Sad cats, cheap cheese, and Victor Hugo

This morning I hit up the American Church for the first time since I was still looking for a place to live, with the hope that some cute Franco-American family was looking for an American babysitter to take care of their kids a few days a week. Not really the case -- there's an Irish setter that needs to be walked every single day for a couple in the center of Paris, and a lot of people want maids. Huh. Not so much with the success.

On the way home, I stopped at my quartier marche -- it's a small market on Saturday and Wednesday (not the same as my Sunday market, which is at Place Jeanne d'Arc) -- the Vincent-Auriol market goes underneath the above ground metro line and is full of produce sellers who will shout at you claiming to sell the cheapest produce. Reminds me of Senegal. I always go to a middle-aged woman and a younger guy who sell me cheap fruit and don't shout at me. They're nice and reasonably priced. Today I spent about half of what I would spend on fruit at the supermarche on bananas, apples, and tomatoes. There's also a cheese stand, where you can buy delicious cheese, and if you stick to small amounts (a sliver of cumin gouda, a little mound of chevre) it's also pretty cheap. And then there is the flower man, who sells fresh-cut flowers for a fraction of what you pay in the neighborhood florist shops.

I should add that the people I buy my cheese and produce from are really friendly. In Paris, people who have these jobs are often just plain rude -- not all the time, but there's less of a need to be overly friendly like in the US -- so it's really nice to have the cheese lady put up with my need to "reflechir" over the fromage and then only charge me 4 euro for two kinds that will last me all week.

I also discovered a boulangerie today that is apparently run by a woman with a sense of humor. This made my day. The thing is -- okay, my salary is not very much. I haven't even been paid yet, and when I do get paid, most of my pay will go to rent. So when I spend money, I'm more careful about it here. I like to linger over the pastry case before I pick out my pain au chocolat. I want to get my money's worth. I mean, I don't want to spend it on an unworthy, sub-par, not delicious enough pastry. When you're doing Paris on the cheap, you've got to make these things count. And a lot of times, Parisians aren't really fans of customers leaning over the pastry case deep in thought for a mini-eternity, when you could just buy your baguette and a pastry and head out.

But this woman? As I looked around her bakery and comparison-shopped tonight's dessert and explained myself by saying, "I have to reflect a little bit," she said, "That's fine. I'm open until 5."

Word. I am coming back.

So, things that I love about Paris:
-cumin gouda
-chevre
-French candy (Actually, I think Haribo is German, but still...)
-pain au chocolat
-how much more I read here
-how cheap and delicious my groceries are
-having breakfast in my apartment and looking out onto the other buildings and the courtyard
-free libraries that have excellent English sections
-cheap pools
-goofy little daily interactions
-the best public transit of anywhere I've ever lived
-my tiny kitchen and bedroom, especially since my last Ikea trip
-living alone (can be really nice, especially when the city gets overwhelming)

Things I don't like about Paris:
-my tiny, problematic shower
-having to watch my step over the urine trails on the sidewalk all the time
-how everything kind of slows down when it rains because people just walk everywhere
-old plumbing systems and consequent problems with pipes and stuff
-the fact that one of my hallway neighbors is turning out to be Mr. All Bad Music All The Time and seems to really enjoy the late-night conversations with people with high-pitched voices (and, this being an apartment building and not Smith, I can't just go over there all bleary-eyed and indignant and be like, "I have a test tomorrow, can you please be quiet?")
-living alone (can get lonely sometimes)

Things I miss about home:
-having on oven. I keep wanting to bake some cookies or brownies or something and that is just out of the question when your kitchen is equipped with hot plates and a mini-fridge.
-PANCAKES. Preferably chocolate chip or blueberry. I really want some pancakes. I don't know why, I don't even eat them that often at home.
-Oreos and peanut butter. Okay, so you can get both here, but they're so expensive!
-how everything doesn't close early,
-and how everything is (pretty much) open on Sunday
-a good mocha/latte that doesn't cost more than week's worth of bread
-American bureaucracy. I never thought I'd say that, but not getting paid until almost 3 months after my arrival in Paris? Yeah. I miss you, United States.

But one thing I love about Paris -- these random moments that sometimes happen in the metro. Like today, I was heading home from Invalides and the American Church with my earbuds in, and I was kind of on autopilot. I got to the Etoile/Nation line, and I started down the corridor to the direction of Etoile, when I realized that Nation is the direction where my neighborhood is, and so I quickly spun around and headed over to Nation.

