Walking home from the opera

A Christmas tree

Jerome and Silke and grandpa Ted and grandma Eva on the way home with a tree!

One more photo of l'académie de musique concert at la madeleine

Silke's grin

This didn't make it into the edit done by l'académie de musique:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjW2jUkI_EE

Laudamus te deum

Someone made a recording of Sunday's concert.  Here is Laudamus te deum by Bizet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTAxnm_RnD8

I swear it is a just a coincidence that Silke is so prominent!  It's not my recording.  I wasn't even at the Sunday performance.

One detail that might be interesting: the 300 singers and instrumentalists represent 30 different nationalities.

Silke's new shoes

Long time readers of this blog will recall that Silke's footwear has already made an appearance.  In fact that was the blog posting that I received the most email about: Silke discovers that she is Canadian .  Maybe you remember the photo of her old scruffy and decidedly non-Parisian runners.  Well, prepared to be shocked.  The dress code for l'Académie de musique specifies high heels for women for concerts.  Despite some protestations of mock horror, Silke seems not at all uncomfortable in them.

And those scruffy old runners?  Long gone now.  For daily use she has new runners (which she insisted on), and a pair of attractive casual shoes (which I insisted on).

General rehearsal at la Madeleine

I obviously can't take pictures at the concerts, so I took a few at the rehearsal last night at la Madeleine.

Silke is not hard to spot, at least in a close-up.  Her stand partner, the concert master and one of the professional musicians in the mix, is Nguyen Nguyen.  The French expression is to say that it is an orchestra of students "framed" (encadré) by professionals.  Here is his biography: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=fr&sl=fr&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.academie-de-musique.com%2FJean-Pierre-Lacour .

Besides me, there were only a handful of people sitting in on the rehearsal.  (Because Silke is so young, I have a pass that allows me attend rehearsals with her.  But mostly I don't, unless they rehearse somewhere new where she hasn't been before, as last week, or it's something special, like a rehearsal in la Madeleine.)  Those listening last night were outnumbered by the statues of saints around the walls.  Perhaps they were listening as well.  Here, Jean d'Arc:

La Madeleine is extremely reverberant.  It is a much more lively sound than Notre Dame.  Actually Notre Dame is kind of dead acoustically I find.  The interior of Notre Dame is cross-shaped, with many deep alcoves and galleries on all sides and at several levels - lots of spaces for sound to get trapped and lost.  La Madeleine, in contrast is simply a huge shoebox - Silke says "ginormous", with only a few shallow alcoves.  Ginormous being a roof at a height of 43 metres, and a hall 108 metres long.  That is longer than a football field.  I think those are the exterior dimensions, but the interior is not much smaller, being one huge open space.  Stone walls, stone ceiling, stone floor, and no interior pillars, except right along the walls.  When then orchestra cuts off suddenly on a loud note, you can still hear it reverberate for the longest time.  It goes on . . . and on . . . and on . . . and if you listen closely, you can still hear it.  When they play with an audience, there will be more sound absorption in the hall, and it won't ring quite that long.  It is actually a hard setting to play, according to the professional musicians.  They prefer la Trinité, where the other two concerts will be held.  Now I know why at the rehearsal last week, Jean-Phillipe Sarcos, when working on a fugue passage, had the chorus sing almost entirely the just attack of each note, and then back right off.  In a smaller hall, that had a somewhat coarse, overly rhythmic effect.  But in la Madeleine, it gives it some clarity.  Actually in walking around la Madeleine during the rehearsal, I found the sound best, and clearest, about 2/3 of the way back in the church.  Close up, the contrast between the direct sound and the delayed reflections was unbalanced.

I recognize that poster

Spotted walking around Paris.

One week to go!

The first of three December concerts by l’académie de musique takes place a week today.  I attended a rehearsal last night, the first in some time that I have attended.  I went with Silke because it was at an unfamiliar location that she was unsure of finding on her own.  And then I stayed.  It was also, as it turned out, the first general rehearsal, with brass and percussion instruments (up to now the strings and woodwinds have rehearsed together), and with the chorus, two hundred strong, and with the soloists, Isabelle Cals, soprano, and Sebastien Obrecht, tenor, and with a number of professional instrumentalists filling out the orchestra where it needed a bit of reinforcement, for example in the violas, of whom there are never enough.

