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found an excellent solution to our need for plastic food storage containers. it's like a decree to eat more ice cream. it's for the good of the state!

poor missy only got to see it briefly. i must be man-struating because it hardly had time to make a home in the freezer before untimely end.

the chocolate flavor uses 70% chocolate. it actually sacrifices some creaminess to fit more chocolate into the ice cream. that's the kind of compromise i can live with. it makes good choco-economic sense — i can get my fix with 1/3 less ice cream. no need to down a pint at one sitting. i think that's representative of a lot of food here, and may be part of the french paradox of rich food == skinny people.

oh, we just found another great idea: crème brûlée ice cream! i've got a case of it on dry ice shipping to jon right now. honestly, this version isn't as good as it could be, but i've got my eyes out for other brands. there's a great love of caramel, nougat, praline and the like here, which i fully support. people must have done some crazy sugar-related experiments back in the day to get some of these great inventions. relatedly: i'm doing extensive research on chocolate bars here and will have something at a later date.

here's something that will make you happy every single day of winter: in the morning, after you shower, lay your pajamas on the radiator. when you're ready for bed at the end of the day they'll be toasty.

i feel the process of aging is accumulating knowlege like this.

that's our sparse bedroom. the blanket is made from old dinosaurs and i'm convinced it gives me allergies. we have two. the other isn't as ugly but is worse for allergies because it was in the room when i beat the rug senseless. so it's in a corner crumpled up.

the drapes are short like that on purpose. that's what missy says.

here's the "dining room" area, with the kitchen-closet behind. we have one table and it's skinny. you can tell in the photo how missy feels about skinny tables. it holds laptops mostly, and sometimes food. there's a great stone tile floor that really gets the echoes going.

the kitchen has two hot plates. we bought a big toaster oven and we're thinking about what size turkey can fit in there for thanksgiving. one of the shelves has a big gold "Ralph Lauren" imprinted in it for some reason. gives the place some class. the microtable we got for under the oven has a couple wine rack shelves in it. good thinking! i've been trying to keep a decent selection on hand, but it's not easy.

and the living half of the main room, of which the dining room is the other. that's corey text messaging on the phone in the foreground during his visit. so euro!

the glass (french?) doors close letting the room double as a guest bedroom. missy's sitting on the little fold-a-bed contraption they call a clic-clac, for the sound it makes when you operate the folding mechanism. so far three of the springy wooden slats they use instead of box springs here have been broken just from normal sitting. now it's kind of tricky to sit in without falling in. plus the foam part was really chintzy to start with and the slats are pretty far apart so it's more like sitting on a horizontal ladder for all the enjoyment you get out of it. we're tracking down leads on where to find a supply of backup slats. i hate getting what you pay for.

and what tour would be complete? this is one of the two half-bathrooms. the big munga water heater is perched right above and kind of overlapping the toilet, getting into its space. you can't really sit up straight. i'm only somewhat conscious of how mass and volume and all that other sculptural and architectural stuff affects your mental well-being, but man if that isn't a foreboding unsettling arrangement. you don't have to be any kind of aesthete to get spooked in there.

there's pipes for the water meter and vents that seem to only work backwards, pumping in smells from other flats. it really feels like the room with the least attention paid to it. or with the most malicious attention maybe.

this is the stairway leading down to the street. pretty bourgeois but pretty tattered too. there's a whole host of old ladies in the building that seem to run things around here. one is about 80 and rides a heavy steel bicycle around town, all full of energy. she's awesome.

they're all wonderfully friendly and helpful. they're insistent on helping to the point that i feel i'm missing some obvious social cues of some kind and not upholding some part of the neighbor bargain. but they haven't bitten me yet. sometimes one or another will have a large dinner party in their lavish apartment. we'll hear all the guests at night in the hall leaving. boisterous crowd noise sounds the same in every language.

there are a number of little mosaics around centre ville avignon, all depicting old 8-bit computer game characters. this one is a pacman ghost ("inky", i believe) affixed looking out into the main square of the pope's old palace. it's got a great view of all the touristy comings and goings. it's a nice little counterpoint to the ancient surroundings.

not-coincidentally i came across this blog entry about how space invaders enemies were based on wells' war of the worlds. small world.

smaller when a comment to the blog entry points to the website of an artist who likes to put up tile representations of old video game characters all over the world. like in avignon. (quicktime)

it's maybe just the mildly autistic part of me talking now, but i'm surprised and excited to find that euro-coins have the two faces facing in the proper direction, relative to each other.

hold a US coin by the edges between two fingers so that you can spin it to compare the design on each side. most likely, you have your forefinger at the top and your thumb at the bottom, like the guy in the photo. notice that if one side is rotated correctly, when you spin it around the other side is upside-down. that always bothered me. long ago, someone had to make the decision of how the obverse (front) and reverse (back) would relate to each other. it was a tiny decision, almost without consequence, but they flubbed it and did it wrong. i only know the word obverse because this fact irritated me enough as a kid to investigate it. here in the enlightened european union, someone spent the extra time to question whether, of two seemingly equal choices, there wasn't some angle they could slice the question to come up with a deciding factor.

there are never equal choices. if it looks like it, you don't understand the situation well enough yet. for a long time, i've loved being presented with a coin-flip decision, so that i could at least come up with some arbitrary reason why one choice is the better. but hey, that's no better, really!

in writing this, for the first time in a long time, i questioned what the reasoning would be for having the reverse upside-down. well, the questioning happened as a by-product of coming up with reasons to do it like i like it. i came up with about an equal number of reasons for doing it either way. drat.

but this is good. this is one step past self-centered, past NIH. except it brings the decision nearly back to being a coin toss.

