Late night Paris

An evening with friends in Paris usually consists of dinner or a bar, or on the weekend, dancing. I decided to grab a few videos of nights out with the friends, in order to share with you guys a typical Parisian night on the town.

One evening last week, I took a visiting American friend to Marcus' favorite new bar, Les Souffleurs, in the Marais. From what I can tell, Souffleurs comes from souffle, to blow. A souffleur is actually a prompter in the theater - someone off stage who gives the actors their lines, or "blows" the words to the actors. Souffleur has also been used as the name of a French submarine, because of the "blow spout." So it's hard to know the intent. Hell, it could even be a sexual pun.

I guess you'd call Les Souffleurs a "gay bar," except it's really just a very cool bar that just happens to have a pretty gay clientelle. Maybe calling it straight-friendly would be more appropriate. It's a skinny little hole in the wall with all sorts of charm and ambience. A nice, cute, relatively young - and friendly - crowd, and dancing in the very small basement cave until the hour is late. (And the mojitos are good, and not outrageously priced, for Paris.) Here's a quick video of Marcus sharing a story at the bar.



Saturday night we had arranged with Friday night's picnic crowd to meet at a bar where, before midnight, they dance Tango and waltzes. It was a total hoot. Then at midnight, they switch for a few minutes to a line dance that they call "the Madison." It sounded awfully familiar to me until an American friend mentioned "it's the Hustle!" I unfortunately did not get a video of the Frenchies doing the Hustle, as I had been grabbed onto the dance floor by my friend Clément, and was trying desperately to remember the dance steps I learned in 8th grade (a long time ago). I failed miserably.

After midnight, the music switched to "Rock" as the French call it. Which isn't really rock. It's oldies from the French and American 60s, 70s, and a wee bit from the 80s (too wee a bit). It was great fun. Basically a healthy mix of American and French 70s discos (and more). Here's the gang dancing to Claude François' "Magnolias for Ever." Which, best as I can gather, is a cheesy French disco song.

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Paris, Je T'aime

8 minutes long. A-dor-able, as we say in French. (The subtitles are hard to read, but they are JUST readable, if you try.) Part of a larger series of films made about the different arrondissements, or neighborhoods, in Paris. This one is about the 14th, where Chris and Joelle live, and where I lived when I studied here. It's not very long. Worth watching.

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The nighttime picnic in Paris

In summertime, especially August, Parisians love their picnics (called pique-niques [peek-neek)). Often we'll have them along the Seine river, cutting through the center of Paris. But you could also picnic at any city park (they're everywhere), or along the Canal St. Martin is also a popular spot. (Interestingly, a reader notes that "picnic" first appeared in the French, according to Wikipedia.)

In Paris, picnics are generally evening affairs. A French friend expressed shock when I made the common American mistake of saying that last Friday's picnic was at "17 heures" (I meant 7pm) instead of "19 heures." No one picnics at 5pm, he told me in disgust. And of course he was right. No respectable Parisian would ever picnic before 7pm, the traditional time at least for my Paris-dwelling friends.

Our usual haunt, near the end of Paris Plage by the Pont Marie, was a bust when we were summarily kicked out by the cops at 730pm. It seems that we picked the last day of Paris Plage (where they turn a mile of street along the Seine into one big public beach, sand and all, for a month) to do our picnic, and the city was closing the event abruptly at 730 (because it would be silly to close the event at the end of evening, or worse, at the close of the weekend).



Above would have been our view had the cops not kicked us out. Fortunately, Marcus and company came up with a much better plan. We'd go over to the Ile St. Louis and picnic at what has always been one of my favorite spots in Paris, since I lived here when I was 19. The spot is right here at a bend in the island and the river. Viewed from the other side, this is where we picnicked on Friday, just around the bend to the left, where you can't see any longer.