All I can say is, wow!  It’s going to be some concert.  The last time I heard a rehearsal, back in September or October, I wondered whether they would be able to fill the huge space of la Madeleine.  Now I think they are going to blow the roof off - figuratively!  I heard some violinists chatting afterwards, and one remarked that at previous rehearsals, those being strings alone or strings and woodwinds, she hadn’t been really enthusiastic about the music, but in the complete ensemble, it was awesome.  Silke said she had missed an entrance because she was listening so raptly to the soprano soloist, and the others laughed and admitted they had done the same at least once during the evening.

A word about the venues: La Madeleine is one of the most recognizable landmarks in Paris.  It forms one end of one “sight-line” in Paris - grand boulevards of straight alignment running between symmetrically opposing buildings or landmarks at either end, and featuring a large square or crossroads at the midpoint.  La Madeleine terminates rue Royale, facing along the length of rue Royale towards l’Assemblé Nationale, whose Corinthian columns it mirrors.  In the centre, equidistant between l’Assemblé Nationale and la Madeleine - place de la Concorde, with its “giant Egyptian pencil” as Jerome calls it, more commonly referred to as the Obelisk.  On the spot Marie Antoinette lost her head to the guillotine.  She was sadly unable to admire la Madeleine as we know it today while waiting for her head to be swiftly and efficiently separated from her shoulders, because its construction was ordered later by Napoleon, who had the pre-existing église de la Madeleine demolished - he generally being unfavorably disposed to churches - and replaced with a monument to his grand army.  In a typical twist of history, a later French monarchist government re-dedicated it as a church.  [ed. The long version of the history is, well, longer, as it was continually redesigned, constantly repurposed and repeatedly demolished in part over a period of 85 years before finally being completed as a church.]  It is however, to my eye, the most un-churchy of churches, being in conception a sort of neoclassical temple, like the Pantheon.  Silke still can't quite believe that she is actually going to be playing there.

photo by Shahee Ilyas, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license 2.0

For the two concerts the following week, they are playing at église de la Sainte-Trinité.  Notably, the funerals of both Berlioz and Bizet, who figure prominently on the concert program, were at la Trinité.    (Some famous composers had funerals at la Madeleine, for example Chopin.  But his music is not on the program of Musique Français en Fête.  Not because the French wouldn't happily appropriate him - he did after all live nearly half his life in Paris - but in consequence of the fact that he wasn't in the line of writing works for 300 singers and instrumentalists, being rather one to prefer 88 keys.)

photo credit user Mbzt wikipedia, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported

If you are wondering what kind of preparation to takes to play a concert like this, Silke figures that in the last 13 days alone, she has attended in total 25 hours of orchestra rehearsals.  (5 of which admittedly, were with another orchestra, as she plays in two.)  Some days she doesn't get home from an orchestra rehearsal until midnight, and then she has to be at school again the next morning at 9 or 9:30.

Salle de l’ancien Conservatoire

Yesterday we attended a remarkable concert.  The reason why this was such a remarkable concert is described here: http://ensemble-palaisroyal.com/evenement-musical-historique/ .  However there is no English translation of the page, so I will provide one:

The Palais Royal, for the opening of its season of Paris concerts, offers an exceptional musical event.  Directed by Jean-Philippe Sarcos, the Palais Royal interprets, on period instruments, the works of Beethoven and Mozart.  The setting for this concert is a salle de l’Ancien Conservatoire. 

La Salle de l’Ancien Conservatoire is a historical monument, erected between 1806 and 1811.  It is one of the first concert halls in history constructed for concerts rather than opera.

Since its opening, the acoustic quality due to the materials of wood and painted tiles have been hailed has exceptional, and the hall has been named the Stradivarius of concert halls. 

This location is laden with a illustrious musical past, comparable to no other: it is here that the symphonies of Beethoven were heard for the first time in France, here that the Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique was created, as well as a very large part of the French music of the 19th century.

Unknown by tourists and a number of Parisians, this hall has survived fires and demolitions and exists still today in its original condition. 

For the occasion, the original concert decor, preciously conserved in storage, has been remounted. 

On the concert program: three works performed [in this hall] in 1828 during the very first season of the orchestra of la Société des concerts du conservatoire : the Beethoven's Fifth symphony, Beethoven's concerto for piano-forte and orchestra no. 2 and the overture of Mozart's magic flute.

