Parisian book corners

I’ve left Marseille for the summer and am now back at UCSD, but I still have some pictures/adventures as yet un-written, so I figured I’d post some final few entries from the sunny southern California beaches. (Just pretend they’re from the sunny southern French beaches.) (Actually, a more apt parallel is a screen-lit southern California cogsci lab masquerading as a screen-lit southern French cogsci lab.) Goodbye to everyone in Marseille… but maybe I’ll be back?! I’d certainly love to see you all again.

In early September, I went up to Paris for the AMLaP conference. I stayed an extra day to breathe in the Parisian scent, and took the opportunity to go up to La Porte de Clignancourt, an area in a northern quarter of Paris which is an enormous combination of 12 differently-themed flea markets. It’s quite the experience, really, wandering around the streets and seeing the rapid shifts in types of goods for sale – from sports clothes to shoes to antiques to furniture to enormous, ugly picture frames to boxes of utter junk. While wandering around, I came across a book store of the best kind – one tiny room, stuffed to exploding with books shoved onto shelves completely haphazardly, so anything interesting you might come across would be the result of pure luck and digging. It’s like a treasure hunt.

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I found a hardcover, gold-embossed, three-volume set of The Three Musketeers (in French, bien sur), but didn’t have enough cash with me to buy them, so I ran out to the nearest ATM. On my way back, however, it started to pour, so I hung out in the bookstore for a while, waiting for it to stop raining. While standing around, I started talking to the owner of the shop (after he offered me a coffee – “don’t worry, it’s free!” – from the coffee machine he’d stuck on the table in the middle of some relatively-well stacked books.) For once, it was me who got to spring the “Where are you from?” question, because his French, while excellent, was obviously accented. Turned out he’d emigrated from Lebanon in 1953, and had come to Paris to go to school at the Sorbonne and study psychology. Hey you, he called to one of his assistants, hand me that white book over there. (Which one? the assistant rather pointedly asked, given the rather large number of books, including white ones, scattered about. The one on top of the third stack, the owner replied.) The owner hands me the book, which is a child development book written by Piaget. You heard of him? he asked. Of course, I replied. (Piaget was one of the most influential forerunners of developmental psychology.)

Turns out the bookstore owner was taking classes with Piaget at the Sorbonne. Now that’s epic. This is like meeting someone who’s taken a class from Chomsky, or Descartes, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

After university, he said, he’d moved to Kuwait to start a grain import business, because there’s nothing there but “oil – just oil and sun.” And no income tax.

No wonder his bookstore was so darn awesome.

La Police Nationale

Saturday I got to wear an official, funny French Police Nationale hat.

My friend Clarice (from UCSD) is here to visit for a few days, so we went on a big walking tour/shopping trip around Marseille. On our way down Canebière towards the port, we kept running into increasingly large numbers of policemen clustered in little groups, decked out in full riot gear and looking (at least as far as a French policeman can) intensely fierce and ready for trouble. What was interesting was that there didn’t seem to be anyone to protect against, as the streets were full to bursting, but only with the hordes of tourists who’d descended for one last Provençal hurrah before the end of the season. Being the inquisitive type, I asked a group what was happening that necessitated such a show of force. The policeman standing at the edge of the cadre informed me they were there for a manifestation (likely the most widely-practiced communal activity in France, second only to [though often co-occuring with] the strike). Apparently the G7 finance ministers were meeting in Marseille and a big protest was planned. What would they be protesting? I asked. “Capitalism,” my new police pal said, downright derisively. “Finance. The markets. The world. Everything.” (Clearly he’d chosen his side in this battle well.)

As per usual, I got asked where I was from¹, and this launched a whole discussion between me and 3 or 4 of the nearby policemen, all of whom were obviously bored with all this standing around waiting for the protest to show up.

After the protest passed by, we wandered around the market some more, and then started off back home. On the street perpendicular to my own, we encountered our friendly policemen again, who accused us of following them around. (Not true!) We went to my apartment, laughing about their ridiculous hats the entire way back. (Seriously, how much fear can be inspired in the masses by people wearing the kind of hats you folded out of a sheet of newspaper back in 2nd grade?)

