How's that for apples

Desolee, pour plusieurs raisons

2007-12-17T15:12:00.000-08:00

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.

Don't get excited

2007-12-12T01:42:00.000-08:00

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?

Weekend update

2007-12-04T03:27:00.000-08:00

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.

Frenzy

2007-11-29T11:41:00.000-08:00

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 16^th? the 17^th? 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!

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

2007-11-25T14:18:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-25T14:04:00.001-08:00

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.

Home again

2007-11-19T11:38:00.000-08:00

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.

Ce n'est pas grave, la greve

2007-11-14T12:30:00.000-08:00

Un autre greve.

I'm fighting back a deep desire to write in French right now. I will resist.

Un autre greve=another strike. I didn't write much about the last strike, but know that about 3 weeks ago, the French transportation workers decided to strike, for reasons that I won't go into, and the city shut down and everyone had to walk everywhere and classes were canceled and there were big demonstrations near where I live (a very liberal area, ever since that whole French revolution thing, with the raising of the Bastille and the declaration of the rights of man and all that other crap). Demonstrations, by the way, turn out to be a lot of middle-aged people strolling down the street in an endless stream, drinking tall cans of beer, happy to have an excuse to take a day off from work, amidst a minority of more enthusiastic demonstrators who set off smoke flares and hand out fliers to passers-by and shout incomprehensible things from mega-phones. Also, "Seven Nation Army" by the White Stripes is always playing.

Anyway. Aujourd'hui, il y avait un autre greve. All of my classes at IES were cancelled, and apparently angry students were/are blocking the entrances to the Sorbonne and 5 other Paris universities--their strike is unrelated, something to do with some new policy about the autonomy of universities, but they have joined forces with the transportation workers, in a general show of solidarity for the right to organize a goddamn strike! What I've learned, through these greves: 1) French people like to strike 2) Most people who aren't striking hate all the strikers 3) French people hate any sort of change (dont' we all?) 4) Strikes actually mean something here. Stefan, one of my homies from Cafe Titon, told me that he finds American strikes really funny--everyone walking in a circle, holding signs. I believe he used the word "cute" to describe them. There's a lot of truth in that statement. When you see a strike in the states, you drive by, maybe honk if you agree or flick them off you don't, and go about your daily life. Nobody pays the strikers much mind. But here, a strike shuts down the city. A strike changes the way you structure your day, a strike ruins your plans.

For instance, today I was going to go to class and then head to the Louvre (today was going to be Napoleon's quarters), and then go to conversation hour and then out to a bar or something. Instead, à cause du grève, I slept until noon, then spent the afternoon walking around the sunny, cold city, exploring the Jewish quarter of the Marais with some IES friends (there is a bakery called Finklestein's in Paris, by the way), then bought absurdly large bottles of beer and drank them in Place des Vosges until a short, angry, red-faced guard kicked us out because it was closing time, and we relocated to the Seine.

I am going to Amsterdam tomorrow, assuming the greve doesn't thwart those plans, too. The airlines aren't affected by all of this, but getting to the airport is another issue. There is some chaos with the other girls who were supposed to come, because they had train tickets and all the train lines are striking, so I may be spending some time alone in Amsterdam. I'm not worried. Il faut etre courageuse.

Family is great. Yolaine is leaving for a two-week trip to Syria on Monday, so I hope I get to see her on Sunday night when I get home. I'll try to put up some more pictures soon--it's hard to remember to take pictures. When you see the same beautiful things every day, you don't feel a lot of urgency to take pictures--oh, that will all be there tomorrow. But time is fucking fleeting. I'll try. Or I'll at least try to procure some of my friends' pictures.

Wish me luck for Amsterdam.

Thinking of titles is the worst part of having a blog

2007-11-09T11:17:00.000-08:00

It is Friday evening. I had a long day—up too early after going to bed too late and drinking too many pints the night before (too many pints=two pints, FYI), then class at the Sorbonne, my three hour Friday class that I’ve missed exactly 50% of the time, then a long walk home, tracing a diagonal line across the city, from the northwest corner to the southeast. When I left class, the sky was a brilliant blue, and the sun had just reached that late-afternoon angle position that creates dramatic, blinding, isolated spots of light. I reached my apartment beneath an almost indigo sky, with a hint of moon but no stars. I don’t know if I’ve seen any stars in Paris, now that I think of it.

Two remarks concerning class today: 1) during the lecture, the enormous, hour-long class held in “le grand amphitheatre,” I witnessed what I believe to be the French concept of class participation. The professor asked, “do you understand?” and no one responded, because there were a hundred billion people in the room and who wants to be the loser who says, “I sure do understand! Thanks a mill, prof!” so then he said, “I didn’t hear an answer…” so then a few people mumbled and incomprehensible noise which he interpreted to be a yes, and he said, “Bon! Un petit peu d’interactivite entre nous!” 2) In the three-hour “small” class (=30-ish students), I got back an essay and I got a good grade. My professor said it was better than most French students’ papers. This is gratuitous self-promotion right now, but I have no one here who cares/wants to hear that type of thing, so I’m putting it in my blog in the hopes of getting a pat on the back or something. Please excuse my constant need for validation.

Tomorrow I am going on an IES excursion to Provins (I, incidentally, pronounce Provins horribly, and it sounds like I’m saying Provence, so I’ve had several very confusing conversations about my weekend plans). We are meeting at 8:15. That means I will be up very early. Because of my deep-seated, perhaps foundationless, disdain for all things IES—and, more generally, all things involving large groups of Americans with digital cameras and guidebooks—I am not too excited for the excursion. But I skipped the other one I was supposed to go on—I guess I skip things a lot—so I feel obligated. But I’ll keep an open mind. I forget exactly what Provins is, but I think it involves going underground at some point, which is cool, and there is a free lunch somewhere in there, which is also cool.

Today I was thinking about how much I like Paris, and the thought occurred to me that maybe I just like places. If I spend enough time in a place, and really think about it as a concept, how it differs from other places, what its people are like, what its culture and history says about it, what kind of lifestyle it promotes, I tend to grow to really love it. This summer, when I was spending a lot of time in Boston for my internship and doctor’s appointments and visiting friends, I started to feel very attached to the city itself. I sat by the banks of the Charles and spilled out three or four pages of florid praise for Boston. During brief trips to both New Orleans and New York this summer, I felt the beginnings of similar attachments stirring inside me. Is it possible that just the idea of place appeals to me? The more I think about it, the truer it sounds. I think I like places more than people, to be honest. No offense.

