une.fille.dans.la.rue's blog

my bedroom
In reading this chapter, I was attracted to the idea, put forth by Nietzsche, of making a lot out of a little. Travel has a lot to offer, but it does have its flaws. The criticism that one hears most frequently about travel is that it’s a sort of passive stimulation, in which people (who have a sufficient amount of money) place themselves into a new environment, and allow things to happen to them, for adventures to take them away from themselves. While I don’t necessarily agree with this, I can see how it would encourage that mindset. For me, travel is a very active enterprise, and yet I recognize within it the passivity involved in visiting a foreign culture.

The inclination towards boredom is something that every person has to deal with, and something that I, personally, really reject in myself. Boredom, for me, is a sort of moral failing, representing mental atrophy. No matter where you are, you should always be able to find something interesting, or something worth thinking about. If you can’t, that probably has more to do with you than with your location. Thus, the idea of making a lot out of little.

As for myself, I can’t say that I would prefer to stay in my room, over, say, taking a trip on the Amazon. At the same time, I think that there is something to be said for staying in one’s room, figuratively if not literally. Travel can help us learn how to do this successfully, by rendering the familiar unfamiliar, and by instilling within us the instinct for observation. Just as Ruskin advocated drawing constantly, so as to promote a more complete knowledge of one’s surroundings, the continual feeling of alienation that one deals with abroad can foster a critical approach to one’s surroundings. With the right attitude, a street in New York City, or even in one of the small towns of America, can have as much to offer as any street in Paris.

I’m really glad that I can say that my study abroad experience is not yet over! But at this halfway point, it’s definitely valuable to take a critical step back, and to think about the past three months, and of the months ahead. First of all, I am so glad that I went through with this. I literally couldn’t be happier. Okay, you can always be happier, but living in Paris is proving to be one of the best decisions of my life. The most rewarding aspect of the experience, I would say, is the way that this trip has challenged me. It has forced me to be more flexible, more adventurous, and more independent. It has also made me less shy, and more responsible.
au revoir les enfants
Ultimately, these are the things I will take away from my trip. At the same time, I find rewards all around me, every day. Somehow, despite living here for over three months, I am still able to get pleasure out of simple acts of discovery and moments of serendipity. I honestly can’t say that I’ve faced any major problems. Homesickness was not an issue, and I have a group of very good friends, who have really helped to make this experience so enjoyable.
More than anything, I hope that years from now I’ll remember the state I’m in emotionally and psychologically, as a condition of contentment that is possible, and which I will probably be working to recapture for the rest of my life. I feel that my happiness is literally a product of my locale, and can’t imagine that I can possibly feel the same way when I’ve moved back to New York. Somehow, I know my anxieties and neuroses will return, and life will quickly become a lot more complicated…that’s how it works in New York City.

hmmm

feast
My Thanksgiving was probably the craziest Thanksgiving I’ve had yet. Usually the holiday is a quiet sort of affair, but mine ended up turning into quiet a party. The holiday began when, at four in the afternoon that day, my friend and I met at the Marche St-Eustache des Halles. We were planning on cooking up a huge dinner that night, and so had a long list of groceries to buy. We spent an hour or so going from stall to stall, and walked away with an enormous amount of food, including cheeses, baguettes, apples, spinach, mushrooms, sweet potatoes, nuts and olives, marshmallows and a whole rotisserie chicken. A second run was needed for the wine, and while my friend was out, I set about cooking. I sautéed onions, stuffed peppers, fried mushrooms, cooked spinach, and stuffed apples for about three hours.
My two friends returned, and it was at this point that things began to get complicated. With the oven going full blast, music playing, and the lights turned out, our fuse had gotten overheated. It began to short out, at increasingly frequent intervals, and, with only a half an hour before guests were due to arrive, we were feeling a little desperate. One of my friends peeled potatoes by candlelight, while I cooked the mushrooms with a flashlight cradled against my shoulder. Somehow, though, we pulled through, and the lights were back in working order as people began to show up.

lost and foundMy advice to other students planning to study abroad: first of all, just do it. Anxieties that might seem almost insurmountable usually work themselves out--fears that I had prior to coming to Paris are almost laughable now. The first step is just getting there, and after that, all you really need is an open mind. It’s important for your own happiness and sanity to have a sense of agency, and to feel that you are capable of getting things done, and of navigating the city. Therefore, get out as much as possible, explore, and talk to people (in their language) as best as you can. Living in a foreign country can be exhausting, especially when you first arrive, and the temptation to just stay inside and speak English exclusively is hard to resist, but your effort definitely pays off.

