Trois Couleurs: Bleu

"Blue is freedom and the story of the price we pay for it. At what point are we truly free?". This is how Krzysztof Kieślowski described the first installment of his Trois Couleurs trilogy of films based around the French tricolore and the famous national motto; Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Before white and red, here is a look at how I see blue in the city.

Looking through photos I have taken recently, I can see that blue is omnipresent in Paris. Or is it just my eyes that are attracted towards it? It is obviously seen on all street names and on Metro signs, and even on the city coat of arms, but does it not simply just offer a striking contrast to the somewhat pale face of the city?

Do the objects I have snapped represent freedom? On the city coat of arms, the colour represents the royal family, but on the national flag today it is the colour of the revolution. Colours are cultural and subjective, but there does seem to be an almost tranquilising, dreamlike quality to these images. What does this colour inspire in you?

Rue Véron

Hopital Saint Vincent de Paul

Palais de la Porte Dorée Aquarium

A Falun Gong march, seen from my window.

Something for the Weekend? (20th – 22nd November)

This weekend will be...well, scroll down and find out!

If you have any events or activities you think should be promoted or which you would like to promote yourself, please add them in the comments. Let me know also if you have any events in the coming weekends you would like to promote.

This weekend in Paris will be…

Rustic

Two large-scale country markets will visit Paris this weekend, helping local gourmets to stock up for Christmas. Producers from the South West of France will set up their stands between the Metro stations of Dausmesnil and Dugommier in the 12th arrondissement on Saturday and Sunday. Expect to find meats, wines and cheeses from this region as well as live music and cooking lessons. If you're lucky, you may even win a weekend in the Correze!

Marché des Producteurs de Pays

21/22 November, Boulevard de Reuilly 9h à 19h

At the Hippodrome de Saint Cloud to the west of Paris you probably won't find horse meat, but you will find the Salon du Terroir de Reuil and 160 producers from all over France.

20-22 November

11am -10pm on Friday, 10am - 9pm Saturday, 10am - 6.30pm Sunday

Oval

The Parisians are recent converts to rugby, but now have two teams to follow in the country's top division. The two teams, Racing Club de France and the Stade Français will meet this Saturday afternoon at the home of RCF in Colombes, but the event will be spoiled somewhat by another event taking place across the city at the Stade de France. The French national team are taking on Samoa, meaning that the star players from the capital's club sides, such as the hairy Sebastien Chabal, will be otherwise engaged.

Racing Club de France v Stade Français

Stade Yves du Manoir, Rue François Faber, Colombes (Le Stade train station).

Saturday 21st November 2.30pm

France v Samoa

Stade de France

Saturday 21st November 6pm

Photographic

The artistic star of the weekend is the immense Parisphoto exhibition at the Carrousel de Louvre (well, it's not just an Apple Store and a McDonalds..). The exhibition features photos from galleries around the world and gives you the chance to meet and discuss with some well-known photographers.

http://www.parisphoto.fr/
Carrousel de Louvre

19th to 22nd November

Environmentally Friendly

If you need a good conscience at the moment, take yourself down to the environmental international film festival. Having said that though, it will probably make you feel even more guilty as all of the film showings are completely free and it's all taking place in the thoroughly charming Pagode cinema!

http://www.iledefrance.fr/fife-english/
La Pagode, 57, rue de Babylone 75007

18th to 24th November

The Port de Paris

The Seine is the lifeblood of Paris and the reason for the city’s existence, but we would be forgiven today for seeing it purely as a shiny mirror for the inhabitants of bourgeois apartments or a pleasure promenade for tourists. Five kilometers beyond the boundaries of Paris however is a liquid extension of the city centre, an immense river port spread over 386 hectares.

In Gennevilliers to the North-West of the city, it is possible to catch a glimpse of how Paris used to be. As you walk through the port and alongside the giant deepwater basins, you can sense the weight of the large, heavy sky above you, and feel the wind whipping into your bones. It’s a domain of working people, where individuals wear overalls, not shirts and ties. They flex their muscles and get their hands dirty, work on their feet, not on their backsides.

