Welkom bij Antwerpen!

Two evenings before I flew out to Paris, I was in Bethesda with a friend to watch a movie, and as we were crossing the street, I ran into my high school art teacher. This is especially bizarre because I had just been thinking about getting in touch with her, and suddenly my wish was granted in the middle of the street on a Friday night. Thus it was totally by chance that we arranged a rendez-vous for the following day, a summer lunch in the beautiful salon she has in her house as a showcase for her students' work.

In the course of our conversation about all and sundry, Antwerp came up as one of the places to go for cutting-edge design. Embarrassingly given my passion for art, I had no clue about this. Embarrassingly given my status as a denizen of the world, I had no clue at the time whether Antwerp was in Belgium or the Netherlands (I should probably not publicize my ignorance, but what else is the internet for? I mean really). I filed away the information in the back of my brain along with a monumental list of galleries to visit, unsure whether I would have enough time to see everything in Paris, let alone anywhere else.

But then I got to talking to my friend Sara, a graduate of the same high school art class who's off drawing funny pictures of Dutch clogs being an artistic genius in Utrecht, and we realized that Antwerp happens to sit right between us on the map. (And in Belgium, for the record.) So we booked our tickets and up and went in the middle of October. Thus it was that one of the best weekends I've spent abroad came about by sheer chance, thanks to wanting to see Crazy Stupid Love on a humid summer night in Maryland.

This is what Anterpen Centraal looks like after a few Belgian beers.
[Thanks, Wikipedia! You're a pal.]

I arrive a few hours earlier than Sara into the city, known amongst tourists as "that place between Paris and Amsterdam" and to those of us who have read its Wikipedia page as Belgium's fashion playground. It's actually pretty cool: this is the place that, in the eighties, gave birth to the Antwerp Six, a group of fashion designers from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts who packed themselves and their collections into a rented truck, drove to London Fashion Week, putting Belgium squarely on the map. But let's not get carried away. This is also the place that sells bread in vending machines.

I wander down through the diamond district (another surprising source of fame) into the southeast corner of the city, which boasts a bizarre collection of architecture and two squares line corner to corner with bars. Of course, eleven in the morning is a little early to start drinking, even in Belgium, so I pass the time until the appropriate hour  wandering around with my head craned back to look at buildings casually adorned with windows like these:

Lente (spring), one of the four houses at an intersection known as the Four Seasons.

The mosaic crowning a particularly loud specimen that was particularly proud to be on Waterloo Straat.

I can imagine breakfast on this balcony only oh too easily.

Why do I not find myself behind the wheel of this large automobile? Why do I not find myself in this beautiful house? And where is my beautiful wife?! Right, no, not bitter at all within an hour of arriving...

Two hours later, the bartender pours me another shot (of coffee) while I sob about the misfortunes of not living in a house with a karyatid-supported balcony and stained glass windows. To console me, Thomas tells me that a few years back there was a plague of rabbits in the nearby city park, way more bunnies than the city's bunny quota could handle. He said that rabbit was the cheapest thing on the menu for weeks.

As it turns out, Saturday night I would be ordering the very same thing off a Belgian menu myself. Despite the fact that not an hour ago I had spent a good ten minutes taking pictures of the herd of bunnies, ducks, and geese living in harmony in the Stadtpark. Sorry, bunnies of my youth.

Pairs well with red wine and ducks.

Then Sara arrives, and the conversation takes a less violent turn. Over the next few hours we polish off another round of caffeine, get lost down a street that would turn out to be where our hosts lived, and catch up on all of the things we'd missed out on for the past ten months of each others' lives. The best way to do this, obviously, is to hit up a Moroccan seafood restaurant and chat over the sounds of the cook frying up our selection of glistening fish.

I feel this picture adequately reflects our varying philosophies on both food and travel: rampant silliness and droll bemusement. You think I kid? On this vacation, I bought a fur-trimmed cape. Sara bought a sweater.

Then it's back to the train station to pick up our bags and meet our lovely Couchsurfing hosts for the weekend, D. and S., who quickly introduce us to Belgian hospitality and Belgian beer. But this weekend? Will turn out not to be an intro course on beer. It's at least a 300-level, and this is the textbook:

Next up on the menu: beer, wild boar, beer, deer, rabbit, beer.

Breizh and la Bibliothèque

I don't really feel fully at home in a city until I'm a card-carrying member of the municipal library. As I also have a mile-long list of texts to consult for the bibliographies of my courses, but lack a mile-long train of hundred-euro bills with which to buy them, the library is going to be my best friend this semester. There are 58 (!) branches in Paris, but rather than choosing which one to visit to by tacking the list to a dart board and leaving it up to my poor aim, I decided to be reasonable and choose based on the proximity to a crêperie I've had my eye on. My logic is infallible.

