Brussels and Passion Week in France

*Jane in Paris*

I'm actually going to start with the second topic. The main thing I wanted to share about Easter in Paris is that it's not Easter! No bunnies, no eggs, no one trying to get me to buy things to celebrate one of the holiest days on the church calendar. Here Easter is called "Pâques," meaning Passover. From what Nick tells me about Easter in Vienna, it sounds like the cute pastel animals come from our Germanic heritage. The church that I've been attending held a special service on Palm Sunday that featured a beautiful Passion cantata by one of the many artistic people in the congregation, John Featherstone. This helped me to start off Holy Week with a sense of solemnity. The other special thing I did that week was to go to Good Friday (here called "Holy Friday") mass at Sacre Coeur basilica. It's one of the larger Catholic churches in Paris, but it lacks the touristy atmosphere of Notre Dame. The most powerful moment for me was when the priests and attendants processed down the aisle, empty handed, and then all prostrated themselves on the floor of the sanctuary for two minutes. We in the crowd immediately dropped to our knees and it seemed like no one moved in the church until the celebrants stood up. I'll also always remember watching the nuns process up to the choir (the nice older woman sitting next to me brought their movements to my attention), all of them in white dresses and black head-coverings. The simple color combination seemed to encapsulate the sentiment of Good Friday. In short, it seemed much easier in Paris to have a meaningful Passion Week than I find it to be in the U.S. It is too bad that the nation's companies have managed to turn it into just another day for Americans to buy things.

Nick visited me in Paris last week, and our biggest adventure was a day trip to Brussels, Belgium. We took an early morning train from Paris and found ourselves at the South Train Station after just 1.5 hours. Right away seeing all of the signs in Dutch and French captivated me, because Dutch seems like a comical, corrupted form of German that I can almost understand. We made our way to the famous Grand Place, snapped some pictures, and then visited the church on the square, St. Nicholas. The priest was standing at the door, greeting people who passed by. Parts of the church had been built in the 13th century and other buildings on the square were actually attached to the walls of the church and obscured parts of the windows. Later in the day we visited another church that we happened upon on the way to a museum, St. Michael. The stained glass inside the church was beautiful and reminded me of the windows of Chartres. All around the outer aisle of the church were paintings that had been inspired by a particular religious poem. I really like that churches in Europe so often support the arts (for instance Notre Dame's participation in Nuit Blanche). One of my favorite paintings was Pâques. We also saw the Atomium, Brussels's version of the Eiffel Tower: a huge model of an atom (mercury I think) also built for a World's Fair.

It was nice to visit a country that was brand new to me but where I could still communicate; despite what I had heard, French in Brussels didn't seem to differ noticeably from Parisian French. Nick and I liked that new and old building mixed fairly freely in this city, which isn't the case in Vienna nor in Paris. Our last activity there was eating Belgian waffles topped with chocolate sauce and fruit.

Some (mostly positve) thoughts on America from the Outside

*Nick in Vienna

As many of you know Jane and I have been debating whether we would rather live in Europe or America pretty much ever since we got here. I won't bore you with too many repetitions, but basically there are many thing about life here we find very appealing - transportation, easier to shop locally, health care, cultural things, etc.

That being said it is very unlikely to ever happen for longer than this trip because of the difficulty in getting musicology jobs in another country. So, we are trying to not be quite so negative on America (which always annoys me when other people do that, so I guess I'm a hypocrite). Last night I was watching some March Madness games online which combines my one of my favorite parts of American culture with my most hated. I love college sports and really Universities in general. Jane and I stayed up until 2:30 watching Ohio beat Georgetown while chatting on Skype and it was very exciting. The negative side of March Madness, though, is the huge companies scratching each others backs and making millions of dollars off of the efforts of unpaid athletes. As I wrote about earlier, I have really gotten used to not seeing so many ads here. It is so nice watching TV here and not having commercial breaks ever 8 minutes. There are certainly ads in the U-bahn, but even half of those are for the opera or symphony or something (loyal readers will recall that it is because of a TV tax that there are so few ads, which I talked about a month ago). So it is really disturbing watching the game on CBS's website. About 30 percent of their player is covered with ads that move and sparkle. During commercials it doesn't let you switch games. You have to sit and watch yet another add from Exon Mobile or Coca Cola - two of the most irresponsible international companies according to some watchdogs. Fine, I get it Exon Mobile, you are researching algae, but don't think you've fooled me into thinking you are this righteous company.

