Shopping at the Leaning Tower of Pisa (LTP)

On our way back from Florence we decided, after much debate, to visit the LTP. The best time to visit the Tower is on a rainy day in November. Lines were short indeed.

Construction on the tower began almost 900 years ago. The LTP was intended to be the bell tower for the cathedral at Pisa, but it was not the will of Allah.

The architect knew little of limestone or clay. He packed mud that shifted and gave when wet. As the tower went up for a mere 100 ft and began to lean, the architect hoped at first that nobody would notice. Hopefully construction would be completed and checks cashed before questions were asked. The identity of the architect is not publicly known, nor are we certain where he hid. I have my suspicions: I believe the name was Hulot and he escaped to France where his influence continues to be widely felt.

After three hundred years the lean was 5 degrees. Galileo measured g but he was unaware of the gravity of the situation. A total collapse was imminent and Pisa’s CAC (Committee Against Collapse) was formed. Attempts to decrease the lean by counterbalancing the tower, pumping concrete into its foundations and similar measures only served to increase the lean.

The best architects in the world were consulted. As in all bar jokes, discussions were multinational. The Japanese suggested pulling down the tower and rebuilding from scratch, the Chinese thought that a second tower should offer support in an inverted V for Victory design. The Russian solution was more complex: Remove the lowest part of the tower where the lean originated. The French? Well, they had to deal with other projects such as the pont d’Avignon immortalized in song. To be continued in the Hulot chronicles.

In 1990, the LTP closed for 12 years while its foundation was reinforced to restore the lean from 5.5 degrees to a more stable 5.0 degrees. To my eye, the lean at first glance appeared even greater; I estimated 10 degrees.

Walking up the steps is an unusual experience where the ears are aware of the tilt and the steps are worn smooth on one side of the spiral compounding the disorientation. Leaving the tower feels much like disembarking from a boat, one totters on level ground before regaining balance and composure. This could be a Buddhist metaphor, what is real and what is illusion and how easily do we buy into illusion and mistake it for reality.

To extend the metaphor, there are some terribly original tourists who will take pictures of themselves standing in line with the tower to prop it up or appear to. Do they feel better for their efforts? Does it add to good karma or is that also virtual?

Pisa has its share of vendors: Umbrellas with art work inspired by the Uffizi, watches with familiar brand names such as Rolex, a great deal at 20 euros, T shirts immortalizing Da Vinci’s man with Homer Simpson at the center.  More impressive were LTPs in plastic with an electric light within. I bought one of these to sit on the mantelpiece beside my plastic Taj Mahal, which also doubles as a lamp.

Les election du College Rouston

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The boys were settling down in their College (middle school in France) and the CLA, the special class for foreigners not fluent in French, when they got kicked up to the regular class to be integrated and civilized. They will be taught everything, including English, in French. This is on a trial basis for two weeks: time will tell. They seem to do better with homework than with listening comprehension in class. It’s hard when the teachers speak too fast.

They are more than a little worried. In France, students’ self-esteem is not a consideration, and feeling good about oneself is tantamount to over-confidence. There is little danger of developing an inflated ego. The teachers read out the scores on tests in class and discuss in detail each student’s mistakes. For additional humiliation, a student can be called to stand in front of the blackboard and work out problems for all to see. During these sessions, the teacher might pass comments like “Tu es idiot, stupide, nul.. Tu ne peut jamais reussi.” The last is a prediction, often accurate: You will never succeed.

To say a petit merci to Prof Tutta who taught them for two months in CLA, Jeroen and I brought a gift of chocolate. We weren’t allowed to see him without a rendez-vous but we could and did leave the gift with the concierge, the little woman who presses a button to open the gates of the school. We walked by her cabin without checking in, and she scolded us for a long ten minutes for slighting her. I kept apologizing with no success in appeasing her. Jeroen stared with a dazed look on his face, which can be translated in five (edited) words: “What is your problem?“

Wouter and Mohan have not thrown a party to celebrate this promotion. The reason for the non-celebration is purely social, unlike the promotion itself. The only kids they could invite are in their special class, and many are upset to be kept behind. Some of the older kids will be leaving this school at the end of December to return to their local schools and face immersion after 12 months of remedial French. I’m not sure they will all succeed, partly because some of them joined mid-year and started in the middle of the course. Like a movie you watch from the middle and can’t understand. I feel that way about French films even when I watch from the start and have subtitles to help.

