Floor crêpes, and other Parisian adventures

This will be a long blog post, and it will hopefully compensate for my conspicuous blog neglect.

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I just returned from nine days in Paris - a work trip, with intermittent moments of play and discovery, and intense bouts of an abundance of companions and then none at all. It was busy and exciting, and afforded me some real space from the day-to-day here, even during the part of the trip spent with co-workers. And I would have honestly blogged about it every evening, but I had no reliable internet. So here we go - day by day - little thoughts on my surroundings. Some longer than others. Enjoy.

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NOV 4:
A slow acclimation after a long overnight flight and an early morning power nap. I speak French decently, though slowly, and I understand most of what I hear. But it's always the little differences that accumulate to a mountain of strangeness, and that leave me fumbling a little, as one does in dreams. I've been here before so I know the drill, but there is nevertheless a lot of quick on-your-feet rekindling of old knowledge, which is hard enough on its own but while jetlagged is mind-boggling. I almost forgot that the Metro doors don't open automatically. In fact, all doors are strange - giant things, often with ancient locks and latches and bizarre knobs to turn and twist and click. Grocery store options are many and all new, and oh, the produce is weighed before one pays. Coins involve a clumsy fumbling - no intuitive sense of shape and weight. A general adjustment of tempo.

In a matter of days, this will all feel resolved. But not yet. Right now I need to accept these awkwardnesses, and focus on staying awake so as to fall in step with my new time zone. And thankfully I have eleven companions here today to help me, supplying me with coffee, macarons, walking around looking at beautiful things, a good dinner, more coffee, wine, and laughter so hard it brought tears.

NOV 5:
I am staying in a darling little apartment in the 5th arrondisement. I stayed in this same apartment in 2006 when last I was in Paris, that time for almost a month. It's Paris, so most everything unsurprisingly looks just as I left it on my street, but there are strange absences. The internet cafes are gone, largely thanks to a wireless hotspot-type system provided by the French equivalent of Comcast, which of course I can't tap into. First the internet drove a lot of shops out of business - bookstores sometimes, video rental places often. But it's funny that now one form of internet seems to be bankrupting another. Last time I spent a lot of time in two internet cafes just a block apart - one, a dusty little hovel run by two very kind Indian men. The machines in there were old, but one of them had an American keyboard, which I appreciated as I paid by the hour and the French keyboards required a lot of the "searching and pecking" typing method -- very slow. The other cafe was more of the "cyber cafe" variety - geeky, sleeker, and full of awkward, bleary-eyed French boys in their mid- to late- teens smoking cigarettes and playing World of Warcraft for hours on end. This one was cheaper, and the owner sold me a phone card nothing short of magical, as it seemingly allowed me an endless number of minutes.

The last time I was in Paris I spent much of my trip with a dear friend, with whom I am not really in touch anymore for reasons unknown - but in the way that doesn't preclude me from still calling her a good friend, if that makes any sense at all. We were both in college and on very limited budgets, and did a lot of cooking at home and ate a lot of the cheap street food (a rarity in France) on the street next to ours, rue Mouffletard. My friend learned English as a teenager, and I am always in awe of her complete and rapid mastery of it - the kind of language intuition that leaves few traces of its secondary (or in her case, tertiary) order of acquisition. But there were these endearing moments of slippage - following the course of most languages, she occasionally referred to the ground or the street as the floor. In English this was always very charming to me, and so in my head I always thought of the street crêpes we'd eat on some evenings as "floor crêpes."

I had high hopes that by the time I returned to Paris, I'd have enough disposable income to eat out all the time and avoid succumbing to the temptation of the cheap floor crêpes. What a joke! I'm as broke as ever, and so it was floor crêpes for me again. I can't say that I really minded all that much, secretly, for really what's to hate about a crêpe filled with Nutella, Gran Marnier, and bananas? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

NOV 6:
Accents are a real bitch. It seems perfectly reasonable that when someone from Italy speaks English to me I know they are Italian, and that when someone from France speaks English to me I know they are French. Yet it nevertheless blows my mind that a well thought-out sentence and a half tumble out of my mouth en français at an art museum and I am immediately singled out as an English speaker. I can't conceive of how my French sounds to a native French speaker at all, and how I wish I could, because it would probably help me out a lot to know this.

