Extracurriculars

At the left, you will find the seldom consumed and even less-oft recommended kir vin rouge. Yup, a friend came over and as we were all out of white wine, we tucked into the red. Drinkable, I suppose, but not the way nature intended it. Below at the right, you will find a really cute picture of Winnie. No relation to the content, just me abusing my artistic control.

Now that classes have started, I have been on the lookout for things to do other than book-learnin'. It was my longtime plan to join a triathlon club here, in order to keep up with my training after last spring's first foray into the world of multisport. I was originally thinking I would join expaTRIés, an English-language expat tri club, but then reconsidered in favor of a more authentic, local experience...until I looked at the membership fees. A senior (adult) tri membership with Paris Sport Club costs 300 € for new members, and with Stade Français Triathlon it's 332.50 €, plus, if I understand correctly, another 100 € for first-timers, whereas a full membership with expaTRIés, complete with required tri license, costs 136.50 €. Not much of a comparison. I've been holding off on joining because they require a medical exam, and since getting my carte de séjour does as well, I thought I'd kill two bureaucratic birds with one socialized medical stone. But, if I'm being honest, the combination of regular walking and vélib'ing is pretty much taking care of my major fitness concerns. I haven't gone running since my goofy first outing, and although one of my classmates posted a terrific time and had a blast last Sunday in La Grande Classique (16km from Paris to Versailles), my knees and I aren't particularly missing it.

Hi, Mom and Dad. I feel as though this admission entitles you to a paragraph all your own. I know you spent an arm and a leg sending me my bike from the U.S. (which, if we're doing the conversion, means that I subsequently spent two of each getting it through Customs, blast them). If I end up not riding it while I'm here--which is to say, not doing any tri training, since it's not the sort of creature I'd tool along the cobblestones on--I will make it up to you somehow. And above all, thank you for going through the pain in the tuckus I know it was to send it. For what it's worth, it's not in the shipping box anymore; I took it out last night because the cleaning lady complained about there being too many boxes around the house. It's now in the closet, behind our coats, covered in trash bags to keep everything clean. Did I mention that I love you?

I figured that, if my tri-life was potentially going to be anglophone, I would search out a group of Frenchies to sing with. I basically wanted to sing with a group that was at a high enough level to require auditions, but I didn't necessarily want to have to audition myself. Tricky, that. Also wasn't sure whether I wanted to sing old stuff, as it's called in the trade. More or less forever in search of my college a cappella group is what it comes down to. I've come close since graduation, but never quite close enough. And given that graduation was nearly ten years ago, maybe my goals should grow up? I don't know, though...At any rate, a little research turned up the Chorale Pop and Soul, which "rehearses" on Wednesday evenings just a few métro stops away. The quotation marks owe to the fact that this isn't so much a singing group as a class, as it turns out, and the teacher charges 35 € a month, which, by the end of the school year, costs just as much as one of the pricey tri club memberships, but without the cardiovascular benefits. Hrmph. But the first class was free, and so I decided to go check it out.

The pluses:
+ Everyone seemed really nice, especially once they realized that I was American.
+ The night I was there, we were singing in English (Madonna's "Rain," if you must know), and so I got to enjoy a gentle sense of superiority, because I pronounce my "h's" without even thinking about it...until I started not to and felt silly.
+ The location is hard to beat.
+ No auditions!

The minuses:
- No auditions, and so the level was not especially advanced. That meant no sheet music, only words. I'm not a great sight-reader, but I'd like the chance to improve.
- Due to the above, the sound wasn't top-notch. Can't believe I'm about to do this, but if you want to listen, you can do so here.
- There was little to no specific instruction, and so the idea of its being a "class" felt semi-farcical.
- The price. Not worth it for me, although I considered signing up just to make some Frends, a word I just coined, meaning "French friends." It only works in writing.

