Before the wheel there were...stairs...and the Devil

The Devil's Staircase-Going down from centre ville to the train station

Poitiers being both old and hilly, it's interesting how stairs have been used in various forms here for a very long time. In fact, if Poitiers were merely hilly, the staircases might not be quite as numerous. The major staircases are placed where roads are impossible, literally up the sides of cliffs.

Besides being interesting elements of pre-automobile urban planning, they are (occasionally) still used today. Allowing pedestrians access to the center of Poitiers who would otherwise have to walk much farther, along slowly climbing, curving streets.

The stairways on either side of the train station, combined with the passerelle allows pedestrians in centre ville and the areas to the west direct access to the train station, bypassing the circuitous route the cars and buses must use.

La Passerelle, which crosses above the trains in Poitiers

Besides the public staircases that help pedestrians shortcut the winding streets, many houses have extensive private staircases to take advantage of as much real estate as possible. You can put your garage on one level and your house on another:

The stairs wind to the left, while the more modern elevator (or dumb waiter) goes straight up

Or expand your garden into a multi-level affair:

Note the white lounge chair near the center of the photo, perfect for a sun-drenched afternoon

It also allows this city to put a park somewhere that would normally be too steep. This park is tucked between two parts of the road that snakes down from centre ville to the train station.

Park along blvd. Verdun

While all these stairs allow a pedestrian to more easily navigate the area, it's not surprising that sometimes you might want to take the long route. These two pictures below comprise one staircase, and a lot of stairs.

Escalier de la Grotte des Druides-Staircase of the Druids Cave

Hmmm, maybe I'll take the bus.

Paris from the Perspective of a Non-French Person

The purpose of this post is to give guidance to tourists and visitors to Paris (and other French tourist towns).  If you want to add to our commentary or dispute some point we've made -- please do so in the comments!!  

Thanks --ARAD

image from smh.com.au

We hope you've been well as we've been traipsing around Poitiers and Paris with Jefe's family.  (And thank you if you are still reading...)

Now that we've been to Paris three times as "resident aliens" (i.e. not counting the times we came before moving to France), we feel like we're beginning to know our way around, which areas we enjoy and which ones to avoid like the plague. 

When people visit Paris, they think all the people they see (at least all those who aren't looking at maps) are Parisiens. Well, that probably isn't the case. While exact numbers are hard to come by, Paris is host to at least 9 million non-French tourists every year, and at least that many French tourists.

Some people (e.g. us) try and hide the fact that they are tourists so that the waiters don't start speaking English before you even sit down. To be hired in a restaurant or cafe in Paris, it's clear that you must prove that you are fluent in French and English. I think preferential treatment must also be given to applicants who have cultivated a special blend of hackneyed "bad English" pronunciation, patience, and a side of caffeine addiction. Unfortunately, Jefe and his backpack and unfashionable coat are usually a give-away. But that's ok, because we ride bikes, we go places most people don't, avoid the places that most people flock to, and we even save some cash at lunch by packing a snack to eat in the numerous parks and gardens (when it isn't raining/freezing).

Paris can be a little intimidating because it feels like everyone is judging you, and they are, the French being an especially opinionated people. The way you dress (she's not wearing black?! OMD --"ouh mon dieu" the French equivalent of OMG), where you eat, what you drink (a Pinot Noir from Alsace with veal liver?!?!?), how you tie your scarf.

Correct:

Incorrect:

Even which hand you hold your fork with. It's very difficult to switch from the zig-zag style of eating to the Continental style. Almost as difficult as learning to write with the opposite hand. But, it's worth it to teach yourself, especially if you are the type of person (e.g. me) who thinks that the patrons and waitstaff in French restaurants are surreptitiously watching you cut into your food and silently judging you. Maybe if you learn to eat properly, they won't think you're a tourist. Oh wait, everyone is a tourist.

Nowadays, we don't have to look at the map quite as often, and even I know which way north is and how to get to the airport (I'm even getting good at helping out lost tourists). I could also give pretty good directions around Le Marais, one of the trendy shopping areas in the 3rd and 4th arondissements.

We're always looking for weird art, and Paris is happy to oblige with many controversial exhibits (which they've conveniently labeled as such). Since the worst minority oppression takes place in the suburbs, Paris has to import their controversy. In this case, from the U.S. in the form of David LaChapelle.

One photo from the series "Jesus is my homeboy" by David LaChapelle

And since I like making lists, here's another one:

How To Look Like a Tourist in France: Top Ten

1. Ask someone for directions.  Extra points if the person turns out to be another tourist.

2. Wear jogging shoes.  Extra points if they're white.  (I still walk to the gym already wearing my gym clothes.  I also--gasp--leave the gym, visibly sweaty, still wearing said gym clothes, and walk home.  I know that it identifies me as a foreigner, I just don't care.)

