Bordeaux and Palmiers

You all might be getting tired of looking at rue Monge, which, if you frequent this blog, may seem like the only street I ever walk down. While that’s far from the truth, rue Monge and I have developed a relationship of sorts over the past few months, a relationship I never would have expected when I first encountered this street just a few short months ago.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the past few months, this last section of my life since the end of January, when I’ve lived in this odd portion of the 5th that seems to be about a 30-minute walk from everywhere I’d like to be. I walk a lot.

Why have I been thinking so much, you may ask? Because, for me, this is yet another end, albeit a temporary one: in a week, I’ll be headed out to another one of my quasi-homes, a place that long-time readers will be familiar with: Paziols. Camp starts again in just a few short weeks, and this will be my third summer falling in love with the southwest and all it has to offer.

When camp is over, Spain is next on the menu: San Sebastian to be exact. I’ll be spending two months learning the language (and learning to surf… I’m not sure whether to insert a *yikes* or a *yipeee!* here…) before coming back to Paris in early November, when rue Monge will be here to greet me again.

Rue Monge held a lot of mysteries for me when I first saw it: it was the street I needed to use to get anywhere worthwhile, and yet I spent so little time actually being on it. It’s faded into the background of my life, much in the ways that my old, familiar streets in the 7th once did, and when I finally noticed rue Monge, it was because I realized–in a strange and striking way–that it was my homing beacon, the indicator that showed me, as I came back from a stroll (or forced march, as the case may be), that I was in the homestretch, that it was nearly time for me to put up my feet in front of Euronews with a glass of rosé and be at home.

On a recent afternoon, on the way back from the grocery store, I passed this staircase. I’ve noticed it before, even spent time taking pictures of it, but on that day, I actually stopped. I put down my bulging grocery bags and sat on a ledge, pulling out a kilo of strawberries, and I ate in the sunlight.

So no, this isn’t adieu to Paris, such a terribly final goodbye. This is just “goodbye for now,” au revoir, “until we meet again.” I know that Paris will still be waiting for me when I get back, and I know that I will have many things left to explore when I do.

View Larger Map

After having lived in France for a bit more than a year, I took a school trip to Naples and fell in love.

I had always had a sneaking suspicion that I would love Southern Italy: it’s something that flows in my veins and, no matter how insignificant it may seem to some, it has always been an important part of my background.

One of the reasons I loved Naples so much was the way that religion was so much a part of daily life. It wasn’t gaudy or loud, the way religion so often is in America. Rather, in ran under and through everything, in the same way that the rest of history does. It had its place, as so many things do, beneath the conscious level of knowledge: everyone knew it was there, but like walking, talking and breathing, they took it for granted and let it languish.

France will never be a country like the Italy I experienced in Naples. France has already undergone the legislation that it took to separate Church from State, to make it a nation laique, and once you go secular, you don’t ever forget.

And yet, I wonder…

So many French people are “agnostic” or “atheist” or “nothing.” They send their children to public schools, and mass never enters their conscious existence. But what about the architecture? The Churches that appear on every corner? The art? There is an element of French history that is intertwined with Catholicism, and this is something that cannot be ignored in the same way it can in a country like America, built upon religion but since created through immigration, where no two people come from the same background.

Here, to be French is to be French, ethnically, nationally, historically. And if you’re French, you were most likely Catholic at some point, like the Irish, the Spanish, the Italians, the Mexicans. And if you were Catholic, even if you aren’t today, you might see a pile of these branches, the French answer to the palms bent into crosses that American Churches pass out on Palm Sunday and stop. And even if you didn’t go to mass that day, you may feel a bit of a twinge, a connection, in the same way I felt connected to a country I had never visited, much less lived in.

And maybe, just maybe, for no reason you could describe, you might feel called to grab a couple of branches, to carry them into the métro, to remember, just for today, the religion that got you and your people where you are today.

Some people like sunrise.

And I get that… I really do. The beginning of the day, the early morning before anyone’s awake.

But I’m not a sunrise kind of girl.

I like the sunset, the desk, the crepuscule, as the French call it. It feels like so much more of a transition to me. I remember reading sunrise being described in A Separate Peace as looking at the world through a burlap sack, something I understand. You expect sunrise to arrive with a fanfare, and it very rarely does.