The description that my study-abroad program gave of the municipal library made it seem like signing up and finding books would be an ordeal, but it was actually ridiculously easy. The entire catalogue is searchable online, I can reserve books for pick-up... I don't understand how this is unreasonable at all. So what if the hours are a little weird--it's Paris, that's a given! The entire process did not take long at all, and the library itself was modern on the inside and old-fashioned on the outside, and I regret not taking a picture. In fact, I regret not taking a lot of pictures at all that day, but I didn't want to ruin the warm fuzzy contentment I felt thanks to the heavy stack of library books in my bag, the sign of a vrai Parisienne.

We could also blame the dearth of photography from my afternoon at Breizh Café on the food coma induced by the delicious, buttery, perfectly prepared galettes au sarrasin. I installed myself in a little corner booth with a book on la Nouvelle Vague and curled up with a little bowl of cider, which was just the ticket on this rainy Friday afternoon. The little bubbles that rose to the surface actually glittered, a sure sign of the magical alcoholic properties within. It was the most unusual cider I've had yet--the fresh and crispy taste of apples that I've come to expect, but followed by the distinct pungency of Roquefort. Since apples and stinky blue cheese is my favorite combination of fruit and fermented milk, I was more than happy to slurp it all up.

Glitter, glitter everywhere!

Even though there are hundreds of bored high schoolers flipping crêpes all over Paris, there are only a handful of places where you can find really, really, really good ones. And the way to tell an authentic crêperie from a false one is if they use blé noir or sarrasin, buckwheat flour. I'm fully on the dark side--I refuse to order a savory crêpe made with ordinary flour. There's something really satisfying about the flecks of buckwheat in the batter and I can't go back: it would be like electing to eat Wonderbread in lieu of a crunchy, nutty, wholegrain loaf.

Sadly, despite their charm, it is impossible to take a flattering picture of a savory crêpe. They're delicious and I love them, but they're none too happy in front of the camera, so I didn't even try. This time I had the complète artichaut, topped with just the right amount of Gruyère and an oeuf miroir, which is the most evocative way to describe a sunny-side up egg. I was really hoping that it would come with a little ring of lettuce leaves on top like the other plates that I'd seen floating past my table, but no luck. I'll just have to get one of those next time!

I was pretty nicely settled in with my book, so when the (rather cute) waiter came by in his sailor shirt with the dessert menu, I couldn't say no. Mostly as an excuse to get him to linger, I asked him which crepe with ice-cream-that-was-not-vanilla was his favorite. It turned out to be an homage to the grain I hold so dear: a buckwheat crêpe topped with buckwehat flower honey and a scoop of buckwheat ice cream. It was magnifique.

Those little flecks are not vanilla beans--they're buckwheat!

Une petite leçon d'histoire

Exhibit A, the Sorbonne:

Exhibit B, the Sorbonne:

Take a wild guess which building houses my classes!

Yeaaaaah, sixties' architecture, that's the ticket. Abuse my eyes with your surfeit of squares, your linoleum surfaces, and your palette de couleurs à l'hôpital (hmm, no, putting it in French doesn't make it any better).

But I thought--I thought--romantic French education, where did you go?!

Oh, you disappeared? After May of 1968? When a bunch of angry students threw their chairs into the street so hard that Charles de Gaulle fled the city? Oh, sorry, that was 2006, the chair incident? My apologies. But  we really do have a load of enraged lit majors to thank for the major upheaval in French society that followed? Cool beans.

Take that, ma! And you said my liberal arts degree was worthless.

To continue in a more serious vein, if I am capable of such a thing, 1968 was a big year in French history. Far too big for me to do it proper justice, given my tendency to crack bad puns at the expense of historical credibility, but here goes anyway.

Our story begins in March, when a group of left-wing activists, artists, and students of the Universty of Nanterre held a sit-in protesting class discrimination and political bureaucracy. After the administration called in the police to surround the building, their conference disbanded peacefully enough, but their discontent remained. After a few weeks of strife between the university and its students, the administration decided to threaten a few of these malcontents with expulsion and, oh, shut the school down. Upon hearing this, their student compatriots at the Sorbonne had a little protest of their own, to which the administration responded just as favorably, by calling in the police.

Which about 20,000 students, teachers, and young workers protested, in a massive march called by the student and teacher unions on the Arc de Triomphe. So off came the gloves and on came the riot gear: tear gas, barricades, and hundreds more student arrests followed. By mid-May almost every union in Paris was protesting in some capacity, the Sorbonne had been declared a "people's university," and the city had basically shut down. De Gaulle mysterious disappeared in the middle of failed negotiations--having fled to a military base in Germany, it turns out--to which 500,000 French responded by marching through the streets waving flags and bidding him a fond adieu.