French picnics are a big communal smorgasbord of a mess. Usually advertised and organized on Facebook (or Fess-book, as they say in French (which is a pun, since "fesses" in French means "butt")), you never really know how many Friends will make it, but normally we get a good 15 to 20. The French like their food cocktail-y. So there's always some kind of salted nuts and cherry tomatoes, pâté and prosciutto, and of course a few perfectly crisp baguettes. The main course is usually chicken and maybe Chinese (that's my usual fallback), and dessert might be some kind of cake or tarte. Oh, and there's always lots of wine, and even sometimes some champagne (this time someone, God bless him, brought a bottle of Veuve).

Another interesting thing: Some guys working for the city came by and left us a big green plastic garbage bag. They go by all the picnic spots and leave people bags so they can clean up afterwards. Yes, there are garbage cans already there, as you can see in the picture below, but the bags usually already have garbage in them, and couldn't take all that we had to throw away (and all of the other picnics taking place just a few yards away). Brilliant move by the city - a very cool small-town move.



This late in the summer, the sun tends to set by 8:40 - mid-summer in Paris, in late June, it sets at 10pm (and twilight lasts until a good 1030) - I remember working here for a summer when I was 23, and going to bed before 10ish, and it was bright as daylight outside. Sunset, and the streetlight-accented darkness after, are the best part of picnicking, especially along the river.



The picnic ended around 11 or 1130pm, just in time for us to hit a few bars and then go dancing until 3am (something I hadn't done in possibly 15 years.) It was fun, and exhausting. Below is the view as we left the picnic, heading over to Marcus' favorite bar, Les Souffleurs. I'll save the video from the Souffleurs for another day.



You'll see our picnic spot, very small in the left hand side of the photo, along the bank, just below Notre Dame in the picture. This is the actual view on the way to the bar. My view in DC on the way to the bar takes me past lots of chicken bones, broken glass, and a few scary housing complexes where people get shot every few months. And people ask why I come to Paris every August. Read More......

A little HDR photography in Paris

I started experimenting a few days ago with High Dynamic Range photography (HDR). Basically, you take a number of images at various different exposures, then stitch them all together into one photo. The idea is that you are able to capture the image as your eye sees it, rather than as the camera normally sees it (the camera will often let you capture the sky or the scenery, but not both, because the exposure setting is so different for each). What I found was that HDR tends to play interesting games with your photos, especially at night. A few of my favorites are below. You can check out the rest here.

A view across the Seine of the Conciergerie where Marie Antoinette was held before she was taken to the guillotine.



Fabien driving near the Hotel de Ville (city hall) after dark - the third in the series of photos moved, so the lights streaked, to very cool effect:



Chatelet metro station, on the way to Marcus' place:



Marcus' art studio:



An HDR look at the Arts et Metier metro stop:



More Arts et Metier:



HDR Marcus:



In this one, below, I started playing with the notion of not letting my software stitch the photos together, but rather using photos of the same subject where the subject is in motion. I thought this shot of a new Australian friend was interesting:



Here's another version of one of the photos above, where I also didn't let the software merge the photos together before applying the HDR conversion:



Marcus putting the cheese away:



Folks on the phone near my favorite pizza place in the Marais:



Chatelet metro again:

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The disgrace that has become the Paris metro

I think when you live in a place, even for just a year, and especially as young person, you always associate it with "home," even decades later. For me, Paris will always be home. I came here at the age of 19 to spend a year learning French. I didn't really speak a lick of French before coming here, yet somehow my parents let me go anyway (the older I get, the less I understand their decision). So when I see things like the poor state of the Parisian Metro, it upsets me on a personal level.

I just posted on my Facebook page a photo I shot the other day of my Metro train, line 4, coming into Montparnasse station, just around the corner from Chris and Joelle's (you can see the photo above). As a foreigner, coming to Paris for the first time in 1983, seeing the Metro was like visiting transportation Disneyland. It was a vision of the future, and a first lesson in the sometimes-fallibility of "We're number one!" We had nothing like this in the states, and still don't to this day.

Today, however, the Paris metro is less a vision of the future, and more a disgusting reflection of New York City at its worst.

