J'habite Ici

I don't like Mondays. I'm up at 6, on the metro by 7, in Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois at 8, where I wait in the cold for a bus to take me to school. This is normally not a very fun thing to do, but it being Monday, I'm invariably on a totally different schedule from staying up incredibly late on the weekends. My friends and I all do this -- sometimes we're actually out, other times we are on Skype. Gotta love that time difference. So anyway, by Monday morning, I'm a zombie, and that's when I get to go teach children. I then have two days off and it's back to work on Thursday and Friday. It's a strange schedule. However, yesterday afternoon I got on the metro to go to my yoga class, and when I got off in Montmartre, an unexpected feeling came over me. There wasn't anything special about that moment -- really, not at all, I was bleary-eyed from going out the preceding two nights, and shuffling around in my sweatshirt, and I had taken that route so many times, but as I walked out of the metro, I realized that that was exactly the point. Paris is just where I live now. When I first got here, I had visions of never dressing down, and flitting around the city having deep thoughts and being serendipitous. But this is not something you can keep up perpetually. Not if you actually live here. It becomes more of something you do when you have time for it. Sooner or later, you find yourself wearing a sweatshirt in public on your way to yoga class. Harried. Not smooth. And it was a weird feeling, because I was rushing to my class in Montmartre passing these Haussman buildings and the costume shops you see in "Amelie," and it felt like such an unspecial, ordinary, commonplace moment that could have happened anywhere, except it was in Paris. And that in itself was good to know. I am never going to be Parisian, and living in a different culture means tiny frustrations every day, and the missing people and feeling the distance from home never really goes away, but it was a moment where I just caught myself comfortable, and thought, Okay. This is home. I live here. There was nothing glamorous or stereotypically Parisian about that moment, and in a way, that was the beauty of it.

On Saturday night, one of my friends and I watched "Paris Je T'Aime" and made a huge salade nicoise. On Sunday, post-yoga, over cafe au lait, we started talking about these small moments where you really do feel comfortable here. Like maybe you're in love with Paris and it loves you back. They're so mundane. Perhaps because in a city so full of elegance and history, the real surprises come from ordinary things.