de Lutèce's blog

I really appreciated this course because, although I have a neglected journal on my night table into which I scribble broken sentence fragments of thoughts and memories to which I hope to return and rewrite into developed entries one day, it’s good to have something that forces me to flesh out my ideas about being abroad and write things about my experiences that are composed and concrete.

I particularly enjoyed reading other people’s posts to see both the similarities and differences between all of our abroad experiences. It’s nice to know that the other Paris bloggers commiserate in my frustrations with French red tape or that someone in Buenos Aires dealt with the same kind of cultural gaffe as I did in Paris.

I don’t have much to say in terms of changes to make for next semester, I liked the way that the course was structured. I had some technical difficulties with the site that I’ve been in touch with you (Steve) about, but I’m clueless about that stuff, so I have no idea how to smooth out that kink.

I’m also glad that the course forced me to make time to read literature about Paris. My readings helped make me more aware of my surroundings and more receptive to French/Parisian culture. Readings about the general experience of travel were helpful as well, especially on my weekend trips around Europe.

Photographing the mundaneAccording to De Botton, all that is required of the traveler attempting to take a De Maistrian journey is a “traveling mindset”, characterized by receptivity. This simple shift in mindset is enough to make your daily environs seem new, exotic, and exciting. De Botton describes his De Maistrian journey through his Hammersmith neighborhood, finding himself on a road he walked along “almost every day to reach my Underground station and was unused to regarding it as anything other than a means to an end.” With his new “receptive” mindset, the unremarkable street became full of observable details and people-watching opportunities.
While reading De Botton’s chapter, I realized that my photography professor has been (probably unwittingly) urging my class towards practicing a De Maistrian form of photography. He calls it “thinking pictorially.” With street photography, the goal is to take the seemingly mundane and turn it into compelling photographs. Executing these photographs successfully requires a shift in mindset towards receptivity, because when we are receptive “we carry with us no rigid ideas about what is or is not interesting.” Thus, when “thinking pictorially,” things we normally disregard as automatically banal and uninteresting are suddenly photographic material. Window reflections add second and third dimensions to space, telephone wires become long, sloping lines dividing the sky, and the people passing by are suddenly subjects of portraits.

A Nook in Shakespeare and Co Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (italicized) is a memoir (or a collection of memoirs) chronicling Hemingway’s time in Paris in the 1920’s as a struggling young writer. His stories are largely about his time spent café hopping and meeting other American expatriate writers. Although the book is amusing and witty at times, I am compelled to admit that on the whole, I find his account to be tedious and inaccessibly nostalgic, the kind of nostalgia that a parent might express while rehashing his/her glory days in high school. For mom & dad’s “trips-down-memory-lane”, it’s best to tune out, as the details of these memories are usually only interesting to those who lived through them.

Hemingway painstakingly details his mundane daily routines, naming every café he sat in to write, never omitting the mention of what drink or food item he ordered: at Closerie de Lilas he worked over a café crème, at La Pèche Miraculeuse, the “open-air restaurant built out over the river at Bas Meudon” he and his wife would eat fried fish and drink “a splendid white wine that was a sort of Muscadet”. This level of epicurean detail is maintained throughout the book; the “Moveable Feast” of the book’s title is probably referring to the author’s wining and dining across Paris.

There is a certain condition that is bred from living in a city as dense as Paris is. A city-dweller knows that he is never really alone; he is constantly surrounded by people. To leave his apartment is to interact with others: to avoid brushing up against people in a crowded subway car, to order a sandwich, to inadvertently make eye contact with someone else while crossing the street. The city-dweller also knows that even when he is innocuously tucked away in his apartment he is not alone, not as long as he is in the earshot of his neighbors.

To “BE CONSIDERATE” of those pesky strangers that happen to co-inhabit his building, the apartment-dweller is always turning down his music, taking off his shoes, and telling his friends to leave before it gets too late. It’s exactly this kind of constant self-awareness wrought by oversensitive (and overbearing) neighbors that drives Roman Polanski’s main characters to insanity in his three films about the maddening lifestyle of a crowded apartment building.

My friend, whom I’ll call Lisa, typically does not invite large groups of people over to her apartment. Her French-American parents own her place, which is located in the chichi 16th arrondissement. The building is mainly inhabited by older couples, families, and other residents who like to keep the noise level low, especially at night.

