Long’s Drug Store

I always forget how much I love drugstores in America. So much stuff to just grab off the shelf and toss in the basket. In France, pharmacies are very straightforward. You pretty much have to describe your ailment to the pharmacist and they go in the back and bring you the appropriate medecine. Drugstores in the US are just so much more than that. They are one of the first things I always hit when I go back, to stock up on Tom’s of Maine toothpaste, Burt’s Bees lip balm, and whatever other stuff on the shelf that I miss when I’m in France.

I also like how they give you a magnifying glass to search for what you need out of the hundreds of choices.

Ironically, not very green is it.

Leaving the coast behind, out into the great blue, with little icecaps visible in the water (though not so much in these photos). Next stop: North America…

I thought that getting my license the first time around when I was sixteen was bad enough, but then a twist of fate caused me to have to go through the whole darn process again. A timeline up to this point of my experience of getting a driver’s license in France.

Spring 2007: I take note of the driving school up the street from where I live and murmur to myself: “Hmm, maybe I should think about taking care of that this year”.

Summer 2007, A Saturday: On the way to the market, I try to drag E in with me to the driving school to get information about the procedure. But the driving school is only open from 10-12pm. It is 1pm.

Summer 2007, The Next Saturday, 11am: We have a chat with the driving instructor, who is also the owner of the school, about my situation. He tells me, as I already knew, that seeing as I already have a foreign license, it isn’t necessary for me to do the 20 required hours of driving. He explains that the courses for the code consist of two practice exams each lesson, using this remote control machin/truc that they use during the real exam, followed by the corrections. He hands me a list of papers that I will need to furnish: copy of passport, copy of American license, five identity photos, three pre-stamped envelopes. I nearly have a heart attack when I see what this whole deal is going to cost me. No free driving lessons in high school in this country. I won’t go into detail, but let’s just say that I paid the same amount for the trip to California that I am taking next week.

Fall 2007: I finally get around to returning to the school with all the papers. The driving instructor takes one look at my pile and asks me where the translation for my driver’s license is. What translation, I ask. You didn’t say I needed it translated. Yes I did, he says. An official translation? I ask. An official translation, he replies. Merde, I say under my breath, and slump out of the office.

October 2007: I buy a book and start carrying it around to read on the metro.

November 2007: I get around to getting my driver’s license officially translated. As you may have noticed, I’m really dragging my feet around this whole situation, probably subconsciously hoping California will suddenly, in the next month, decide to sign an exchange agreement with France.

Christmas comes around, and I let the whole thing slide for a while.

Late January 2008: I go back to the office. The instructor creates a file for me, and tells me to come back the next week to have a driving evaluation.

First week of February, 2008: I have a driving evaluation with another instructor from the school. He has me drive around Montmartre for an hour, and spends most of the time sending text messages on his cell phone and asking me whether I think Obama or Hillary is going to win. I take this as a good sign as far as my driving skills are concerned.

He tells me to return the next evening for the code course.

(I should probably add as a sidenote here that, by sheer coincidence, it happened that the three cars I have owned in my life were all stick shifts. It just kind of happened that way. I was gifted with a Volkswagen Bug when I was seventeen, and seeing as my two options were either learning to drive a manual or not having a car, well, I’m sure you can imagine which option I took. After that, I always somehow ended up with stick shifts. My point in saying this is that removed a potential major headache from my particular situation. If, like many Americans, I wasn’t able to drive a stick, I’m not sure what would have happened. I think you can still learn, but on your license it says you are only able to drive an automatic. But I’m not sure about the procedure for that).

The next night: I take a practice exam and get 21 correct. I need 35 out of forty to pass. My heart sinks at the thought of the work that lies ahead of me.

February-March 2008: I spend three to four evenings a week at the driving school, taking two practice exams at a time and trying to figure out the logic of the French Driving Code. The exam consists of forty questions, and you have about thirty seconds to answer each one. You are faced with different situations and asked various questions about the situations (can I pass, can I park here, do I need snow tires, do I need hi-beams in this situation, etc). The practice exams are full of little traps. There always seems to be some tiny little guy in the distance with his blinker on. And then there is the issue of the priority on the right. In France, if you are driving down a street and someone turns onto the road from the right, you must yield to that person. Even if you are going fifty miles an hour. You must slow down and let them in. A concept that was responsible for many of my mistakes on the practice exams, and which I still haven’t quite grasped even now.

By the end of March, I have managed to raise my average score to anywhere between 32 to 36 correct questions.

