24 December 2010

Maggie where are you?

Today I left home for my winter vacation. The flight was supposed to connect in Paris because Marseille, even though it's France's second-largest city, has very few useful connections anywhere. It's a provincial airport, like all airports in France except Paris CDG, but unfortunately it has managed to attract very few budget airlines.

Early in the morning Air France sent mail, announcing that the flight is cancelled, thank you for your understanding, pleasy do not reply. What makes them think that I would understand anything? I went to the airport, and KLM got me routed through Amsterdam. KLM, even though it's owned by Air France now, knows how to deal with an emergency.

The emergency being, of course, the usual French blight hurting everyone who wants to get something done. Three days before Christmas the Marseille airport security was on strike, so noone could fly. Riot police got called in. That strike has ended but now workers at the factory that supplies the Paris airport with glycol were on strike, on December 24. Glycol is needed to de-ice airplanes; it's still very cold in Paris. So they cancelled half of all flights from France's central air hub.

Amsterdam is also in the grip of the harsh winter this year, and the airport is seriously busy and affected by the strain the winter is putting on all of northern Europe. But my connection in Schiphol was perfectly punctual. The Dutch know how to run a business.

I like France but I am beginning to lose patience with this dysfunctional country. Mrs Thatcher, where are you when we need you?

19 December 2010

Silent zoo

Marseille has a zoo, the Jardin Zoologique. It's not huge, but it's a beautiful park in a city that doesn't have a lot of green spaces. You enter through the Palais Longchamp. Zoo entrances don't come much more grandiose than this:



Inside is a well-manicured park with numerous little asphalt trails looping through the grounds. There are many old trees, and lawns that are actually legal to sit on. That's very rare in French cities, normally a uniform will rush at you whenever you look like you'd defile their sacred lawns by setting foot on it. There is a playground, families with children, joggers, and a generally tranquil setting very far away from Marseille's bustle.


The one thing that Marseille's zoo doesn't have is animals. None. At all.

Even dogs aren't welcome. There is a small space set aside for dogs, like smokers at airports, with a sign on the gate that carefully categorizes dogs as legal, illegal, and very illegal. All those looping paths are completely pointless, they go nowhere and loop back on themselves as if to say, oh well, never mind, what was I thinking.

And that's a good thing. Because before the zoo closed in 1987, they did have animals, and there are still a number of rusting hulks of cages. Very small cages, and very depressing. When they built them in 1854 they were probably state of the art, and old pictures show ladies in big floor-length dresses with hats and parasols enjoying themselves, but no animal larger than a cockroach could lead a decent life in one of these cages. Some of the walls have paintings of what the artist might have considered a natural environment, but only animals with extremely poor eyesight could have been fooled by them. Somehow they make the whole thing even more depressing.



The old reports don't say what happened to the animals when the zoo's money ran out. Probably went into a bouillabaisse.

The Palais Longchamp today houses the Natural History Museum. It's the old kind of museum, with many rows of antique display cases filled with insects and bats, carefully pinned to hand-written cards with latin names in beautiful century-old handwriting; tons of fossils and stuffed birds and fish, and a room with giraffes and other exotica. (Hm, maybe those are the zoo guests that escaped the bouillabaisse.) The museum's presentation is more interesting than its contents, but they are certainly trying.



14 December 2010

Really English.

A couple of weeks ago I was talking about the difficulties the French are having with the English language, which is really an unnecessary luxury best left to foreigners. But every marketeer and creative ad agency "artist" firmly believes that their message is cool and compelling only if it has some English words in it. Nobody told them that normal people see this as pathetic and pretentious.

So, suppose you are selling something profane like sweaters. If you are one of the aforementioned advertising droids, you'll come up with something like this, which I saw at a bus stop today (cropped from the full poster):


A cashmere is a goat that is really successful, I see. Boring. Let's put an English word in it to spice up the message. "Really" is the best victim because the sentence doesn't need it, better play it safe. And let's put it in quotes too, those French ones that look like double angle brackets, to make it absolutely clear that this is not a typo but intentional and a quote and you aren't supposed to understand it, keep going, there is nothing to see here.