There is graffiti everywhere - and I mean, everywhere. On the train windows, the train walls, the outsides of the trains, even the tunnel walls between stations. And it's not the "pretty" graffiti they used to get in New York, as if that would be some kind of consolation. The graffiti "artists" are using some kind of acid to etch the walls and windows, so it's just a big scrawling mess, like someone took a screw driver and scratched everything, ten times over.

And the worst part, I come here every year to house sit for Chris and his wife while they're gone on vacation, and it's been this way for years. Either no one is doing anything about it, or what they're doing clearly isn't working. In NYC, they finally put a stop to the graffiti by cleaning it up immediately, every single time it happened - eventually the graffiti artists simply gave up. Here it seems as though the government, and the public utility that runs the Metro, has given up.

It really is disgusting. I can't believe there isn't more public outrage about it. Or maybe the public has given up too. Read More......

A bit more Paris blogging...

I spent yesterday with my friend Serge, who was having some difficulty with his washing machine. The hose broke and it wasn't entirely clear how to install a new one. So I popped over to his neighborhood in the 10th, near Gare de l'Est, and we spent a late afternoon washing machine fixing and checking out Serge's new artwork he created (I should have gotten some photos, will next time). What made Serge think I would be able to help fix a washing machine, I'll never know.

In the upper right of the photo above, at the top of the long street, you can see the Porte Saint-Denis. It looks like the Arc de Triomphe, and is a relatively new addition to the neighborhood - built to replace the old walls of the city, themselves built in the 1300s. This new addition dates to 1672.



Serge has a studio apartment in a really old building - well, American "old" - I believe it's from the 1700s. The iron work outside his windows is apparently original. I love the old wooden stairway and windows as you walk up to the 6th floor or so where Serge's place is.



The neighborhood is quite ethnic. Heavy Arab influence, but also, apparently, an Indian and Pakistani influence as well (judging by the Bollywood video store just below). But just like big cities in the states, the neighborhood is slowly shifting from working class to yuppie, or at least a healthy mix of the two.



Just a view of the sidewalk below Serge's. I like to hang out the window and snap photos. Paris, being such a low city - buildings just don't get that tall in most of the city proper - you always have a great view once you get up a few floors.



After we manly fixed the washing machine, and I helped Serge figure out that, after all these years, he apparently DID have wifi in his apartment we went down the block to a Kurdish kabob place for dinner. It was quite interesting. My first Kurdish restaurant, and I'm pretty sure my first Kurds as well. The kabob was quite good, I got lamb (we also got a second vegetarian thing that you can see Serge eating above), Serge got ground beef, but the best part was sitting on these itty bitty v-shaped-butt chairs at itty-bitty tables that felt like something out of kindergarten.

It started to rain, and we had finished our kabobs, so headed back to Serge's for a late night herbal tea. The French are big on having tea with friends (at least my friends are). And it's quite lovely, for lack of a better word. The entire tea set comes out - folks my age actually have tea sets - and you sit and sip your tea while surfing for Ikea shelves on Serge's newly-found WiFi (or wee-fee, as they say in French).



Finally, back to Montparnasse around 11pm or so. The rain had stopped, so the streets had a nice glisten to them, perfect for the neon that is both popular, and famous, in our more chi-chi neck of the woods.



Oh, and the scarves. The French (and a lot of Europeans), just LOVE their scarves. A short rain, and temps in the mid 60s, and the scarves are out in full force (in the states, we don't sport scarves unless it gets to the upper 40s F or so, I'd say - at least not in the north). Admittedly not a bad way to warm up if you have a slight chill, even in the 60s.

And hey, she looked good. It is Paris, after all. Read More......

Tuesday morning Parisian open thread

Last night I went with my friend Serge to the "Dreamland" exhibit at the Pompidou Center, located in the Marais. You'll recall that the Pompidou Center is the inside out glass and tubes building. The exhibit was difficult to describe, I'm really not sure what it was about. But it was really interesting. It went from the World's Fair to Vegas to artists' visions of the future. I think the idea overall was varying visions of the future, or more than the future, visions of an almost whimsical architectural future. It was very cool.