At one end of the port you can find the offices of the Port Autonome de Paris. It looks much like an Auguste Perret building, but its central clock tower would seem to belong in Tony Garnier’s ideal “cite industrielle”, a structure that he believed should be at the heart of all cities.

Naturally this is well beyond the scale of similar activities that previously existed in the centre of Paris. This is the second biggest river port in Europe, a place that treats, stocks, processes and transfers 20 million tonnes of merchandise each year. It is a giant interchange, where barges, trains and trucks meet to exchange goods and products. Hydrocarbons, building materials, petrol, wheat, cars, coal and lego-like container blocks come through here, picked up, redirected, transformed and rechanneled.

In an industrial era, Paris needed a large-scale port, but it didn’t get one until comparatively late on. Although designs for this port originate from 1920, (drawn by Fulgance Bienvenue who also planned the first Metro lines) it wasn’t until after the Second World War that the port was built and became established. Indeed, almost accidentally it was this conflict that helped it to grow. All the bridges between Gennevilliers and the sea were destroyed and needed to be rebuilt, enabling the authorities to construct them at specific heights to encourage significant river traffic.

Walking around the zone today, what is striking is the angles and the scale. Everything is solid, rectangular, practical. There is none of the superfluous decoration of Paris here, just enormous, russet-red rectangular cranes and concrete-grey silos. The zone is criss-crossed by shiny steel railway lines, most of which you can walk along. Trains seemingly come to pick up and drop off goods only in the dead of night. Large trucks do thunder past though, containers on their backs, off to one of the motorways that snake past the river.

It is all about the river. A dirty, pretty thing, slopping into the six basins that have been built here. This is the artery of Paris, something that should be used and celebrated. The architect Antoine Grumbach understood this, and it is his vision that was the most discussed when proposals for a new ‘Grand Paris’ were made recently. "Paris, Rouen, Le Havre all merged into a single city with the Seine as its central boulevard" he suggested, echoing Napoleon's 1802 vision of the city. He sees this as a liquid "highway", lined with green housing and "nature-city" parks. Paris would not just be the ‘ville musée’ but once again a hard-working, practical place.

We are a long way from Grumbach’s proposal today, but some of the ideas have been accepted in principal. There are no parks here, but alongside the colossal Grands Moulins de Paris I make an unexpected discovery. I thought I was alone, but here on the riverside is a dock for pleasure cruises and a building sheltering two restaurants and a cafeteria. The railway tracks and interminable warehouses are still here, but so are grass and flowers and a large terrace overlooking the almost attractive whitewashed flour mills. Downstairs is the canteen for the workers, a place to feed the five thousand who work in the sector. Upstairs though is a more upmarket brasserie, with dressed tables offering views across the basin to the huge mills. A long way from La Tour d'Argent, but a remarkable proletarian, romantic vista.

The view from the canteen. As you eat your bread, you can see the place where the wheat was ground into flour before being transported to the city's boulangers.

The Death of Television

This week, the first region in France will switch over to completely digital television transmission. For the people of the Nord-Cotentin zone around Cherbourg, Wednesday the 18th of November will mark the point where those with analogue equipment will cease to receive any signals. Although this switchover is not scheduled to arrive in Paris until 2011, it seems that are already several victims littering the streets.

Television the drug of the nation, or television, window into the nation's psyche? Certainly a home to egos and super-egos, but perhaps less and less a reflection of how each country lives and relaxes. A large percentage of people today spend more time on the internet than they do watching television, and with video on demand or replayed programmes available on the internet after their scheduled slots, fewer and fewer people are watching the same shows at set times.

The principal victim of the digital era though is the old-fashioned television set. With digital signals, the receptor can take any form, right down to a hand-held telephone terminal. The box in this street corner has had its chips. Rejected and thrown out of a warm home, it was too cumbersome and took up too much space in a streamlined world. Final insult, it has been cut open, its guts spilling out across the pavement.