For Thanksgiving, Lisa decided to make an exception to her no-party policy and invited a group of 20 of us over for dinner.

“Hey, Happy Thanksgiving, will you please take your shoes off and leave them by the door?” she greeted her guests, thinking of her neighbors that live a floor beneath her.

Hosting a party is always a stressful activity, even without the added pressure of keeping your guests quiet.

“Shhhh” Lisa would coax every time our laughter got too loud.

After a three-hour flight to Casablanca and a four-hour train ride to Marrakech, my roommate and I collapsed into bed when we arrived at our hotel at 1 am. So far, all we had seen of Morocco was the inside of airports and trains and taxis. We caught a painfully beautiful African sunset from the airplane windows mid-flight. I’d never seen a red, orange, and indigo sunset before. After we landed, the rest of our travels that night took place against backdrops of depthless blackened windows, as if someone had pulled a thick black curtain over the outside world, hiding the landscapes of this new, mysterious country.

The next morning, we awoke to an alternate universe. We stepped out of our tranquil Riad (Moroccan house built around an interior garden, which now functions as a hotel) to find that we were situated smack dab in the middle of the souks, Marrakech’s labyrinthine marketplace, where pushy salesmen beckon you into their shops to sell you anything from scarves, to pottery, to pastries. We made our way around the corner to La Place des Épices, the spice market, where the shopkeepers lure you into their stalls by calling you in to play a guessing game in which they hold out handfuls of herbs and spices and challenge you to identify each one.

It was in the Place des Épices where we first met our Moroccan buddy, Moustafa, who was the first spice seller to summon us to play the guessing game, holding out bars of musk and amber for us to smell. He was an extremely animated and talkative character who immediately invited us to sit in his shop and have tea with him. He pulled out a couple of stools, served us a pot of sweet mint tea, and talked to us about Morocco amid piles of red paprika and yellow cumin.

A Moment in the Tuileries 1. Luxembourg Gardens- I hate to kick this list off with the obvious by naming Paris’ most popular park, but not only are the gardens one of my favorite spots in Paris, they are also emblematic of Parisian culture. The fact that the Luxembourg Gardens is a public park says a lot about Paris’ accessible beauty and the city’s transfixion with aesthetics. The lush, perfectly manicured lawns lined with vibrantly colored floral arrangements are fit for a king, literally. Yet the park is freely enjoyed by squealing children, teenagers, joggers, cozy couples, and anyone else. The French have a keen sense for what is pretty, and Paris is drenched in French prettiness, from their buildings and gardens, to their paintings, to their food. The “pretty” formula seems to be varying combinations of pastel colors, flowers, white marble, and molding; Monet paints his pinky water lilies, French bakers line their shelves with Easter-colored macarons, and Luxembourg Gardens looks best in the spring.
2. Sunday brunch at Le Cavalier Bleu- In order to transport my favorite New York weekend tradition to Paris, my roommate and I set out to find a perfect Sunday brunch spot. In the 4th arrondissement, on Rue St. Martin looking out onto the Pompidou Center sits Cavalier Bleu, a corner café with an outdoor terrace that stretches out onto Pompidou square, dotted with heating lamps to huddle under. For 9 euro, a glorious French breakfast is yours: the best croissant I’ve had yet, eggs, bacon (which I subbed out for potatoes, without the typical French hassle), bread and jam, coffee/tea, and orange juice so fresh and pulpy they give you a spoon to drink it with. Great way to spend a Sunday morning.

The Crowds
The Louvre saw 8.3 million visitors last year. If you are interested in adding yourself to that number, here’s the perfect day NOT to go: on a rainy Saturday in mid-August at the height of Paris’ tourist season. I learned this lesson the hard way. On said day, I believe I saw 8 million of the museum’s yearly visitors. I was surrounded by herds of tourist groups of various shapes and sizes and observed as they shuffled lethargically through crowded renaissance painting-adorned hallways towards their target destination. They loafed through hundreds of pieces of overwhelmingly exquisite artwork, unsure of what to look at and photograph along the way.

Everyone was headed to visit a slightly-smirking lady with calmly folded hands, smooth, yellowy skin, and a hint of cleavage. They’d all seen her face a hundred times, on postcards and magnets, in caricature and cartoons, with a mustache and a goatee à la Duchamp, or screen-printed in primary colors à la Warhol. Now, all of these visitors had made their pilgrimage to see the world’s most commonly reproduced painting live and in the canvas flesh.