The last Thursday in March: The instructor pulls me aside after the course and tells me he thinks I’m ready to take the test next week. I am hesitant at first, as I’ve barely grazed 36. I always thought I would wait until I was having solid 39 or 40 scores. But he explains, as many people have told me in the last month, that the actual exam is not as hard as the practice exams, and that as far as he is concerned, just having regular scores above 30 is enough. I’m still skeptical, as I don’t want to end up having to pay another eighty euros if I fail (each time you fail, you have to pay to take the exam again, and moreover there is a month-long waiting period between exams), but I decide if he thinks I am ready, I should go for it.

Wednesday, 2 April: The exam will take place not at my school, but at an exam center clear across town, at 10am. I calmly leave the house at nine, stop by the bakery for a croissant, intending to have one last look in my code de la route guide on the metro. I get to the metro station and nearly have another heart attack: my metro line isn’t running due to technical problems!

Why oh why, on this day, of all days?! Why couldn’t the metro not have worked yesterday, when I just had to go in to silly old work?!

I rush to the nearest taxi stand. There are ten people ahead of me. I wait about seven minutes, and not a single taxi has passed by.

As a last resort, I decide my only other option is to head to the nearest metro line. That nearest metro line happens to be line twelve, and the nearest stop happens to be at the top of Montmartre.

With all of the effort of one of those Olympic torch bearers, though with none of their grace and ease, I start racing up the hill, my Converse rubbing huge blisters into the back of my heels. I peel my coat and scarf off along the way as I huff and puff and start to sweat profusely. So not the way I wanted to spend the morning of my exam, running a marathon up to Montmartre.

When I arrive at the top, I am dripping with sweat and my face is tomato-red. Sliding in the doors of a train who, by the grace of God arrives within two minutes and is not out of service that day, I collapse into a seat, breathing heavily. The mere sight of my red face and the sweat droplets causes some cool-as-a-cucumber Frenchies to regard me with a look of alarm, but I’m too stressed about getting to the exam center on time to care.

Any hope I had of reviewing my book one last time is banished as I am too busy checking the time at each of the twenty or so stops along the way, wondering if there was any leeway at all for latecomers, or if they shut the door at 10am sharp.

After an eternity, we arrive at the stop before the one I need to get off at. I position myself by the door with my hand on the latch. The second the train pulls into the stop, I open the door and bolt out, zig-zagging my way between people. Outside the metro, I see a girl from my class. She looks equally out of breath and stressed, although not quite as red-faced as I. We trade horror stories about the morning; she too had tried to get a taxi but in the end had to catch a different metro as well.

We both start running towards the center, and pop in the doors at 9:58am.

Our instructor is there. “Enfin!“, he says when he sees us.

As it turns out, there are a couple hundred people taking the exam this morning, and we all go in groups. So, after all that, I don’t even end up taking the exam until 11:20am. All that stress for nothing.

After the excitement of the morning, the wait is unbearable. I am really hoping that I pass the exam, as I can’t bear the thought of going through all this again, broken-down metro or no broken-down metro.

The exam itself is indeed a bit easier than the practice exams, but not by much. There are still questions about technical aspects of the car and registration, but at least there are no tricks, like there are in the practice exams. The situations are pretty straightforward, no tiny guy in the distance with his blinker on that you can barely see.

At the end of the exam, the administrator says that we will not know the number of right or wrong answers that we had. He will call us up individually and say either “C’est bon” or “C’est pas bon”.

My heart is pounding as I wait for him to call my name. When I go up to the table, I must have a desperate look on my face. He puts my remote into the machine, looks at the screen, looks up at me and says “C’est bon”.

I breathe a huge sigh of relief.

End of part one of Driver’s License Number Two. I’m now waiting on Part two, which includes some actual driving lessons in the car. We’ll see how this next step goes…

Of late, every free moment that I can manage to scrounge up, not to mention every spare brain cell, has been grudgingly devoted to finally getting around to attacking this.

(Excuse me just one moment, I thought I could get through this without, but it looks like I am going to need to step out of the room for a second to emit yet another shriek of frustration that my license is not from one of these states….

………….

…ok I’m back).

I have much to say on the subject of the French Driving Code (ummm, priorité à droite makes sense HOW again??), but I am momentarily trying to yank my wallet away from the driving school, who is attempting to make off with my last centime.

I will return soon.

Gotta go, I feel another groan of frustration coming on…

Woops, I seem to have fallen asleep there, as I look back and realize it’s been over a month since my last post. Thanks to the Late Bloomer for waking me up with this little meme.

