Somewhere we read that the restaurant Les Philosophes is a cheap eat place good for "seeing people and being seen". Since it is only 50m from our apartment, we have been trying to have dinner here since we arrived, but it was always too crowded. At last we made it in! Don't know about seeing and being seen, there's just too much cigarette smoke in the room. The food was fine, nothing special but perfectly adequate, and the waiter we got spoke perfect English but was prepared to put up with our French.
Sadly, our French langauge skills are not great, despite a refresher course at Berlitz before we left Sydney, but they are more than good enough to order a meal at a restaurant, a drink in a cafe, a baguette at the boulangerie, a ticket in the Metro etc. Clare has discovered that some cappucinos come with "mousse" (froth, which she wants), others with "chantilly" (whipped cream, which she doesn't), so we know how to ask for it. Holding a conversation is another matter altogether, and we have 99 French language stations on our apartment TV and radio, but we can't really understand them.
Our attempts to speak French in shops are almost always well received, and the shop assistants really try to help you. In some places, we've found that no-one can speak English, but we still manage to get by with our fractured French, which visibly makes the locals cringe. We have seen very little of the famous snooty French attitude to non-speakers. Where someone does speak English, they seem to prefer to speak it rather than listen to us mangling their language. Maybe they like to practice English, maybe they just can't stand our accents! But, almost invariably, if they do speak English, they speak it a lot better than we speak French. Others are quite prepared to let us practice, and they offer help. We shopped in the markets on our first Sunday here. Not much English spoken there, but everyone was friendly, and we were able to buy what produce we wanted and pay the right price. One lady, who we bought holly off for Christmas, realising quickly that we weren't locals, proudly told us that she was from Romania. A lot of people are interested in where we are from - they often guess, England first, then America, never Australia.
Mike had spent a walk to the local post office practicing how to order stamps for postcards to Australia and the USA. It was unnecessary. The man at the counter had excellent English, and went to a lot of trouble to explain what the picture on the EUR0.85 stamp was commemorating (renovations at the Palace of Versailles).
One young couple approached us looking for directions, for the Tour Montparnasse as it turned out. We knew where it was. They had no English (which surprised us, given their age), and we struggled to point them in the right direction. Another oldish lady in our apartment block opened up a conversation with us one day. She had no English, and we didn't get far, but we were able to work out what she had been saying afterwards. In other words, we couldn't deal with her language quickly enough, but should have been able to.
It has been said, and we have confirmed, that it is easiest to read a language, much harder to speak it, and much much more difficult to listen to it and understand it. To our ears, French seems to have so many silent consonants, and so many common words which are similar, that it's a real battle. We have had particular troubles understanding a price when quoted by a shop assistant. Mostly, fortunately, you can read the cash register, but sometimes, you can't.
One time, we had a change of plan in a Metro station, so we were puzzling over the map on the platform ("quai"). A young French lady helped us - she spoke excellent English - and it transpired that she works for the chocolate company Nestle, and will be coming to Sydney in 2008.
As mentioned, our TV options are quite limited. The apartment gets cable TV (and broadband) but the only English channels are BBC World, CNN, Skynews, and some of the content on the German channel DW. But we can easily connect the radio 702BL in Sydney by streaming from the ABC's website, so we put ouselves to sleep with this at night. We believe foreign (i.e. English) movies are shown in their original language and with French subtitles, but so far, we haven't encountered anything we want to see, that we haven't already seen (e.g. Elizabeth). We don't seem to have time anyway.
Just listening to people speak makes you realise that Paris is full of foreigners, and they don't all seem to be tourists or visiting businessmen. No doubt, the open borders of the EU have allowed a lot of people from elsewhere in Europe to come here, work here and live here. We've noticed on TV that these EU borders have just been widened, and the news reports just how far you can drive now without having to show a passport. This seems strange to Australians, but it shows how much Europe has been changed by the EU. No doubt, these arrangements will be causing great ethnic tensions, but the economic power generated by the trade consolidation here is made manifestly obvious from how the Euro has appreciated over the US Dollar since it was created.
We are counting down the days to 1 January, when, apparently, smoking is banned in Paris cafes. We have observed that smoking is rampant in traditional French cafes, but is much less so in what you might call American influenced places (hamburger restaurants, fast food cafes.) Anyway, note the photo of a poster in a Marais bar advertising the "Last Smoky Party" for new year's eve. Other photos are of us in the Cour Puget inside the Louvre museum, and of Sacre Coeur from a vantage point down the hill from Montmartre.
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