Solemn post

The last couple of days were not so interesting except for a trip to le cimetiere du pere lachaise. For anyone who doesn't know it, this is supposed to be one of the most famous cemeteries in the world. It has a strange collection of residents, including people like George Haussmann (the architect that designed much of the beautiful buildings and boulevards of Paris, transforming it from a mediaeval maze into the grand city it is now), Camille Pissarro (the impressionist painter whose work we saw in the Musee d'Orsay), Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison. Oscar Wilde's grave was bizarre, it was covered in lipstick kisses.

Unfortunately they closed the cemetery to visitors just after we arrived so we only really saw Oscar Wilde and some war memorials. We also managed to walk right past Edith Piaf, oh well. The whole cemetery was stunning though. Many of the family memorials (or sepultures) were just incredible, some almost like little chapels.

We went off the day before and found a Carrefour that was over the motorway from us. This is supposed to be the ASDA or Tesco of France. They have some "hypermarchés" around that are bigger than the regular "supermarchés" you usually find. This one was just a supermarché. It was not bad, especially for us non-super kinda shoppers. We bought a few things including another kids book (this one was a kids picture book that teaches English names for common items) and a copy of the first Harry Potter in French. The copy of Harry Potter is kinda for the kids, but I though that it would also be useful for me to get a book that I knew the story and was written for a young audience. Could be good practice.

Apart from that, we've been mostly just doing our regular daily activities. So that's home schooling for Annmarie and the kids and job seeking for me. I've got a couple of interesting possibilities at the moment.

One is in a tourist shop that is also a bureau de change. Doing bureau de change could be interesting for a while. The other is an English bakery and lunch time restaurant that does weekend brunches. They are looking for an assistant chef to help with the lunches and help make up the menus. Would be challenging to be sure, but could be interesting.

Annmarie has been musing over starting a natural/raw food kinda restaurant somewhere for a while now, so the bakery job could be an opportunity to get some commercial experience. I also have mused on getting a career in finance so the other job could be interesting too. Maybe not...

Anyway, gotta get on, make calls and get things moving.

Après Fête de Mères

Yesterday was kinda nice. It was Mother's Day here in France (Fête de Mères) and Annmarie slept in till midday. I tried to go out with the kids to do some shopping, but what I thought was a street food market was just a street trash and treasure kinda market. I called my Mum and our friend Luiza called us.

We headed out eventually and walked down to the Bastille. There was another market there, with much nicer stalls that the one down near us. We milled around there for a while, then headed off to our primary destination: gelatti!

We had seen a gelatti shop a few days before. It made up cones of gelatti in the shape of flowers, I believe I have mentioned it before. Annmarie wanted to go out and get one of these for Mother's Day and I felt I shouldn't argue. The gelatti was really nice.

Then we wandered back home and got some groceries en route. Just now, I'm going to go get a falafel for lunch and then call Annmarie to see what she is up to.

Quick post

Hello all. Just a quick post from an internet cafe late at night to let you know we are still here. I'm doing some job seeking stuff and it's late, so I won't say much here. We've had an interesting couple of days. Last night we went to the Musee d'Orsay, finaly, and saw the exhibition, though it was far too crowded to really appreciate it.

Today we had a picnic at a giant science park. That was quite fun though the weather could have been better. I'll post up a better description soon. Cheers.

More of the weekend and not much else

Well I will now get on to the rest of the weekend, unfortunatelyI don't have any pictures to post up, so that will have to wait for later. Some of them are really quite good. I keep thinking that I need to post up pictures from other parts of our trip as a lot of them are really worth seeing.

Alors, the Sunday was really quite interesting. We had decided (encore) to try and go to the Musee d'Orsay, which will be our outing this afternoon hopefully. We also were réessayer (trying again) to find falafel, having failed to find some on the Saturday night at our local middle eastern type kabbab shops.

Now falafel is interesting as I didn't actually know it's real origin. In Adelaide, practially every Lebanise takeout that makes yiros, also makes falafel. I always assumed that falafel was either of middle eastern or arabic origin. Maybe Turkish or whatever. I have now discovered that it originated in Syria.

I don't really know the various affinities within the middle east and arab regions so I don't know how it propogated around, but I would have assumed that Turkish people may have been in to it. Not the Turkish people who live round us at the moment it seems. Looking in one of the Paris guide books in the apparment we rented, I found a reference to a falafel house that Bob Marley apparantly claimed was the best in Paris, which is probably pretty high aclaim on the international falafel eating scene. It was called L'As du Falafel and was down in Marias in the 4th arrondisment. That was near Place de Bastile.