Noticed the little asterisk after "really"? Asterisks are normally used in French cell phone contracts and mean "just kidding, this is all a beautiful lie, read the twenty pages of extremely fine all-caps print in light gray on white taped to the underside of the carpet in our Kuala Lumpur branch office". So let's go looking for the legal footnote. Yes, there it is, sideways in small print at the bottom left edge of the poster:


I can't tell you what the number means, probably printer's code for "if you are reading this you are a nerd". But vraiment is indeed the French word for really. You have to admire the earnest desire of the designer to be properly understood. I need a shower.

11 December 2010

Paradise freezes over

The summer is clearly over, but that doesn't mean the same there here at the Mediterranean Sea as it does further north. I still ride 21km to work, by bicycle, in shorts. But not every day anymore, sometimes it's a little cool in Marseille and when it's cool in Marseille it can be positively cold out in the hills, where frigid winds blow down from the Alps. Meanwhile, Paris has come to a standstill because the weather has turned it into a full-blown disaster zone, two days ago they had 11 cm of snow!

Wait, 11 cm, four inches, a hand's width? Throws one of the largest European cities into chaos? I polled some Canadian friends and they found this very funny. Two meters of snow won't stop a Canadian. I have seen people in Montréal, Quebec, walk around in shorts while it was snowing in May. These people pay no attention whatever to 11 cm of snow. But Paris wasn't prepared. Two years ago it was snowing very lightly in Marseille, an unheard-of phenomenon, and Marseille is even less prepared for such a natural disaster. This city of one million does not own a snowplow or any other kind of suitable equipment. So they closed all the schools and stayed at home, waiting for armageddon to end, while parked cars gently drifted to the bottoms of the hills.

The city of Dresden in the east of Germany not far from the Polish border, had temperatures of -24 degrees centigrade a couple of weeks ago. Now that might get a passing notice from Canadians, in early December at least. It's not supposed to do that in early December, if at all. I have walked to work in Montréal in -25 degrees in January and it's hard to breathe in these temperatures. Marseille dropped to 5 degrees that week and I saw ice on the puddles out in the countryside. No bicycle that day.

Today we had 6 degrees at night and 14 during the day. That sounds warm for December in Europe but consider that these people are not good at installing proper heating. They don't have to be, normally. My three-room apartment has exactly one gas-fired radiator in the hallway. My hallway, and only my hallway, is very warm. I use a large fan to blow the warm air into the living room and close all other doors, and I have stuffed styrofoam into the fireplace because cold air (even hail, once) enters through the chimney. I can't actually use the fireplace because they run antenna cables through the chimneys. The French would rather be cold than give up TV.

I was hoping to show some pretty Christmas decorations in Marseille, but there isn't much to see. They decorated rue Saint-Ferréol, the main shopping street, put three or four rides on La Canebière, and hung a few lights in the trees. I have seen more than that in Bangkok last year and Christmas has exactly zero tradition there. Some pictures, taken on Ferréol, rue de la République, and Canebière:




That's pretty much it, Marseille before Christmas, now you've seen it. Nothing at all like the Champs-Elysées in Paris, now that is a sight in December.

The one thing that seems curiously out of proportion here is the Christmas market on Place du Général de Gaulle. There are maybe 30 large booths, all selling the same thing: little painted clay figurines for nativity scenes. Armies of little Josephs, Marys, Jesuses, and wise men, plus auxiliary personnel and some donkeys. Who buys all this stuff? There must be a huge market for it. You can buy them unpainted as well. They don't do it for the tourists because there aren't a lot of tourists here at this time of the year. (Which is surprising, considering the ongoing end of the world in Paris.)

02 December 2010

World Heritage Burger

So UNESCO gave us a new world heritage: the French Cuisine. A good choice. The French take eating seriously, but only at the correct time of the day. Lunch is served from 12:00 to 14:00, and dinner starts at 20:00 but you'll have no problems getting a table at 20:00 because most people won't show up before 22:00. Law requires that working hours are posted at companies, and the lunch hour is a generous 90 minutes. We need the time.

