useless questions for Philippe, translated

"Philippe, how do you say 'raccoon' in French?"

"What?"

"They're animals. I don't know if they only exist in the US or what. They have... Wait, how do you say 'tail'?"

"...What?"

[vague pantomime]

"Oh! Queue!"

"Right. They're animals with a long tail, shaped sort of like this, with lines on it."

"Les ratons-laveurs? They smell bad, and they wash their food before they eat it?"

"Uh, maybe. They have hands, like people. And they look like they're wearing masks."

"Yes! Ratons-laveurs. You know, because they're like rats, but they wash their food. We have them in Europe, mostly in Germany I think. Only in places where there's a lot of water."

"Oh. You see them everywhere in the US. They get into people's trash cans and stuff... Actually, I forget why I asked this question in the first place."

There you have it, America. In France, raccoons are called "little washer-rats."

mysteries

oday on the way back from class I came across a mouse flattened on the sidewalk. It wasn't a dramatic, unpleasant flattening, not like a mouse was just sitting and got a piano dropped on it. It had remained mouselike, but been shrunk down heightwise to a few millimeters, like somebody was projecting the image of a mouse onto the sidewalk. It looked vaguely mummified. And this was baffling for several reasons.

1. How does a mouse get flattened on a sidewalk? By an extremely wide bicycle? By the cumulative force of hundreds of pedestrians? Readers: have you ever stepped on a mouse? I haven't. I wouldn't expect a lot of people to step on a mouse. How many people have to step on a mouse before it is reduced to paper? I lot, I bet.

2. What happened to the other 90% of its mass? I will accept that it was probably about 70% water, which is gone now, hence the mummification. But what about the rest of it? I mean, if you mummify a human it's still pretty big, even (I assume) if you flatten it out after the fact.

Anyway, long story short, I saw a flat mouse. It was pretty interesting.

ne pas nourissez les chats errants

With most of my weekday schedules filled in from around 8:30 AM to six or seven at night but the weekends left jarringly empty, I'm quickly becoming a big fan of solo tourism. Taking the other people out of the equation makes the planning go much quicker, and all that's really lost is a few brains for navigating and someone to turn toward when you point at something and go "look, look at that thing, do you also see it." And despite me being a navigationally-challenged individual living in a city that looks like it was organized by starfish, it's not that hard to find your way around as long as you've got a small map and a functional short-term memory. With this in mind, and with nothing planned until four in the afternoon, I decided to spend an Unscheduled Friday in the Cimitiere de Monmartre, which was within reasonable walking distance of my apartment.

So at maybe ten in the morning, I wandered out into the suspiciously empty streets and headed in The Direction. The thing about looking for something as large as a giant cemetary is that you don't really need directions, you just need one direction and if you make sure to stay on track you'll find it eventually. This is pretty much what happened to me - I started out being like, "Well I will go right on Avenue de Clichy until it bears right and I see a metro station and then take this road and then the first right..." What actually happened, after I stood on the sidewalk and twirled around in confusion a few times (I probably didn't literally do this, but you can imagine I did if you want), was that I said, "It's on this side of the road," and that was the Direction and I followed it until, eventually, I ran into a large stone wall.

This was, of course, my destination, but I had, ended up rather far from the entrance, which in my defense wasn't marked on the map. After skirting the perimeter for a while I discovered a bridge and my first view into the cemetary.

The quest to find the entrance was similarly tedious, involving me looking suspicious/like an idiot as I tried opening a large door which turned out to be locked (later, on the inside, a man would ask me if it was possible to exit through this gate, and I would for once be able to emphatically say that no, that door was not useful for going anywhere), but finally I found my way in. I was greeted by a few large signs telling me about the history of the cemetary, famous people buried there (Emile Zola, some singer I'd never heard of, others whose names now escape me), and various small pictograms depicting things you are not allowed to in the cemetary. Do not walk your dog. Do not sit on a bench and drink a bottle of wine. Do not... pour a bowl of cat food for a cat? I had to pause and read the text for that one. "Do not feed the wandering cats."

:D

WANDERING CATS.

The cemetary is filled with cats.

They are everywhere. This is honestly true and not an exaggeration, and despite being in the presence of several dead famous people and a weird microcosm of French architectural history, I found myself most interested in a lot of angry looking cats. I suppose they live inside the tiny-house tombs (What are these called? I like them, and while wandering around I contemplated insisting that one be built for me when I die, just because I like the idea of people coming and sitting in my tomb to get out of the rain.), and I did see one woman who had clearly come in just to feed the Wandering Cats, as she was carrying a huge jar of cat food. I don't know who thinks cats really need to be fed, because they're pretty much designed to eat anything smaller than they are, and while I was there I saw one climb up a tree, which was seriously impressive.

Later on I watched a slug squeeze into a hole in the sidewalk. If you are reading this hoping for helpful recommendations for entertainment in Paris, I remind you that I am not the best judge of "interesting."

But! Enough of that. Onward to the pictures.



Who is this guy, and why is he dead on top of his own grave? Whose idea was this? It just strikes me as an odd way to be memorialized. Like, "Here's Bob. He died. We want you to remember that."




Oh hello there Zola.


And, to conclude, I'm not sure what this is but I really like it.

salut

WELL I have been in Paris for one week now, and I figured it would be a good time for a Blog Revival (hallelujah!) in case anyone's interested in the exciting story of me being slightly lost and confused in a foreign country. So here you have it - marvel as I eat bread with every single meal (true), gasp in shock as I forget to properly set my alarm clock and miss my first orientation class (also true). Sit riveted in suspense as I try to figure out where the post office is (it's around here somewhere, I know I've seen it).

The family I'm staying with is lovely and very friendly. They have a large dog named Rimbaud who has hilarious, gigantic dog-lips the way dogs do sometimes, and who likes to sit his head on the furniture. Sometimes when I pet him he smashes his face into my torso exactly the way Nessie used to, though he's probably ten times her size.

Lorraine, who is my host mother, (which is a suspiciously detached title if you ask me, and I avoid it) is a professor who talks exactly like a professor. This is something that kind of freaked me out before I found out what her job was, because without that information it was just as if she was always trying to inform me of something very important, and there was an odd quality to her voice that kept making me feel like I needed to pay close attention. But that all made sense once I figured it out - teachers and future teachers take note: once you become a teacher, you never stop being one. We can tell, you know.