Sunset creeps, but in a different way. The day grows cooler, you notice as you’re walking that the street that used to make you sweat makes you need a sweater. You see the sun getting larger, descending down behind the trees. If you’re in Paris, you start to lose it behind buildings, walking whole blocks without knowing where it is.

The parks in Paris are all gated, and all of the gates are promptly locked at dusk. Paris recognizes the sunset as an integral part of its days: nighttime in New York may be made for wanderers, but in Paris, we nighttime refugees have to find somewhere other than the welcome of a park bench for our internal monologues.

But in the spring and summer, you can just barely catch the beginning of a true sunset in the park. The policemen may be standing at the gate, ready to hustle you out the minute you get too close, but if you linger for awhile, they won’t come chase you. You can take a picture of the sun, a bright orange, hovering by the famous tower. You can turn away from it and try to forget that you’re in Paris, and just be for a moment, there in the dusk and the late sunlight.

Dusk is forgiving that way. It lets you forget everything, even who you are.

After nearly three years of living in France and writing, I’ve finally landed my first writing job in French!

It’s a blog–much like this one–whose focus is Paris and all the things to do here. That doesn’t mean I’ll be abandoning this blog, far from it–in fact, every once in awhile, I may write about the same event in both languages so that even my Anglophone readers can find out about the things I feature over there.

But if you’d like to learn more about Paris (and practice your French), feel free to stop by Parisblog.fr for reviews of events, bars and restaurants and even more Paris secrets!

Today, I’ve discussed dancing on the Seine, a rather new Paris tradition that happens every night in the 5th arrondissement around 8:30 or 9. This isn’t typical club dancing: it’s outdoor salsa, tango and swing! I’ve made up a google map so that you can find it an try if you like…

And be sure to stop by Parisblog.fr too, where you can read all about this event and more!

View Larger Map

Benjamin Fondane

(Jassy, 1898-Auschwitz, 1944)

French poet and philosopher lived in this house from April 15th 1932 to March 7th 1944.

“Remember only that I was innocent, and that, just like you, mortals on that day, I too had a face marked with anger, with pity and joy. Simply the face of a man!”

A lot of expats I know have a bone to pick with Paris.

It all has to do with the expectations you have, really. People who move to Paris, especially from the States, arrive bright-eyed and optimistic, expecting to step off the plane into some combination of Paris, Je T’aime, Amélie, An American in Paris and a little bit of the last two episodes of Sex and the City. The reality they get is a city like any other, where it can be difficult to meet people, where strangers are rude, where taxis are expensive, where the post office closes at noon for two hours.

A lot of them return home dejected: I saw quite a few classmates from the American University of Paris whose four (or less, as the case may be) years here made them jaded. They learned how to hate Paris, not love her, and while they’ll probably look back in 20 years and wonder why they didn’t stay, they never would have been truly happy living here. Not without a major attitude change, anyway.

My life in Paris has gone through several reincarnations: from the first few months, where I arrived, like my friends, ready to take on the world, the Champs-Elysées, the Bastille, St. Michel and everything in between. We went out and didn’t mind paying the exorbitant drink prices. We laughed when we got rude stares. It didn’t matter: we were in Paris.

The months went by, and several of those people left, sent back home with the memories of their perfect four months in Paris. I was leftover with a handful of others, too tired of our old way of life to go make friends with the new starry-eyed visitors, but not quite ready to give up on the city.

The Canadian had arrived as a full-time fixture by then, and his pessimism towards the city would start to creep into my psyche, leaving me forgetting that I had ever loved this city. I was ready to be done soon enough, and by the end of my first year here, all I could think of was graduation, moving on, a new place, a new city, starting over with a new romantic view on the world.

But I stayed. As everyone in cyberspace knows by now, I stayed and started dating a Frenchman, which opened up all sorts of possibilities for me here. For no matter how long you’ve been here, no matter how well you know the nooks and crannies of the city–better than a local, even, as it was in my case–for an American, the only way to truly feel integrated here is to have a group of French people who hang around you and tell you so. That’s what I wanted. That’s what I spent the first few months of this school year craving and not finding.

Another year, another leaf turned. January saw me coming back to a jumble of things that changed and morphed too quickly for me to even notice: a job I didn’t keep, new people and friends I didn’t know stopping by, leaving for months at a time, reappearing in my life. I left the job to wander the city, and it slowly crept back into my head. Without even noticing, while waiting for something better to happen, I fell in love with Paris again.