But maybe not. Maybe I really just love Paris. It is important to keep in mind that everything on this blog could be complete bullshit, since most of what I write are thoughts that come to me while I’m on the metro, between playing rounds of snake on my cell phone and trying to figure out if I’m wearing the same boots as the old lady next to me.

One more thought: When I walk out to the main street in front of my apartment, Boulevard Voltaire, I usually turn left. Left is where things are. If you go right, I recently discovered, there are about 15 blocks which are, I swear to God, all identical. They are all clothing stores aimed at 20-something women, all owned by Asians, all bearing the words, “Pret-À-Porter” (“Pret-À-Porter,” literally translated, means “ready to wear” [isn’t all clothing sold in stores “ready to wear?” have I been missing some crucial post-buying pre-wearing step for all these years? (by the way, thanks for the math bracket suggestion, Maya, but if you take a closer look at previous blog entries, you will see that I was already privy to that tidbit [I am aware the I used the word “tidbit” in my last entry, and since it is quite a distinctive word, I fear that readers might scoff at the repetition, but I just really like the word “tidbit”])]).

Okay.

Dinner then sleep.

Let’s hope Provins rocks.

Au revoir, mama

2007-11-05T14:22:00.000-08:00

My mom is gone.

In a sense. She left my apartment about twenty minutes ago and is now three or four blocks down the street, in her hotel room, in a modern, creak-free queen-sized bed, maybe writing in her journal, maybe reading a book, getting ready for her flight tomorrow morning.

Once you decide a trip is over, a trip is over. She might as well be back in Boston already.

It is time to be independent again. After two weeks of visitors and gratuitous neglect of my blog, I am once again alone--just me, Paris, and mes penees. How poetic.

We had a good week, my mom and me. We saw a ballet at the Opera Garnier and ate fabulous meals and walked around the city in the sunshine and walked around the city in the gray-time and walked around the city in the mist, and made plans and canceled plans and changed plans and walked and drank and ate and walked and talked and saw and drew and walked and drank and walked.

Tonight we went out to a little Bretonne restaurant down the street from me, a hole in the wall that I pass almost every day when I walk to Bastille. We drank hard cider--my mom almost ordered this special expensive kind that was about halfway between hard cider and soft cider, but I put my foot down--only the real shit for me--and ate Brittany-style crepes. I feel soft and fuzzy from my hard cider. The cider sort of tasted like mold--but I only mean that if mold can have a really great, tasty connotation. If not, scratch that observation.

Fabulous week. I'm tired and buzzed. I have a mid-term tomorrow, apparently. I learned that little tidbit about three hours ago, and have not altered my plans to accomodate for it at all. Failing doesn't count if you're nine time zones away, right?

Two things

2007-10-30T14:29:00.000-07:00

A lot of men in Paris look like Mr. Bean.

Should I buy a beret?

Catching up

2007-10-28T12:47:00.000-07:00

I am writing this in my journal. Putting a felt-tip pen to the surface of the paper in my little black journal engenders a much more confidential, intimate feeling than typing directly into the "Publication d'un message" window on the blog website. I worry that the distorted sensibility of this medium will lead to me writing some hyper-introspective, self-analyzing absurdity that I will not be able to bring myself to post on the blog. In any case, if you are reading this right now, it means that I decided the bull-shit to decent-shit ratio was low enough to type up this entry and post it online.

I am at a cafe at the bottom of la butte de Montmartre. My first week in Paris, I ate a croque-monsieur here. I was at a two tables away from where I am right now. Sacre Coeur looms above me. I just went to mass. Four days ago, Dave and I visited Sacre Coeur, and ate sandwiches at the bottom of the hill. I can see the bench where we sat. It is unnerving how quickly your reality becomes your memories.

This morning, a pale gray sky covered Paris, but noontime has seen a triumphant sun break through the blanket of clouds. For the first time in three days, there is blue up above.

Dave should be taking off right now.

I have neglected my blog, and I apologize for that, but life beckoned.

I slept for three fitful hours last night, and I am exhausted, but I feel the need to recap the past week or so, at least perfunctorily (if perfunctorily is not a word, it should be).

A few words on each day:

Sunday: up early, blinding sunshine. the lingering effects of le greve gave me no problems, and I made it to Charles de Gaulle on time. Dave. Walking tour of the neighborhood and Bastille; crepes and cheap cans of beer.

Monday: Class for me in the morning. Back to Reuilly-Diderot to get Dave, who emerged from his hotel, smiling, somehow eluding the oppressive, insipid clutches of jet lag. To Ile de la Cite. Coffee and Notre Dame. A tour of St. Michel, a picnic in the Jardin de Luxembourg. Pain, fromage, raisins. Une grande pomme pour moi. Du vin rouge--a bottle of screw-top Spanish wine (we had no bottle opener) that we left, with a few rancid gulps remaining, in Hotel Mistral yesterday morning. Beaucoup de soleil, mais les palmiers n'etaient plus là. C'est vraiment l'automne.

Walked to Denfert-Rochereau, malgré l'orteil blessé de Dave. What a trooper. Dave liked the big lion at Denfert-Rochereau. Cemetery Montparnasse. Le tombeau de Maupassant. Met Hugo at Trocadero. Dave and he reunite. Two California boys at heart, both born in the wrong place. Stroll under the Eiffel Tower, past l'Ecole Militaire, Les Invalides. Coffee again. Bon Marché. Goodbye Hugo. Late dinner in Bastille. I ordered a disgusting drink and forced myself to finish it. Don't let all those Parisian billboards fool you--un Ricard is disgusting.
Tuesday: Class again for me. A "test." C'est une blague. Long, late lunch in a sun-saturated cafe between Denfert-Rochereau and St. Michel. Croque-monsieurs pour nous deux. Stroll by the seine. Eiffel tower, up to the top. Freezing. Beautiful. But really, fucking freezing. Cans of beer in my apartment to warm up. Jazz club in Montparnasse--le Petit Journal. An American all-female quartet. I used my charm and French prowess to bring the cover charge from $25 to $15. Champagne. We ride line 1 back home--the line where all of the cars on the train are connected so you can see forever--and nobody else is on it, so I take off my shoes and run through the cars and spin on poles and it is fun. Very un-French, I think.
Wednesday: Sunshine and croissants and cafe au lait. Montmartre. Dave ate the best eclair of his life. Sacre Coeur. A French man strumming on his guitar on the steps out front, singing songs like "Torn" by Natalie Imbruglia. He has a lisp. He winks at me. Dave loves the basilica as much as I do, and I am happy. We decide not to drink the wine we brought. Sacrilegious? Out to a bar with Olivier and other French friends to watch a soccer game. We order a giraffe. See below if you do not know what a giraffe is.

