Food, food and more food

Nick and Pauli came to visit me over the weekend. For those who don't know them they are friends of mine from sydney that I haven't seen for nearly a year and a half. They have been traveling around South America and are now living in Leeds. We had a great weekend eating and drinking and sightseeing (mostly eating and drinking).

They arrived on thursday and first night we had dinner at a cool cafe, not too far from my place. On friday while I went to work Nick and Pauli went to the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe. Friday night we went out to dinner in the latin quarter where they could try snails and duck orange, and I could have my usual, chevre chaud (warm goats cheese salad) and cheese fondue. Afterwards we sat on Pont des Arts and drank a bottle of wine, before coming home and drinking a couple more, and chatting for most of the night.

Saturday (when we finally got out of bed around lunchtime) I went to the patisserie and bought a tonne of pastries for breakfast and afterwards we went to Sacre Coeur and wandered around Montmartre and Pigale (the red light district where Moulin Rouge is). On the way home we stopped at the supermarket and bought heaps of kinds of cheese and some vege tarts for dinner and decided to buy 5 bottles of wine, as the shops are not open on sundays here and the plan was to save 2 for the next day. We went back to my place and gorged ourselves and managed to drink all 5 bottles of wine plus an extra one I had at home. Pauli passed out sometime after 3, Nick and I went to bed when the sun came up.

Sunday was a bit of a challenge but Nick and Pauli managed to make it to the Louvre by mid afternoon and I met them there a few hours later (I didn't want to go again). Afterwards we took a boat ride down the Seine, and went to a restaurant in the Marais for dinner. The food was fabulous, the tomato tart looked so good I wished I had taken a photo of it, and it tasted even better. Nick and Pauli both raved about the steak tartare and the creme brule was the best I have tasted so far and was huge! We ate so much food we could hardly walk back to the metro!

Sadly they left this morning, but promised to try to return again soon and I am hoping to go visit them in the UK.

As promised here is a link to some photos from the weekend.

Nick and Pauli in Paris

Aug 28, 2006 - 23 Photos

The Outsider

I have been feeling a little homesick and strange lately, and feeling more like a foreigner than ever. I think it is partly because now that I am working this is no longer an adventure - this is my life now. So I have been thinking alot about home, and about my life here and what I wanted it to be, and what it actually is turning out to be. It is also partly to do with the culture shock, which I have felt a lot more strongly at work than I did before. Even though I have several french friends here, all of them have lived overseas before and speak some english, but the people I work with are all very french and very different to what I am used to.

I am also finding the language barrier more and more frustrating. I guess now that I am working and living a "normal" life here I feel like I should be living a more french life, I should be able to speak better and have more french friends. I still find it very difficult to make friends if I speak only french, I don't feel like I am myself, I am not really able to be funny or subtle, and I speak slowly and often can't find the right word to describe what I want to say.

The weather has also been terrible here, it has rained almost every day for 2 weeks, and rarely gets above 20 degrees. Also Paris in august is very strange. All the french leave Paris and, apart from the centre and the very touristy areas, the entire city feels empty. Alot of the shops, bars and restuarants are closed for the whole of august. All my local boulangeries are shut and I have to buy bread from the supermarket!

But I am actually feeling alot better about it all now. On friday night I went out for a couple of drinks with Alison to an Irish bar in latin quatier. We ran into some people we knew and ended up staying until until 7am. It was the first really big night out I had had for ages and even though it was very unfrench I met alot of cool people and had a fun night.

Yesterday (afternoon, after we dragged ourselves out of bed) Alison and I decided I would feel better if I got to know some other parts of Paris so she took me to some areas I hadn't been to before, which were just gorgeous. We spent hours walking around the city and stopped at a bar for an apertif and dinner and then walked all the way back to the centre of town. Everything looked amazing, all the gorgeous buildings, the tree lined streets, and little shops and bars and I remembered why I came here.

Today I went to the musée d'art modern again (my favorite art gallery in Paris) to see a temporary exhibition (a retrospective of Dan Flavin) which was amazing. Afterwards I went for a walk around the 17th arrondissement which I don't know very well but is really french and quite cool and I stumbled across a really nice park with a lake full of ducks and black swans. Later I went to Cour Saint-Emilion, a very cute little stoney village like area with lots of trendy bars, not far from where I live.

