Base Camp Established

We're here. Teri and I have settled into our base of operations for this field season: A small apartment in Paris very near the Louvre. The flight from Miami was uneventful, but we slept very little.

Once in France, we were met by an American colleague who has been studying the French for almost 4 months: My daughter Emily. She is a "study abroad" student at the Sorbonne, and is studying French language, culture, history, and politics.

While I have yet to begin formal observations, I must say that our experience with everyone we've met, from a restaurant waiter to someone waiting for an elevator in the same building, has been friendly and kind. Emily speaks a fair bit of French, and helped us out enormously.

First Cultural Difference Noted: Driving

The only cultural difference that jumped out at me was the traffic. Drivers in France seem to be highly skilled, very attentive, and quite safe. But they do things in traffic that most Americans would never do. Traffic in Paris is a kind of organized chaos. Drivers will suddenly change direction and cut in front of traffic moving in a different direction, or merge where there is no room to merge, or drive in a lane clearly not intended for them. Even so, there is little horn beeping (unlike New York City), and I saw not a single crash.

I suspect that the attentiveness required by these risky driving habits actually lowers the number of accidents. It has been my experience that in the U.S., crashes happen when one driver is on autopilot, and another car does something unexpected. French traffic is so chaotic, drivers must always be expecting just about anything! (Caveat: I have not checked the statistics on this little hypothesis of mine, but I would like to).


Something Else You Don't See in the U.S.

As we were walking along the Sienne at about 5:00pm local time, I passed a side street and looked down to its end. As I did, something I saw stopped me in my tracks (and my companions, too): A huge crowd of what appeared to be all men ran around the far corner and continued on toward us (they were still 200-300 feet away). It had the same feeling as footage I'd seen of the "Running of the Bulls" in Spain, but there were no bulls... then a startlingly loud expolsion was heard, and we saw that someone was lighting off fireworks. Flares were also being lit and dropped from windows in the buildings.

The people continued to surge forward, aproaching the place where we stood. We decided to keep moving. Within 30 seconds, at least 20 large white police vans with their sirens blaring and blue lights flashing zoomed into the area. They blocked off three or four side streets, and guys in riot gear jumped out. There were a LOT of cops! As we watched the spectacle unfold, a police helicopter began orbiting the area where I had originally seen the men running. We walked on, heading for the Sienne river tour. As we did, we continued to see and hear police vehicles heading the the scene.

I learned later from the AFP Web Site that a large group of Dutch soccer (futbol) fans were causing a bit of trouble, and that's what we stumbled onto. I wish I had taken some video!


Acting Like Tourists


Ok, we took a delightful boat tour on the Sienne, although by this time we kept falling asleep if we sat down. We saw all the notable bridges across the river (I didn't know bridges were such a big deal), and circumnavigated the island where Emily's dormitory sits. We also went right past the Eiffel Tower at night, illuminated by blue lights. It was beautiful.

Once we returned to land, we stopped in a small cafe (well, it seems they're all small), and had some coffee and dessert before heading home.

Tomorrow, we're off to Versailles!