So we decided to walk down to Bastile and go have lunch at L'As du Falafel. The walk was as uneventful as a walk through Paris can be. We stopped at a park en route (to make up for not stopping at one the day before) and made our way to Bastile. As we got to close to Bastile we heard a rather loud noise, it sounded like people and horns and drums. It seems we walked right into some kind of street march.

There were tens of thousands at least lining the place and the main roads comming into and out of the place. There were fire breathers and performers and what seemed like at least 10 or more bands on the backs of trucks slowly making their way through the city with the crowd marching along side.

We ended up following some kind of mexican/south american/spanish kinda band that were really good. The had a "Stop Bush" sign up on their truck. There seemed to be other activist kinda posters around, so I guess that this was some kind of social awareness march or something. It was a really good atmosphere in the crowd, very social and amiable.

So we followed the crowd up to near where the falafel shop was and then cut off to the side. We found a small museum of the history of Paris which was free, but we didn't go in, we just had a sit down in their courtyard and had a look at the gardens and an Angel statue. We then headed off to the falafel shop.

It was absolutely packed. There were actually three or four of them all next to each other and they all seemed rather good, but we came for this one, so we lined up for the outside takeaway. It was rather well organised. They had a couple of people who took your order in the line. Then you paid that guy and he gave you a ticket for your order so when you got to the counter (which was very noisy) you just gave the guy your ticket and he got you your food.

The falafel was really good. Definately worth tracking down if you are in Paris and you like falafel. We sat down in the street to eat them, since the whole march atmosphere was just so inspiring, kinda like the old fringe in Adelaide. Sitting around, I noticed that there were a lot of Jewish shops and bakeries in the area. I found this interesting at first, but reading the wikipedia reference I now see that falafel is a hugely popular food in Israel, so that now all makes sense.

After finishing, we had given up on going to Orsee, so we just wandered around Marias for a bit. My Mum has suggested that we go see a little church in Marias, but unfortunatelyI didn't remember where that was or even that we were in Marias at the time so we didn't get round to that. There were a lot of nice little shops everywhere and we had fun looking around. We found filled merangs the size of footballs and a shop that sold Italian Gelati and shapped the cones like tulips or roses (not sure which it reminded me more of). Then we made our way back home and, after another quick stop at a playground, got rained on. Grandement.

The rest of the week has been looking for work and doing shopping. I have had my hair cut here (un peu) and there was a good street market out yesterday which dissapeared today. But my time is running out and I'm off to find a fresh copy of FUSAC and the American Church in Paris (which is meant to have a good tableau d'affichage for work and accomodation ads). A bientot tout le monde.

A longer post

Well, it certainly is easier to type on a familiar keyboard. My last post took an awfully long time to write so I didn't get much time to talk about what had gone on over the weekend.

The move was rather hectic. Basically I managed to not rent a car for the day, meaning we had no transport to move our stuff out of the flat and into the new one. Luckily we managed to find a "“man with a van"” at short notice. He was a really nice guy from Shrilanka and we had a good chat on the way over. Being short notice, we could only get him at the last minute so there wasn't much time to co-ordinate switching over.

He didn't help with lifting the bags (he had an injury that prevented it, he told me that if we had needed that, he would have brought someone else) so I had to rush up and down the stairs hefting the bags down. This was made especially fun by the fact that there was painting work going on in the stairwell of the apartment, so there was dust and painting equipment everywhere.

Hefting the bags past all this was a rather difficult task. I spent most of it on the verge of plunging down the stairs. The weight of the bags didn't help either. Annmarie and I have both agreed that next time we travel, we really need to lower the amount of stuff we bring with us.

Unfortunately due to the lack of time, after loading up the van and driving over to the new flat there was still quite a bit of stuff still back at the first flat. I knew there was some still there, but I didn't realise quite how much. So the final inspection ran through with no immediate worries (that may appear when I get the final notice from the rental company) but then I, having gone on my own to return the keys, was stuck with rather too much luggage to carry around. I met up with Annmarie and we made our way back to the new flat.

After that, we didn't really have much enegry for doing much else, so we just wandered round looking for dinner, which we eventually had in a Quick burger restaurant. They are a local French company that runs a MacDonalds esque burger chain. Not too bad, better for salads and they have a nice fish burger.

The next day we didn't really feel like doing much at all. We just planned to go out and get some groceries to stock up on for the week. While wandering around we thought we'd hang out in a park for a bit. Unfortunately all the parks had been locked up. We didn't think this was usual Saturday behaviour in Paris so when we spotted a caretaker in one of the parks, I asked why the park was closed. This went kinda along the lines of:

"Pardon monsieur, le parc est ferme?"