The funny thing about visiting the Mona Lisa is that you can’t even really see the painting. The sacred 30 x 20 inch canvas is under maximum security- two guards stand on either side of the wooden railing that encircles the bulletproof glass chamber that holds the piece. A second set of railings restricts the crowds from getting any closer than twenty feet. If you’re not one for pushing through crowds, you’re standing on your tiptoes, holding your camera above rows of heads, zooming in and clicking. Then, on the screen of your digital camera you can look at Mona the same way you’ve always looked at her: as a reproduction.

I once had a primary goal when I decided to come here. Somewhere along the way, I tucked that goal in the back of my mind and forgot all about it until after I arrived. Two happy and glorious months whizzed by. Then, one night, I couldn’t fall asleep because that goal I had forgotten about was staring me right in the face.
YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO COME BACK FLUENT IN FRENCH, YA DUMMY.
Oops.
“You must be improving though, maybe without even realizing it,” reassured my parents when I called home to whine.
“Marginally. Not exponentially.”
I know where I went wrong.
See, I know I had the right foundation to come back fluent. I’ve always loved French. I’ve always had a special enthusiasm for my French courses above all other courses. It just seems like more of a hobby than work, like taking pictures or learning to play an instrument. Getting college credits for my hobby is a pretty sweet deal.
“Vous serez bilangue,” a professor once said to me when I told him I was planning on studying abroad in Paris. I was really happy that day.
Then, I did this silly thing where I blew an American bubble for me to live in when I got to Paris.
American Things:
- Roommate
- School
- Friends
- Classes (2)
- Thoughts
French Things:
- Classes (2)
- Waiters
- Strangers
- Friends (3ish)
- Movies
Exercising knowledge of French: Check
Mastering French language: …
I unconsciously chose comfort over challenge. Becoming fluent means living with a host family, taking classes at a French university, socializing in French, thinking in French. It would have been a struggle, it would have been frustrating and uncomfortable, there would have been days of wanting to give up. But if I pushed myself, I could have done it.

The Kiss The chicken-or-the-egg dilemma of Paris is what I will call the cinema of love dilemma. That is to say, what came first: Paris as the “city of love” or French cinema? Did the conception of Paris as the city of love exist as a cliché before the film industry began consistently representing it as such? Or did the birth of cinema in France give way to the stereotype of Paris as the hub for all things romance?

Regardless of how Paris’ “city of love” label was first applied, it is indisputably evident that the consistent filmic representation of Paris as a city meant for finding, losing, or rekindling romance has projected the “city of love” fantasy about Paris to the rest of the world. In “Representations of Western Tourism in Cinema”, Tara Kolton argues, “…the virtual nature of cinematic images enhances our expectations and fantasies of actual places.” The simulated realities of setting-driven films serve to deepen and reinforce our perceptions of a place, even before we make a trip there. Thus, to the collective tourist imagination, Paris’ city of love myth is irrevocably linked to the plethora of relevant films, from the epic classics of Les Enfants de Paradis (1945) and Jules et Jim (1962), to modern-day representations such as Paris Je T’Aime (2006) and Les Chansons d’Amour (2007).

This guy is so hardcore.Central to MacCannell’s thesis that the tourist experience is composed of front and back regions, the latter of which the tourist attempts to gain access, is that the tourist “demands authenticity” in his travel experiences (600). While the desire to experience a place “authentically” is present in a tourist’s travels, I argue that this desire is not the organizing principle of a typical tourist trip.
MacCannell writes, “touristic consciousness is motivated by its desire for authentic experiences, and the tourist may believe that he is moving in this direction, but often it is very difficult to tell for sure if the experience is authentic in fact” (597). In his view, the tourist’s ultimate goal is to achieve an “authentic experience.” MacCannell’s notion of “authenticity” seems to consist of transcending “front regions,” or spaces set up for the sole purpose of facilitating “touristic visitation” (597). However, merely gaining access to a region further from the “front” is not enough to ensure an authentic experience. MacCannell associates the authentic experience with the sharing of the “real life” practices of the places visited, or making “incursions into the life of the society they visit” (594). “Real life practices” or “back regions” consist of the behind-the-scenes spaces: kitchens of restaurants, backstages of shows, mail boats, factories.