The concerto for piano-forte and orchestra no. 2 will be interpreted on an original piano-forte made by Franz Baumbach (Vienne, circa 1780).  This piano-forte, recently discovered in an attic and restored for the occasion, had not been played for over a century.  It finds itself for this concert together with a hall and repertoire of the same age."

-- Le Palais Royal

There is some possibility that this was the first orchestral concert in this hall in seventy years, although that couldn't be established for certain.  Why so little use?  Well, for one thing, the hall is small.  With modern spacing for the seating, the hall accommodates an audience of 440.  There is no lobby to speak of, so of course no intermission is possible.  And there is no air conditioning.  So with all the people and the lights, the hall got quite hot.  My shirt was soaked through with sweat, and the orchestra had to retune between the second and third movements due to the increasing heat - and this is in winter!  Remarkably, at opening season in 1828, 1100 people were admitted.  Hard to imagine.  For one thing, at the time, there would be been no seating on the main floor - that was standing room. And the balconies must have been full to overflowing.  And all the women in their voluminous and elegant early 19th century gowns!  It must have been terribly hot and uncomfortable with 1100 people in that small hall.  No wonder the ladies had fans.

As for the music...  well this is the first concert I have attended where the orchestra had to play an encore - and then after the encore the audience still wouldn't cease, so they played part of the overture again.

Oh, I should note that the conductor, Jean-Philippe Sarcos, also conducts l'académie de musique, which is one of the two orchestras that Silke plays in.

The most chic mop store in Paris

The Carrousel du Louvre is an underground shopping centre connecting with the underground entrance to the Louvre, beneath the famous pyramid.  It is a very chic shopping centre, with brand name stores selling jewelry, watches, perfume and the like.  And, there is Perigot, a store which sells mops, buckets, dust pans, garbage cans, coat hangers, and so on.

The inverted pyramid inside the Carrousel du Louvre, mirroring the outside entrance pyramid to the Louvre.

Perigot - when only the finest mop will do.

The Cold Song from Henry Purcell's King Arthur

For Silke's formation musicale class at the conservatory, she has to sing the cold song from Henry Purcell's musical theatre work, King Arthur.  She had already learned it, but wanted to see some performances of it.  So we looked it up on youtube.  My goodness but there are wildly different interpretations!  Here are three of our favourites.  If you don't like Baroque opera music, and not everyone does, than skip this post.  You regularly-scheduled Paris-related posts will return after this interruption.

The first is the most straight-forward performance, by the countertenor Andreas Scholl.  The orchestra is playing on period instruments, in an authentic style.  Silke's comment on this one, "I can't believe how good that is."  She listened to it a lot.

The next one, sung by Nanette Scriba, is what Silke and Jerome call the "Spaghetti Western" interpretation.  Not because of the visuals or the singing, but because the tangy guitar, especially in the intro, sounds like it could be the opening score for a Sergio Leone movie.  In this performance, the original English lyrics are translated (loosely) into German.

And the last one is wild and wacky and fun!  No credits on the youtube video (arg!), but your music sleuth (me) has identified it as a 2005 production by Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopernchor.  The cold song starts at 2:15.

What all these performances have in common is that they are German productions.  (OK, the last is Austrian).  You can laugh at them - we did - in fact there may have been some danger of someone here dying of laughter - but at the same time they are three really great and daring performances that show what you can do with Baroque music today.  I don't think it's not just coincidence that these are German productions.  More than once now I've heard someone here introduce a musical project by way of explaining they were attempting something that exists in Germany, but up until now hadn't existed in France.  Who knows why that is?  Maybe it's something in the water, or maybe it's critical mass, or maybe it is, as I've heard ventured, that artists can actually afford to live in Berlin.

Addition: The New York Times recently printed this article about music in Berlin: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/arts/music/classical-musicians-too-make-berlin-their-capital.html?smid=pl-share .

The Abbey Bookshop

There is a Canadian bookstore in Paris.  Are there even still any Canadian bookstores in Canada?

Sunday mid-day queue at the bakery

Sunday in France is a day to eat with your family, or your friends.  But not all bakeries are open on Sundays.  So the ones that are, are busy.  This is a queue outside at our favourite bakery, Boulanger Erik Kayser.  It's not the closest one to us, but it is a short walk.  I myself am rarely inside it, since that responsibility is delegated to others in the family.  Either Silke or Jerome, or frequently both of them, go there every morning at 7am, and buy four croissants and two baguettes.  On Saturdays and Sundays, instead of croissants they get pains au chocolate.

