August - Settling In...

JUMPING IN, FEET FIRST!

The kids started school today!  All four are attending different schools in four different parts of Paris.  We think each school is the right choice for each child, but logistically things couldn't be worse.  Now all we can say is, "What were we thinking!?"  We tried to carefully plan how to get all people all places at all times on this first day.  Luckily, Sadie starts later this week.  Tom carefully mapped out a roller-blading course to Ian's school.  The Metro and train route took about 45 minutes, but sporting new rollerblades, and having practiced, the two could make it from our door to Ian's school door, in just 30 minutes.  Ian has been placed up a grade for this year, so our tiny fourth grader is now with all French speaking fifth graders.  Off they jetted as I scrambled to drop off Leo -- who can only ask where the toilets are and say please and thank you, and an occasional bonjour if he gets the courage -- to his entirely French public school. There are three other English speaking students in his grade (Kindergarten) and all have been strategically placed in separate classes so that they will be forced to steer clear of English.  A bit of guilt is hitting us hard.  Once the pirate had been delivered, I flew to the Metro to meet Sadie and Thomas -- who rode the Metro half way across Paris all by themselves --  for Thomas' orientation.

It was a smooth ride, compared to Tom's.   He arrived promptly at Ian's school, so proud to have made it to our new fourth grader's first day of all-French fifth grade.  Then it hit them and their stomaches sank:  On Ian's first day, as a new student, in his new school, in a new grade, he had no shoes, only rollerblades!  Tom apologized to Ian's new teacher and then used his most polished rollerblading skills to fly home and return with Ian's shoes before Ian had to go to recess with bare feet.

The end of the day report?

Ian made seven girl friends and six boy friends.  And he didn't have to relinquish his "gold" to a big kid on the playground.  

During French lessons for the rest of the class, Ian's teacher found a beginning French reader that she thought might be appealing to Ian.  It was all about cowboys and indians in America. 

Leo also found some friends at school, and fortunately the toilettes!

Thomas passed orientation!

Sadie dives in soon!

ODE TO TOILETS

"Ou sont les toilettes, s'il vous plait?" ("Where are the toilets, if you please?")  It's a phrase that I mastered this spring, as I repeated it over and over, walking along a lengthy row of tourists queued-up at the Palais de Versailles.   I tweaked it and tweaked it, until Sadie asked me if I was aware that I was asking hundreds of people up and down the line with a varied array of inflections, "Where are the toilets, if you please?"  After a good laugh, I tucked the phrase away, knowing it would come in handy in the future, afterall, it is one of my only perfected French phrases.  But for all my mastery, at the expense of those who had come to tour Versailles, the phrase is, unfortunately, of no use.   There are no toilets in Paris!  And when you do find one, that doesn't come with a restaurant bill included, you'd better savor every moment.  They are few and far between.   With a fully potty trained 5-year old, it's several full blown potty dances a day.  I can't imagine what it's like with a toilet training toddler!

IT'S ALL ABOUT WHO YOU KNOW

I don't have any friends in Paris yet and that means I don't have any friends in Paris with phone numbers.  It's become disconcerting and awkward.  When I couldn't remember my own phone number and had purchased a large amount of items for delivery to furnish our apartment, the clerk pulled me and my items out of line and told me to return them.  "It's not poss-eeble (possible)" she repeated over and over, just like I perfected toilettes.  And then, over and over she demanded, "You have no friend in Paris with a phone number?  You don't have a friend in Paris?"  She said it repeatedly, in front of the entire line, until I actually began to feel sorry for myself for not having a friend in Paris with a phone number.

** Just a foot note, Tom, with his charm and good luck and lack of Paris friends with phone numbers, did the same thing at IKEA the week before with not a hitch!   I, in the meantime, am desperate to find a friend in Paris with a phone number that he or she is willing to share in emergencies!  

(**Another footnote - I had not a single friend, with or without a phone number in Taiwan, and they delivered a baby!)

BAGGAGE

Tom and Thomas spent 4 1/2 hours preparing for a racetrack in Nurburg, Germany, by sitting in the luggage compartment of their train.  Was it that they wanted to become familiar with the bumps and turns of the tracks and figured what better way than jostling on top of everyone's luggage for a few hours?  No.   By no fault of their own they were fortunate enough to score the luxury seats by paying full price for normally cushioned seats that, when all was said and done, just didn't exist on the model of train they were riding.  So to get to the big track, they became intimately familiar with the long track. Here's Tom's account of the adventure.

Wow! I just got back from 4 days of driving the Nordschleife. Unbelievable! I really can’t imagine a more remarkable driving experience.

