Category: Travels

As I arrived at the Bastille Metro a mass of students exited, marched across the 5 lane roundabout and sat down.  Chaos ensued.  Unfortunately for them the road was so wide they could manage a blockade only 2 to 3 students deep.  This was not enough as angry young french men with jobs drove their mopeds through the crowd kicking the students along the way.  Apparently the workers of the world are not united, at least not in France.  Unable to maintain their ranks the protest fell apart.  Today, however, some 40,000 students protest across France and the police presence in Paris remains strong. 

Here is my previous post describing the economics behind the protests.

1. A few of the best restaurants are Pierre Gagnaire, Taillevent, Le Cinq, and perhaps Guy Savoy.  Most critics might put Gagnaire as number one.

2. Michelin "two-forkers" are quite good, but you must book to get in.  In general you can’t get a seat in a decent Parisian restaurant unless you either book or show up at opening.  If you are wandering around looking for good food at 8:30 p.m., or for that matter 1 p.m., you are unlikely to do well.

3. In The Louvre, spend an hour in the Poussin room and also obsess over Watteau’s Voyage to Cythera.

4. In Musee d’Orsay, gaze at Courbet’s Origin of the World (sorry, I can’t link to the image on a family blog but do Google it) and Puis de Chavannes, in addition to the usual delights.

5. Go see the medieval tapestries at Musee Cluny.

6. Spend a few hours walking the main roads of the Left Bank.  Start at Invalides and take the major arteries through to the Islamic Center.  Walk, walk, walk.

7. Watch The Triplets of Belleville and spend hours walking through the (rapidly gentrifying) working-class neighborhoods of the Right Bank.  The Metro is splendid but it robs you from seeing the greatest walking city on earth (Buenos Aires is number two).  Don’t take it.  Walk, walk, walk.

8. Go into a good cheese shop and spend $40.  Focus on the weirder cheeses.  Buy the non-pasteurized delights.  Sit down with a baguette and some fruit as well, finishing the meal with small squares of outrageously priced dark chocolate.  Throw in a sausage for good measure.  Keep the cheese leftovers in your room at night and eat them for breakfast the next day.  And the day after that.  See how many days they will keep, you will be surprised.

9. Rue de Bussi and thereabouts has a convenient collection of cheese, fruit and bread shops, and it is in an excellent part of the Left Bank.

10. Internet Cafes are hard to come by.  You must rely on the dumpy area near Centre de Pompidou.  I find Paris to be the hardest city to blog from.

11. See a "world music" concert from Algeria, Madagascar, or the Congo.  Or try contemporary music at IRCAM.

12. Here is my previous post My Favorite Things French.  Douse yourself in Godard films  before going.  Start with Breathless, Band of Strangers, and My Life to Live.

13. If you want to read recent French social science (if you can call it that), try Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, Jean Baudrillard, Alain Badiou’s Metapolitics, and Gilles Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus.  Don’t get too upset if these books only make intermittent sense.  At least they are alive.  For a recent hit novel, try Houllebecq’s The Elementary Particles.

Comments are open, and I encourage all of you but especially John Nye and Barkley Rosser — both Paris experts — to make a few suggestions for my friend.

Worth a look, taken from www.digg.com.  And here are some pictures of the new species found in Indonesia’s "lost world."

2. Many of them came from rural Western Canada in the 1920s.

3. They left Western Canada, as they had left Holland, Prussia, and Russia before that, for fear they would be forcibly assimilated, in this case through public education.  Mexico offered them a special (Spanish-language) contract.

4. Most of them are blond.

5. Each village has a number, not a name.

6. Unlike many of the American Amish, they use cars and electricity without hesitation.  They are quite prosperous, in a Mennonite sort of way.

7. They still make cheese using methods from centuries ago.

8. Their best cheeses, which are non-pasteurized, are illegal in the United States.

9. Many of their road signs and advertisements are written in hochdeutsch, but they speak eighteenth century plattdeutsch.  Their Spanish is sing-song and halting all at once.