And since I started on the topic of food - and what would be a blog without food shots? - here is a cream of parsley soup I made yesterday, served of course with a baguette from Erik Kayser.

And wild mushrooms, cèpes, from the market.  Because it is mushroom season.

Galleries of paleontology and comparative anatomy

Last weekend we went to the galleries of paleontology and comparative anatomy in the jardins des plantes.  The galleries are only one of many buildings in the jardins des plantes which are devoted to natural history and evolution.  There is even a small zoo in the gardens.  It would take a long time to see everything there.  I think the galleries, which along with the superb building they are in date to 1898, are one of my favourite places that we have seen so far.  There is a floor devoted to dinosaur skeletons, which is cool.  But what turned out surprisingly to be the most interesting were the modern skeletons.  Thousands and thousands of them.  You really can see the patterns of life.  For example, all mammals have more or less the same bones, different shapes for sure, but connected in the same order, and you can generally name the bones, whether it is a mouse or a giraffe or a gorilla or a porpoise.  This isn't news of course to anyone who has studied biology, but it's one thing to know a fact and see illustrations in a book, and another thing altogether to be looking at hundreds of real skeletons, of wildly different shapes, and yet all still a variation on a theme.

So, I have more photos for this post than usual.

Elephant

Whales

Performing on the Paris Metro

Here's a video from the New York Times about musicians playing on the metro.  http://nyti.ms/1fjwYSA  After three months, I still love taking the metro.  Everyone complains about it: it's crowded, dirty and bewildering.  But it beats the heck out of finding a parking spot.  And in a city crowded with cafés with outdoor tables where all the chairs are facing out for the purpose of people-watching, you can watch a heck of a lot more people in a short time on the metro.  They don't serve drinks, but, as the video shows, there is live music.

Vincennes

Today is the last day of school holidays.  It also happened to be a lovely crisp fall day - and the forecast for next week is rain.  So we went to the park de Vincennes on the edge of Paris.  It's the largest park in  Paris.  There is also a castle there, le château de Vincennes.  It's a 14th century castle, which served as a royal residence for a number of kings in the 14th and 15th centuries.  Medieval castles seem really rather small and uncomfortable compared with renaissance palaces.

What we were really there for was not the castle, but the park, so after a quick tour of the keep, we found a vélib station to get some bikes for a spin around the park.

Opening hour at le café Campana

Le café Campana is inside musée d'Orsay.

Eiffel Tower

Hilary Hahn and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe

Yesterday we went to see Hilary Hahn and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, who were playing at la Cité de la Musique.  She was as amazing as you would expect her to be.  Silke was hyper with excitement.  Less expected, although perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised, was that the orchestra was equally amazing.  None of us had ever heard an orchestra of that calibre live, or even realized that a live orchestra performance could be like that.  Besides the Barber violin concerto with Hilary Hahn, they played Schönberg's La Nuit transfigurée and Shostakovich's 9th symphony.  I'm not a music critic, so unfortunately I can't describe it.

We were seated second balcony, behind the orchestra.  Cheap seats certainly, but it was quite a cool place to sit.  There is only a single row of seats in the second balcony, and it was like sitting at a glass bar, as there was a glass ledge one could lean on.  We could look right down on the orchestra and it was a fantastic view of everything that was happening in the orchestra.  And we could right at the conductor.  Just before the performance started, an usher came offered to move us to better seats - the concert was sold out, but some people hadn't shown up - but the kids decided to stay we were.  (Their young eyes are pretty sharp - they were able to read details on the sheet music on the stands that I just couldn't see.)

Backs of the heads of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and Hilary Hahn.

Red Umbrella

Piano on the street

There are many street musicians in Paris.  But this is the first time that I've seen a street musician playing a piano.  Did he enlist 3 burly friends to haul it from his apartment to the street?  Or perhaps a nearby brasserie, being as it was early - 7:30pm - and having few customers yet, decided to take the piano outside and play where the people were.  Who knows?  Also, as you can see in the photo, it had been raining not long before.

Tour Paris 13

Yesterday we went to see an unusual art exhibit.  It is a building that, at the end of this month, will be demolished.  The city of Paris invited several well-known street artists to come and live in the building for seven months and do whatever the liked to the interior or the exterior of the building.  Then for one month, right now, October, it is open to the public before being finally demolished.

