Flamenco

Tonight I am off for a week to the ski slopes. That will be exciting because I have not been skiing in over five years so not sure how it will go, but cute, French ski moniteurs will be on hand to help.

Last night, Andrea and I went to a flamenco performance at a theatre nearby. I booked it randomly a few weeks ago because I wanted to offer some kind of cultural entertainment to my friend but she doesn't speak French so it had to be music or dance. Unwittingly, I chose the best art performance I have seen in a long time. It was one of those rare experiences where from the moment the lights went down to the last clap one gave herself over to the enjoyment of "art". My eyes were glued to the stage, where four beautiful women from the four corners of the world were performing a flamenco choreography involving Arabic, gypsy, South-American and Spanish moves for over an hour and a half, but I could still sense the audience collectively holding its breath in anticipation of what more amazing and beautiful stuff was going to happen onstage. There was no coughing or humming, no playing around with plastic bags or ringing mobile phones: only pure excitement and energy of the event was to be felt and I (we all) didn't want it to be over. It was truly blissful, I almost fell in love with those women and at the very least I was dying to be like them and feel the passion and the pain and the joy and the energy they exhibited...

Back to more mundane pleasures: this morning squash, later yoga (poor Andika, I am making her go) and tonight drinking and eating before I have to catch the night-bus to the mountains.

Weekend in the country...

sounds sooo English. I went to London to take care of some paperwork and then spent Saturday and Sunday in the country (the Cotswolds) at a party for my friend Robin's birthday. Robin is the ultimate international jet setter (me multiplied by ten): we have met up in Rio, London, Budapest and Paris already and I am contemplating paying him a visit in Shanghai, which is where he currently resides. He has businesses everywhere and knows loads of people in all of these countries and his friends, including the guests at this weekend's party, are usually quite cool and interesting and generally "my kind of people", or at least the kind that I get on with without any effort. They were mostly English, but of the sort who, despite having the poshest BBC English accent, still feel the need to claim that they are actually Italian, Greek, French, whatever - because they have a parent or a grandparent from those countries. Upper-middle class, private school educated, well travelled and (mostly) jewish they do lots of different things from international event organizing to investment banking. Many of them "have their own companies", they know to appreciate the good things in life, and they all have an air of elegant ease about them, which comes from financial and academic and success, but are not arrogant and don't show off.

Against this background, I was not really surprised that I very much got into and enjoyed a "murder mystery game" that we played on Saturday night - despite the fact that I am not usually a person who likes organized fun. The game consists in acting out a detective story: with dressing up, character development, the whole nine yards. Of course, the gorgeous dinner cooked by one of the girls contributed to the amusement level as well as the fact that I had a lot of success with my costume and acting during the game: I had to play a man, an alcoholic actor from the 1920s, who is perennially broke and is in danger of being suspected of the murder. Anyway, it was all fun and games and food and champagne, which, after a previous night of playing around at various bars with a new male acquaintance had the effect that, by the time I got back to Paris last night I felt truly exhausted.

Coming back to work didn't help: still trying to (mildly) assert myself in this sexist, nerdy environment - with limited success. Of course, as always, I am torn between my (if not bruised but slightly chipped) "professional ego" (and reluctant feminism) and my fundamental lack of interest in the subject matter or workplace competition...

(PS: the English' ability to be parochial and insular still amazes me every time: the only two things they kept obsessing over on the news was the stupid hunting ban and Charles & Camilla's marriage. I mean, Jesus, get a life. Although from a different perspective this is sort of positive: if there is nothing more important to obsess over then the state of the affairs must be pretty damn good.)

Further to before. Thankfully I went out, had a nice dinner and got trashed. So there is hope yet...

Trendy and nostalgic

I have an amazing sense for what is trendy (or "tendance", as the French, annoyingly, say): my hot (Bikram) yoga classes are so in, that even my collleagues were talking about the TV documentary that they shot in class last Friday. As a result of the TV show and a feature in ELLE magazine the place is so packed in the evenings that whenever we do the deep breathing exercises I can feel the carbon-dioxide exhaled by my neighbours filling my lungs...I still enjoy it a lot because even if unpleasant while it lasts, the feeling of well-being post class is priceless. Perhaps it has to do with the practice of yoga, and this worries me: in addition to not smoking and cutting down on the alcohol, I have also stopped eating red meat completely and drink more green tea than coffee. I even got to drinking soy milk, I am ashamed to admit. Left to my own devices out here, I might turn into a complete, new-age freak.