A middle-aged woman in a hijab who was standing in the Nation corridor saw the whole thing and just smiled at me. I could tell she thought it was funny but there was nothing malicious about it. I smiled back and it was like we were in on a joke. This is a stranger I will never see again, but it's funny how you can connect with people in unexpected ways, even fleetingly, in a huge city full of strangers, which is exactly what Paris is.

I have plans to go to Victor Hugo's house this afternoon, but that moment made my day.

I go back to work tomorrow and I can't wait to start teaching again and see my students and attempt to make small talk in the teachers' lounge and have a million French children ask me questions about whether or not I was born in England or the English words for the days of the week or whether or not I have friends in Paris. I've already planned one lesson for Friday. We're playing Bingo with numbers up to 20 in English. Last week they counted pictures on the board and I tried to teach them little bits of English.

"How many sad cats are there?"
"Zair hah firteen sad cats."

"How many cats with hats are there?"
"Zair hah ten cats ins ats."

Vacation, schmacation, France. Maybe it's that pesky American/Protestant/Puritan work ethic, but I like going to work.

Sharif don't like it.

I just returned from my first Parisian party, where I discovered three things:

1) You have never really heard "Rock the Casbah" until you have heard French people singing along to "Rock the Casbah."

2) You know you don't go to Smith anymore when you go to a party and men are just there, voluntarily, hanging out, the music is American rap when it isn't "Rock the Casbah," and although your command of the language isn't perfect, you're pretty sure no one has used the word "hegemony" in the last hour.

3) The Metro runs until 2 a.m., and even if you live in the sleepiest part of the 13th arrondissement, you won't be the only one coming home on the Metro late at night.

Good to know.

This is what it's like to live in Paris.

This is what it's like to live in Paris. I think I get it now. You live in your small apartment and cook simple, cheap staples for yourself, and then spend lots of money on delicious Mediterranean food and red wine when you go out with your friends. You live in a neighborhood that isn't touristy at all, because it doesn't have any tourist attractions in it, but it does have a lot of Parisians in it, of every imaginable appearance and age and ethnicity and religion and socioeconomic status, and sometimes you take the Metro into the more touristy or especially beautiful parts of the city to get felafel at that one place in the Marais, or to meet friends, or to go to Musee d'Orsay because it's your favorite, or just to wander around because you live in Paris, and no matter how much you wander through Paris, you will never see or understand or experience all of it. After your time in those places, you come back to your Metro stop and get off with everyone else who lives in your quartier, walk a few blocks from the Metro, type in your Digicode, enter your building's courtyard, type in your Digicode again, enter your building, and climb six flights of stairs back up to your small apartment to wash your face, hop in bed, and call it a night.

Because you live in Paris. And you don't have to do everything in Paris in one day. Because you know you can't.

Or maybe that's just me. I just got back to my apartment after the aforementioned dinner in the Marais, and I realized as I crossed the Seine in the Metro that this is how it's going to be. It's not too different from my life in Seattle, really, except that I got to stop and stare at the Bastille before catching my train back to the 13th.

God damn. I love it here.

Ruminations on a Futon and Shopping Under the Influence

It's officially cold in Paris, as of yesterday. The wool jackets are out, and the only place where it's warm is the Metro. Right now I'm at one of my coffee places in the Marais - the front of it is totally open, so everyone is huddled inside wearing coats and sitting at their laptops.

I saw apartment #2 yesterday in the 10th arrondissement - it was about the size of my dorm room last year, with a tiny kitchen that at least had hot plates, a fridge, and a small sink (some of them don't!) and a really big bathroom. It wasn't furnished though, and it's just a little out of my price range, and I don't really want to have to buy and deal with a futon at the moment. Plus, the guy who's renting it is a little more legit than many people in France who rent their apartments - he's taking dossiers from applicants, and then he'll pick a few to follow up with. I wouldn't mind living there, but at the same time...futon. C'est complique. Tomorrow I'm visiting an apartment in Antony, which isn't actually Paris, but it might be an okay place to crash for now - we'll see. It's a colocation with some other people, none of whom I think are incredibly old. And on Monday I have an au pair interview with a British woman who rents out a room in her apartment on the cheap in exchange for some baby-sitting. It seems a little intense, but I only work twelve hours at my job, so it might be a good option. Plus it's centrally located.

Also, people keep asking me for directions. Most of the time, if it's in the Marais and they're tourists, I can usually help them out, and they're usually pretty excited when they find out I speak English, but on Thursday when I was at an RER stop, totally lost on the way to my orientation, a French woman asked me for directions. While I was lost. This struck me as being particularly funny for that reason alone, and then I was a little concerned that Parisians get lost on the RER too. I mean, they live here. Like, all the time.

