OMG IT'S YOU!

Today I spoke to Agnes Varda in the street in my neighborhood. This is incredible. I knew she lived around here, but I've been to her store and I've wandered around Denfert Rochereau and I've never seen her. So, today I finally went to see "Les Plages d'Agnes," her movie that's been playing at the Denfert cinema forever. A friend told me she sometimes introduces the movie, so I looked around the cinema from the balcony hoping to spot an old woman with two-toned hair. No dice.

The movie was good. She had a lot of locations in the neighborhood, so on the way home, I wandered down Rue Daguerre, where I passed her house (used in the movie!) -- it's right across the street from her store. I stopped for a moment in front of it, thinking how maybe I could camp out at the cafe across the street and wait to see her, when I turned around and there she was! Coming out of her store to cross the street to come home. I stared at her awkwardly, and then we had a conversation:

Me: You're Agnes Varda?
Agnes Varda: Yes.
Me: I just saw your movie!
AV: Which one?
Me: "The Beaches of Agnes"!
AV: Where?
Me: At Denfert.
AV: Did you like it?
Me: Yes!
AV: We're right in front of the courtyard in that movie, you know.

At this point I felt like I should probably head home, so I turned around to do just that, when:

AV: How many people were there?
Me: What?
AV: How many people were there? 5? 10?
Me: Ten.
AV: (in the cutest way possible) Oh, c'est sympa!

Then I headed home and she went into her house. I smiled at everyone on the walk home.

And I did not get the gender of film wrong.

Paris, je crois en toi

I just got home from a dinner at some family friends' apartment in the 13th, not far from where I used to live. It was really nice to see them again, and really nice to understand everything that was said at dinner. I started thinking about my list on the way home.

I like making lists a lot, although I don't always cross the things off of my lists. But given how little time I have left in Paris, I just revisited an old list of things I wanted to do before leaving Paris, and it's just silly to look at now. So many of these things ended up being kind of impractical or boring or just not the things that I love about Paris, which I stumbled into for the most part. In any case this is it:

see Agnes Varda at Denfert-Rochereau (not for lack of trying)
write at Les Deux Magots (one of Ernest Hemingway's hangouts)(this seems so touristy to me now, I've walked past it many times)
go running in Luxembourg Gardens (not as romantic as it would seem; there is traffic on the way)
buy Ben Simon sneakers(naturally, I accomplished the shopping goals)
see old French movies in theatres(eh, they weren't French, but I've seen a lot of old movies, so I think I can cross this off
go to Musee d'Orsay, Musee du Quai Branly, Jeu de Paume, Fondation Cartier
go to the Brigitte Bardot exhibition(I missed this one. Tant pis!)
ride a Velib' around my neighborhood
learn how to make lasagna, enchiladas, and a crustless pear tart(I didn't do this but our oven broke, so I don't really care...)
eat Senegalese food again
go to The Red Wheelbarrow (English-language bookstore in the Marais)(This just sounds really boring and touristy to me now)
find a third job(two tutoring jobs!)
traveling: Amsterdam/Berlin/Prague with one of my oldest friends from home (coming up in February), London, maybe Barcelona
Bikram yoga in Montmartremore trips to the Butte de Montmartre
see a movie at the film institute
drink cheap wine beside the Seine
go out for onion soup and cafe creme at the brasserie near my metro stop
have a picnic in Parc Montsouris
cardboard box dinner parties
go to the top of the Eiffel Tower
visit Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway's houses
go out for moelleux au chocolat and ice cream sundaes
visit the Centre Pompidou permanent collection for free with my visa
get a Jean Seberg haircut and frolick around Paris in a red dress(Not quite Jean Seberg, but it is really short)
read a book on a bench in Parc Montsouris

And this is my new list of things I want to do before I leave Paris in two weeks:

