Interviews in Lille

My week in Lille is already almost over.  I cannot believe how quickly it has flown by.  I put in a full day’s work yesterday on interviews and between them, some I got here on Tuesday and those I got in Paris I have hours of really interesting footage to work with for my project.  I have so enjoyed meeting all of the people I have interviewed and am lucky to have a reason to ask people to sit and talk with me.  It was interesting to hear the things that were mentioned by nearly everyone, some I would have guessed and others that were surprises, like the French Revolution being important to what France is today as well as paid holidays and the European Union.  And as the fellowship makes clear, I just love to hear people’s stories.

The reason I chose Lille is because one of my fellow teachers at Lane has a brother who teaches at the University of Lille who volunteered to help me out.  I have been incredibly lucky to have Chad involved with my project.  He took the time to arrange all of the interviews I have done here, which wasn’t easy since I have been interviewing many of his colleagues and students who are coming in on their summer break to meet with me.  He also invited us to stay in his home and has been organizing all of our non-interview time with discussions on culture and visits to historical locations.  Chad and his housemate, Kathleen, are both Americans who have each lived in France for nearly a decade and have had great insights from the insider/outsider perspective to add to the interviews.  My third host, Olivier, has also been incredibly gracious.  He is French and works as the head of a project to reopen an art museum here that had to be closed for expansion to house a new collection.  Olivier gave us a private tour of the empty museum and it was fascinating to hear all the explanations for and reasoning behind various aspects of the building’s design.  I love architecture’s scale and the need to be both beautiful and functional.  I hope to come back when the museum has reopened, but as great as it will be with the art I am glad to have seen it empty.

My four weeks in France end on Sunday and I have really fallen in love with it.

Arras

Arras was so nice!  A charming little town with two charming town squares and lots of interesting limestone quarries.  It was a very easy train ride from Paris on Friday and we went out to a restaurant called Le Rapiere that night.  This is the second time we have eaten at a restaurant by this name, totally unrelated to one another.  We were drawn to each because of their claim to specialize in local cuisine.  The first was in Rouen where we had a type of fish stew and Norman holes, which is an unfortunate seeming name for a refreshing apple sorbet.  This time, in Arras, we had a savory cheese flan and beef stewed in beer and brown sugar.  Delicious.

Over looking the market and Flemish facades.

Saturday we went wandered through a market, got a cold and windy view of the Flemish architecture from a belfry, and then walked across town to the newly opened Wellington Quarry Monument.  The town of Arras is situatedatop extensive limestone beds and for about 800 years this limestone was extracted for construction, but by the 19^th century the market for limestone dropped off.  What remains are the underground tunnels and caverns that were once filled with stone.  Some have been used for other purposes since; those directly under Arras’s town square have been used to store goods for markets, as a dumpsite for a china store’s broken dishes, and currently some restaurants offer seating in the tunnels. 

In the tunnels directly under the town square.

It was during WWI that the quarries probably had their most significant use.  The French troops had left Arras to move further south to defend other positions and British troops came into fill their place.  In an attempt to break the stalemate on the Western Front, a plan was designed for the French to launch a major offensive strike.  A few days before this attack, it was planned that the Commonwealth troops would launch a distraction in the north near Arras to pull up some of the German troops.  The preparation for this diversion took nearly eight months.  A group of tunnelers from New Zealand spent most of this time connecting the various limestone quarries that pocket the area until they had a u-shaped tunnel nearly 20km long with its bend in Arras and the two terminuses at the German line.  Once everything was prepared the 20,000 troops, who had been slowly gathering at Arras, moved into the cold tunnels and lived there for 8 days until it was time to attack.  The day of the attack new exits were blown out and the Commonwealth soldiers came pouring out of the tunnels to the surprise of the Germans.  The first three days of fighting were very successful, so successful in fact that the commander decided that his men deserved a day off, which was just enough time for the Germans to call in reinforcements.  The Battle of Arras lasted two months with the British gaining 10km of the front, but at the cost of 4,000 lives each day.  It is just impossible to picture what that must have been like.

Visitors of the Wellington Quarry Monument can go 20 meters underground and walk through sections of the tunnels that were so key to this battle and where 20,000 soldiers lived for 8 days.  You get to see the latrine set up, the bunks, the kitchen and the communications area.  There are also several carvings and drawings on the limestone walls.  Some of them are humorous – one soldier carefully carved the name of a famous New Zealand cave over the entrance to a tiny storage nook.  Some of them are sad – portraits of girlfriends or wives left behind.  And it was so cold; you can imagine all those men huddled in their wool coats, just trying to pass the time until the call came to fight.