louvreHistorically, Paris is a place that has been associated with the creation of art. Parisian art is often most closely identified with the modern movements of cubism, fauvism, and impressionism, and with the art of Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet, Picasso, and Matisse. Though the French contemporary art scene is less powerful than it has been in times past, Paris continues to be a city where art is a strong presence, evidenced by the multitude of museums and galleries, and by the seemingly endless rotation of shows, exhibitions, and festivals. The strongest icon of Parisian art, however, is not truly a piece of art at all, but a building; it is the Louvre, where centuries of French, Italian, Dutch, and Ancient art are hung on its labyrinthine walls.
Constructed in the 12th century as a fortress, the Louvre’s function evolved over the years, acting as the Royal palace until the 17th century. At that time, Louis XIV vacated the Louvre for Versailles, and converting it into an exhibition space for the royal collections. The Louvre’s history is a political one, and for many years it was under control by the Academie Francaise, and used as a tool for manipulating the public and dominating the art world.
Though the Louvre has housed more modern art, currently the majority of work it displays date from the period of its supremacy as an institution, during the 16th and 17th centuries. They also offer a world-class collection of ancient art produced in Greece, Rome, Egypt, and the Middle East. Perhaps the most modern thing about the Louvre is the glass pyramid, designed by architect I. M. Pei in the late 1980’s, that stands in the central courtyard, and which is offset by the immense stone walls that surround it on three sides.

jelloIn the Ville St. Paul, by the Seine and just next to an English bookstore, there is a place called the Thanksgiving Store. There, you can find a range of American and English food products, ranging from Jello to gumbo. I had heard about this shop, and, passing by it the other day, decided to step in and have a look. Initially, I wasn’t particularly motivated to check it out—Americana and the cult-like devotion to American junk food doesn’t really hold much appeal for me. So I was surprised by how excited, even thrilled, I felt upon entering the store. Its shelves were stacked with the familiar boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese, Swiss Miss, Kellogg’s and Betty Crocker.
Much like an American general store, the shop offered a range of items, including food, measuring cups, and cupcake tins. The food is mostly canned or in mixes: there were several different kinds of beans, including baked and black (both impossible to find in Paris), as well as gumbo, campbell’s, and even pumpkin pie filling. Fully half of the store seemed to be devoted to desserts, and there was even a cold case offering a variety of American sodas not available in Europe, such as Dr. Pepper and Mug Root Beer. I spent a while looking over the goods, but the prices kept me from going wild. Where most of these items would be sold for only a dollar or two, here they were easily twice or three times as expensive. I did, in the end, spring for a can of black beans, which came in two euro fifty, or over three dollars.

proustCurrently, I’m in midst of reading Within A Budding Grove, the second volume of Proust’s enormous “In Search of Lost Time.” The book itself is large and quite hefty, and it’s taking me a while to get through it, in part because it’s too heavy to take anywhere. But the story and style are engrossing, and every night I make some progress before going to sleep. In Search of Lost Time follows the life of a young man, as he grows up and lives out his life amidst the Parisian upper class in the early twentieth century. In “Within a Budding Grove,” we find him in young adulthood, as he navigates his first romantic encounters and finds his place in society.
Across the body of his work, the themes of time, memory, space—and the interpenetration of these three things—all loom large. They figure into a specific passage I came across, in which Proust talks about the value of journeys. He writes “…the specific attraction of a journey lies…in its making the difference between departure and arrival not as imperceptible but as intense as possible, so that we are conscious of it in its totality, intact, as it existed in us when our imagination bore us from the place in which we were living right to the very heart of a place we longed to see, in a single sweep which seemed miraculous to us not so much because it covered a certain distance as because it united two distinct individualities of the world…from one name to another…” (302).

Part of the fun of living in a foreign city is learning to navigate it. Its unfamiliarity or illegibility forces one to approach it actively, to investigate it both critically and physically. Here in Paris, I spend a lot of time making plans, going out of my way to discover new things, often for very little reason besides the fact that they are unknown. Markets I hear about, or millefueilles I have to taste, suddenly become imperative.
I keep a running list of things to do, and make every effort to carry each one out. This is not to say that my exploration of Paris is highly structured: I like to have a range of possibilities, arrayed on a sort of mental map, so that wherever I happen to be, I can count on finding one thing or another within easy distance. The element of serendipity is important here, and often I discover still more things to try or eat or see along the way to my initial destination.
Some of these visits are informative without being transporting: I discover that Versailles is too crowded for me, or that pistachio macarons just aren’t my thing. Others, though, are of critical importance, and get absorbed immediately into my catalogue of routines and desires. Markets I discovered or bookstores I visited within the first few days of my arrival have become places that I return to again and again.

scotlandAbout a week ago, a friend and I decided to go on a trip. We talked it over, and agreed that we wanted to get as far away from Paris as possible, spending the least amount of money possible, and to get there and back in three days. On Wednesday night, we sat down at our computers, and spent hours researching and booking tickets. By the end of the night, we had booked a series of plane, train, and bus tickets, and reserved places at three different hostels. We were leaving the next day.
After dinner on Thursday, we met up at Porte Maillot, a metro stop in the sixteenth arrondissement, and took a shuttle to a regional airport. From there, we hopped onto a plane that got us to Glasgow in an hour and a half. At Glasgow, we took a shuttle from the airport into town, and caught a taxi at the bus station, which took us to our hostel in the west end of Glasgow. By this time it was about one in the morning; I had been traveling for about six hours, and had spent just under a hundred euros…and we had only just gotten started.