Monday, December 17, 2007

Desolee, pour plusieurs raisons

I had a busy and fun last weekend. I dragged Theo to the theater with me on Thursday—Theatre de la Huchette, a tiny, 30-seat auditorium where they have been performing the same 2 Ionesco plays for over 50 years. It was bizarre and hilarious and everyone should find a way to read and/or watch French absurdist theatre because there is nothing like it. Fell in love with a 2-year old French boy named Paul. Out to dinner on the Champs Elysee, out to a bar in the sports’ club where Olivier plays some crazy Basque sport that I can’t pronounce, out to a concert with Theo and his friend, out to a dance club, out out out. Whiskey and Bob Marley and Frenchies in my room until seven in the morning. But this week is strange. I am unsettled.

C'est hiver tout d'un coup.

La lumière ici est plus belle que jamais—délicate, légère, vif…elle fait délicatement étinceler la ville, mais elle ne chauffe rien.

Ma tête est déjà ailleurs, malgré mes efforts

J’ai commencé à faire mes valises.

J’ai visité le Louvre pour la dernière fois.

Je suis allée au Sacre Cœur pour la dernière fois.

J’ai mangé mon dernier croque-monsieur.

Je suis bouleversée.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Don't get excited

This won't be long.

I'm going insane and there's too much to do. I finally have homework/papers/tests, and too many things to see and people to call and Christmas presents to buy. Sleeping is hard, becuse I lie in bed making lists of all the things I need/want to do and trying to figure out how to fit it all in.

Brief (seriously this time) update, in no particular order: Birthday party at Loubna's house. Raclette--ask if you're interested. Concert at Cafe Titon. A South African man told me I look like a writer. Bad American movie with Theo. Liesse--oldest sister--comes home today. Madame Bovary is an insane book.

Okay I'm going to the Louvre now. I'm so close to having seen all of it, but I still don't know if I'll finish on time.

Paris just got cold, by the way. Boston's warm, right?

