Sunshine Keeps Knocking on My Window Today

We are enjoying the longest period of consistent sunshine we've had the pleasure of basking in for at least four months.  Of course we're not doing it in Paris, where winter still reigns supreme.  Instead we are perched on the top of one of San Francisco's vertiginous hills thanks to an extremely generous friend who offered us a wonderful place to stay while here, since our own house is rented to others.

 

This means that rather than feeling like homeless exiles in our own town we are feeling like vacationers in one of the top vacation destinations in the U.S., with views to kill for.  The Maritime History Museum's restored vessels are below and Alcatraz beyond.  The occasional tanker or cruise ship passes between them on weekdays and dozens of sailboats, spinnakers billowing, on the weekend. 

We're also benefiting from incredibly lucky weather patterns.  The forecast was for rain and we packed for rain, knowing that February in the SF Bay Area is usually the wettest month of the year.  The first year I lived here it rained every single day in February.  In the week we've been here it's rained about 3 hours.  

The air is clear and crisp and the outdoors irresistible and this morning we pulled ourselves away from the view and went to the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero for lunch and a walk.  That's not by any means to say we gave up on views.  The top photo of the Bay Bridge and Oakland beyond it was taken from the Ferry landing.  Extraordinary sights are almost ordinary here.

I had forgotten that the tramway running along the restored Embarcadero uses antique tramcars, gathered from all over the world, restored and put back into service here.  This is the one that we crossed in front of today.  Very cool.

Beyond the track and on top of Telegraph Hill is Coit Tower, famously dedicated to the firemen of San Francisco by heiress Lillian Coit, the original firefighter's groupie, sitting above a collection of pre- and post-1906 earthquake bungalows on the slopes of the hill.  It's great, and rare, to be able to appreciate these things as an outsider, a visitor, and that's what we are at the moment.  Lots better than being homeless.

Home Leave

We've exchanged the cold European winter for the rainy Californian winter for a short time.  The above is what we left behind at Frankfurt airport.

 

This is what we saw on descending into San Francisco airport.

  

And this is what we saw when jet lag woke us at dawn. 

We've already seen family and friends, had spicy Chinese food, bagels and cream cheese, corned beef sandwiches, cheeseburgers and barbecued spareribs and managed to pick up a bad cough.  More friends, Mexican food and recovery are coming soon.

It's not Paris, but it has its charms.

(Thanks to all of you who have already voted in the Top 100 International Exchange and Experience Blogs 2010 by clicking on the VOTE FOR THIS BLOG button in the sidebar at the top right.  There's still time to vote if you haven't yet, and to forward the link to everyone you're willing to annoy.  Voting closes on February 14.)

A Vote for Me is a Vote for...Me?

I'm honored that Are We in Paris Yet? has been nominated as one of "The Top 100 International Exchange and Experience Blogs 2010" by the language lovers website www.lexiophiles.com.

Being the driven world-beater I am, I want to win this, and I need your help to do it.  Please click on the box in the sidebar to the right, the one that reads:

It won't cost you a thing except a minute or two and just think, you can make me very happy.  Isn't that everyone's goal in life, to make me happy?  Well, click it anyway.

(It's about halfway down the list, which is, unfortunately, not alphabetical.)

Water, water, everywhere

 

No, it's not Venice.  This is what much of Paris looked like exactly 100 years ago.  This photo is of rue de Seine, about a block and a half from where we're living, and it comes from the exhibition at the Galeries des Bibliotheques Nationales called Paris Inondé.  A combination of extraordinary weather events and progress, including the new Metro system whose tunnels allowed rising water to infiltrate deep into the city, caused flooding that lasted for several weeks and brought the city to a grinding halt.

The water rose to levels never seen before or since.  Here's where the water level usually is in January.

It's a fascinating exhibit and you can see much of it by clicking on this link Paris Inondé .

Return to Paris

We returned to a Paris that had warmed up to more normal temperatures; a mild 40F was practically tropical compared to what we had left 10 days before, and we had apparently missed several freezing days while in Morocco. 

The first order of business was to go to the Grand Palais to see this years Monumenta exhibition.  We had seen the one by Richard Serra last year and the wonderful Anselm Keifer show the year before.  This last project in the cycle is by Christian Boltanski, an artist I've liked for many years, and I was excited to see it.  The Monumenta shows, called that because they are meant to fill the enormous space of the nave of the Grand Palais, are usually held in the fall but Boltanski asked for his show to open in the dead of winter. 

