Chinese lions take the lettuce

No need to make for the Marais or the Hôtel de Ville on Sunday to celebrate Chinese New Year. Wandering down to rue du Faubourg du Temple for a croissant I bumped into a group of Chinese lion dancers welcoming in the New Year with a traditional bang.

Many of the shops here, usually the ones that sell shoes, cosmetics or fashionable scraps of jersey clothing, are Chinese-owned, and the lion dancers had the duty of bringing them prosperity and good health in the coming year of the Tiger - which this year began on 14 February.

In the bright, cold sunshine it was an unexpected treat to witness the old ceremonies so close to home with none of the jostling crowds who had assembled to watch the big parade in the centre of town.

The drums beat as the two lions approached each shop. Dancing into it, they snaffled the bowls of oranges on offer – bright red and orange are auspicious colours – watched by the happy shop owners and workers. The dance continued outside where a lettuce, its green leaves symbolising money, and a lai see packet, a red envelope containing real money, hung high in each doorway. A red string of firecrackers dangled invitingly too – but real ones are not allowed in Hong Kong any more and I expect they’re not allowed in Paris either. The lions leapt and twirled, eventually snaffling the lettuce and the lai see packet. The lion thus fed, good luck was ensured for another year.

Kung Hey Fat Choi!

Canal Banksy

I’ve just seen that the British streetartist Banksy, whose one-man show in Bristol broke all records last summer, has made a movie. Watching the trailer on the BBC website I recognised the place de la Republique. Has Banksy taken to the banks of the Canal St Martin? And is this canalside image of the Mona Lisa (one of my favourites), one of his?

The film is to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Will more be revealed? And will Banksy go all big-shot on us?

Turnips mon amour

Hey foodies! Who could resist the chance to learn to cook – and shop for food – the French way? I’ve just found out that the Fédération Française de Cuisine Amateur (I’m translating this as the French Federation of Lovers of Cooking) is running free workshops every week from now until 16 October 2010 in the markets of Paris.

Every week, in different markets all over Paris, you can join a group to meet the market traders, gain their expert advice and then learn from a chef how to make the best of what you’ve bought.

Find out when and where at the Fédération Française de Cuisine Amateur's website. I'm planning to try it out in February. I can't believe that a nation that rejects parsnips embraces the turnip so fervently ...

Un doigt de pied dans l'eau

With an extra hour’s sleep this first Sunday of winter I finally managed to have a swim at my local pool. Piscine Parmentier is only a couple of minutes’ walk from Chez Grisette (on the corner of rue Alibert and avenue Parmentier) but a couple of previous attempts at a morning swim had failed because of my failure to understand the entry rules.

Today at last I put my toe in the water and, even better, achieved more than 20 laps. Here’s how it works. First you need to check the opening times (posted on the door or see piscines.paris.fr).

Then you need to realise that entry to the pool closes half a hour before the advertised closing time and that the pool is cleared 15 minutes before the closing time. So for an early morning weekday swim in term time you need to arrive at the pool between 7am and 8am (though the opening time is advertised as 7am-8.30am). No such problem for the next couple of weeks – the Toussaint holiday lasts until 5 November this year.

Buy a €3 ticket and make your way down the stairs and into the shoeless zone (zone pieds nus). Enter by swiping your ticket against the electronic reader and make sure to take off your shoes before going through the turnstile. Just here there is a vending machine which sells swimsuits for men, women, children and babies and the necessary swim caps (le bonnet), both silicone and fabric. Prices range from €5 for a swim cap to about €7 or €8 for men’s swimming trunks to €10 for a women’s racerback costume. You better leave your Havianas and Vilebrequins at home if you want a swim here, chaps. For men, tight swimming trunks (slips) are obligatoire (that favourite French word) as are swim caps for both sexes.

Pick a changing room (le vestiare) – they don’t seem to be segregated and are havens of cleanliness compared to what I’m used to in the East End of London – no chewing gum, graffiti or broken doors. Just clean tiles everywhere you look. The lockers are included in the entry price – choose one, key in its number, then a pin of your choice and it will lock. Dip yourself in the shower (obligatoire, bien sûr) and dive in.

Actually, I think diving might be banned – certainly everything is very calm and well ordered. You can leave your towel on the side if you want. This morning there were four lanes dividing up the 12.5m width of the 25m-long pool. One reserved for lessons, one for fast swimmers (nage rapide), a wider one which seemed to be used mainly by beginners, and one for ladies like me, who proceed with a stately breaststroke. I tried out a couple of stretching exercises in the shallow end (petit bain, 90cm deep) – if you’ve ever seen M. Hulot’s Holiday you’ll get the general picture – but I think these might also be défendu (banned) before pushing off for the deep end (3.8m deep). All in all everything is absolutely comme it faut – the lifeguards even speak a bit of English.

Paris to London without walking on water

Now I’ve a whole spring and summer of welcoming guests to my apartment in the 10th, some of the questions they ask are recurring, so I’ll occasionally use this space to answer them.


It’s difficult for a European to gain a North American perspective – and more difficult still not to crack insensitive jokes about our differences, but please tell me dear American friends – you do know that there is a body of water between England and France?


The old (English) joke used to go: fog in Channel, Continent cut off. But since 1994 the world’s busiest shipping lanes have a tunnel with trains running underneath.


You can get on a train – Eurostar - in Paris and be in the centre of London in less than two and a half hours. Or you can drive to the coast and put your car on a different train – Eurotunnel - for an undersea journey of 35 minutes.


Despite the odd hiccup – the occasional strike or fire in the tunnel (some lorry/truck drivers have had to scramble to safety but no one has been seriously hurt) the Channel Tunnel has been a great success.


I travelled from London to Paris by Eurostar just a couple of hours before the last fire and was able to make the return journey just a few days later also by Eurostar. There was a limited timetable and it took quite a while longer since only one of the tunnels of the two main bores (there are also service/safety tunnels) was in use, but the trains were up and running again remarkably swiftly.


I wouldn’t say my praise is unconditional – the help for those with mobility difficulties can be very slow and patchy for instance – but I’ll save that subject for another day.

Ça chante, ça clap, ça boum

On the edge of Canal St Martin at Point Poulmarch on this sunny Sunday afternoon a big crowd were cheering Equivox - a gay and lesbian choir who had just finished their pavement performance in the Voix sur bèrge festival. I bumped into them returning to Chez Grisette after a relaxing lunch in a friend’s garden. A whole raft of rock and pop choral groups had been entertaining the picnicers and bikers who line the canal on summer weekends, just one of the frequent – and free - “animations” that pop up all over Paris.

I thought I’d missed it all, but there was one choir left on the list. The first group of the afternoon had as its slogan “Ça chante, ça clap, ça boum”, but L'echo raleur seemed to subscribe to that policy with extra glee. They describe themselves as a rock ’n’ chorale but that’s far too staid.

Percussive acapella with synchronised handjive was just the start of it. On French numbers as well as international standards such as Heard It Through the Grapevine, California Dreaming and The Harder They Come, the choir gave it everything they had – lips, larynxes, lungs, hip swivelling, eyelash batting, jazz hands, finger-clicking – the maximum emotion, joy and jokes never stopped.

As well as the sound and movement, there was plenty of colour to look at, too. Different groups in the choir seemed to have chosen different dress themes. The blokes who went for Scottish with a twist were particularly fab. Kilts from midi to mini accessorised with orange feather boas would have made any pipe major squeak. One guy added a sequin jacket, while another hadn’t quite worked out what he should do with the hairy sporran thingy – well these chaps are French after all. So he’d dyed it orange and wore it as a shrug. It’s what the phrase je ne sais quoi was invented for.