Paris, a few random thoughts

• I've now done this teaching gig five times since the beginning of the year. Paris was, by far, the most fun.
  

  I think that's largely from choosing to stay in the city and commute "out" to the office. Our offices are all out in the sticks where real estate is cheaper. Of the other locations, only in Amsterdam would it have been possible to do the reverse commute. The Amsterdam office is the only other one with easy access to cheap, fast transportation.
  

  The French desire to start the class later also helped. That meant I didn't have to be up and coherent as early so I felt able to stay out late.
  

  And finally, there's just so much to see in Paris! Even just being a "tourist" out on my own I never felt at a loss for finding somewhere interesting to go.




• I've been told that French people hate Americans and will be rude just for fun.
  

  I certainly didn't find that to be the case. I took three years of French in high school and college but that was all more than 30 years ago. It gave me enough to be more or less read a menu and to attempt to speak in their language. That attempt made all the difference. I think that being rude causes rudeness. American waiters don't, in general speak any foreign languages. Well, ok, in Texas they very well might speak Spanish. But tourists in other countries seem to demand that the locals must be able to speak and understand the tourists language. Or if not that, English.
  

  My last night in Paris, I stopped in to a sidewalk cafe at about 1am for a glass of red wine. After I had ordered some German (I think) tourists plopped themselves down and bellowed across the cafe "Ve vant some trinks". The waiter, who had just been able to understand my mangled French and English without any problem suddenly had immense difficulties understanding their needs. It was pretty comical. I got my wine in good time and had been sipping it for quite a while before their "trinks" arrived.




• Nothing in Paris happens in a hurry.
  

  Having dinner at a cafe or restaurant takes two hours. It just does. The pace is slower. Nobody is in a rush to get served, get their food, and leave. The restaurant isn't in a hurry to turn the table and get someone else in. Everyone lingers over a pre-meal aperitif and an after dinner coffee. You can sit in a sidewalk cafe and nurse a drink and talk for hours. Once you adapt to the pace, it's great! Until you adapt to it, it's crazy-making. I'm used to the "protocol" of American restaurants where you're grudgingly allowed to sit at the table only if you're generating enough revenue for the restaurant.
  

• Paris is more crowded and busy than I expected.
  

  People may not be in a hurry in general but there are a lot of them. The trains at normal commute times were packed to the gills. And there were hundreds of people passing thru the square near the hotel even quite late at night. But everyone was unfailingly polite. Nobody pushed or was rude on the trains. The drivers seemed to mostly take lane markers in traffic circles as a suggestion but then all wove together. I hardly ever heard a horn honk. And bicycles, skaters, motorbikes all zipped down the narrow streets with no problems. The most surprising thing was that drivers actually yielded to pedestrians in crosswalks even when the pedestrians were crossing against the signals.