques being partiellement compatibles, I don’t need a dictionary to figure it out), and once I have that, I can guess decent chunks of the rest of the discussion from context. The net effect of this is that I slip into a French-language mode in the classroom. I even stop thinking in English some of the time. This just makes it more amusing when my teachers inject English words into their classes; I’ve encountered an impressive diversity of Franglais accents so far.

Anyway, I’ve finally finalised my enrolment for my semester here, and I’ve ended up with a (largely) surprisingly fun-looking timetable: six units, 12.5 hours of classes a week, and Mondays off (and only one class on Thursdays and Fridays). Apart from one in French-language-methodology, all of my units have turned out to be in linguistics: formal and logical semantics, linguistic typology, language contact, comparative linguistics of the Romance languages, historical and comparative linguistics. The last one is particularly interesting – I took a historical linguistics unit at UWA and signed up for another here to get a different perspective on the topic. And damn, did I get a different perspective: we’ve spent the last five weeks analysing Nepali verbs.

The pay-off for this mostly pleasant timetable is my Tuesdays; somehow, I ended up taking half my weekly classes on a single day, which runs from 9 am to 6 pm. I expect this wouldn’t be fun at the best of times, but in winter, this is the entire daylight period, and by the end of my second typology lecture I’m definitely flagging. How do I survive, not being a coffee-drinker? I turn to another popular comfort consumable: chocolate.

I go through two of these 100g bars a week. Don’t judge me.

The big surprise is that I’m really enjoying my semantics classes. I was kind of worried about these ones before I arrived, given that formal semantics isn’t an area of linguistics I’ve read much about at all; but so far it doesn’t seem crushingly difficult. Something about its strict, logical rationality really appeals to me. And I’ve been having a great time in my tutorial classes, especially when I spot answers that the native Francophones can’t see. (For example, one of our first classes was on ambiguity – ‘Tous les enfants ont vu une sorcière’ [‘All the children have seen a witch’] was an ambiguous sentence we were given. I found the ambiguous interpretation fairly easily, a small discovery which brightened my morning; and given that my semantics tutorial starts at 8.30 am, things that brighten my morning are appreciated.)

Meanwhile, my language contact teacher is boundlessly enthusiastic, my typology lecturers are thorough and give great examples, and I love my class in comparative linguistics of the Romance languages; it’s pretty small, which gives it a nice feel, and it’s delightfully broad-ranging and fascinating. (Plus it starts at 2 pm and I have no classes before it, meaning I can get up at midday if I want to.)

All in all, shaping up to be a cool semester.

Oh yeah! In other news, I made an amazing French onion soup last night. It was my second attempt while I’ve been here, and undoubtedly the more successful one.

Why yes, it was even more delicious than it looks.

(And the ambiguity in ‘Tous les enfants ont vu une sorcière‘? You can interpret it either to mean that all the children have seen the same witch [i.e. ‘this is the set of children who saw the witch who was here last week’], or that all the children have, at some point, seen a witch [i.e. ‘this is the set of all students who have seen a witch in their lives’]. It’s a ‘distributive-collective’ ambiguity, centred on the determiner tous, ‘all’.)

Function Two: Journées d’accueil

In my home city there’s a suburb called Northbridge, very close to the CBD. It’s a cultural hub – it’s stuffed full of cinemas and bars and restaurants catering to an enormous variety of tastes, and the biggest library and art gallery in Western Australia are just nearby. So people tend to go there looking for a good time. And given how much alcohol is freely available (usually, a lot) it has a reputation for being a little bit seedy, a little bit dodgy, especially at night.

The other day I came to a realisation: Paris, or at least Paris inside the Périphérique, is like what you’d get if you took Northbridge and inflated it to an area of ninety square kilometres and a population of over two million.

I’ve been in the City of Lights for two weeks now, and the thing that has surprised me most is how normal it feels. Yes, everything happens in French, of course. But on weekdays I still wake up to my mobile’s alarm and take the train to university; on weekends I still sit and write or go out and listen to music as I walk through the city. Most of my food still comes from supermarkets (café and restaurant food hasn’t ceased to be overpriced). My studies are, as ever, fascinating and linguistic, and my teachers are still dedicated. The differences are mostly pluses: the Paris Métro is rather more efficient and reliable than Transperth, for example.

This isn’t to say that nothing has changed. Internet access and the presence of other exchange students has, in a way, inured me a little to the linguistic shock of moving out of the Anglosphere; but there are times when the transition from English to French feels especially abrupt. In conversation, especially casual conversation, my default expression is complete blankness. People have been largely very kind and accommodating, always willing to repeat themselves more slowly, but I kind of miss the spontaneity that comes with not having to work to talk to someone. For me it’s easier to speak in French than to listen – I have enough French vocabulary now that I can express myself with relative ease (and English is stuffed full enough of Latinate words that I can usually guess and be right in cases of uncertainty). But taking in the language is a different skill, one that comes to me in fits and starts, to the extent that I sometimes blank out even for very simple questions. (Ones like ‘Do you like France?’ I misunderstood that yesterday and scandalised the group of French students with whom I was talking. Awkward.)