Should that happen, I will just have to move to California. I really loved it after all. On Sunday we went to see Sideways, a very enjoyable movie set in the wine region of California. I felt a pang of nostalgia: it was almost a year ago that I started my travels from there. Then I started pining for California, the beautiful beaches, the sun, and all the other places, and above all that sense of liberation I felt at the time. And, perhaps oddly, I started pining for a friend that I haven't spoken to in a while, because the immature, cheating, yet endearing male character reminded me of him so much. Hmm...perhaps I'll skype him.

We've had a long stretch of beautiful weather for the past two weeks here in Paris. Last weekend, when my friends were visiting we spent a lot of time walking around the city. Today, however, I cancelled a brunch to due to violent storm but then decided that it would be a good idea to get out and visit the Louvre. The more so because during all my time in London I never randomly went to the British Museum or the National Gallery for no particular reason (ie no special exhibition, friend in town, etc.), because the thought that I could any time and would some time was enough. And yet, whenever I have the usual conversation about why it is so great to live in a crowded, expensive, cosmopolitan city like London or Paris, one of my main arguments is the "availability of culture in incomparable abundance" - argument. So, I thought, from now on I am putting that argument into practice. (Perhaps, that is also because I feel that my time here in Paris is decidedly finite.) Needless to say, the museum was crowded, packed with irritating tourists from all over the world taking bad pictures and even worse short films of various pieces of art completely indiscriminately, while racing towards the ultimate goal: La Joconde (a.k.a the Mona Lisa). In a way the democracy in access to culture and art is beautiful, but every time I confront this phenomenon I cannot stop myself from feeling for all those poor souls back in the respective homes of these people, who will have to suffer through endless nights of excruciatingly boring photo and film viewing sessions. Not that I am such a great art connoisseur of course: each of my visits to an amazingly rich museum like the Louvre only makes me realize how little I know about ancient history, Greek mythology, Christianity, the renaissance, and everything else. I feel frustrated at first, and then motivated to read and learn in an organized manner, but then, inevitably, I realize that compared with many of the people I am surrounded by I can still hold my own in a superficial conversation and I fall back into my default intellectual laziness. Now that I have verbalized this I, again, aspire to be more like my uncle, Peter, who is a professor at Yale or my good friend, Bence, who both have an amazingly deep knowledge  of most things from literature and philosophy through architecture and poetry to classical music and art history. As soon as I finish this - I will start the self-education...will keep you updated.

God bless America (and let them take over the EU)

I have lived in the UK for four years, have been in France for four months and I think that I can confidently say the the EU is pretty much a farce. (I have never lived in Germany so perhaps this assessment is unfair to them...but who wants to be fair to the Germans anyway?) I spent all of last Friday putting together a "dossier" for the rental of an apartment for my bosses. They are both German, have an English company with a French client. Their company generates a revenue of hundreds of thousands of euros a year, their British bank was willing to give a letter of credit to the owners (one of the biggest French bank' s real estate arm) and yet the rental will be impossible because the Germans don't have a "livret de famille" (a bizarre and archaic jewel of the French administrative culture the point of which is I guess that you don't forget the name of your children or when your mother died) and besides "we just don't deal with foreign companies" - said the lady. When I pointed out to her that this is an EU company and was not established in a distant land like China or Russia she said: "if it were, I wouldn't even be talking with you right now". And that was that. The charming bit is, that the French are unbelievably racist and are apparently completely oblivious to it too. So the French are chauvinistic, incompetent and arrogant about it. The English on the other hand are relatively polite and condescendingly friendly to the foreigner, but they just want to stay out of the whole muck, thank you very much, cannot fathom why anybody would want to deal in those bloody euros as opposed to those "spiffing pounds sterling" and are just permanently "afraid they cannot do anything about anything, ma'am" (especially if they are in the customer services business).

There is no love lost between the French and the English (not to speak of the Germans and either of those) but more importantly: for all the EU Directives and regulations on international collateral, taxation of savings or stock raising, if you try to put the cross-border life into practice, then each country's administration/banks/local authority/car authorities and the rest will do everything to curb your enthusiasm...the one thing that seems to be uniformly true everywhere is that they are light years away from "the land of the free(ish) and the home of the brave" in terms of understanding customers and markets. I think our best bet is to let the Yanks take over the services industry everywhere, including banks, insurance companies, real estate companies, you name it without letting them do the cooking. Honestly.