And so back to the drawing board. I sent some more e-mails to other choral groups, received a couple replies, got one message bounced back to me twice (why did I try a second time?), and even made a phone call, which is usually not in my bag of tricks, but I got lucky and hit voice mail. Then a friend mentioned to me that our choral director from over the summer at Middlebury had a chorale here in Paris that he (friend) was joining. I got in touch with said director, she was game for another alto, and thus my second vocal adventure began. Best part: it's an audition-to-get-in group, but she said I didn't have to audition! Couldn't have designed it better myself. I went to my first rehearsal this past Monday night, and discovered a few things:

1. The whole thing is conducted in English.
2. The bulk of the repertoire is Negro Spirituals.
3. The group is quite good!

#1 is not entirely what I was going for. #2 is fine, musically speaking, and while I feel a little odd singing things like "Soon ah will be don' a-wid de troubles ob de worl'," I'm sure I'll get used to it. I'm just hoping that it isn't a religious group. I have no problem with Christian people (or people of any religion)--heaven knows I've been surrounded by 'em most of my life--but I'm a Jew, through and through. I'll sing pretty much anything, but I like to keep my social interactions as non-sectarian as possible, unless explicitly stated otherwise. #3 is, obviously, a plus. So for now, I'm spending my Monday evenings with Voices Choeur International.

And finally...a little income! I didn't come to Paris planning to work or take on an internship in addition to my studies; I thought I'd leave the baguette-winning to Nick. But I couldn't resist when the woman in charge of job opportunities and other day-to-day life stuff for Middlebury in Paris e-mailed us, saying that the Paris office of Camp Experts, a company that matches French kids with summer camps and programs in the U.S. and around Europe, was looking for a paid intern during the second semester. Are you kidding me? Camp is my thing--no, better still, my thang. You heard me right. This is mostly due to one camp in particular, Hidden Valley, where I spent some of the best summers of my life as a camper, counselor, and funny in-between creature called an AWAC--some part of 12 summers in all, if I'm counting correctly. Kid paradise itself. So this Camp Experts gig seemed right up my alley. I immediately sent a letter expressing my interest and my innate campiness, along with my CV, and soon heard back from Catherine, the boss lady, who wanted to speak on the phone. I called her, and everything went great. She told me that one of the major roles of her intern is to help out with the salons she hosts every year, in schools, among other places, where families meet camp representatives. Sure, I said, do you know yet what the dates are of those salons? She listed out several days in the beginning of February...which happens to be precisely when my nephew (first kid in the family--so excited!!) is expected to arrive, and when Nick and I are going back to New York to welcome him. General deflation of spirits, because Catherine, like me, felt that we were a perfect match, but couldn't envision hiring someone who wouldn't be around for the salons. We each understood where the other was coming from, but that didn't change the basics of the situation. And so we hung up, and each went on our way.

At the beginning of last week, she e-mailed me and said that, after thinking about it over the weekend, she was interested enough in my "profile" that she wanted to meet me anyway, in hopes that we could find a solution for the salons. And so I went to her house in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, a couple days later. She operates the business from home, and so this was also my potential workplace-to-be. And what a home it was! I asked the woman who met me at the door whether she was Catherine, and she said that no, Madame was upstairs. That sort of household--the kind with help. Looked huge and beautiful, although I didn't get the full tour. Anyway, we chatted, discussed possible salon solutions (isn't that a brand of shampoo?)--her scanning and e-mailing me new families' contact info to enter into the database from New York, for example--and she told me she was interviewing two more people and would get back to me at the end of this week.

And so I wait...

Vélov'

Just wanted to be clear that I don't always drink alone. Not that four kirs side-by-side prove it...These puppies were made with crème de framboise, raspberry liqueur, which I brought to a classmate's house for apéritifs a couple nights before school started.

