What do you do on a Sunday night in Paris when you find your cat uncharacteristically expelling his food (violently), instead of  inhaling it?

Why, call SOS Vetérinaires. In fact, when I phoned my regular vet hoping to  get the SOS number from the recorded greeting, my call was instead automatically redirected to the Emergency Hotline.

Within an hour and a half, Mats was splayed on top of our dining table, quietly growling at the indignity of rectal thermometers. The vet was tall, young, blond and handsome, and — as if to underline all those attributes— wore a firefighter’s 3/4 length jacket, the kind in black canvas with yellow reflective stripes on the sleeves and bottom. He carried a large grey plastic toolbox from which he gave Mats several anti-nausea injections, and then handed me a sachet of chalky white goo to feed him an hour later.

Being a French vet, he also gave me a lecture: “Your cat is too fat. His fur is bad. He must be tested for diabetes and potentially pancreatitis. He must lose weight.”

As I began to explain the series of diets we’ve been trying for the past year, he continued his spiel, ignoring my interjections:

“…but it is not the fault of the cat. It is not he who buys the groceries, hein?” He gave me a knowing smirk. Grrr. I started to get annoyed.

As he prepared to launch into a diatribe on the sins of grocery store cat food, I realized that this time, being at home, I could actually prove that I was not free-feeding him Purina Cat Chow and pulled out out a box of Mats’s only-available-from-a-veterinarian, ‘kidney-formula’ food sachets. So happily, that particular lecture was cut short.

Instead, in complete contradiction of my regular French vet, he advised that while Mats must lose weight he must never go hungry (those who have spent any time in the presense of Mats will be able to appreciate the humour). Apparently going hungry causes too much stress (no wonder Mats has early-onset kidney disease). Solution: top up his food dish with puréed zucchini, which is high in fibre, and low in nutritional value.

The tally for the 30 minute visit at just before midnight, including the injections, was about double the cost of a standard vet consultation here.

Most amazingly, when I phoned my regular vet at 10 am today to schedule the tests, the assistant was already up to speed: “Oh, Madame Hosking, how is he today? When can Mats come in for the blood tests?”.  Apparently the SOS vet automatically emails a summary of the visit to the regular vet.

It is at times like these that I find it hard to believe that this is still the same country that requires most things, from applying for a continuing-education evening course  to obtaining a healthcare card, to be done via triplicate forms written in longhand (carbon paper doesn’t appear to exist in France) and then snail-mailed to the appropriate administrative fiefdom.

From recuperating cat

Sorry I haven’t been terribly communicative for the past few months. We’ve been keeping happily busy with visiting friends, short trips, and in my case, some volunteer work that ironically had me working full-bore while the rest of Paris made their July & August exodus from the city.

I think I got blog-fatigue. Also, I was torn on what to write: judging by the feedback, what people most like is what I call “Paris expat p0rn”: stories of cafe life, lovely markets, visits to charming villages, etc.  And, while we certainly enjoy that aspect of living here, its about as accurate as assuming that life in Vancouver is limited to strolling the Seawall, walking through the Anthropology museum, hanging out on the Capilano suspension bridge, or eating salmon.

On the other hand, it does make for easier updates: a few pics of a crumbling village & voilà, a blog post!

In fact, that’s what I normally would have done right now, since we are approaching the end of a 2 week bike tour through Burgundy. Unfortunately, we’ve had another problem with theivery and so alas our camera containing oodles of travelling-France p0rn is now AWOL.

Overall though it’s been a fun trip, aside from one ambitious day of 95 km of climbing innumerable hills only to lose all elevation gained by descending again. I felt like Sisyphus after a few hours. Even HerrKaa, the Energizer Bunny on a Bike, was pretty exhausted. But it has been a good excuse to eat large helpings of garlicky snails and down copious amounts of hearty red wine.

Right now we are in Beaune, the very heart of Burgundy’s best wine region (the Cote d’Or), hanging out at the….library.

Don’t worry, we’ve already had our fill of dégustations and viticulture lore; now we need to fill in our applications for the bargain French classes offered by the City of Paris, which fill up fast as I learned first-hand last winter.  Since the forms only came online yesterday, we  have been hogging their internet station this morning to get all the info needed to complete forms for 3 separate applications (each in triplicate – vive l’administration francaise!).

Soon after we moved to Paris, I responded to a Craiglist ad from a 30-something French woman looking to do a French-English language exchange. We met in a bubble-tea restaurant in the 9th arrondissement, and bonded over cat-ownership, love of asian food, and being only children.