The President of France, Francois Hollande has outlawed homework. This is partly because children are suffering from burnout and are dropping out of high school, especially kids with single parents working long hours who may not be able to help with homework. The growing disparity between kids with pushy parents and helpless parents has been a challenge, so rather than “No child left behind,” France has adopted a “No child gets ahead” philosophy to level out the playing field. Hollande also wants to have children promoted every year to stay with their peers despite lack of skills rather than have kids fail and repeat a year and get displaced socially. France will soon be more like America and may even consider renaming pommes frites to frites de libertie.

I am proud to tell you that Wouter was elected Class Representative of the CLA class. He ran a great campaign. A la Romney, Wouter had flexible stands on policies. More critically, he chose the perfect running mate: a lad from Turkey. This secured the block of five Turkish votes. With Turkey in the bag, the East-Block constituency (i.e. Romania and Lithuania) came also on board. The three Anglophone votes were secure from the beginning as was Mohan’s loyalty vote. However, with Wouter’s promotion to French-only education, CLA will now have to elect a new leader. Perhaps the boy from Romania who has invented a new language, a melange of Romanian and French, nouveau francais, which Prof Tutta cannot understand. I think he doesn’t try. Anyone can figure out “Moi etre dans toi classe.”

Soon my boys will be speaking English with a French accent. It doesn’t get better.

Our penthouse

For those needing directions to our new place: go down Boulevard Albert 1er until you run the risk of stepping into the salty waters of the Mediterranean. Look left, and up and find the flat with yellow sun-shades.

Rent-a-baby

If you want to experience French bureaucracy at its finest, you could do no better than to visit the Prefecture to obtain a Carte de Sejour, a long-term visa, needed by those wishing to stay in France longer than three months. 

There are things one needs to know before setting out on this mission. Getting a Carte de Sejour is not usually achieved in one trip. It took our American friend Julia three visits, which is about average. The line outside the Prefecture starts at 7 a.m. Local legend has it that only 50 people are served on any given day. Number 51 gets to return the next day at an ambitiously early hour.

The person in charge at the CNRS (Jeroen’s employer) gave us some forms and a list of documents to photocopy before leaving for an extended holiday. We needed recent photographs, copies of “useful” pages of our passports – we found out in time that they meant “used” pages-- proof of address, pay slips, letters from the CNRS, telephone and electricity bills, and marriage and birth certificates, offically translated into French. The translation office used by the French embassy in Washington DC is no good because, perhaps because it is does little to further the French economy. We triple checked everything and got there at 8 am when we saw two queues, one for the carte de sejour and a much shorter one for automobile registrations. Not as bad as we feared.

Two women from the Prefecture with white silk flowers in their buttonholes stepped out to answer questions. One of them looked at my paperwork and asked, “Are you from Sophia?” Jeroen said no, I said yes. Mine was the right answer; the CNRS is located in Sophia Antipolis. Jeroen, in his best French, was busy denying that we were Bulgarian. The woman said that we would be better off to have the paperwork sent to them from Sophia when the liaison person returned. Our situation might be too complicated for her colleagues to understand. We were not ready to turn back, not yet.

The doors opened promptly at nine. We entered the foyer, which brought Dostovesky to mind. The short car registration line opens into the same foyer. Some switched to join the front of our line, probably returning petitioners. People who’d arrived after we had in the morning were now ahead.

A Tunisian gentleman left the line for a few minutes and returned with coffee and directed us to a vending machine. Jeroen congratulated him on his country’s successful revolution and its influence and inspiration. He smiled and offered a sip of his coffee.

At the main desk, someone cursorily checked our dossier and gave us a token. We sat on orange plastic chairs in a busy basement room with monitors suspended from the ceiling to direct token holder to counters where they would presumably be served. Behind one of these counters was a woman in a red blouse looking at her computer screen and tapping on her keyboard. She had no clients. Was she playing Tetris? Her fingers moved too slowly. It had to be Minesweeper and she wasn’t about to be blown away. Perhaps she was a trainee, doing well judging by her sulk and the work she wasn’t doing. She got up once in a while to distract a colleague. More time squandered.

With A-36 in our hands, and A-32 on the monitor, we thought our turn was near. However, we hadn’t anticipated the wave of strollers and lovely children, bringing the room to life at 10 a.m. They formed a new line at the main counter and received golden tokens. From A-32 it went C-01, then C-02, and then C-03. An entirely different series claimed priority. The C-series, dedicated to the elderly, the impaired, the pregnant, and especially mothers with children who had skipped a morning dose of ADHD medicine.

When it was our turn one and a half hours later, it went smoothly. We were out in 20 minutes and in my hand I had a paper, a visa of sorts. (Julia says we’ve set a new record). Now that I can work in France, I want to start a business: a childcare facility across from the Prefecture in Nice. The rent-a-baby service would be a sister concern.