A wall in the 7th arrondissement, on the banks of the Seine

Realistically, it’s not the fact that some of the changes are big that irks me, it’s that, all too often, they get in my way. I can understand most of my teachers fine while they’re speaking, but I’m constantly beset with worry that the one sentence I didn’t get was a crucial one (a key concept, assessment timing). Some banks refuse to open accounts for exchange students; others close at 1 pm on Saturdays and don’t open again until Tuesday morning. Offices have an irritating habit of taking long lunch breaks, usually just as I find out where they are. (Last week, while I was sorting out my enrolment, I arrived at a particular office at 12.10 pm, to find that they closed from 12 to 2.)

Student life has a different tenor, too. There’s no space in the Quartier Latin for the sprawling university campuses I’m used to; Paris III’s buildings are densely packed, and stretch up rather than out. This leaves less room for socialising and forces people into the limited space outside, where they tend to form small and tight-knit groups under clouds of cigarette smoke. (I’m getting good at holding my breath.) Registration for classes is a baroque process, and requires some effort. The staff have been welcoming (the journée d‘accueil for exchange students, held on Monday last week, was a real help), but it’s not always easy to find the people who have solutions, especially when there are no campus maps to be seen. (Well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve seen one useful map so far.)

On the other hand, all these obstacles pale in comparison to the greater reality: I’m living in Paris now. It’s only temporary. All too often, it feels precarious. But it’s real. I can walk twenty metres down the street and get a great view of Sacré Cœur, because I’m in Paris. When I wander off during my breaks I stumble across buildings that aren’t just beautiful, but world-famous. On the best days I can turn in any direction and see something new or thought-provoking or stylish (or sometimes all three). And although the city has a tendency towards grubbiness (another thing it shares with Northbridge), its streets are still inviting, because it’s nigh-impossible to go far without encountering the comforting light of a bakery. And (in case you didn’t know, or had forgotten) the bakers here are renowned, and deservedly so.

For now, I’ll leave you with a photo of the view from my window. It might not strike you as particularly impressive; no landmarks. But from my perspective (both literally and figuratively) it’s ever-changing, pseudoiterative – alternately bright or cloudy by day, lit from lamps and windows at night. It’s a view of a place that needs to be breathed in.

Function Two: Time to start doing Parisian things

While I like that I have a blog so I can rant on the Internet, I did also have a second function in mind when I set it up: I’m studying in Paris for the next six months, and it occurred to me that people might like to hear about what I’m doing and see photos and things.

Hence: Function Two.

So the self-centred posts about me being in Paris and doing Parisian things start here. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

In the last 36 hours I’ve travelled about 17 000 kilometres, flying from Perth to Paris (via Dubai) with Emirates. It’s a pretty classy airline. (No, I’m not getting paid to say that.) The food was good, the in-flight entertainment was very comprehensive and – joy of joys, wonder of wonders! – there was even ample leg room. On the other hand, some of the films were ‘edited for content’, apparently quite selectively: Love Actually was heavily censored, Machete Kills wasn’t.

(How much did they edit Love Actually? Put it this way: the word ‘codswallop’ was uttered much more than I remembered, Martin Freeman’s character doesn’t appear and at one point Chiwetel Ejiofor utters the phrase ‘bug off’. And no, I wasn’t watching Machete Kills, at least not deliberately: someone in front of me was, and that much splattering blood is hard to miss. The most interesting thing about that film was Charlie Sheen being credited as Carlos Estévez – his real name.)

One of the photos below is of a video screen showing a real-time view, from the front of the plane, of our arrival in Dubai. I don’t have any photos of the airport itself; apparently it’s illegal to take those. Dubai International is a strange place. It’s not overtly hostile or anything, but it’s clearly built for functionality rather than comfort (or fun, like Changi), and if you’ve read the travel warnings for the UAE, you may (like I did) spend your stopover there feeling vaguely uneasy. Which is to say: Dubai International is pretty close to purgatory.

The other three photos are all from Paris: one was taken on an RER train going from Charles de Gaulle Airport to the Gare du Nord, and the other two are from the hostel where I’ll be staying until Tuesday, St Christopher’s Canal Paris. (You may not be able to see, but on the television screen is a recap of the Women’s Ashes series, of which there’s a match on in Perth at the moment. A surprise, to be sure – some part of me is screaming that I left Australia to get away from that kind of thing.)

Oh yeah, and the sun’s out, hooray!