I've had a couple of really good days here. It gets rough sometimes, but I've been quite pleased to be here. We left Lille and are now in Rouen. By the time you read this, I'll most likely be back in Paris again for a petite respite before we head to Strasbourg.
Rouen feels like a village. It's the place where they burned Joan of Arc at the stake. For some reason, the building they built to commemorate this and I guess to honor her looks TOTALLY out of place. Here it is:
Not very french looking. My friend kept complaining about how modern it was. I keep forgetting what city we are in or what day of the week it is. It starts to run together. It's quite amusing to watch a group of adults discuss what day they THINK it is for 3 minutes, dead serious. We were standing in front of a french store that was closed in the middle of the day and we had to run through our list of why-the-french- don't- want- to- work- right- now excuses.
1) It's Sunday (sort of legit, but it's been so long in the US I've forgotten about Sundays off)
2) It's Monday and I already had to work on Saturday
3) It's Monday and it's a pharmacy before 3pm
4) It's a restaurant and it's after 2pm, but before 7pm
5) It's the weekend of Easter
6) The owner has a hangnail....
Okay, just joking about the hangnail, but there's lots of closures. And when we first saw a store closed we thought it was Sunday and then realized that it was Thursday and that individual store proprietor was closed for no predictable reason.
I try to figure out why I seem to have so little time here and it dawns on me that eating at restaurants every day for 2 meals takes a LOT of time, as does doing laundry and mundane tasks that you can't do easily without a car or a house. So, I get less done, but I've sort of come to expect less. A good day is one where I can call my husband, read and answer emails, update my blog, paint my nails, eat and get a decent amount of sleep. Anything above and beyond is just gravy.
Alright, more later.
3 comments:
You're short!
The grass is always greener ...
Don't kid yourself, the french may have their own work schedule and/or ethic, but we've got our own dysfunctionality here. It's just different.
In corporate america (I am the spokesperson for them, in case you were unaware), it's coffee breaks, it's corporate politics, it's rules that make no sense, etc. We appear to be more busy more of the time, but not sure we're all that more productive.
Perhaps I'm being overly hard on us ... but we too waste time in different ways.
I had the opposite reaction to seeing the photos of Jeanne D'Arc's martyrdom building: to me, it looked out of place, but still french. I frequently have that reaction when I see things like the Pompidou, or some of the modern bridges, or things like that. I think it's that the contrast between really old, really classical styles and modern, freaky weird styles is more pronounced when they are juxtaposed ... Somehow it seems less weird in Germany (Berlin for instance) where there's the same high contrast mix, but just a lot more of it.
Ok, that was more philosophical than I intended.
I love Deb. She's always good for something substantive.
Post a Comment