The irony of all this is that within a month--after the National Assembly had been dissolved, new elections called, and de Gaulle restored shame-faced to his magisterial seat--the Gaullists won the greatest parliamentary victory in French history. And in 1970, the Sorbonne was divided into thirteen universities, one of which, forty years later, I now call my own: Paris 3, or the Sorbonne Nouvelle.

But what it lacks in aesthetic qualities it makes up for in aesthetic theory, which I shall talk about at a later date. In the meantime I will be curled up in the library of Paris IV, the old Sorbonne, pretending that I picked out the crown moldings myself.

All images thanks to Wikipedia.

Desperate for a Date

Mysterious objects began to appear at the market last week: bright yellow little fruits, the size of Italian plums but hard as apples, tightly clustered on long golden branches. They were dates, and they were beautiful.

And I was terrified.

I feared them, feared trying one only to relive my experience with le coing, which turns out to be the French word for 'quince,' which turns out to be an accurate approximation of the nasal sound I made when I chomped into it. They should really put up signs for these things. 'Bite me and wince,' or perhaps, 'Bite me and quince.'

But I couldn't resist the siren song of the Golden Bough, so I finally mustered up the courage to ask the grocer what the hell one did with said dates. My apple-addict friend was making her purchases when I marched up to the counter, dates in hand, and asked if it was edible.

He was a little stumped. "Of course it's edible."

"No, but I mean, do I have to cook it first?"

Flat expression. "You have to roast it for seven days."

Blank stare.

And then he burst out laughing and gave me the dates for free, which was a terrible mistake, because now I'm addicted.

These aren't just the fresh variety of the standard Medjool or Deglet Noor dates you'd find in the States; it turns out that Phoenix dactylifera is a great deal more complex than we give it credit for. There are actually several dozen kinds of cultivars, most of which never make their way out of the Middle East because they're too delicious (just kidding). I think it's more that the Western market wouldn't know what to do with them and, more importantly, wouldn't be able to tell the difference, so why bother sending prize dates to people lacking the refinement to taste the distinction? I kid, but I do wonder sometimes...

Anyway, the mountain of dates that I've been consuming lately are of the Barhi variety, which is one of only a handful that can be eaten in the khalal stage of maturity, which is the second of four: kimri (unripe), khalal (full-sized, crunchy), rutab (ripe, soft), and tamr (ripe, sun-dried). Apparently Barhis taste good at the later stages, too, but I wouldn't know this from personal experience, as that would require waiting to eat them.

Namaste au Côté des Champs-Elysée

There is a picture hanging on my wall at home: it's the middle of Times Square, and a little old lady is doing a sun salutation in a sea of yoga mats. I tore it out of The New Yorker who knows how many years ago, and I've stared at it over the course of many an evening spent delaying on an essay.

Today I got to be that little old lady, except I was facing the Eiffel Tower instead of M&M's World.

I'm especially impressed with myself because last night, Saturday, was Nuit Blanche, a sleepless night of contemporary art where the whole city stays up from 7 PM to 7 AM. There were installations and performances from Le Marais to Pigalle, some of them amazing, most of them mediocre, and a few downright terrible. Such is our lot. I made it to about two before calling it quits, because I wanted at least a smattering of sleep before crawling onto the métro at 9 AM to bliss out on the Champs Mars.

It's pretty moving to be seated in a crowd of two thousand people, all of us dressed in white, holding warrior pose in the blazing Paris sun. There's something powerful to be said about gestures of solidarity, even if it goes no farther than general goodwill. I've always felt there to be something intrinsically altruistic about the practice of yoga, because when undertaken seriously it cultivates patience, self-evaluation, and, by degrees, self-understanding. In the face of massive frustration, the yoga mat is just another mirror into our own minds; it's a microcosm for any kind of human interaction. What are our relationships with other people besides a reflection of our relationship with ourselves?

Every time I don't hate myself for being unable to hold the crane position; each time I breathe in deeply instead of slamming my fist against the mat--these are small steps towards accepting my negative tendencies and then moving beyond them. It's called a 'practice' for a reason: these gestures build habits for when I meet with frustration in the big bad world outside myself and have to choose a way to respond to it. I don't buy into the idea of positive thinking having the miraculous ability to magic money into existence or bullets out of it, but I do think that any kind of solitary undertaking aimed at self-improvement is a beneficial one. When we ourselves behave better the world behaves better, just a little bit, because we're part of the world and math doesn't lie.

No matter how small, every such gesture is one less drop of anger in the world, and maybe one less drop of bloodshed. And every gesture counts.