We also took a tour of the Canadian Vimy Ridge Memorial.  Like Pont du Hoc, the Canadians opted to leave the land given to them by the French government more or less alone.  There are craters from the bombings and trenches, although the original sandbags have been replaced by replicas in concrete.  And rather than a traditional cemetery, the Canadian government opted to send over North American trees to be planted there.  They sent over 100,000 and they grow around the edges of the battlefield.

Seeing the trenches was pretty cool.  It was particularly interesting to visit these because at one point the Canadian and Germans were hunkered down no more than 20 yards from one another.  I typically think of wide, smoky no man’s lands strewn with barbed wire, but sometimes they were really right up on top of each other.

Where next?

Tomorrow we will leave Paris.  I still wish I had been able to get more interviews than I did, but I had a great deal more success this week than last and am excited about the results I am getting.  We will see what happens as I continue, but as of yet my expectation that people would cite immigration as a major contributing factor of cultural change has not panned out.  I had formulated this hypothesis based on the fact that France has been addressing some immigration related issues and that it is certainly a factor of change in Chicago, but it has not come up once in my interviews so far.  The things that have come up are very interesting and I can hardly wait to get on to the next wave of interviews and then the editing.

We have two days between our rental running out and when we are to arrive in Lille.  I have bounced through several different ideas about where we should go and how we should spend our time, but since my tour of the Normandy beaches I have been pretty set on going to visit WWI sites.  It had never occurred to me that there might still be trenches to see until my guide mentioned that she had done it, and I’m not sure if that would necessarily have interested me if I hadn’t just seen the incredible bomb craters that scar Pont du Hoc.  Initially, I thought this would be pretty easy to accomplish and planned to go from Paris to Verdun to make it happen.  It is a little out of our way, but the location of some of the most important fighting of the war and I thought it was going to be worth it.  Once I took a look at the town’s tourism website I began to wonder if it would.  The website gives a sense that the trenches and memorial museum had been designed by the same people who built the tram through the “City of the Future” for the Epcot Center.  Outdated and cheesy.  Plus, getting there and getting around once we arrived both seemed difficult without a car.  I began looking at towns in the Somme Battlefield area, which would straight on our way to Lille, but not having a car continued to be a problem.  It had been so easy to get to Bayeux and to jump from there to the Normandy sites, but there didn’t seem to be a convenient equivalent for the WWI sites.  In the end I decided, based on the limited information available, that we should go to Arras.  It is the easiest to get to and from and although there are not many sites right near it, those that are sound like the most interesting.  I hope I am right.

Bastille Day!

Every city needs an Eiffel Tower!  The fireworks we saw last night for Bastille Day were the best I have ever seen.  They launch them from around and from off of the Tower.  The Tower was also set to light up in different ways at different times in the show and had rows off huge torches that would flare up in conjunction with the fireworks and lights.  Very impressive.  The show draws a justifiably large crowd; if it hadn’t been for the French spoken all around and the food vendors selling paninis rather than ribs it could easily been July 3 at Taste of Chicago.  It was fun to be in the thick of a celebratory crowd that feels so familiar.  

Picnicking in the crowd.

And it is a small world after all – we watched the show from a tour boat on the Seine and just before the fireworks began a man proposed to his girlfriend.  We congratulated them and found out they live in Chicago about five blocks from where we live.

On the boat.

Today we did a self guided walking tour of the Montmartre neighborhood.  This is where the film Amelie is largely set, where the Moulin Rouge is located and was the stronghold of the Paris Commune.  My guidebook is pretty good, but definitely focuses more on the popular culture history than the revolutionary history.  It’s a shame because that’s a period I would really like to know more about.  It is on my list of things to read up on.  Montmartre is a charming neighborhood and Sacre Coeur was wild.  This beautiful church is, for whatever reason, the place to go if you are a street performer or if you are a tourist who wants to see street performers.  There are street performers everywhere in Paris - on the streets, on the Metro - but this was different.  The setups the performers had were quite elaborate with amps, costumes, and synchronized dance.  There was a woman playing the accordion in front of an enormous, portable, flower covered back drop that made her appear to be a live Frida Kahlo painting.  The crowds watching the performances covered the stairs of the cathedral, patiently and enthusiastically sitting through the rotation of singers, acrobats and Brazilian dance fighters.  It definitely set a mood that set this particular cathedral apart from the many others we have visited.  I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.

www.jim-haynes.com

Jim Haynes holds a dinner party every Sunday and everyone is invited. If you want to go, send him an email and the first 50 to 60 people he hears from get the okay to show up at his place in south Paris at 8pm for dinner and, more importantly, introductions. He believes that you make memories of people, not places, so he holds these dinners to facilitate meeting people.