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Weekend update

I had a fabulous weekend and now it’s Monday night so I’d better write about it right now or it’s gone forever, erased and replaced by new stimuli.
Thursday night I was cold and tired and already in my sweats, ready for a night of Madame Bovary and crossword puzzles, when Theo knocked on my door and poked his head in. After twelve straight hours of class and an eight a.m. class awaiting him in the morning—the French educational system is INSANE and I will go on a tirade about it when I get home—he was raring to go out on the town. So I threw on my warmest sweater and my grandfather’s old hat over my pajama shirt and we went to a bar down the street where we drank pints of Stella and exchanged stories about our rebellious younger years (wow…what kind of future awaits me if I’m having nights like this at age 21?). We got home late and both convinced each other that it was entirely unnecessary to go to class the next morning.
Thus, I had a lovely nine-hour rest, and then lazily got ready and went to my afternoon class, the three-hour travaux dirigé, which was very not-fun.
Friday night I went out to fondue with Olivier and some of his friends. Fondue, I’ve learned is a traditional French meal—not Parisian, but country-France, the France of the mountains, the France that people tell me exist outside of the city. Well, there are three types of fondue—fondue Savoyard (the French kind), Chinese fondue, and a third kind that I couldn’t understand when Olivier told me, and after having him repeat it about four times I gave up. But it exists. Anyway, there are a lot of fondue restaurants throughout Paris, most in St. Michel and most pretty tourist-y, with warm, savory scents drifting out and people huddled over the pot of melted cheese, protected from the Parisian December outside, rechauffés and happy and full. Olivier took me to a fondue restaurant, Le refuge de la fondue ( ?), in Montmartre. It was a tiny room, like most establishments up on the butte, sunken down two steps from street level, with two long tables running the length of the room, such that the people who sit against the wall have to have a waiter help them climb over the table to get to the bench. The waiters were funny and the fondue was delicious and the baskets of bread were endless and we drank wine out of baby bottles and the toilet was decorated to look like a big piece of cheese. Then we walked up to Sacre Coeur in the nighttime mist, and tried to find a cheap bar (which, if you’re interested, do not exist in Montmartre).
Saturday I found a new place. It simultaneously thrills me and breaks my heart when I discover something new in the city. How much will I never discover? Anywayyy….I went to le parc de Bercy, which is big and open and beautiful, and filled with bridges and ponds and an orangerie and oriental stylings. It is a long, narrow park, and at the end it opens up into a vast network of playing fields where young boys played rugby and kids rode on the carrousel and dogs chased each other and one homeless woman organized her enormous sacks of mysterious contents. Arena-like staircases surround the park, and I climbed up one and there was the Seine and there was a pedestrian bridge, and I crossed and stood in the middle and leaned on the railing. Bercy is way in the southeast corner, so you can see almost the whole city from that point. I silently named all the monuments that I could, which I do every time I get a good view of Paris. There are a lot of places to get good views of Paris.
Saturday night we made crepes. I’ve given Theo the impression that I’m obsessed with crepes, which I probably am, so he wikipedia-ed a crepe recipe—much to the chagrin of Yolaine, who was shocked that he didn’t use the family recipe which she has been using all her life—and we made crepes. They were good and I even managed to flip one, and we emptied the refrigerator and put whatever we could find in them.
This entry is getting long and I’m getting antsy, so I’ll up the pace.
After crepes I went out with some girlfriends, dragged them to a new quartier because I got it in my head that I absolutely cannot repeat places at this point in the game. The quartier ended up being basically empty, and we were about ready to leave, when we stumbled upon the Café Litteraire, a tiny bar with bookshelves full of old books and board games, and a concert hall down below where a jazz band happened to be playing. We played French Jenga (which, believe it or not, is much like American Jenga) with two French guys that we met there, and drank Belgian beer, and I ended up talking about Russian literature with one of the Frenchies and speaking with much authority about things I know very little about. It was a fun night. And I’m good at Jenga.
Sunday it was rainy and cold and gray, and the Seine was angry and the wind was biting, but it was the first Sunday of the month, which meant that national monuments were free, so I had to go out. I have been trying to climb up the towers of Notre Dame the first Sunday of every month that I’ve been here, but for one reason or another I’ve always been thwarted. So I set my alarm early and bundled up and went straight to the towers. I waited in line in the rain for a long time—I was too cold to check my watch, but I probably stood there for close to 45 minutes—and finally climbed up. It was beautiful. But, I hesitate to say this because it feels sad, but I wasn’t super impressed. It’s just, I see that view almost every day and it’s never any less beautiful. The inside of the tower was really cool (I honestly can’t think of another word besides cool. Sorry.), and I loved being able to see all the gargoyles and buttresses up close, and the big bell. It made me want to read The Hunchback of Notre Dame—I think the French title is Notre Dame de Paris?
Then I walked through the rain, which was slowly turning from drizzle to fat, driving, relentless drops, to the Musee D’Orsay, where there was a 45-mile long line. I stopped short to regroup, looking for a sheltered place to look at my map and find somewhere else to go, when I realized that I was standing right next to another museum, eternally ignored in the shadow of its eminent neighbor. It was the Museum of the Legion of Honnor, and it wasn’t all that interesting but it was free and it was dry and warm, and I learned some things and got to see medals that Eisenhower wore and decrees that Napoleon wrote and swords that Charles de Gaulle used. I spent a lot of time at the windows watching the people in line for the Musee d’Orsay and wondering what on earth they were thinking.
Dried and warmed, I left the museum and walked toward St. Germain. The rain had relented but it felt colder than before. I wandered the winding streets and looking in windows of boutiques and bakeries, and ended up stumbling upon a museum down a tiny alleyway. It was the Musee Delacroix—apparently Delacroix’s old apartment/studio—and it was filled with his paintings and his sketches and letters he wrote to friends. It was very warm in that museum and it made me think fondly of Delacroix, who I had never been very attracted to before. It seems like he was a very nice man.
Then I went to Montparnasse and found one of the cafes that Hemingway was known to frequent—Le Select. I sat on the terrasse chauffée (heated terrasse) and drank a mug of hot wine with cinnamon and a thick orange slice floating, half-submerged, in the steaming liquid. I read A Moveable Feast while I drank, and read about streets that I had just been on or that I walk down everyday. Maybe it was the wine or the warmth, but at that moment, I agreed passionately with every word that Hemingway wrote and I wished that he was sitting next to me and I almost started talking to the man next to me, imagining that maybe he could be like Hemingway and we could have a conversation like the dialogues in Hemingway’s stories. I read with my map next to me, and every time he mentioned a street I didn’t know I looked it up and figured out whether I’d been there or not.
Then back out in the cold. I walked down the block to look at another restaurant that Hemingway had been known to frequent, La Cloiserie des Lilas, which I didn’t go to because it was too expensive, and where he wrote the entirety of The Sun Also Rises. The rain had stopped but a violent wind had replaced it and I walked the whole way with my hand on top of my hat. As I walked I narrated what I saw in my head, and tried to use the kind of simply, precise wording that Hemingway would use.
Then I bought a raspberry tart from a beautiful patisserie in St. Germain and the woman behind the counter wrapped it up in a lovely pink box and I carried it home with me and changed out of my rain-soaked clothes and curled up on my chair and ate the tart.
Yolaine is home now. She did all the laundry that has been sitting in my basket that she told Theo to do while she was gone and that he never touched.
Today was sunny and bright, but I had class all day at the Sorbonne. Still, I did manage to get to Parc Monceau for a bit and walk through the winding paths and watch the little kids on recess from a nearby school, all in matching uniforms, screaming and running in all directions and so feverishly consumed by what they’re doing—chasing a ball, trying to catch up with a friend, screaming and flailing aimlessly—that they don’t notice me walking through and crash into me.
In other news, my internet stopped working again. This will be posted tomorrow morning. Goodnight.

