While sitting today on the sunny but chilly balcony outside our living room, I started to reflect on the last month in Paris and how things have been going so far. Now that the initial excitement has worn off, a bit of homesickness has set in and I have a few criticisms of Paris that are totally rational and non-crazy:
- The birds sound different here. No magpies serenading me in the morning.
- There is a distinct absence of overhead tram wires. It's just wrong.
- There is hardly any traffic on the roads in the centre of Paris.
- What cars there are on the road appear to be driven entirely by lunatics. Red lights are more or less optional and the best way to cross the road is to fix a driver with an intense, penetrating stare and attempt to trot across the road while retaining one's dignity. Also, the acceptable distance between parked cars is so minuscule as to be as close as possible to 0cm.
- There are very few hideous skyscrapers. The buildings here are too nice!
- There seems to be a special code for pedestrians that I have no yet been able to figure out. In many parts of the city centre the pavement is exactly wide enough for one person and one dog. The best place to walk quickly seems to be in the bike lane.
- On dogs, there is dog crap everywhere. A recent survey revealed that only 60% of Parisians bother to pick up after their dogs, so trying to avoid the piles and the haughty French people hogging the pavement armed with umbrellas takes on the quality of a death sport.
- Another fun death sport: trying to negotiate your way up six stories of stairs in pitch darkness while still looking good enough to enter the party once you get up there.
- The best place, according to French people, to converge and stand in large groups is wherever the tightest bottleneck in a given thoroughfare happens to be. Seriously, people seem to go out of their way to stand exactly where they will be the most inconvenient to passers-by.
- Everyone smokes here. Everyone.
- The trees here are wrong.
- People don't understand how anyone could possibly like rain. Coming from a city where we've tried everything short of rain dances to cause water to fall from the sky, and where storms of rain are exhilarating and rare, I can't get used to the near-permanent drizzle and people saying “oh, no! It's raining!” I've even taken to using an umbrella, and it's even a good idea to carry one around if it's sunny. Rain falls without any big, showy spectacle to announce its imminent arrival, it just kind of drops from the sky in what I consider to be a rather conceited and obnoxious fashion.
- French people are, of course, very keen on their language and want foreigners to do them the quite justifiable courtesy of bothering to learn a few phrases before arriving. But they seem to prefer a rather passive-aggressive sentiment in this direction. Even when I know I'm saying something a. grammatically correct and b. polite, most of the time people will look at me with scorn and reply in English, or, occasionally, refuse to speak to me at all and call over their specialist anglophone friend/coworker to deal with the ignorant foreigner.
I don't want to give the wrong impression. I love this city. Now that I can walk to the Centre Pompidou, to university, to the Tuileries without getting lost, I feel I can really appreciate the ambience and the cultural differences that make the place so charming for an anglophone. I also love its imperfections, the social problems that make it so easy to compare it unfavourably to my homeland. For example, the government is trying to implement a scheme whereby Roma (gypsy) people are deported if they commit even a minor crime. Many Roma are, of course, French citizens and no longer live the lifestyle of their ancestors. It's 2010 and they're scared of gypsies. They also don't like working. There are huge protests that periodically grind the city to a halt and block off large areas around my home because the government has proposed extending the working life of French citizens to age 60. There was also a protest outside my local supermarket by employees who resented being asked to work on Sundays. I have learnt not to expect anything to be open ever. I was prepared for things to be closed on Sundays, but most of the supermarkets, banks, shops etc are closed on Mondays too, or, it seems, whenever they feel like it. There's also usually a lunch hour of about an hour and a half which takes place at an apparently arbitrary time. The shop selling readers for my classes was only open for 30 minutes to an hour every day, meaning that a person halfway back in the enormous queue might well wait for an hour and then not be able to buy their books. Fortunately I arrived 30 minutes early and didn't have to wait as long, but it still had a Soviet feel to it. I have learnt several important words vital to my survival in France, for example, citron vert (lime), epilation (hair removal) and gendarmes (riot police). I am also trying to learn a few pieces of slang and a few words in Verlun, the language created in the outer suburbs for the express purpose of being incomprehensible. Fortunately, the language is mostly comprised of words spoken backwards, for example, femme becomes meuf, but it's still confusing. I would equate it to attempting to read the comment board of a Kanye West video on Youtube in another language, written entirely by people with defective space bars.
I blame most of my current malaise on the absence of paid work, and therefore having much more time on my hands than I am accustomed to. No wonder Western capitalism is structured in order to make people work as many hours as possible, without the mindless toil of 8 hours in a projection booth every couple of days I have become entirely too observant and cynical.
* * *
Aaaand we're back. Apologies for the brief interruption caused by a few days of illness, but I'm feeling a bit better now. Anyway, my classes are going pretty well. My main stress at the moment is having to do an expose for almost every subject, that is, a super-formalised oral presentation on a given topic. I have done one so far and it went fairly well, but I have one on Monday too which is a bit more stressful because I have to do with two other human beings, and it's on the Bauhaus movement, something I'd never previously heard of. But apart from assessment everything is going well. My favourite class so far is Sacred and the Profane, mainly because the teacher is really engaging and doesn't mind the occasional diversion. However, I think I'm getting a bit sick of being a student. Something about being in classes with a bunch of 18-year-old second year students makes me want to escape. What's more, with the exception of a handful of international students, almost, everyone expresses completely conventional and non-interesting opinions. Like “communism is a really cool philosophy, but it can never be properly implemented.” Or “people should be able to express whatever faith they want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone.” I don't mind people holding such banal opinions, as long as they don't talk about them at length.
My cultural experiences are more promising. I went to an opera last night! Actually, I was hanging out with this guy Matthieu who is doing a language exchange type thing with me. At 7:10 I expressed a desire to see an opera. At 7:30 we were climbing the stairs of the metro two at a time and arriving at the Opera Bastille. Wagner's “Phantom vessel” (? I don't know the English translation) was on, which is a hugely popular show, and the tickets were sold out, and besides would have cost 80 euros. So by affecting a casual manner we managed to insinuate ourselves past the ticket collectors and found a space to sit down on the edge of a box, almost looking straight down into the pit. I was amazed. It was a Wednesday night, but the enormous room was packed! They really love their opera here. It was pretty good, if I'm any judge.
On Saturday night I experienced culture in the form of an all-night modern-art orgy. The evening began with dozens of other exchange students, drinking wine on the Pont des Arts, followed by us all stumbling, crocodile-fashion, in the direction of various modern art installations. It was Paris's Nuit Blanche, and the inner-city was packed. Thousands of people! The highlight was gradually forcing our way through the crowds on Ile de la Cite, where I finally saw inside Notre Dame cathedral. There was an incredible light show set to music which lit up the stained glass windows.
In summary, things are pretty good. And things that aren't pretty good are getting there. Now I must finish this up and find some vegetables to eat that I hopefully won't throw up. Urgh.
Oh, and by the way, at this moment I'm wearing black jeans, a black turtle-neck top and a black beret. Sartre stylez.
