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.