Riding a bicycle along the Seine on a warm evening--it doesn't get much better than that. Paris is blessed with a network of self-service rental bikes called vélib' (pictured below--photo taken from their website), which I can only assume is short for vélo libre, or "free bicycle" (the kind of "free" that describes freedom, rather than not having to pay). Nick and I first discovered the vélib' a couple trips to Paris ago, and had heard rumors that they were no longer available, due to theft and other unfortunate shenanigans, and were thrilled to find, upon our arrival, that they are still in full effect. There are banks of 3-speed bikes stationed all over the city--every 300 meters, according to the website--and once you subscribe to the service (1€ for one day, 5€ for seven days, and 29€ for a year--plus a security deposit of 150€ in case you run off with one of the vélos), you can take one out from any of them, and return it to any other. The first 30 minutes of any trip are free of charge, and the bikes are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, allowing for an unlimited number of trips per day. It's amazing! I've started riding the vélib' to school almost every day, and just today, after doing so for a week, I found my way home (not the same as the outbound route, due to a profusion of one-way streets and a downright un-gridlike layout). I get such a kick (although wicked messy hair) out of exercising during my commute. We try to take the bikes as often as possible, and while it sometimes takes about as long as taking the métro, other times it's considerably faster, particularly where changing métro lines at huge stations would otherwise be concerned.

A few thoughts and tidbits of advice from my week-plus of vélib'ing this time around:

• A good idea when you stop at a red light, if you're a 3rd-gear rider like me, is to down-shift, so that when the light turns green, you can take off without too much effort or swervy nonsense. This may be obvious to you, but wasn't to me.
• Hand signals are a big, important deal when you're riding in traffic and go a long way toward getting cars to let you in where you want to be. Again, all city riders may know this already, but I hadn't given it much thought. Maybe I should have called this section "Things You Knew and I Didn't."
  
• The iPhone app "Velo" is fantabulous. It costs $2.99 and has maps of all the vélib' stations, *plus* a fairly up-t0-date account of how many bikes and "parking spots" are available at each one. It has this information not only for Paris, but also for 14 other cities that have similar bike networks--in France and elsewhere in Europe.
• There are one-way streets in the 9th and 10th arrondissements (and probably elsewhere) that have bike lanes going in the opposite direction, so that you can more easily get where you're going without having to make your route excessively circuitous.
• I still haven't figured out what the local custom is regarding red lights. Some bikers stop, and some slow down and then go through if there aren't any cars or pedestrians coming. And some drivers and motorcyclists get annoyed and yell at them. Or me, as the case may be. Clearly jealous.
• There are bike/bus lanes around a lot of the city, and a lot of cabs that drive in them. I can't figure out whether they're bikes or buses.
• If you head off on a vélib' in the general direction of where you thinking you're going, you may not end up there, but you can always return the bike and take the métro if you end up in the middle of somewhere else.
  

I heartily recommend trying vélib' if you're in Paris and know how to ride a bike. If you don't live here and come to visit us, we will inevitably do our best to show you what fun it can be to tool around town on two wheels. Happy riding!

What About the Children?

Even though I'm not going to be kir-ing it daily, I still have a backlog of photos. This one was homemade, and marks Nick's and my first time entertaining (if only slightly) at our apartment in Paris. A few of my Middlebury friends came over for apéritifs and munchies before four of us headed out for mediocre tapas with the three dogs we had between us.

