La fête de la musique

The 21st of June was la fête de la musique, which is also called "Make Music Day". All day (although especially in the evening), people of Paris come out onto the streets and play music, listen to music, and dance. There are organized events (for free), with professional musicians playing their most well-known pieces, and there are spontaneous expressions, with groups of plucky amateurs testing out their latest improvisation. It's quite something.

June the 21st is also around the time of the summer solstice, the longest day. This year, the sun rose at 5:47am and set at 9:58pm, giving us 16 hours and 10 minutes of daytime. This long day is ideal for an evening of wandering the streets and enjoying music late into the night!

If you're reading this in the USA, a 16-hour day probably seems pretty long. Only in the northernmost edges of the continental US do you get days even approaching 16 hours. On the other hand, if you're reading this in Scotland, you're probably wondering what the big deal is - Paris's longest day was more than an hour shorter than Glasgow's longest day, and the Shetland islands enjoy nearly 19 hours on the same day. Most of Scotland won't see days as short as 16 hours until early August. And if you're reading this from somewhere else, then hello! Nice of you to join us.

So, as I mentioned, there were many many musical events happening all over the city, some publicized, some not. There was a tremendous diversity of music on offer - from smooth jazz to punk rock to electro-swing. We decided to go to a little concert which was being held in the courtyard of the Mémorial de la Shoah (Holocaust Memorial Museum). It featured an eclectic classical string group with two violins, one viola, two cellos, a bass, and a harp! Also performing was a teenaged a cappella choir who sung vocal versions of pop songs. They took turns performing throughout the evening.

Our view of the string performers.

I'll leave a full critique of the music to Talia, but I certainly enjoyed it and it was clear that the performers were all really enjoying themselves. It is really special that there's a whole day set aside for people to just enjoy music. And looking at the publicized events, there was a real diversity on offer. If you wanted to go and see the Orchestre de Paris play a Mahler symphony, you could do that; if you wanted to go to a rave, there was that; if you wanted to enjoy some traditional Portuguese fishing songs, then you could even do that. And of course, just around the corner there is an old crooner singing the Beatle's Come Together in a thick French accent. What a way to celebrate the summer solstice!

Bike helmets

As we mentioned in our last post, I was in the Netherlands recently. I enjoy visiting the Netherlands, and one of the reasons is that I get to marvel at the bicycle infrastructure there, where towns are organized on the understanding that cycling is the most popular mode of transport, with cars an afterthought.

And so in my brief time there, I saw hundreds of people cycling. Old people, young people, children, teenagers. Cycling to work, cycling home, cycling to the supermarket, cycling for fun. Cycling fast, cycling slow, cycling on tandems, cycling alone. Yet in all this diversity of cyclitude, one thing was constant:

No-one was wearing a helmet.

Dutch people cycling near the Nijmegen train station without any helmets. The nutters!

How shocking you find this will probably depend to a large part on where you're from. Of course, the Dutch find it quite normal. In Paris, helmets are not common, but maybe 10% of cyclists wear them (myself included). At the opposite extreme, there are places like Sydney, and a number of American cities, it is illegal not to wear a helmet.

Surely, then, the gentle Australians are much safer on the roads, with their mandatory helmet, than the harried Parisian (or Amsterdammer) who braves the busy city streets sans un casque (with no helmet)?

As it turns out, places that have mandatory helmet laws tend to have more bicycle accidents than places with no such laws.

Still, perhaps that's why they have the laws? As you can see in the picture above, in the Netherlands there are huge dedicated cycle lanes, separated from motor traffic. Perhaps the Sydney traffic is just so terrible - and the bike infrastructure so meagre - that biking is inherently super-dangerous and the helmet law is actually protecting people. Without the helmet law, the cycling accidents would be even more severe.

The counter-argument to this took me a while to understand, but it's the common refrain when you ask Dutch people (and many others) about why mandatory helmet laws are a bad idea. It begins with the principle that cycling is good. Cycling, as exercise, is good for your health. (If you're in an accident, it can be very bad for your health, and we'll address that later.) Cycling is also good for the public at large - if someone chooses to cycle, generally they're choosing not to drive. So each cyclist on the road means one fewer car on the road - this alleviates traffic. It's also good for the environment - one fewer car on the road means less air pollution.

So, from the point of view of maximizing the social good, cycling should be encouraged, and we should make bike-friendly policies. This includes bike lanes, subsidies for bike purchases or rentals, and more bike parking spots.

