danaenfrance's blog

Less than 20 kg? I doubt it.I wish I could reflect a bit right now on my semester in Paris, but my flight leaves tomorrow and my last few days have been lots of fun but also incredibly stressful. I squeezed in a visit to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris yesterday for an exhibit I had really wanted to see, I’ve gone with my friends to our favorite bars, and we had a wonderful goodbye dinner that concluded with the best chocolate mousse I’ve ever eaten.

But a lot of my last week in Paris has been rather bureaucratic. I closed my bank account, dropped off a DVD at school, went to the post office to ship my books home (and discovered that there are special burgundy-colored boxes specifically for shipping wine bottles). Tuesday night I spent five hours in the emergency room with a friend who needed antibiotics; we got home at 3 AM and I took a final the next afternoon. And now I am completely preoccupied with packing, with fitting everything in and trying to keep at least one of my suitcases under the weight limit. It’s not a very elegant or thoughtful end to my semester in Paris, but I guess that’s how it goes : I think an idea I and some of the other people in Paris kept coming back to is the balance between the elegance and fascination of the city with the banality of real life

The NYU in Paris program is, for the most part, very well organized, and the classes are interesting and challenging. I did want to take a class at a French university, though, which NYU really encourages people to do; I had a very hard time trying to navigate the Sorbonne class schedules (the one posted on the wall during the NYU tour, the one the Sorbonne office gave us, the one posted on their website), and when I finally found a course that interested me and fit with my schedule, I realized that I would be taking too many credits this semester (with this class and our two-credit preliminary course) to take a four-credit class outside of NYU as well (by this point, our regular classes had started). This was frustrating but, in hindsight, maybe not such a bad thing—I’ve had a lot of free time to explore Paris. And I’m glad I’ve had this class to encourage me to reflect, as a record of my expectations and experiences and changing perspectives during my time in Paris.

Hemingway and friends in ParisTo start, this entry is so late because I only started reading my second book two days ago. Not because I didn’t want to read it—from the time I saw the Paris book list for this course, I was looking forward to reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. It’s just that I like to be out in the city, not in my apartment, so I usually read on the metro or in cafés; I’ve just been trying so hard to fit seamlessly into Parisian life—to seem like a local on the metro, to not encourage my waiter to start speaking to me in English—that reading things in public that aren’t in French has made me a bit uncomfortable. Anyway, out of either my changing perspective or out of necessity, I’ve made an exception with Hemingway, and I’m so glad I have.

Many aspects of Hemingway’s Paris, which was even to him an “old city,” don’t exist anymore. I haven’t seen any goatherds walking around in the early morning, blowing on pipes and milking a goat into the pot of whoever comes outside and pays. His cafés and bistros no longer exist, as far as I know, and the area around Cardinal Lemoine is no longer poor. But the way he experiences Paris, and writes about it, is so immediate that the city feels alive and recognizable. His Paris isn’t Paris of the sights and the nostalgia, but it’s not wholly separate from them either. And while he knows the streets, wanders without getting lost, knows the names of the waiters in his local cafés, Hemingway often mentions his circle of Anglophone friends, and frequents Shakespeare and Company, the famous English-language bookstore. I suppose it’s this kind of balance between living in Paris and remaining an outsider, in a sense, that I’ve aspired to in my few months here.

As much as A Moveable Feast is about Paris, it’s also about writing. Hemingway describes how and what he writes, what he drinks while he writes (a café au lait, a rum St. James) and where; he mentions Gertrude Stein’s critiques of his stories; he recalls how a suitcase of his manuscripts was stolen from his wife Hadley at the Gare de Lyon. I especially loved reading these parts of the book because I write, or try to, and because despite the clichés and despite Hemingway’s experiences, I have written very very little since I’ve been in Paris.

Of gambling at the horse races, Hemingway writes, “By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.” I wonder if New York will still be that something better when I get back in January.