10. They bake little cookies called "Galletas Menonitas," and they eat borscht and tacos.

11. The adjacent Tarahumaras make for a striking contrast.

To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, when a man is tired of Mexico he is tired of life and death.  My short time here has been just splendid:

1. From the air one sees many enclaves of small condominiums and townhomes, a’ la Orange County.  This is the Mexico of the future.

2. When it comes to median income, this is the wealthiest part of Mexico I have seen.  It is not a city of peaks and excess, but real poverty is hard to find.

3. The town is neat and orderly and the streets lie in a near-perfect grid.  Imagine Mexico run by the Swiss or the Singaporeans.

4. Downtown there appear to be more Chinese than Mexican restaurants.  The Chinese, however, came here in the 1880s, and have since had little contact with Szechuan grannies.  Imagine them having imported the menus for Chinese food, but not the recipes, and trying to recreate those titled dishes using their imagination and Mexican ingredients.

5. The weather is truly perfect.  In January, that is.

6. My guide insists on telling people I am from the more-recognized "Carolina," even though he knows full well I live in Virginia.

7. The town square has lovely fig and orange trees; both fill with squawking blackbirds as night approaches.  Otherwise there is absolutely nothing to see here in the way of tourist sights.

8. Sonoran beef compares favorably to that of Argentina.  Eat in Jardin Xochimilco, better yet are the street places.

9. The flour tortillas are much grainier (and better) than what we receive in the States.  They are wonderful toasted over burning sugar cane.

10. Try the coyota, the town specialty.  It is the most delicious baked sweet I have sampled, ever.  Scroll down to this recipe.  A coyota alone is worth the price of the trip, which was only $120 and 75 minutes from LA. 

I am willing to fly to Nova Scotia for the heck of it.  There is a direct flight from Haiti to Suriname.  I expect Colombia will be the hard part.  Salvador, Brasil is the outstanding gem.  I’ve heard Villahermosa is lots of concrete and not so much fun.  Honduras is only a matter of time.  Santa Cruz, Bolivia to northern Argentina can be done overland; I love Latin American buses.  Santiago, Cuba will require a Democratic President.  I wonder how easily you can get from Guyana to French Guiana.   I have never visited Birmingham or Mobile, Alabama.

In seven days’ time I will spend a few days in northern Mexico.  I am researching, among other topics, how health and safety regulations influence food markets and why a border can matter so much for foodstuffs.  My sites will be Hermosillo, Chihuahua, and Tijuana.  Do you have any recommendations?  I won’t have much free time.  No whales, no Copper Canyon, etc., but of course I will eat three (or more?) meals a day and have some time in each city.  I thank you in advance for your ideas.

Someday I will relate to you my misguided and delusional plan to visit every major urban area in the New World.  I would not have otherwise made it to Hermosillo, so perhaps the gods are on my side.

Bshhal?  (How much?), I say, pointing to an objet d’art.

He gives a figure.

La?!  (No?!), in mock shock at the price he has quoted.  Bezzaf!  (Expensive!)

How much you pay?

I get out a small pad of paper and pen (invaluable in the souk) and write a much lower figure.

Now it is his turn to be "shocked," handmade, silver, he says launching into a spiel.

We bargain some more back and forth.  The call to prayers starts in the background, he says, "listen, good sign."

I say, yes but for which one of us?  He laughs.  I am not budging much on the price so he tries to distract me with a less valuable piece.

C’est la ou rien, I reply.  For some reason the use of English, Arabic and French is not confusing.

Then he says "you give me maximum price, top, price serioux."

La, I reply, you give me minimum price, price serioux.

He laughs.  You professor?

Now, I am shocked.  Yes, how did you know?

I smelt it, he says touching his nose. "Everywhere professors have good eye but no money."

I seize an unexpected advantage, na’am (yes) no money.

