Category: London and Paris

Freedom of speech for the mute

Today I taught for the first time my other English conversation class. This class is larger than the first; twenty to the previous lot’s eleven. It was hard work to get them talking, and that’s all my boss at in the language department wants me to do! I knew that the students of this second group were broadly from science and computing courses so I opted in the first lesson to teach from an article on Google’s recent entry in to the Chinese Internet market. Before we worked on the article itself we had a good session generating useful vocabulary for all to use. My second preparatory item however, a discussion about freedom of speech, was not so successful. Questions such as “what do you think freedom of speech means” and “do you have the right to say what you want here in France” were all met with stony silence. I had to hide the smile on face. It did seem a little ironic that we were talking in essence about a country where there isn’t the right to freedom of speech, and there I had a bunch of students in a ‘free’ country who could have said anything for all I could have cared but instead exercised their right to say nothing. A case of freedom of speech for the mute. Still, things picked up with a vocabulary quiz at the end where students had to buzz in with animal noises. That old pedagogical chestnut!

Cookie Doog

In August I went for an ice cream with my grandmother at an ice-cream parlour oft frequented by us on trips to the seaside on France’s Atlantic coast. She was giving the order, so I asked her to order me a double cornet with vanilla and cookie-dough ice cream. Not certain what I meant by cookie-dough, I pointed to the little card above the box that gave its name. There was no French translation. She wouldn’t even venture trying to say cookie-dough with a French accent so I made the order myself sticking to the English pronunciation.
The ice cream itself was unmemorable, but the question of how to say cookie-dough in French stuck. Clearly the ice-cream parlour didn’t think there was a translation. I was reminded of this question when I went to see Indégènes at the cinema the other day. There again was cookie-dough ice cream. I had by now reached the conclusion that French for cookie-dough is in fact cookie-dough which then raised another question, how do you say it with a French accent? My grandmother clearly didn’t know and Mary sidestepped the issue by plumping for vanilla (boring).
According to my dictionary, dough is pronounced “d

This post refers to an event I took part in a couple of weeks ago and I have been meaning to write about it for some time. One afternoon Mary and I were walking past Place Gambetta in the 20eme when we were approached by a woman getting people to sign up for a peace protest in the following week. The protest coincided with the interational day of peace, I think. Anyway, what caught my eye was their plan to make an enormous CND sign using people holding flaming torches. I think that this kind of protest can attract a lot more meida attention than smaller activities and so can have more impact. This human CND sign was to be formed infront of the Eiffel Tower, so as to get a good photo shot from above. Mary couldn’t make it but I signed up there and then and bought my wax torch for the protest (the police wouldn’t let the protesters sell the torches at the event itself)

So later that week, I sauntered down to the Champs de Mars with my rather menacing enormous wax-covered batton. When I signed up I was given a number which corresponed to a position in the CND sign at which I would be standing. And sure enough, on the grass beneath the Eiffel tower I found my number written in flour in the glass. Not being a regular protester, I naively assumed that things would kick-off on time. Silly me. But over the next hour, the crowd started to gather. Pic-nicers enjoying a romantic glass of wine beneath the tower became unaware that they were slowly becoming encircled, trapped, overwhelmed by an enormous symbol of peace (I’m only kidding – everyone seemed quite friendly really). All of a sudden it was time to light the touch papers. From the ground it was hard to really make out the form of the symbol. There we stood for an hour while speeches and demands were called out. I only narrowly avoided setting light to the hair of my section commander. It’s amazing actally that no one’s hair did go up in flames. Then it was time to go home, satisfied that the world would surely take notice and get rid of all its nuclear weapons.

From the ground

From above

As far as food at institutions go, the grub at ENPC ain’t half bad. For the early morning caffine boost, elevenses and mid-afternoon pick-moi-ups there is the coffee bar situated in the full splendor of the atrium. Canny students know at precisely what time to grab the left-over croissants before they get put out at the end of the day. That just leaves lunch which is served in the cafeteria. There is a generous selection of hot and cold food not to mention the bulging desserts. Not only does it taste good, it is also subsidised, but instead of knocking ten percent off the cost of any purchases as they do at Imperial, they just knock 1.70 Euro off the bill. This reduction makes a meaty main course half the advertised price. But if you opt for the enormous bowl of salad from the salad bar costing only 1.50, when it comes to the check out my discounted meal has a negative price. That is, everytime I eat there, I earn money! All I need to do is eat 75,000 more lunches there and I will have paid off my entire student debt! Yum…

It’s one of those things about growing up. People start calling you Mister. For a long time it was just my bank or anyone asking me for money. It wasn’t until I started teaching maths in the states that I had to get used to the sound of Mr.Broadbent on a regular basis. You see, the trouble is it’s just not me, it’s my Dad, or even his father.