As luck would have it, on our way back out (this time to buy cheeeeeese!), we ran into them once more. We decided this was a sign, and so went over to ask to try on their hats. They very enthusiastically agreed, and also offered up their official anti-riot helmets and shield.

Et voila the photographic evidence:

After the hat photo-op, two of them then proceeded to rip off various official police badges and give them to us. That was a bit strange, admittedly. The bottom one will be going on my office door, though.

As per usual, we got invited out for a drink, which we politely declined, given that, among other obvious reasons, we already were going to a birthday party that night. Turned out to be a good choice, as this party turned into an all-night secret Marseillaise clubbing adventure and then a walk home timed to see the sun rise….
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1. The one upside of my intense accent is that it certainly facilitates unexpected social interactions. Maybe I should start affecting an accent in English in San Diego? Just think who I’ll meet!

Conference excursion – to the Calanques!

The past week the lab I’m working at here in Marseille hosted ECEM (European Conference on Eye Movements), a four and a half day extravaganza of conferring and going on amazing outings in Provence. Way back in June when I’d first arrived, I volunteered my English-speaking services and so this week ended up working at the registration desk and various other coordinating jobs from about 10 am until the end of the evening’s entertainment, which – at the absolute earliest – finished 11 hours later.

Perks, however, were abundant, as compensation for hours of cognitively-demanding language-switching in the sun. There was an event every night and, being French, these guys sure knew how to throw parties. Sunday night we had an aperatif (read: heavy hors d’oeuvres and copious quantities of wine) after the opening address. Monday night was a wine tasting and buffet on the grounds of a chateau and vineyard in Trets, a village in the countryside 45 minutes outside of Marseille. Tuesday was another aperatif/barbecue at school.

Wednesday, though, was the most exciting day, when talks broke early for excursions; I was one of two tour guides for a 3 hour boat trip around the Calanques. The conference had hired a private boat which took us out from Vieux Port and through the gorges between the sheer Calanque cliffs on either side. After shepherding the conference attendees down to the Port and onto the boat, Kim and I got invited up to the upper level where the captain was, so we could do the tourist narration of the trip. We were given a book of awkwardly-translated paragraphs about the surrounding Calanques, and as we went past a particular area, the driver (boater?) would give us an involved explanation of what we were passing and we’d translate however much we felt like into the mike for everyone to hear. The view from the upper deck was fantastic – it was a semi-enclosed cabin with a tiny outdoor deck on either side, affording excellent views, unobstructed by the conference goers in steerage down below.

On the way back as we were approaching the harbor, the boat guys put on some rock/techno/dance music in the cabin, and I got them to put a mike up to the speaker to pipe it through the whole boat and everyone danced along. They even let me drive the boat (which had a legit pirate ship-type steering wheel) for a good chunk of the way back home. (Though only after asking if I had a driver’s [of a car] license.) The trip was really amazing; being out on the sea, surrounded by gorgeous scenery, with the sun overhead (as it so often is here in Provence) and the wind whooshing past and just boats and cliffs and water all around.

Wednesday night, immediately after the excursions, was the gala dinner, held atop Marseille’s Fort St. Nicholas, overlooking the harbor, in the starlight. Lots of wine (until it ran out), limited vegetarian food, and after a couple of hours, a DJ and a very inviting dance floor, which led to some rather epic dancing by a bunch of very enthusiastic scientists. Definitely the best conference I’ve ever attended in terms of events (sample size thus far: 2).

A sampling of pictures below (click on them to make them bigger), and (most of) the rest of the pictures I took on the official ECEM photo website:
https://picasaweb.google.com/117260803759574680086/CalanquesBoatTrip

Ramadan in Marseille

As my friend Andrew astutely pointed out, Ramadan began a few days ago. This explains the sudden uptick in frenzy and sweet-selling at the markets in Noailles, the heavily-concentrated Arab section of Marseille. One fasts until sundown, which happens here at about 9:30 during the summer. But in addition to all the regular fruit/vegetable/olive/nut/fig/bean/battery/watch/cigarette stands that are open every day, everyone had a table full of heaping trays of honey-saturated pastries. What was interesting was that they were out already at 6:30 or so, when I was walking home from work, and thus long before sundown.

Every little store had one of these stands selling several different types of incredibly sticky, honey-covered snacks.

Dates and figs by the kilo.