Me and one of my Parisian friendsMy advice: come to Paris. It’s an incredibly beautiful, historic city, but it’s also a really culturally vibrant and interesting place to live right now. Of course there’s the Louvre, the Champs-Elysées, the Arc de Triomphe; there are the people who attract tourists using these clichés, playing accordion in the metro and selling miniature Eiffel Tower keychains under the real thing. And that’s all wonderful, but living in Paris really gives you the chance to explore all the hidden corners and less-celebrated aspects: the North African bakeries dotting the north-east part of the city, the illegal roasted corn sellers on the sidewalks of the eighteenth. And if you speak French, even a little, living in France is probably the best way to improve and to start speaking a living language, not just textbook sentences.

That said, be prepared to spend a lot of money. A lot. Paris in general is just expensive (An espresso in Tours this weekend cost the same as one from my local café, and was three times the size.). And on top of that, the exchange rate is brutal. Learn to appreciate bread (good and comparatively cheap) and to enjoy cooking with friends instead of going out to dinner so often. But don’t constantly translate the prices from euros to dollars in your head—you’ll starve doing that. And if you want a pastry, go for it.

I live in an apartment by myself, which I really like but which might not be for everyone. I’ve heard about great home-stay experiences and not so great ones. I live in the fifteenth arrondissement, in the south-west part of the city; it’s really charming during the day, with wonderful bakeries and markets and little shops, but it’s also an expensive area with a lot of families and older people, so there isn’t much to do at night. If I ever live in Paris again, I’d try to live either between the tenth and the nineteenth/twentieth, or maybe in the fourth, both younger, hipper, and more diverse areas (though the fourth is getting pretty gentrified). If you like to go out to bars and clubs a lot, the eleventh or somewhere in the center might be best, because the metros close at 12:30 (1:30 on Friday and Saturday nights) and reopen at 5:30 in the morning. As for going out, a few people had recommended some places to me before I left; some were great, some were okay, and some were filled with Americans. I try to avoid bars that are full of NYU students, or Americans in general (maybe I’m looking for a more “authentic” experience), but regardless of what you prefer, you may have to search a bit before you find a bar or club you really like. Also, I think a lot of people come to Paris hoping to make French friends, but know that it’s not necessarily easy (most people go out with their friends, and stay with their friends), and sometimes your French friends aren’t as much fun as your friends from NYU anyway.

The Maison de Balzac (Balzac's former house) ... I'll go in eventuallyNear the beginning of this semester, I wrote a blog entry about my walk to school, and the interesting things I sometimes noticed on the way, crossing the Pont de Grenelle: a film-crew, a “pigeon-man,” a woman leading miniature ponies. Though I actually saw the woman with the ponies again a few days ago, walking towards the bridge, I feel like my heightened awareness, which came from the newness of living in Paris—of crossing the Seine to get to class—has gradually faded over the course of my time here. For a while, I tried to make myself notice one new or interesting thing on every walk to school; recently, though, I’ve usually been focused on nothing but making it to class on time: how many minutes do I have? will the light change soon? and why won’t these people in front of me walk any faster?

Reading de Botton’s “On Habit,” I was struck that his descriptions of the new and exciting becoming mundane sounded so familiar. We become “settled in our expectations”; we grow “habituated and therefore blind to” what’s around us, what used to be so exciting and unknown. I forget about the quaint house mixed in with all the skyscrapers on the right bank of the Seine; I hurry past the Maison de Balzac, with its beautiful little garden, telling myself one day I’ll stop in to look around or sit on a bench reading (maybe one day when it isn’t raining). As de Botton writes, I reduce my awareness to only a few things, the absolute necessities for getting from my apartment to my classroom without being late or completely out of breath. I miss the beginning of my time in Paris, when my awareness of the city and all its small quirks was much more open.

And yet it can sometimes be hard to retain “the travelling mind-set” to our own quotidian lives, our own neighborhoods and well-trodden routes. Of course, I still love wandering around a little area of Paris, an unfamiliar pocket of an increasingly familiar city; holding on to this attitude, this receptivity to discovery, doesn’t always fit in with the tasks and stresses of everyday. Perhaps, in my last two weeks in Paris, I should just leave my apartment a few minutes earlier, so I have the time and the concentration to notice more than the pavement in front of me on my way to school.

