The Beginning of the End

I think it is starting to almost become time to begin getting ready to make plans to head back to the States. The girls have just about done it all here in Paris, my work is wrapping up at the MNHN and the Parisians are beginning to leave town for their holidays. The two things that I most enjoy about Paris right now are the weather and the escape it provides for what’s waiting for us in the States. The City of Light is providing a nice refuge from the deluge of responsibilities that will hit me as soon as I get back to the USA. Now I know how Roman Polanski feels.

Nancy and Daphne are getting restless for a change of scenery. Especially Daphne. She needs some friends to play with and some opportunities to be outside without being so closely supervised. After 7 weeks, we really have crossed gone over the hump where we need to decide whether we are going to abandon our little studio apartment to return to home or stay longer and get a bigger place. Daphne and I still have to visit the Panthéon and climb up the dome so that we can get a picture of our apartment from the outside, and I think this weekend, we will be visiting the Museum of Sewers, so it is not like we are bored or anything.

My work at the museum has been going well. Too well, in fact. I had found all the Anodonta and Pseudanodonta type specimens that I was looking for in the MNHN before I left for Frankfurt, and I was planning to spend the next couple weeks moving all those specimens to the malacology department where the rest of the types are and photographing them for the MUSSEL Project Database. Who knew it would only take me two days? So now, I have embarked on a whirl-wind effort to find all the types of the genus Unio, which is slightly better organized than Anodonta was. My fear is that I will leave France with two weeks of data that are incomplete and that I will need to come back to try to pick up where I left off mid-project.

One thing that has made my work go more quickly this past week is that everyone is gone at the museum. The French get six weeks of annual vacation. This is perhaps why they are so happy to be French but also why they have never been to the moon. Apparently, those six weeks for many begin with Bastille Day, 14 July. It is kind of like the 4 July in the USA: it celebrates a revolution. In the States, we celebrate the revolution that led to our current constitution and independence from Great Britain. In France, they honor the symbolic storming of the Bastille — the notorious prison of the Bourbon king, Louis XVI — in 1789. That revolution led to the first republic, which gave why to the dictatorship of Emperor Napoleon, which ended with the return of the Bourbon monarchy, which then collapsed into another republic that then ended with another Napoleonic despot... blah, blah, blah... a few different German occupations... yadda, yadda, yadda... Charles de Gaul and the fifth republic. And, here we are today. So complicated, but a nice excuse to have a parade and for current-president Sarkozy to show off his wife. The downside of this vacation period is that the proportion of foreigners has gone up exponentially in Paris. The sidewalks are filled with gawking slack-jawed yokels moving in slow motion.

I would still rather be in Paris than Philadelphia right now. It is so hot there, and we still have so much packing to do before we leave for Alabama — one week after we get back!