Anyway, the apartment search continues. And tonight I'm going to Nuit Blanche, which is basically a city-wide art exhibit and an excuse for everything to be open incredibly late, including department stores, who I think will do pretty well. I like shopping when it's daytime and my judgment is totally fine. Imagine how many impulse buys must occur when everyone's judgment has slid by 3 a.m., and that's not even factoring in that Nuit Blanche is basically an all night party. Drunk shopping strikes me as being a little like drunk knitting. Friends should not let friends do it.

I'm headed to a new area in Paris and I'm really going to miss the Marais. After living here for a week, I really do feel like it's my neighborhood. Underneath the touristy thing, it's really a cool neighborhood - it's the old Jewish quartier, currently Paris's gay neighborhood, and it's just a really interesting mix of people, including tourists and Parisians. I'm going to miss its little cafes and patisseries and being so close to Place des Vosges. It would be really nice to live here, and who knows - maybe a tiny little studio is around here just waiting for me.

Or maybe I'll move to the tiny apartment in the 10th, and I won't be too far away on the metro. The good thing about Paris is that with metro, you're never too far away from anything.

...And then again, sometimes I hate you.

Still homeless for all intents and purposes, which in France translates to: tres screwed. I need an address to open a bank account in order to be paid for my work, but I can't use my hostel de la semaine for it, and I still haven't found a permanent place yet, so things feel really stalled at the moment. I started my orientation for work, and even that is horribly disorganized. I mean, I love Paris, but thus far I am not loving the French school system. And it doesn't help that everyone in my program, for the most part, has already found housing. This is also the only thing they seem to talk about. And at our orientation, I sometimes feel like I'm stuck in high school French again. Perhaps sitting in a room full of Americans as we try to speak French together will always be a little reminiscent of being fifteen and daydreaming about Paris as my teacher, who was American, and had a severe American accent, described something really riveting like...I don't know...French fashion terms. Which, given that our book was from 1984, wasn't going to be applicable anyway in real life. Although acid washed jeans are back, so you never know. Maybe I should have paid attention.

Every time I tell someone from my program that I don't know where I'm living yet, they give me big sloppy puppy dog eyes like I just informed them that I have a rare and painful but incommunicable disease that sucks for me, but luckily they won't catch it. Most people got here about a month ago, it seems, which leaves me feeling really unprepared and haphazard. What can I say, though? Some of us were still recovering from abdominal surgery a month ago and that's why we don't have an apartment yet? I think that might be all kinds of awkward.

Anyway, I'm about to head to the tenth to look for an apartment that I may or may not have the correct address for, and then I'm going out to dinner with two girls from the program who aren't in the same section of Versailles as me. They don't have housing either. I also met a boy who's working in Creteil and also hosteling it for now, so I'm not exactly an anomaly. It can be hard to remember this when someone extols their new apartment as "meant to be" but it is, in fact, the reality of moving to Paris.

The best times I've had have been nowhere near orientations or paperwork or anything like that anyway. They've been in the Marais, wandering around, sometimes alone and sometimes with other people, eating delicious felafel and shawarma, and gelato and fruit and hanging out at Place des Vosges and exploring the city in a very casual, relaxed way. Also, today I ordered my lunch in French at the cafe I go to every day to check my email without the woman behind the counter switching over to English. This was an accomplishment, because I was at the equivalent of French Starbucks, which means that if your accent is even a little bad or your grammar the least bit shaky, they won't even give you chance to continue in French. So I may not have an apartment, and my job may be super disorganized, but at least I can order my own sandwich in French.

A petite studette meublee in a nice neighborhood can't be far behind.

The International House of Students; or, Nothing Lasts Forever, Even Cold November Rain

This morning I trundled onto the metro in a state of fuzzy confusion surrounded by scary trample-prone speedwalking Parisiens, who apparently know their way around the city and the subway stations. I was headed to the American Church and up earlier than I've been in probably a few months, because word on the American teaching assistant street was that you can find postings for places to live there, but only if you get there before ten. That's housing in Paris for you, I guess. I proudly asked a Relay clerk for directions in perfect French once I got inevitably and horribly lost on the metro. He directed me to lignes 1 and 13, but when I emerged at Les Invalides in front of this fancy dome with gold statues and the Air France building with a good section of the Eiffel Tower in view, it occurred to me that I still didn't know exactly where I was going. I found myself asking for directions again, repeatedly, in increasingly bad French, until, after taking a few wrong turns, I made it to the American Church around ten sharp.