One of the least comfortable places to sleepMy Thanksgiving started a bit earlier this year. At midnight, more precisely, which is roughly when my “day” began. I had decided, with two of my close friends in Paris, to go to Milan over this past weekend, which happened to be Thanksgiving in the US. Unfortunately, the friend who booked the tickets accidentally chose the flight leaving at 6:45 AM Thursday morning. We’d have to get to Charles de Gaulle airport by around 5 AM, which is before the metros open and the airport buses and trains are running. We were, of course, not thrilled about this, nor about the thought of paying sixty to eighty euros for a cab.

Our French friend Justin suggested we call Julio: we don’t know exactly how the two know each other, but Julio is Spanish and working in France; at night, he becomes an unofficial taxi driver in Paris. Justin spoke to Julio, who volunteered to drive us to the airport for thirty-five euros. We’d still have to leave around four or four-thirty, but it was by far the best option.

Then, Wednesday night, Julio’s car broke down. (At least that’s what we were told.) Anyway, we ended up on a regular bus to Porte de la Chapelle, at the north-eastern edge of Paris, just before midnight, and from there, after near-desperate searching for the right bus stop, on a Noctilien (night bus) to the airport. We must have arrived around 1 AM, and spent the next few hours wandering around the cold airport, passing homeless people in sleeping bags on the floor, attempting to sleep first on the chairs (very hard, and with incredibly uncomfortable armrests) and then resting on our bags on the floor, until two airport security men and their muzzled dog asked us to move. I was still sick with a bad cold, but I think all three of us were pretty miserable.

Once we could finally check in and board, we slept through the entire hour-and-a-half flight and the hour-long bus ride from the airport to our hostel. The rest of our Thanksgiving involved a delicious lunch (risotto alla Milanese, colored gold with saffron), a much-needed shower and nap, an Italian pastry from a dessert truck parked near the Duomo, and a dinner of aperitivi (a buffet of appetizers, free with your drink in most bars in Milan) and a giant mojito. And I don’t think we could have been more thankful for our hostel beds that night.

Outside the Cinémathèque Française, designed by Frank GehryThe Cinémathèque Française is the center of French cinema and a mecca for cinephiles worldwide. For the past few years, it’s been housed in a big angular stone-and-glass building in the twelfth arrondissement, a much more modern area of Paris that used to be pretty industrial but is now more high-end, and has become a sort of cultural center in eastern Paris (the François Mittérrand national library and the biggest stadium/music venue in Paris are nearby). The building used to belong to the American cultural center in Paris, who sold it to Cinémathèque Française at a big loss because they couldn’t pay for all the maintenance; now the French government helps pay for the upkeep costs, and there no longer exists an American cultural center in France.

I first went to the Cinémathèque Française during our two-week preliminary course, before regular classes started. I had to do a presentation on the photographer and filmmaker Raymond Depardon, and so I went to watch one of his films, Profils Paysans, at the Cinémathèque’s Bibliothèque du Film, or library of film. At first the building was confusing, and then simply intimidating (a friend had told me that it was the new favorite place for Parisian hipsters), but I paid three euros for a ticket at the BiFi desk, put my coat and bag in a locker in the coat room, and asked for Profils Paysans by its number in the giant binders of films by title or director. In exchange for my license, I was given the DVD and a booth with a pretty large TV, a DVD player, a VCR, and two sets of headphones. I’ve since gotten used to the ritual of watching a film at the BiFi, and I go back almost every Monday morning to watch a film for my cinema class.

Of course, the Cinémathèque Française also has an actual cinéma, a movie theatre that plays mostly retrospectives: Fellini, Michael Haneke, actors of the Nouvelle Vague (I saw Roger Vadim’s … And God Created Woman there last month). There’s also a small museum of cinema, with century-old movie-making machines and clips of Charlie Chaplin films; and there’s a really nice café, with chalkboard walls, long tables, and some of the cheaper hot drinks in Paris. I imagine I’ll find myself there tomorrow after I watch the next film for class, probably drinking an espresso.

