BonjourParis

I drove my red with black trim Smart Car into a parking slot at Two Creek Coffee House and walked in to order my usual, a twenty ounce Latte to go when someone said, “It takes a real man to drive a car like that.” I turned around to see a plastic surgeon I knew. “No, it is about metrosexuality,” I said.

As a Francophile and a frequent traveler to India, I have long been fascinated by the prospect of visiting the one remaining French enclave on the subcontinent – Pondicherry. Located in the state of Tamil Nadu on the southeast coast, this seaside city still counts French among the languages spoken and has most of its streets labeled as Rue… It even has a French quarter – La Ville Blanche – complete with Hôtel de Ville.

There’s music in the air, and it isn’t charming.  I don’t mean accordionists playing “La vie en rose,” though amazingly they still exist, or marauding Scots in kilts playing the pipes invading the Champs Élysées.  Those could actually be fun in small doses and at a safe distance.  What’s actually in the air isn’t music itself, but a lot of brouhaha about the Eurovision Contest.

A long walk today, from the apartment near the Luxembourg Garden to the Jardin des Plantes to look at the animals.  The zoo is not one of Paris’s triumphs, but it was the first day in a week that it wasn’t cold, windy, and rainy, so the zoo seemed as good an excuse as any to take a walk through several quartiers of the city I don’t often see, the streets of  l’Abbé d l’epée, St. Jacques, Clovis, Cuvier, Monge.  If I learned nothing about the animal kingdom, the day and the walk taught me something about time.

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As we drove our red Smart Car off the dealer's lot in Lindon, Utah last week the sales person shouted to us, "Be prepared for conversation!" The fact that so far there was only one other Smart Car in SLC, a yellow one, portended that we would undoubtedly receive a lot of attention. In the parking lot at the hospital people noticed (it was hard not to) and when they found me said it was "cute."