The rules, if I understood correctly, are as follows:

a) Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more.

b) Find page 123.

c) Find the first 5 sentences and read them.

d) Post the next 3 sentences.

To be perfectly honest, and I feel I must be honest with you about this, the truth is that I read blogs from the living room, which is where I was when I noticed I was tagged, and the living room is where we keep all our art and photography books. Great, shiny, big, and yet short, books. Heavy on images and light on text. I briefly thought about cheating and going into the bedroom, where my stack of books-to-be-read teeters on my nightstand, where there was sure to be a wordier book with something interesting written on page 123. But then I thought, no no no no, I can’t go down that path of cheating on memes. Even if you wouldn’t ever know, I would, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s enough of a deterrent.

So, I picked the nearest book off the shelf that seemed to have more than 123 pages, which was a photography collection, entitled Fast Forward: Growing Up In the Shadow of Hollywood by Lauren Greenfield, with a foreword by Carrie Fisher and an afterword by Richard Rodriguez.

I was intrigued by this book when I came across it a couple of years ago in the Artazart bookshop on the Quai de Valmy. I was familiar with one of Greenfield’s other book of photos, Girl Culture, which is a collection of portraits of girls and young women with regards to issues that hang over them: body image, eating disorders, self esteem, objectification, society’s ideas about beauty. Fast Forward is a collection of photos taken between 1992 and 1995 of kids growing up in and around Hollywood. It unflinchingly depicts the extremes of the socio-economic specter in Los Angeles, including raw and shocking but surprisingly honest images ranging from children of movie moguls getting nose jobs, lavish bar mitzvahs on studio lots, or teenage modeling competitions, to gang members growing up in South Central LA and the violence they are often subjected to. In short, the extreme and extraordinary wealth of some, and the desperate poverty of others, and how image plays a strong role and affects all of their young lives.

Incidentally, this book has exactly 128 pages, so as it were, turning to page 123 landed me smack dab at the very beginning of Rodriguez’s afterword. Which I was glad about, as I was worried that I was going to be stuck with nothing but one-liner photo descriptions such as Enrique, 17, Hollywood High School senior class president, pays for a limousine outside his prom date’s home, South Central Los Angeles or Mijanou and friends from Beverly Hills High School on Senior Beach Day, Will Rogers State Beach.

Richard Rodriguez’s afterword is entitled The Invention of Adolescence:

America’s greatest contribution to the world of ideas is adolescence. America invented a space - a deferment, a patch of asphalt between childhood and adulthood; between the child’s ties to family and the adult’s re-creation of family. Within this space, within this boredom, American teenagers are supposed to innovate, to improvise, to rebel, to turn around three times before they harden into adults.

I am now supposed to tag people, but alas, it looks like most everyone has already had a shot at this meme. So I’ll send it over to Susu, and Anitale, and Bold Soul, and Passementerie. If they haven’t already done it…

The annual winter sales will begin tomorrow, and this year, the city of Paris, along with the Office of Tourism and the Chamber of Commerce, has launched a program intended to attract foreign tourists for some shopping in the capital. Soldes By Paris will take place for eleven days, during which foreign tourists, as well as tourists from other cities in France, can take advantage of the sales and at the same time, receive reductions on their hotels, according to the daily metro paper Metro France. More than 1,500 businesses and almost 500 restaurants and hotels are participating in this second edition of the program. From one- to four-star hotels will offer reductions of anywhere from 10 to 55 percent. Participating restaurants will also be offering aperitifs. Five shopping circuits (the Chic Circuit, the Trendy Circuit, the Original Circuit, the Romantic Circuit, and the Creative Circuit), from Place des Vosges to La Défense, passing by the Champs-Elysées or Saint-Germain-des-Prés, have been created (map here). Five shopping stations are set up along the circuits, with multi-lingual shopping “coaches”. A welcome pack, which includes a bag, a guide to shops, fashion houses, small boutiques, concept stores and designers in Paris, and discount vouchers for events, massages, city tours etc, will be available in participating hotels and shopping stations.

On your mark, get set…SHOP!

More info: visit the Soldes by Paris website.

The above was in part translated from an article in today’s edition of Metro France.

Photo credit: Soldes by Paris

The very eloquent B tagged me for a retro meme.

I just love Christmas in France, and in Paris particularly.

