Mobile Moments: Celebrity Sightings!

So I was on my way to tutoring today (in the rather ritzy district around the Arc de Triomphe) when I ran into a few paparazzi and a small group of fans waiting around outside a hotel. As it turns out, Jennifer Lopez is in Paris to promote her new album, and a after about a 2 minute wait I was able to snag a cellphone photos of my first up-close encounter with a celebrity.

The first photo got an odd fisheye effect going from the motion of my hand and the many people encroaching on J-Lo's personal space:
The second shows how close I really was:

I could have been even closer, but since she was already being rushed along by some pretty serious-looking security guards I decided to let the more dedicated fans (who brought flowers in exchange for autographs and pictures with the "bomba latina") move in. One strung-out guy with a CD looked as though he had been waiting for quite some time. To her credit, though, J-Lo was a real sweetie and made a few moments for her fans even as she was quickly ushered, with her entourage, into a limo and off to her next event.

Rue Dénoyez

Yesterday was the 9th annual festival of Rue Dénoyez, a bohemian, celebration-of-graffiti pedestrian street just down from métro Belleville, in the heart of the gritty and diverse 20th arrondissement. A longtime admirer of this street, I was nonetheless surprised to hear that its quartier had a day dedicated to it, and I was pleased that we chanced along at the right moment. To celebrate, we had $4.50 mojitos at one of the pop-culture découpage tables on the outdoor terrasse at Bar aux Folies. The awning sheltered us from the light rain and afforded a great view of the dynamic street...

...and of the free reggae concert (not pictured is the transsexual gyrating enthusiastically in his afro, hoop earrings and miniskirt).
All in all a great corner of alternative Paris, worthy of celebration.

Everyone who should be here is here

Now that I'm counting down the days until my imminent departure I've been trying to live my Parisian existence to the fullest (and I've got the extra pounds in macarons, pastries and café crème to prove it). However, this being a three-day weekend in France (for Pentecost of course--although avidly atheist, the French will never give up their Catholic holidays), and me being a fidèle, tourist-snubbing Parisian, I just had to escape the city.

And that is how this morning we found ourselves all dolled up in a train packed full of well-dressed people, headed towards Chantilly. A small town just north of Paris, Chantilly is known for two things: its crème Chantilly (whipped cream--it claims to be the birthplace of this foamy delicacy), and its horses. While I won't pretend that I didn't indulge in the first regional specialty, it was the latter--more specifically, the annual Prix de Diane Longines horse race--that was the draw on this particular day. The energy in the standing-room only train on the way there was almost palpable, with men perspiring in their pinstriped summer suits and women jousting with ornate hats, battling for head space.

The town's love of horses was evident from the moment we stepped off the train and saw a street sign:
We arrived a few hours before the first race, which gave us a good amount of time to grab some lunch (we turned down the pre-packed picnic-complete-with-champagne-in-a-collector-hatbox kits for a more humble and affordable ham sandwhich) and check out the scenery. Feeling snazzy, we strolled the 'red carpet' to admire the many designer horse sculptures that had been custom made for the event, watched a free concert by a Regina Spektor-esque French artist and splurged on a rather extravagant ice cream smothered in the town's trademark cream.

By far my favorite activity of the day was hat-watching. As a fan of My Fair Lady, I already knew about the tradition of wearing ridiculous headwear to horse races, but nothing could have prepared me for the scope and variety (and age range! it started at about age 4 for the children of posh parents).

Some of the more ridiculous hats of the day:
Men were not entirely excluded, either, although their options showed much less imagination. Here's a shot of the rich old man viewing box, which guarded to protect them and their brandy from the common riff-raff. I wondered if they had a top hats only dress-code:
A few younger women, rocking the black and white look:
Finally, it was time to make our way over to the track to figure out how odds and betting worked. Here's me on the track before the first race, rocking my own (slightly less fancy) hat:And when all the bets were laid and the spectators in place, they were off! Here's a shot from the first race--see the horses?
To my dismay, my tactic of picking horses by fun name (Invincible Viking! Andromeda!) or by the look of their jockey's jersey turned out to be a poor strategy, and I lost every single one of the 2 euro bets I placed. Tom managed to win twice--once on a horse to "place" and once on a horse to "win," meaning that our collective gains outweighed our collective losses by about 8 euros--enough for a glass of wine each in a bar on our way home.