Speaking of dogs, we came over here with two, and the question of what their lives are going to look like here has been evolving. Back in Brooklyn, we were rather particular about what they ate. We looked for human-grade ingredients, and had read or been told that at least the first three or four should be items that we would eat--meats, for example, as opposed to meat by-products or bone meal. We ended up settling on Merrick Before Grain dry food mixed with such flavors of their wet food as Thanksgiving Day Dinner, Wing-a-Ling, and...trying to remember...maybe Cowboy Cookout? I like to think that there is a difference between a pet or a child's being spoiled (which literally means that something is rotten, right? that it's gone bad?)--which, to my mind, implies behaving in an entitled manner--and being treated well...but regardless, we may be walking the line with these two. Anyway, we arrived in Paris with very little of the dry food we had brought on vacation and none of the wet. And so it was time to either order more Merrick from the U.S. and pay for costly shipping (because that stuff's heavy!), or find a French alternative. After visits to a couple of grocery stores and three pet stores, I think I've found a mixture that we can all be happy with. I hesitate to feed Graham and Winnie anything that can be purchased at the supermarket, but given that the people food here is mostly better than what you can find at Gristedes or Food Emporium at home, maybe it's the same for the critters. At any rate, I found a dry food at Shopi (one of the supermarket chains here) whose first ingredient was chicken, rather than one grain or another, and have been switching off among several wet foods: one made by Pedigree from Shopi, an all-natural German one called Almo Nature that we found at Miaou Waou, a pet store in the 11th arrondissement, and a third one, also from Miaou Waou, called Nature's Harvest, which comes in frozen-dinner-type trays and says it should be used--even if refrigerated--within 24 hours. This means that we will be either: a) throwing out a lot of dog food, because our two are small and can't possibly take in a whole tray of that stuff in a day without dire consequences in the output department, or b) serving them vittles that, by Nature's Harvest's exacting standards, are past their prime. Time will tell, as we're just nearing the end of our first 24 hours after opening.

It seems that people also walk their dogs differently here. In New York, where you're generally dealing with sidewalks rather than yards, the rule of thumb is to try not to have your dog pee on anything valuable or right in front of somebody's door, and always pick up #2. I was told before my arrival that there would be a great deal of the aforementioned #2 on the sidewalks of Paris, and also that there are dedicated vehicles, called Mobicrottes, whose drivers tool around town removing it. I haven't seen all that much of the former, and none of the latter. I do believe that we are the only dog-owners in Paris who walk around with plastic-bag caddies on their leashes, picking up after their furry little ones--or, at the very least, I haven't seen anybody else doing it. If somebody straight-up tells me not to clean up after them, I'll probably stop, but until then, it seems wrong not to do it. It also seems that people actually walk their dogs in the street here. We're working on this. Graham and Winnie are fairly sidewalk-oriented, and so sometimes it involves a little tug on the leash, when they're wearing one, and on the contrary, when they go au naturel, it can be a challenge to get them out of the street when a car approaches. I should probably always have them on leash, but as a lot of French dogs aren't, I'm a fan of the sense of freedom that accompanies letting them do their own thing a little bit.

And then there's the question of childcare. Because we're ridiculous, we had a dog nanny back in New York. She would pick the kids up in the morning, hang out with them at her house during the day, walking them regularly, and then bring them home in the afternoon. Our pups are crate-trained, and so when we're not at home, they hang out in a cage-type den, rather than being loose in the house, where they could get into things that could be harmful to them (or soil things that could be of value to us). Having lost our first dog to chocolate consumption, this seems reasonable to us, and so the dog nanny situation came from not wanting to have them crated all day. But Park Slope, Brooklyn, is the kind of world where, if you place an ad on Craigslist for a dog nanny, ten people make appointments to be interviewed, show up with references, and you can be pretty well assured of finding a worthy candidate among them. This may be a corollary to the fact that Park Slope is a world of yuppies with misplaced priorities, but so be it; it's worked for us. Craigslist Paris, on the other hand, has about five postings under Pet Services. So this will be an interesting figuring-out process. Once Nick is back from picking grapes in Beaujolais, we'll at least have more hands on deck. But for now, I've been forced to crate them in my absence, particularly as we're staying in an apartment full of rugs and little doo-dads that could be damaged by a rambunctious puppy. We arrived with a small travel crate that we brought with us on vacation, but its front flap zips shut, and one or both of the dogs--my money's on Graham, the more separation-anxious of the two--has unzipped it while I've been out. In fact, I came home the other day to find him standing on our dining room table. Yikes. I have an order placed with Amazon for a larger crate with a real, latching door, but in the meantime...for their (his) next trick, they actually ripped the flap open, reducing the crate to a silly little joke. So for the last couple days, the crate and pups have been in the petit French toilet room--see, it is good for something!--which, thankfully, has a real door as well, and that seems to be a reasonable solution while we wait for the Amazon box to show up. Stay tuned.