We were lucky to attend last Sunday's dinner and had a great time. I brought my video camera with me in hopes of getting interviews, but once I got there all the conversations were so lively and the small home and its courtyard so congested that I got too caught up. It was a mix of people from all over the world, most of whom spoke English. At least half of the guests were there for the first time and the other half were either neighbors who came regularly or fans of Jim's who attend every time they are in town. We met one couple who met at the dinner 12 years ago and married 9 years ago.

We also met a group of half a dozen twenty somethings, a mix of American, British and French, who live in Paris and invited us to meet up with them again last night. We took them up on it and had a great time. There was a lot of talk about my project and I continue to compile notes on people's comments, reactions, and stories, but last night I also got a taped interview. Romain is a graphic design student who has studied in London and speaks fantastic English, though he was a little nervous and took notes on his answers beforehand, which I liked because it is what I have done in France before every single phone call I have made. The plan was to post my interviews here, but that doesn't appear to work. I left it to upload while I took a shower and it still didn't complete. I'll try again later, but for now I am off to enjoy Bastille Day.

The Institute of the Arab World and Paris Mosque

Today we visited the Institut du Monde Arab and the Mosquee de Paris, then strolled through the Latin Quarter past the Pantheon and through the Luxembourg Gardens.

The Institute was established by France and 20 Arab countries with the aim of promoting awareness between Arab countries and the West. There is a museum that is open to the public, but for the most part it is just a display of artifacts and a collection that pales in comparison to that of the Louvre. One portion of the museum was an introduction to a website that the Intstitute has created that tracks the growth and fall of Western and Middle Eastern Empires and explores the exchanges between them in the fields of art and science. The site has not been entirely translated to English yet, but when it is I think it will be a great resource for my students to explore.

The Paris Mosque is somewhat modest on the outside, but has a magnificent interior with a beautiful central coutyard. Unlike the dozen or so churches we have visited, the mosque does ask a 3 euro donation from visitors to contribute to its maintenance. The openess of the courtyards and the arabesque stone work created a much brighter environment than the much older stone cathedrals we have seen in France.

Versailles and the Louvre

We spent a long time at Versailles, a very long time. But it is so enormous that it was very easy to pass hours quickly. The main draws, the Hall of Mirrors and the apartments of the king and queen, were very crowded and it was a little difficult to not feel as though we were moving through it on a people mover. It was beautiful, but difficult to really enjoy. Once you get down to the apartments of the dauphin and out to the Grand and Petite Trianons (which cost extra) things opened up quite a bit and we were able to peer into nooks and notice many more details. One of my favorite things were two large round tables in a sitting room of the Grand Trianon. They had tiny numbers on the top and below each number a drawer that slid out; these were used by women to store their sewing projects. These tables make so much sense in the tiny apartments of Paris, but it is funny to think of a table maker designing clever storage in such an enormous house or that princesses had to clean up after themselves and put their things away.

My favorite part, though, was the Queen's Hamlet. This was part of Louis XVI's gift to Marie Antoinette when she was fed up with court life and moved off to another corner of the property. She had the Petite Trianon, but also this little farm with incredibly enchanting country buildings, garden plots, cows and a dairy. Marie and her friends went here to enjoy "country life" and play at working the farm. It is well known that Marie wasn't very aware of the poverty and desperation of her subjects before the Revolution, but seeing her little farm, I wonder if it could even have made sense to her. Country life seems so romantic and wonderful in this perfect little setting, the place she came to get away from how tedious it was to be queen. Based on her perspective, it is easy to see how if she had heard she might have just thought the people were whining.

France had terrible weather leading up to the Revolution, which had caused huge shortages of food and I wonder if Marie noticed any difference in the production of her gardens. More likely she relied so little on the gardens that they always seemed overly abundant. The gardens were full of berries, lettuces, squashes, etc when we were there and I would imagine they were equally productive then, only no one had to live off that produce.

Yesterday we went to the Louvre. We arrived in late afternoon on a day that the museum stays open late so, like Versailles, it got less and less crowded the longer we were there. Once again, I took lots of pictures to use in my lectures. Hammurabi's Code was definitely a highlight. We also, of course, saw the biggies - Venus de Milo, Winged Victory and the Mona Lisa. The crowd around the Mona Lisa lived up to the reputation. It was huge and pushy and full of flash photography. Lots of flash photography. There were four or five museum employees standing around and not trying to stop the use of flash, which brought me to the conclusion that we were not looking at the original painting. If they swapped the real thing for a poster reproduction, who would know?

The Louvre is obviously filled with amazing things, but I was just as impressed by the palace itself. The ceiling paintings, carved wooden doors and stone staircases were pretty spectacular and rivaled those of Versailles. We saw the mock up of the new Arab art wing. It is supposed to look like a blowing veil, which is interesting since the country passed legislation to limit religious articles like the hijab from public schools. But I thought it looked more like a flattened jelly fish. I guess I will have to come back to Paris to see the finished product.