go hunting in the vintage stores in the Marais
go back to Musee d'Orsay to see the portrait of Berthe Morisot looking badass again
Cluny Museum
ride a Velib'
blueberry pancakes at Breakfast in America
go back to the Pompidou permanent collection
see more old movies at the Filmotheque du Quartier Latin
pick up coffee at Starbucks and lounge in the Tuileries
photography the quartier
eating: felafel at L'As du Felafel in the Marais, crepes at Le Petit Grec in Rue Mouffetard, massive amounts of pastries from Dominique Saibron and my neighborhood boulangerie, cafe cremes, pastry and coffee at Miss Manon in the Marais, salade nicoise/Orangina at a brasserie, picnics, and tons of street food...
go on the Left Bank writers walk mapped out by Lonely Planet (hi, I'm a nerd, and, also, what up Ernest Hemingway's old house, salut, Edith Wharton's place!)
picnic in Parc Montsouris
Indian food in the Indian quartier near Gare du Nord
work on the chapbook in the Cafeotheque and La Mer a Boire (favorite cafes)
running in Parc Montsouris
Catacombs
SEE Agnes Varda, or at least her movie, "Les Plages d'Agnes," playing perpetually at the movie theatre near where she lives at Denfert Rochereau
Berlin part deux
see people I can only see in Paris
cook black beans and rice and pancakes on the stove top in my kitchen
go back to Bikram yoga if it's not prohibitively expensive
shopping: Uniqlo, espadrilles, H&M, etc.
get my short hair niced up by Daniel of the Rue des Malesherbes Franck Provost, the best hair stylist in Paris
read a book beside the Seine
buy presents for people I need to buy presents for
do nice things for the people who have helped me immeasurably since I moved here: dishes and cooking for the roommate, flowers and massive thank-yous for the family friends, declarations of undying devotion to my friends, etc.

When I look at this list I get really excited for the next two weeks. And really glad that I've gotten a chance to get to know Paris to the point where I even know the things on this list exist. And I'm really hoping that I'll have an Agnes Varda sighting, although I would probably say something dumb, like, I'd get the gender of film wrong. In front of Agnes Varda. Which -- who am I kidding? -- would be AWESOME.

Mostly I'm grateful for the people. Who would have thought you could make a family out of time spent over small cups of coffee and hours in parks and watching soccer games and half-understood conversations? And I'm grateful for the Paris I've discovered beyond the one I fell in love with when I was 17. Sure, the village-y neighborhood my aunt and uncle live in is probably the most beautiful, vibrant place in the world, but it's nice to know where to find the cheap Indian food and where to stalk Agnes Varda and what cafes will allow you to work on poems at a table for hours. It's not like living abroad is ever easy, and I still have a lot of angst over what happens when I come home. But I guess once we peel back the imagined Paris and the years of dreaming, we all have to make our own versions of Paris. This is mine. I believe in it.

Paris, je t'aime?

No. Paris, je fucking t'aime.

That's more like it.



(Latest favorite metro song.)

La demoiselle et le soleil

If there is a better feeling than that which accompanies being 23, drinking a Dutch beer in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont at 4:30 in the afternoon with two friends while eating Petit Ecolier cookies, lying in the grass looking up at blue sky while smoking a Gauloise (yes, smoking is bad, I don't do it, but it was to celebrate), and watching children run around brandishing fake guns and chasing after each other while a friendly Parisian sun shines down on it all with work finished last week and a few weeks left to enjoy Paris, then it can only be playing soccer with aforementioned people and random kids inside of a cave beside a waterfall in the same park around 5:30. Although I can't say for sure what time it was, because I left my watch at home.

I'm on vacation this week. My parents were supposed to be here, but couldn't because of the volcano in Iceland and subsequent ash cloud looming over the continent and subsequent cancellation of transatlantic flights. So instead of biking through Normandy with my mom and dad, I'm spending this week with my Paris friends, doing Paris things, with the knowledge that I'm coming home soon, so I only have to budget three more weeks, and also with the sense of relief that only comes from surviving a truly crappy job. On Monday I finally went shopping with a friend of mine, and then we had delicious Mediterranean food at a place in the Marais with terrible service. We talked and ate and complained at our sidewalk table until after the sun went down. On Tuesday at the Parc des Buttes Chaumon, we watched kids run around and torture each other. We had to wear our sunglasses. And it was t-shirt weather.

Today I went back to Belleville to plan a trip with a friend. We met at the best cafe in Paris, right next to Parc de Belleville. It has ginger juice that tastes like Dakar, cheap coffee, and cheap platters of cheese and meat, outdoor seating on a quiet corner in Belleville, and it's kind of hidden as well. I'm really starting to love Paris's more fringey places. Belleville is out of the way, and it's full of poor people and hipsters. It has excellent parks, the aforementioned best cafe in Paris, and a view of the Eiffel Tower. It also has little Turkish grocery stores where you can find black beans and rice and all manner of deliciousness. The old men who run them are usually friendly and French is their second language too, so no getting corrected on the proper gender of, say, a bag of rice. I kind of like the unattractive parts of Paris. In some ways, they're the best. Although my pretty little quartier is nice too.

And I'm going back to Berlin next Thursday, then Seattle on May 10. The time has gone by fast, although at times it felt glacial.