AmundsenI can’t think of very much to say about Paris right now … I feel “done” with Paris, in a sense, though I think this is probably a feeling that comes and goes for a lot of people living abroad. Anyway, it’s because I just spent a long weekend in Copenhagen, and I was very tempted to not get on my flight back to Paris last night. So I guess I’ll write about Copenhagen here.

Three of my friends who are studying in Prague had planned to go to CPH for the weekend and had been trying to convince me to go too. And so, despite the expensive tickets and my plans to go on the NYU trip to Grenoble this past weekend, despite knowing that I should be exploring France, or somewhere new, or at the very least Paris, I went to Denmark instead.

My ex-boyfriend/friend/lover (it’s complicated, sorry) lives in Copenhagen, and so do his friends, many of whom I’m also friends with, and his family, who we stayed with while my friends visited because their apartment has more beds. For me, the weekend was less like travel and more like going home to my family, or my second family, only with a little orange kitten, Amundsen, instead of my crazy father. We drank tea in the warm apartment and played cards and cooked everyone dinner one night: fiskefrikadeller (the fish version of Danish fried meatballs), boiled potatoes, sautéed spinach, and salad. We took my friends walking around the city until it got dark, around 4 in the afternoon (the early sunset can be really disorienting). On Sunday my friends left at three in the morning for a 7:45 AM flight from Malmö, Sweden (a half-hour train ride from CPH and apparently much cheaper to fly to from Prague), and my Dane and I slept until 2 in the afternoon, waking up in time to see the little Christmas tree lighting in the apartment’s back garden, drinking gløgg (mulled wine) and eating æbleskiver (little pancake-donuts) with powdered sugar with his parents’ neighbors as the sun went down.

Admittedly, it’s still frustrating to be in Copenhagen and not speak more than a few Danish sentences—when I don’t get a neighbor’s joke, for instance, and I have to just smile and remember to ask my Dane to explain it to me later. It’s not a problem I’ve really experienced in Paris, since I came knowing French and living here has forced my French to keep improving. Still, this past weekend felt more comfortable, happy in a simpler way, than a lot of my time in Paris. I guess Paris is still my adventure, and it’s nice to have somewhere to go and take a break from all that.

Le Repaire de Bacchus wine shop on Rue St CharlesA couple weeks after I had settled into my apartment, I had my friend Max over for dinner. Max is a student and intern in Paris, and he lives in a foyer, or French student housing, with a small shared kitchen and not even his own refrigerator, so I invited him to my clean, personal kitchen to cook and eat with me. We bought fresh ravioli, tomato sauce, and lettuce for salad, then went into Le Repaire de Bacchus, a wine shop up the street from my apartment. It’s a chain—all of the Repaires de Bacchus in Paris have a green exterior and a little hanging sign with cursive letters—but it’s not a supermarket or the much more common (and less sophisticated-looking) Nicolas.

Surrounded by two walls of bottles and baskets of specials, we were immediately overwhelmed. Then the man working, who had been sitting behind the cashier’s desk in the back, asked us if we needed help: were we drinking the wine with a meal? what were we cooking? and what were we looking to pay? and pointed us to an appropriate red for about 7 euros. We kept talking, and as Max and I were paying he asked where my accent was from—was I Danish? I think I probably made a very strange face as I explained to him that no, I’m not but my ex-boyfriend (we had broken up maybe a week before) is Danish, and Max joked that Denmark wasn’t too far from New York.