wishing upon an étoile

I'm home really late tonight, so I'll keep today's post short and sweet with a few shots from atop what is probably Paris' most famous landmark after the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre Pyramid--the Arc de Triomphe. It sits, glorified, in the middle of a Haussmanian feat of architecture--the Charles de Gaulle Etoile ('star')--so named because it has Grands Boulevards radiating away from it in all directions like victorious urbanized beams.

Voici its most famous boulevard, the Champs-Elysées (which forms an axis through Place de la Concorde and the Jardin de Tuileries to end at the Louvre pyramid. Neat, huh?)
And here we have La Défense, or as I call it, the "future". After the quaint, cobbled, iron-balconied, 6 floor-high city of Paris, this suburb on its Northwest corner looks like something out of a Sci-Fi movie.
And finally, the obligatory Eiffel tower shot.

Arab-Paris intersections

In addition to working, tutoring and being a rather pathetic blogger, I have spent the last year taking Arabic courses in Paris. They're a win-win situation, really. They're paid for by my job, they entitle me to the student visa that has kept me in the country, and they have helped me retain/cement the snatches of Arabic that I learned during the summer in Tunisia that originally started me blogging. They've also provided me with enough Arabic to slowly sound-out graffiti or to strike up conversations with the many North Africans working in cafés or markets around the city--to their obvious surprise and delight. You can just see them thinking 'aww, look at that cute little white American girl speaking Ghetto Shakespeare. (The main problem with learning Arabic is that the language is completely different in each country that speaks it, so as a student you have the option of either learning an extremely geographically-specific dialect, which makes you sound like you're speaking 'hood slang, or the archaic, never-spoken but widely-understood literary Arabic, which makes you sound like you've time traveled from the Shakespearean age. I have very limited bits of both, which must make it all the more bizarre.)

I take my classes at the beautiful Institut du Monde Arabe (Arab World Institute), right beside the Seine in the fifth arrondissement. The facade of the building, which was designed by Jean Nouvel in the 80s, is essentially one huge window. They recently opened an adjacent gallery with equally (if not quite coordinating) intriguing architecture, with its shiny white curves making it either look like a new Mac product or a spacey, 3D interpretation of a Möbius strip.

To enter, you have to pass through a walkway traversing giant granite slabs. You can sort of see them in the picture above, but this photo gives a better sense of the experience:
Back when the construction on the new gallery was still in progress, there was this really cool fence around it to separate it from the walkway. Although it was, underneath it all, just your typical corrugated metal construction fence, they decorated it with Islamic artifacts of various colors, taking advantage of the corrugated curves to paint in such a way that the fractured images you see from straight on became solid pictures when viewed at an angle.
Voilà! Cool, huh?
The glass of the facade is covered by a series of metal plates in octagonal patterns traditional to Islamic art, which you can see more clearly from the inside......and each plate actually functions as a small aperture, to let in more or less light based on the weather, time and season.
The café at the top of the building is a great place to catch a view of the river, the two islands and even the Notre Dame cathedral in the distance. All in all, an architectural beauty and a great cultural resource (not to mention a necessary one, in a city where race riots are very recent history, and 7-11-esque corner stores are referred to unabashedly as "l'Arab du coin", or "the Arab of the neighborhood").
Moving on, here are a few shots of the Grande Mosquée, or Paris Mosque, which is further south in the 5th arrondissement, closer to the border of the 13th and the student haunts on Rue Mouffetard. Here's a view from the inner courtyard.
And now of the garden, with a clearer shot of the minaret:
As with most Mosques, the beauty is all in the detail: the carvings, the tiles, the religious calligraphy threaded throughout--all as intricate as possible to best represent the complexity of life and of the Infinite (the closest Muslims come to depicting God).
Close-up:
The same styles of designs are used to decorate the mosque's two adjoining facilities, which unlike the mosque are open to the general, non-Muslim public: a hammam (or Turkish bathhouse) and a Moroccan-style tea house with a verdant terrace outside and room upon labyrinthine room of low tables, tiled walls and tapestries. I highly recommend stopping in for a tea and pastry (2 euros each) if you ever find yourself in the area.
And finally, to make this post a little more politically relevant, a few posters I've seen in the metro recently. The first, from the Tunisian tourism board, trying desperately to tempt rude and nude (but wealthy!) French sunbathers back to their post-revolution beaches with an ironic juxtaposition of said sunbather and the text "it seem as though in Tunisia, the tension has reached its peak":
And a different reference to North Africa, this time as inspiration for a Leftist party: (Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria...It's the same there as it is here, act now for a citizen's revolution!)

