Welcome to Saint Cloud! Now Go Away.

I spent a fair amount of time Sunday and Monday before in a suburb (I guess you'd call it that) called Saint Cloud. WTF was I doing in a suburb? you ask. Well, the GF is playing a few jazz gigs in Paris and she was practicing with the other musicians in a school there. As suburbs go, Saint Cloud seems well-to-do, very clean, and pretty much hostile to anybody who doesn't live there. It's not a gated community in the USian sense, but there were numerous blocks that were closed off to the general public by gates. People with cars have to have a key, and visitors have to get themselves buzzed in.

I guess the urge for the well-to-do to say “fuck off” to the less fortunate is universal.

For example, here's a street in Saint Cloud that isn't gated but is par for the course: high walls, dense shurbs, all connive to make sure that you can't see in, you rotten busybody. And this despite (or because of?) the near-urban density of houses.

I suspect you're thinking I'm reading too much into this. Maybe...pictures of the gated streets would have driven home the point, though.

I will say this for Saint Cloud: it has a Rue de Maurice Ravel and that earns it +5 by me.

More photos:

The main drag in Saint Cloud:

Some trees getting trimmed on the street leading to the school where the GF practiced with the other members of the quartet, the ECLA, which seems to be some sort of arty place where kids can learn music and dance and adults can try to hook up under the guise of trying to learn to paint. I recall that in The Red and the Black, (or in a footnote to it in my college edition) Stendahl decried the French preference for trimming trees. He evidently thought they should be let alone. I haven't thought about it myself, but it might be one of those little things that makes places in France have their distinctive look. And people say you can't put express these things in everyday language.

The building at the ECLA where the band practiced. Both practice rooms smelled like mold, and had peeling paint. Not something that would fly back in the US. On the other hand, while the mold I could definitely do without, I think there's a lot of pointless maintenance that gets done in US homes and buildings out of the childish fear that people will think you're poor and/or dangerous unless everything is brand-spanking new.