Because that’s the only way to do it, in the end: expectations are costly, and they leave you dissatisfied and wanting more. In the end, Paris comes to the rescue just when you thought you didn’t need her at all.

My walks are mainly about this idea: about welcoming Paris back into my life, about expecting nothing. I don’t go to the Louvre or the Musée d’Orsay, even though that’s what I promised myself when I did end the job: to see the things that eveyone who moves here always says they’ll do every day and that they usually leave never having done.

Instead, I head towards places like this: an outdoor sculpture garden I had never known about, despite it being just on the other side of the Jardin des Plantes that is a stone’s throw away from my apartment in the fifth. I take pictures to remember, later, when I think that Paris and I are through and it’s time to move on to greener pastures, that the pastures are pretty damn green right where I am.

View Larger Map

Musée de la Sculpture en Plein Air

Quai Saint Bernard, 5ème arrondissement

I found these pictures lurking in my iPhoto… I can’t believe I’ve never talked about Ypres before.

I’ve mentioned before that when I was 14, I spent several months in the north of France. What I may not have mentioned is that my baby sister did the same thing seven years later.

It was so strange to be back in my old town this past January, when I rode the train an hour to the north to pay her a visit. It was as though she was living my life: going to the same school, seeing the same sights. Rewinding my life and seeing what it had been like at 14 through my own eyes at 21 was strange, to say the least.

Even her host father reminded me of mine from 2001: he cared so much about my baby sister growing to love the North.

The North can be a hard place to love, especially in the winter, as the popular film Bienvenue Chez les Ch’tis showed audiences recently. The North is often viewed as a cold place: not only temperally, which is true, but also in its attitude. People from the North of France are caricatured as drunks, as stupid… it’s not a flattering portrait to say the least, and I have no idea where it comes from.

The Northern French, like the North of France, just takes a bit of getting used to. You may have to try a little bit harder to fall in love than you did on the Riviera, where sun and beaches seem to make everything easy and friendly and fun. Les provençaux may seem friendly when you first meet them, but it was the Northerners who welcomed me into their home and made me a part of their family without a second thought. My host father dug deep into the heart of the North for me, and when I visited my sister, I noticed that hers was doing the same.

One afternoon while I was visiting for the weekend, he, the host mother, my sister and I drove about an hour to Ypres, just over the Belgian border. We wandered through the old town, got a hot cup of coffee when our fingers got too cold, meditated over the memorial for victims of war.

I took endless pictures of the Northern architecture, austere and daunting, and I noticed that my baby sister was a far better photographer than I would ever be. In the end, it wasn’t my life she was living, I finally realized. Even if the experience seemed the same, a bizarre déjà vu, she was making it her own. Seven years later, she was far more grown up than I had been at her age, when I had first arrived in France.

I don’t know what the future holds for her: if she’ll decide to expatriate, like I did, or if she’ll follow another dream back in the States. I don’t know if she’ll write about her experiences years later, like I have a tendency to do, or if her gorgeous pictures will be enough to send her back in time, to the three months where she got to live in the North of France, where she learned that not everything is about Paris, where she, too, for three months, became a part of a Northern French family.

I’ve been pretty bad about updating this blog… will you forgive me if I say I’ve had a lot on my plate? I thought I was going to be traveling to an entirely new place–an entirely new continent for me–with new stories that I would have shared with you on this blog and new pictures, and then those plans fell through and I’ve been working on coming up with new plans to fit in where the old ones should have gone.

Regardless of whether that trip happens, I do have another trip to write about–one that we took over one of the three long weekends that the French are graced with in the month of May. Alex and I decided to head all the way to the Basque region of France, right next to Spain, to do some exploring.

When we booked the trip, we were looking forward to the warm weather that we assumed one of the last weekends of May would bring. I knew that I wanted to try surfing for the first time, and we booked a hotel right on the beach (the highly recommended Hotel Valencia–well-priced and with a bar beneath that looks out on the water). Unfortunately, we only had one great weather day–a day we devoted to at least trying to learn how to surf.

There was a silver lining, which was our decision to take the boat across the water ten minutes to Spain and the Spanish town of Fuenterrabia. It rained the entire time we were there, so we spent most of our time holed up in different Basque bars–not a complaint, considering that the Spanish Basque region is one of the best in the whole country for tapas, or, as they’re called in the Basque language, pinxtos. 