Anyway, this clash got me thinking that what is, to me at least, truly great about America is that the system encourages so many fantastic people and so many corrupt people. On the one hand there are plenty of nutjobs and people that purposely deceive and distort facts for their own ideological or financial gains. Unfortunately these people have a TV network and are trying to convince us that if we enact a plan to insure millions of people that would have been progressive 80 years ago the country will fall apart. (Side note - when thinking about this issue, please know that Jane and I will very likely be without health insurance next year, and possibly quite a few years to come. At some point we're going to want to have kids or go to the dentist, so I really hope this bill passes). America is also responsible for the great over consumption that will probably destroy the world in a few hundred years. Please, if you haven't, go to www.storyofstuff.com and watch their 20 minute video. It is very informative.

On the other hand, however, the injustices and corruption encouraged in the American system also create thousands of fantastic people, many of which we met in Columbus. These people don't have a TV network, but instead are actively engaged with their communities, trying to make life better for the poor, uneducated, disabled, etc. We had the pleasure of knowing many of these people in Weinland Park and look forward to working with them again. I'm just not sure how many of these people there are in Europe. I am sure there are some, but really life is just so much more comfortable and easy here that really there don't need to be as many. I'm not saying this is a reason to avoid social justice, actually the opposite that this shows it can work. But what I am saying is that right now there are thousands of amazing people doing amazing things in America who don't get recognized or paid for their efforts. Evil can breed tremendous good. The exploitation of the lower class and the abandonment of the working class by corporate America has created huge problems for American cities. While a handful of people have gotten very, very rich, and have gotten very good at tricking us into thinking we need a new i-pod, countless more people have responded to these circumstances and have actually started doing something to make their communities stronger.

Wow. Sorry, didn't mean to get so preachy. And yes, I'm sure I'm wrong about a few things in there, but this is what I was thinking about today, so there it is.

I guess what I'm saying is that there are many fantastic people trying to make America a little more like Europe, and maybe we should be a part of that instead of just moving back here.

The Last Few Weeks

*Jane in Paris*

Besides finishing our puzzle Nick and I went to three operas while I was visiting him in Vienna. Two of them had just been composed this year - yes, art music by living composers! Our favorite was Medea by Aribert Reimann. Great text, great staging, great music! And the opera house was packed for the performance we saw. Then we also went to a Verdi opera, Simon Boccanegra, which turned out to be rather disappointing. Oh and we also started another puzzle.

The first weekend I was there we went for a 8 mile hike in the Wienerwald - an area close to Vienna that features picturesque small towns, sizeable hills, but actually not that much forest. Mason came along, continually running ahead of us on the trail and then sprinting back once he felt too far away. Parts of the trail we had chosen took us along roadsides, which was a little frustrating. The high point of the hike was the Peilstein rock formation on top of a large hill. We met a few guys who were climbing with ropes and gear there and we did just a little bit of bouldering on the rocks ourselves.


A few days before I left we went to the Wiener Eistraum (ice-dream). As a kid I did a lot of roller skating (I'm sure you remember it well, mom and dad) and I suppose that these skills just transferred to ice skating without me being conscious of it. I had therefore arrived at the conclusion that ice skating is a natural kind of movement that most people can pick up quickly. Several pieces of evidence presented themselves against this idea. Nick didn't think that he would be able to ice skate, because when he was a kid he couldn't even stand still on roller skates. But no, I told him, standing on ice skates is like standing in regular shoes, and skating is just as easy as walking. He definitely could not ice skate. But he tried really hard for about an hour to do it, and I'm convinced that by the end he had actually improved noticeably. I am proud to say that Nick can at least walk on non-ice surfaces in the skates - that's something, isn't it? So after awhile Nick decided to just sit down and so I skated for a few hours by myself. I ended up having a great time because the setup was so wonderful: the Eistraum consists of two skating rinks and four lengthy paths. The paths were pretty fun, except that there were often slow and unpredictable children on them blocking my way. These children were the second piece of evidence against my ice skating theory, because they were falling over left and right on the ice. It was obvious that kids have to learn to skate. I actually fell one time while I was skating alone. I was trying to go fast and my legs were getting tired, and so as I picked up my left foot while skating through one of the rinks the toe of the skate got briefly stuck in the ice. So I stumbled for what seemed like awhile, and then I decided to just take myself down while I had enough control to do it safely. I decided to slide on my stomach because I was wearing lots of clothes and this would likely protect my hands. As I slid along the ice I started laughing at myself and a couple passing by me gave me odd looks.