Update #1: Tossed the Nature's Harvest and started a new can of Pedigree; didn't want to deal with the potential fallout, as it were, of expired dog food.

Update #2: Right after I posted this (which was Saturday, even though it says Tuesday at the top--it records the day of the first "save as draft," as opposed to the day you publish), I took the pups out and, lo and behold, saw a man picking up his dog's beezwax with a plastic bag. From the sidewalk, no less. Viva la globalization!

The Run-Around

Okay, so seriously? What was I thinking? A kir a day?? I'm already foreseeing getting tired of them before too long, even with the potential variation of peach or raspberry liqueur instead of crème de cassis. So I'm changing the rules. A year in France is, by its very nature, a year of kir; I don't have to be so darned literal about it. There will be kirs, I will photograph them, and those photographs will be featured here. But let's not go overboard. As long as I have this picture, though, I will tell you that this was the first kir I made here, in our Paris apartment. The first of three, each on a different day. And this is only our fourth night here. You see what I mean about the over-zeal? A little out of hand.

In other news, I went on my first Parisian run yesterday. On the right is a picture of me before takeoff. I thought it was kind of a lousy picture, and when I clicked to enlarge it, it turned out to be, in fact, a seriously lousy picture--totally out of focus. Ah well, it's what I got. I planned out my route looking at maps online, because I wanted to make my way down to and run along the Seine (that's the river here in Paris...I'm sure all of you know that, but if it turned out that I was name-dropping and someone didn't know what I was talking about, I'd feel bad). I live where the little "A" pin is, just to give you a sense of things. So I ran down Boulevard de Sébastopol, which was quite crowded, and then hung a right when I got down to the river. So far, so good-ish, except for the people-dodging. The Eiffel Tower was now ahead to the left, and the sky was pinkening slightly, and it was this beautiful moment of oh-my-goodness-I'm-really-here. But I wanted to run down by the river (cue old Chris Farley SNL skit), rather than on the sidewalk above it, and so I went down a narrow sidewalk and, brilliantly, entered a tunnel that was full of moving cars. I was sort of hoping that it would be a short passageway that would let me out on the quai (but how? Where would the cars go?), but it went on and on, and as I was trotting along a quite-narrow sidewalk facing traffic, the cars sped by and honked at me. Good times. And good breathing. With no other-end in sight, I waited for the traffic to thin out for a moment and turned back around. I soon found a way down along the riverbank that was made for foot traffic, and then ran along the cobblestones (which receive about a C for ease and comfort as running surfaces go) for the remainder of the "out" part of my out-and-back. Went through another little tunnel under a bridge where a small homeless community seems to have set up camp, passed some teens enjoying snacks and drinks, couples sitting on benches looking at the water, people fishing...a lovely Parisian evening scene. I'm going to have to keep working on better routes, but I do like it here.

Good Christian Méens, Rejoice!

The kir to the left came into my life at Paul Bocuse's paean to Paul Bocuse, located outside Lyon in Collonges au Mont d'Or at L'Auberge du Pont de Collonges. Very shmancy meal, very classic techniques used in its preparation, a little much, in terms of both quantity and richness and certainly price (thought not always enough in terms of service). Not so much my thing, but an experience I appreciated having. And hey, we saw PB himself!--here he is on the right.

