Postcards From Paris

On the way to meet a friend from high school who was in Paris for several days, I stopped for a chocolate croissant: hot from the oven, with the flaky dough and melted nutella.

I got on the metro and met her at a café on the edge of the Seine, across from the Louvre (a block down where I lived last fall with a host family). We had croque-monsieurs (toasted ham and cheese) and finished with espressos. I showed her where I had lived and we crossed the bridge Pont du Carousel towards the Louvre, my favorite place in Paris.

From the bridge, you can see the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, City Hall, Notre Dame, the Seine, the apartment of former President Jacques Chirac — and my old door.

We descended the escalator under the glass pyramid of the Louvre. This museum is so big, I have visited many, many times and still have not seen everything.

Of course, we saw the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo, but one of the most interesting parts to me is in the basement.

There, you can walk around the original foundation of the first fortress built in the 12th century where the Louvre stands now. In an adjacent room is the history of the Louvre, including models of the development of the enormous architectural masterpiece we know today.

Leaving the Louvre, I stopped at a grocery store on the way to another Haverford friend’s apartment. We started the meal with appetizers and aperitifs, followed by moules (muscles) and pasta, and topped it off with French tarts and homemade cookies. French wine accompanied it all.

After relaxing for a little bit, we made our way to the Eiffel Tower. We camped out on the Champ de Mars, the lawn leading out from the tower, amid droves of picnickers who flock to the park with blankets and baskets on nice nights like this one.

La Tour is awesome at night, completely illuminated, and for five minutes every hour on the hour, the tower sparkles with 20,000 lights. We opened up several cheeses** and some ham and took advantage of the amazing atmosphere.

Around 11:30 p.m., we got in line to buy tickets for the 700-step climb up to the second level. Any higher, you must go by elevator.

I had not been up in the tower at night before, and it was breathtaking.

We had the good fortune to be there at midnight when the sparkling began again. The light was like rain falling, shooting down around us. We even signed our name on a billboard on the second level, taking our cue from the thousands of names already left there.

The city of lights always lives up to its name.

**Grant’s top 5: Roquefort (blue cheese), Chevre (goat), Camembert, Comté (gruyère), Beaufort

Re-posted with permission from Community News. Originally posted Aug 13, 2009. View the original post on Communitypub.com

Sunday, July 25 was the final day of le Tour de France. As always, it ended in Paris on the Champs-Elysées. I have never been that interested in bike racing, but I followed it in the office with the sports editors who always have the television on, and by the end, I was really excited to see the last stage in person.

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The weekend also brought a visit of a good friend’s parents, who, completely unaware of the race, booked a hotel right on the biker’s route.

On the way to meet them, I squeezed through the masses already lining the road in anticipation of the Peloton (pack of bikers). People were clad in their team’s or country’s colors and even some in full biking gear, waving flags and banners.

The doorman directed us to a designated room where hotel guests could watch the race from the second floor: Quelle Chance!

The last day’s stage started in Montereau-Fault-Yonne, 60 miles south-east of Paris. Before they arrived, there was a huge parade featuring advertisers and sponsors – from a sausage company to laundry detergent. Even the national police were on display.

We had the best view in the city: no one in front to block us and we could see everything from the balcony. It became our own little club box too, where we could cool off in the shade on a nice couch and watch the race on the flat screen.

As they finally rounded the corner onto our street, the lane erupted with fans cheering and making every noise imaginable. I had been warned, but hadn’t prepared my camera trigger finger and so wasn’t fast enough to get a picture of the first couple riders.

Fortunately, they circled Paris eight times, so the next time I was ready.

Amid fans yelling, there was Lance Armstrong and Alberto Contador (Lance’s teammate and soon-to-be tour victor). It’s amazing how fast they were going — you can’t tell from watching the television. And even though he didn’t win, Lance still came in third, pretty good for someone two months shy of 38.

It was so great to see the race in person.

Re-posted with permission from Community News. Originally posted Aug 6, 2009. View the original post on Communitypub.com

Last Thursday morning, I left Paris for Avignon, a small, walled city in the south of France, where I spent six weeks last summer.

It is also where, when France divided from the Vatican, seven popes lived throughout the 1300s, having a big Palace built for them. In July, Avignon attracts thousands of tourists and performers for the three-week Festival d’Avignon: one of the world’s biggest theater festivals.

I can’t get enough of the festival atmosphere. There are people everywhere, overtaking the streets (ignoring cars) and the public squares. There are actors promoting their plays and street artists entertaining with caricatures, watercolors, dancing and singing.

On Friday, I saw two spectacles: The Doctor Despite Himself — Molière’s satirical style is always good for several laughs — and a group of us saw a circus on the island in the middle of the Rhone River. The circus was awesome — it is a mix between a regular circus and Cirque du Soleil, in that it had humor and clowns, but also a story, interesting lighting, and a very creative, original production.

Later that night, we loaded up at an “épicerie,” a small convenience store, and headed for Place du Palais, the courtyard in front of the big palace. I sat in same place last summer, and like then, I sat in a surreal haze, thinking to myself, “I’m sitting here, in France, speaking French with my friends and anyone else, watching artisans and dancers perform for tips, the whole time dwarfed by the breathtaking 700-year-old palace of the popes.”

The next night, my host family took me to their sister-in-law’s house in Aix-en-Provence and as it turned out, I wasn’t the only American. Aix is a hot spot for studying Law and a more up-scale and bourgeoisie than Avignon, with bigger houses and immaculate gardens. Avignon does it for me though. It amazes me how the festival can transform a small, quiet town into a melee of constant commotion.