So P really digs the theatre – plays, music, dance, mostly contemporary stuff. She even went to some crazy play this spring that was 11 hours long that was last performed in 2003 . And lately she’s been telling me about this very original dressage show coming soon to the Tuileries. The thing is, it’s called Lever du Soleil which means “sunrise” and which also means you must be there at 5 am. Funnily enough she’s having problems finding company for that one.

However, she has also invited us to less-extreme but still very original events, such as the dancing Buddhist Shaolin monks we saw last Friday at the Theatre du Chaillot, in the Palais du Chaillot (for those of you who’ve been to Paris, you’ll know it as the massive art deco structure opposite the river from the Eiffel Tower.) Who woulda thunk Buddhist monks could be so adept at sabre-wielding and baton-brandishing? Perhaps this is how they purge themselves of any excess passion before comitting themselves to a lifetime of Zen….

The audience behaviour was also interesting. The show was a bit late to start, so some started to clap rhythmically as their way of saying “Get on with it, already!” No one applauded during the show, not even when little-boy-Buddhist executed a series of sommersaults and round-offs right across the stage. And at the end, while some people gave a standing ovation at the end, it was not the automatic audience-wide reaction as it has for every opera and dance I’ve seen in Vancouver. Instead, people stamped their feet and made a lot of catcalls, and the cast took about 5 bows while grinning crazily. It sounded like a stampede, not a Parisian theatre in the sedate 16th arrondissement.

We spent the past week in hosting-mode, and hadn’t been watching the news. So today over breakfast we tuned into France24 to learn what’s going on with the world, see if Iranian students are still rioting, etc…

Hah. Today it’s all about the death of Michael Jackson. There was a brief mention of a Baghdad market bombing, and then back to Michael. Footage of worldwide mourning, crowds gathered at the LA hospital, survey of shocked headlines from papers around the world. After explaining that the press was still waiting for Obama’s reaction (!), they then showed a video of the French minister for Culture delivering his thoughts on Mr. Jackson’s premature demise to the press. 

Ok, now the Business section just came up and they are discussing how much money his records and tours earned, accompanied by excerpts from the Beat It and Thriller videos.

It is sad that he died so young, but it’s now been a straight hour of news about Michael Jackson. And this is France, where he isn’t hugely popular. What’s going on back in Canada?

Around the end of April, I received an unusual letter. Instead of the usual financial statement or request for additional paperwork to prove my existence/address in France/married state, this was from our cable company.

“Your satisfaction is our priority and we will do everything to retain your loyalty” was how it began. It went to on to describe how they had created a dedicated phone line for customer concerns, assuring the reader that the cost for all calls will even be reimbursed and that requests will be processed within the lightening-fast speed of a week. 

This is not normal. The French are not proactive about customer service. They rarely admit to mistakes, and will only do so grudgingly. When I emailed our bank manager copies of our statements as proof of being double-charged bank fees, her reply was “You are right, an error seems to have slipped by us. We would, however, have surely found it eventually”.

So I took this as an ominous sign. My cynicism grew after I received another copy of the same letter two weeks later. 

Sure enough, we came back from our vacation at the end of May to a modem with blinking orange lights. A few times we coaxed it back to life long enough to download a few emails, but then it would resume blinking helplessly. So last Thursday I braced myself for an earful of rapid-fire jargon-laden French and phoned tech support (on HerrKaa’s cell phone, since our ‘fixed’ phone line was also dead as it relies on internet). After 5 minutes of me requesting at regular intervals “Could you repeat that please?” a home visit was set up.

Yesterday morning, the technician shows up more or less on schedule. He does some tests and confirms that our 100 MB modem is not working, due to problems switching over to fibre-optic. “You need to go to the Numéricable store on boulevard Montparnasse and get a 30 Mb modem.”

It is grey, cold, and raining. March weather. It will take a good 30 minutes each way to get to there. “Can’t you leave this one?” I ask. 

“Yes, but then I will have to charge you 50 euros. If you get it yourself it is free.” 

“Even though the problem is entirely on the part of Numéricable? After all, when I signed up, the salesman gave me a 100 Mb modem, even though he should have known the fibre-optic cables weren’t fully laid in our neighbourhood?”

“Malheureusement, oui.” The technician gave me a sad look and an apologetic semi-shrug. He probably hears this reaction a lot.

I was annoyed, but relieved: at least there was a solution, and so today we are once again connected to the WWW.

