Paris Parks FAIL (sort of)

My goodness, how time has flown!  Gosh, I can't even remember what I've been doing over the past week that I haven't updated my blog.

Well, for one thing, I've got a bit of a project going that is related to my blog, but basically replaced the time I might have otherwise spent actually writing in it this past week.  So... more on that in a few weeks, I guess, but in the meantime I will just say that I have been having such a nice time in Paris and it seems like such a shame to leave, in a way.  I mean, I know I can't stay here forever, and it would obviously start to get old eventually, but I've just had such a great time!

So let's see... my last entry was from July 7th, what have I done since then?  Well, last weekend, the friends I'm staying with went on a little daylong excursion to a neighboring town, and I took the opportunity to go to a free jazz festival in one of the last big Parisian parks I hadn't visited yet.  I've knocked a good number of things off of my "Paris To-Do" list since I've been here, and I'm very pleased about that.  I did the Sainte Chappelle with Karen, Emily and I did the Grande Roue, and one other thing I always meant to do was to get out to see the Bois de Vincennes.  So the Bois de Boulogne is the big park that extends all along the western side of Paris, and it's where I used to go running a lot of the time when I lived here.  The Bois de Vincennes is the big park way on the opposite side of Paris, in the southeast corner (which is probably why I never got there), and there's a big castle and botanical gardens and all sorts of cool things to check out.  So since I had the day all to myself with nothing to do and there was a free jazz festival going on, I took the opportunity to sort of kill two birds with one stone and see the Bois de Vincennes and some free jazz.

The concert I saw was really great!  There was a jazz accordionist, if you can believe it, and he was incredibly talented.  They played some super cool music, and it was a really nice afternoon, and I was so glad I went.  I also had a fun little exchange with an older French dude, related to the fact that I had misunderstood how the public bike system works.  So, the public bikes.  They are so great.  But the thing is, you normally have to have a credit or debit card with this little chip on the front of it to be able to pay to use a bike.  In fact, all machines everywhere that accept cards in Paris basically require you to have a card with the chip.  And my impression is that all machines everywhere in the world except the U.S. require you to have this little chip thing, actually.  So it sucks as an American to have a hard time using your credit/debit card to pay for things.  It means you have to pay cash for everything, which means you have to keep going to the ATM, which means you wrack up an impressive number of bank fees pretty quickly.  (Except Emily told me that Bank of America has "partner banks" in most foreign countries, where you can use their ATMs without getting charged any fees, and it turns out BNP Paribas is my French bank.  That would have been really nice to know before I got charged like $30 in bank fees.  But I digress.)

Anyway, the Vélib' bike thing normally works by just inserting your bank card and getting charged a euro or whatever for the time you use the bike.  Unless you don't have a card you can use, in which case you can purchase a day pass or a week pass on their website, and they give you a little number you can type into the machines.  So that was really nice to figure that out, and we did that the first week we were here.  But it's 8€ a week to use the bikes, and it's only 29€ a year if you buy a special pass.  So heck, knowing I was going to be here like 6 weeks, it was totally worth it to buy the year long pass.  The thing is, I just assumed that in typing in my credit card information online to buy the pass, they would just keep my card info and charge me for however much I used the bike.  (The first 45 minutes of each ride are free, and beyond that it's 1€/hour.)  But no.  Of course not.  Silly me, this is France!

The point of the story is this: I was going to go for a very nice bike ride to explore the Bois de Vincennes after the jazz festival, and I went to use my year long pass and pick up a bike, and it wouldn't work.  As I was being unsuccessful at using my bike card, this guy comes up to me on a bike, and says, "Ah!  You're an angel!  I've been circling on this thing forever."  All of the bike lock ups were full, and he needed to turn in his bike so he would quit getting charged for it.  So I'm trying to get my bike card to work, and I say, "Well, I'm apparently not that blessed, because this is clearly not working."

So we go over to the little machine thing and I type in my number, and it says, "You currently owe 1€ before you can get a bike."  And he's like, "Oh, you just have to put more money on your account, no problem."  And I say, "No no, I have the year long pass, it should work."  And he says, "Yeah, but you still have to recharge it."  And I say, "You do??  What?  I apparently don't understand how this works."  And he says, jokingly, "What, you thought you could pay 1€ one time and just ride all over France however much you please?"  And I say, "Well, I gave them my credit card information, I thought they would just keep it on file and charge me for however much I use the bikes."  And he says, "What?  No, of course not, then you'd have to send in a form."

Dingdingding.  I had completely forgotten that whenever you want to authorize a regular deduction from your bank account in France, you have to send in a special form, with like, copies of your ID and signatures and blah-dee-blah.  So I'm like, "Oh right!  The form!  I totally forgot about the forms!"  And he says, "Well of course, you don't want places just charging you however much they please all the time."  And I kind of see the logic there, but being truly American at heart (apparently), convenience is a much higher priority to me than, say, financial security.  Man, whatever.  I would rather let the Vélib' people keep my credit card information and just charge me however much I owe rather than have to fill out paperwork and wait 4-6 weeks to be able to go for a 1€ bike ride.