We bargain some more and come to a deal.  I ask for my pen back.  He says no, small gift, small gift, mon amis.

Twenty dirhams!, I reply.

Professor, you must be Berber.

I laugh.  He keeps the pen.

Addendum:  If you go, ask for mon amis Rashid at Zemouri Ahmed Belhaj in the Souk.  Tell him that the Professor, day after Christmas, sent you.  He says he will remember. 

I see about as many women in Marrakesh in full scale (eye slit only) chadora as on a typical day on the campus of George Mason University.  Tyler is correct; globalization makes every place increasingly different and all places increasingly similar.  Of course, I have yet to see snake charmers in GMUs central square.

The dates and apricots from the street sellers are the best I have ever tasted.  I could subsist on the dates, apricots, pistachios and the incredible orange juice alone.

I visited a harem today; alas the women were long gone or at least moved to the new palace.

The monkeys look sad.

As I am blogging I can hear the call to prayers in the background.  Ancient and modern in one experience; how cool is that (insert exclamation point here).

Donald at www.2blowhards.com nominates some architectural pilgrimages worth taking.  I suggest the Ford Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan:

Here is a brief history, with some stunning black and white photos.  I also enjoyed my pilgrimages to Tulsa and Kansas City (barbecue too).  Buenos Aires has the best public sculptures.  I’ll nominate the Taj Mahal for the most overrated site; it looks just like the postcard and I liked the saris of the visitors more than the site itself.  Here is a picture of Magnitogorsk, which I hope to visit.  Here is a broader index of Magnitogorsk pictures.  Brasilia is another dream of mine, and yes I do find that image attractive.

Here is an on-line version of Ludwig Lachmann’s Capital and its Structure, courtesy of Liberty Fund.

The streets of Marrakech run with blood today.  It is Eid Al Adha, the feast of the sacrifice, to comemorate Ibraham’s (Abraham) willingness to obey God by sacrificing his son Ishmael (Ishmael/Isaac, who can say?).  (If a booming voice told me to sacrifice my son, I’d tell him to go to hell.  My failure to see the virtue in Abraham’s more faithful actions lets me reject three religions in one go.  Convenient.)  In anycase, God relented at the last minute and said sacrifice a ram instead.  So today rams are being sacrificed all over town, the heads are then cooked in the streets over barbecues made from old bedsprings.  It’s not to my taste but if I wanted things to my taste I would have gone to Starbucks.

Many thanks to all who gave tips earlier.  I will write more later the kybrd here is hard to use.

You may have heard that Alex is going to Marrakesh.  But is he ready to deal with the touts?

The fundamental problem: for most of the day you don’t want a (Moroccan) guide at all.  But having a guide, if nothing else, keeps away trouble.  If you walk around without a guide, you are pestered incessantly by all the other would-be guides.  It is like choosing which giant leech should be attached to your head, knowing that the space will not remain empty.

The guides don’t cost much up front ("I am your friend.  I love United States.  I show you for free.  Very good friend.  No charge nothing."), but at the end of the day they ask you for money.  I don’t just mean ask, I mean beg, plead, cajole, and finally, if need be, demand.  Avoiding this spectacle — humiliating to both parties — is itself worth at least twenty dollars.  In the meantime the guides bring you around to merchants of their choosing, and receive kickbacks on anything you buy.  So don’t expect the guide to do your bidding or to bring you where you want to go.

In Marrakesh you cannot do without a guide altogether.  You will get lost in the souks and never come back to your blogging life.  And you might wish to visit two or three quality stores, rather than the twenty your guide has in mind.  A guide can, in principle, bring you to the good ones.  But little do you know just how interesting he thinks the carpet factory will be [hey, you can’t see child labor like this just anywhere…].

So how should Alex structure an optimal compensation package for his guide?  How can he avoid being ferried to stores he does not wish to visit?  Can the end-of-day performance art be dampened if not avoided?  When should he pay the guide, how much, with what instructions, and contingent on what?  Must he use the same guide for more than one day?

