November 27, 2005

12:36:21 am French Diary VIII, Southern Africa Diary I  

Friday and Saturday, November 18 and 19, 2005 - Paris, France; London, UK; Johannesburg, South Africa; and Maun, Botswana. 50 in France, 80s in Botswana.

Traveling days. We all had similar flight times leaving Paris around 2:30 PM Friday. Mom and Bill flew to Chicago, while Deanna and I flew to British Airways to London to catch the overnight flight to Johannesburg. Air France had a direct flight from Paris, but due to our onward travel after southern Africa, BA was cheaper. In Johannesburg, we met Bill and Stacy Carlson, who arrived from Tampa the night before. After a couple hours in the Joburg airport Saturday morning, we flew to Maun, Botswana and from there we took a small charter flight (our fourth since Paris, the Carlsons fifth since Tampa) to our first campsite. We stay two nights each in three different camps in Botswana.

Stacy and Bill successfully completed their mission to bring us a new PC to replace our old one. I quit writing about this in Spain, figuring I was whining too much about not having a PC, but now I have one again. Most of the credit goes to Mike Fortner, who I used to work with at Inforte. In responding to a routine question I posed to him, he volunteered to order a new PC from a supplier that could ship in time. Mike then had the PC shipped to him, loaded software on it for me, and then shipped it to Bill in Tampa for him to bring to me. It is difficult to capture in words how grateful I am for his help. Deanna is appreciative too, for now I am far less grumpy. There are no phone, email, or internet connections in our safari camp locations, but that is okay as I have hundreds of pictures to edit from 10 countries we have been in since we were last able to post pictures.

Deanna is going to write about Botswana in a separate post. I will pick things up again on Friday, November 25, when we visit Victoria Falls on the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia.

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12:18:15 am French Diary VII  

French Diary VII

Wednesday, November 16, 2005 - Paris, France - Cool, 50.

Rodin Museum was unexpectedly closed, so we went on to the Monet Museum, then we split up. I took the sewer tour (stinky, more modern, and less interesting than the Catacombs), while mom, Bill, and Deanna went to Notre Dame Cathedral, which I had seen before. We then met, had lunch, and visited the Louvre. Deanna is somewhat better, but still has a cold.

Thursday, November 17, 2005 - Paris, France - Cool, high 40s.

Apparently, it snowed in Chicago last night, and the windchill is around 0 Fahrenheit. That makes the cool weather here more bearable. This is about the coldest weather we have had on the trip, and likely the coldest we will have until we return to Chicago. The highs in Botswana, our next stop, are around 90 right now.

We split up again, with everyone else going to the palace at Versailles that I had seen before. Mom and Bill liked it. Deanna was less impressed, thinking the palaces in St. Petersburg, Russia surpassed it. I think she is correct. Versailles is the best-known and most imitated palace, but inevitably one of the imitators did outdo it.

I spent about five hours in the internet cafe--2 1/2 hours in the morning and a similar amount of time at night. I needed this much time due to another French let's-do-things-differently-just-to-show-we-can-be-different idea. The French keyboard has five letters in a different place then the standard QWERTY keyboard, requiring about three times the normal amount of time for me to type (the a, w, q, z, and m keys are rearranged). Now all over the world, different countries do customize their keyboards so that local symbols and special characters are present or more prominent. But this is the first time I have encountered a redesign of the letter keys. I am sure the French placement is technically more efficient if you were only to ever type French on a French keyboard. But to deviate from a de facto world standard for a small efficiency gain seems absurd to me. A French person traveling outside of France will be a bit helpless on a standard keyboard, while visitors to France will similarly struggle. This non-standardization is good for French internet cafe revenue, I will say.

In between low-productivity internet sessions, I visited Shakespeare & Company, the English-language bookstore along the Seine, near Notre Dame. It gained fame as the publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses, when no other publisher would touch the book. It is a rabbit warren of small rooms with books stacked floor to ceiling in no apparent order. Some books are new, most are old. Most books are for sale, but some are not--you can read them on site though. Struggling writers use the facilities for research, writing, or accommodation, although the conditions appear a bit spartan and dirty. It was interesting to see. You may have seen it in movies or TV shows--I think it was in After the Sunset with Ethan Hawke in the past two years.

After that, I rode the metro out to La Defense, the central business district of Paris that is not in central Paris. Most large French companies have their headquarters here. It is all modern skyscraper architecture in contrast to Paris's 19th century and earlier low-rise buildings. The architecture was good, better than many post-World War II commercial centers and I was glad that I went.

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12:14:10 am French Diary VI  

Tuesday, November 15, 2005 - Paris, France - 50, rainy.

Orsay Museum (art 1848-1914; begins where Louvre ends); World War II section of Invalids; Catacombs. Deanna continues to be sick with a sore throat and now no energy. She went back to hotel after Orsay Museum, but then ventured out later to Invalides by herself.

