The Great Canadian Pub of Paris

Not the Great American Pub

This weekend I was going to finally get the Internet set up in my apartment, and finally, finally watch USC football in the comfort of my own place with beer and streaming video. This did not come to pass, but a better adventure was had.

I began my day searching in Bois-Colombes after successfully navigating the morning market for the first time and purchasing fruit and bread for the week ahead, yes this was a minor accomplishment by my low ex-pat American standards. Afterward I had lunch, and went to the brand new SFR in town. At the store the rather courteous middle-aged clerk retrieved a 3G key from the back room, and began asking for articles of ID. Uh-oh.

  1. Passport? Check
  2. Bank RIB form? At the apartment, can get later.
  3. Utility bill? Um… no

So I left without the internet again, but determined to go back to my apartment and then to the office to scrounge up some sort of alternative documentation. I grabbed all of the papers from my bedroom desk, my laptop, and headed to the 16th. At the office I fooled around on the web for a bit, made some long-distance phone calls on the work line, and grabbed anything else I thought might aid me in my next battle with SFR.

My second attack on team SFR was even less useful than the first. This particular clerk had a Parisien attitude, and did not offer much assistance. This problem was exacerbated by the fact that the more annoyed I got the worse my French became.

At one point I decided to just read the damn list of accepted proofs of residency, and saw paystub listed. I grabbed my paystub from within the stack of papers I had taken from the office and handed it to him thinking I had triumphed. Alas, my paystub had no address on it! How is this even possible!!??

The clerk suggested I either find a resident French friend to set up the account for me (non-existent) or go to my bank and get what I believe he said was a chequier de commerçant. Of course by this point I was so frustrated I would have barely understood ‘Bonjour’.

In any case I now need to go to the bank this week and see if they can help me out. Thus far in my dealings with Societe General they have been of use, so now I just have to remember to bring my passport to work tomorrow; I have already failed to do so Monday and Tuesday this week.

Regardless this takes me to the more interesting part of the day. That morning I had resolved that Internet or not I was going to see my team play, even if this meant returning to the Great Canadian Pub to try and make them stay open until the final whistle after 4 in the morning local time.

I arrived at the only bar in Paris I knew showed American football around 11 at night, just in time to see the final moments of Florida’s destruction of Georgia. Wow is Georgia bad. I talked a bit with some Big Ten fans, one of whom had the early quote of the night with ‘wow I really want to dislike you but, you are right too much,’ after I made the comment that Les Miles needs to find a better fitting hat.

At around 1130 with the early games in hand I asked the bartender to switch the slingbox game to Northwestern vs Penn State so I could pretend to care about my graduate school. NU promptly fell behind 20-13.

Now, the Great Canadian has two tuners for North American games, a slingbox which can pick up just about anything that is televised and ESPN America which in general shows the biggest game of any American sport. I set myself at the bar directly in front of the main slingbox TV just in case the  USC game was not the one chosen for ESPN America. At midnight though I was thrown not one but two curves.

Just after the Penn State touchdown, the bartender told one of the Big Ten guys that he better be ready because at the top of the hour the game was going to hockey. That’s right hockey. I thought the barman was joking because he said it with a laugh and made a comment about how we were in the Great Canadian Pub, not the Great American Pub. He wasn’t and at midnight the slingbox left football to join the opening of Canadiens vs Maple Leafs. The football fans left, and I was left alone at the bar to mutter softly to myself… hockey?? HOCKEY??

Adding insult to injury ESPN America was set to show the World Series instead of football of any sort. Now this was acceptable because it was the World Series after all, but of course the end result was no football for Stefan. And to compound it all, the baseball game was in a rain delay. It was a sad time.

At this point I was faced with a quandary, leave and take the train home, or wait it out and maybe catch the back end of the SC game when the hockey ended around 3, hoping the bar stayed open until the game ended. I decided I needed to find out how the late night train worked and of course the Oregon game would be close so I might as well stick around until they threw me out. Of course we all know how the game went, and there is no reason to rehash the details here, but suffice it to say that when I did not get cell reception I got not one but two absolutely livid phone messages from fellow Trojans back in Chicago.

In any case I met a couple of very nice university students at the bar who took pity on my poor french and offered up some comparably fantastic English. We talked about a bunch of things while one of them alternately fought off and accepted the advances of an Irishman. I found out among other things that Tarantino is as revered among French film students as US ones, and that Sex on the Beach is a popular drink wherever you go.

Alas the SC game never came on, even after the hockey finished, as the slingbox couldn’t pick it up. Probably for the better considering what the score had to have been at that time. In any case I saw the young ladies into the cab, watched the Irishman leave ultimately defeated, and meandered on my way back to where the night bus was. I am happy to report that the Noctilien is in fact punctual and very easy to navaigate, and I finally climbed into bed in the Hauts-de-Seine at 6 in the morning.

Hockey???