I should start by acknowledging my ambivalence about starting a blog, not merely because of its self-display but also because of the possibility that the wrong eyes might see something they don't want to read. But it seems as if this mode could be useful and semi-entertaining, if only for myself, in passing along some sense of how this strange trip is evolving.
A word about the URL choice and my title: a prof of mine (who inspired the voice of Pontius Pilate in the Monty Python movie) repeatedly dismissed Philip Sidney as "an aristocratic bauble," much to my consternation at the time, and I realize some of the Tourers both then and now might be dismissible as such (for that is how I will refer to the people in my class, since I don't know how well this'll be searchable and I want to be able to stay candid about events and places and, perhaps, people). About my title: Not sure whether I want to keep the lame-ass word-within-a-word nom de blog, but it's the best I could do under jet lagged conditions.
Voices of some loud Yanks are wafting up five floors from the street below, as mopeds blat past and the Parisian skies decide whether to dump rain again. I arrived on my friend's doorstep at 9 AM from San Francisco via Kennedy, the first leg punctuated by coach-class nightmare 2-year-old friskiness behind me (my reaction muted by my sheepish acknowledgment that my own son had inflicted such trauma on others with even greater force), the second leg featuring hauntingly beautiful cloudscapes over the North Atlantic in the bluish pre-dawn light, immediately took a two hour nap, and awoke refreshed enough to charge over to the Pompidou for the Kandinsky and Calder exhibits.
We then swung by the hotel that has been arranged for my kiddies and me for our week in Paris starting the 12th of July, and unfortunately the DJ on my personal soundtrack cued up the song, "Here comes that sinking feeling": the place is charmless, expensive, across from the St Lazare railway station, not a salubrious locale for sheltered 'mericans on their Summer Abroad adventure. I immediately began unproductive time-travel fantasies, wishing I had put my foot down back in October and told the woman she could do better. But as I warned the assembled students and parents at the orientation in May, any time things get tough I will trot out the examples of real Tourers who got caught in crummy rat-infested holes, besieged by bandits and subject to the whim of nasty customs officers! This made for a somber bus ride home to the friendlier confines of this neighborhood...
However, after a plodding couple of laps around the Luxembourg gardens, and a cramped shower, I felt better, made a couple of phone calls, and had what would have been a fine dinner on the terrace of a favorite restaurant with my host and her son, had it not been for the perfectly tag-teamed smoke from the tables right and left of us, as course by course these supposedly food-obsessed Parisians seared their own taste buds and spread the asthma love, course by course. I'm realizing that inside is probably where to find the better air now.
And for all that: With wi-fi password laboriously copied in correctly--thanks to the tech support provided during dinner--I am on line, receiving e-mail, skypeing a former student who requested help with GRE sample essays, and (hold your breath) a bloggviator for the first time. Bear with me as I continue!
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