Posts Tagged ‘paris’

Cafe Paris is an informal restaurant based in downtown Reykjavik. Why it is named after Paris is unclear. The menu seems fairly Islanic rather than French. Perhaps it reflects the general hustle-and-bustle of the French capital.

The food looks a lot better in real life than it does in photos. Specifically this photo…

Presentation could do with some finesse. However, it gets good marks for taste.

The portions were massive. Elina’s creamy seafood soup felt bottomless. No matter how much she ate there was more seafood hiding at the bottom of the large bowl.

There was no #JeSuisPakistan hash tag. People did not pray for them. The media did not cover the story. Nobody cared, because the victims of the bombing were brown. The event was simply ignored.

Other than it being the lead story on BBC News of course.

What we did get to experience, was a torrent of people talking about how nobody carried about Pakistan. There was outrage. “How dare people not change their profile pictures to the Pakistani flag. How dare the media not demand that everyone change their profile picture to the Pakistani flag. No, we don’t care that the Metro published a guide on how to do it” yelled the mob, “people are ignoring this tragedy!”

This isn’t the first time such comments have been made. I regularly see items appearing in my news feed comparing the attention that news items in the West get vs news items in the East. It is a constant series of points scoring against each other as to who can be seen to care the most.

I suspect that the truth is that many people in Britain, including myself, do care more about a bombing in Paris than a bombing in Lahore. There are good reasons why:

• A bombing in Paris is a lot closer to me. If they can bomb Paris, they can bomb Leeds. Many of the people I care about most in the world are in Leeds.
• Paris is close by. I have visited it and I have friends that visit it. It is far more likely that a bombing in Paris will affect someone I know.
• The attack on Charlie Hebdo was a direct attack on values that that I care deeply about and am actively involved with.

I do not think that that lives of the people I love and care about the most are objectively more important than the lives of people in Lahore. However, like all human beings, I do care more about my friends and relatives than I do about people I do not know.

I did not add a French flag to my profile picture last year. I have no plans to add a Pakistani flag to my profile picture this year. If you are doing both, then great, I am glad some awareness of both of these tragedies is being maintained. However, surely we all have better, more productive things to do than score points off each other as to who is demonstrating their outrage in correctly proportioned amounts.

The response of the emergency services on 7 July was inspiring. But what I found more inspiring was what people did on 8 July. They got back on the buses, they got back on the underground, and they showed that they were no afraid.

Just like people did in the Second World War. Keep calm and carry on. These days that phrase is unfortunately associated with fuck-wit hipsters, to the point where it is easy to forget its important origins as a motivational poster to support the blitz. When the shit falls, you don’t run scared, you don’t get angry, you just carry on and show them you will not be victimised.

If you take a look at Wikipedia’s list of best-selling books of all time, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens comes right at the top. Of course, it was published over 150 years ago, so who can say where Fifty Shades of Grey will be after a similar time has lapsed…

It also shares a very similar name with the Leeds-based food blog A Tale of Two Sittings. I am not sure whether it is a deliberate reference to the book, or whether the blog pre-dates the novel and Dickens was making a reference to the blog. More research is needed.

Dickens tells the tale of a small cast of characters and their jet-setting lifestyle between London and Paris, both before and during the French Revolution. It takes quite a while to get into. I think I got to about half way through the book, still wondering what it was actually about. Of course it all comes together in the end though to form a beautiful tapestry of interwoven stories that culminate in what is probably a happy ending. Ignoring the tens of thousands that went to the guillotine of course…

As a belated Valentine’s Day present, I recently took Elina to Paris for four days. We took a plane there.

Needless to say, it was incredibly stressful, but once you put aise the horror of travelling it was a fantastic place to be – these two extremes balance the entire trip out to an average response of “it was ok.”

Also, my “translator” girlfriend, refused to speak to anyone on the trip, so I had to do all the talking, despite not speaking a word of French for over a decade. Another lie in her backstory is revealed. But anyway…

Paris is a gorgeous city. We were fairly central – just five minutes walk from Notre Dame Cathedral, so we spent our nights walking the banks of the Senn and listening to groups of jazz musicians freestyle by the river. Not that you have to be central – the beautiful buildings seem to go on for miles and miles, all in the same Parisian style.

We got the open top bus tour tickets that they sell everywhere – even Leeds – so we could just hop on and off, allowing us to work our way round the Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, Place de la Concorde and do some shopping on the Champs Elysées as well as seeing the Louvre, Notre Dame Cathedral and the Panthelon, which were all only a short walk away.

I wasn’t expecting a great deal from our hotel room given my experiences in other capitols, but it turns out we had got one of their “executive suites” (LateRooms FTW) so it turned out to be massive, with an en suite that was bigger than entire hotel rooms I have stayed in in London, and a balcony overlooking the streets below.

I was also shocked at how cheap it was to eat out – the restaurants in the Latin quarter offer three course meals for €10 and there was more food than I could eat! On the last night I treated myself to the €15 menu (which is still half what I would expect to pay in Leeds!) and had an amazing duck in orange sauce (or a Canard a l’orange if you will) as well as snails, muselles and some beautiful desserts.

I recently returned from Paris (I’m not bragging or anything), and one thing I noticed was that I only saw two people wearing the hijab (Islamic headscarf) the whole time I was there (four days). I saw nobody wearing a burka either, though that is to be expected given it is now illegal in France.

One explanation for this could be that there are simply very few Muslims in Paris, but given the multicultural nature of any large capitol, that seems unlikely. A more likely explanation, at least if I was to take an educated guess, is that the French have managed to create a society in which is the Islamic community does not feel oppressed (and therefore needs cultural signifiers such as head scarves) and is able to integrate. Perhaps we’ve simply got it very wrong in the UK, and the segregation many communities are seeing, is the result.