Hendaye and Fuenterrabia are small towns–there isn’t a lot of tourism to be done, and in the summertime, Hendaye becomes a tourist destination mainly because of the family-friendly beaches on the Atlantic, which are also a great place for surfers to come. Although the weather wasn’t ideal (an understatement… on our walk back to the train station, we huddled under a bus shelter to wait out a hail storm!) I really enjoyed our stay in Hendaye and our visit to Fuenterrabia… I highly recommend visiting, especially in the high season.

It’s funny how you sometimes don’t see things until you’re ready to see them.

I walk down rue Monge most days… nearly every day. I’ve gotten to know the stores and the market days by heart. I know what to expect: nothing surprises me on rue Monge.

Just a little bit down rue Monge is a turnoff for rue de Navarre, which leads to the back entrance of the Roman arena I featured on here a while back. Other than that, there’s nothing of real interest down this street, so I usually walk right past it.

But one recent afternoon, when my headphones had run out of batteries, I ended up paying much more attention to my usual walk than I do on a normal day, and I actually noticed rue de Navarre.

And I noticed this. A hidden metro station.

I suppose it’s not really all that hidden. It’s not even an unfamiliar station: just another entrance to one that I never use at Place Monge. It’s close enough to home that I would never ride the metro to get there, but far enough away that I would never get off and walk home. I don’t think I’ve ever even been inside the stop, though God knows how many times I’ve walked past the other entrance, which is right next to the Place Monge market.

There was something about this station that struck me, and it wasn’t just the fact that I’d never noticed it before. I love the sign, which seems so old-fashioned to me: I’ve never seen one like it anywhere in the city. I’d like to know who uses this exit, which seems so useless to me, when the other is right in the middle of a bustling marketplace.

It’s nice to know sometimes that even my most familiar haunts in Paris still hold surprises for me.

View Larger Map

I know. It looks daunting. But don’t worry… it’s not all that hard.

In comparison with those nice, easy to read métro and RER maps posted on the sides of every métro stop in Paris, the bus map kind of looks like it’s all over the place… which it is. But this is not a good reason to avoid taking the bus: I did for the first year I lived here, and you miss out on a lot by making all of your travel the underground type.

Understanding the entire bus system is daunting and can take months. But starting to take buses is a great way to get around and see parts of Paris you would never see: often, visitors to Paris think of the layout of the city more in terms of which locations are on the same métro line and not where they are actually geographically placed. By riding the bus, you may discover an easier way to get from point A to point B than switching trains three times, and you’ll see a lot of things that many tourists never find the time to see: ivy covered buildings, local cafés, schools, playgrounds and lots more.

The first step to understanding the buses is to understand even one line. Go to the bus stop outside your hotel/hostel/friend’s apartment on whose couch you’re crashing and take a look at the simple, easy to read map on the inside of the bus shelter: this one, in contrast to that tangle of colored lines I’ve posted up top, will only have stops on the line (or lines) that stop at that particular stop. You can easily see which direction the bus will be going, and, in most cases, to go the opposite way, you simply cross the street. Once you get to know one line, find it on the larger, confused bus map… doesn’t it make a lot more sense now?

Another great way to get to know the bus system in Paris is to use the RATP website: ratp.fr. When you land on the home page, there are two boxes located under the title “se déplacer en Ile-de-France,” getting around in Ile-de-France. Simply type in your location on the left and your destination on the right, select the appropriate button for what you have entered (addresse/address, station/métro stop, lieu/place of interest), and click the button labeled itinéraire. A new page will pop up, asking you to click the hyperlink at the top of the page, which will open a pop-up window that will give you the easiest way to get to your destination based on the current time. To look for earlier and later modes of travel, use the précedent (earlier) and suivant (later) buttons at the top of the page. There are also options to change your results based upon fewest transfers, fastest way of getting to your location, shortest walking time and even which modes of transport you want to use (for example, if you would like to use the bus and tram, but not the métro or RER).

This site is fairly user-friendly, and there’s even the possibility to translate it into your native tongue (look for the flags at the upper right-hand corner of the page).

To ride the bus, you can either use one ticket from your carnet de dix (pack of ten), valid for riding the bus, métro, RER within the city and the tram, or you can just swipe your NaviGo (this is a cheap way to get around: one week of unlimited travel for zone one is about 20 euros… you can’t even get two carnets for that!)