Anyway, the guy says, "Well it's ok, you can just put your bank card in and add money to your account right now."  And I say, "No, I don't have the chip on my card."  And he says, "What do you mean you don't have a chip?  Of course you have a chip, everyone has a chip."  And I say, "No, it's an American card, we don't have the chip."  And he doesn't believe me, so I show him all of my cards, and sure enough, no chip!  He's flabbergasted, and totally tickled.  "Hehehe!" he says.  "For once we're ahead of you guys on something!  Vive la France!"  Which was pretty funny, because he was genuinely quite happy to learn that France's credit card technology surpasses ours.  And then after he finished laughing at me and gloating, he offered to use his card to give me the 1€ it would've cost to go for a bike ride, which was really extremely nice of him.  He insisted, too - I said, "No no, that's very kind of you, but it's ok."  And he said, "No, really, it's no problem at all!  It's just 1€!"  But I thanked him again and we went our separate ways.  I dunno, I think that whole interaction might have been more fun than the bike ride, anyway!

That was all on Sunday.  The rest of this week, we had a few subjects to test, and my French friend (whose piano is sitting all alone in my house right now) got into town, and we've been having a really nice time!  He got here on Wednesday and is staying with us until Sunday or so, so it's been great catching up and hearing about his crazy summer traveling and linguistic fieldwork.  He's been in a tiny little village in Chad for the past two months, which inevitably results in some interesting stories and gorgeous photographs, and I don't have to feel bad for making him sleep on the floor because hey, he has a mattress and a pillow and that's way better than a dirt/sand floor in a leaky tent.

Yesterday, the two of us met up with a friend of his and we walked around Paris all day.  All told, we did somewhere between 10 and 12 miles, including a trek up to the Sacré Coeur (the basilica we can see from our balcony) and getting mildly lost in a neighborhood where none of us had ever been before, resulting in a necessary, well-deserved, and delicious ice cream break, followed by lots more walking and a second break for coffee and French fries a few hours later, after we dropped his friend off.  You know, coffee and French fries doesn't sound like it would be particularly appetizing, but the coffee was a really nice pick-me-up, and the French fries were nice and salty and caloric, and it really kind of hit the spot at the time.

But that's when things got a little more complicated.  So, yesterday was Bastille Day, which is French Independence Day, and there was a big military parade and a big concert and a big fireworks display, and I had planned on going to see at least part of the concert and the fireworks with the friends I'm staying with.  The thing is, one of those friends isn't big on crowds, and I went to the Eiffel Tower for New Year's Eve the year I was here, and it was the biggest, rowdiest, craziest event involving a crowd that I've ever experienced, I think.  There were people chucking full bottles of champagne in the air, and it was really pretty insane and somewhat dangerous, and knowing that my friend doesn't like crowds, I thought it might be better to avoid all that stuff and go back to the Parc de Belleville (the park from my last post, with the gorgeous view) and watch the fireworks display from there.

But there was some sort of miscommunication along the way, or something, and so while Florian and I were enjoying our weird-but-necessary coffee and French fries, waiting to hear from my friends about what they wanted to do, it turns out they had already left for the Eiffel Tower without us.  This was totally fine, except that we had pretty much decided we would like to avoid the crazy crowds and that they would probably like to avoid the crazy crowds too if they realized what they were getting themselves into, so by the time they sent me a text message saying they had already left, it was kind of hard to figure out what to do and where to meet over text messages.  Eventually we decided to meet at the metro station close to the Parc de Belleville, but I couldn't tell if they actually wanted to do that or were just being polite, and it took way longer to walk up there than I thought, so they were waiting for us at the metro for a really long time, and I felt bad about that, and then it turned out that everyone else in the northeast quadrant of Paris was trying to see the fireworks from that park too, and we couldn't see a darn thing.  I would've been okay with that, except that then I felt bad that I inadvertently made them miss the fireworks, basically.  So, Parc de Belleville FAIL.

But today is good so far.  I just had a delicious lunch with lots of veggies, which was really nice after my day of ice cream, coffee and French fries, and kebabs for dinner.  Don't get me wrong, all of those things are absolutely delicious, but sometimes a girl needs some greens.  I think I'm going to go by the store and pick up some goodies to bring home to people in the U.S., and I might be going all-in on the non-native speaker thing tonight and going to a party with a bunch of French people.  My brain usually protests for a few minutes ("Aaaack!  What??  Hang on!!") but it doesn't take too long until I don't have to concentrate anymore and can relax and just let the words wash over me.  Yesterday was a nice reminder that it really doesn't take too long to switch language gears, and that I am in fact still capable of doing it!

Well, this is a long post, and I think it's time to wrap it up now.  Thus begins my last weekend in Paris for a while, so I probably won't post again until I'm home in Berkeley, which will be Monday night!  It's been so great, but it'll nice to be back in California and start to get back into the swing of real life.  (Finally.)  Signing off!