One of the main reasons the thought of protecting my hands crossed my mind in that moment was because I was scheduled to play a concert at the US ambassador to France's residence the day after my return to Paris. This was a stressful concert for me because I had no piano. I either practiced in the music library for limited amounts of time or rehearsed with the vocalist in a very nice space at a Parisian university. Then I spent the two weeks before the concert in Paris, which meant the vocalist and I had to do final rehearsals two weeks early, and then quickly regroup the day of the concert. I played fairly well - there were 10 songs and it really depended on the song. It's hard after not performing publicly for over a year to go out and stay poised throughout a concert. The ambassador's house in Paris is quite lavish - the fixed architectural decor was in a neo-Baroque style while the furniture was more modern but still uppity. The ambassador is frankly a total jerk, which I already knew because he had appeared briefly at a Fulbright event earlier in the year. He for some reason didn't say anything to me when he met with us musicians and then he actually left the room where we performed during my performance (other people who were there think they saw him leaving with an important looking man, perhaps another ambassador). Several of the other Fulbright scholars came to the concert; I wasn't expecting them and it was very nice to see them. We went out for a drink together afterward and were eventually asked to leave a bar because we were being too loud. What?

Finished the puzzle!

Jane has been here in Vienna for about a week and we've done a bunch of stuff that we'll blog about soon. More importantly, though, we finished our puzzle.

On Television and Taxes

*Nick in Vienna

I, like many people in America and Austria, have been watching quite a bit of the winter olympics this past week. The Austrians really like the winter olympics because it seems like everyone here loves to ski and skate. The public school system here takes a "ski week" where everybody takes off of school to go skiing. Seriously, I'm not kidding about this. While Americas are fretting over test scores and trying to add more hours to the school day, Austrians are saying, screw it, let's just all go skiing this week. Mind you, they still take religious holidays (far more than in the US) so this is just an extra week off.

Anyway, this post is about television in Austria and Europe in general. I've got cable here at my apartment and I watch a fair amount to practice my german. The primary difference is there are way, way less commercials. I first really noticed this during the Super Bowl a few weeks ago which was picked up by a local cable channel. During the game, which as far as I am concerned is a 5 hour commercial sometimes interrupted by a football game few people care about (I'm a baseball fan first, you see) they took very, very few commercial breaks. This was really odd. They were using the American feed, so it was very easy to tell when the Americans had cut to commercials, such as after punts, timeouts, injuries, etc. The Austrians rarely went to commercial, but instead played highlights of the game or talked about football in general. They only took a commercial break between quarters and at halftime. As another example, yesterday I was watching a replay of an olympic hockey game. Since it wasn't live they could do whatever they wanted (the games was originally played at about 4 am European time). What they did was never take a commercial. Not even between periods. As soon as one ended they just started the next.

But how do the television stations make money, you may be asking. In Austria and France, and probably in other countries but I don't know, they have a "TV tax." If you own a television set you pay a tax on it. That money is used to subsidize the stations (several of which are run by the government) so they can run programming without commercials ever 8-10 minutes (and if I had to guess are forced by law to not run too many commercials).

I'm of mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, TV watching is far more enjoyable and it does seem like Austrians are less materialistic (subjective, I know). We don't have kids yet, but I can imagine it is a pain if your kid sees 100 toy commercials a day. Here that doesn't happen.

On the other hand, the TV tax is very weird. I, as with many americans, believe that information should be freely available to citizens for a democracy to properly function. There is also a radio tax here, meaning that for a person to have a device that allows them to get local and national news, they have to pay a tax for it (I don't know how much the tax is, but I think it is around 250 euros a year for tv). Most Americans pay far more than that per year if they have cable or digital cable, but there are many who can't afford cable and their primary source of information is the local evening news.