Since I have been at Imperial, things have been pretty quiet on the mister-stakes. Today however, I became Monsieur Broadbent when I stepped for the first time into the English conversation class that I have now started teaching at the University of Marne-la-Vallee. There are few things that I hate. Nuclear bombs and radishes. Apart from those the only other thing I really dislike is the sound of ‘Broadbent’ said in a French accent. There is no way you can twist Broadbent to make it sit comfortably on a French palette, and I have tried. So no sooner had I become Monsieur Broadbent did I quickly rebrand myself as ‘Oliver’. Original, I know but it just seems to sit well with me. My parents like it. If it wasn’t for all the trouble it would cause with French bureaurocracy, I would just ditch the Broadbent bit all together for the year. Just like Brittany did.

So with an oven installed in our ever-better equipped kitchen, I decided to invite a few of my new international chums over for dinner. We discovered that our modest dining room table normally used for sitting two to four people, can actually accomodate eight. I cooked up a tomato soup (1.5 kilos of tomatos for a euro!) and some pesto to go with. The guests came with offerings of cheese and a fine selection of wines (all ticked off of course on our gastronomic maps). Christna and Alex’s tortialla espagnol was the best I have ever had – suspiciously good in fact. It turns out that for a piece of coursework that had had to do on quality control processes, they investigated the factors that affect how good a tortilla tastes. (Fingers crossed that the secrets will be divulged).
With the meal over, another four people showed up taking the total up to twelve – a record for the moment – before we headed off to the local venue the Flesh D’Or to see a few bands. As we piled out of the club in the early hours, I was glad to only have a ten minute journey home. Some of the others living out near the campus had to wait until five in the morning to get the first train home.

On Sunday I had the chance to go to a “repas du quartier” – (neighbourhood meal). The deal is that it’s a meal somewhere in the locality, sometimes on tables in the streets, where everyone brings some food and shares it with whoever likes the look of it. Sunday’s repas took place in the local cultural centre, called “Confluences.” There our lentil salad and tzatziki were swapped for various pasta salads, some sizable hunks of cheese and some delicious brownies.

My description makes it sound a little like a battering stall – “I’ll give you a bit of French tart for some of your melons” but it is far from that. You stroll from table to table taking a pick at whatever you fancy. We got chatting to a woman with the most adorable little girl who kept getting chocolate moose on her nose. The mother had brought with her an entire roasted chicken wrapped in foil. It was just like having Sunday lunch with the neighbours.

The cultural centre used this opportunity to promote their programme for the year which included a season of plays, films, something else that a very passionate man spoke about at some length but which I failed to catch a word of, and photography exhibits. At the moment the centre is displaying a set of photos taken by a group of African photographers who were invited last year to come to the Twentieth and photograph the area.

One of the sets of photos was taken by a lady who set about approaching twenty different households and cooking them a meal. In each case a photo was taken, some at the table, some in the kitchen, all very warm photos, and almost all featuring the brightly coloured casserole dish that she brought the food in. Later, when clearing up our plates, we spotted that same casserole dish on a table. The photographer had long gone, her visa having expired soon after the final photo was taken, but the dish that she had used as her prop remains along with her pictures.

This photo display was one stop on a trail of photo exhibits around the 20eme arrondissement called “Nouvelles Africanaines”. We took a map and checked out some of the others. The image below shows a wall of photos donated by residents of a local hotel where the majority of the rooms were filled with families who lived there permanently.

I am really glad to have found out what’s on at Confluence and I am really looking forward to going back there soon to see a play next week.

I saw this ad last spring but it still makes me laugh!

Hooray – I have arrived. Last night, I hauled up the steps the final suitcase into the flat that will be Mary and mine for at least the next year. And unlike my last few visits to Paris, I won’t be getting on a Eurostar back to London at stupid o’clock tomorrow morning, nor the day after (not in fact until the end of October, and that will be an evening train). It feels great to be able to settle in.

First thing this morning I went out to the university campus because I have been given the opportunity, through a friend of Mary, to teach some conversational English classes. The ideal thing about this part-time work is that it would take place in the building next door to where I will be studying. To get out to the campus, it is a five minute ride on the metro down to Nation and then twenty minutes on the RER out to Noisy-Champs on the outskirts of Paris.

