Blogs
First days in Paris
First days in Paris: Algerian pastries from Bague de KenzaI arrived on Tuesday, and I’ve eaten a croissant almost every morning since then. I think you can imagine where I’m studying. I’m Dana, and I’m a junior in Gallatin. I can’t remember when I decided to study abroad in Paris, but I’ve been a Francophile since around the sixth grade, when I started studying French in school, and my infatuation with the French language and culture has only increased since then: I went through an intense French existentialism phase in high school, and about a year or two ago, I fell madly in love with Jean-Luc Godard. Now, I hope to see Paris the way the filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague saw it. My concentration focuses on 20th and 21st century art, literature, cinema, and poetry; as so many friends and relatives have reminded me, Paris is the perfect place for all that. Really, though, I’m here for the food. A friend joined me for dinner two nights ago, and we went out and bought fresh tomatoes and garlic from the produce market, fresh ravioli from the pasta store, and fresh shrimp from the poissonerie (all of whom we had to rinse, de-shell, de-vein, and behead—it was a miniature French Revolution in my kitchen). On the street, Parisians walk around holding a baguette or three, sometimes with the top crust already bitten off (it’s not just a cliché!). Nobody eats on their way to or from anywhere. And many of the stores here close for a few hours at lunch time, so everyone can enjoy a relaxed meal. In New York and in central New Jersey, where I grew up, it’s so uncommon to take a few hours off to sit down and have lunch, to really savor the food. It’s a nice change, coming here. I’ve been trying to remember how to speak French, and for the most part I’ve been doing okay, although I couldn’t quite understand the crazy man on the métro yesterday, who smelled like liquor and sweat and kept asking me about discothèques and whether someone else was “mon mec” (“my boyfriend”). My classes will all be in French as well, though I’m not sure yet what I’ll be taking—hopefully I’ll be studying French cinema, theatre, literature, and art history at school, and I’ll learn a bit about French wine, cheese, and the art of being a flâneur on my own, as I wander around the city and settle in.
PASTRY!!
Dana: where is the bakery where you took that photo?! Those look incredible - and so different from everything else I have seen.
Also it is always nice to meet another French cinemaphile. I have not seen nearly enough of the New Wave - what would you recommend? And, out of curiosity, could write more about what you meant by seeing Paris the way those filmmakers saw it? Do you mean like revisiting sights of certain scenes or notable haunts of the filmmakers while they lived here, or a certain idealistic approach to deciding what to see or where to go, or what? The idea just very much intrigues me, and I would love to hear more about it.
patisserie et cinéma
Hi John,
The bakery is La Bague de Kenza, the pastries are incredible, and I think they have three branches in Paris now, with at least one in the 15th, on rue de la Convention. There are also incredible North African pastries at the tea room/café of La Mosquée, the biggest mosque in Paris. (If I'm a cinephile, I'm also a dessertophile.)
I'm honestly not sure exactly what I meant by seeing Paris as the way the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers saw it, except perhaps to see it as a really alive, inhabited place, where regular people have adventures, and not simply as some cliché-romantic, charming jewel-box of a city. Though I guess you don't have to be Godard to recognize that. I'm not an expert on French cinema at all, but the two major films of the New Wave are Godard's A Bout de souffle and Truffaut's Les 400 Coups. I feel like Godard gets kind of stranger as he gets older (One of my favorite films of his, though I haven't seen a ton, is actually from 2001.). If you're interested, the Cinémathèque Française has a bit of a Nouvelle Vague program going on now.