Lunch begins with an apéritif, a drink. Usually that's a table wine. Then follows the entrée, an appetizer. The plat, the main dish, follows. Finally, there is a dessert, and coffee. If you are in a hurry, you may drop either the appetizer or the dessert, or combine dessert and coffee into a café gourmand, a coffee with several miniature desserts on a plate. Dinner is the same procedure, except more elaborate. I have eaten at many wonderful places - see my September Bouillabaisse article for an example, and I have eaten at various famous Parisian restaurants, and my newest discovery here in Marseille is a great French place called les pieds dans le plat, the feet in the plate. And the French love to have lunch outdoors, like in this picture from Aix-en-Provence:


When you order meat, you'll be asked about the cuisson: how would you like your meat? You'd be tempted to say "medium", but in France the categories are shifted. They like their meat (red meat at least) nearly raw. Saignant, bloody, is just that: lightly singed from both sides but basically raw in the middle. And there is another category below that, bleu, which means blue and describes the color on your face if you take a bite. So, ask for bien cuit, well cooked, or at most à point, if you don't want your food to crawl off your plate.

You are not supposed to just "grab a sandwich". Sandwich places exist but I haven't found a good one; besides, everything from gyros and kebap to ham and cheese sandwiches look alike - a baguette filled with stuff and French fries. Ice cream parlors are so-so despite the proximity of Italy, and the fact that they invariably proclaim themselves to sell glaces artisanales, maybe best translated as homemade ice cream. All Asian restaurants are, at best, rather mediocre because there are so few Asians around here in Marseille. Another place near work, called Buffalo Grill, is a charming burger emporium where everything is decorated Texan style but it's a hilariously obvious veneer on a French restaurant. At least I have never been offered French vin de pays to drink and crème brûlée for dessert in a Texan burger joint.

What the UNESCO maybe doesn't realize that underneath all this attention to excellent food, France has a big underground of junk food. Pizza is everywhere, and it's usually some sad mushrooms and olives frozen in a sea of gelled yellowish cheese. They'll warm it up for you. Dino's pizza near work is known to make pizzas with a black charred outer rim ever since they opened their doors. Fast food flourishes most in the USA but only McDonalds has a significant presence here; the French have their very own fast food chain called Quick that looks like McDonalds, except that the food - if you can believe it - tastes worse.

In the name of science I went to a Quick today. With the world heritage award in my mind, I took them at their word and ordered their current flagship product, a Supreme Cheese Bacon everything burger and took it home for analysis. After careful dissection it turns out to be a bland pile of mushed stuff that looks almost totally unlike the pictures above the counter. I have been taught to not throw away food but since there is evidently nothing at a Quick restaurant that deserves this description, I binned it after a few disgusting bites.


The French are great bakers. From my living room window I can see four boulangeries, and their croissants, baguettes, and other pastries are just glorious. The French are masters at tartes and petits-fours as well; nobody in the world does it better. But all the bread is white, if you want dark or whole-grain bread you'll have to buy German bread.



There is much more to be said about French food, but I'll leave that for another post.

21 November 2010

Graffiti

Since the big garbage strike is over, tourists from Singapore no longer automatically get heart attacks when visiting Marseille. But Marseille, especially the Cours Julien area where I live, is covered with graffiti. In Singapore, they cane graffiti artists. Here they don't. Graffiti is on the walls, the street, road signs, sometimes across windows and doors. Nobody paints cars; cars are sacred even here. It's very rare to see graffiti being removed, it just covers entire street blocks from one end to the other. Some shops pay graffiti artists to paint their steel shutters, so at least they decide what people see.

A good deal is actual interesting, not the mindless tags thrown up in seconds by vandals elsewhere. People take pictures of the graffiti, like me:







Well done, but of course nothing can touch the master. Search Google for Banksy:

http://www.google.com/images?oe=UTF-8&gfns=1&q=banksy&hl=en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=uljpTLfwC4HGlQeUlLCpCw&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CDMQsAQwAA&biw=1280&bih=1284

15 November 2010

How to spot a Frenchman

The stereotype says that all the women here look like Brigitte Bardot (big sunglasses, big hair) and communicate by saying oh la la, while the men play Petanque, drink Pastis, and drive Citroen 2CV cars. None of this is true but you can tell by looking a little closer.

Nobody here in the south uses backpacks or waistpacks, except the tourists. Locals don't wish to get mugged. Instead, they carry everything in thin plastic bags. And because they have their hands full of plastic bags, they carry their baguettes under their arms. If you see someone with a kilt and bagpipe, that's a Scot. If you see someone with a baguette, or a whole bundle of baguettes, under their arms, that's a Frenchman. The previous sentence ran out of political correctness halfway through.