Thursday: Louvre. Ancient Egyptian wing. Overcast. To Saint Germain des Pres to pay a visit to La Rhumerie. Finally my dreams of hot alcohol materialize. Dave gets a grog and I get a Cafe Creole. We discuss what, exactly, Creole means. It gets heated. A large old man in a tweed coat and a scarf sits in the corner booth puffing on an impressive looking cigar. He grumbles that there is to much ice and not enough alcohol in his drink. He is great. Shakespeare and Co. I read about the gospel according to Dostoyevsky, Dave reads old history books. Out to dinner at Chez Paul (an "institution" in Paris, according to Theo). We resolve the white wine (me)/red wine (Dave) dispute withe a bottle of rosé. We eat escargot.
Friday: Cloudy. Stroll through le Marais. Patisseries and sandwiches in Place des Vosges. Rugby exhibit at Hotel de Ville. Catacombs are closed. L'Arc de Triomphe. Champs-elysees. The ferris wheel by Place de la Concorde. Crepes. Dinner with my host family. Language barriers. Dave valiantly attempts to explain his major (try translating "Public Policy Analysis"). Yolaine made a tart. Out to a bar with some of Theo's friends, though not Theo (he eventually shows up later on in the night). We leave to go meet Olivier and some other friends near Jussieu. I order a bloody Mary at the bar, because it is 4 euro. It is, I must say, not disgusting. The metro closed, we walk home.
Saturday: Patisseries and coffee. Walk in Bois de Vincennes. We sit on a log and drink tall cans of strong beer (Dave goes all out, downing one with 11.6% alcohol. I can only manage 8.4%). A man carrying a near-empty bottle of wine stops and talks to us for a moment. He says that Paris is too noisy, but that the Bois de Vincennes is like Africa.

Dinner at Hugo's beautiful apartment in Montmartre with his friends. He makes quiche. We drink wine and champagne.

We go out to a bar near l'Opera Garnier, where Hugo and Co. are "very famous." We dance, and I drink a Coca Light that tastes nothing like a Coca Light. Home. Sleep. Awake not much later. We get halfway to the train station before we realize that today was daylight savings and we are an hour early. Who is in charge of this shit? After much procrastination, Dave finally boards a train. Dave leaves.
I walk around in the gloomy, delayed morning, from Gare du Nord up to Montmartre, then all the way down Blvd. de Clichy. I listen to Ani Difranco on my ipod and revel in my melodramatic angst. I look at Paris from the top of the hill. Mass.
My coffee is done now. And so am I.

Dave's here

2007-10-21T05:46:00.001-07:00

I have many things to describe and write about--the greve, rugby, parties, lifelifelife.
But I will not write about them now.
Because Dave is here.
Goodbye.

quel desordre

2007-10-15T14:08:00.000-07:00

I had a lovely weekend from which I have yet to recover. My eyes want to shut and I have class in the morning, but my sense of duty won’t let me rest until I’ve written at least a brief blog entry (I’m using brief in the loose sense of the term…I’m a loquacious lady.)

Highlights from the past few days:

Friday I had my (I believe) final fiasco with the French university system. Apparently when the administration decides to change the day or time of a course, a sufficient means of communicating that change is to post a small piece of paper in the corner of a bulletin board at the end of a long hallway on the 4^th floor of one of the buildings on campus, a building which is not, in fact, anywhere near where the class takes place. The consequence of this apotheosis of efficiency was that I missed my class. But (thank GOD!) I didn’t miss my travaux dirigé (T.D.), the weekly tutorial for the class, during which I listened to a sweaty middle-aged man explain, for three hours, how to read a poem.

Saturday night was the big England vs. France rugby game. To kill the suspense right off, let me just tell you that France lost. It was actually a pretty depressing game—we (we???) were winning until the last 8 minutes. I watched the game with Theo and about 12 of his guy friends from high school, the same group I went to a house party with a few weeks ago. After the game, there was disagreement about where to go next (my friends wanted me to meet them at St. Michel, Theo and his friends didn’t want to go that far away—we were in Vincennes at the time, a suburb just southeast of the city). I ultimately convinced 5 of them to come with me to St. Michel, the incentive being the declaration that “il y aura beaucoup des americaines!” (there will be many American girls).

It was a fabulous night. We all convened at the jam-packed hub of the city’s nightlife, the network of tiny bars, pedestrian streets and drunken students that is St. Michel. After much persuading and screaming directions on my part, the final crew ended up being pretty large and diverse—Theo and his friends, a handful of girls from IES, Olivier—my dread-locked conversation hour homie—and a few random French guys Olivier brought along. It made me happy to witness the successful mingling of some of the different groups of people I’ve met.

The group tapered off one by one, and the night concluded with me, two girls from IES, Theo, and two of Theo’s friends wandering around the streets at 4 in the morning, happily searching for any bar that wasn’t trying to close, realizing that all the metro had long-since stopped running, and listening to Louis and Guillaume rap (I believe I mentioned previously the French Wu-Tang equivalent and the French Bob Dylan aficionado—they are, respectively, Guillaume and Louis). They both call me Kat because Kate is too hard to pronounce. It was wonderful.

Theo was very drunk, which means that he insisted on trying to speak English. Despite a year in Montreal, ten years of hosting American students in his apartment, and three road trips across the states, his English is pretty horrible—but it’s endearing to watch him try, to see the pained look of concentration as he searches fruitlessly for a word, eventually giving up and just saying it in French. In his drunken state, he told me that I was the second best French speaking student they have had (number one was also from Boston, incidentally). He also explained to me, very seriously, and without an ounce of derision, that the Big Mac is the United States’ Mona Lisa—that is, the masterpiece that we have contributed to the culture of the world. I can’t remember all of his reasoning, but it made sense at the time.

I think my plan to become a regular at Café Titon is working. The guys who work there know me now, and say “Hello” when I come in because they know I speak English. Last time, one of them came over and sat with me for a while—when I told him I was from Boston, he asked me if I’d read that article in the Boston Globe that mentioned the café—apparently they all became really friendly with the guy who wrote the article. They know my name now, too. I could be well on my way to getting a “Hello, Kate!” when I walk in.

