A book: "A year in the merde"

You start a new book at around midnight on a Saturday evening, and you don't notice the hours pass by till you only have a few pages left and it's 6AM and you've barely stopped a few times to change the music and to get some more nibbles or sthg to drink. All the while you are concerned that you are often laughing so loud that you are going to wake up your neighbours. That was at least my experience of "A year in the merde", by Stephen Clarke.



The story is about this young and ambitious British manager who accepts a job in Paris to launch a chain of tea-rooms, but not only that. The book is a description of all aspects of the culture shock of a Briton (any foreigner, really) arriving in France: language problems, work etiquette and attitudes, body language even, food, restaurants, the housing market in Paris, the continuous strikes, political ethics, the French health service...

A terrific book, and indispensable reading if you have lived or are going to live in Paris for a while, and although you might think sometimes it is borderline psychedelia (if you have not experienced living in Paris yet, that is), it's all true (probably). And best of all, it's a book with very little concessions to political correctness.

Just one last warning: if you are French, you might not like it.

Exhibition: "Venice & l'Orient" at the IMArabe

Work in progress.... but here you have a picture... (a bit moved, but...) ;-)

http://www.imarabe.org/temp/expo.html

Musee Quai Branly: D'un regard l'Autre

This week I've had the pleasure to go to the Musee Quai Branly in Paris and visit the temporal exhibition "D’un regard l’Autre" (http://www.quaibranly.fr/). Although it was late and we had to rush through the different rooms containing a very heterogeneous collection of exhibits, and at first I was a bit puzzled by the organisation of the exhibition, I have to admit that once I've had time to reflect on it I've found it very original and informative.

The exhibition shows the evolution of the image of the 'exotic' places seen from european/western eyes along the ages, from the middle ages to the present time. starting with the scary images of salvage men and women, who would only be covered with their own fur (!!) and who would enjoy tearing apart and eat any lost explorer, as depicted in many medieval books, to the present assimilation of african, asian and native american art in contemporanean art, passing by the treasuring of exotic materials and items and later the catalogation and detailed description of animals, plants, buildings, cultures and customs with the birth of the scientiffic method and ethnographic disciplines.