So here we are in Paris. Our apartment is lovely, beautifully decorated with what I imagine to be art from Cambodia, where the owner lives and owns a hotel or two. No air conditioning, but as we seem to have crossed the season barrier from summer into fall as we drove here from Lyon (l'iPhone américain says it's 55º F in Paris right now!), open windows provide more than enough ventilation. Living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom, small office, nice bathroom, toilet across the apartment from the bathroom. We're pretty centrally located, within five-ish minutes' walk of about five subway lines. I have [no-longer] secret dreams of living in the 4th or 5th or 6th arrondissement (Paris is divided up into 20 of these districts), but that's just me being bratty; the 3rd is quite nice. An eye is kept on our building during the day by a concierge, who, rather than getting us restaurant reservations or last-minute theatre tickets, is a sort of doorman type who hangs out (lives?) in a little hut in our courtyard, where he has a fridge, a washing machine, and maybe a TV. His name is Dominique and he collects our mail and provides other such helpful logistical services, among the most essential of which is wagging a finger at me if Graham, our younger dog, pees in the courtyard. Oops. I brought down a pitcher of water to rinse away the evidence, and so hopefully he won't hold a grudge, although our apartment's owner told us that Dominique wasn't a super-nice guy, and so it's hard to know. My plan had been to overwhelm the guy with kindness and adorability, always saying bonjour and wishing him a bonne journée, so that he had to like us, but that was long ago, before the Unauthorized Urination.

On the progress-in-getting-established tip, we finally have a bank account! We ended up choosing BNP Paribas as our bank, because our landlord has an account there and got us in touch with one of their bankers. He, in turn, made us an appointment with the fabulous Christian Méens, who set up our Esprit Libre (Free Spirit) joint checking account. Monsieur Méens (sounds like may-awnhce) is a funny, funny dude. Short-sleeved button-down, comb-over, glasses, tie, mustache, a hunt-and-peck typist and all-around sweetheart. After telling us that people said he didn't look his age, he made me guess how old that was, and when I guessed 40 (I first tried 23, but he wouldn't let me off the hook with that one) and he couldn't get me to budge any higher (he's 52), he supposed aloud to Nick that I didn't have any experience with such things. He shared with us a French saying about marriage (being no-longer-married himself)--that it constitutes a choice to have worries and problems that you wouldn't have on your own--but assured us that, over three years into it, we were probably good to go. We spent over an hour in his office, signing papers and actually writing out the words "lu et approuvé" several times, to indicate that we had read and approved whatever we were also signing our names to. Monsieur M provided us with the much coveted RIB (relevé d'identité bancaire, the string of numbers that identifies our bank number, account number, etc. to anyone who is planning on whisking our money away to, for example, pay a phone bill). He also informed us--had only we known a couple days earlier--that BNP stands for Banque Nationale de Paris, and it is a fully national bank, which means that we could have opened an account in Lyon and accessed it in Paris with no problem. Ah, well.

We walked out of BNP, RIB in hand, ready to finally make our iPhone dreams come true. But alas, you need not only a RIB (and proof of residence and proof of identity) to get a phone contract, you also need either a bank card or a cancelled check, and we wouldn't have either for a week or so. They don't give you temporary ATM cards when you open an account in France...or at least BNP doesn't...or at least M. Méens didn't. Which wouldn't be an issue (given that there's no money in our account yet), except for the phone situation. After being turned away by the guy at Orange, one of the main cell service providers here, we called M.M. to see if he could give us a temporary card. He offered a letter stating that we have an account with BNP, but still no dice; apparently, the Orangeman needed to input our card or check number right into his computer, and so there wasn't a lot of flexibility. Boo. And so we limp on, iPhoneless, for another few days.

Putting Down Roots

This kir came from a bouchon in Lyon called Le Petit Flore, recommended by the New York Times in a Travel-section article about eating in Lyon. A bouchon is a bistro serving traditional fare of Lyon and the area, and we had a tasty, well priced meal at this one.

It's been a long time since I set up a life somewhere. Given that I've lived in the same country--even on the same coast--my whole adult life as I did growing up, you could pretty much say that I've never done this before. I remember going into Chase Manhattan Bank on 3rd Avenue on the Middle East Side (East Midtown? We never knew what to call it.) with both my parents in October of 2000 to open my first checking account, which now, going on nine years later, bears Nick's and my names jointly. The school year I spent in Brittany at age 15 involved no independent establishment-of-self in the two-forms-of-identification sense; School Year Abroad worked out with our parents to get us a weekly allowance in francs (quaint!), and as this was before the era of cell phones, little else seemed necessary.