The exhibit was on the top floor of Pompidou, which might be 7 floors high or so, but in Paris seven floors is huge. The city is so low, the buildings are so small, that, like Washington, DC, the seventh floor can be amazing. And at Pompidou it is. All of these photos are from that top floor. I kind of the like the one just above, you'll note the Eiffel Tower peaking over the tube in the middle of the photo.



That would be Serge, above, in one of the people moving tubes. Serge is an interesting guy. An artist by training - he went to the school of the Louvre - he also, for some odd reason, seems to know a lot about everything. From French history to the GATT accords. He's a very typically French, or even European, "intellectual" - a word we don't use much in American English. Just absurdly educated, and strangely so, in terms of the breadth of the education beyond his primary discipline. Being an artist, Serge has an 'artist's card' which gets him, and me, into any museum in France for free. You gotta love this country.



You couldn't ask for better timing. Just as the exhibit closed, at 9pm, the sun set over Paris. There's probably nothing better in Paris than sunset time. Whether on a bridge, or atop a building, or having a nighttime picnic along the Seine or in a park, nothing beats the sunsets in this town. Read More......

Monday morning Parisian open thread

Yesterday I spent a typical Parisian Sunday with a few of my French and American friends. My friend Arnaud, who works at a PR firm, took me to a late brunch at a Russian-ish tapas place in the Marais. The meal was nothing special - brunch is often better in concept in France - but we got to sit outside in this beautiful little square in low-70s weather on a sunny day.

At one point, the dog you see in the right hand side of the photo came over to greet us. We both found it cute, and typical (dogs in France are a bit like cows in India), and made appropriate cooing noises at the mutt. The owner, the guy standing up by the dog, was none too pleased with the animal. I told him, in French, not to worry, I loved dogs. He responded, yes, and she loves shit. Apparently the dog wasn't coming over to greet us, but rather had found a tasty morsel on the ground behind my seat. Such is Paris.

You'll note in the photo above that Arnaud is using a small device to pay his bill. They've had these in France for at least four or five years that I remember. They're very cool. The server sometimes even uses the device to write down your order, and then rings up each person separately at the end - the device takes, and verifies, credit cards. It's very cool. And kind of makes you wonder why they've been in France for years and I've still not seen one in the states. (We're number 1!)



From there, Arnaud went off to see a friend, and I met up with my friend Fabien at the open house our American friend Marcus was holding at his art studio. You'll remember Marcus' studio as the place I crashed at last year when I was recuperating from my eye surgery. Every Sunday, or so, Marcus holds a "salon de thé" at his studio, where people can stop by and check out the art, buy something if they like, and more generally have tea and speculos and good conversation. The window above was right across from Marcus' place - just some graffiti or something, but I thought it looked cool with the sun and shadows.



Inside Marcus' "atelier" (workshop), I found an old friend of Marcus', and new friend of mine, Donna from New York, who is studying French at the Sorbonne, in the same class in which I found myself 25+ years ago. Some Brazilian and German classmates of hers were there too. The photo above is of Marcus's desk in his studio.



Marcus is a good friend, with a good wit and a ready laugh, and also awfully photogenic. So I enjoy shooting shots of him inside his typically French apartment with those wonderfully large and reflective French windows.

After Marcus' tea, Fabien and I were going to rejoin Arnaud for a "Bal Portugais," some Portuguese dance that was taking place. But we got word around 7pm that the dance was kaput, over in only an hour and a half. So we went to Arnaud's and played pinball for a while, on the machine that Arnaud's roommate had gotten him for his birthday.



Between pinball matches, the boys, being French, had to take frequent nicotine breaks out the window. Did make for a lovely pic at least.