More later,
Grant

Re-posted with permission from Community News. Originally posted Jul 17, 2009. View the original post on Communitypub.com

While at Haverford this past Spring I mentioned to one of my French friends who was going to be in Paris this summer that I wanted to go to a soccer game…I mean football.

When we both arrived in France, she invited me to the National Rugby Championship, saying that the soccer season was pretty much over, and that rugby was probably a better idea if I felt like staying healthy (the soccer games get pretty rowdy).

We met at the Gare de Lyon train station and took the regional rail to le Stade de France, built in 1998 for the World Cup. Seating 80,000, it was surprisingly full. We found our seats high up among the sea of blue and yellow of the Clermont team. Amazingly, just before the start, like a switch was turned, the stadium hushed for a moment of silence.

But that was the last quiet of the night — from then on it was no holds barred. There were eruptions from the stands, replete with flags and noise-makers, cheering and whistles. Sporadically, the fans would cheer “Un Essai (roughly equivalent to a “touchdown” in English), or an anthem that my French wasn’t quite refined enough to understand.

The Perpignan team pulled ahead until it was clear they would win, and when the final whistle sounded, their fans went nuts. Several flares ignited in the crowd. One hit a wall in front of the first row and caught on fire. Still, fans manically celebrated for 20 minutes, jumping up and down and tackling each other.

Once awarded “le bouclier,” the championship plaque with a large silver shield on it, they took it around the front row letting their fans touch it. Then, the players left the field and they announced there would be fireworks. After they were over, we descended into the masses on the streets, where it seemed that all 80,000 fans were heading in the same direction to take the trains back in to Paris.

Les Français (French) who we were with laughed while showing us the difference between football and rugby fans: after soccer games there are riots, but these fans were congratulating each other, with “Bravo,” or “Felicitations.”

I was caught up in the festive mood, and happy to be a part of this unique piece of European culture.

More later,
Grant

Re-posted with permission from Community News. Originally posted Jun 30, 2009. View the original post on Communitypub.com

Grant Firestone '10 (second from right) at a recent rugby game with friends (from left) Audrey Saul '12 (French), Sarah Gibson '12 (American) and Thibault Foillard(French).

I had forgotten what being in Paris was like. All of the history is overwhelming. It’s not quite as shocking as when I was here for the first time last fall (when I studied in Avignon and Paris for six months and participated in the Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Conference), but I still am amazed when I walk by the Eiffel Tower, or look down the Champs-Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe. It makes me realize how new America is when the building I’m staying in for the summer is as old, if not older than my country.

I’m starting to get the swing of things at work. Towards the end of last week, I was doing most of the tasks on my own; including the intern training me only when I had a problem (like when the copier jammed three minutes before the editors’ meeting).  I made it through the meeting, and properly directed the calls, and sent the front page off to New York—all on time!

Here’s just one vignette:

During my daily rounds, I stopped to watch the layout editor as she was putting the stories onto the pages. Her hands were flying around between the keyboard and the mouse, typing in shortcuts to cut, copy, paste, re-size, and move stories around the page. It seemed to me like a really difficult and important game of Tetris: seamlessly piecing together all of these blocks of different sizes and shapes to create the page.

“Here, see this?” she explained, “I’m going to switch these two stories, and make a medium headline… and there, I’m able to add a hundred more words to that story.” I can’t imagine how a paper was put together before computers. News flies around the world through the internet, from reporter, to journalist, to editor in Paris, the back again, and ends up at the layout desk where the program used does everything from collecting the stories, to remapping the paper, to alerting the user if the photograph has not been checked for legal usage.

More to come.

– Grant

Re-posted with permission from Community News. Originally posted Jun 23, 2009. View the original post on Communitypub.com

Bonjour!

I made it here safely, despite back pain inflicted by the knees of the obnoxious girl behind me on the plane, and disturbing news of the lost Air France flight from Brazil.

The first day, after setting up my room and connecting to the WiFi (“WeeFee”), I went out to revisit some of my old stomping grounds. When I got home last December after seven months in France, I kept saying Pardon or Bonjour, and now I have to start doing it again. I must get back into living in a different language.

The next day, I went to the International Herald Tribune where I will intern for three months. Minutes into my first day, we printed out the skeds for the editors’ front page meeting and I got to listen in as the editors discussed the news of the day, debated about what should be on the front page and why, and looked through the photograph choices.

I’m learning the newsroom lingo and what it takes to print a newspaper. It’s been interesting: the IHT recently went through a redesign, so there are many new ideas flying around about styles and presentations that will appeal to readers. There is so much thought that goes into the paper’s presentation and information that comes from the layout that I had never thought about before.

After work, I met up with friends for a drink, then got home to make dinner at midnight—the metro takes longer than you think.

The third day, I went to the bank to set up my French bank account – necessary to get paid and to get my Tickets Restos (meal tickets). Everyone that works in France gets them. They can be used at restaurants, grocery stores, and sometimes for liquor, and they help anyone living on a student’s budget survive a little better.

At work, I picked up the paper I had worked on the night before. After having directed all the pieces through the Communication Center (intern desk), it was really fun to see the finished product.

My favorite part of the day is the editor’s meeting. Every day there is something new. Friday (Dieu merci c’est Vendredi = TGIF) there was too much news that deserved to be on the front page, including Obama visiting Buchenwald in Germany and coming to France for the D-Day ceremony; tension in Israel over building new settlements; and Britain’s political turmoil.

More next week.

- Grant Firestone ’10

Re-posted with permission from Community News. Originally posted Jun 11, 2009 @ 02:23 PM. View the original post on Communitypub.com