From this perspective, mandatory helmet laws discourage cycling, as it puts up a barrier to cycling. Forgot your helmet at home? Oh, you can't cycle. Don't have a helmet for a visiting friend? Oh, you can't cycle. This problem is especially amplified for bike-share systems like the one in Paris I have blogged about before. In Paris, you can just hop on a bike and nip down to the post office or wherever without a care in the world. In Sydney, you need to bring a helmet with you. (This may be part of why the Sydney bike share system is relatively unsuccessful.) Such a law also puts a burden on families, who need to buy new helmets every so often for their growing children.

I read a report from a Dutch advisory body (I would link to it, but I've forgotten where I saw it, and it's in Dutch...) which concluded that yes, there are some injuries that could have been avoided by wearing a helmet, but that the overall public health benefits of people cycling outweighed those injuries. Exercising is good and accompanied by a small risk, but the net outcome was a positive one for society in general. An extreme analogy would be that going to school is risky, because you could get hit by a bus and die, but the benefits of going to school and being educated outweigh the risk of dying by bus. The cold Dutch calculus concluded that helmet laws are unnecessary.

There are other problems with mandatory helmet laws. There is concern about how effective they actually are. I would wager that maybe 5-10% of the helmets I've seen worn in Paris were actually being worn incorrectly - not tight enough, pushed too far back on the head, and so on. A helmet only protects part of your head, not your jaw, or your torso, or many other vital body parts.

And then there's the psychology. There is evidence to suggest that wearing a helmet makes people feel safe, which is a problem because that encourages them to do more risky behaviour. Not just the cyclists - there have even been suggestions that motorists drive much more closely to cyclists wearing helmets than to those without. I know that I feel "naked" when I cycle without my helmet, and I wonder if that means that I take more risks when I am helmeted than when I am not - thereby increasing my chance of an accident. That's not what helmets are supposed to do!

Finally, I've heard philosophical arguments against helmet laws. Such laws put the onus of safety and protection on the cyclist, rather than on the system as a whole. Rather than asking cyclists to "be safe", why don't we work to make the environment safe? As I mentioned the biking infrastructure in the Netherlands is very advanced and helpful for safe cycling, quite unlike many US cities. (Still, a helmet law is cheaper and easier to enact than sweeping infrastructure changes...)

So what do I do? I wear a helmet when I cycle. I want to protect my brain, above all, since that's quite a useful organ for a professional researcher to have fully intact. Hopefully the helmet would protect me in case I have an accident; or perhaps it encourages risky behaviour from me and motorists around me? I'm not sure. Still, I don't think that a law mandating helmet use is a particularly useful piece of the puzzle in encouraging cycling. I'm glad to have the choice, and to be able to forget my helmet from time to time.

Visitors, Trips, Birthing Classes, and Immigration Woes

We are rather falling behind in our writing of blog posts. Sorry, dear readers! As the end of my pregnancy draws nearer, it seems there are a plethora of tasks as well as hours of research begging to be done. But we will do our best to keep up with the updates. Here are some of the things we've been busy with recently.

First of all, last weekend we had a lovely quick visit with Micah, another dear friend from Columbus. Micah happens to be the younger brother of Soraya, who we saw in London in April. Just four more people to go and we will have been visited by their whole family! Micah, who is studying history at Ohio State University, was part of a school tour of European historical sites. He visited Ireland, England, France, Poland, and Germany, and we were lucky to get to take him out to dinner before he left Paris. We sampled the delicious, if not-so-French, cuisine of Loulou's Friendly Diner (excellent burgers and gluten free buns too!), walked around the Saint Germain des Prés area of Paris (the Middle Ages Museum is cool--it features a Roman-era bathhouse), and walked up to the Panthéon, the huge domed secular mausoleum where notable French citizens are buried. Then naturally we found a fancy chocolaterie, Maison Georges Larnicol, where we oohed and ahhed and Micah bought some treats to take back with him. It's always wonderful to see friends from our old home!

Micah came to visit!

We also spent about 16 hours that same weekend taking a childbirthing and newborn care class that was put on by and for the English-speaking members of Message, a group for anglophone parents in Paris. I will write a post soon with more information about Message, as it's been a lifesaver for us in navigating pregnancy in France. But for now, I'll say that the birthing class was excellent! It was attended by five couples from American, English, Scottish, French, and German backgrounds, and was taught by a lovely and knowledgable English lady who received training from the UK's National Childbirth Trust. It was a great opportunity to meet others in the same boat as us, trying to navigate the confusing waters of grossesse en France. We learned a lot, shared our experiences, hopes, and fears, and made some friends and supporters in the process.