Today on the metro, a disheveled looking fifty-something man in a dirty t-shirt wandered on, disoriented, his glasses askew. He carried a large square box filled with dirt, with two dismal geraniums poking out, and a massive tome entitled “Ma grossesse, mon enfant” (my pregnancy, my baby). Just an interesting image to leave you with.

P.S. Thanks for the grammar correction, mom. How embarrassing.

Ask me what a bidot is. I dare you.

2007-10-12T08:47:00.000-07:00

Nobody here thinks I’m American. That is not to say that they believe I am French, but rather, that I am English or Australian or from Quebec (what is the word for that? Quebeci? Quebecian? [en français, c’est québécoise (désolée pour le français, ma chère Maggie)]). What that says about me or about Parisians I do not know and I will not attempt to analyze here. Just an observation.

The past few days have been busy, filled with tasks and commitments that are slowly coming together to form my daily routine here. IES classes, dance class, the Louvre, Café Titon, visiting my favorite little Greek sandwich shop where the Turkish man behind the counter talks to me and corrects my French. Also, I’ve started doing homework. Sort of. It’s, like, really really great homework—we’re talking worksheets and fill-in-the-blanks and vocabulary quizzes.

Wednesday nights, IES hosts a conversation workshop, open to American and French students who want to hang out for two hours and improve their skills in whatever language is not their native tongue. The concept seems bizarre at first—one person speaking French and the other responding in English—but it works out to be a really fluid blending of the languages, and the brain manages to transition between the two modes of speaking pretty seamlessly. Last week was a special wine-tasting conversation hour, so about 40 IES students showed up. The lack of alcohol this week meant that only huge nerds like me showed up. It turned out to be a great decision, though—my friend Lauren and I ended up talking to three French garçons and going out to get a drink with them afterward. They are all really great and funny and down-to-earth—no pointy-shoed, tight-pants-wearing, cologne-doused, slick-haired Euro-style. One of them, Olivier, may be the only person in Paris with dreadlocks. After a very American weekend, it felt good to meet some new French people. Apparently, they love IES and come every Wednesday, so there is some serious French homie potential there. Incidentally, my French slang is getting really good. Ask me about verlan.

Today I got a walking tour of Paris from a French student I met while I was roaming aimlessly along the Seine. I discovered secret parts of the city that I never would have found otherwise—a hidden quai by Ile St. Louis, a raised garden not five minutes from my apartment that runs along a serious of connected roofs for miles, all the way to the Bois de Vincennes, a secret alley that will seriously cut down my morning walk to the metro.

This Saturday France plays England in the semi-finals. Serious stuff. I was really disappointed to miss the France/New Zealand game last weekend, so this time I’m going to ensure that I am surrounded by excited/drunk French fans.

I’m still feeling overwhelmed by how much stuff there is to see and do. Time speeds silently by, imperceptible, striking me suddenly when I ask someone the date and realize that I’ve been here for one month and two days. Jesus. Sacre bleu.

Nathenel, my little host brother, had to write a paper for school, in English, describing his ideal day in New York City. This day revolved around hanging out with homeless junkies in dark alleys. Last night I heard him playing Smells like Teen Spirit on his guitar in his room. He wears skin-tight jeans—we could probably share pants. I wish you all could meet him. I want to write a whole blog about him. Fifteen-year-old boys are great.

Pensive=entertaining (?)

2007-10-09T07:29:00.000-07:00

On Saturday night, at a bar in St. Michel, a man asked me, following the requisite small talk formula, if I like Paris. I said yes, and explained why in a few pre-scripted words. Then he asked me what I don’t like about Paris. I laughed and said something about it being too expensive. I’m feeling reflective, so please indulge me while I try to articulate some precise answers to both of the above questions.

I like Paris because there is so much to see in such a concentrated area—as if a giant picked up the city in the palm of his hand, and carefully plucked out all of the boring stuff, all the eyesores, all the strip malls and highways and gas stations and junkyards and Walmart’s and Target’s and any store exceeding 20x20 feet, then squeezed all the remaining interesting stuff together into one tight mass, and plopped it back down on earth. It is impossible to walk for more than five minutes without seeing something incredibly beautiful or historic or famous. I meet friends in front of Notre Dame just because it’s an easy place to convene; I drank wine by the pyramid of the Louvre because that was where the nearest benches were; every day, I walk by the very spot where the Bastille was taken over and the French Revolution turned around. Everything is smaller here, but so packed with something. Tiny boulangeries overflowing with morning or noontime crowds, everyone peering at the tiny, tiny pastries, each one displaying its own world of intricate icing designs or fruit arrangements or glazes or meticulously drizzled chocolate. Tiny Smart Cars with six people inside. Apartments—mine included—with seven rooms and as many inhabitants. Restaurants where strangers share tables for lack of space. I already mentioned the shrunken old ladies and the microscopic dogs. St. Chapel nestled inside the Palais de Justice, which is watched by the gargoyles of Notre Dame not 100 meters away. Narrow cobblestone streets, so narrow that they make the 5-story apartment buildings lining them look like skyscrapers. There are, by the way, no skyscrapers in Paris. Well one, in Montparnasse, and that’s a pretty big deal. Laurent, my host mother’s friend, told me that, after visiting New York City, she realized that she couldn’t live “dans une ville avec autant de verticalité.” Paris, I realized, is not very vertically orientated, and it’s wonderful. Everything rests at eye level or close to it, such that the world actually surrounding you is what catches your attention. Unless you happen to glance up for a moment, in which case the lack of verticality allows you to see the top of the Eiffel Tower peeking out over some apartment buildings or, if you’re lucky, the crisp outline of Sacre Coeur, pale and porcelain, way up on the highest hill on Montmartre. I’m getting very poetic right now, but that’s how Paris makes me.

That might be another reason I like Paris. It affords me a romantic backdrop against which I can brood and ponder and wander and gaze and, to the greatest degree I’ve ever experienced, make my life into a novel. And that is, it must be said, my ultimate goal. Most places, in reality, do not live up to their stereotyped and idealized archetypes. Paris does. I actually pass old men sitting alone on benches drinking wine and wearing berets. People actually walk down the street with baguettes poking out of their bags. Couples kiss under the Eiffel Tower. Men wear tight pants, women are tall and beautiful and nonchalant, everyone age 9 and up has a smoldering cigarette between their fingers, every face bears the same expression of disinterested, aloof poise. I actually heard a little boy on the metro yell “Sacre bleu!”

So, there you have it, a circuitous and partial explanation of why I like Paris.

