Etonnez-Moi, Francoise!

The French will never get over the sixties, I don't think. And I can't blame them. They have a lot of icons from that period, but while most people have heard of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin and Brigitte Bardot, my favorite is Francoise Hardy. I mean, just look at her. Where do you think Cat Power got her look from?

She's a contemporary of Jane Birkin, but while Jane Birkin has always just been too breathy for me to take, Francoise Hardy has this complicated old school charm. She sings about the sensation of being a single woman surrounded by happy couples, and wanting to be astonished by Benoit, and she does an awesome cover of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne." Paris has a massive history of style icons and actresses like Catherine Deneuve and Brigitte Bardot (I love Brigitte Bardot too, more on that later), but Francoise Hardy just epitomizes this smart, kind of badass, laid-back style that I really love. She's complicated and interesting. Which I think is a big difference between the United States and France. I get the sense that women like Francoise Hardy are more likely to be popular in France than in the United States, where we can't really seem to get more creative than Audrey Hepburn. And no offense to Audrey Hepburn, but Francoise Hardy isn't cute. There's no aiming to please or adhering to a preconceived notion of femininity going on here. And yet, Francoise Hardy was and still is a huge popstar.

Anyway, I love Francoise Hardy. Her music, her leather jackets and striped t-shirts, her style. And I think that Cat Power, Jenny Lewis, and any woman in indie rock with bangs and angst is pretty indebted to her.  And I love them too, but you can't really dispute this:




Monday was crazy as per usual. Bikram yoga in Montmartre was just right though. Maybe if this writing thing doesn't work out, I'll just become a yoga instructor. I can just see it -- shouting "Tirez! Tirez! Tirez!" to a room full of suffering French and American yogis and yoginis trying to balance their entire bodies on one foot. Or I could just have two professions that pay terribly.

In the words of Francoise Hardy, je suis bien perplexe.

You can't make me not love Paris.

I am not Amélie Poulain. I'm probably that introverted, but as it turns out, I don't really like living alone. I realized this yesterday morning when I woke up in my quiet, tiny apartment. I thought to myself, oh yes, this is all very bohemian and writer-ly, but... dude. I need people. I need someone to say hi to when I come home, even if it's just someone I share the apartment with. I live in a big city, and I have friends, but living alone in a tiny, only moderately cheap studio isn't worth it. Colocations are way cheaper, and the apartments are often nicer. I mean, my place is cute, for sure, but sometimes I feel like it's la Maison Bric-a-Brac, like if I stomp around too much one of the walls might begin to fall apart.

So I'm looking for a new place. And more importantly, I'm looking for roommates. It's a bit dramatic, because I have to break my contract with my landlord, but according to French law, you can get out of a lease without penalty if you give 30 days notice. So I only hope the gnome is up on his French law, because I really want my security deposit back.

Things have been really up and down lately. Like, on Sunday, I was walking down Tolbiac and this drunk homeless man kept trying to talk to me. So I ignored him. Because I do that. And then, just as I was passing him, he launched his beer can at the back of my neck.

Okay, a few things:
1. I'm glad it wasn't a bottle, and also that he was too incapacitated to throw that hard.
2. Still. It was almost full.
3. Dude wasted his beer.
4. And got beer all over my wool bomber jacket.
5. Can I just say, I was terrified. I ran.

I called the police and when I returned to Tolbiac the next day, the sketchy homeless guys had apparently been removed. Now, I do feel a little weird about calling the police about homeless people. But I also need to feel safe where I live, and I shouldn't have to cut into my budget to dry clean my jacket because it got drenched in cheap beer because this guy wanted me to talk to him.