I wish I could say I liked it, but I was quite disappointed.  Behind a high wall of rusty metal boxes, each with a number, he has laid out multiple blocks of recycled clothing along the length of the space, all facing in the same direction, with low-hanging flourescent lights over each, and in front of them all is a mountain of additional clothes, some of which a mechanized claw is picking up and dropping randomly.  There are echoes of mosques, of death, of concentration camps, of missing people, and of futility.  But, to me at least, it was repetitive and boring.  There's an argument that the repetition drives the point home, but not to me.  I spoke about it today with an acquaintance who had visited the exhibition with a docent, and who had liked it.  Perhaps it needs some commentary.

Something that needs no commentary is the pleasure these children were taking in skating at the icerink set up in front of the Hôtel de Ville.  They have their own little rink separate from the larger one where families were skating sedately while hot dogging teens wove in and out among them.  I'm not sure how long the rink remains, but in this weather it's perfectly appropriate.

Because, yes, the Siberian cold is back.  White flakes fell from leaden gray skies yesterday morning and we walked as fast as we could from the Marais, where we saw a really interesting exhibit called Paris Inondé, about the historic 1910 flood that crippled Paris and left thousands homeless, to St-Germain, stopping for a hot chocolate on route.  Somehow the cold is easier to endure when the sun is shining, so I was thrilled this morning to walk out into a bright sunny day, huddled in coat and muffler and gloves.  Maybe I'm not meant for this winter stuff.  Next week we're back to California for a short visit.  Of course they've had record-breaking winter storms lately.  Out of the frying pan into the fire.

More Morocco: Essaouira

Essaouira is colorful in a different way than Marrakech.  It is bright white and blue as opposed to Marrakech's rose.  From the ocean side it could almost be taken for a Greek island town.  There are surfers on the beach.  The camera is drawn to bright colors.

And to cute vignettes.

But although I felt freer in Essaouira than I had in Marrakech, I still felt as I had there: outside and unwelcome, as I had rarely felt anywhere else I traveled.  It's possible that the inwardness of the culture, the blank walls and closed shutters, contributed to this feeling, and the strictures of a Muslim culture underlying a tourist economy definitely did, but I felt uncomfortable in many ways.

 

I didn't feel free to hold Gene's hand in the streets or have his arm around my shoulders.  I didn't like seeing women bundled up as if their very existence were shameful, even if I assumed they didn't mind it themselves.  I didn't like the fact that nothing remained of a once large and vibrant Jewish community.  I didn't like the sense that, with only a few exceptions, I was viewed only as a source of income to most of the people I encountered, and not as a human being.   

To be fair I should say that Gene liked it much more than I did.  He didn't feel as excluded, or not to the same degree.  I wonder if being a man made him feel more comfortable.

I know others who have had different experiences, friends who love Morocco and return again and again, but my sense of otherness there was much different than the otherness I've felt in Asia, for example, where I never felt deliberately excluded. 

Of course I know that people living in a tourist destination must feel invaded and resent being seen as 'local color', but I wanted to feel that I could enter and learn about the place I was visiting.  Instead I felt that it was closed to me, and in some cases there was actual hostility, as when I turned down efforts to sell me something. 

 

I wanted to feel a welcome visitor and instead I felt locked out.  I'm glad I went but I doubt I'll return.

More Morocco: Marrakech

Here are some photos that convey, I hope, a bit of what caught my eye in walking around Marrakech.  The majority of women wore coverings of some type, either a scarf with western clothing or progressively more, culminating in a full burqa-like covering with eyes barely showing.  Since most people actively avoided having their pictures taken, I can't show you most of these.

The tile around the door in the photo above is typical in the medina, something often seen on houses and storefronts.

Before King Mohammed VI dissolved his legislature recently there were 34 registered political parties.  Since a sizable proportion of Moroccans are illiterate, these painted panels serve as reminders, linking the party's number to its symbol, making it easier to recall.

There are lots of jobs in the souk, including cart drivers, either donkey- or human-propelled, sellers of wooden objects, sellers of clothing, sellers of pottery, sellers of olives and other prepared and preserved foods, sellers of preserved fruits like dates and figs and nuts, sellers of pastries, sellers of meat, and, in the huge Place J'maa el-Fna, sellers of orange juice by day and snails by night.  Yes, those are huge pots of escargot cooking.

The sellers of rugs were ubiquitous.  Like sellers of other products, they clustered together, shoulder to shoulder with the competition.

 

These boys were moving these oranges from place to place near the Koutoubia Mosque. 

Some people weren't working or didn't have work we could see, although a lot of living goes on on the sidewalks, so maybe this is a meeting of some sort.  When we came back to our riad at the end of the day, a group of women were invariable sitting there at the end of the alleyway, often preparing food, often just talking. 

 

There were few places without people, and that may be why those rooftop terraces are so appealing.  Looking up is your only out.