Now I’ve lost energy to try to identify what I don’t like about Paris. I’ll try, in 100 words or less, to do a brief overview:

Everything is expensive. Parisian people always look put together and fabulous—this can be lovely, but also a bit exhausting and intimidating. There is too much to do. Small inconveniences—Paris doesn’t have the toothpaste I like, or Red Bull, or Target (I know that I praised the lack of Target above; it’s a double-edged sword), or coffee to-go (another thing that I truly love as an idea, but in practice can be irritating). French people love their friends and go out with their friends and aren’t looking to make new ones in cafés or parks or bars, so I always have to make an extra effort to meet people, except, bien sûr, for the scary, sleazy, old drunk men, who are extremely friendly. French people don’t put the heat on and love open windows (ha!ha! just try to imagine how I’m dealing with that). And of course, most importantly, I miss YOOOOOU!!!!!! (that is directed specifically at you, not the other people reading this blog)

Ok. Brief, brief update on goings-on: France won the rugby quarter-finals on Saturday, when they were expected to lose. Paris went CRAZZZZY—naked people and screaming and beeping and debauchery. I met a bunch of African guys at a bar who all spoke like 5 languages but worked as gardeners or mechanics. Go figure. I went to the Centre Pompidou with Hugo and his amazing, extremely French friend P.H. Hugo is fabulous. He teaches me all the cool French swears. He is going to take me out in Montmartre. On Friday, I went to my Paris VIII class in St. Denis, which is located, for those of you who don’t know, really fucking far away. And when I got there, j’ai rendu compte que, premièrement, it is the ugliest university ever created, et secondement, the administration had decided to change my class from Fridays to Mondays, which I can’t do because it conflicts with another course. It took me about 15 minutes to figure it out, because the secretary was out to the longest lunch in the entire world and literally every wall was covered with posters explaining something about the classes, many displaying contradictory information. Anyway, long story short—I’m now enrolled in two courses at Paris IV—the Sorbonne—instead of one at Paris IV and one at Paris VIII. I had those two classes today. Mondays will be busy. The classes, I think, should be an interesting experience. Enormous, in an amphitheater, I’ll explain more about them later because there are lots of interesting things to describe about the French university system and its students and professors, but I’m even testing my own patience so I’ll leave that for later. One brief thing—one of my professors at the Sorbonne stood behind a table, leaning forward, with his palms spread out on the table in front of him, staring straight ahead, and stood like that for the entire hour while he lectured. And the first three minutes of the lecture was him telling all of us that, if we just do our work “normalement,” we probably won’t fail. I was entertained.

Saluuuut

Standing on the edge of the weekend

2007-10-04T09:26:00.000-07:00

Cafe Titon again. Same table. I'll be a regular any day now, I can feel it. I even made a joke to the guy who worked here (joke=I say "Bonjour," he says, "Ah no, bon soir," and I say, while laughing, "Ah! C'est deja le soir?"---the laughing part is what makes it a joke, if you didn't get it). I'm drinking an expresso (and no, I am not one of those insufferable people who call espresso "expresso," that is actually how it's spelled in France). I like parentheses. Is my life one big parenthesis? Finding an aside in every new phrase, and gradually, one bracket after another, veering farther and farther away from the topic at hand, until I am so entangled in layers of punctuation that there is no way out? No way to remember what the hell I'm talking about? Wow I just got so worked up that I spilled coffee on my laptop. Oops. Anyway, the point I was going to make was that I drink a lot of coffee and red wine here and my teeth will be black by the time I get back. Back in blackkkk

I booked tickets to Amsterdam today. Not going until November, but it felt good to get the tickets. I was getting really overwhelmed about all of the places I want to go and not being able to decide where I wanted to go most and when and with who, so today I just went for it. Man I love planning things. Legal marijuana and sex shops here I come! Just kidding. Only windmills and Hans Christian Anderson museums for me(those things are both in Amsterdam, correct?).
Yesterday, Marine and I went to Versaille (if you don't know who Marine is, please refer to one of the below blog entries). It's a pretty sweet pad. Marine is fun, not your typically Parisian. She wears a lot of heavy eyeliner and listens to rap(mostly French, but she is a big Black-Eyed Peas fan, both pre- and post-Fergie) and just got back from 6 weeks in Buenos Aires. Five straight hours of intensive conversation only in French.

My friend Emily and I enrolled in a dance course in the Marais, a hipster-trendy-artsy part of Paris with a thriving homosexual community and lots of hair salons. It's a hip-hop class. The class seems pretty great--lots of "cool" Parisians, with their baggy sweat pants and fashionably ripped tank tops and oversized jewelry that somehow stays in place through the grueling hour and a half of grooving. I, by the way, am not a very good dancer. That was the first thing that I learned in dance class. It will be fun, though. The teacher is actually from L.A.---sassy black city woman turned expatriate. There was also an American woman who is here for a year teaching English--she and I got to talking, and somehow came to realize that we were both in the midst of reading the same Maupassant book, and both of us were carrying it with us in our purses. Anyway, point is, I'm going to be a hip-hop machine come December.

There are a bunch of homies by the door of Cafe Titon and I want to be their friend. That will be mission #2, after becoming a regular.

Tomorrow is my first class at Paris VIII, another one of the big Paris universities.

Saturday is "Nuit Blanche," which means everything stays open all night. Things stay open late anyway, so I'm not quite sure what difference that will make, but everyone seems pretty pumped about it.

In Paris, the three most common things to see when one walks down the street are hunched over, bundled-up old women walking microscopic dogs, pre-adolescent girls dressed like 30-year-old women and smoking cigarettes, and (probably related to item #1) dog poop. The old women, by the way, all wear the same calf-length off-white coat.

Tonight I think I'm going to an Irish bar in St. Michel to meet up with some French college students that came to a conversation hour at IES last night. We'll see.
Oh, and Malika, if Maggie (or someone else) is reading this out loud to you, I wanted to let you know that I saw something in the window of a Chinese restaurant today called a Malika. I'm not sure what it was, but it was some kind of Asian treat.