I could put up more photos, but you'll find better ones here: http://www.tourparis13.fr/

I also noticed that it got a mention from Bill Cunningham: http://nyti.ms/1bzAd6r .  If you don't know who Bill Cunningham is, then you're probably not very interested in fashion.  That's fine, I don't know anything about fashion either, but even if you think it doesn't interest you, I recommend tracking down and finding a copy of the biographical movie, Bill Cunningham New York. It is a fascinating study on the way one person chose to live his life, entirely devoted to one thing, and radically outside "normal".  But that is an aside.

You'd probably assume reading this blog that we saw the interior of the tower.  We didn't.  We started lining up at 1pm.  By 6:15pm, it was clear we wouldn't get in before closing time, so we gave up.  But it wasn't a waste of time.  We took turns being the queue.  It was an interesting atmosphere.  Every time someone did get in, the waiting crowd cheered.  For safety reasons, they only let 49 people be in the tour at one time.   But long queues are common here.  The thing is, although there are dozens of things to do in Paris at any one time, there are thousands of people, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, looking to do something. Carolyn figures that the Parisians don't mind the queues, because they love to talk, and they spend the time talking.

Watch for Break Dancers

Manifestation!

The French take to the street at the slightest provocation.  It is a grand French tradition it seems.  Demonstrations, and riot police, are a common sight around here.  Possibly more so where we live because we are not far from the national assembly.  I could have had some great photos for this post if I had had the camera at the right moments.  One day last week there was a line of white police trucks with flashing blue lights as far as one could see down boulevard Saint-Germain, while around the corner rue de Solférino was completely barricaded by demonstrators.  I believe that they were railway workers protesting the proposed privatisation of some minor part of the SNCF.  It was the first time that the noise of a street demonstration could be clearly heard from our apartment.  In general, in preparing Silke and Jerome for getting around Paris by themselves, we had to discuss strategies for finding alternate routes in case where you want to go is blocked by a demonstration (never try to force your way through one), or a metro line is not running due to a wildcat strike, or more mundanely just because of mechanical failure.  (Or more gruesomely, suicide-by-metro, which I am told statistically exceeds service interruptions due to strikes.)

Friday Silke and Jerome had a more personal and direct experience on this subject.  They arrived at the Lycée to find a huge crowd, and the huge front doors blocked by a mountain of green garbage bins.  Standing on the mountain of garbage bins, dragged from the surrounding streets no doubt, people were yelling and chanting.  (I mean that the garbage bins were dragged from the surrounding streets, not that the people were.  It wasn't another Revolution or St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.)  The Lycéans were protesting!  Actually it is a rather sad case that was the cause of this demonstration and others at Lycées across France.  The police had stopped a bus of students on a school trip, and removed a girl whose family, illegally resident in France, was being deported to Kosovo.  The family were Roma - I suppose we would say Gypsy in English.  This is a very fraught and complicated issue, since there are a large Roma communities in France that are not well integrated, to say the least.  The young pick-pocket children who swarm tourists at Châtelet/Les Halles, and the women at the metro stations selling discarded but still valid metro tickets at discount prices, are identifiably Roma.  This family it seems were however well-integrated, had been here five years, and the girl, of Lycéan age, was attending school (which is not always the case) and doing well, speaking perfect French.  The insensitive, even outrageous, action of the police in stopping the school bus to remove the girl provoked these large demonstrations.  It made the front page of le Monde on Friday.  For Silke and Jerome, who aren't in the habit of reading le Monde in the morning, it was a little bit unexpected, if no longer bewildering - they're been in Paris too long for that.  The collegians, who are between Jerome and Silke's ages, were not expected to be participating in the demonstrations by the older Lycéan students, but getting access to the school was difficult because the only other door, a small entrance to the side of the great main doors, was also blocked.  After some negotiation, the demonstrators agreed to allow collegians to enter.  The youngest, Jerome's age, were gathered into classes and escorted through a class at a time.  Older students had to make their way through themselves.  Or not - some students from 3ème whom Silke encountered asked her not to mention that she saw them.  They preferred to have the day off it seems.  One of Silke's classmates who did go in (they nearly all did) was very slightly injured, accidentally I'm sure.  The teachers took care to explain the reasons and the motivations for the demonstration - they were not unsympathetic to it, and one saw fit to add that there was no fear of damage to the doors, because the school has their own barrier of wooden beams that are set up "on occasions like this" to protect the doors.  Another teacher - or perhaps the same one, I don't know - observed that these kind of things did tend to happen more frequently just before school vacations.  (School vacations did just start this week - see previous post.)  For anyone inside the school, lunch at the school restaurant was free on Friday.