Finally, after were pinballed out, and the boys had enough nicotine in their blood, we went down the block, in the 11th, to some small plaza on a street where the houses and businesses were all painted different, fun colors (much like La Recoleta in Buenos Aires). You have to understand that in Paris, everything is beige. There we found two little cafe/restaurants, and sat at one while Arnaud had his dinner, and Fabien and I, having already eaten some sandwiches from the local patisserie, slowly worked on our typical evening fare of mojitos and caipirinhas as the late summer sun set on Paris, and the temperature drifted into a perfect upper 60s, as it will many a summer night.

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Saturday morning open thread

One of the neat things about being in Paris is walking. I have to admit that I was never much of a walker until I got my puppy earlier this year. And once I dropped 7 pounds as a result of our twice a day romps around the neighborhood, little Sasha had me hooked on the value of a good stroll around the block.

But walking in Paris is something entirely different than walking in Washington, DC. To wit, my walk home last night from the Marais, an old neighborhood in the center of Paris. It was around 10pm and I was about to hit the metro, but figured, why am I heading home? I had nothing to do, but still, it's early and it's Paris. So I walked. The entire walk took about 45 minutes (not including a ten minute ice cream break at my favorite Italian gelato store, Amorino - they're a chain throughout Paris, and the best damn ice cream I've ever eaten - equal to the best stuff in Italy).

Anyway, so my walk started with the usual Marais night life, which can be a bit overwhelming unless you take a less traveled street, which I did. Then it's quite quaint. I headed down to the Tour St. Jacques, which was recently (relatively) renovated, and was standing in all its glory, bathed in green light, oddly.

I looked down the block and caught a glimpse of the Hotel de Ville, or city hall. And it's such a gorgeous building, even by day - but at night, with the lighting, it's simply stunning. So I took a detour so I could walk by it. As I got closer, I heard music. There was some kind of concert going on, and the crowd seemed to be liking it. So I headed on over.



Here's a quick video of the concert:



I have no idea who the band was, but they were speaking French with a heavily English, I think, accent. As I cut through the crowd, there were a slew of bikes just standing there, and I realized - it's 10 o'clock on a Friday night in Paris - it's the city-wide bike ride! Every Friday night, in summer at least (not sure about the rest of the year), at around 10 o'clock at night, they close some of the streets in Paris and have either a big bike ride, or a big roller blade ride. It's just great. I need to try it some time, at least the bike ride.



So I left the bike ride before it began, cut across the river and caught a glimpse of Paris Plage, or Paris Beach. Every year they truck in tons of sand and dump it along the roadway along the Seine. Probably a mile's worth. They then put up beach umbrellas, bring in vendors, water sprays, chairs, music, and voila! - it's a beach in the middle of the city. It's quite the popular event, takes place, more or less, from July 20 to August 20. You can get a glimpse of Paris Plage in the right side of the photo below.



Then more trekking south until I approach, of course, Notre Dame cathedral.



Honest to God, this is what it's like walking home in this city. You just walk by the most incredible things. I stopped for a moment and looked up at Notre Dame, a sight I've seen probably dozens of times, but just had to look again. Then headed south, across the river (Notre Dame is on an island, basically), and heard music playing, again. This time it was a guy with a guitar serenading a pretty large crowd along the Seine. He was playing Gloria Gaynor, I think, then swung into full blown Madonna.

Here's a quick video of the guy playing - I'm pretty sure he's singing "Like a Prayer." I love seeing the people just sitting along the Seine, 1030 at night, couples, friends, lovers, without a care in the world. I can't imagine sitting in any big city along a river late at night, and surviving.



From there, I walked through the Latin Quarter, heading down past St. Sulpice, and then hit Amorino, and walked the final minutes home in chocolate bliss. Read More......

France's Bastille Day celebration marred by human rights controversy

Both Chris in Paris and I wrote recent posts celebrating this year's Bastille Day. Recall that Bastille Day commemorates the fall of the Bastille, pre-revolutionary France's most notorious prison, on July 14, 1789.

Despite its excesses, the French Revolution almost single-handedly created the concept of "les Droits de l'Homme" — the Rights of Man, or "human rights" as we now know them. The Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 is a stunning document, a huge advance in the war against man as predator of man.

