Saturday, April 23, 2005
Paris in the Springtime?
I finally made it to Paris, almost a year to the day after I left Australia with that very idea on my mind. It was grand, really. Not the romantic ideal I had cultivated while swilling caffeine in Rue Babs and writing earnestly in my Moleskine, but the most comfortable place I had been since that fateful departure. I walked the streets, the beautiful streets, with Kara on my arm, and could still vaguely imagine a ‘studio’ and a scraping existence selling poetry or waiting tables or tricking tourists out of their spotless new Euro notes.
We filled our days with all the tourist things – a day at the Louvre, a walk through Montmartre and a visit to the Sacré Cœur, the Eiffel Tower all lit up at night, the Arc de Triomphe while some old Resistance soldiers celebrated something, the Notre Dame in the rain, the Musée d’Orsay and the Centre Pompidou, the Latin Quarter and Saint Germain des Pres. We strolled through two of the Big Three cemeteries of Paris – Pere Lachaise and Montparnasse, and stood in solemn reflection of the contributions to humanity of such luminaries as Proust, Balzac, Baudelaire, Wilde, Sartre and de Beauvoir, Moliere … and Jim Morrison. We left our Metro tickets at Serge Gainsbourg’s grave and searched in vain for the last resting place of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. His hiding away in an unmarked tomb seems either a deep philosophical statement or a final trick to play on an evil, materialistic world.
Nights included a house party almost at the Périphérique, dinner and drinks and movies in places where famous people once hung out, and one day and night preparing food and catering for three hundred petit-bourgeois Parisiens. Thanks Shimon for that opportunity.
The week spent in Paris was a great opportunity to practice my faltering French, as I was the only one in our tour group of four that spoke any of the lingua franca. Unfortunately, for the most part, it didn’t get much more detailed than ‘comment est-ce que je peux aller à …’ or ‘trois cafés et un café au lait , s’il vous plait’. But just hearing that accent, understanding some of what was going on and being able to read signposts encouraged me to aim for fluency by the end of the year, no matter where it is that I end up in the next couple of months.
I got the feeling - as inexplicable as it is - that I would be back here soon enough, that I would be an expat in the city and as such had no reason to be embarrassed or ashamed of my tourist label. Ah, it was all just appearances anyway.
Kara brought me to an excellent English language bookshop just across from the Île de la Cité where we could have browsed for hours, except my parents were unimpressed by the extensive range of reading material and waited impatiently outside. We quickly purchased Orwell’s ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’, which is most appropriate, considering our lack of funds and plans to travel to London in the next couple of weeks.
The time in Paris would not have been as enjoyable or as financially viable without my friend Pippa generously offering her bedroom over to two weary travelers, so if you read this blog by any chance, merci beaucoup mademoiselle Druce et j’espere te revoir encore bientôt.
I finally made it to Paris, almost a year to the day after I left Australia with that very idea on my mind. It was grand, really. Not the romantic ideal I had cultivated while swilling caffeine in Rue Babs and writing earnestly in my Moleskine, but the most comfortable place I had been since that fateful departure. I walked the streets, the beautiful streets, with Kara on my arm, and could still vaguely imagine a ‘studio’ and a scraping existence selling poetry or waiting tables or tricking tourists out of their spotless new Euro notes.
We filled our days with all the tourist things – a day at the Louvre, a walk through Montmartre and a visit to the Sacré Cœur, the Eiffel Tower all lit up at night, the Arc de Triomphe while some old Resistance soldiers celebrated something, the Notre Dame in the rain, the Musée d’Orsay and the Centre Pompidou, the Latin Quarter and Saint Germain des Pres. We strolled through two of the Big Three cemeteries of Paris – Pere Lachaise and Montparnasse, and stood in solemn reflection of the contributions to humanity of such luminaries as Proust, Balzac, Baudelaire, Wilde, Sartre and de Beauvoir, Moliere … and Jim Morrison. We left our Metro tickets at Serge Gainsbourg’s grave and searched in vain for the last resting place of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. His hiding away in an unmarked tomb seems either a deep philosophical statement or a final trick to play on an evil, materialistic world.
Nights included a house party almost at the Périphérique, dinner and drinks and movies in places where famous people once hung out, and one day and night preparing food and catering for three hundred petit-bourgeois Parisiens. Thanks Shimon for that opportunity.
The week spent in Paris was a great opportunity to practice my faltering French, as I was the only one in our tour group of four that spoke any of the lingua franca. Unfortunately, for the most part, it didn’t get much more detailed than ‘comment est-ce que je peux aller à …’ or ‘trois cafés et un café au lait , s’il vous plait’. But just hearing that accent, understanding some of what was going on and being able to read signposts encouraged me to aim for fluency by the end of the year, no matter where it is that I end up in the next couple of months.
I got the feeling - as inexplicable as it is - that I would be back here soon enough, that I would be an expat in the city and as such had no reason to be embarrassed or ashamed of my tourist label. Ah, it was all just appearances anyway.
Kara brought me to an excellent English language bookshop just across from the Île de la Cité where we could have browsed for hours, except my parents were unimpressed by the extensive range of reading material and waited impatiently outside. We quickly purchased Orwell’s ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’, which is most appropriate, considering our lack of funds and plans to travel to London in the next couple of weeks.
The time in Paris would not have been as enjoyable or as financially viable without my friend Pippa generously offering her bedroom over to two weary travelers, so if you read this blog by any chance, merci beaucoup mademoiselle Druce et j’espere te revoir encore bientôt.