Can you repeat that?

*Jane in Paris*

According to the Fulbright Commission, I officially passed the halfway point of my 9 month grant yesterday. The date also served as a deadline for my midyear report, which concerned the progress of my research and integration into French culture. As I answered the questions I realized that I am certainly not wasting the time given to me.

My contact with real French people increased from almost nothing when I decided to join a French Protestant church one month ago. Since then I have attended four worship services given entirely in French, eaten a meal with several other church goers three times, and last week I attempted the scariest thing for the first time: attending the college student group. This was stressful because as tends to be the case in the US, younger people speak very fast, and like in English one can take a lot of short cuts and use a lot of slang in modern French. But I want to learn how to speak real French, with real French people, so I had to go.

The youth pastor of the church is British, but he speaks French fluently and just as fast as the students. The group consisted of about 10 of us, who filtered in slowly as we gathered at the beginning to eat dinner. During dinner I spoke a little bit about myself and tried to hang on to stories the other students told at a blistering pace. After the meal we sang some Christian songs, and some of them were funny to me because they were American songs that I knew quite well that had been translated ("Lord I Lift Your Name on High" was one of them). Then we undertook a fairly complicated conversation that combined the Lord of the Rings, the Bible, and how the modern Christian fits into history. As it seems conversations with young Christians often go these days, we ended up in a heated argument about the afterlife. I say "we" because by this point I could understand most of the conversation well, and I had things to say in my head, but the pace of the discussion was much too fast for me to interject. Alex, the leader, had to call for us to stop talking several times before it finally happened.

So on the one hand I feel like my ability to comprehend spoken French has really gotten better, but my speaking ability is still frustratingly inconsistent. I find that because rhythm and exact pronunciation are so integral to speaking French I need to warm up. Today, for instance, I had to go pick up a package in a small town outside of France, and when the man at the reception desk began speaking to me with a heavy non-French accent I couldn't understand him at all. "Oh, you are not French," he said after awhile. It's still difficult for me to speak with someone suddenly like this. The longer I speak with someone the better I tend to pronounce things and to use more complex grammatical constructions. Because I speak the language so inconsistently I have gotten everything from "she is injuring the French language" (an exchange between two people at a US university fair that I understood perfectly well) to "you speak French very well." I think that sometimes people say the latter to mean that I pronounce the language well, which is no small feat in itself.

It's fun to take note of the strange changes taking place in the brain when I am learning a new language. When I spent two months in Germany as an undergraduate I experienced a period of about a week towards the beginning of my stay when I forgot scores of English words (one of them was "surprise," for instance). I could actually tell that my brain was rearranging the structures that deal with language to make room for German. Then when I began to learn French a year later German always seemed to get in the way, especially when it came to numbers. Now that I am living in France but spending considerable time in Austria as well it isn't too difficult for me to switch between the two languages. The French, however, is now impinging upon the German in my head because my German pronunciation has become to my ear quite tainted by French sounds. Nick is in the process of learning to speak German with real Germanophones at the same time, and so there are often funny moments during our Skype conversations where neither of us are getting our English out very well.

I would be interested to hear about other people's experiences with foreign language. It has been so difficult to learn these languages over the last ten years, but persevering until I actually got them "in my head" has been an ample reward.

Doing a Puzzle

*Nick in Vienna

Jane and I write a lot about all the highfalutin things we do in Paris and Vienna, but a large chunk of our time is spent doing normal activities. When Jane was here last week for a quick visit we didn't do any operas, ballets, or museums, but instead mostly stayed home (except when we went rock climbing and out with Mason) and worked on a puzzle. I will say that Austrians really seem to like puzzles. We walked to a store somewhat like Target and they had a huge puzzle section, all of them of very high quality and made in Germany. Anyway, it was very nice to just stay in for a couple days and work on the puzzle, which we didn't finish but will still be here at the end of February when Jane comes back. Mason, however, did not seem to care for the puzzle. We think he could tell we were doing something fun but he couldn't take part. He mainly just paced around and whined because he wasn't getting our attention (which he got plenty of, trust me).