Sadly, France has America's problem — very high, publicly declared ideals, and a history of failing to meet them. For us, Vietnam; for France, Algeria. For us, the Philippines; for France, Haiti. And in our corporate dealings, we have both corrupted Africa for our benefits.

We all fail; it's how we meet our failure that measures us. From the BBC (my emphasis):

France has staged its annual Bastille Day parade, amid criticism at the presence of some African leaders.

Armies from former colonies celebrating 50 years of independence were invited to join the military parade.

A human rights group has said that some of the troops and leaders should instead be facing trial for war crimes.

Critics also said the move gave the false impression that France granted them independence, when many fought against French rule. . . .

The letter added: "It would be no small paradox that during a celebration of the values of the Republic, these values should be flouted by the presence of torturers, dictators and other predators of human rights, and that instead of pursuing them, France honours them."

Said the French Defence Minister in response:

I don't see the sense in putting ourselves on trial over these questions.

Sound familiar? Africa haunts us all, doesn't it.

Gaius Read More......

Bastille Day (my small contribution)

My small contribution, on Bastille Day, à la Résistance. This is one of the best political anthems I've ever heard. It's stirring, even if you know not an ounce of French. Damien Saez wrote this in 2002, as a response to the election that saw Jean-Marie Le Pen, the super-rightwing racist, place second in the French national elections.

But the song is universal — it works for all who believe in the rights of man, and in resistance. The inactive and disconsolate need not apply.

First the clip, then my meager translation, for those who wish to follow along.

Sons of France
Damien Saez

"40% of voters 18-25 years old didn't vote. Unimaginable!"

I saw, with tears in my eyes, this morning in the news
20% for the horror, 20% for the fear.
Drunk with unawareness, all of them sons of France
In the land of Enlightenment, suicidal forgetfulness.

No-no-no no no
No-no-no no no

We are, we are . . . the land of the Rights of Man
We are, we are . . . the nation of Tolerance
We are, we are . . . the land of Enlightenment
We are, we are . . . at the hour of Résistance

For all the dreams we had, for those that we will dream
For the fist that we have lifted, and the fist that we will make
We march for utopia, we march for a better we,
Allons marchons together, enfants de la patrie.
Sons of France!

. . .

Behind us there are shadows, traitors and their plots
The banners that they fly, their anthems and their shouts.
And then there is you, my brother — you, who believes no more
And there are all our prayers, and our lost causes too.

Shame on our country, shame on our patrie
Shame on us, the young, shame on the tyranny
Shame on our country — look, the old enemy!
Allons marchons together, enfants de la patrie.

We are, we are . . . the land of the Rights of Man
We are, we are . . . the nation of Tolerance
We are, we are . . . the land of Enlightenment
We are, we are . . . at the hour of Résistance !

An alternate version, from an all-live performance:



Powerful stuff. À la Résistance !

GP Read More......

It's Bastille Day

A great ending to an excellent movie (Danton) about the French Revolution. The little boy reads The Rights of Man to Robespierre on the day Robespierre had Danton executed. Thomas Paine lived about ten minutes away from where I live today. He also was lucky to survive "the terror" because he voted against executing the king. Paine was sent to prison in the Luxembourg (today it's the Senat) and survived only because the chalk line that was supposed to be in front of his door (indicating he was to be executed) was incorrectly placed inside the doorway when it was open. When the door was closed, the line was hidden. That mistake provided him with an extra day which was enough for someone to save him. If you have the opportunity to see the movie Danton, it's definitely worth viewing. Read More......

Bearded women take on old boy network in corporate France

It's about time. We could all learn a lot from the Nordic countries with their progressive policies related to women.

A group of women wearing fake beards stormed the podium at Veolia Environnement SA’s shareholders’ meeting in Paris last month, challenging Chairman Henri Proglio over the gender makeup of his overwhelmingly masculine board.

“Is it really wise to allow women to define the strategy of a company, a task requiring intelligence, an ability to react and cool-headedness?” an activist of the feminist lobby La Barbe, or “The Beard,” said to the packed hall, taunting the French water utility’s board for having only one woman member out of 17. The activist didn’t want to be identified, in line with the group’s internal policies.