So I was pretty bummed after that. Paris is Dreamland for me, and so when very real things happen, it shakes me up. Then yesterday morning, feeling residual angst over Beer Man and getting ready to launch my new housing search, I went to my quartier's marché. I picked up my apples as usual, and then, because I was feeling down, I went to the flower man to buy some little yellow flowers for my apartment. I think he could tell that I was sad, because he said, "Ça va?" and when I gave an unconvincing, "Ça va," he picked out a small pink rose for me from his stand and gave it to me for free with my little yellow flowers. It was such a small, sweet gesture, but it did make me feel better. And it was the antithesis of the creepy guys hitting on you all the time in Paris. Sometimes I think it's these little interactions that make Paris what it is.

That afternoon, my head full of images of shared apartments with clean, new bathrooms and washing machines, I got on the metro to meet one of my closest friends at the Abbesses metro stop in Montmartre. Montmartre is my favorite place in Paris, and it was the reminder I needed if why I love Paris. We wandered to Sacre-Coeur, and through the gloomy mist of a rainy Paris evening, we pointed out Notre Dame and l'Hôtel de Ville and the towers of the Bibliothèque Nationale far off in the distance. It looked magical and tiny in the layer of fog and rain. Paris looks so small from Sacre-Coeur - like a toy Paris. I love seeing it from that perspective. It reminds you of how many people live here, of how many tiny worlds exist here. As we wandered down to Pigalle (hello sex shops, hello red-light district, hello tourists in line for Moulin Rouge) we said good-bye to the winding streets, the tall old buildings leaning into the Butte, the Christmas lights strung along the narrow alleys. I might go back tonight. So take that Beer Can Man. You can get beer on my jacket, but you can't make me not love Paris.

The End of Ikea

The French have it in for flat sheets. They like fitted sheets, and they're big fans of duvets and huge, fluffy square pillows, but flat sheets are like the annoying thing that comes in between you and your duvet. They hate them so much that at Ikea you can't buy them in any color besides white, which is kind of a drag if your fitted sheet is dark blue, and you bought two of them thinking one was a flat sheet, and you only brought one back to Ikea to exchange it for a flat sheet... Yeah, I now have mismatched flat and fitted sheets. What of it?

The good news is that I finally conquered Ikea. As in, I walked in, got the stuff I needed, scrutinized over prices to make sure I didn't get anything too expensive to be worth it or too cheap to be functional, and my apartment is now fitted out with a flat sheet, a new paper lantern over the naked bulb my bedroom came with, a mattress pad for my futon/sofa/bed (they call them clic-clacs here, way less complicated...), and a bedside lamp. In the interest of being a Responsible Adult, I set a spending limit for today's trip, and I did not exceed it. Now, this may not seem like a big thing. But I have a weakness for pretty things, and Ikea casts this glowy fluorescent spell on me that last time made me buy a gratuitous pair of slippers and picture frames that are too big for the photos I brought from home, so it's kind of an accomplishment that I didn't buy anything cute and stupid that I didn't really need.

Because really, this is Paris. Beautiful clothes can be had here at very cheap prices. If I'm going to blow my money on things I don't need - and I don't even really want to do that - they might as well be clothes. Or lavish meals. Or cafe cremes outside at cafe-brasseries.

I am never going back to Ikea. From here on out, it's flea markets and things I stumble upon in Paris. Scandinavian design has a special place in my heart, but I can get it at home.

Something I can't do at home is wander around Montmartre. And that is what I did after rearranging my furniture and making my Ikea spoils make my place feel more like home. I took the Metro to Montparnasse, then to Montmartre, where I meandered up to the Butte and my favorite view of Paris from Sacre-Coeur. I tried to find my neighborhood, but either you can't see it from there or my Paris geography is still iffy. Montmartre is always full of tourists, no matter what day it is or what else is going on or how many other places there are to be in Paris. But it's probably my favorite place in Paris, and I plan to go there as often as I can while I live here, no matter how many mimes try to talk to me or how many guys on the street try to sell me Eiffel Tower key chains or beer. After getting a look at the view, I decided to go back down the back of the hill rather than the (touristy) front, and as I wandered down the hill, I walked right through a movie set. I mean, a movie was being filmed on a street in Montmartre not far from the Montmartre Museum, and the actors were there as well as the camera crew, and they were just letting people walk through where they were filming. It was crazy. I guess I live in a city where movies get made now. It must be something that Parisians and New Yorkers are accustomed to, but it was really strange that the area they were shooting in wasn't blocked off at all.

