Bordeaux and Palmiers

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.

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Musée de la Sculpture en Plein Air

Quai Saint Bernard, 5ème arrondissement

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