I've realized that with French in particular, it's not only the accent, but also the intonation. American English, I've come to realize, is not very animated. But French is - it borders on songlike at points. Take the following sentence:

English: I would like a crepe with Nutella and bananas.
That's more or less how one would say it - just as it's typed up there. And if it were phrased as a question - Do you have a crepe with Nutella and bananas? - you might not know it in English. It's just so monotone sometimes.

In French, the whole thing cascades. And not necessarily with the flow of emphasizing the most important element as the sentence, as one does in German. But more as if it's following some sort of secret rhythm:
Je voudrais un crêpe avec Nutella et banane sounds more like:
Je voudrais un crêpe avec Nutella et banane.
I don't know how quite to type it, this crescendo. But I think it's key to my outing myself as a native English speaker over and over.

NOV 7:
My apartment overlooks a little square which is home to many cafés and where nightlife seems to converge on a regular basis. I've learned to love falling asleep to the noise of it, and skulking around among its (drunken) ranks with my iPod Touch, stealing internet from one of the cafés silly enough to make their password the name of their establishment. From my apartment I can always single out the Americans, not even by the very obvious - that they are speaking English - but by the way they laugh. It's hearty and boisterous and loud. Here the French hold back. Maybe laughter compensates for the lack of affect in our daily speech. Or maybe it's all posturing, and not genuine at all. I don't know. But it's different.

I cringe as I make sweeping generalizations like this, and I should say that I don't mean by this that the French aren't funny, because they can be absolutely hilarious. The differences are not universal, but they are significant enough to warrant mentioning and notice.

And on a side note: I am exploring strange new foods. Fig yogurt: surprisingly good! Take note.

NOV 8:
Today while walking along the Seine I saw something fantastic. An epic garbage collector drama unfolded before my very eyes!

I'll preface this by saying that I find French garbage fascinating for two reasons. One is that they do garbage pickup every day. I had a moment where I said, isn't that kind of excessive? But then my French friend pointed out that Paris smells a fuck of a lot better than American cities, and so I retracted my skepticism. The other thing is their outfits are hilarious to me - they basically look like deflated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-inspired raver outfits - baggy and bright, green and yellow, and covered with reflective tape of all kinds.

In any event, as I was walking along the Left Bank I was keeping good pace with a garbage truck (which, because they collect trash daily, is not the smelly behemoth that it would be in the States, so I didn't really mind). I'd get ahead by about a block as they collected trash, and then they'd catch up.

At one of the Ponts the truck stopped and the man riding on the side hopped off, gathered two bags of trash, tossed one in the back of the truck - and - the driver took off without him! The collector - still carrying one bag of trash - yelled a desperate-sounding "Non! NON!" up the street and then proceeded to do this odd, slow trudge up the block dragging a bag of trash with him.

At the next corner, he tosses that bag in the back and grabbed two more. Until this point, I had assumed that the incident on the last corner had been in error, that the driver thought the thud of the bag landing in the back was the man clambering back up on the truck. But oh how wrong I was, for at this corner the driver did the same thing again! This time he was called after not with a "Non! NON!" but with a slue of other words I shall not reproduce here, and some of which I can only guess at the meaning of, but I'm sure it was absolutely foul. With one bag of trash in hand, the garbage collector started up the hill again to meet the driver.

At this intersection the driver got out. He was doubled over with laughter - what a funny prank he thought he'd pulled. But you know who had the last laugh? The collector. Because he walked right up to the driver and punched him in the face!! The outfits, I must tell you, made this scene all the funnier. I'd show you, but googling "French garbage" called up some very disturbing images.

NOV 9:
The French are boisterous drunks, especially the young men. But unlike American college-age drunks, they aren't (for the most part) out streaking or stealing street signs or acting like total fucking assholes in any number of other ways. Instead they sing. I mean, French music is ghastly, and a bunch of inebriated French men trying to make it through as much caroling as they can before they pass out or go home means that success is a tall order. And if American men were out doing the same thing - in their case, probably singing some sort of sports song - I'd be all "shut the fuck up!!!" out the window and demand quiet sleeping time. But there is something stubbornly endearing about the French dude version of this, and sometimes I can't fall asleep for laughing at them from the safe distance of my apartment.