France doesn't do Monday

2007-10-02T05:13:00.000-07:00

It is Monday night and I am drinking wine alone in my bedroom. My wireless has decided not to work tonight, so I will save this document and bring it to IES to post tomorrow morning after class. I rolled down the big wooden blinds over my window, so I can see, clear and vivid, my reflection staring back at me as I write this.
I’m drinking that bottle of white from Crus et Decouverts. I think I taste smokiness? It’s good.
Today should have been my first day at the Sorbonne, but it was cancelled. When I came home and told my host brother, he said, “Ah. Ca c’est la Sorbonne.” He hates the Sorbonne. He’s really great. He and I were supposed to go to a play tonight, a play that one of his friends was in—a university show, free admission. By the time I got home from my afternoon doings (=walking around Paris with some girls, realizing slowly that EVERYTHING is closed on Mondays) at around 7:30, I was exhausted; so, when Theo came stumbling into my room at 8 barefoot in sweats and said, “Euh…veux-tu aller?” in a tone that really indicated he did NOT want to aller, I was pretty relieved. We did, however, make plans to go to this tiny theater in St. Michel to see some Ionesco plays at some point. Ionesco is, like, a really crazy French playwright. I read some of his stuff in a class last semester—things about people turning into rhinoceroses (rhinoceri?), and dead bodies inflating and flying away, and mushrooms growing out of carpets. I think he drank a lot of absinthe. Anyway, there is this theater that I stumbled upon on Friday in the rain that has apparently been showing the same three Ionesco plays every night for 50+ years, so Theo and I are going to go, at some point.
On Saturday I went shopping with Loubna and she introduced me to her friend Fabian (Lou and Fafa, as their best friends [a.k.a. me?] call them). It was fabulous. Loubna had no interest in shopping for herself, but took me all around Paris, trying to “comprendre mon style” and advising me about what was worth my money and what wasn’t. Fafa had just gotten back from a year in London, and so was the “English expert.” English expert apparently = broken sentences and phrases like “I go Greece my cousin last year.” We sat at a café afterwards and the two of them chain-smoked cigarettes and Fafa showed me pictures of her many boyfriends and we talked about all sorts of topics that were pretty difficult to address in a foreign language, but fun nonetheless. They were fabulous (adjective repetition intended).
That night, they took me to Maxim’s, this club near Place de la Concorde, apparently one of the chicest clubs in Paris. At dinner with my host family that night, I told them I was going to Maxim’s, and they all gasped. It was quite the establishment—three stories, spiral staircases, velvet carpets, chandeliers—an old building still bearing witness to the décor of la belle époque. That, of course, means that each drink was 12 euro. And mom, you’ll be happy to hear that my host mother, Yolaine, called my cell phone at 2:30 in the morning because she wanted to remind me not to drink anything that someone gives to me, and to keep my eye on my glass at all times.

Ahhhh this one really was meant to be short. Okay real quick—Sunday I walked along the banks of the Seine and then met up with Hugo, Cohen’s host brother from last year (for those of you who don’t know Cohen, it is sufficient to know that he is some guy). I went to a bar in St. Michel with Hugo and his friends and watched the Ireland vs. Argentina rugby game (Argentina won, which is apparently bad for France). Hugo and his friends are all 19, so it was a nice break from the ultra-sophisticated Parisian world that seems to surround me pour la plupart du temps. They quoted Beavis and Butthead. And Hugo had been to Pomona to visit Cohen earlier this year, so it was really nice to talk to him about people that we both know. A (sort of ) taste of home.
You know what, I’m going to stop apologizing for long blog entries.
Bye.

Rainy day

2007-09-28T08:42:00.000-07:00

I am at a cafe, sitting at a table in a corner by the window. Fat raindrops jump, one by one, from the overhanging storefront. I am at Cafe Titon. The walls are bright green and the accents are deep red and there is jazz playing, but yesterday it was punk. In the far corner, a young French girl is talking very loudly. She is excited about something. I get wireless here.
I am going to become a "regular" at Cafe Titon, I decided. Becoming a regular, I realize, is not something one should really decide on. In the world of regulars that I imagine, you choose a place to patronize, and suddenly, without any effort or time put in on your part, the waiters know your name and your order, and you get drinks sent to you, and you're allowed behind the bar to grab your own drink or something. But that just didn't seem like it was happening for me, so I sought out Cafe Titon (there were a couple other cafes in the running for a while, but Titon beat them out), made a conscious decision, and now I will come here every day until they greet me with a "Bonjour Kate!" goddammit!

Choosing Cafe Titon coincides with a general trend of regularizing my life in Paris. I have my cafe picked out I have my class schedule picked out. I picked a day for weekly visits to the Louvre (Thursdays, 4-6---by the end of December I might have seen half the museum). Things are falling into place. I need lots of regular, planned things to keep myself from becoming completement bouleversee, overwhelmed and panicked by too many things that are ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to do and see.

Last night I went to a bar by myself. A huge group of IES girls went to Kilty's, this Irish pub in Bastille. I was supposed to meet them there, but when I got to Bastille, I just couldn't bring myself to enter, to spend my night speaking English and standing in a mob of Americans. So I went down the street to some random pub where drinks were two for one, and made friends with the bartenders and waiters and a pair of middle-aged French cops from Marseille who were in Paris on business because something top-secret is going down with the mafia apparently. One of the guys let me see his gun. It was fun.

Today I spent an hour in the rain trying to find Shakespeare and Co, and getting hopelessly lost. Despite my wet jeans, it was actually a nice way to spend the afternoon. St. Michel and Saint Germain are beautiful, interesting parts of Paris. I found a restaurant or something called "Bedford Arms" and took a picture of it. And side not for the rents--I found La Rhumerie. It looks pretty good, I think I'll stumble in on some cold November day and drink a grog or some other version of hot alcohol (p.s. hot alcohol, what a great idea!).

This was supposed to be a short entry, but I still have so many things to say. I'm not a very good blogger, I don't think.

Tonight Theo is taking me to play poker with him and his friends. Should be interesting.

Tomorrow I have plans to go shopping with Loubna, the French woman I met last weekend. Let the bank-account routing begin.

I just went to Crus et Decouverts, this wine store down the street from me that was written about in The Boston Globe. The guy was super nice and helpful and I tried, very inarticulately, to explain to him what kind of wine I like, and he picked out a bottle for me. A white wine that is a mix of Chardonnay and Sauvignon, made with no pesticides, and I should look for a smoky, fruity, floral flavor. This paragraph is pretty much just for my dad.
I'm trying to figure out if I can distinguish Americans from Parisians. Today I stood next to two women, waiting to hear if they spoke English, because I thought that one of them was eating her apple in a distinctly American way. I'm not sure what that means.

Next time will be shorter, I swear. I'll set myself a word limit or something.

Maggie I just IM-ed you and you're not responding. You bitch.

