So after all my confusion and finally acceptance that the weather of Paris is just innately warmer than in both North Carolina and Georgia, it has finally gotten cold. October 31, 70 degrees and sunny. November 1, 43 degrees. And then today I had to walk to class (well, on Thursdays my classes are at University 7 Pierre Mendes-France and the nearest Metro stop is a good 15 minute walk through Chinatown) and it was bitterly cold. I think in cities it is just worse anyway because all those buildings are just like wind tunnels (YOU go to wind tunnels...) And the wind hits the concrete and just bounces off and keeps going.
Last Thursday I wrestled myself out of bed for my art plastiques class, which begins at 9 am, and as I got on the Metro at 815, I realized the sun was just rising and I got to see it coming up over the Seine and Paris. Beautiful. Then this week because of daylight savings time (WHO KNEW THAT EUROPEANS DO THAT?) I got out of class today in the dark, which would generally have been highly disconcerting since I went in the morning before sunrise and came back in the dark, except that I love Paris at night... I came home on the Metro, walked down to the grocery store and on my way home with a grocery bag of single girl’s food in each hand, I couldn’t help grinning like a fool at the sight of my neighborhood in the early evening. Businessmen rushing past me with their scooter helmets under their arm, a scarf balled up inside and a baguette sticking out the top; au pairs listening tirelessly to their charge’s account of l’ecole maternelle; middle-schoolers in uniform hopping homeward, and the thought that I would never have been allowed to take the Metro alone at that age.
Parisian buildings are beautiful; they are usually storefronts at street level with either an apartment for the store owner or a hotel in the upper floors. But the buildings never look real to me, it’s like walking on a movie set, where I can see my breath and here the soundtrack playing on my MP3 player, with cut outs of buildings on each side of the street... probably they only look like that to me because of all the ambient light, or smog or something, but it’s lovely. And there is my favorite café that I pass, Le Franklin, named for Benjamin Franklin, who lived here during his time in Paris. I’ve never actually had coffee there, but it’s this warm-looking little place painted so cozily; the kind of place where probably had I started going when I first arrived here the waiters would by now know my usual. (One would think places like that do not exist in a city this size, but at my wireless café, I always get coffee because it is the cheapest thing on the menu and I am in there three times a week-ish... and by now they know. This could also be because the memory of me sticks out as being "that American girl with the bad accent who comes in and buys a euro-fifty’s worth of coffee and then hangs out for an hour and a half working on her computer...")
Furthermore, I have realized that I truly do shop like a European single girl, buying typical European things, but in terribly girly quantities... for example, it is quite possible to go into a boulangerie and buy just a "demi-baguette"– half of a regular baguette, because who can really eat a whole one before it gets tooth-breakingly crunchy? Milk comes in litres, which is perfect. So does juice. And things bought from the market– like, the STREET market– can be bought in whatever quantity you want ("un petit peu plus, s’il vous plait"), BUT as I have learned, things from the market do not have preservatives in them... which makes them delicious and I can pretend they are thus healthier, but it also means that dates from the market, unlike dates from Monoprix, have to be eaten toute de suite because they do not last.
One last thing about Disney: on Main Street, all the buildings have American flags flying from them. If the situation were reversed, Americans would never stand for the tricolor waving from anything, even fake buildings at a theme park. But from now on, I feel like EuroDisney is my new embassy... forget McDonald’s, if I do something bad, I am heading straight for Disney. French cops can’t function there, it’s like a... a... protectorate of the US or something.
It’s much better to face these kinds of things with a sense of poise and rationality.
~B