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Should racists be fined for their remarks?

It's something that I used to be more opposed to but increasingly I'm less against it. The added stigma of being found guilty of saying something racist should carry some extra weight. The amount is irrelevant, but the fact that the courts have found the comments out of order says a lot. Of course, George Allen's "macaca" moment was the end of his political career and no fine or ruling was needed.

In this case, a French minister has been fined for making an obvious racist remark. BBC:

Mr Hortefeux was joking with a small group of activists from the ruling UMP party in south-west France.

Immediately before Mr Hortefeux's controversial remark, one activist is heard saying: "Amin is a Catholic. He eats pork and drinks alcohol."

Mr Hortefeux then says: "Ah, well that won't do at all. He doesn't match the prototype."

A woman is then heard to say: "He is one of us... he is our little Arab."

The interior minister then says: "We always need one. It's when there are lots of them that there are problems."

The court ruled that his remark was "incontestably offensive, if not contemptuous".

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Champs Elysées transformed into country farm

French farmers organized a massive event on the Champs Elysées yesterday that will continue today, during the long weekend holiday. I generally avoid that area at all costs because it's overpriced, sterile and is a magnet for crime. It's been quite a hit and has drawn large crowds. French farms still have a small, family farm feel compared to the massive, corporate owned farms of the US but it's changing. More from The Guardian:

By bringing in 8,000 plots of earth and 150,000 plants to the city and installing them, amid sheep and cattle, along three-quarters of a mile of the thoroughfare, struggling farmers are attempting to highlight an aspect of French life which they believe is too often overlooked by Paris.

In the ravages of a crisis which has seen production costs soar and product prices fall, representatives of the agricultural sector say farmers are being brought to their knees.

But William Villeneuve, president of the young farmers' union, insisted the greening of the Champs Elysées was more a celebration than a protest.

"We are not here to bemoan our plight," he said. "We are here to promote our trade." The farmers wanted to make French consumers reflect on "what they have on their plates" and how it got there, he added.

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Paris art museum theft valued at €100-€500 million

The police are focusing on a single intruder who disappeared with five paintings from the likes of Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani. What kind of a person steals such pieces of art? Even worse, what kind of bottom dweller would think to buy them?"

This is a serious attack on the heritage of humanity," said Christophe Girard, deputy culture secretary at Paris city hall, standing on the steps of the museum amid a swarm of television cameras. Listing works by Georges Braque, Amedeo Modigliani and Fernard Léger, Bertrand Delanoe, the city's mayor, urged that everything be done "to recover these masterpieces".

Girard said it remained unclear whether the thief, who removed the paintings from their frames and rolled them up to so that they could be carried away easily, had been acting alone or with a team.

Sources pointed out that if the thief had had people waiting for him, he would have been able to make a speedy getaway, thanks to the museum's proximity to the fast-moving traffic of roads running along the side of the Seine.

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Ban the burqa?

From Taylor Marsh:

Should Pres. Sarkozy bow to religious pressure so that France changes to accommodate one religion and their customs when it confronts and would change the historic rejection of religious symbols of this country?

For outsiders who love this country, the spirit of France seems antithetical to the burqa and niqab.

Some argue banning the burqa and niqab impinges on women’s freedom and they should be able to choose to wear it or not. But let’s remember that conservative religions, from Muslims to Southern Baptists to the Catholic church, are inherently misogynistic, separating women out because they are seen as less worthy, denying them priestly powers, which basically relegates women to second among men, even in God’s eyes. This is not 21st century thinking that should be supported in the larger public arena. Every religious group has customs that should be respected among those of that faith, but the public is under no obligation to embrace these customs, let alone acquiesce to them or even respect them if they discriminate through gender, or if the religious tenets will bring a chill across a country’s public landscape.