Pardonnez-moi

2007-09-26T03:21:00.000-07:00

Oops.
It’s been a week and I’m overwhelmed again.
I went to a house party this weekend with my host brother. His name, for the record, is Théo. I know this only because he used my phone to send a text message, and I looked at the message afterward. I still have no idea what my host sister’s name is, and I talk to her every day. Names are hard to understand.
Anyway. House party. We (Théo and I) met up with his friends at a bar in Vincennes, un banlieue, and watched the France vs. Ireland rugby match, then went to a house party nearby. It was utterly fantastic. I met the self-proclaimed biggest Bob Dylan fan in France, who educated me on Bob’s fictitious, publicity-induced relationship with Joan Baez and wrote the names of songs I need to hear and movies I need to see all over my arm. Additionally, I met the French equivalent of Wutang. Wutang, I realize, is a group of people, a large posse if you will, and not one person; nevertheless, Guillaume, on his own, apparently equals Wutang. Intermittently throughout the party, someone would let me know that the rap we were listening to was, in fact, Guillaume. He was actually pretty good, switching back and forth between French and English and making sense for the majority of the time. I made the mistake of telling my new French friends that, sometimes, I like to freestyle when I drink. So they made me freestyle. Freestyling in French is pretty humbling; my rap went something like “Nous sommes ici, à une boum, everyone is dancing in the room.”
I salsa danced and discussed the philosophical wisdom of “Hakuna Matata” and learned how to say “motherfucker” in French. Théo and I finally left at around 4 and made our way home on the night bus, le noctillien. He is utterly fantastic. He invited me to his country house in Bretagne, and told me he would take me to all of the “cool” places in Paris. In a lot of ways, he is the most American guy I’ve met here. He wears t-shirts with holes in them and mumbles and blasts classic rock from his room.
I spent Saturday with the niece of a friend of Yolaine (my host mother). The friend had met me on Thursday night and, unsolicited, arranged a lunch for me and her and her two nieces so that I could meet more people. The niece, Marine, and I spent the afternoon walking around a park and talking—she doesn’t speak a word of English, so the pressure was on—and she told me to call her because she wants to take me to Versailles. On Saturday night, I met a French woman at a club who gave me her number and said that she wants to take me shopping because I told her that I don’t feel fashionable enough in Paris. I’m not sure whether or not everyone is going to follow through on what they’ve promised, but right now I’m pretty much tossing aside the entire conception that Parisians are cold. Je suis complètement bouleversée.
I saw Jim Morrison’s grave on Sunday. And a few other homies.
Tonight at dinner, we were discussing French exclamations, such as “zut!” and “sacre-bleu!” and somehow that turned into every member of my host family saying “fuck.” I don’t think they really got it.
I picked out classes. At IES, I’m taking Traduction (translation), Atelier Plume (creative writing), and Dessin (drawing—drawing for, like, ultimate beginners and/or retards. Yesterday we drew circles and squares and the teacher let us know that—don’t get overwhelmed now—we will be discussing perspective in classes to come). At the Sorbonne, I’m taking Métiers de L’Ecrit (careers in writing); at Paris VIII, the institute for feminine studies, I’m taking Ecrire devant la Mort (writing before death). I’m a little nervous about the university courses. They start next week. I’ll keep you posted.
I saw a French film last night that was possibly the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. Un Homme Perdu. I was perdu.
Ok. More soon. Once I get into my regular schedule it will be easier.
Sorry for the meaningless promises. We’ll just have to see how it goes.

A mid-afternoon haiku

2007-09-20T06:43:00.000-07:00

L’homme sans-abri—qui
vit seul à Paris—boit du
vin rouge et sourit.

Le Techno

2007-09-19T02:59:00.000-07:00

This blog causes me immense stress. Twenty minutes ago, I got into the shower, knowing that I would write this entry when I got out. By the time I had rinsed the last bit of conditioner out of my hair, I had become a wide-eyed, frenzied jumble of half-formed sentences, funny anecdotes, pithy descriptions, and ironical, would-be-witty observations. Now it is all gone and I only have a surfeit of things to write about and a deficit of motivation to actually write it. I put on some Tom Petty and am sitting on my bed and am trying to calm down. Breathe.
Too much happens in Paris.
I am going to explode.
Here is what I will do: I will write about one thing in detail, and then, at the end of the entry, put a list of other happenings. If you want to know more about one of said happenings, I will be open to inquiries.
The Technoparade now receives my undivided attention. Pronounce it “techno-par-odd” if you want to sound French. My story begins on the eve of the parade.
Friday night, some IES girls and I stumbled upon this rugby convention/party by the Eiffel Tower. For those of you who don’t know, the rugby championship is happening in France right now, and last Friday there was a match in Paris, L’Afrique du sud v. L’Angleterre. So we found this big, closed-in tent, filled with TV screens and beer and wine and food and screaming rugby fans. The IES girls stood in a clump and spoke English and giggled. I stood awkwardly three feet away, trying to look French (I think I did passably well—I went to a vintage shop in Montmartre earlier that day and bought some seriously French vêtements). After a while, I managed to weasel my way into a conversation with a bunch of young French people. They were all very friendly and nice and patient with my English and laughed a lot (at me?). Anyway, the upshot of the conversation was that they invited me to join them the next day at the Technoparade.

The Technoparade is an annual event in Paris, to celebrate techno music—it actually is the inaugural event in a week of techno-related celebration. It consists of a procession of double-decker buses that drive, very slowly, through Paris (starting at Bastille, looping through Montparnasse, and ending back at Bastille, for those who know the city’s geography). Techno DJ’s—apparently some who are pretty famous, if you know anything about techno, which I don’t—are on top of the buses, blasting music, dancing like maniacs, and yelling things like “Paris 2007!” “Levez vos bras!” Oceans of people surround the buses, dancing even more maniacally, elbowing and jumping and screaming their way through the crowd. The parade lasts from noon to 8 o’clock at night, and people apparently stay for the whole time.
I met up with my French homies at about 5—they came to meet me and two other girls, and brought us back to the parade with them, although they had already been techno-ing for several hours—and lasted until 6, which I thought was a formidable feat. It was incredible. People were dancing like there was no tomorrow, and when I gained enough space around me to move an arm of leg, so was I. People stood on benches and on top of bus-stop booths dancing and screaming. I don’t know or particularly like techno music, but it was impossible not to feed off of the energy.
There were a lot of people. A lot. And many of them had been drinking or taking other unidentified drugs since noon. I thought I was going to die. I saw a girl faint and get trampled. Someone gave me a flat tire and I felt certain that if I stopped to put my shoe back on, my life would end, my body slowly disappearing beneath a pulsing river of gyrating hipsters. But the Frenchies were really great, and made sure that we all stayed together and more or less uninjured. Christophe, a particularly tall garcon, saved me more than once with some strategic elbow thrusting. It was quite an hour.