The Paris subway is among the best in the world. You are never much more than 500 meters from a station and the trains are frequent, the maps are plentiful, and the system is well maintained. It is similar to London in layout, but less prone to breakdown. I don't remember if it is physically uncomfortable in summer; London definitely can be, but Paris's warmer temperatures may mean they have addressed the cooling problem out of necessity. Probably Paris and Tokyo have the best systems overall, although each has a deficiency of escalators/elevators that are present in more newly built systems. Their absence is an inconvenience if you have luggage. Singapore is the sleekest system in the world, in my opinion, although it is not yet as comprehensive. Also, its stations verge on being too big, requiring you to walk long distances to get from the train to the street. Seoul's subway is excellent also, nearly as comprehensive as Paris and Tokyo, but occasionally suffering from the huge station syndrome like Singapore.

Saturday's International Herald Tribune had a great op-ed piece by Roger Cohen on the speech that French President Jacques Chirac has not given, but should, in response to the French riots. Before I discuss what Cohen said, I do have to say that Chirac's feeble response has been so invisible and lacking as to make George Bush's initial handling of Hurricane Katrina look like a model of crisis management. Also illuminating to me is that while in general the IHT has criticized Chirac, it has taken a rather mild tone, before dashing back to its comfort zone of haranguing Bush on everything he does, devoting far more column space to far less serious matters than the French riots. This unbalanced contrast, following the horribly biased Katrina coverage in Europe a few months ago, again shows me that Bush--a man who admittedly does provide much to criticize--is unlikely to get a fair evaluation by the European/US east coast media establishment for the remainder of his term. The sore loser phenomenon of 2000 has a long half-life, especially once the Iraq war re-stoked these passions.

Anyway, regarding France, Cohen providing a soaring speech that pinned the trouble assimilating immigrants to failed economic practice and a welfare state that "inhibits us, saps our creative energy, and extends a culture of dependency into suburbs of despair and vandalism." The answer Cohen says is not more government programs, but a break with past practices such as the 35-hour week and lifelong unemployment benefits that oddly have resulted in more than 60% of French citizens opposed to capitalism.

One thing I will have to commend France on is that they reject affirmative action out of hand, and have continued to do so after the riots, despite some calls to adopt this (most surprisingly by Nicolas Sarkozy, the leading conservative candidate for president in 2007). They also collect no census information on ethnic origin or religious practice, not wanting to put people in groups. Everyone is a French citizen of equal standing, with no distinctions made. Unfortunately, as the riots have revealed, in practice there has been discrimination and immigrant assimilation has not worked as well as in other countries, including the US, which falls all over itself to create ethnic and minority distinctions. I think the US success in immigrant assimilation is due to its economic model that gives hard-working people the opportunity for advancement, rather than its census taking procedures or quota systems, and I would hope if France were to adopt any of our practices it would look to the former and not the later. France's colonial past is full of historical mistakes, but this does not approach the magnitude of US slavery. Thus, I think any justification for affirmative action for France falls short. If they were to adopt any form of positive discrimination, I would hope they would base decisions on economic factors and not race or ethnicity. This might be a better method for the US to switch to as well.

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November 18, 2005

10:45:05 am French Diary V  

Sunday, November 13, 2005 - continued from prior post

There is an official French tourist publication entitled "The D-Day Landings and the Battle of Normandy" that lists all of the sites, but we did not stumble onto this booklet until late in the day. Still, we made the most of the day, visiting Utah Beach, the museum next to Utah Beach (Musee du Debarquement in Sainte-Marie-Du-Mont), Pont due Hoc (a bomb-cratered battle site where US Rangers suffered a 60% death rate but ultimately knocked out German artillery aimed at the beaches), and Musee Memorial D'Omaha Beach. These sites, along with the American Cemetery we saw yesterday, provide a comprehensive full-day visit of the D-Day invasion. You could, though, spend several days here if you wished as there is much more to see. Also, the beaches that were filled with death over 60 years ago are today great recreational beaches. I don't know if people do swim and sunbathe here in summer. It would seem disrespectful on one hand, but on the other, it would seem a waste for 50 miles of wide, pristine beach to sit idle.