Anyway, as I tell Silke and Jerome, we are here in Paris so that they can get a broad education.

School Vacations!

Silke and Jerome's friends in Canada will be jealous to know that here in France, there are now two weeks of vacation from school.  Although considering how long and demanding school days are, I think on balance they aren't getting off any easier.  Silke had six exams last week.  Including an exam in what we would call Physical Education!  She had to demonstrate that she could correctly apply the techniques that she had learned in table tennis.  Table tennis is not one of her strengths.  The tables are numbered, and during the term, if you won, you moved up a table number.  Lose, and you go down.  The first week Silke soon found herself at table 1.  Although, by the end of the section on table tennis she had worked her way back up a couple of tables.  Fortunately, the table tennis exam was not evaluated on winning, but on whether you held your racket correctly, whether you served correctly, and whether you employed, successfully or not, some of the instructed strategies.  By the way, marks here are not a private matter between yourself and your teacher and parents.  Some teachers read out the marks obtained in each test or assignment.  Others post them.  So everyone knows.

So what do we have planned for these two weeks of school vacation?  We may go to London for a couple of days.  But mostly, catching up and preparing.

Silke discovers that she is Canadian

Another title for this post could be, "Which child is which?"  Anyone who knows Silke knows that she is a very gregarious child.  Wherever she goes, she makes friends with astonishing speed.  Jerome on the other hand has always struggled socially and been more of an outsider.  As a very quiet boy with interests in math and music and reading but not in sports or video games, he could hardly be otherwise.  But in Paris something odd has happened.  Silke has decided, intentionally, to remain to some degree a social outsider.  And Jerome seems surprisingly to be accepted as "one of the boys" in the class.  One of our children sometimes eats lunch alone, which doesn't surprise me, only that it is Silke and not Jerome is surprising.  There is an obvious factor.  Silke, in 3ème, is in the last year of collège, so her classmates have been together for four years and social groups are already formed.  Jerome on the other hand is in the first year of collège, so it is a new school for all his classmates.  But there is something more fundamental going on with Silke.  She has met the Parisian teenager, and decided that is not who she wants to be.  To the point of over-reacting.  Of course, one thinks of clothing.  Her classmates dress trendily, wear makeup, and some of them smoke.  Silke wears her MEC hiking pants every day, a T-shirt, and either hiking boots or old scuffy running shoes.  (Her father - me - has almost convinced her to go shoe shopping sometime soon, if nothing else at least to get a slightly more presentable pair of sneakers.)  More than clothing are the attitudes.  This was well-illustrated when her class watched Charlie Chaplain's "Modern Times".  (They were doing a quite interesting analysis of the political and economic issues.)  As she reported to us after, she was the only one who laughed out loud.  Nor was she inhibited when no one else did, "It was funny.  Too bad for them if they didn't laugh." Apparently it even drew mention from the teacher, who probably had been hoping that more students would openly find it funny.  Silke of course loves slapstick, and goofiness.  And when one thinks back to her friends in Canada, they all did.  Starting with her (sole) classmate of least year, Emil, with whom she had great times, and the other members of her quartet, the Tetrarchy, Katrina and Andrew, and the girl-friends that she has kept in contact with from elementary school, Dana and Eleanor and Julia and the others.   Are they typically Canadian, or just typical of Silke's friends?  Regardless, they are all of the same cloth.  Irreverent, but frankly curious and eager to learn, boisterous and goofy, but considerate and gentle, not earnest but putting in the effort when required.  And each of them a unique character not particularly concerned with conforming, nor expecting conformity from others.  For Silke, that describes her friends, and that is who she is, and will stay.  Not that she is a pariah here.  She is friendly with her classmates, and they with her.  But nevertheless, lines have been drawn, and has declared herself comfortably outside of some lines.  Silke - the funny exotic foreigner with strange habits and ideas.