So, to date, the best memories I have of Paris:
1. the afternoon spent in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont
2. the first French party I went to, where they played "Rock the Casbah" and one of my best friends and I drank gin and talked to French boys
3. that night I went to the movies alone, saw a homeless man get treated cruelly, gave him a euro coin, and thought about how much this year has changed me
4. standing in front of Notre Dame with my parents and Owen on Christmas Eve
5. the entire weekend I spent in the UK
6. ditto Berlin
7. the moment my class of 7-year-olds started rushing me for hugs and good-bye bisous on my last day teaching them -- when one of the little girls said, "Tu vas nous manquer, Megane!" ("We are going to miss you.") I just about lost it
8. any time anyone referred to me as "la demoiselle." I don't care if this is belittling. I think it's cute.
9. watching a video installation outside Centre Pompidou with someone I had just met on Nuit Blanche in October and knowing that we were going to be friends
8. coming back from Italy and realizing that I could speak French
9. going to the top of the Eiffel Tower with Michelle on her last night in Paris
10. writing in cafes for hours for no other reason than I feel like writing some poetry

This list is clearly incomplete.

It's been a weird week since I was supposed to be in Normandy with the family, but it's also been a good week. This post-work time in Paris has this vibe of revelry. It's like carnivale. Like, okay, we made it. We did the hard part. Now we can just enjoy the intensity of being 23 and in Paris until it's time to go home and face the reality of a job and saving money.

And in the sun, Paris is a different city. After a gray winter and a crappy job, I'm ready for it. Here comes the sun.

Weekend in the Homeland, or, Hitsville UK

(I originally wrote this on Sunday, April 11, 2010 at 10:07 p.m.)

I’m on a train between London and Paris so this post will not be in realtime. I’m listening to “Johnny Appleseed” by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, and I already miss England. My Eurostar ticket was my birthday present from my parents, and it’s probably the best birthday present I have ever received. I arrived Friday night in London, found a bus to Oxford (I actually miss long bus rides!), and met up with one of my friends from Smith who’s doing a master’s there. We found dinner (quesadillas!) in a pub, and then on Saturday we walked all over Oxford (There are tiny sculptures of baby dragons! And rowboats on the Isis, which is part of the Thames! There is a mound no one is allowed to climb on! There is a college called Jesus! There is a college called Magdalen, but it’s pronounced Maudlin! I thought that was pretty funny…) then spent very little money on a lot of clothing at Primark, which is like Forever 21 with H&M styling and Wal-Mart prices. And it’s British. In other words, the holy grail for those of us who make our living (ha) teaching English to French kids, or are working on postgraduate degrees in very expensive England but still like clothing. I finally got a blazer so I can look like every other girl in Paris, and a purse for 3 pounds. I am not kidding. It was kind of a madhouse, but it was worth it.

We capped off the day with a walk into North Oxford and half-pints at a pub in a meadow that had everything in common with the site of Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first birthday except for fireworks and actual hobbits. We sat outside and watched cows bob across the field, surrounded by babies tugging prayer flags and chasing each other with toy guns while their parents drank some pints and a hen party (bachelorette party) raged in the background. The women in attendance wore fuzzy pink antennae. It was a good look. A bluegrass band played CCR covers. “Bad Moon Rising” never sounded so good. 

We then made our way to a new pub for half pints of cider and veggie burgers stacked with pickles and curry mayo with baskets of fries. We sat under walls decorated with records by the Smiths and the Sex Pistols and They Might Be Giants beside armchairs, wood furniture, and bookshelves and talked about the Clash and life after Smith and that particularly scary prospect that it is the future. Especially for me, MFA school reject. But things are looking okay, actually. I have my job at 826 and a place to live in Seattle and friends I am really excited to see pretty soon actually. I’m going to spend a year writing, working, earning and saving money, and figuring things out. I’m actually excited for it. And I might reapply to schools in the fall if that’s what I want to do. We’ll see. I like the openness of it all. For once, I feel like I’m not on anyone else’s clearly-defined track to such nebulous concepts as fulfillment and success. And that feels kinda nice. Okay, when I’m honest with myself, a lot nice.

So back to Oxford. We ended up eating Ben & Jerry’s (MY FELLOW COUNTRYMEN HOW I HAVE MISSED THEE) Phish Food and watching “Taking Woodstock,” which featured upstate New York heavily, which is none too far from the old alma mater, aka the piece of my heart I left in Massachusetts. Back at the Jesus College house, I listened to “Sandinista!” and read Kavalier & Clay as the sounds of the university and locals out at pubs rustled in through the half-open window.