You'll find street musicians anywhere. But only in France will you see an old lady with a clipboard and a microphone, dressed in red velvet, belting out French chansons. She is aided by the fact that chansons are customarily sung with a throat cancer voice.


Contrary to common wisdom, the French don't refuse to speak English to foreigners out of arrogance. They aren't arrogant, they truly don't speak English. They have learned it at school, of course, but forgot it. They don't speak any language other than French because it's not necessary. The French like to spend their vacations in France, especially at the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, where only French is spoken. (They all have their vacations at almost the same time, which makes the holiday season the best time to visit Paris and hell everywhere else.) English-speaking businesspeople, and even English-speaking tourist information staff do exist though, the French economy does not consist of hermits.

The French are much more polite than Californians. This is not the synthetic politeness of a Californian waitress who waits until you have your mouth full to ask "is everything ok" with her widest grin, watching you sputter. The French, when boarding a bus, will always greet the driver with a friendly bonjour (unless it's after 18:00, in which case it's bonsoir), and the driver will return the greeting. Shopkeepers will go beyond that and say both bonne journée and au revoir when you leave. (Although here in the south it comes out as à revoir.) In California, excuse me often means get out of my way, while a pardon here means my sincerest apologies, I didn't see you, of course you can enter the line before me. These people even pay attention to zebra crossings!

However, the French language is also good at swearing. I have waited at the checkout of Marseille's posh Galeries Lafayette department store, listening to the loud conversation of the cashiers punctuated by putain and other potty language. The literal translation of putain is whore, but overuse has worn it down to a mild expression of disapproval. And to bust another stereotype, I haven't heard anyone say merde yet.

03 November 2010

Got into a fight today

I am writing this on a computer that is chained to my desk. You see, Marseille has a reputation for very high crime rates, but it's actually a very safe city. At least according to people I have asked. A friend who helped me choose my apartment, for example. While I was admiring the view, or (usually) the lack thereof, she would inspect the three-point locking system, the steel plating on the door, and opportunities to break through a window. But don't worry, she says, nothing can happen, Marseille is a very safe city. I half expected her to recommend a gun rack next to my door, so I could dissuade unwelcome visitors by spraying them with bullets.

Shopkeepers have a somewhat different perspective on the matter. While ground-floor apartments protect their windows with cast-iron bars, most shops have steel shutters that would stop a tank. I don't know the percentage of burglars who drive to work in a tank but it must be significant. A few months ago, some guys tried to stop a Brinks van by very literally spraying it with bullets from their very literal AK-47 Kalashnikov submachine guns, right down at the old fishing harbor, a ten-minute walk from here. There were bullet holes everywhere, it's a miracle that nobody was hurt. As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up. But Marseille is a very safe city, trust me.

Just now I got into a fight with a pickpocket. I was walking up rue d'Aubagne from the Marché des Capucins (a major tourist attraction in the Moroccan quarter close to my house) when a dark-skinned unshaven young guy started chatting to me under a pretext. I caught him when he pulled my wallet from my front pants pocket, attempting a distraction that alerted me. Rather than going for the wallet I attacked the guy to wrestle him down, and it quickly turned out that I was bigger and stronger. He dropped the wallet and I didn't lose anything and wasn't hurt.

When I told the story to my friend, she asked if I punched him and hurt him badly. She was disappointed that I didn't, because I am in Marseille now and that's what people here do to pickpockets. But Marseille is a very safe city. For Karate black belts carrying AK-47s and sufficient ammo, maybe.

30 October 2010

A breath of fresh air

They've done it. The law has passed, French workers have to work two more years in their life, most of the unions shrugged and Marseille is slowly getting back to normal. The start of the fall holiday season might also have something to do with it. They are actually cleaning away the garbage that was choking this city during the strike, and some places look like new, if you ignore the scorched walls where garbage has burned. The stink is also going away, but it will take a while to get back to normal garbage levels. Pictures like this one (if you'll excuse one last garbage picture) are a thing of the past - until the next strike, which might be months away.