So here we are in France, and we thought that, as long as we were in Lyon with not much to do and American iPhones that are best used as paperweights now that we've torn through our international data plan, we would get the French version and become just as tech-nerdy in Paris as we were in New York. In the U.S., although it's been a while since I started from scratch with no cell phone or contract of any kind, I think that if you have a credit card, then Verizon or AT&T (interesting aside, as I am currently typing on aforementioned American iPhone, brought back to useful life by the wifi in our apartment: the iPhone does not automatically capitalize Verizon, whereas if you simply type in "att," it is magically transformed into AT&T--also known as the iPhone's sole U.S. service provider...what, you mean there are other wireless companies? asks the innocent little device...) or whoever will be more than happy to take your money and put you on the road to telecommunications. In France, on the other hand, you need a bank account. Not only do you need a bank account, but you also may need proof of residence, depending on which service provider you select. Like a gas or electric bill, for example. As we are renting someone else's apartment for the year, we are never going to receive a gas or electric bill; they are all going to the owner, and we will pay him. Incidentally, the setup is the same for our home in New York, which we are renting out during the months that we are overseas. How about a ConEd bill from a duplex in Brooklyn, buddy? Can that get me l'iPhone français? By the way, in case you're over here shopping for one yourself, "iPhone" is pronounced "aye-phone" in French, same as it is in English--not the more French-seeming "ee-phone."

So, then, a bank account. We were in the Bellecour area of Lyon, a veritable banktopia, if you will, and so, armed with a sense of which ones had branches near our apartment in Paris, we went a-callin'. The first one, LCL (formerly Crédit Lyonnais), didn't have Internet at that office, and so couldn't print out the apartment rental contract that Nick had on his e-mail. They also informed us that we wouldn't be able to get something called a RIB ("reeb"--acronyms are often pronounced in French)--which proved we had a bank account and was required by the phone people--for at least a couple days. So LCL, or at least the Iron-Age branch, was a no-go. Next up, HSBC, where the lady at the front desk said that she really thought it would be better if we waited until we got to Paris to open an account, but didn't say why. Actually, she suggested we leave for Paris a day early--that very day, to be exact--so that we could open the account immediately. Nothing like down-home hospitality. Finally, when I asked the guy at Crédit Agricole why it mattered where I opened the account, he told me that, in Bankworld, France is divided into regions (Paris and Lyon being in two different ones), and that they're not linked to one another, so that if I opened an account in Lyon, I wouldn't have access to it in Paris. At least, that's what I understood. Odd and backwards to me, but at least now I knew what the deal was. And boy, were we ever glad that we hadn't taken the lady at LCL up on her offer to have their scribes copy out our rental contract by hand.

So no phone, no bank account, but I do believe we got a little smarter as far as what is required of us in order to set up shop.

Huh?

Why "A Year of Kir," you may ask? My husband, Nick, and I are moving to Paris for the 2009-2010 school year while I work on an MA in French through Middlebury College. Kir--white wine and crème de cassis, a blackcurrant liqueur--is my apéritif (pre-dinner (or pre-lunch--why not?) drink) of choice here, and one whose acquaintance I made when I lived in Brittany the year I was 15. Kir (rhymes with "cheer") is France to me, and so it seemed a good mascot for these ten months here. Also, I love a good rhyme.  And, because I'm curious (and a little odd), I thought I'd photograph every kir I order during my sojourn, and put one at the top of each blog post. This one comes from Les Chênes Verts, a one-star restaurant in Tourtour, in Provence, where we had dinner a couple nights ago with our Brooklyn friends, Bill and Launa, and their daughters, Grace and Abigail. Their family is spending the year in France as well, but in a very different France from ours. They will be living in Aups, a small town in Provence, and Grace and Abigail will be going to school with wee Frenchies. Follow their adventures on Launa's funny, thoughtful, well written blog. Off to have some adventures in Lyon, where we're spending two nights before heading to Paris--more later.