Carna-huh?

I love parades. They're such a vibrant celebration of urban life--streets are closed off to cars and reserved for pedestrians, an odd mix of people gather in wait, there is music, bright colors, costumes, vendors hawking cheap crap to the crowds, and usually, usually, there's some sort of culturally significant aspect--you know, gay rights, Chinese new year, Thanksgiving...

...and then there was the Paris Carnevale parade.

As I understand it, Carnevale is a festival loosely based on getting all the celebration out of your system before lent, so it's already a bit vague, but at least other countries seem to have done a better job of giving it some sort of defining theme. Italy goes for a class-obscuring obsession with ornate masks, New Orleans goes for the three Bs (beads, blues, and boobs), and Brazil goes for, well, feathers and nudity (as appreciated in a decidedly politically incorrect manner by a very young Ah-nold in this priceless video posing as a legitimate travelogue). Even the South of France, where I once lived, has its act together--Nice picks a yearly theme (second, of course, to its unofficial theme of small children spraying silly string in everyone's hair for a solid month), and the nearby Menton does a Rosebowl-style tribute to Citrus fruits by constructing sculptures, floats, and even walk-through architectural structures from its bountiful harvests.

In comparison, Paris' take on Carnevale was an utterly random, poorly-publicized, fully-clothed and last-minute affair. It still afforded a jolly atmosphere and a few good photos though, as well as a chance to check out the quartier of République, which I seldom visit.

My favorite cheap vendor item of the day was this Spiderman balloon, with either a poorly- or brilliantly- chosen location for its inflation tab (hey, at least they don't inflate via mouth like a normal balloon):
Next up on the random list, this pants-less bunny luchadora, who was protesting in support of some indecipherable cause that apparently necessitated the wearing of a golden thong. I'll keep this PG and only show the front, cloaked view:
I couldn't really tell if the people in the parade were some kind of organized group or just random bystanders that happened to walk in the same direction as the floats. Some of them managed to be color-coordinated, but never with any kind of identifying markings:
I take it back, there was one unifying theme: noise. Everyone had boomboxes, marching bands, whistles, bells, symbols, drums, party blowers, maracas...anything would do, the louder the better. This Dr. Seuss-esque float was covered in noisy things (and had its own entourage of noise-making people):
Even more Dr. Seuss-inspired noise-makers. Don't be fooled, this isn't a full marching band, it's just a bunch of people looking like muppets carrying drums:
As is par for the course in France, there were also a lot of parade participators carrying and drinking alcohol:
A troop of mines in plaid, on stilts:
The highlight of the parade was the giant puppets, which seemed to represent different traditional roles from French history (knight, baker, farmer, nobleman)...
And just when I had thought I had detected a puppet pattern, out came the random, styrofoam-limbed dancing puppets.
So I just rolled with it. Vive la Carnevale!

Hopping into the New Year

To start off this post-a-day countdown to the end of Paris, let's start at the very beginning ("a very good place to start...") with the start of the Chinese New Year, and its parade in Paris' "Chinatown" and one of my favorite corners of the city--the 13th arrondissement.
Red and gold ruled the day. As did firecrackers thrown in the street, or burned all at once on big, vertical racks.
A truck carrying princesses drove by...
...followed by their tiger-like male counterparts.
And then, finally, came the moment everyone was waiting for: the dragons! This guy tried to stare down the red one.


A very belated year of the rabbit to all!