Et chaque fois, les feuilles mortes ♪ ♬ ♩

A photo that I took the other day with my iPhone of some fallen leaves on a fall day in Paris

Une photo que j’ai prise l’autre jour avec mon iPhone d’une feuille par terre dans une rue de Paris.

Paris - where chewed gum is used on the sidewalks to absorb shocks

Am I the only one that notices that all of the sidewalks in Paris are covered in ABC gum (”Already Been Chewed”)? My theory is that the chewing gum surface provides a sort of cushion layer to the pavement, which in great quantiy will reduce the hardness and absorb some of the shocks incurred by pedestrians. Parisians must just spit their gum out on the streets to keep their knees from giving out from all of that walking they do.

What’s your theory on this chewed up spit out gum that lines the streets of Paris?

Ferrari Speeding through Paris

My uncle sent me this short film and it had me sitting on the edge of my seat. The film itself has no special effects and there appears to be doubt as to the real model of the car. Was it a Ferrari or was it a Mercedes? Certain sources claim that the vehicle driven may have been a Mercedes , but the soundtrack was dubbed with Ferrari engine sounds.

Claude Lelouch… histoire louche?

Apparently, there are several different urban legends that have sprung up around this film, other than the type of car driven. Was Lelouche arrested for filming this? (He didn’t have a permit). Was the actual driver a Formula 1 driver?

Regarless of the underground nature of the film or the debate surrounding the circumstances of its creation, if you know the streets of Paris, you should check out this clip.

C’était un rendez-vous

Great example of cinéma vérité

This court-métrage from 1976 was fimed using a camera mounted to a car (more than likely a Mercedes) and shot in one take. Whether the engine sounds were enhanced later or not, the soundtrack is so powerful that at moments, you feel as though the car and a dog on the sidewalk are growling at each other.

The natural lighting provided by those old yellow/orange headlights they used to have in France, makes it seem at moments as if the pigeons were on fire as they flew out of the way of this speeding car. Very vintage and nostalgic Parisian.

The streets of Paris

On your marks, get set, go!

And watch out for the pedestrians, street cleaners, other cars and the roundabouts!

(Click on the rectangular button to go full screen)

The Metro’s dirty dirty secrets

Les sales secrets du métro parisien

Other than some of the obvious gross and dirty things one finds in the Parisian metro, I was suprised to learn that some Parisians were totally unaware of one of dirtiest secrets of the Parisian metro. I’m talking about the dirty spots.

dirty spot n. (m.)¹ ['dɜrtispɒt]

area along the Parisian metro’s platform [usual painted white] which has become discolored as a result of passengers getting off and on at this location.

¹ if used as an anglicism in French, (or michèlisme) I am assigning it the ‘genre masculin’. [almost 90% of French nouns borrowed from English (aka anglicisms) are considered masculin]

Line up correctly au quai, OK

Nowadays on a few lines of the metro, the spots where the doors will open along the platform have been painted with indications so people know where to line up. Even though a lot of passengers still just try to get right in without letting people off first, these new painted lines will show you were to line up. If you are on a line that doesn’t have the painted indications, look for the dirty spots! They may be difficult to notice when you are right on top of one (as the entire things looks pretty dirty in general), but look down the quai “platform”, and you should be able to see them. I took a picture to help you out:

escalator, n.m. [εskalatoR]

« escalier mécanique» • “electric staircase”

This word, is actually a trade name created in the US in the early 20th century from escalade ‘climb a wall by ladder’ [an English word which, by the way,  comes from French < Latin] on the pattern of elevator. [Source: Concise Oxford English Dictionary – (The World’s Most Trusted Dictionaries)].

In French this word exists in the same written form with the same sense as in English, but obviously with a phonetic adaptation. Unfortunately the TLFi has not yet consecrated an article to the word escalator, but we do find a contextual example of its use in French in the article escalier. According to « Le Grand Robert de la langue française » the word was attested for the first time in French in 1948. Unfortunately they don’t cite their sources like the Oxford or the TLF, so this information would be time consuming to attempt to confirm. The one thing common to the 2 French dictionaries, is their citation, I thought it was pretty interesting:

Lui : L’amour me fait presque toujours penser aux escalators des grands magasins : l’un monte pendant que l’autre, parallèle, descend. Moi : Les escalators se croisent à mi-hauteur (J. DUTOURD, Les Horreurs de l’amour, Paris, Gallimard, 1963, p. 518)

Him: Love almost always makes me think about escalators in department stores : one is going up while the other, parallel, is coming down. Me: The escalators pass each other in the middle (from a work entitled « The Horrors of Love »).

Ode to an escalator

Oh, escalators. I used to love them so much when I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to get somewhere that had an escalator, so I could have some real fun. I would run down the up going stairs, up the down going stairs, lose a shoe and have to be carried. I would do parallel bars with just the hand rails and be pulled away. Sometimes I would even get at the bottom in the middle of an up going escalator and a down going escalator, hang on to the arm rests and test how far my arms could be stretched apart before being ripped from the sockets, (it was actually my clothes that ended up being ripped apart in that experiement before my arms were put to the test).

So having all of these great childhood memories of fun and thrilling escalator experiences, I thought getting around Paris and encountering escalators on a daily basis would be cool. Even though the magic which escalators once contained for me has vanished with age, I still think they are pretty neat - except in certain cases.

Bad escalator etiquette

The worst thing ever:

The terminal stopper. When someone gets to the end and then just stands there without getting out of the way. Seriously. You may think, « No big deal, just deal with it ». Well, easier said than done (plus facile à dire qu’à faire), especially when you almost knock them over ‘cuz you are being propelled into them. Come on Stoppy McStopperson, je te dis, « bouge de là » (get outta the way).

Another rude escalator behavior:

The pass blocker. This person is one of 2 people: the person that stands next to someone without passing, and the person that is just taking up too much space and is blocking the fast lane, preventing you from passing. This message is for you guys: take a step back. If you just leave one extra stair in front of you, you can put the long part of your protruding obstacle (briefcase, extra sacs etc.) in front of you instead of to your side. This works for you too, Chatty McChatterson, if you need to be conversing with some the length of an escalator ride, just stand in a parallel line on the stair above them and turn around. (Il faut juste être aware de la fin pour ne pas tomber. [You just need to be aware of the end so as not to fall.])

Well, obviously these aren’t the only bad escalator manners I’ve encountered, (there is also wrong lane guy – we are not in England here, stand on the right and pass on the left); but I think you get the idea. Here’s hoping to seeing better manners