After picking up the R8 in Frankfurt we drove up to Nurburg. There’s little indication that there’s anything special there – no billboards or giant race venue sitting up on a hill. A nearby castle is the most visible landmark. The track itself is pretty well hidden in the trees.

 

Arriving on an “open” day we drove up to the main gate area of the Nordschleife into auto sport pandemonium. There were people and vehicles everywhere. The vehicles were everything from a Carerra GT, multiple Challenge Stradales and dozens of GT2s and 3s, to delivery trucks, motorbikes with side cars, family vans and a 4-wheeler.

 

When you step up to the ticket counter no one asks to see your license, no one asks you to sign anything, no one hands you a sheet to remind you to check whether your tires have air or there’s gas in your tank. It’s unbelievable! You just buy tickets – 15 laps for about 20 Euros a lap.

 

Then you just get in your car, pull up to the gate, stick your ticket in and you’re off. After a few laps, the driving became indescribable. It’s not necessarily that you get going so fast (though there are plenty of sections over 120 mph) but that the speed you carry into some of these sections for the conditions of the track and the camber of the turns blows your mind! The other remarkable thing is the carnage. On an open day there seems to be an accident every several minutes. No one seems to care much. They just put up a yellow flag and tow the debris away. Then the offending driving gets an invoice for whatever had to be done to put the track back in order and has to pay before leaving.

 

The BMW event/school that took up the next couple of days was pretty cool – remarkable mostly because of the track you’re on. It culminates in a “graded” lap where speed and accuracy through each of 15 sections get you the best score. At one point during my lap I came off the track into to gravel. Pretty hair raising, but very fun!

 

I have to believe this is one of life’s must-do’s, if you like driving and nice cars. (The day before we arrived some Italian had paid a few drivers from team Black Falcon(?) to take his Carerra GT, Enzo, Koenigsegg, and a couple of his other cars I didn’t recognize the names of, around the track to see which was really fastest.)

An Historic Sunset

It was an historic sunset by sheer accident and most of us witnessed the unbelievable sight.   With a slight bump of a child's hip, a sunset made in stained glass in 1906 - the crest of a large stained glass window in the winding stairwell leading to our apartment - dove, in silent and unusually brilliant form, to its bitter end.  We mustered all the courage we had to report the viewing to the powers-that-be.   There is still no official report on the aftermath - just a gaping hole on the horizon.

THE MEAT OF IT...

There is a boucher (butcher) on our block who is clearly a master at his skill, slicing slabs of raw beef, chicken, pigs and more all day for queuing customers.  While he is hacking away, we are unfortunately hacking up his native French language.  We tried to retrieve a set of apartment keys that we had dropped off at a local locksmith to have duplicated, so that we would all have a key to our apartment.  After some discussion that clearly wasn't going anywhere, I pulled out my U.S. driver's license to show the shop owner our family name, thinking that might trigger his memory about keys that Tom had delivered just four hours earlier.  Incensed he told me that they DO NOT make reproductions of driver's licenses and please bring keys back if we would like copies made.  Thomas and I left, tails between our legs. Tom returned in 15 minutes to successfully collect the keys.

August (Aout) Favorites

Leo's Awful Tower (Eiffel Tower)
Leo's Open Dom (Notre Dame)
A giant rainbow that stretched across our apartment rooftop, after an unbelievable thunder, lightning and rainstorm.
Chocolate croissants / Nutella crepes
The Tour de France finale on the Champs-Elyseese.  The photos below are from budding photographer Will S., seen here with Thomas, and his mom Christine.

Painting, drawing, reading, trying to speak some version of French
A great French connection with Sadie's friend Madi and her family, that included days of fun and a Jack Sparrow sighting.
People who play speed chess in the Luxembourg Gardens (Literally timed - 3 minutes each)
Vivaldi at sunset in St. Chapelle
Friendly health department workers that laugh at their own bureaucracy and give us school certificates and appointments for TB tests on our first visit!  We've learned to translate, with a new deciphering characters method that we personally pioneered, vaccinations listed in Chinese into English and now French!!  It's a skill we're sure we'll never use again, but we're still very proud of it.  (It was our only record of four that passed through the French bureaucracy with flying colors!)

SPEAK WAY UP!
While traveling through Speaker's corner in Hyde Park in London, a toothless man standing on his soapbox looked at Tom as he walked by with Leo perched on his
shoulders and said, in his perfect Brittish accent,"That
man's got a child growing out of his shoulders!"  It's true.
 Leo has seen most of Europe perched on
Tom's shoulders in his cowboy boots.