I went around taking pictures, all for you, dear readers, and at first I tried to sneak around and be as surreptitious with the camera as possible. It helped that there was tons of activity on all sides, so enough people were always not looking at me that I could walk around relatively unremarkably. But after a while, standing around staring right at vendors while taking their pictures gets them to look up, so the incognito approach didn’t work for too long. What was amazing, though, is that they’d invariably be absolutely thrilled to have their picture taken. A bunch of people asked me where I was from – I said I was an American student – and everyone I talked to was more than happy to pose and make it into the annals of American photography. The guy below even gave me a piece of the cake-thing he was dishing out as a thanks for taking his picture: it had the consistency of extraordinarily granular and sticky cornbread, and tasted as though it were made entirely of honey with a token almond stuck on the top.

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See those black things? They're not chocolate chips...

Whenever I walk around Noailles (which is often, because it’s the best place to buy produce, is right near my apartment, and always has something interesting to see), there’s this tiny voice in my head that chants on repeat, “If only they knew you were American and Jewish…” Some days I look more American than others; not sure if I ever look particularly Jewish. I do unconsciously check that my star necklace is under my shirt, though, or turned around so it’s in the back and so under my hair. Honestly, it’s probably not necessary, if the American sentiment here (and in the city in general) is any indication: I have never once gotten an anti-American response, and only rarely even gotten neural, as opposed to positive, ones. People here really do seem quite accepting, especially when you’re friendly and speak French and are happy to talk. So I really do wonder about the Jewish thing and whether it would be at all an issue. The habit of hiding my star comes from my first month here the first time around, when I went to Rosh Hashana services and got adopted by a Jewish yente, who told me the city was quite anti-Semitic and so to be aware. I think (hope?) her view was perhaps a hold-over from shortly post-war times. In any case, Marseille is segregated in the sense that there are definitely distinct neighborhoods but I’ve not experienced any outright on-the-street racial conflicts.

Gorges du Verdon

Photo time. On Saturday, we took the day to drive north for a couple of hours to the Gorges du Verdon, an area somewhat inland in the mountains with an enormous gorge running through the middle. The Lac de Sainte-Croix sits at the bottom of 700 meters of plummeting rock face, and the Verdon river, feeding into the lake, winds off between the mountains. The water is a shockingly, incredibly, deep, clear turquoise whose color you can see even way up on the ridge of the gorge. It’s truly phenomenal. We armed ourselves with picnic supplies and ate lunch on a random deserted hilltop amidst the trees, and then started winding our way down to the lake, where we rented canoes and went boating and jumping off the boats to go swimming in the lake. No photos from the boating part, alas, and these here really don’t do the lake’s sparkling color justice.

(Click on the photos to make them full-size.)

On the way down

The river winds between the mountains, carving out the gorge.

Panorama

After the boating and swimming expedition, we stopped in the little town of Moustiers-Ste-Marie, a village forcibly shoved into the mountain side and voted one of the prettiest towns in France. (When I excitedly pointed this out, François suggested that there were a lot of towns that had been given this designation, but conceded that in fact this particular one was probably very nice indeed.) When I was in Provence in May 2003 with my parents, we were going from somewhere (maybe Toulouse?) to somewhere else (maybe Nice or Cannes?), and we stopped here. I had an incredibly clear picture in my head of what this town looked like, and sure enough, 8 years later, it looked about the same. (Not so surprising for a town that laments its “demographic haemorrhage” in the 14th century!) It was quaint and picturesque with flat plains of identical, shingled roofs. Built into the mountain, above the town, was the church – well positioned so you’d have to do some work for your weekly praying. It did afford quite incredible views of the town and the surrounding mountains, like the one below:

Moustiers-Ste-Marie

Driving back home that night at 10, when it was nearly completely dark except for a minute glowing orange-ness way off in the distance, we passed through unseen lavender fields that bombarded the car (with its open windows) with lavender smells that enveloped everything and seemed to come from everywhere (which, admittedly, it did). We also passed  several sunflower fields, full of flowers that all faced exactly the same direction and which I must assume was towards the sun.

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In other news, I have successfully moved into an apartment in Marseille! (See Going Postal.) This is the view from my living room windows:

Marseille lit up at night, and Notre Dame de la Garde glowing on the hill in the distance.