It gets dark early, but the city is filled with such gloriously decorated streets, buildings and churches, that simply light up the night. The days are crisp and in the last couple of weeks there have been a surprising amount of sun and blue skies. The temperature has been hovering some days this month around 0C but I find myself enjoying the cold and the wintry holiday spirit. Strolling through the streets after dark to admire the Christmas lights, all bundled up in a coat and mittens, eating roasted chestnuts bought from street vendors, admiring the windows at Galeries Lafayette and Printemps. (Admittedly, there have been a few instances of wanting to knock down the wall of shoppers that crowd the streets, but I’ve managed to resist this urge, in the name of the spirit of Christmas). Then curling up at home with some vin chaud or hot chocolate with whipped cream and cinnamon and grated nutmeg and admiring the Christmas tree.

For all my talk of all the American holidays that I miss: Fourth of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving, I’ve got to admit that I’m completely sold on the French Christmas, food-wise. The traditional Reveillon meal is best described as how a student of mine summed it up: a time to eat luxury foods that aren’t eaten so often the rest of the year. Some classics include:
-Foie gras, served on little toasts

-Smoked salmon

-Shellfish. Oysters in particular are a staple on the traditional Christmas eve menu.

-Escargots

-All that washed down with champagne, of course.

-The main meal (yep, those were just the appetizers) is quite often turkey served with chestnuts. Or sometimes chapon or pintade (guinea hen).
-A cheese plate, of course. Some winter favorites are beaufort, crottin de chavignol, or reblochon.

-The traditional dessert is the bûche de noël, a heavily frosted log cake. A history of it is here.

-As well as chocolates, marrons glacés (glazed chestnuts), candied fruits, dates, clementines, etc.

Christmas in France always leaves me more stuffed than a stocking hung by the chimney with care, so the past few days following the holiday have been all about winter salads. A winter salad has always seemed like a contradiction in terms to me, but there really are so many good things in season to put in a salad at this time of year. Two of my favorites are:

Pear and Belgian Endive salad with Roquefort and Pomegranate seeds, dressed with a walnut oil vinaigrette.

Candy Cane Beet, Fennel and Orange salad with citrus vinaigrette.

I’ll be eating these until the pants button can close again.

Here’s hoping you had a beautiful holiday, and all the best in the 2008…

My family’s dog back in California, Ivy, died yesterday. She was ten years old, which is younger than my own dog, but she was a large black lab and they say that big dogs don’t live as long as small dogs. Still, ten years old is pretty young. She lay down to take a nap on Sunday afternoon and never woke up again.

Even though she wasn’t my dog per se, she was a very special family dog and I spent a lot of time with her, especially when I lived in California and after I moved away, whenever I would go to visit. She was the sweetest and most gentle dog, even with little children. My little cousins would stick their little hands in her mouth and hang themselves from her jaw and she didn’t mind at all.

I used to take Ivy every single night after dinner on a walk around Mission Bay, both when I lived there and when I would visit. She knew the drill, and would sit patiently until the dishes were cleared, then walk over to the drawer where the dog supplies were kept, pick up her leash, walk over to me and plop it on my lap. These walks were very calming, especially at the end of a long day, and she was a good companion. Sometimes we would sit in the dark in the sand by the water and just stare out into the bay. She would sit patiently next to me and sometimes put her head on my shoulder, and I would even talk out loud to her, tell her a problem I was having and she was a great listener.

She’d get very excited when the fish would jump out of the water and try to go catch them.

On weekends we would take her to the dog beach at either Coronado or Fiesta Island, which is a completely leash-free island. Ivy was a great swimmer and would sometimes swim so far out into the bay that we worried she would get in the way of the water skiers. So we started bringing bags of dog treats to lure her back.

Once, we lost her on the island. We walked around calling her name, and finally found her hanging out with a group of campers, who were taking turns feeding her bbq’d hot dogs. No wonder she wouldn’t answer to our call.

She also loved to go for rides in the car, and to have her picture taken.

I missed out on one last walk with her during my last trip home. One night last August, as usual, around 10pm she brought the leash over to me in her not-so-subtle way. I put the leash on her and let her out the front door, then I followed after her. The light was off on the porch and well, that’s when I fell down the stairs and sprained and fractured my foot. Ivy came back and was running in circles around me, but of course there was no chance of a walk for the rest of my time there. The day I left, I promised her that next summer I would take her for more nighttime walks.

I wish I could have kept that promise.

That’s the problem with having pets: they always go and die on you.