I’m not French (some French, on my mother’s side), but I’ve had the pleasure of traveling to this stunningly liberated nation, which I’ve grown to love deeply, beginning many years ago when I first witnessed French art. Few things would be more jolting than to see it change on the wings of any conservative religion. As one person living in France reminded me, the French fought off religious conservatives (mostly Catholics) before in her history, so this is just the latest battle. They should keep fighting; for the burqa, niqab and the chador are ostentatious religious symbols that have no place on the French landscape.

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New plan in Paris to shut down auto traffic on banks of Seine

I may be biased but Paris has a pretty decent mayor. For years he's been implementing various programs to disrupt traffic and encourage people to use the cheap yet excellent public transportation. Our neighborhood had increasingly become more and more of a parking lot during rush hours. Now, I can even ride my bike through the (previously) worst intersections without concern. I drive once or twice a year but only when leaving the city because the public tranport system goes everywhere and it's cheap.

The new plan is to remove the high speed roads on the one side of the Seine and give them back to people. Sure, it would have been great to do the same on both sides but perhaps that is the next step if this succeeds. (Thankfully the Greens will help keep that issue moving.) The cars on this route today drive like it's a race track. One of the bike paths that I often use forces cyclists to wait for them to race by which always feels uncomfortable to me. Instead, I cross a few lanes of deep but slow traffic to avoid the dangerous wait. As unpleasant as it is cutting across Paris traffic, it's better than sitting like a target waiting for the light to change. Another great idea from Delanoë.

Two-lane urban motorways, which have disfigured one of the world's most beautiful riverscapes for four decades, would be partially abandoned and replaced by parks, foot and cycle paths by 2012.

The proposals are a permanent extension of the "Paris Plage", or beach, which has replaced a section of the urban expressway on the Right Bank of the Seine each summer since 2002.

Under the plan, a kilometre-long stretch of the Left Bank from the Musée d'Orsay to just before the Eiffel Tower, would become a permanent park, footpath and cycle track. According to the town hall's preliminary plans, there might even be small off-shore islands, complete with palm trees.

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Toulouse, France to pilot 'walking energy' lit sidewalks

What a fun idea. Hopefully the pilot is successful and we see other projects like this around the world.

Embedded with microsensors which produce energy when people move over them, the modules seemed to Marciel to provide an unprecedented opportunity to alter how cities save and produce energy.

"It all stems from an observation that, in the public sphere, energy is wasted and it would be good if we could somehow get it back. There is nothing original in that but what the Dutch start-up had created was new," he said.

Although the authorities say they have succeeded in proving that the idea works – to the bewilderment of some sceptical Toulouse residents – they and the designers admit there have been problems.

The prototype of the modules, said Marciel, was unsuitable for street use as "at that stage they only worked if you jumped on them like a kangaroo". "So a model was developed on which you can walk normally and still produce enough energy to power the lights," he said.

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Brits cook more during the week, make conclusion they're better cooks than French

While there are plenty of great opportunities to eat well and find great food in London, there's still a significant difference between eating in France versus England. Sure I know plenty of good cooks from over there but quality drops off very, very quickly compared to what you find throughout France. You can almost always find good food anywhere if you try hard enough. What makes France (or Italy) so great is that you find high quality not only in the big cities, but you often find even higher quality in the countryside. From my own experience, that's much harder to find when you travel outside of London though surely there are some fine examples.

It's wonderful to see a more serious food culture developing in the UK but keep things in perspective folks.

The survey, carried out by the French magazine Madame Le Figaro and the BBC's food magazine Olive, has produced an agony of French soul-searching – and a certain amount of disbelief – over the apparent erosion of the country's most celebrated heritage.

More than 2,000 French people and nearly 1,350 Britons were asked about their eating and cooking habits. Their answers revealed that 72% of the British cook at home daily, compared with 59% of the French. One British cook in two spends more than 30 minutes preparing a meal while only a quarter of the French spend that long.

Four per cent of the French polled admitted they never cook, four times as many as Britons questioned. While French and British cooks are just as likely to bake a cake or fillet a fish, nearly twice as many British people as French make their own bread.

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