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Frenzy

I leave three weeks from today.

Ever since returning from Amsterdam, I haven’t been able to turn off the internal countdown in my head. It’s dizzying and unstoppable and unbelievable that I’m leaving so soon. Three weeks, I am trying to make myself understand, is a long time. A three week trip somewhere is a really, really long trip. Three weeks off from school is a very considerable vacation. But three weeks left here—in Paris, at 22 rue Leon Frot, with Nathanel’s maniacal laughter emanating from his room, and with Theo slouching through the apartment in a hole-covered t-shirt with a hand-rolled cigarette peeking out of his mouth, and with Yolaine singing opera in the kitchen while she makes a three-cheese tart that will undoubtedly be delicious and that she will undoubtedly apologize for, and with Sacre Coeur lit up like a toy in the night sky, visible from my balcony, and with the old, low, gray buildings spreading out before my window looking like a scene from a Dickens’ novel, and with the boulangerie next door and Café Titon down the street and the Turkish man at the sandwich shop and the old men at that tiny bar who always stand at the counter playing cards with the bartender, and with all of the places that I walk by and want to go to and haven’t been to yet, and all the places that I haven’t walked by and haven’t been to yet—three weeks of that, is nothing.

But I’m going to try to refocus. To pretend like it’s my first three weeks again, and do everything and see everything and pack my days from sunrise to sunset—which won’t be very hard, since the sun sets by 5:30 these days. I’m going to start going to bars alone again and meeting strangers to help me practice my French. I’m going to go to every arrondissement I haven’t really explored yet (the 16th? the 17th? almost everything above 12 is a mystery to me). I’m also going to go to the refrigerator and get the can of beer that I just bought (90 centimes for 55 cl of Kronenburg—niiiiice!), and try to calm down.

Okay. Back.

I haven’t written a real entry in a while. Trying to recount the past two weeks would be too daunting a task, so I’ll resort to my favorite device, the list. Maybe my sporadic blogging stems from the fact that if I write infrequently, I get to do rapid lists, using lots of commas and semicolons, whereas if I wrote more frequently I would probably have to write a complete sentence now and then. Something to ponder.

