A Satisfying Recognition; More Skateboarding; Modern Architecture in Bercy

I had an "wow" moment coming home on the Metro today from class.  I realized that for the past couple of days, I've been able to sit in class and listen to the teacher speak in French and understand what she was saying totally easily and comfortably, seemingly without having to translate the words into English in my head.  This, I think, is the very beginning of being able to know a language well -- to have it be in your head in such a way that the words you hear are just naturally understood, without effort.  That just comes with time and practice, both of which I am fortunate to have right now.  When I got home from class, I turned on the midday news, and was even able to follow most of the newscast with relative ease.  (The commentary on the French stations during the Tour de France, however, is pretty much a lost cause.)

I'm going to miss some of the people I've been in class with the last three weeks.  It's interesting for me to have discovered much I usually evaluate people by their speaking ability, since I've had to suspend that mechanism during this class.  There is, in particular, one woman in my class, who is from Finland, who I am quite sure is very, very intelligent, but who has difficulty speaking.  I have heard that Finnish is quite different from other Western European languages (and is related, somewhat oddly, to Hungarian), so that a native Finn speaker trying to learn French has a much more difficult time of it than does, for example, an English speaker, particularly where vocabulary is concerned.  Even if a word in French has not exactly the same meaning as in English, often times the sense of the French word is close enough to the English sense that you can divine the meaning (excepting, of course, the infamous so-called "faux amis" -- words that look the same in French and English but have completely different, or somewhat different, meanings).  The same thing faces (although to a lesser extent) the woman in my class from Russia.  So I've had to remind myself that these young women are no doubt highly intelligent, and not at all "slow," even though they speak even more halting French than I do.  (It also does not help that both of them appear shy and reserved, speak in quiet, soft voices, and almost never give an opinion or crack a joke.)

Elsewhere, one of the better things about having kids is that you are sometimes drawn into situations and circumstances that you'd never experience without them.  The day before yesterday, my older son Will tried some kind of trick on my younger son Andrew's skateboard, which involved jumping down on the board with his 205 pound frame.  The trick did not succeed, and the board ended up in two pieces.  So yesterday afternoon off I went with Andrew to search for a skate shop called "Nozbones" located near the Place de la Nation.  This necessitated a long, long trip, as part of the No. 6 Metro line is being repaired, which requires as a result getting off at Place d'Italie, walking to a bus, taking a slow bus ride past 4 Metro stops, getting off the bus at Bercy, walking into the Metro station and getting on the Metro again, getting off at Nation, finding the right street, and walking 3 blocks to the store.  The store looked exactly like you'd expect a skateboard store to look, and was staffed by wonderfully friendly and helpful people, including a young man (and two young kids who were just hanging out there) in the 'new board' department who helped us select a board, then put on a grip and attached the trucks from the old board.  During part of the time this was happening, I walked down the street to a little cafe and sat in the shade watching the people go by.  Andrew was extremely happy to get a new board, and the owner of the shop also gave him a new skateboarding DVD, a bunch of stickers, and a few other things.  If you ever need a skateboard store in Paris, Nozbones is the place -- great, great folks there.

On the way to the store, Andrew had noticed that located at Bercy was a very famous "stake spot."  For those not in the know about such things, a stake spot is different from a stake park.  The latter is a place specially made for stakeboarders; the former is just a regular public space that happens to be useful to stakeboarders.  The famous skate spot at Bercy is the plaza surrounding the big arena called the "Palais Omnisports Paris-Bercy."  This big plaza has a lot of concrete, and steps and blocks of various heights, making it a perfect place for jumping.  Because I know you are all just dying for more skateboarding pictures, here are two of Andrew (more, as always, on Flickr).

The arena and the area around it are places in which the traditional Hausmannian Paris style has been thrown out the window. The arena is of an ultra-modern design, with lots of bars and girders and geometric patterns and exterior walls covered with grass (yes, grass, which had me wondering how the mowed it). A great place for taking interesting pictures (see below), but not exactly warm or welcoming (unless you are a skateboarder, I guess).

 

The other huge facility in the area houses the French Ministry of Economy, Finance, and Employment. It is also a modern-plus building, a portion of which extends into (more exactly, over) the Seine. A photo from the French government (showing the end that's in the Seine) is followed by one of mine.

 

 

By the time we got home, we'd spent more than four hours coming, going, transacting business, and skating (one of us only). Sometime earlier I had pulled some muscle in my leg, which all the walking and step-climbing we had to do exacerbated, leading to a painful night last night, which I promised myself I wouldn't mention because I doubt it's very interesting even to those who might be concerned, but which has made me realize how very many steps I have to take in the course of a normal day here, since each one of them today has been painful. Come on, Advil, do your thing.

PS -- Thanks again to Beth for e-mailing me about my tendency to type "stakeboard" instead of "skateboard."  I did it again today, but caught it before publishing.

PPS -- Lest you think skateboarding is easy, I give you the following.  For every success, there are more failures, perhaps a good life lesson.