Lately there have been a number of songs that - what with the distance, their drunkenness, and my sleepiness - I have only understood fragments of. One night there was clearly a regional battle - a faction singing some tune with a deep, gutteral, choral "Ly - yon - naiiiis" followed by some rivals belting out a song that seems to be called "Paris, c'est magique!" More enigmatic is this other song that gets sung just about every night, and that I find so hilarious I can't pay close enough attention to the words. It appears to have the word "dix-huit" in the chorus, but I'm probably actually wrong about this. I just want to hang on to the idea that the song goes something like, "Dix-huit! Dix-huit! Blah! Blah! Blah!" In fact, I've made up tons of variations on the blah blah blah part, and I like to sing the dix-huit song to myself often and with enthusiasm as I make my coffee the following morning.

NOV 10:
Today's thoughts are brief, for I am drunk and full, and I have to knock out before I become entranced by the dix-huit song. This evening brought a culinary adventure for me - a five-course, authentic French meal with all the scary components that make this lapsed vegetarian think many a time, "Are you sure you want to put this thing in your mouth?" These moments of pause were tamped down by free-flowing red wine, and then white wine, and then the promise of a renowned cheese plate and some sort of flaming dessert with rum in it, as well as by the "when in Rome" promise I made myself when I sat down at the table. Neither before nor after (and especially during) my vegetarianism was I ever an especially adventurous carnivore, and so it felt rather odd to be willingly eating tête de veau and not just pushing it around on my plate. Same goes for the paté de foie gras and the mysterious game bird that definitely wasn't a chicken. I can't say that I'd ever do it again outside of France, and truly the reason behind the consumption of such things in the first place was simply to be good company in front of some polite company. But it's nice to know that when such situations arise, I can push the bounds of what I am normally comfortable consuming and bravely try something new. Plus, I'm not gonna lie: that paté was pretty out of this world delicious.

NOV 11:
It's Armistice Day, and just about everything is closed. I ran around all day trying to cram too much in - seeing people last-minute, seeing even more art last-minute, buying presents for my cat-sitters at the few shops open today. Now this evening is reserved for packing and a last stroll up to the Seine. Packing has afforded me the time to look at the books in the apartment I'm renting - a scholar's place, full of all sorts of interesting reading material. A quick skim of titles reveals very little overlap between my library and hers. I love this; so often I get entrenched in my field of study, and spend much time with people in the same boat - and I lose sight of just how much there is out there to read, how narrow my focus is. The apartment owner has all sorts of delightful-looking things I'll never have time to read - books about May 68, medieval chansons, gender studies, poetry, and more novels than I allow myself to buy. We have two books in common: one a book on medieval art, the other, Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? -- though my copy is in English, hers in French. The last time I was here there was a copy of Middlemarch lying around, which I began to re-read. That would have been a third book in common, but it wasn't here this trip.

It feels oddly like I've been here in Paris forever, and yet, that I haven't been able to do half of what I set out to. And I've traveled enough to know that time plays even more tricks on the other end of my journey, and that this time tomorrow when I am back in the States it will feel strangely like I was never here.

NOV 12:
This was supposed to be a thoughtful entry about leaving this beautiful city, written on my forty-minute train ride to the airport, at which I would have enough time to wander about and find the most hilarious thing in duty-free, which I would photograph and post right here. As you can see, there is no photograph, and no thoughtful post, and that is because the train to the airport was not running today. No announcements, no signs, nothing. I was willing to foot the bill for a cab but I knew better - they are hard to flag down and the traffic situation around the edge of the city is unbelievable. So instead I crossed my fingers, made friends with a lovely British couple and a Danish girl who were in the same predicament, and boarded a train to another destination, at which a French man promised me there would be a shuttle bus waiting to take me to the airport. That there was, and it took just about every curvy, windy, roundabout, slow country road to get there, stopping at two points for a drawbridge and a cow that would not move out of the middle of the road. I got to the ticket counter just about when my plane began boarding, and then I was that jackass running through the airport to my terminal. And so my trip ended, out of breath and sweaty and stuck with the misfortune that is airplane food and fifteen dollars in Euros that was supposed to buy me snacks from the airport terminal. Never again, I tell you. Next time, I leave 16 hours before my flight. So next time, the last blog entry will be better than this. I promise.