Anyway, let’s try to do 11 days in one paragraph: strikes continued, lots of walking, lots of annoyed Parisians, lots of manifestations and marches; visited the Louvre three times, since it’s a nice indoor activity and Paris is getting cold and I need to get cracking if I’m going to see the whole museum before I leave; met a man named Ludovig (?) at Café Titon and somehow it came up that I liked books, which turned into an hour-long conversation of him giving me not only literary recommendations, but movies, music, philosophy, restaurants, and bakeries, all scrawled on scraps of paper and napkins and thrust at me haphazardly—I have them in a drawer and I intend on taking each and every suggestion; Thanksgiving at IES, which was ok, nothing like homemade Thanksgiving, but I got to sit at Bertrand’s table, and I know I haven’t mentioned Bertrand at all yet, but know that sitting with Bertrand is a coveted thing; out to bars with Theo and IES friends; discussions about life late at night with Theo, him telling me that he has a good intuition and that he knows that I will write wonderful novels in the future, and that he wants me to send him a copy of my first book; unsuccessful Christmas shopping; successful Christmas shopping; chocolate bliss—Dave you’re the only one who knows what I’m talking about; going to a bar in St. Michel where a) the waitress tried to steal a full pack of cigarettes from our table b) the bartender yelled at us for petting the enormous dog that was literally sitting in the booth with us c) said dog mounted my friend Caitlin and proceeded to attempt to copulate with her, while no bartenders intervened; walking by the Christmas displays aux grands magasins, where every building is lit up entirely, and the window displays are works of art that move, and crowds gather to watch, standing in their thick coats and puffing hot breath into the air and holding up their little kids so they can see the dancing penguins, and vendors stand off to the side selling roasted chestnuts; the Musee du Vin (wine museum), where you get a complimentary glass of wine with your tour, unless you’re me and then you get TWO free glasses haHAAA!; hip-hop class; going to a bar with Olivier where the beer was 2 euro a pint and there were board games on all the shelves, and he taught me a crazy French card game that made no sense but apparently I won, and then we played French scrabble and it was impossible and the only word I could come up with on my own was “tu”; seeing the Arenes de Lutece, an old Roman amphitheater near the Latin Quarter that is apparently the oldest monument in Paris.

Okay. Nolwenn just told me that it’s time for dinner. À table!

Sunday, November 25, 2007

A day in the life, continued (I can only upload 5 pictures per entry...LAME)

The Sunday morning bread-rush at a boulangerie down the street from me, and the goods themselves:



Rue de Charonne. Great fucking street.



The Bastille. The Genius of Liberty glints in the sunlight on top. Yay freedom! And guillotines!



Me and Joel at Cafe Titon. I was standing on a bucket.

More later. Goodnight.

A day in the life

Due to several requests, as well as my own desire not to write anything real tonight, this entry will be devoted primarily to pictures. These images, more or less, constitute a normal day for me.

First, I wake up in this bed:

Those are scarves and an umbrella hanging from the wall. That is Clownie lying lifelessly on my pillows.

Then, twisting the long, creaky metal pole, I roll up my blinds--wonderful, heavy, wooden blinds that keep me in pitch blackness as late as i want--and sunlight comes flooding in (unless it's gray and rainy. which is fairly frequently). This is what I see:

Yes, that is a French-language version of Cosmo in the right corner. And yes, I make sure that my sunglasses stay in a straight line at all times.

When I leave the building, I go through this gate:


No matter where I am going, I am usually late, and I spring out of the metro station, breathless, ripping my scarf from my neck and unbuttoning my coat as I run, working myself into a heated frenzy even against the biting chill. A rough approximation of said event:



These, Cory, are my feet on Parisian pavement:



They are, I believe, pretty different from my American feet.

Monday, November 19, 2007

Home again

I walked four trillion miles today.

The title of my last blog entry is not, in fact, true. La grève est très grave. And it continues. Getting home from Charles de Gaulle last night was a disaster, and included such amusing activities as elbowing through angry crowds of tired travelers, waiting in the cold for prolonged periods of time, and walking a half mile in the pouring rain without an umbrella. And today, trying to get to and from class entailed literally hurling my body into a packed metro car, hoping that I landed on somebody soft—because the trains only came about once every 40 minutes and everyone and their mom wanted to get on—only to bounce violently back and leave the metro station resignedly to traverse the city by foot.