It was a good day.

Sunday was London. After picking up coffee at an honest to God real coffee shop (France! Look what England can do! You can do it too!) and Marks and Spencer sandwiches, we hopped back on the Oxford Tube, had a picnic in Hyde Park (full of daffodils!), saw Westminster Abbey from the outside, rifled through the goods on display at an outdoor book market (I am not kidding—I found a volume of Alan Bennett’s diaries and was filled with giddy glee and nostalgia for my seminar on him that I took in my last year at Smith.), and then went to the Tate Modern, where I saw a collection of interesting photos taken by Bruce Davidson in the New York subway. It was interesting because I often think of how cool it would be to photograph people on the Paris Metro. It’s such a strangely public, somewhat threatening everyday place where everyone is thrown together out of what is essentially necessity. So cool to see it documented in his photographs. The photos were the highlight. Seeing Andy Warhol stuff for real was cool too. They also had some Pierre Bonnard paintings, which I love as well. It was a quick visit, but we did a lot and we had a lot of fun.

And I was really struck by how quickly at home I felt in England. No language barrier, people are friendly, and there are just a lot of small things about it that I am completely enchanted by. For example, almost obsessively detailed signage (example: Please put your dogs on leashes in this area, because otherwise there is a chance they may disturb the waterfowl, which include pelicans—only a little exaggerated, en fait). It was such a comfortable place. Different enough to feel like a different country, similar enough to feel right. There’s a lot of square-ish architecture which reminded me of Smith, real coffeeshops, video stores, highways that look like the ones at home, cheap lip balm at Boots (does not exist in Paris)…and then there are the bookstores, the Oxford University colleges, the history, the literature. I mean, it should be no surprise that I love England. I was an English major. My favorite authors are British. English literature has been known to make me cry/shiver/salivate. I like things like clever wordplay and absurdly detailed signs. I actually laugh at these things. I love Virginia Woolf and Alan Bennett and I’ve been a fan of Jane Austen since I was fourteen. The Clash is my favorite band. So of course I like England. There’s also that whole thing where it’s the homeland.

Still, I wasn’t really expecting to get so excited by just seeing things like the Victoria line to Brixton—“Brixton! Like ‘The Guns of Brixton’! I need to take a picture! On a subway platform!”

This is probably what I get for waiting until the age of 22 to go to England.

I even liked the tube. It’s way cleaner and smaller than the metro. So, after, visiting a whole slew of European countries, I think Germany and England are the winners. And England is my favorite. I can’t wait to go back. I don’t want to go back to work tomorrow, but it’s the beginning of my last week of work, and then just a little while before I come back to the US. With a trip to Normandy with my parents and maybe a chance to see one of my cousins and do Paris things like see movies and hang out with my friends before heading home.

But I don’t want to be leaving England. Well, they do have an MFA in creative writing at Oxford. And I have a couple more Clash songs to get through. So I think I’ll just bask in my good weekend for a little while.

My friend said something funny to me while we were at the pub the first night I was there. After I’d talked to her a little bit about living in Senegal vs. living in Paris. Something to the effect of, “When you have kids someday, they’re going to think you’re really cool.”

And I don’t know about the kids part. Because I’m only almost 23 (Friday) and I don’t always love the kids I work with. But I like the idea of someday showing some hypothetical children my passport from the past couple of years, with all of its stamps and visas, and saying, “That was when I lived in Senegal and Paris. This is what it’s all about. Collecting stamps on your passport. Where do you want to go?”

My friend Michelle has this wonderful theory that the meaning of life is nothing more than puppies and babies, and sometimes I think she’s onto something. But I would adjust it a little bit. I would add in passport stamps. Because I think that they’re pretty wonderful too. My passport is my biography. My passport stamps are evidence of everywhere I’ve been. My visas are evidence of the places I’ve lived, the times I’ve changed my address and had to survive in a different language, the times I’ve met people who have given me so much that I know that returning it in kind is impossible. My Senegal visa reminds me of being twenty and learning abruptly how to live in the present moment. It reminds me of dust and heat and one dollar rice and fish and eating dinner every night with my host mom and sister with the door open and the Spanish telenovelas on. My France visa reminds me of coming to Paris this year with a set of expectations and having to completely remake them. But mostly, my passport stamps remind me of where I come from, what I’ve made it through, what’s been hard and what’s been fucking transcendent. I know the next stamp is coming from the US border patrol when I go through customs to go home, and after that, the ever-present question returns. Where’s the next one gonna come from? Where do you want to go?

I’m still deciding.