I don’t go back to Le Repaire de Bacchus very often, but he’s been my wine guy ever since. He’s tall and thin, maybe in his thirties, usually wearing black, incredibly knowledgeable about wine (in a sense, a pretty stereotypical Frenchman) but also incredibly friendly. Once, when I asked for a not too expensive bottle of wine, he replied, “So around sixty, seventy euros?” (It took me a few seconds to get the joke.) He’s asked what I study, and we’ve talked briefly about German cinema; I still don’t know his name though. But even just walking past on my way to the metro or to school, I’ve never seen anyone working at that Repaire de Bacchus other than my wine guy. And I think I owe him another visit soon.

A grey day in Paris (photo by Charlie Tatum)Grisaille means greyness. It came up today in an article I was reading in Le Monde, I think the article by Slavoj Zizek about communism 20 years after the fall of the Berlin wall. I recall that in the article, grisaille referred to the sort of mental or atmospheric state of communism itself. The word, in that context, surprised me at first.

Today Paris oozes grisaille. Outside the two big French doors in my apartment, there’s the big grey static sky, my grey balcony, the greyish-beige apartment building across the street. I am making my second cup of tea this afternoon, because my apartment, no matter how high I turn the heat up and no matter how many sweatshirts I wear, doesn’t seem to want to get warm. I think a lot of people find it depressing when the weather is grisaille, but it’s relaxing to me. Or at least it would be if I wasn’t so cold.

This morning I went out to do some food shopping. It’s Sunday morning; my entire neighborhood was out doing the same thing. I bought a Kouign Amann, a Breton pastry, at the bakery, and a newspaper from the man at the news table just outside. I went to the little supermarket for cereal, rice, and apples. And next door at the produce market, I bought a head of lettuce, a zucchini, and a big group of tomatoes, all still connected by their green vine. It’s not the most convenient way of food shopping (admittedly, I could have bought my tomatoes in the supermarket, but they looked bruised and unhappy), but it’s a nice way to spend a grey Sunday morning. And it’s a habit I think I’ll miss when I go back to New York: there aren’t really any simple produce markets, and buying fruits and vegetables at a greenmarket is usually expensive. There’s also the feeling in the U.S. that buying produce at greenmarkets is pretentious; in France, it’s a popular (in the sense of the general public) activity, almost a given—I think most people know, or assume, that market produce is often better, and fresher, than at the supermarket. And so I wait on line to pay for my groceries with little old French ladies toting around their purchases in cloth bags on wheels.

Authentic?Reading MacCannell’s “Staged Authenticity,” I was struck by his ideas about the sight-seeing tourist and traveler in search of authenticity. MacConnell works at dissolving the boundaries between the two, noting that both tourist and traveler set out on a pilgrimage-like search for experience or understanding, and that authenticity, seeking the “true” nature of a place or a culture, is often a construction—that is, not as authentic as we thought, or at least not in the same way.

I think it’s easy to lump all major “sights” or tourist attractions into the tourist category, the antithesis of authenticity; but especially in a city like Paris, or any other huge tourist destination, even these “sights” become an integral part of the city. Of course I’m guilty of scoffing at the big red double-decker buses unloading tourists at the base of the Eiffel Tower; of course the nearby restaurants and sandwich shops are the worst, and priciest, in the city; of course I prefer discovering less crowded, less well-known neighborhoods, where not everyone is taking the same photograph and no one is trying to sell me an Eiffel Tower keychain from a giant ring of them. But that doesn’t make the Champ de Mars, or the Louvre or the Arc de Triomphe, any less real and Parisian than the student-tended garden behind the Cinémathèque Française, or the little boulangerie around the corner from my apartment. These are all just different sides of Paris: the traditional, the grand, the overlooked, the historic, the quotidian, and so on.

Even still, now that I’m living in Paris, I think I’m especially motivated to discover the overlooked, non-touristy corners. I think I expect myself to be an authority on Paris, on the “back regions,” as MacConnell calls them, of the city, the places where visitors for a few days or weeks wouldn’t find. I’m still exploring, but sometimes I wonder if it’s a reasonable goal. Sometimes I feel strange comparing Paris, which I love and which continues to fascinate me, with Copenhagen, where I’ve never stayed for more than a few weeks at a time but which still feels more like my home in Europe… at least for now.