Last week, Rory was finally able to make his re-scheduled trip to the Netherlands. He had been invited to give a presentation at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen back in March, but with the Brussels terrorist attacks happening the day he was meant to leave, his train was cancelled. This time he made it to the Netherlands without incident and enjoyed presenting his research to a group of linguists. Afterwards, he spent a few hours wandering around Amsterdam, being impressed by the half-moon-shaped belts of canals and the huge number of bicycles on the streets.

Canals of Amsterdam

On a less exciting note, I had my long-awaited convocation at the police prefecture for my carte de séjour (my French residence permit). I'd waited for this since my last appointment in January, and at this appointment I should have, in theory, been given the green light to actually receive the real permit in about a month or so. However, we moved to a new flat in a département (an administrative district in France; bigger than a county but smaller than a state) outside of Paris in the intervening months. Since cartes de séjour are handled by each département separately, the best they could do for us was to renew my récépissé for a month (a receipt which allows me to live in France for a couple of months at a time), and tell me to make an appointment at the prefecture in my new département. I suspect the process (ongoing for the last 7 months) will have to be started again almost from scratch at the new place, so I'm not overjoyed about this development. C'est la vie française. 

More soon to come! Have a great week, everyone!

Pregnant in Paris, Part 2

28 weeks along with our new poussette

A lot has changed since I last wrote about my experiences of being pregnant in Paris. For one thing, I was considerably smaller back then. Now our beginning-of-third-trimester baby is packing on the pounds and so am I. Despite what feels like a hugely noticeable change in my body, I still get comments from people to the effect of, "You're barely showing!" Keep in mind, dear friends, that whether you say, "You're huge!" or "You're so tiny!" to a pregnant woman, it's probably the opposite of what she wants to hear. You've been warned.

I've heard from others moms in Paris that France is the place to be if you're pregnant. There are special check-out lanes for you at supermarkets, you can cut to the front of the line in many situations, people are supposed to give you their seat on the bus or subway, and you're just generally treated like a rock star. Plus, once you actually have the baby, French men in particular seem to have been trained to help mothers with strollers whenever needed, such as carrying the stroller down the stairs to the metro station. There is apparently a lot of kindness and consideration here for those who are gestating.

But I haven't really experienced it yet. Not much, anyway. The one time I was offered a seat on the metro was when Rory was very obviously rubbing my protruding tummy. I've seen it happen to other pregnant women though, so maybe the perks will start coming when I've gained a few more inches in girth. And as for the special lanes in stores, or people letting you go first, well, those special lanes are usually clogged with normal-appearing people, and no one has yet offered to let me skip a queue. But we shall see.

The healthcare puzzle

In my last pregnancy post I mentioned the French health care system, or what little we understood of it at the time. I think I have a better handle on it now, though figuring out the sécurité sociale (how one is reimbursed by the government for healthcare expenses) and what to do in case of grossesse (pregnancy) has been more challenging than I anticipated. It's rather like being told to put together a jigsaw puzzle for which you have been given only half of the pieces and no final picture to aim for. You have to find the remaining pieces by yourself with no instruction on where to look. Oh, and by the way, it's a 5000-piece Impressionist painting jigsaw puzzle. Bonne chance!

Briefly, the hunt to acquire a social security number for myself has gone something like this.
-Learn that I can be attached to Rory's social security number. Rejoice!
-Learn that I can't be attached to Rory's social security number. Despair!
-Call an English helpline and be told to fill out a form, put together a dossier, then go to a CPAM office to ask for a social security number.
-Get to the CPAM office and be told to mail them the dossier instead and wait two months for a response.
-Proceed to wait, hearing nothing, while still paying for monthly doctor's and medical lab visits out-of-pocket.

The plot thickens...
Meanwhile, around February, I registered for auto-entrepreneur status (translation: self-employment) for the teaching work I've been doing. I received complex documents in French regarding paying taxes on my business earnings, but no concrete steps on how to do so or on how to obtain healthcare coverage with this status. Suddenly! I received a letter saying I had been registered with the RSI, the social security/healthcare coverage organization for auto-entrepreneurs. The what?? I had no idea this even existed. And voilà! Just like that they gave me a social security number! Had I not become an auto-entrepreneur, I suspect I would still be waiting for my number and going back and forth with the CPAM office.