Not seen on the runway at Paris Fashion Week 2013

As for Jerome, I don't know exactly why he is suddenly more social.  Simply, he is altogether happier and more confident here.  The higher expectations and denser course material, and the structure and the rules suit him.  It's not elementary school anymore.  There is quite a lot of self-responsibility required of him here.  That extends right to getting to and from school, which he does on his own on the metro.  (His school day rarely begins or ends at the same time as Silke's.)  It seems to be good for him.  He's also lucky in that his class does swimming once a week (all year!).  If there is one sport that he is good at - besides cross-country skiing - it's swimming.  So he is not even the un-athletic boy anymore.

L'Orchestre de l'Académie de Musique

One of Silke's few regrets (although there are some others) about not being in Calgary this year was not being able to play with the Calgary Youth Orchestra (CYO).  She is on the CYO mailing list, and every time she saw what they are playing, she exclaimed that it wasn't fair, and that she wanted to play that music too!  The Erik Satie conservatory orchestra is a fine level for Jerome, and exciting for him because it is a complete orchestra with woodwinds and brass, but it was not up to Silke's level.  I pulled her out of the conservatory orchestra (which entailed some small amount of drama) and we started looking for other options.   Emmanuel Emerich recommended l'orchestre de l'académie de musique.  He not only recommended it, he also talked to the conductor to arrange an audition.  Which was a good thing, because the minimum age is nominally 18.  L'académie de musique is not for professional musicians, nor even for those who are studying music at the university level.  The conductor, Jean-Philippe Sarcos, founded it to promote classical music in the younger generation, and particularly in the decision-makers of tomorrow.  The orchestra is intended for those university students who have graduated from the conservatory system (roughly equivalent to an ARCT in Canada), but are now pursuing other studies and other careers.  It provides them a chance to keep playing their instrument at a high level, and to stay connected with classical music.  In addition to the orchestra, their are choirs, with over 300 singers altogether.  The choirs welcome all levels, but provide a quite rigorous training, even for beginners.  Anyway, you want to know if Silke got in.  She did!  (Yes Jeff, with the first violins :)   She had a rehearsal tonight (Monday), three and a quarter hours.  (There are also Saturday rehearsals.)  It was midnight before she got home and got to bed.  We will see how she survives the week after that.  But she is incredibly excited about it.

l'orchestre de l'académie de musique au Cirque d'Hiver

Anyway, you can hear the orchestra, and see why Silke is so excited about it.  A few years ago they did a production of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana for French TV, which was also shown on the BBC.  Someone recorded it from TV and put it on youtube, so here it is (the sound quality is decent, except for a slight lag between the picture and the sound)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LzMtqcI-nI

(The shots of Paris in this video are fun for us.  Name the place!)

Here is their fall program: http://www.academie-de-musique.com/-actualite-2008-2009- .  (Yes, I know the link contains "2008-2009" but it does in fact link to this fall's program.)

I don't think we are going to be hearing any more regrets from Silke about not being able to play with the CYO this year.

A picture at the Louvre

Nope, it's not a photo of the Mona Lisa taken by holding a iPhone up above the crowd.  Sorry.  There are several those taken every minute, but sadly we're not posting one here.  Instead, here is a picture of us in front of an advertising banner.  30,000 works of art on display, and we take just one photo of  advertising.  Why?  Because it's kind of humorous, and because it's for Carte Louvre Famille.  And we have one of those.  A year's family pass to the Louvre, which is a 10 minute walk away.  How cool is that?

Thanks to Mrs. Agopian doing a wonderful art history program with Silke last year, Silke recognized a number of works today.  She was pretty much jumping up and down to see them in real life.  (So was Jerome, but he was just trying to get a view over the heads of the crowd.)

If you really want a photograph of the Mona Lisa, you can find really excellent ones on the Louvre site: http://www.louvre.fr/oeuvre-notices/portrait-de-lisa-gherardini-epouse-de-francesco-del-giocondo .

By the way, at the end of the school year, one of the exams that Silke will have is an art history exam.  There is no separate art history course, instead the material is spread across several subjects, French, History, Art and Music classes.  The exam is oral.  She needs over the course of the year to prepare an art history notebook, which she will hand to the examiner, who look through it and then ask her questions about the material that she has prepared, and Silke has to be prepared to answer and to speak intelligently about art history.

Help Jerome pick a statue for art class

Jerome has to take a photo of a statue to art class.  I think they might be drawing the one they bring from the photograph.  Here are some possibilities:

Choice A

This is a monument at place Saint-Michel .  Lucifer is having a bad day.