The RER is Paris’ answer to London’s CrossRail – or should that be the other way round since the Parisians designed and built theirs over twenty years ago. The RER station at Nation is an impressive feat of geotechnical engineering. Deep below ground-level, the RER’s platforms are in an enormous tunnel, 30m in diameter and several hundred meters long. The station has some amusing pseudo-technical features that someone who has just missed their train might happen to notice. For example, it looks like the train drivers look at computer monitors to see when people have finished boarding the train, but on closer inspection these devices are in fact a mirrors mounted in the shells of a computer screens. Hmmmm. That along with hi-tec looking train indicator board that actually has all the possible destinations permanently displayed, with a light bulb that lights up next to the destination for the next train, and the ultra-modern-ultra-dated vacuum formed plastic benches along the walls, lead me to conclude that the designers could see the future, they just didn’t yet have the technology to implement it. But enough about stations…

The univeristy campus is called the Cite Descartes. It houses numerous ‘Grandes Ecoles’ as well as the university of Marne La Vallee. The Cite is an architectural playground and I am looking forward to taking a closer look at some of the buildings. After some wondering, I found the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chausses. It is an attractive steel and glass building with an impressive and inviting attrium in the middle. It is in stark contrast to some of the buildings of the University of Marne la Vallee and a reminder of the extra funding that the Grandes Ecoles enjoy over France’s regular universities.

The interview went well, and depending on my timetable at ENPC I will be teaching a few hours of conversational English a week. Some of the teaching will be for science and maths students and there will be also be classes for students studying urbanism. I think it is all going to be quite interesting and I look forward to starting. It will be a good intro to the world of work in France.

This afternoon we went to an exhibiton called “Residencity”, a history of the housing that has been built around the edge of Paris. The exhibition itself was in Montreuil, a suburb in the east of the city, in a beautiful building about twenty minutes from the end of the metro. We were in the heart of the banlieu, a catch all term for anything outside the Periferique ringroad and synonymous with the riots of last year, or so the news would have you believe. This bit didn’t look all that different from the urban landscape you would find around Harrow. I get the impression that there are many who would think of this as a no go area. Seemed quite nice to me!

“Residencity” charts the housing projects that were built to provide accomodation for Paris’ worker population, which swelled at the end of the nineteenth century. Early schemes to clear slums envisaged replacing them with low level blocks of houses among trees remincisent of Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities. These early sketches look surprisingly modern but their age is betrayed by the clothes that the people in them are wearing. Designs for buildings in the 20s are not all the dissimilar to the building that we live in. By the 50s, the developments had taken on the enormous sprawling dimensions typical of some of Paris’ grimmest housing projects. It was all to clear from the posters and protest slogans displayed opposite these designs that slum-dwellers had little choice as to where in these monster developments they were to be housed.

One cartoon particularly made me laugh. It showed the aspirations for housing of three different classes. For the working class, heaven was a detached house with a garden, purgatory the new edge of town developments, and hell, the slums. For the middle class, heaven was a modern apartment block, purgatory a detached house with a garden, and hell, the new edge of town developments. And finally for the upper classes, heaven was a chateau, purgatory was a modern apartment block and hell was a detached house with a garden. Well, it made me smile (Note to self: they do say that a picture says a thousand words – a photo might have been good here)

Some archtiects of these developments were more creative than others. Blue sky thinking is evident in the conception of this quite unbelievable housing development – Les Tour Nuages: (click to see image in full)

My thanks go to Henry Bardsley, lead structural engineer on the Pont Simone de Beauvoir, for putting me right on some of the points I made in my article on this bridge earlier on in the week. Since it is not the purpose of this blog to disinform, I will bring these corrections to the fore.

For starters, while the central vesica of the bridge was indeed built on the banks of the Rhine, it was constructed on the west bank and not in Germany but in France. Secondly, the Seine is not tidal in Paris and as such there was no need to wait for low tide in order to fit the barges carrying this central section of the bridge under the low arches of the Pont des Invalides. That is not to say that passing under the arches didn’t present the engineers with any problems. Indeed, Henry writes that ballast was used to not only to balance the barges but also to change their height in the water so that they could carry their cargo high over the seas and low under Paris’s other bridges. The Pont des Invalides was successfully passed but not without a grazing the river bed!

Once again, my thanks to Henry for setting the picture straight!