Bye bye Ivy. You were a great friend and I will miss your toothy dog grin and our walks together with your ferociously wagging tail knocking over everything in its way. I hope that wherever you are now, there’s a big island for you to run around on, a lake for you to swim in, lots of fish and squirrels to chase and a giant-sized never-ending bag of dog treats for you to stick your nose in…

One day, in the summer of 1990, I hopped on the number 434 bus in Santa Monica out to the end of the line at Trancas Canyon and then walked home again, a good twenty-five miles or so.

It wasn’t the first time I attempted this walk. The summer before, my best friend Marie and I had decided to venture away from our normal summer beach spot at station 26 to spend the day in mythical Malibu. We ran into a lull in the afternoon service for the return trip home, however, and so one of us, I don’t remember who it was but it was probably me, suggested, hey, why don’t we walk home.

So we started out, dodging traffic on PCH, ignoring offers of rides from pickup trucks filled with sunburnt surfers. We walked for hours and hours, and we might even have made it all the way home had the sun not gone down, and had it not become too difficult and dangerous to walk on the highway after dark. So, at Temescal Canyon, we stopped at a payphone and asked Marie’s father to come pick us up at Gladstone’s.

I don’t know why but the idea of completing this walk haunted me during the following year. I felt like I’d been cheated out of something that I knew I could do. It was a time of burgeoning independence, of pushing limits, or maybe of discovering them, and then pushing them further. So I decided to make another go of it, which I did, setting out at sunrise and finishing just as the sun tipped below the horizon, collapsing on the living room floor in victory, then diving into leftover birthday cake to replenish lost carbohydrates.

When I look back on it, it seems even more poignant to me that I would have undertaken this walk at this time, because the leftover birthday cake was from celebrating my sixteenth birthday the week before, and I had just passed my driver’s license. It was a moment I had dreamed of since age twelve. All my years of walking everywhere, to school, to the bus stop, to the mall with boys who didn’t have a license either, were coming to an end. I would no longer look in envy at the upperclassmen who headed into the high school student parking lot after school. I was to come into possession of an old VW Bug in the coming months, and a new sense of independence and freedom was at last dangling on my keychain.

Driving was so important to me for many years. I loved it. I loved having a car. Sometimes I’d just get in the car and go for a drive, in search of nothing but night air. But, and I couldn’t tell you exactly when it happened, but at some point, it started to be more of a pain than anything else. Traffic everywhere in California was horrendous. I started thinking about environmental concerns, and the role that cars played in that domain. Sometimes, when I was on the freeway, I would just stare at the endless miles of cars surrounding me, coming at me from the other direction, and it boggled my mind. I thought about the school holidays I had spent visiting my mother in New York City, and how easy it was in that city to be able to just take a subway or walk. I wondered if I could try to use my car less, walk more. It was a crazy thought. After all, who the heck walks in LA?

At my university, parking was limited. I wasn’t authorized a parking spot, so I began to take the bus, and realized how much more convenient it was. I could study for last-minute tests and be dropped off in front of the building where my classes were held, rather than having to cut clear across campus from the parking lot. Then I started thinking about how silly it was to drive to go grocery shopping. Trader Joe’s was only a few blocks away from where I lived, so I started walking to buy my groceries. After graduation, I decided to keep the habit of taking the bus to go to work. The next thing I knew, I really was walking just about everywhere, and my car was collecting cobwebs on the street in front of my building, the key being put in the ignition no more than twice a week to move the car on street cleaning days. One day, at the coffeehouse down the street on Melrose, the barista was lamenting about the difficulty of living in LA with no car, having just moved from the midwest a few weeks before. I’ll sell you mine, I told her, real cheap. I myself was moving to back to San Francisco, a place which I knew from experience that one could live comfortably without wheels, and I had been pondering what to do about my car, and the look of gratitude on her face told me it was the right thing to do.

Today, I walk constantly. I still do enjoy driving occasionally, mostly on holidays. But cars are no longer a part of my daily existence, the way they once were, and I don’t miss that part. I walk everyday now. Upstairs and downstairs, to the metro station, to the market and back. Two weeks ago, during the transportation strikes, I walked more than ever. It’s economical and good for la ligne. No stress of finding a parking place or sitting for hours in endless traffic. Not only that, but it’s also an important “step” (haha, no pun intended) for the future of the planet. Poor air quality and dependence on oil could very well be our undoing. I think getting out of the car and adding a few steps to one’s day can have a tremendous impact on health and on the environment, and on clearing your head and giving you a different perspective on your daily surroundings…