The drive to Paris was not long in distance but it was lengthy in time as everyone returned to the city after a three-day holiday weekend. Our missing license plate was a never-before-seen phenomenon that attracted much attention from other motorists, many of whom desired to politely warn us of our condition. The streets of Paris were quiet as could be, with no sign of the recent rioting. In part this was likely due to a visible police presence with officers on about every other corner around our hotel. We stay five nights at Hotel De Suede St. Germain in section 7 of Paris within walking distance of Invalides and the Orsay Museum, with the Eiffel Tower a long walk away. Arriving at 10 PM on a Sunday, no restaurants were open near our hotel, except for one--a Chinese place just down the street. So our first Paris meal was Chinese, where we spoke Chinese to the owner and his wife as we knew it better than we knew French or they knew English. That is to say we barely knew it at all, but we nonetheless impressed them with ni hao, hein hao, xie xie, boo yong, and boo-ker-che (probably all mispelled here), thus exhausting much of our Chinese vocabulary. On the subject of misspelling, I'll note also that the British Airways lounge PC I am typing this on in London prevents access to spellchecker.com, no doubt a site full of offensive words, so the English spellings in this post may not be as accurate as usual either.

Monday, November 14, 2005 - Paris, France - Sunny, low 50s

Eiffel Tower, Arc De Triomphe, Champs Des Elysees. Initial impression of Paris versus prior visit in 1992: cleaner, much less graffiti, less dog crap on the sidewalk although still a lot (I actually saw someone pick up after their dog, an action previously unthinkable), a bit more English spoken but still not that much relative to other places in Europe. Overall: quite favorable.

Regarding the language, it occured to me how difficult it much be for a French person who does not speak English to travel outside of France. The average Dutch or German person we met while in those countries was fluent in English and thus would hae no problem going anywhere outside of their own country. But if you only know French, you aren't going to have much luck outside of places such as Belgium or former colonies like Algeria. You could join a tour group of course, which is what monolinguists from China and Japan must do (younger traveling Chinese and Japanese today know English though). You would have an easier time than Asian monolinguists, as you are more likely to find an occasional French speaker than a Chinese or Japanese speaker, plus you might be able to read English even if you could not speak it. Still, interaction on any question not covered in your French guidebook would be difficult. This experience would be the same for anyone from any country not knowing English of course, except for the Spanish who could be understood throughout Central and South America, but you meet a lot of French who you would expect to know English who do not, which is why I mention it here. Growing up in France you are protected a lot from the outside world. This of course means that you are not always prepared for the outside world.

They are calling our flight, so once again I will have continue this another time.

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November 17, 2005

11:53:55 am French Diary IV  

Saturday, November 12, 2005 - Bordeaux, Omaha Beach, and Caen, France - Cool, occasional rain, 55.

Drove most of the day to Normandy, arriving in time to visit the American Cemetary at Omaha Beach an hour before it closed. There was a sizable crowd, mainly French, probably due to the weekend marking the end of World War I (although this cemetery was only for World War II). World War I lingers in the European memory (and also the Australian and New Zealand memory) to a greater extent than it does in the American memory. Although I have not done the math, I suspect that if you measure WWI casualties as a percentage of WWII casualties, you will find the WWI percentage for the US to be lower than for the UK, France, Belgium, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand. The US got off lighter, so to speak, due to its late entry. New Zealand, I believe, actually had more WWI casualties than WWII. The US, however, experienced nearly the same number of casualties in Vietnam as WWI, so WWI has lost some significance for us. Armistice Day remains a government holiday, but it is now re-christened as Veteran's Day, and it is not a business holiday. In France, though, November 11 remains a major holiday, and in New Zealand and Australia, the day of their major WWI battle (April 25, Gallipoli) remains a huge holiday, equal in magnitude to our Memorial Day (originally Decoration Day to honor Civil War soldiers), or perhaps even greater.

We stayed one night at the Otelinn in Caen. It is right next to a museum on World War II and the 20th Century that ironically we did not go to due to time constraints. Caen is a small city of just over 100,000, but the town of Bayeux, around 15,000, is closer and more convenient to the D-Day sites. In summer it would be best to stay in one of the small villages of a few hundred or a few thousand people near Omaha Beach--e.g. Colleville, St. Laurent, Vieruille. Once the weather turns colder in October and November and the crowds diminish, many of the small museums, shops, hotels, and restaurants in these villages close for the season.

Sunday, November 13, 2005 - Caen, Utah and Omaha Beaches, and Paris, France - Cool, 50.

Spent the day touring different D-Day sites. The invasion area was 50 miles wide along five beaches: Sword (UK), Juno (Canada), Gold (UK), Omaha (US), and Utah (US). The battle for Normandy, a region in northern France, lasted for several months after June 6, 1944. D-Day is the largest invasion in human history. It was not the turning point of the war--that occurred one to two years earlier (Stalingrad in the Soviet Union, El Alamein in Africa, and Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal in the Pacific) but it opened a vital third front against Germany, allowing the Allies to push into Germany from the west and end the war.

There are dozens of battle sites and commemorative museums throughout Normandy. The bulk of these are along the five beaches. There is no central museum--instead there are numerous homespun museums full of personal memorabilia and often devoted to a particular aspect of the invasion, such as a specific US army unit. You can visit each site in about an hour.

Internet cafe is closing, so to be continued at a later time.

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