And apparently gasoline is flowing freely again, and not just because of ruptured gas tanks. The streets are packed with cars, I ride past kilometers of stop-and-go traffic every day. The French endure it stoically, even though the buses and trains run again. The temperatures have started to fall, but while northern Europe is approaching freezing temperatures, here it's just below 20 degrees and usually sunny. The leaves start to fall, and expose the plastic bags that the wind has extracted from the garbage and blown high into the trees. Wind can be a problem - they enjoy the Mistral here around this time of the year, which can approach 100 km/h and make bicycle riding, or in fact any outdoor activity, a little touchy. But not yet.

It is windy enough to make French smokers, which huddle around restaurant doors because indoor smoking in public places in Europe isn't allowed, visibly uncomfortable. There seem to be a lot more smokers in the south of France than in northern regions.

23 October 2010

Ashes to ashes

I'd like to return to the regular scheduled programming, but Marseille is still in the grip of the strike and the uncollected garbage, and so is this blog. The strikes continues and they burn bigger barricades now. The one shown below generated so much smoke that a fire truck came; it took one look at the situation and drove off again.


Instead of just watching the garbage piles get higher and higher, people are now doing something about them: they set fire to them. This is not always a wise strategy. In addition to huge piles of garbage, we now have a foul smell and damaged trees, cars, walls, and entrances. The fire at the Marseille Rotary Club burned through a window, and the Virgin Megastore has hit on the strategy of covering up a huge pile of ashes with plastic tarps. Out of sight, out of mind.


This is on rue Saint-Ferréol, Marseille's largest shopping street, which connects the Préfecture with the bourse. Lots of fires here. Another street that got hit severely is little rue Curiol, perhaps better known for the numerous brothels and waiting ladies of negotiable affection in their loud high-heeled getups. The plastic garbage containers at the epicenter of each pile there have melted and dripped picturesque streams of plastic onto the street.


Overall I'd say that about half of all garbage piles were burned. Sometimes it's hard to see because the ashes get sedimented down by new garbage piled on top. It's going to be very difficult to clean up this mess of molten junk. The news say that they are now sending the gendarmes, who are exactly like the American National Guard except completely different.

I wonder if someone is going to decide at some point that the remaining value of Marseille is less than the cost of making it livable again, and starts working on nuke-from-orbit scenarios, just in case. There is something very wrong about the way the French go about solving their problems.

Here is what plastic name plates do when they feel too warm:


20 October 2010

Burning tires

They are still at it and neither side is going to compromise. Yesterday I saw some burning tires in front of the tram and bus depot in Marseille, spewing out big black clouds. This morning there were overturned garbage containers and burning barricades (small ones) at the main gate. Handmade signs said "contre les réformes", misspelled, referring to the increase of the retirement age from 60 to 62.


Traffic in Marseille was terrible this morning, even my little rue Saint-Pierre that I use to leave downtown was blocked, and it's too narrow to pass cars even with a bicycle. Drivers moved aside with their usual superhuman French courtesy to let me pass, but there is now so much garbage everywhere (the garbage men are still on strike) that it's overflowing onto the street, leaving even less room than usual. The city is starting to look positively filthy because strong winds are scattering the garbage.

I pass through the city of Aubagne on my way to work, and traffic was unusually quiet there - maybe because all gas stations in Aubagne and the surrounding villages are now closed because of the fuel shortage. One third of all gas stations in the country are closed. Riot police have reopened some storage facilities but the situation is very unstable.

18 October 2010

Percussive parking

Marseille was never a royal capital, so nobody went and razed half the place to make room for big wide streets where your cavalry can exercise and control the public, like Haussmann did in Paris. Most streets are narrow and crooked, and sometimes steep. Few streets are parallel, the sidewalks are narrow, and parking in scarce. To make it scarcer, and give pedestrians a chance, they scatter poles and other obstacles along the curbs, and make most streets one-ways.

But people still need to park, so they find ways. It just takes a little more enthusiasm to get your car into that impossibly small space. That's what bumpers are for, move until something rattles, then reverse. I haven't heard a car alarm since I moved here, nobody bothers, it would go off all the time. The sidewalks are so narrow that you'll impede traffic even if the car is only centimeters away from the wall, but that's ok. Pedestrianized streets see less traffic than normal streets. And I have seen fear in friends' eyes when they had to make a 180-degree turn up extremely steep and narrow hairpins between parked cars and 16th-century houses without sidewalks, using manual transmissions.