A wounded beast, this creature still has its antennae on its shell. Evolution will soon render these useless, leaving this dinosaur alone to a future of fossilisation. The steering coils were merely mortal, the cathode ray tube gunned into surrender. The life-support wires are still plugged in, but the electrons are negative and frequencies getting lower.

Digital television is the brave new world, but is the medium also writing its own testament? Today I get most of my information through the internet, but when I arrived in France in the 1990s, I learned the language and a lot about the country by watching television. The first things I learned were that French television was not good, and that apparently nothing at all happened outside Paris. Almost every programme lasted for a minimum of two hours, and was either stuffy, serious highbrow or desperate, inane lowbrow. Nothing was middlebrow, very little entertained, but it still helped me to improve my French. Today, my television is still a large box in the corner, but I'm not sure I'll bother upgrading.

Something for the Weekend? (13th - 15th November)

This weekend begins with a special date – Friday the 13th! The French like to see themselves as rational and Cartesian, but the reality is that they have the same superstitious quirks as everyone else. Friday the 13th in France is traditionally seen as an opportunity to test your luck, so in celebration of this, here are three ways you can chance your arm this weekend – or three ways to lose your shirt! Good luck!

If you have any events or activities you think should be promoted or which you would like to promote yourself, please add them in the comments. Let me know also if you have any events in the coming weekends you would like to promote.

Buy a lottery ticket
Gambling is not illegal in France, just run by the state and strictly controlled. Go to any Bar-Tabac and you will see dozens of scratch cards, lotteries and machines to bet on the outcome of football matches and horse races. Temptation in techocolour, but all run by an institution known as La Française des Jeux. This Friday, two draws take place; the national Super Loto and the Europe-wide EuroMillions, both of which are using this particular date and a four-leaf clover as the promotional tools of the week. It works though - more people play on this day than at any other time during the year. However, this also means that the total kitty to be shared out is also higher too, so it's a good time to get lucky!

You can also play online, but only if you can prove that you are French or resident in France!


Go to the Casino at Enghein les Bains
France is closely linked to the world of the casino (after all…faites vos jeux…the international language in such institutions is French!), and yet once again the rules governing such establishments are incredibly complicated. Until very recently, casinos could only be situated in a station thermale (spa), generally next to the sea or beside a lake. A secondary rule dictated that they must be situated at least 10km from Paris, meaning that the only suitable site in the region of the French capital was at Enghein les Bains, 14km to the north, .

Situated only 15 minutes from the Gare du Nord by train, it is a nice place to escape to even if you don’t set foot in the casino. However, the self-proclaimed ‘leading casino in France’ is clearly the chief attraction of the town, especially on this particular day! Further rules on casinos state that they must also offer a restaurant and other entertainment, so you may find more profitable ways to spend your time.

Go Horse Racing
As previously mentioned, it is possible to gamble on the outcome of horse races in certain bars in France, but only in a relatively complex manner. You need to fill in a card and select the first three, four or five horses for each race, which reduces the gamble to something akin to a lottery. If you want to bet on just one particular horse, you need to go to the track where the race is taking place and where there are fewer restrictions.

On this Friday the 13th, you have two possibilities. A daytime meet at Maisons Laffitte in the west or an evening ‘trotting’ meeting at Vincennes to the east of Paris. Gina Rarick, the trainer I met recently informed me that standard meets such as the one at Maisons Laffitte are very poorly attended, and although the sport at a trotting meet is of low-quality ('nags from people’s back yards' I believe she said), the entertainment level is high. There is a good trackside restaurant at the Vincennes hippodrome, and it’s a fun way to see a slightly different side of Paris with a lot of colourful characters! For those not in Paris this weekend and those who are not superstitious, note that there is a meeting almost every Friday during the year – including Christmas day!