29 April: Sitting on the Canal St. Martin
It's a gloriously sunny and warm day--finally, after most of the week being overcast and occasionally chilly temperatures requiring a jumper (aka, a sweater).

Rather than take in a typical tourist attraction, we decided to go for a stroll along the Canal St. Martin, one of the walks recommended by our DK Paris Eyewitness Travel Guide. On the northern end, where we got off at the Stalingrad Metro stop, it was a bit more industrial and full of taller, modern apartments as well as more ground debris and excrement (both animal and human) than we've seen so far. But once we turned south for the actual canal walk prescribed by the book, the neighborhood became a bit more residential and businessy.

We stopped at the Le Valmy cafe right next to the canal just shortly after noon, and it was good timing. Within ten minutes the place was filled up with office workers (or knowledge workers in Microsoft white paper parlance) on their lunch break. I would have loved to have gone around from table to table, asking everyone what they did for their day jobs and what their daily routines were like. So far, we've stuck to the more laissez faire touristed areas, where it seems no one works and instead just sits around in cafes.

I'm sure cafe sitting (and caffe sipping) is an important part to a French citizen's day (and probably a right protected by the constitution). But I've been reading The European Dream by Jeremy Rifkin (subtitled: How Europe's vision of the future is quietly eclipsing the American Dream), and he notes that productivity has been growing at a far stronger pace in Europe than it has in the US (where overall productivity is still stronger, yet not growing as fast). So somebody's gotta be doing some work somewhere.

So far, it's been a very interesting read, and perfect subject matter for this trip. It's a bit better than T.R. Reid's book--whose title escapes me now (and I can't look it up as I'm writing this offline)--which came out about the same time last fall. While it made many good points and had Reid's typically energetic and ironic voice, it was a bit more interested in pointing out the gee whiz differences between American and European cultures (they have complete public health systems; much of today's multinational corporations are centered in Europe). Rifkin's book starts out with many of the same statistics, but has now started (I've just cross page 100) looking back on the origins of European philosophy that underpin the current state of thinking of how Europeans view space and time (from Enlightenment science to economics).

I'll probably have more to add about the book as I continue through it, but I think it might be time to get a petit caffe with Mrs. F.