Consequently, there are very few new or fancy cars in Marseille. They all drive old compacts, and most have substantial body damage, like this guy:


I didn't go and choose a particularly old or damaged car, that sort of thing is normal. Marseille doesn't suffer from an SUV infestation like Los Angeles, anyone trying to drive such a thing around here would suffer a nervous breakdown after five minutes and collapse in tears. They do like Smarts, those Swiss/German two-seaters that are no longer than other cars are wide. Très pratique.

One consequence of Marseille's anthill approach to traffic is that rental cars are very expensive, like twice as much as elsewhere. I guess the rental agencies don't really expect to get their cars back after letting tourists hurl them through Marseille's daily demolition derby.

At the same time, French drivers are almost infinitely patient and polite. They'll wait if you need to crunch your car into a parking space, they'll let cars turn or cross, and they'll let cars turn in ahead of them from side streets even if they have spent the last half hour in stop-and-go traffic. Quite remarkable. Maybe a beaten-up subcompact doesn't make a good ego extension to be defended at all cost, but maybe the French are just nice people.

Except the scooters. Scooters are the plague of French cities. Scooters deserve their own posting.

16 October 2010

Vive la grève!

Marseille is not the cleanest city in the best of times. That habit of dropping garbage where you stand is hard to break for many Marseillaise. The city cleans up as fast as it can but it's heavily outgunned.

But these are not the best of times. I have to write another strike article because the French are still at it. For a week now, they are protesting president Sarkozy's new law that raises the retirement age from 60 to a shocking 62 years (still the lowest in Europe; 65 to 67 is typical). Well, in fact a big reason is Sarkozy's arrogance on the subject - it has to be done, l'état c'est moi, shut up.

So the trains don't go (the trains are always the first to stop), all twelve refineries in France are on strike so fuel is running out, and without fuel the planes don't go either. People have begun to hoard gasoline and food. As a nice extra touch, the garbage men are on strike too. Which brings us back to Marseille.

When I went on my garbage safari this morning, I got a lot of comments. Clearly I was a journalist, the world travels to Marseille to look at the garbage. C'est Marseille. Marseille, the cultural capital of the south. The Marseillaise take it with humor. And they try to be neat about it. Each trash container now sports a carefully balanced trash pyramid on top, palettes and cardboard boxes are used to build impromptu walls, and in a pinch a car makes a nice retaining wall for garbage. For a while, until the garbage overflows. I have seen a motorcycle about to be swallowed by a ravenous garbage pile, only the front wheel and handlebars still stuck out. I wonder if it will still be there when the garbage is finally cleaned away?

And with three-meter piles of garbage in the street, surely nobody minds if they add a few mattresses and refrigerators and other jumbo junk that normally wouldn't be picked up. It's going to become worse too - the strike is open-ended, so I expect the garbage to attain critical mass in a few weeks, become sentient, and begin to hunt humans for food.



You can't have a strike without a nice protest march. The French are good at this. The police closes a few roads, the protesters line up under the colors of their unions, and they bring signs, whistles, and trucks playing music. First come the red shirts (communists complete with hammer and sickle flags, and Attac), then the white shirts (FSU), then the orange shirts (CFDT), and finally a forlorn bunch of blue shirts (UNSA) who have strapped a badly sagging blimp to the roof of a truck for some reason. Where else can one see communists these days, now that North Korea has become a hereditary monarchy?

Mixed in are some brave student groups; at a rally in Paris last week a 16-year-old lost an eye to a rubber bullet after which the responsible minister promised to use "less violence" in the future. But in Marseille everyone is relaxed, there isn't even tear gas. The leaders of each group carry a wide banner with the name of the union, which serves the same purpose as those divider bars on supermarket checkout belts. Clearly these people are pros, they have done this many times before and they will do it again. Like, maybe tomorrow.



Me, I ride my bicycle to work. Let the traffic self-destruct, I don't care.

BTW, a puzzle: was the reference picture below taken in Marseille, France, or in Chennai, India?


29 September 2010

Bouillabaisse!

Bouillabaisse is Marseille's signature dish. Calling it a fish soup doesn't do it justice. It is not eaten, it is celebrated, and yesterday I celebrated it at the Miramar at Marseille's Vieux Port, the old fishing harbor.

