paris, from the beginning

As for many travelers, Paris for me was an idea before becoming a site of personal memories. Some people--superficial tourists, afraid of and segregated from 'the natives'--never make the transition from the first to the second, from the place they knew about and could recognize in famous landmarks to the place where part of their lives unraveled in the monuments' shadows, quite apart from them. It took me a very short period of time--one day--to make the transition, and because most of my memories of Paris are therefore personal, my observations lingered less on difference than on a sense of discovery. Moreover, I was not inclined to compare Paris--the new, foreign place--with home--the baseline of 'normalcy' for most people who go abroad--but rather with the Paris of history books and films, the platonic ideal. I never fully fit in at home anyway, which might explain why it never occurred to me to make those sharp observations that render national borders meaningful and which I find interesting to study academically. For me, Paris was first a disappointment before it became better than I could have ever imagined. So, while I personally find descriptions of cultural difference, miscommunicaiton, and surprise endlessly fascinating, I produced few of my own. The following is what I can remember of that small lag between Paris the idea and the Paris I love and miss, the one I lived in; and decent evidence for the proposition that if you expect books to be sufficient mirrors of reality, you will either find only what you have prepared yourself to look for (ie, tourists who miss the city for the Louvre) or find none of it, either way setting yourself up for an unnecessary disappointment. Nothwithstanding the myriad of publications on French culture, there is a reason that the phrase "it had a certain...je ne sais quoi" is of French provenance and remains, even in America, untranslated, recognizable, and indefinable by definition.

I first went to Paris in July of 2008. My roommates and I had rented a flat on Boulevard St. Germain, right next to the Rue des Bernardins. Anticipation made my memories crisp: sunrise over the atlantic--I don't see sunrises very often--a fox spotted in the distance as the plane landed, the complete lack of american-style customs (lacking the paranoia of american customs procedures, mostly).

Lesson 1: Xenophobia. Attention to borders isn't ever the full measure of a nation's insularity, but it sometimes gives you a good idea. In the US, you have to fill out forms and have a chat with an official and stand in two different screening lines. In France, you hand your passport to some guy who looks at it for maybe a quarter of a second, and you're off.

I took a cab, and therefore was immediately introduced to Paris's ugly side: the run-down suburbs and then--the horror--Mexico City-caliber traffic jams. The traffic was awful, but worse, it was in the way of post-card and history-book Paris, tainting my first impressions of the seine and the place de la concorde in particular. I got to the apartment, armed with my funny-shaped key and the digicode (all keys in France, it appears, are different varieties of funny-shaped) to find a similarly jet-lagged, uncharacteristically un-coiffed Will Derringer waiting for me at the adjacent cafe. We went in.

The apartment was big by Parisian standards, but unpredictably complicated. The woman who lives there had left us a gift: a piece of cheese that probably smelled like death when it was purchased, that had been steeping in the refrigerator for two weeks and emmitted a smell capable of driving one to suicide. She had turned the gas off before leaving, and left instructions for how to turn it back on. "turn the nobs". we turned the nobs, and found that we had no hot water. it took days, and several retrospectively scary experiments with a lighter (the pilot light had gone out) to remedy the situation (by 'nobs,' it turns out, she had only meant one of them, the one on the left). all of the floorboards creeked. the woman upstairs, like clockwork, woke up at 3 am to cough the cough of a wicked witch. for the next month, I was convinced that someone in the building owned a rooster, as I heard one--a loud one--every morning. It turned out to be Will's alarm.

Sleep was for the weak; I went out for a walk. I turned up the first street I saw, and ran directly into Notre Dame. Walking along the Seine, I stumbled into a situation I was entirely unprepared for, for which I blame French textbooks. In class, you learn impractical French--I remember, clearly, learning the words for 'unemployed' and 'strike' in my first semester of French, but never the infinitely useful expressions one uses to excuse oneself politely from unpleasant company.

Lesson 2: Learn how to say "I need to go now" before venturing the streets again. Being hit on provides a wonderful chance to practice your french, but it gets weird after about a minute, and the sudden realization that your vocabulary has not developed enough to do what one would do in english ("Listen, it's been great, but I'm running late...") makes for a fun, high-stakes, racking of the brain for improvisation. In the end, I mustered an "I'm leaving." I fished it out of Manu Chao lyrics that I remembered ("Si tu devais partir"...ok. got it: "Je dois partir maintenant...") Not as polite as I would have hoped, but graciousness comes as a nuanced shade of language acquisition that I had not yet cultivated.

I went home, took a nap, then set off boldly in search of dinner with Will. We found a Croque Monsieur near the Sorbonne. It was fantastic. We then decided to try to walk to the Eiffel Tower (it looked so close on the map). we weaved from left bank to right, passed the Louvre and walked through the Tuileries, across to the National Assembly--a detour mandated by what looked like a film crew or official business--lingered on Pont Alexandre III, and exhausted, turned around. Paris seemed cluttered to us then--too many monuments seemingly piled on one another, each individually stunning but collectively straining to remain important, inundated by traffic. And the dust! Why are Parisian parks paved (wrong word, I know) with dust?

On the way home we stopped at a cafe for a glass of wine, and met a group of traveling lawyers from Texas. All of us took another bottle of wine to the Pont des Arts, and like magic, Paris became something else. It became a city of life and light, where twentysomethings get together at night to enjoy wine, play music, and pass their evenings in the middle of that historic city and--the key--despite it.

The best thing about Parisian life is that it could exist anywhere--there could be safe public spaces anywhere in the world, and people could go make their own fun there instead of going to clubs or sequestering themselves in apartments--but they DON'T exist anywhere else. The culture of enjoying oneself--very different, by the way, from the American cult of indulgence--is what the city is all about. Quality of life matters there, and is measured by far different standards from what quality of life means in the states, the contrast being that of intangible versus tangible. In the states, we value that which can be measured--material possessions, careers, vacations that allow you to come home and rattle off the list of important things seen, work. There, emphasis is placed on precisely the opposite, the ephemeral: lived experience trumping the tourist's checklist, time pleasantly spent, long dinners with good wine, time away from work--appropriately, such things are difficult to put in list form. Small, un-listable experiences and discoveries occupied most of my time thereafter. They're harder to write about.