And tomorrow the grève continues, so I am setting my alarm for an ungodly hour and preparing my body armor for another foray into the Parisian public transportation system. I will get where I want to go, and ain’t no granny in a beret going to get in my way.

So. Amsterdam.

Two things: 1) it was great. 2) it made me realize that I don’t want to go on anymore trips. A bit of elaboration on each point:

1) Amsterdam is beautiful. Narrow houses with back-breaking staircases and old hardwood frames line the canals, which meander in and out of one another in an incomprehensible, infinite network of waterways and bridges off of which the blinding sunlight glints. Houseboats and flowerbeds and smiling bikers and tiny shops are everywhere. Big wheels of cheese and a never-ending outdoor tulip markets and wooden clogs and Christmas decorations. I kept on repeating one of two phrases, either “I feel like I’m in a storybook!” or “I feel like I’m in Disney World!”

We did all the things that we wanted to do—went to the Van Gogh Museum, the Sex Museum, the Anne Frank House, ate good falafel, went to “coffee shops,” visited the Red Light District (twice, at my request—I could write pages about that…it was incredibly difficult to make myself understand that it was real), wandered the canals, went to bars. It was cold, but frequent doses of hot, spiced wine and a few sprints through Dam Square helped to fend off frostbite.



Incidentally, I got to Amsterdam four hours before the other girls, so I roamed the city alone for a while, during which time I stumbled into the smallest pub in Amsterdam and ended up doing the twist on top of the bar with Alastair, a middle-aged Australian man who, I later learned, is an Olympic medalist for sailing.

Also, I got into a yelling fight with a cab driver, met a man named Moose, and impressed a Scottish marine with my drinking skills.

2) I came up with an analogy (my life, incidentally, seems to be a constant search for ways to describe my life in analogies) to describe how I feel about Amsterdam/trips in general: the difference between traveling all over Europe on the weekends and staying in Paris is like the difference between skimming the headlines of a newspaper and sitting down in a comfy chair with a big mug of coffee to read the whole thing, cover to cover. I do not mean to say that I didn’t have fun in Amsterdam, but I couldn’t help but feeling like my entire experience was superficial. I don’t understand anything about the city’s culture, I don’t speak the language, I have only a cursory knowledge of the history, I don’t know what bars or cafes or clubs or shops are good, I don’t know how to get from point A to point B. Sure, I did the things you’re supposed to do in Amsterdam; I took pictures; I had a good time. But I was an outsider. I was, in all senses of the word, a tourist. I felt lost and helpless and stupid—I spent way too much money because I didn’t understand the GODDAMN TRAM SYSTEM and I approached people on the street and awkwardly asked, “Do you speak English?” and, just, touristtouristtourist.

I know I’m not a Parisian. I know that. But here I feel like I belong, or at least like I can pretend that I belong. I have a routine, I have places that I know and people who know me, I speak the language, I don’t get lost, I pass places where I have made memories, I know what signs say, I know what monuments mean, I feel like I have a place. In the back of my mind, I had been planning one more trip—Belgium or Spain—but I know now that I won’t go. I missed Paris this weekend. Four months is a short time, barely enough to build friendships with the people around me and to establish an existence here, and, especially as the end the semester begins to approach (TOMORROW is the one-month-left mark…jesuschristfuackfshs;kldja), I feel that I cannot cherish my time in this city too much.

Yolaine left today for Syria, and she’ll be gone for 15 days. That sucks, a lot. I’m trying not to think about it.

I would like to add that, during the course of writing this blog, I was interrupted four trillion times (four trillion is the number of the day), by telephone calls and skype invitations and dinner and cigarette breaks with Theo (cigarettes for him, nothing but smiles and innocence for me), and, during this time, I have also consumed a respectable glass of Jack Daniels, so, due to both factors—distraction and alcohol—I exempt myself from harsh critiques of my linguistic capabilities.