First, waiters come brandishing large silver trays, loaded with fish and langoustes (lobster) decorated like a work of art. They smile, maybe expecting applause, and then take it all away again and get to work on a large worktable in the middle of the restaurant, while we have our apéritifs and our entrées. As the word indicates, an entrée is an appetizer, only the Americans think it's the main dish. Speaking of the misuse of French words: maître d' means "master of" and will leave your French friends waiting - maître de quoi? Master of what?

Anyway, when the bouillabaisse is finally ready, you'll get a bowl of reddish-brown broth, with a plate of croutons and a surprisingly spicy tomato paste. (Surprising because the French don't like hot food, waiters normally ask for confirmation with worried looks on their faces if you ask for spicy food, which then turns out to be very mild.) Croutons are thin slices of white bread fried in oil until they become dark and very dry and crisp. They have nothing to do with the small yellow bricks they sprinkle over Cesar's salads in less enlightened countries.

The soup is delicious. The taste of fish is strong but very smooth, not at all "fishy", although it is difficult to identify all the kinds of fish and shellfish that went into it. It's also strongly seasoned with herbs and spices, making it very savory without overpowering the fish flavors. It's quite filling, and when I had finished my bowl I was getting ready for the desserts.

But that was just the first course. After the dishes were cleared away, I got another bowl of bouillabaisse, only this time it was filled with several different kinds of fish filets, two large lobster tails, and a red crab perched on top looking at me accusingly. I got a fresh spoon but this time nobody ate the soup, just the meat. Which can be a challenge: you need to separate the meat from the bones and skin, but every time you apply the knife the piece submerges and you can't see it anymore. You need to plan your surgical maneuvers ahead and then execute them blind. In the end, only the crab survived the massacre, it's there for decoration only.

At this point everybody was close to bursting, and the conversation turned to the restaurant scene in Monty Python's Meaning of Life. If you aren't getting the reference, prepare some wafer-thin mints and watch the movie now. We also understood why, quite contrary to normal practice, we were asked to place our dessert orders before the meal, because after a bouillabaisse nobody really has space for a dessert. Professionals at work. After a suitable delay the chocolate variety plate was quite good though.

With all the appetizers and little side dishes and intermediate courses, the bill came to about a hundred euros; they boillabaisse alone is 58. Without drinks. The company was paying. The dinner lasted almost four hours - Bouillabaisse is a serious matter and not something for a quick bite during lunch hour (in France, lunch hour is actually an hour and a half). I expect that if you ask for a can or frozen box of bouillabaisse in a grocery store in Marseille, the authorities will have you deported to Romania instantly with their usual disregard for EU law and due process.

I didn't take a picture of the Bouillabaisse, that would have been crude. So I'll show a random Marseille harbor picture with fish in it.


22 September 2010

In on bail

French law protects tenants. Your landlord can't kick you out and can't raise your rent, the law is completely on your side. So landlords choose their tenants very carefully.

Suppose you make 3000 euro and the rent is 1001 euro. You won't get the apartment because the rent is more than one third of your income, an iron rule of renting. Landlords are also keenly interested in your ability to pay the rent, and will ask for a bank guarantee. Most people will ask their parents to sign the guarantee, which is perfectly acceptable even if the parents live on welfare in a nursing home. In my case, I was allowed to put a year's rent into escrow, 10000 euro. Easy. Another thing to watch out for is the état des lieux which lists all damage, like broken tiles - forget something and you'll pay for it when you move out. I have some flaking paint in the kitchen, which the landlord will get repainted asap; five months after the signature someone will definitely maybe come and take another look before the painters will perhaps come (this is southern France, after all). Once the contract - bail in French - is signed, the place is yours.

If I had tried to arrange all that on my own I'd probably be homeless now. An agency, Provence Relocation, did all the work. They arranged a visit of a number of available apartments, and all I had to do was pick one. They did everything else. The service is expensive, but the French government is once again helpful: you get a little welcome gift of over 3000 euro, just like that, which pays for the relocation agency and the real estate agent too.

The process is so complicated that people don't move much in France.