Now that I'm finally in the social security system, one might think it would be straightforward from here on out. Alas, this is France.

So shortly after this revelation happened, I spent three weeks in the US and we moved to a new apartment just outside Paris. Thus, I received no more letters or instructions and couldn't access any online systems to update my address. With varying success, I tried to contact the various organizations in charge of my health care and tax status and ask for information, and I've now managed to update my address with all but one. I recently learned who to inform about my pregnancy and who I should contact about healthcare cost reimbursement, which was really my goal in the first place. So I feel cautiously optimistic that things are finally looking up.

Ever so slowly I am finding these hidden puzzle pieces and the picture is starting to take shape. Now all we have to do in the next three months is buy most of our baby gear, prepare for giving birth, learn how to take care of a baby, figure out taxes, start getting reimbursed for healthcare, receive my French residence permit, and find all of the remaining thousand or so puzzle pieces that constitute our life in France. NBD.  

Le printemps est arrivé

Spring is finally here! The weather has turned around, and after a few driech weeks of grey rain, it's sunny and warm. It's about 20C (68F) today, and this weekend it's supposed to get up to 25C (77F). That's summer weather as far as I'm concerned!

A view of the Seine from the Pont de Bercy. In the distance you can see the Pont Charles-de-Gaulle, beyond that the Viaduc d'Austerlitz (with a métro train on it), and behind that you can just make out the piers (the parts that descend into the water). of the Pont d'Austerlitz. There's a Wikipedia article on Paris bridges if you want to know more.

Nice weather means that the Parisians want to go out to enjoy it. Things get pretty busy!

The crowds at the Jardin de Luxembourg. In the distance is the Église Saint-Sulpice.

Last Sunday was May Day, which is a national holiday in France, although it was a Sunday so people were off work anyway. Talia and I decided to take a trip to the Parc de Sceaux. This is a large garden in the suburb of Sceaux (pronounced "so"), formerly the grounds of a stately home (and historically a castle). It's about 30 minutes by commuter train from the centre of Paris. The park was busy, but nowhere near as busy as anywhere in Paris!

There's a huge "canal" through the centre of the park.

And some really beautiful water features.

Us! I'm struggling to keep my eyes open in the sun. See the beautifully-tended gardens behind us!

The old country mansion at the centre of the park has a museum inside, but being a Sunday (and a public holiday), it was of course closed. No matter, as it was absolutely delightful being outside and strolling around in the sun with a gentle breeze blowing. I hope you're enjoying the weather wherever you're reading this from.

A trip to London

Last week we went to London to see Soraya, a dear Baha'i friend from Columbus. She was just on her way out of the UK after studying in Oxford for a term. It's easy to forget how close London and Paris are - it's just 2 and a half hours by train from city centre to city centre. London is closer to Paris than it is to Glasgow, and Paris is closer to London than it is to Marseille!

So, it wasn't difficult to hop up to England to see Soraya. We had planned to visit the New Southgate cemetery, which is where Shoghi Effendi (the leader of the Baha'i Faith from 1921 to 1957) is buried. It's a little far from central London so I think Soraya appreciated us being able to help her with directions and navigating the tube.

A view of the resting place of Shoghi Effendi. The tulips were blooming!

After paying our respects at the cemetery, we toured around central London a little. This included a trip to Oxford Road, where we looked in shops for baby things, and Soraya practically fainted at the cost of pushchairs. ("How does anyone afford to have children?") We also got to explore the famous department store Selfridge's, which we were disappointed to discover does not actually sell fridges.

Talia outside of Selfridge's

At the risk of making an obvious statement,London is different from Paris.

Yes, I've become that person who visits somewhere and then spends the whole time comparing it to wherever they live. ("Ugh, these baguettes aren't as good as in Paris.") This can be obnoxious if the place you're visiting is a little village or in a radically different culture, but in the case of London, it feels appropriate to compare it to Paris. (Both are global cities consistently ranked in the top 5 for participation in the worldwide economy.)