Wow that took a long time. Okay quick list:
1) My host brother is alive. And fun and nice. I hope he wants to be my friend.
2) I saw a corgi pooping today.
3) Other things I’ve seen—Saint Chapel, Sacre Coeur, Musée D’Orsay
4) Really good ice cream
5) I got stalked by a drunk Frenchman in the park (don’t worry, mom, it’s not as scary as it sounds)
6) Americans R Dumb (there are some specifics to back up that observation)
7) The word truc. It’s absolutely the most popular word in Paris and I love it and I want to write a whole entry about it.
8) A waiter at a café told me I had a beautiful accent, and then informed me that Boston was not, in fact, in the U.S., but in Spain.
I think that’s it for now. This was an absurdly long entry. I’m sorry and I applaud you if you read it all. From now on I will try for shorter, more frequent entries. We’ll see how that goes.

Nouveau message

2007-09-13T10:29:00.001-07:00

In France, my computer speaks French. So now I am in the tab labeled "Publication d'un message." Je cree un nouveau message. Tres bien.
I only get wireless in the living room of my host family's apartment, so here I am, sitting on the couch, hoping nobody noticed that I unplugged an antique lamp so that I could power up my computer. The room is cluttered, but with a very French, intellectual, elegant sort of clutter. There are not dirty clothes and unwanted catalogs and used plates, but old embroidered tapestries and unframed paintings and dusty books and brass bowls etched with intricate patterns and dried flowers and a disconcerting amount of pieces of wood painted with the image of the Madonna in muted, faded tones. Bertrand, my host father, just came home. "Ca va, Kate?" he said, and I stuttered back some nonsense about what I was doing on the computer. What I was doing on this computer, before I started writing this, was looking for cheap tickets to Munich for Oktoberfest. Not that I've found anyone to go with me--people at IES probably think I'm verging on desperation, because my first conversation with any given student goes like this: "Hi, I'm Kate...I'm from Boston, I go to Pomona...hey do you want to go to Germany with me next weekend? Or the weekend after? Whatever works for you, I'm cool." They usually smile and nod and say something about how yeah, in theory, Oktoberfest would be fun. Would it be a horrible idea for me to go to Oktoberfest by myself?
Today I spent almost 20 euro on a pair of tights. As I spoke with the woman at the pharmacy, and she found the right size and color for me, the French words just rolled off of my tongue, my accent sounding impeccable--at least to my ears. So when she rang me up, I just couldn't ruin it all by saying SHIT NO I'm not paying you 25 bucks for some see-through spandex to wrap my legs in. My face must have betrayed my surprise, however, because she began explaining why they are so expensive (they have a control top to keep in excess stomach fat, and they help varicose veins--two issues that are extremely relevant in my life). But whatever. I needed tights.
I realize I haven't even gone over the basics of my first few days in Paris. Details seduce me.
Family--four kids, only three of whom I've met, I'm not sure where the fourth one is, I know I've been told, but I can't really understand. He might just come home really late at night. Or he might be in Scotland. It feels weird to ask now.
Classes don't start until the 24th, but IES is making us go to lots of meetings about how to not kill ourselves or offend French people.
I've been to the Tuilleries and the Champs Elyssees and the Musee Rodin and the Place des Vogues, to enumerate my tourist-y outings.
My bed creaks when I move, but it is comfortable.
I have a balcony.
Alors, je vais vous quitter maintenant. Je pense que je sort pour le diner ce soir, parce-que ma mere d'acceuil est a Normandy. Alors il faut que je m'habille et fait des choses comme ca.
Laissez-moi des commentaires, s'il-vous-plait!!!

Last minute musings

2007-09-08T18:47:00.000-07:00

I am ready to leave.

What do I do, now that the to-do list is empty? What can I say, now that I’ve said goodbye to everyone, given everyone my contact information? Anything else that I do is superfluous, anything else that I say is merely speculation. I don’t know anything. I know just as much about what my life in Paris will be like as you do.

In an uncharacteristic move, I don’t have a novel to read on the plane—just a half-completed book of New York Times crossword puzzles, and a Paris guidebook. And my journal. I think that I sub-consciously believe that if I don’t bring a book, I will be forced to write some subtly brilliant journal entry that will lead to a semester of insightful musings in Paris and, ultimately, publication and fame. More likely, I will buy an Us Weekly and read about Katie stepping out of Tom’s shadow.

Today I went to Great Meadows. Dragonflies swarmed and swooped through the oppressive, sudden September heat. I looked at a dragonfly and, for a fleeting instant, wondered whether there are dragonflies in France. It was a retarded thought—of course there are dragonflies in France—but it said something about how I perceive my leaving for Paris. Going somewhere foreign implicates a sort of ineffable transformation. I bought this weird shimmer lotion at CVS today, something that I would never actually use myself, but when I bought it, I truly believed that I would use this lotion in Paris. In Paris, I will be the type of person who wears weird shimmer lotion. In Paris, dragonflies do not exist. In Paris, I will suddenly be inspired to write the great novel of my generation, I will speak impeccable, effortless French, I will read the news, I will develop a taste for red wine, my name will no longer be Kate, pigs will fly.

A few thousand miles, a six hour flight. I might be the same person when I get there.

My host mother is picking me up at Gare du Nord. I have to take a train there from the airport, and I have been assured by both of my parents that I am going to be robbed on the way there. My host mother is “grande et blonde avec un écharpe rouge!” Old ? Young ? Kids ? None ? We shall see…..ads;lkjf;lksajdf;lkajsoiewupr

eeeeeeeek

this feels a little creepy

2007-09-05T19:49:00.000-07:00

I have never read a full blog entry (by anyone). Blogs, to me, are the internet equivalent of an enormous bowl of spaghettio's---you think you're gonna love it, but after 2 bites you've really had enough. But now I guess I'm making one. Blame it on peer pressure, ish. Well, I expended a lot of energy to create a blogger account (my first URL choice, "stunnashades" was taken, goddamnit) and to craft these fine first four phrases, so I'm going to decide that this is an adequate first entry. Bye. Do you say "bye" in blogs?