So I now have an apartment at La Plaine in the old center of Marseille, in walking distance to the old harbor and the mediterranean sea. There are lots of small cafés, shops, and restaurants in narrow pedestrianized alleys (pedestrianized means there are fewer cars) around here, and from my window I can see four boulangeries (bakeries) making fantastic French pastries. Most buildings here are 300 years old, which means high ceilings, French windows, and creaky old staircases, and everything is so densely built that the courtyards are narrow shafts. My place has a creaky old staircase too but the unusual luxury of windows with views on three sides, and those famous Provençal mauve sunsets that inspired painters like Vermeer and van Gogh; may they inspire my kitchen painters too. The floors aren't level, the walls aren't straight, the fireplaces can't be used because the chimneys are used as cable tunnels, and the bathroom is a daring combination of mint green and black. But I like it anyway.


14 September 2010

Nothing moves

The French TGV bullet trains are marvels of technology. They are built by Alstom and test trains have run at 575 km/h, although regular service is slower. France built the fastest train in the world and proudly handed it over to - the slowest train operator in the world, perhaps. It's not that SNCF, the French national railway company, would be poorly run or incompetent. The trouble is that it employs 180,000 French.

The work ethic in France is based on different principles that in other countries I have worked in. Suppose SNCF were to decide to let half the employees go, and there would be a massive strike - a grève - that would stop all wheels in France. The same massive strike can be expected if some union worker's aunt's little brother's hair dresser has heard a rumor that the new transportation minister may have said something about SNCF. Grève. A passing cosmic ray? Grève. Works every time.

Right now the government plans to raise the retirement age from 60 to - well, guess, maybe 67 like in Germany? No, 62. An outrage! And that after working a grueling mandatory 35-hour work week. Grève! Seven different unions decided the time has come to play a little havoc on the economy last Tuesday. The roads were packed with cars because the trains didn't go, and I didn't see any buses either. And the air traffic controllers never miss a grève. Nobody complained, they might have a little grève too this afternoon maybe so let's all have some fun. They'll do it again next week.

When I first arrived in France, they were already several days into a grève of tank truck drivers who supply all the gas stations. You can imagine what that did to traffic; turns out that gas stations don't have much gas stored at all. No French city would be complete without earnest men in safety vests handing out grève leaflets at intersections.

On the other hand, the train from Nice to Marseille I used last Sunday was perfectly punctual. Trains in France work really well between grèves. If only they wouldn't route every line longer than 100 meters through Paris. But that's for another blog post.

Hm, I like pictures but I don't have grève pictures. Grèves are characterized by what's not there. So I'll show you a typical "summer opening hours" sheet you'll see in shop windows, to illustrate the hard life that French retail workers must endure until their well-earned retirement. Yet French workers manage a higher productivity than their industrious neighbors, the Germans.

05 September 2010

Dead People Storage

I have no intent to turn this blog into a chronological diary, so I might as well start at the end. Someone else's end of course.

The biggest cemetery around here is Saint-Pierre. Nice scenery, no doubt, although I doubt that the customers appreciate it. Nice orderly well-maintained rows of marble tombstones, with pretty flowers. The flowers are made of porcelain, which probably cuts down on maintenance a lot. I saw very few real flowers, or other visitors. Many tombs have little stone tablets with gaudy pictures of the dear departed, usually grinning zombies that would make you cross to the other side side of the street if you'd meet one. I wonder who picks those pictures? Better put one in your testament file now, and write "use this one" on the back.

The cemetery is big but the customer list is bigger, so there is a shortage of space. But the French are never afraid of solving a problem with large amounts of concrete, so they built a huge parking garage where they park their dead relatives. No ramps but the typical elevators, dark corridors, broken flourescent lighting, and tasteless concrete facade. There are no cars, just concrete shelves, big enough to stuff a body in and affix an engraved slab of marble. Very efficient. There is still space, reserve now!

Now I am an atheist like pretty much everyone I know, and I don't care if they stuff my body in the recycling bin after I die. (Timing matters.) I won't be needing it anymore and nobody is going to row me across the Styx. Now I understand that the family may want a place for grieving, but then why rent a slot in a parking garage, nail some plastic flowers to the lid, so they never need to actually show up? Kind of defeats the purpose, n'est-ce pas? Deferred for further study.

Cemetière Saint-Pierre, first class.

Final parking at Saint-Pierre

Inside the garage. Vacant economy-class bins in the back.