3. Sport multi-colored eyeshadow, fake bake, or cakey foundation.  French girls typically go for "le smoky eye" look with neutral face and lips.

le smoky eye

4. Wear anything that is visibly optimized for comfort.  Fleece is an excellent example.

5. Count with your hand incorrectly: the French start with the thumb, not the index finger.

6. Hesitate for more than 10 seconds when someone asks you a question in French.  You will know that 10 seconds have passed because he or she will repeat their question in English.

7. Only order a plat instead of the whole formule. Extra credit if you order the wrong kind of wine, too. 

8. Stop in the middle of the street to take pictures of a building.

9. Travel in a group of more than 5 people.

and of course...

10. Start speaking.

Bordeaux, Part II: Vélo F***ing Sutra

To enrich our wanderings in the center of Bordeaux beyond shopping the thousands of post-holiday sales, we went in search of some contemporary art. There were a few spaces showing this kind of art in the center of Bordeaux, most notably the Espace St. Remi. Formerly a church, it has been converted into a space for showing contemporary paintings and sculptures

Jefe found it accidently while he was looking for a place to lock his bike near the hotel one afternoon. We passed the church/art gallery and immediately found ourselves in a quiet square, deserted except for a few middle aged women, each separated by 30 or 40 feet, sitting on chairs on the sidewalks with thigh-high, white, high-heeled boots (these are apparently the newest component of the national prostitute uniform this year, which we noticed in Poitiers). The art inside was almost as strange as the scene outside.

Apart from the Espace St. Remi, the center of Bordeaux is too expensive for emerging artists and they are forced to stay in nearby Eysine or the industrial area of Bègles. These side trips wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't for the ever-present rain. Oh well. So Jefe biked among semi-trailers and warehouses of Bègles to La Morue Noire for an exhibit by Frédéric Lucas. This sculpture garden was outside:
Inside the building were the paintings. Lucas uses an interesting technique; up close it looks like layers of peeling paint, but from a distance various forms are discernible among the chaos.

Sort of the urban/street version of a Monet.

Since this blog is about bikes and art, among other things, I have to mention a series of comics by Cami that were exhibited at the Maison du Vélo, Bordeaux's headquarters for bike rentals (only to residents, unfortunately), maps, and information.

Yes, that says Velo Sutra

Don't laugh too hard.  We did, until we actually saw some of these positions in action, at night, in the rain.  Pretty scary.

As anyone familiar with us should know, we visited all the local movie theaters. On the Place Camille Julian, there was Cinema Utopia, two screens and a cafe/bar in a converted church (a theme in Bordeaux?), where we saw Che: Part One. Also UGC Ciné Cité in the center of Bordeaux (where we saw Twilight and Slumdog Millionaire), and Cinema Festival in Bègles, kind of a hike, but worth it to see 20th Century Boys.

And while we like the combination of dinner and a movie more than the average couple, we have other interests too, notably live music. Champaign-Urbana has a very active music scene for a town its size (some of our favorite acts of recent years: The Beauty Shop, The Living Blue, Bellcaster, Animate Objects,  Headlights, Kate Hathaway, Darrin Drda's Theory of Everything, Triple Whip, and the list goes on). Needless to say, we jumped at the chance to see Calexico in Bordeaux at the Barbey Rock School. Apparently, so did a lot of other Bordelais, as the 700 seat venue was nearly full.

Pre-show, before most of the people finished their beers and coffees in the lobby.

Luckily, we got there early and were able to stand right near the stage.

They played for nearly two hours, and everyone (fans, band, us) was pretty exhausted by the end.  But Rebecca was sublimely happy.  She saw Calexico in a small outside venue in NYC a few years back, and this show brought back a lot of happy memories.

La Haine...Snark, Part 1

Or...Things that sometimes make us want to poop on the sidewalk

We recently decided (after much debate and pouting) to include a little more snark (parents: that's what we kids call a snide remark) in the blog. While we will still be rhapsodizing new discoveries and the delights of France, there are a few things we feel the need to address. Such as, for instance, certain things so poorly designed that we continue to hate them, even after trying really hard to find their redeeming qualities. Note: this is not mere homesickness for a certain brand of cookie or the lack of a specific type of beer, these are things that anyone--even the French--should be complaining about.

So without further ado,

Snark, Part 1: Géant Casino

For starters, it's called "Giant Casino". Just the name makes me think of an onslaught of light, noise and irritation. Sometime I wonder if France is playing a cruel joke on us. The Americans create things like Walmart, McDonalds, and blockbuster movies (which I don't like, in case you didn't know), and the French see these things and morph them into something even more outrageous. For example, the French word for "corporation" is "exploitation". It's as if they are taking the aspects I dislike the most and shoving them back in my face in the form of monstrous stores, food that makes my skin crawl, and movies that make me cringe just thinking about them. Perhaps they are doing this in an elaborate attempt at cultural critique?