But overall, I must say that signing up with this ISP has been like ordering a brand-new car, only learning upon delivery that the steering wheel and brakes are extra. There was a 40 euro ‘registration fee’ on top of the  monthly charges. Another 50 for the a technician’s visit, which was necessary to connect to their network. During this visit, the tech assured us we could use one jack for our internet & phone, and another at the other end of the room for the TV we planned to buy. Of course, after we bought the TV and tried to hook it up we had to call in another techie, who revealed that the second  jack was from an ancient cable line and now totally useless. 50 euros for the visit, plus another 50 for the splitter that went on our sole functioning jack. 

So obviously, I have a lot of reasons to call this magical customer service line. It will be draining to explain this on the phone, and I think I am getting into the French habit of wanting supporting documents for, well, everything, so I might be better off writing. 

However, I have no intention of switching to another ISP. Even after all the visits and 190 euros in extra fees, their customer service is still way better than the others I’ve dealt with. It’s almost enough to make me miss dealing with Rogers.

By fluke last night I learned that our TGV train from Avignon to Paris was cancelled due to yet another strike by French railway workers. I mentally shrugged. Being marooned by striking French transport employees is a rite of passage, and there are worse places to spend an extra day than Barcelona or the south of France.

As it turned out, we wouldn’t have made the train anyways.

Our final 24 hours in Barcelona started with a quest for paella, and ended with a replacement rental car. In between there was a proud Catalan restaurant owner plying us with free cava, truffles, brandy, and cuban cigars; a pickpocketing and high-speed foot chase in the Gothic Quarter; LaCanadienne alarming the nighttime hotel staff with her newfound religious zeal for white porcelain; a 4:30 AM au revoir to a still-drunk Fauna heading to the airport; and HerrKaa’s losing a bit of his usual sang-froid around noon when he realized that he did not recover everything from the pickpocketers: they nabbed the key to our rental car. 

As for this afternoon…let’s just say there are better ways to pass time in Barcelona. Thank god for work-paid cell phones and Avis Technical Assistance. But now it’s 11 pm, we have a new rental car, and are spending the night in the cava- and pickpocket-free town of Perpignan, just north of the Spanish border. The room looks (and smells) like it was once part of an old-folks home, but the owners are friendly, happily cramming our bikes into an already-stuffed storage room and letting us park illegally outside their front door. They even have wifi (which not even our slick Barcelona hotel could boast of) with which we managed to find 2 free seats on a TGV tomorrow.

We’re looking forward to the quiet life back in Paris.

HerrK, myself, and our friend Fauna have been on the road. Spent the past week in Provence, and now we are in lovely, muggy Barcelona.

Our breakfast today, pictured below, is a sample of the light cuisine the Spaniards are noted for.

From In search of sun

Thank you, Eddys!!

This was the view from our kitchen window in January.

As far as Parisian kitchen-views go, this wasn’t bad at all, but we were excited to see the big maple in the courtyard next door. We’d be able to see leafy green-ness in spring & summer, yay!

And indeed, our dream came true. Same view, Easter weekend. 

Lovely, lovely….

Alas, turns out the French need to tame all growing things into submission isn’t just limited to parks & roadsides, but also extends to courtyards. I just walked into the kitchen 15 minutes ago and was a little bit surprised to see this:

Ok, I suspect the logical explanation is probably to let a lot more light into the lower floor apartments of the building next door. But my emotional response is “Wah!”

My trusty hybrid bike, which I relied on almost daily to get me around Vancouver, now sits neglected in our cave. And I have stopped buying monthly metro passes.

Why? Because along with the arrival of double-digit temperatures and sunny weather came my annual subscription for Vélib (Vélo + liberté), Paris’ short-term bike rental network.

There are well over 1000 Vélib stations in Paris, including one mere steps away from our apartment building. The best thing about it (aside from it being free for the first 30 min) is you can take a bike from point A and drop it off at point B. This means I can bike from home to the metro station just across the Seine, park the bike there, then ride the metro to my French class. No worry about theft, or of having to lug my bike up & down our building’s stairwell.

And it’s not just for locals: if you have a credit card with a microchip (which I strongly recommend to anyone travelling in Europe, regardless) you can get short-term subscriptions for 1 or 7 days, which cost 1€ and 5€ respectively.

===Update===

✱ Freedom, that is, until you:

a) get to your destination across town and realize you forgot to check where the nearest Velib station is and so spend the next 10 minutes cycling up & down random one-way streets hoping to find one.
b) get to the station and find it has no empty stalls left so then you must lurk until one frees up, or return to (a).

==========

Here’s a more thorough explanation of how it works. Don’t be put off by the narrator’s voice (it’s kinda amusing, really), because the vid is well done.

 
And for those wondering how Parisian kids handle growing up without backyards, real forests, or parks where you can walk on the grass, here’s how (keeping in mind these weigh over 20 kg and don’t have shocks):