...

when i took my last big trip, i was writing about how iced coffee means something totally different in australia. an australian friend called me out for writing about nothing, of missing the entire point of travelling: getting deep into the culture talking to people. but claire was way more social than me. i hear her voice now in my mind, nagging, but i'm still excited by this kind of stuff. rain man still enjoyed his trip to vegas, after all.

i keep forgetting you guys don't know where we live.

this is a shot of our building. we're above a store that sells 250€ men's shoes. i'm not sure why we're allowed to live here. you can walk three doors down to a fancy restaurant/club that has 12€ cocktails. i don't think we'll ever go there. but people do, and they come out smashed at 1:30 in the morning. people like to get stumbly and loud around here. and we like to watch them from the window above. we like to get stumbly and loud too, but we can't afford it. beers are 5€ at a bar. a bottle of wine at home is 3€. as a result, we have to do our recycling often.

this is miss in front of our big wooden door. you can't open it with the weight of your body. you put the key into a small slot on the right and turn and a big creaky electric door opener grinds for 30 seconds and grudgingly opens up for you. honestly i fell in like with the apartment before i ever saw the inside because of this door. there's a whole chapter in Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong about the french love of grandeur. the door is it and i love it.

this is a plane tree. they're all over the place and have really beautiful bark. apparently they're the same thing as sycamore trees. i'm not sure if they're special or not, but my pop was asking about them and i just found out what they are. they line the quaintest-of-the-quaint street, Rue de Teinturiers, that you'll see if you visit here, next to a small canal with water wheels. then you'll like them too.

it's hard to be so new here and have something intelligent to say about the riots all over france. the BBC had been running excellent articles about the background of the situation as well as daily updates. they also include moderated comments after each article giving different viewpoints from people around the world. we've been talking to our french teacher about it as well. and missy's new purchase Sixty Million Frenchman Can't Be Wrong, which i'm only a third of the way through so far, gives a lot of well-researched background on the french attitude, character, and history.

what started it all was three teens in a poor ethnic suburb of paris thought they were being chased by cops and jumped the fence into an electric power station to hide. two got electrocuted and died. to the residents, this is just another example of the police hassling them, but this time it ended in death. it seems well documented that there is systemic racism towards the north african muslim population in france. the police hassle, the local officials try to marginalize, and national officials ignore the problem.

the setup is that there is a large north african population in france as a result of colonial fever back in the 1800's that all ended very badly in the Algerian War in the 1950's. marseille, on the coast to avignon's south, was the gateway from north africa, and so has a large immigrant population, in the way new york or san francisco do. it was the second area to start rioting. avignon itself has a sizable population, and things have heated up here as well.

as with any large distinct set of newcomers, integration problems occured. the french are very interested in preserving what they consider the french way of life, and this conflicts with elements of the traditional muslim way of life.

the people i've talked to about the problem don't come across as racist. the ban on head scarves exposes this. something like 90% of the population favors the ban. to give a more complete picture, crucifixes and any other overt religious symbol are banned as well. no one group is singled out. the goal is to keep the state and religion separate. in US high schools we regularly ban clothing that could represent gang affiliation under the reasoning that it distracts from the dual goals of learning and learning to live with one another. no different.

so i don't think it's an ideological problem. the french love and hoard political power, and as a result, revolution is a frequent method of changing up government. revolution is tough, so change does not come fast or easily. women only got the right to vote in 1944. the number of female politicians is half of what it is in the US. no gloating though, it's only 20% in the US, compared to 50% in some scandinavian countries. so if you want to be heard, the reasoning goes, you've got to take it to the streets.

the french love protests, as we've seen. in fact, i've read that as halloween begins to be introduced here, it takes the form of a street protest, with kids all marching together down the main street, entering shops and demanding treats. you place things in frameworks that are familiar to you.

a lot of this bothers me though. i'm all for burning cars, mind you, but for one thing, the people whose cars get destroyed are the neighbors. so now they're even poorer and also now they can't get to work. even torching a starbucks is idiotic since the owner is only renting the name and equipment. guaranteed he's not a bourgeois elite. not an effective way to assert political pressure. chopping heads off of politicians is far more intelligently directed. but of course logic is not the point. i destroyed my own bicycle once in a childish fit of frustration. it was mine and i loved it and i deeply miss it. stupid. humans are only ruled by logic when emotion allows it.

by all accounts this is a problem that has been brewing for thirty years at least. there is a national election coming in 2007, and already politicians are spinning this to aid their candidacy. hopefully some good can come from it. it is refusing to die off. every day politicians say it is getting under control, hoping it will go away, and it doesn't. the police have been unable to quell it. i think people have recognized that it is time to start the ball rolling. it's strange to watch and try to understand. when making whipped cream you stir and stir but there's one moment when it starts to stiffen and turn from liquid to whatever form whipped cream is. it's sort of a simultaneous group decision to change form that can't exactly be predicted. this feels a little like that.