Géant is a large commercial center located near the University of Poitiers. Similar to a Super Walmart, it houses a huge grocery store along with lots of other smaller shops. In addition, all under the same roof, there is a bowling alley, three restaurants, many clothing stores (such as H&M, Zara, Jules, Bershka, Esprit, Stradivarius), several shoes stores, three banks, a Sephora, a hair salon, a pharmacy, a gas station, and a car wash.

Of course, it's different closer to the center of Poitiers, where there are a lot of quirky shops (a custom umbrella shop, communist bookstore, etc.), but there are certain items, like socks, that you can only find at the hypermarché.

We've been to Géant a few times, mostly because it is near Rebecca's office at ESIP. At first it seems really convenient. The bus, which typically comes by every 15 minutes, drops you off just down the street. But then you start to walk toward the building from the bus stop, and the sidewalk abruptly disappears. You end up in a pavement purgatory, walking through a narrow entrance (the western one just off Avenue JFK) to the parking lot with limited visibility, jostled by other pedestrians as well as cars, bikes, mopeds, and volatile middle school students. Oh yeah, and once you get to the entrance, you are greeted with exactly no places for bike parking.

It is hard to see how this complex could have been designed so poorly. Perhaps if it had been built 20 or 30 years ago when there weren't many bike riders in Poitiers, I could understand. But it's only 10 years old. Besides, with the university so close, how could they completely fail to anticipate the possibility of pedestrians?

OK. Supposing you finally make it inside, you get your 5 kilometers of exercise while shopping in this giant store and you're happy because almost everything is super cheap. You then have 40 checkout lanes to choose from: the traditional sort with a real person there to scan your items. Oops, only 3 of those are open.

Should you go through the self-checkout? Not unless you want to wait for the newbie to figure out that they have to set the item down on the counter after scanning it.

How about the self-checkout plus? You get to carry around a cool handheld scanner and zap all the stuff you want, then just dock the scanner and swipe your card. Nice idea, but it requires advanced registration and your first born child.

Maybe the credit card checkout? They scan all your items and give you a barcoded receipt, then you proceed to a separate machine to pay. This works on the theory that paying is the part of checking out that slows things down. Interesting hypothesis, but it doesn't stand up to testing. You still have to wait in line to get all of your items scanned. And paying is still a hassle, especially with American style credit cards that require a signature. This option is a last resort.

Oh wait--there's an opening in one of the traditional check-out lanes *sigh of relief*. The checkout person is scanning all your items and everything is great. Oh crap, where's that little sticker that was on your red pepper?

"Oh no, please don't tell me that your red pepper doesn't have a little sticker on it. Here at Géant, we don't keep a list of all those exotic vegetables at the checkout counter, so I'm sorry but you'll just have to walk back 300 yards to find a new little sticker and bring it back. No, I'm sorry, we can't just call someone and ask them what the code is. This is Géant, we don't do that here. Do you want to go get the sticker or just forget the red pepper?"

So, dear reader, unless you enjoy torturing yourself (as many people seem to here, given the popularity of Géant), or you like to bowl while your significant other does the shopping, I would try to avoid this hypermarché hell.

Side note: This post is conspicuously devoid of pictures. The last time I went there with my camera, I left too frustrated to think about taking pictures. In any case, pictures rarely achieve the same snarkiness as a well-placed barb.

Historic Poitiers

Poitiers is really old, at least that's what the Wikipedia entry says. But sometimes it's hard to wrap your mind around what 'old' really means; dates and numbers, rather than elucidating this, sometimes just make your vision blur.  For many of us, tangible things are easier to appreciate.

Take for instance the electrical wiring in our apartment, which seems a little sketchy, or the fact that rainwater drains inside our building.  That means the place was built before people worried about things like electromagnetic pollution and toxic death mold.  So that's a pretty tangible marker of age, but then again, the same kinds of weaknesses were present in the poorly-maintained 80-year-old house we rented in Illinois.  

What we're trying to get at is that to US "old" is nothing compared to European "old".  Lately, we have been noticing the patchwork nature of the construction here. There are, for example, university buildings less than 20 years old sharing a common wall with a 500-year-old half-timber house.

One side of the house...

...and the other.

And with so many layers of renovation and new construction, I can't even begin to imagine the headaches faced by all the engineers and architects involved in these projects over the last few hundred years.

Fortunately for the curious-minded, Poitiers reveres its history, and has marked out three historical walking routes (red, blue, and yellow; so far partially translated by Jefe) that people can take to see various interesting houses, churches, and city buildings. While taking these self-guided walking tours and translating all the associated information on posted plaques, he began to notice how few of the buildings stick to one style of architecture (e.g Classical, Romanesque, Gothic, Flamboyant Gothic, Renaissance).