I assumed that this meant I was doomed to long-term homelessness in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. But as it turned out, only a small group of forlorn Americans (and some French people as well) flanked the bulletin boards, which were covered in refreshingly recent "annonces" for apartments and rooms to rent. This was truly amazing, as I've been scouring French craigslist on the daily, and their ads always seem to be a few days old - they don't come in very often, and yesterday I made about ten phone calls to people who had already rented their apartments.

In my woozy state, I scribbled down phone numbers in my notebook and headed back to Les Invalides to get the metro back to the Marais and my hostel, where I could call these people and beg for a place to live, boasting my tiny assistant's salary, funding from the parentals, and...I don't know...really, really liking France?

But it worked out. The American Church is way better than the Internet for finding a place to live, because you have to physically go there to get the information, you can't just stay at home in your PJs and check out listings online. Which means that to begin with, fewer people even see these ads, which means less competition, which means that all of the people I called in the hostel courtyard today, at least the ones who picked up, all still have rooms and apartments available. So I've gone from absolutely zero ideas hostel bound terrified to having an apartment visit in Montmartre scheduled tomorrow, an au pair interview next Monday, and another potential interview in the works. Okay, so I really don't want to be an au pair. But I'm going to be a teacher anyway, I like kids, and a lot of families in Paris rent out rooms or studios at discounted rates (read: affordable) in exchange for anything from babysitting a few hours a week to full-on live-in au pair-hood. I'm giving it some serious thought. Especially because, a lot of the time, these people want someone who can teach their kids English. I mean, I don't have a lot of money, I speak English, I teach English, I can totally tolerate children, and I really, really, really want to live in Paris - this is kind of a no-brainer.

I hope one of these situations works out. In the meantime I'm applying for housing in student apartments throughout Paris - literally, I'm applying to about five places. And in the mean-meantime, I'm staying at a hostel called MIJE, an acronym which, directly translated, means "International House of Students and Young People." Like IHOP, except it's PEOPLE. I'm staying in a room with six other people, two of whom I am sure are over MIJE's age limit, but I've been informed that the youth hostel thing is kind of a technicality. It's fine - we have a sweet courtyard, the people are friendly, and the only real drawback is that there's no wireless and one of the girls in my room snores like a seventy-year-old man with breathing problems. But it's an all right place to be right now, and I'm not really worried about theft - it feels very secure to me.

But the wireless, that's a problem. It means I have to go to Cafe Columbus on Rue Vieille du Temple once daily to check my email. I could go elsewhere, but Cafe Columbus is all right with me. It's a French chain that is clearly pretending to be Starbucks, because apparently the French are unaware of the fact that the way they do coffee is already way better than the way it's done in the US. It has the token whipped cream-topped fake coffee beverages, paper cups (whoa!), wireless internet, coffee bean murals, and, wait for it...it plays a lot of American music, although today seems to be 80s day, because they just played "November Rain." Not that I don't like Guns 'n Roses, it's just unexpected. Coffee shops in Seattle and Noho are always playing pretentious hipster music that is for the most part calm and mumbly, so it's nice to drink my espresso to some emotive upbeat-but-not rock with thunder in the background. Plus, let's face it, right now is sort of the "November Rain" period of my stay in Paris - confusing, frustrating, rife with uncertainty. So in a weird way, it's nice to know that it's temporary. I may be bouncing between youth hostels for now, but eventually Paris will feel familiar and I won't get lost on the metro and things will make a little bit of sense. I know this because I lived in Senegal for four months, and if Dakar started to feel like home, which it did, Paris will get there too, minus the near-constant marriage proposals from strange men, getting yelled at in the street, and being scared shitless every time I took public transit anywhere.

And I've definitely had a few moments where I feel like I'm in the opening to Beauty and the Beast and people are flinging their windows open saying, "Bonjour! Bonjour! Bonjour! Bonjour! Bonjour!" and dancing around with baguettes and books and stuff. Because I kind of love it here. And sometimes I have to remind myself that being here is literally a dream come true for me. I've wanted to live in Paris since I was twelve, and it's still crazy to me that I finally finagled a way to make it happen, however haphazardly it may have happened. I mean, really? I live in Paris?

And then there are times I get lost on the metro, and other unpleasantries occur. Let me just say, you haven't visited Paris until you've seen some random dude peeing in the street talking to himself in Paris. Whatever. Nothing lasts forever, even cold September days getting lost in the metro. Right, Slash, Axl?