I walked from Montmartre into the 17th arrondissement, where I found a wonderful bookstore at Place de Clichy. They had so many books, and I even found Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath translated into French. I was tempted to buy Mrs. Dalloway, because it's my favorite, but then I decided that if I read something in French, it should probably be French. I should be reading someone like Camus in French.

I also walked past the Montmartre cemetery. I'm not suddenly a cemetary fan, but it is also cool looking, although I think Montparnasse is really much prettier. Montmartre is darker and more gothic looking. There's something a little Buffy the Vampire Slayer about it, like you could picture an undead Jim Morrison wandering around if you went there late at night...

On the Metro home, I read the biography of Diane Arbus by Patricia Bosworth, and as I looked around the Metro car and thought of people I've spotted all over Paris, I thought that Diane Arbus would probably have a field day with Paris. There are so many weird looking people here. I keep reading Patricia Bosworth's descriptions of the people she photographed, and they're really sensational, as if Diane Arbus's subjects were really that unusual. And I think, definitely with the exception of the giants and dwarfs, they all sort of look like people I've seen on the Metro in Paris.

After my Montmartre walk, I came home, put on Duke Ellington, made a ham and brie scramble for dinner and realized that one of the best things about living in Paris is looking out your window at night and seeing all of the other windows around you lit up in the darkness, and knowing that each one is its own small world.

Paris, Je T'Aime

Today I checked out, and rejected, my first housing offer - a rented room in Montmartre, mainly because I don't want to be roomies with the old man who's renting it. The location was fine, just off the Butte de Montmartre (mad touristy), but as enamored as I am of living in Montmartre (which is to say - very, very, very, very...) it just didn't seem right. Hopefully something else will come through as my search continues.

I also got my passe Navigo, which I can use all the time on public transit, and it's really fancy and has a microchip and you just wave it around in front of a sensor to get on the metro. Okay. I know that doesn't sound very exciting, but I'm from Seattle, where public transit is kind of an afterthought, and so I am incredibly excited about my passe Navigo. It even has my picture on it.

Also, last night I met up with another assistant for dinner at Le Petit Dakar, and had Senegalese food for the first time since I was abroad. It was good, but definitely de-spiced for the benefit of the French. I mean, my nose didn't even start running. I was pretty disappointed.

After dinner we wandered around the Marais and got gelato that comes in the shape of a rose, and it was so wonderful to just walk around aimlessly and listen to all of the people eating dinner in the cafes and bars along the streets. The Marais used to be Paris's Jewish neighborhood, and it still is to a certain extent, so there are tons of felafel and bagel places around, and an art deco synagogue I have yet to stumble upon, and there's something really nice about it. It feels like a very distinct neighborhood, even though it's full of tourists quite often, one of whom asked me for directions in French yesterday. I was pretty happy about that. Once you get off of Rue de Rivoli and into the neighborhood, it turns out that the Marais gets way more quintessentially French and perfect for wandering and thinking and people watching and way less full of tourists doing tourist things.

And I love that I can just wander down to the Louvre after dinner or walk across the quai to Notre Dame and I don't even want to go in, it's just nice to be in a place that is so ridiculously beautiful all the time. Which is not to say that Paris is perfect, because it really, really isn't. I just am really enjoying being here not as a tourist but as someone who actually lives here. Although I'll feel a lot more like I live here when I actually have a place to live.

I have my orientation for my job tomorrow. I think that will help too.



Haiku for Sketchy Montmartre "Apartment":

Non pour Montmartre
Un peu sketchy, plus tourists
C'est dommage, ca.