The closer you look, the quirkier things become. For example, most of the windows have actual working shutters (instead of the decorative shutters we have in the US), which people actually use daily. Built into the exteriors of the walls near those shutters are small iron latches that keep them from swinging freely when open. There are numerous designs for these tiny shutter latches, but the one below was surprisingly common:

I haven't figured out who, if anyone specific, this is supposed to represent, but I'll be asking around (or please let us know if you have any guesses).

The other minor detail that people have preserved over the last few hundred years are the doors. Since so many periods of construction coexist, it seems like no two doors (even in their dimensions) are the same. Short rounded medieval doors stand next to giant entryways for carriages, which neighbor stubby blocked-off doors that must have been deemed too low for human use and decommissioned. But at least these still seem to work...

Antique (or just really old) door knockers

After walking around on foot and dodging all the dog poop on the sidewalks, you may wonder where all the parks are. Besides Parc de Blossac, most of the grassy spaces are hidden within courtyards and gardens behind the walls of formerly aristocratic homes (which have since been converted to apartments). However, occasionally you think you are walking into a parking area behind a building and you end up here...

The truth is that it is easier to find the parks using Google's satellite view than by walking around. Some parks are right in your face, but with entrances that are locked. This park looks great on Google. Unfortunately, it is completely private. Maybe they didn't want to deal with the dog poop (yes, that's the same link as before.  It's just really funny).

Berlin...Part II

Despite a forecast of wet and cold weather, Jefe decided to take his bike to Berlin. The transport system has good coverage and is efficient; one 2 € ticket gives you access to the S-Bahn (like the 'El' in Chicago), the U-Bahn (like the subway in London or New York), and the trams and buses for up to two hours. But taking the S-Bahn or U-Bahn only allows you to see things at one place or another, not in between. Since Berlin is spread out and relatively flat, a bike is the way to go, and Berliners seem to agree.

Even during our stay, with the lousy weather, the vast network of bike paths and bike lanes was consistently full of cyclists, who rode everything from older racing bikes to cargo bikes. Sometimes the bike paths are denoted only by differently colored bricks on the sidewalk, and so it quickly becomes second nature to look both ways before crossing a bike path.

On the bike, Jefe was able to explore places that were a little out-of-the-way, like the architectural neighborhood of Hansaviertel.
He also spent one afternoon checking into a few art galleries in the Mitte area of central Berlin. Most of these would be considered avant-garde, or just bizarre. The Zak Branicka gallery was showing a movie called A Summer's Tale, a fairy-tale by Katarzyna Kozyra about midget gardeners that begins idyllic and then turns ugly. The same building housed the Galerie Volker Diehl, showing work by Herbert Volkmann. The show was titled Die Morphinisten (The Morphine Addicts), and syringes featured heavily in most of the artwork.

For more entertaining entertainment, we went to see Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan (with opening band The Miserable Rich) at the Columbia Music Hall. They are from Glasgow and musically, they fall somewhere between Leonard Cohen and The Beauty Shop. They were very good, and we were surprised by the large Sunday night crowd. Maybe they have a cult following in Berlin. We were in a hurry to get home and didn't see any CD's for sale, but we will definitely look for something online.

Before the show, we stopped at Atame Tapas Bar for wine and finger food. One gem we found were these dates which were stuffed with almonds, wrapped in bacon, and then roasted. They were fantastic: salty, sweet, soft, and crunchy. The next night we returned to Nosh (where we ate twice while in Berlin in December 2007). The food is simple, but delicious, roast lamb shoulder with ratatouille and goose leg with mustard sauce and crispy potatoes. Also of note were the salmon brunch at Cream, the cold dahl salad and warm vegetarian paella at Saladette und Freunde, and the rum raisin Rittersport chocolate bars (not available in the US).

The Alexanderplatz was also buzzing with activity. The Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas Market) and carnival encompassed the area of three or four city blocks. For everyone, there were sausages, pretzels, crepes, candy and fries. For the kids, there were numerous rides: a ferris wheel, various carousels, and a rollercoaster. And for the adults there was Glühwein (mulled wine with rum and amaretto).

In Berlin, people drink on the street. They drink on the subway and on the metro. They drink on the bus and the tram. Bottle caps blanket the city, smashed empty bottles glint in the sun. And although Germans are most frequently associated with beer, glühwein is the beverage of choice from the beginning of November until the end of January. What? It's 4am, and you're out of glühwein? Try the pizza place next door. Chances are, they've got some.

Poitiers has mulled wine too, but here there is an issue of decorum, one which seems to have been resolved in Germany back when it was still called Prussia. This year Poitiers has banned the sale of vin chaud at the Christmas Market. This is has caused a small furor, and our friend William, the local Caviste, has started an informal petition (translation) to reverse this development. Du courage William!