Comments are open; whether Alex knows it or not, he needs your help.  Badly.

Next week I am off to Marrakech.  Why?  Can any economist claim to understand markets who has not been?  I will also spend a few days in Casablanca.  Comments are open if you know a good gin joint.

…the good stores just don’t have the larger sizes for their finest items.  What else? 

Piegari was the best food, Olsen the best restaurant decor (they serve Swedish food, oddly enough), and Ataneo (the Santa Fe branch, set in a former Art Deco movie theater) is the most attractive bookstore I have seen anywhere.  If it wasn’t for that tiny matter of per capita wages, I would live here.  It is my favorite city, period.  I don’t care that I go to bed before most of them wake up; I am not that social anyway. 

The people here don’t seem very Catholic.  But most of the politics revolves what has happened to various dead bodies.  Older people still speculate about what happened to Eva’s corpse during its missing years, a topic fraught with political implications.  And for two decades the "desaparecidos" (disappeared ones), killed under the military dictatorship, have dominated the national consciousness.

When the New Year comes everyone rips out the pages of their old calendars and leaves them on the street.  It makes for a mess.  You can walk just about anywhere in the central bank without encountering hostile or even inquisitive security guards.

I recognized only one name on the top ten music charts, namely Madonna at number four.  The new Saramago book — not yet available in English — is number one in book sales.  Taxi drivers know not only Borges but also Ernesto Sabato. 

A quality apartment in an excellent part of town can sell for as little as $U.S. 50,000.  I have stocked up on DVDs of recent Argentine movies.

Have you heard of the appropriately-named "Faena Hotel and Universe"?  The Hotel as Womb.  The people who stay here (that’s not us) are pampered by a personal assistant and barely leave their quarters.  The modern world has not ceased to produce architectural wonders.

Get the bitter [amargo] chocolate ice cream.  Go to Uruguay with low expectations and you will be charmed. 

Tango shows are mostly a waste, unless you have an inside connection to a dance group or some good lessons.  And don’t be put off by the fact that two-thirds of your meals boil down to a choice of either lomo or pasta; both are superb.

Woe to the young Argentine woman who is perceived as overweight.

Our guide at Recoleta had indigenous features, but she insisted repeatedly (and to a foreign audience) that her family was white and she simply had too much of a sun tan.  She has been learning about the histories of the families in the graves since she was five years old; she can talk for hours about them without notes and has an opinion of each and every family and its moral character.  Auto-Icon, or the cemetary as Panopticon.

Why do so many stores and restaurants use the "ring the bell" system?  These are not diamond merchants seeking to protect their wares.  I suspect that clientele effects are especially strong in this city.  Perhaps "regulars" are more willing to ring the bell, and these same regulars are more valuable as customers.  Signalling is rampant.

Don’t expect major sights of the kind you find in a Frommer’s guidebook.  Use the Time Out guide to find experiences.

Contrary to what my wife thinks, people here are not happier than in the United States.  She won´t go to the parts of town that prove her wrong.  Nine years ago, there were no beggars opening taxi doors for you, expecting a peso in return.  The shanties near the airport are extreme.  The poor of Buenos Aires have it good compared to parts of northern Argentina, but Salta and Jujuy will have to wait for another trip.

Go to Kumana’ for the best corn empanadas, fifty cents a piece.  El Obrero is excellent Italian home cooking, with amazing soccer decor, again for a pittance.  Cafe Uriarte was first-rate.  La Brigada has the best baby lamb intestines you can imagine.

You have a status quo bias.  And like most people, you probably overinvest in goods and underinvest in experiences.  Get off your bum and go.  Many major cities in the USA have direct connections to Buenos Aires.  You fly overnight and sleep on the plane.  You wake up in a new universe. 

In the meantime, thank god or luck that you were born where you were, unless of course that was northern Argentina.  Happy New Year to you all.