So now I am loving Paris all over again, and am feeling alot better about living here. So in honour of my new french life, I am sitting here at my computer drinking a glass of bordeaux and eating warm goats cheese, and feeling quite french.

Fontainebleau

I don't really have any news for you, but last sunday I went to Fountainebleau, which is a gorgeous forest about an hour from Paris, famous for it's amazing boulders and sandy soil. It was absolutely gorgeous so I wanted to put a few pictures up.







More news soon.

Learning Curve

The first week at a new job is always a bit awkward. For me it usually involves reading lots of documentation, attending meetings about things I don't understand, having no idea what any of the processes are and inevitably forgetting everyone's name. So my first few days at work have been pretty much the same but on top of all that I have been struggling a little with french work culture and the language.

I have spent most of the last few days with a constant feeling of uncertainty, never really sure what I am supposed to be doing. I have no idea when to use "tu" and when to use "vous", when to use someone's first name and when to use "monsieur", when to kiss or when to shake hands (alot more often than you would think), whether to use salut, au revoir, bonsoir or ciao (which are not as interchangable as I had thought), and a million other little things that i never think twice about at home which are just different here. But in spite of all this I actually quite like it so far. I wanted to have a genuine french experience while I was here and despite that fact that I was told the company had a very "international" amosphere, I am the only person who is not french, so it is very french. And although I feel a bit uncomfortable everyone has been very nice to me, either repeating instructions or explaining them in english when it is clear I have no idea what is going on.

Two other people started the same time as me so we are doing the training together. The documentation is all in english but the training sessions have been mostly in french. I am actually surprised how much I do understand and my boss is very nice (and very funny) and has gotten to know that blank look on my face when I am not following and tries to explain in english or in easier french (he has a tendancy to use alot of slang).

So far I quite like the french attitude to work. It seems it is not necessary to get to work until 9.30-10.00am and, in true french style, lunch involves going to one of the nearby restaurants for 1.5 hours for a two course meal followed by coffee (and accompanied by several cigarettes). Everyone tends to go to lunch in groups, which is nice, and everyone has tried to include me in the conversation, although so far the main topics of conversation have been the relative advantages and draw backs of C++ over Java, and under what circumstances it is or is not morally appropriate to have a strike as opposed to a demonstration, both of which were a little heavy going for my limited vocab.

But despite all this we still do have to do our 40 hours a week, which means that everyone stays in office quite late. Which isn't too bad as everything here is shifted an hour or more later anyway, everyone eats dinner late and stays out late, shops are open until 8pm, and, at the moment at least, it is light until 10pm. Also to compensate for the arduous task of working a forty hour week we get 2 days off per month (on top of our 25 days annual leave). I think I am going to like this system.

Working Girl

I have a programming job! I am going to be working for a telecommunications company here doing similar sort of work to the stuff I was doing in sydney before I left. I start tomorrow! It all happened very quickly. I had an interview on friday and another yesterday and they offered me the job. So I spent yesterday and this morning running around getting all the paper work sorted out. This time I managed to get my working papers sorted out without any dramas and I am all ready to start tomorrow.

I am excited but I am a bit nervous. Especially about working in french. My interview was in french and I was pretty impressed with myself that I managed to get through the whole thing only resorting to english on one occasion. Pretty much everyone speaks some english so if I get stuck I can speak in english but I will be using french most of the time i think. Which is great, but I think it will be very exhausting at first and I am a bit nervous about not understanding instructions properly and doing something completely wrong. I am also a little worried about the differences in office culture and how I should behave and just basically not really understanding the system at all. But everyone seems very nice and not too formal (I get to wear casual clothes to work!) so I am sure it will be fine, it is just first day nerves mangnified a bit by the whole language/culture thing.

The other exciting news is that if everything goes well they said they will sponsor me, which means I will probably be here for 2 years at least. I have been thinking lately that one year wasn't enough. I have been here 3 months already which is 1/4 of my time here and I don't feel like I have done 1/4 of the things I want to. So I had been hopeing to find a job who would sponsor me. But now that I have agreed to it I am feeling a little homesick and missing you all and thinking how long it will be until I am back there. But I know it is only because everything is happening so fast.