"Oui, tout est ferme aujourd'hui."

"Pourquoi monsieur?"

"Parce-que (something something something) trop vent."

... (me thinking) "Ah, vent. D'accord, merci monsieur."

So I got that it was too windy. Didn't understand most of the rest of that sentence, but the end bit was enough. So we had the picnic lunch we had bought on a bench just outside a park and then wandered round a bit more till we found a little supermarche.

The Sunday was rather interesting too, but I'll write about that later, and post pictures. I've been writing more job application emails at the moment, and I'm a bit out of time. I also have a hair cut appointment to get to. Tomorrow we are hoping to get to the Musee d'Orsay to see an exhibition of Cezanne and Pissarro. I've messed up a couple of our attempts (including today) so we have to make an extra effort tomorrow as the exhibition ends this week.

Still here and still ticking

Well everyone, we have successfully completed the move to our new flat. The place is quite nice actually, smaller than the previous place technically, but much better laid out so it actually feels roomier. We have a phone, but no internet, so I am posting from a late night internet cafe. I'll have to see if I can get something organised tomorrow for that.

I'm running out of time here, so I'll just make it a quick post. The French keyboard is making typing slower so I'll just finish off for now. A bientôt.

Moving again

For the second time in two months we are moving again. This time to something a bit less nice but a bit cheaper. Still very expensive as this is temporary accommodation in Paris but cheaper than where we are now. This will be the second month in Paris and if things don't work out we will more than likely move back to Australia. However we are still confident that something will work out. I have two good options at the moment, both being telephone type positions. One is for a start up company as a business to business salesman (not too sure about that one) and the other is a telephone interviewer for a survey and research company. I actually quite like the idea of the second one, so I really hope that I hear back favourably from them.

One big problem of the new flat though is that at the moment, it looks like the place doesn't have a phone. Not having internet access is fine, I was mostly expecting that when we first came. The fact that this place had ADSL thrown in was a nice surprise. However, without a phone, we can't get any kind of dialup internet and nor can we keep in contact with people by phone except by mobiles, which internationally is very expensive.

I've been told that the landlord may be able to get a phone put on for us for the month, so we'll see how that works out, otherwise the agent says we may be able to change to somewhere else. This flat isn't in an ideal place entirely, it's out in the 20th arrondesment, quite out the way. However it is right next to a park, which is useful, and is of course right on a metro line, as everywhere in Paris is. I'd rather not have to move again, but we need to be out of here tomorrow so we'll see how things go.

A localised Blog

As noted in this comment, my blog is now appearing with a French interface. So all the dates and other navigation texts are in a French format. I had noticed this myself but wasn't sure if it was just for me since I was connecting from France or if it was changed for everyone. I thought it might be because I changed my location in my profile to France. So Bec's comment has confirmed that, vraiment, il a changé pour tout le monde.

Something to fill the gap a bit...

Well, I'm not in the mood to write a whole history of our trip up here just now, but I thought that I might pop up a few pictures that I have snapped while here. I haven't really posted many pictures of Glasgow, but there seems to be something prompting me to do it here. What is it? Je ne sais pas!

The first image over on the right is of l'arc de triomphe with a rather patriotic French flag draped down the middle. This was quite an impressive sight and was up for the celebration of the fall of Germany and the end of WWII in Europe on the 8th of May.

This next one on the left is another monument adorned with flags pour le 8 Mai. This one is a gold statue of Jeanne d'Arc. As everyone should know who that is I won't go into an explanation. The statues and the buildings in general are quite fabulous. It is one of those places that you can just wander about having a couple of coffees and just appreciate the city.

The last picture I'll put up for now is the one at the bottom right. This is of a building that I didn't know much about before arriving in Paris. It's le Petit Palais. This is a beautiful old building that has been recently restored or cleaned or something and is just (re)opening as a museum. It really is a tremendously impressive frontage. Seeing things like this has really struck home the difference between seeing pictures of some things and seeing them for real. The size and grandeur of this building is rather lost when viewed as a photo. Even if you blew the picture up, it would just not be the same.

Anyway, it's getting late and I have other things to do on the web, like look for work and flats, so I'll leave it there and get back to it later. A bientôt tout le monde!

Something weird happened

Well something weird has happened on my blog. I had a bunch of posts about being in London and making the move to Paris, but they seem to have disappeared. I'm not too happy about it, but I can't do anything about it just now.

I'll try and run a catch up bunch of posts soon, but at the moment, Annmarie and I are looking for our next place to live. Hopefully it will not present too much of a problem. I'll try and catch up my posting then.