Choice B

The above figures are cool, but probably pretty hard to draw.  However on either side are dragons.  These are easier to draw, and they're more exciting for an 11 year old boy.

Choice C

Dragons still too hard to draw?  No problem.  What about this one from les Tuileries?  It's... um... dunno actually what it is.

What's your choice?  (Jerome ended up deciding to take photos of all 3 to art class.)

Vélib

Carolyn has always loved commuting by bike.  It keeps her fit and sane.  -20 and snowing was never enough to stop her riding her bike in Calgary.  Paris has this wonderful bike-sharing program called Vélib, which you've probably heard about.  It's fantastic, with 1900 stations in Paris.  Carolyn even has an app that shows, in real time, how many bikes are available at nearby stations, or, if dropping off a bike, how many free slots.  Carolyn just has to swipe her card, which is the same as her transit pass, and she can take a bike.  There's a small annual fee, but no charge each time to use a bike, as long as it is returned within 30 minutes.  Most of her commute is along the Seine.

Carolyn on a Vélib bicycle

A Vélib station

The view on Carolyn's morning commute

Jerome learns to tie his shoes by watching a TED talk

This is not a post about Paris, except that I mention how dirty the streets are.  I bought Jerome a pair of gym shoes that he needed for gym class.  Dedicated shoes for gym class are required, because the gym floor would get rather disgusting if you wore your outdoor shoes in the gym.  Coincidentally, tonight Silke and I were visiting someone from who is married to a Japanese woman.  He mentioned, while providing us with slippers to wear inside, à la japonaise, that every time he returns from Japan, he forgets to look where he is stepping in the Parisian street.  Yuck.  Anyway, about the shoes for Jerome, I neglected to notice that we picked out running shoes with laces.  This is an important detail, because once, a few years ago, I tried to teach Jerome how to tie shoelaces.  The outcome of which was, we thereafter only bought him only shoes with velcro fasteners.  So the day before Jerome's gym class, Carolyn notices that his gym shoes have laces.  Brief panic, then she then has the flash of genius, to see if there is a TED talk about tying your shoes.  Jerome has nearly perfect retention of anything he has ever seen in a TED talk.  It turns out, there is such a TED talk.  So now Jerome can tie his laces.  By the way, you are probably tying your laces wrong, so you should watch it too:  http://www.ted.com/talks/terry_moore_how_to_tie_your_shoes.html .

Rue de Rome

In Paris, if you want anything music-related, you go to rue de Rome.  The whole length of the street is stores related to music.  Violin shops, piano shops, stores specializing in saxophones or contrabass, music bookstores, anything!  I have no idea how you choose a luthier.  In Calgary, there are two good luthiers in the city.  Here you stand on the corner of rue de Rome and there are luthiers as far as you can see up the street.

One of many luthiers on rue de Rome

Decoratively carved contrabass bridges

Public drinking fountains with carbonated water

This is a public drinking fountain with chilled carbonated water:

I knew these existed, but we weren't out looking for one.  We were just out for a stroll along la promenade plantée when we came across it.  La promenade plantée is a former metro viaduct, now converted to an elevated garden.  The original metro is now underground.  La promenade plantée is 4.5 km long, and it passed through several gardens along the way.  Gardens are one of the most attractive things about Paris.  There are the large famous ones of course, Jardin du Luxembourg and les Tuileries, but there are countless small charming public gardens, all well-frequented by Parisians.  It wasn't always like this.  In the 17th century there were apparently zero public gardens on the right bank.  So where did they come from?  Former palaces, every one.  Even les Tuileries was formerly a palace and its grounds - must have been a mighty big palace.  And at least part of today's le Jardin du Luxembourg was formerly the grounds of a palace belonging to the de Medicis.  But mostly they were smaller, only half a block size or so.  All of these palaces were destroyed by republicans (mostly burned) sometime during the revolution, or some time during the 19th century, which was a time of continual conflict between monarchists and republicans.  Some were of surpassing beauty it is said, and full of rare art.  But the gardens are better, if you're not aristocracy.  Actually, the central Paris of today is largely 19th century, a little is 18th century, and it is only the rare occasional building that is older.  Such as le cathédral Notre Dame de Paris.  Which is awesome in any case, and stupefying when you know it dates to 1163.

Don't believe me that Paris has fountains with sparkling water?  http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2013/09/11/sparking_water_fountains_italian_and_french_cities_have_them_can_we.html