So, some observations that I made, in no particular order:

• London is cleaner. Not just the streets, which have less litter and, uh, organic detritus, but even just the trains and buses seem to be less grimey.
• The London underground (locally known as the tube, although I kept calling it the métro), especially the older lines, has small tunnels, claustrophobic trains, and feels much more like a series of old mineshafts. By comparison, most of the Paris underground feels like a set of train stations that just happen to be underground.
• The architecture in London is less varied than that of Paris. I'm not sure to what extent this is due to London neighbourhoods being levelled during the blitz in WWII...
• London also feels much much bigger than Paris, and the transport system is much more confusing, although these feelings might just be due to Paris being familiar to me and London unfamiliar.
• Also, people speak English in London, and French in Paris, but I overheard a surprising amount of French in London. Apparently somewhere between 70,000 and 300,000 French people live in London, giving rise to the claim that London is France's sixth largest city.

I'm curious to know if others share my perspectives (even if you've only visited one of these places). Let me know in the comments! Part of the fun of travelling is seeing how things are different or the same from places you are used to. I'm not sure what I am "used to" now (having lived in three different countries), but comparing things can still bring fresh insights.

Party in the USA

Our last post was a month ago. How time flies when you're travelling internationally, moving to a new town, and entertaining guests! Today I'll just catch you up on some of our activities in the past month.

Amazing warm spring weather in Oregon

You may recall from my last post that I would soon be leaving France for a three-week stay in the US to visit my family in Oregon. This was my first time being back in America since we left eight months ago, and my first time seeing my family in nearly a year. Prior to this trip, I had finally been feeling more settled into Paris life and my conversational French was definitely improving. I was getting used to living in Europe. So I wasn't exactly desperate to leave France and the dismal political and social news coming out of America every day didn't help matters either.

So how was it going back home, you ask?

It was marvellous.

It may be trite to say so, but absence really does make the heart grow fonder. After so long in Paris, here are some of the things I appreciated most about America (and specifically Oregon):

My nephew's 2nd birthday party with a farm-themed cake

• Strangers smiling at me and making eye contact. And occasionally even complimenting me!
• Not having to prepare my sentences and figure out verb conjugations before speaking.
• Knowing where to go in grocery stores and what I can find in them.
• An abundance of gluten-free and dairy-free options at stores and restaurants. Vegan cheese! Vegan ice cream!
• Finding inexpensive and comfortable maternity clothes.
• Smoke-free air!
• Seeing mountains and trees and nature everywhere I go.
• Being able to see more than three stars at night.
• Catching up with friends and family.
• Hugs from people I love (rather than a semi-awkward kiss on both cheeks in the Parisian style).
• Best of all: being a real part of my family again. Playing with my nieces and nephews. Getting parenting advice from my siblings. Watching Downton Abbey with my parents. Actually being there.

Homemade eclairs for the baby shower

Baby shower gifts!

On top of all that, I got to walk along the beach, attend my nephew's second birthday party, eat lots of gluten-free chocolate cake and eclairs, get a massage and a pedicure, and generally soak up all the fun and relaxation I possibly could in three short weeks. One of the sweetest things was having a baby shower put on by my mom and sisters-in-law and receiving blessings, wisdom, and gifts from dear friends. I brought home an extra giant suitcase filled with all sorts of treasures and necessities for our little one.


I'm filled with gratitude for the incredible time I had back home. It was refreshing and reinvigorating, and I came back to Paris with a full heart.

Cello duets and interpretive dancing with my nieces   

Meanwhile, in Paris, Rory was hard at work on getting us moved into a new apartment. In a stroke of exceptional timing, his mum and sister came to visit him during this time and were able to help haul our belongings to the new place. Thanks, Fiona and Zoë!

The apartment is just outside of Paris in a suburb called Montreuil (“mon-troy”), and is a small, albeit tastefully decorated one-bedroom furnished flat. It's more comfortable than our old place: ground floor—not fifth, quiet neighborhood, only two other tenants in the building, and it's 200 euros cheaper each month. Our landlady, who owns the building and lives upstairs, is so kind and helpful that she even bought us a memory foam mattress topper when she learned I was pregnant, just so I would dormir bien. We're still settling in and working on building our nest for when the baby arrives this summer.

The kitchen in our new apartment. Still small, but no neon walls!

Whew! I think we're caught up now on the Turnbull goings-on. Tomorrow we're catching an early train to London to spend the day with a lovely friend of ours from Columbus, so we'll have more posts coming your way soon.







In conclusion, here's another picture of my niece. It'll make you smile.