paris, in anecdotes

I've now spent, collectively, three months in Paris over the last year; three months and a week in France (I went to Lyon for a week last October), and am preparing to add another month to the counter shortly. Writing coherently about the experience has proven impossible, but I've found that the small observations I've made have come to mean a lot to me personally, and in the interest of not losing them all in the abyss of facebook status updates, where most of them are now, I'd reflect a bit in a random, rapid-gunfire way here.

1. gun metaphors are very american, and I had no idea how often that imagery is the first place my mind goes to, even though I've never actually even touched one of the damned things. riding shotgun. shotgun wedding. shotgunning (as in, a joint). rapid-gunfire expressions. etcetera. the french don't ride shotgun: they ride "helper".

2. 15 august, 2009: I saw a shooting star while picnicing with some friends on the tip of Ile St. Louis. It passed from the east, and disappeared behind the Hotel de Ville. I'd never seen one before.

3. Language becomes endlessly interesting when your dignity becomes dependent on one you're shaky in. In movies in Paris, when they're in English, I read the subtitles while I watch. Often, that's the interesting bit about movies to me, the point of going becomes comparing what is said with what is translated. I went to the Parc de la Villette for the Ciné en plein air this summer to watch Mulholland Drive, a movie that I don't fully understand even in English. The translation for "that's a lot of baloney" is "that's a lot of flan." and "little dawgie", as in "Git along little dowgie" translates to "get along, Calamity Jane".

4. Understanding books or discussions in French about history or science is way easier than understanding anything else. Nuclear reactors, for example. My friend told me all about them one morning, and now I know how they work.

5. things I never expected to find dubbed on french tv: cops, jerry springer, cops, the steve erkle (I don't remember the show's real name or the guy's spelling) show, and a variety of soft-core porn from somewhere in non-latin-based-language europe (as far as I can tell). also, the porn comes on at like 8pm on sundays.

6. French refuses to allow itself to be forced, at least from me. The second it becomes unnatural to speak in French, say to an American friend who I meet in Paris, the verbs refuse to conjugate themselves in my head before they come out of my mouth, the pronouns become jumbled and out of order, and I become an idiot. Language is personal. I can speak french to person X, because I've only ever known them in French. Not with person Y, whom I have known in English.

7. The reason for this, as Hannah (French, but with the same relationship with New York that I have with Paris) recently explained to me, is that one becomes a different person in a different language. It's true, and it's no less an authentic part of onesself than the original version, but it means that different Natalies interact with people depending on whether they know me in French or English. Switching feels artificial, though existing as both does not. It also explains why missing a place can feel as intense as missing a person--a little bit of me stays behind when I come home, and only a handful of people ever know that bit. In English, I'm funny in a caustic kind of way, and fairly cynical; in French, I'm optimistic in a detached kind of way and when I succeed in being amusing it usually comes without the wit.

8. Americans curse in casual conversation way more than the French. It has become mildly embarrassing to me. But I never do it in French.

9. The historical geography of Paris is almost universally lost on the people who are lucky enough to live there. I wonder how they see their city.

10. Douche (as in, 'that guy's such a douche') and Sleazy are the most difficult words to explain in French. Douche, mostly because the connection between their word for shower and a person who's intrinsically, and therefore unintentionally, an asshole is hard to explain; sleazy because, well, when in France...

11. The French are not rude. Not by a New York standard, at any rate.

12. French books print the table of contents in the back, rather than the front, and the titles printed on the spine of books face the opposite direction from Anglo-American ones.

13. Dogs in Paris do not seem to require leashes to behave.

14. milk, chicken, vagina, sandwich, hermaphrodite: masculine nouns.

15. army, masculinity, indecisiveness: feminine nouns.