"The difference between Los Angeles and yogurt is that the yogurt has an active, living culture."
~Written in French on a flyer at my University.

When I arrived in Paris in September, I had come pretty much straight from sleeping in an un-air conditioned cabin with twelve girls under the age of seventeen. Between their chatter and the roar of the window fans, I learned to sleep through all outside noise except my own alarm, kept dangerously close to my ear. That fact, combined with the mono that I acquired upon arriving allowed me to sleep through everything during the autumn here.
Thus I had forgotten, or perhaps never properly learned, what happens in Paris when the weather is warm.

Nothing in this city is air-conditioned, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that Paris is a mild temperate climate that doesn’t NEED "climatisation." No, in fact, Paris is... so hot right now. My best explanation is that this is a city of extremes: extreme hot in the summer, extreme cold in the winter, extremely high-priced coffees, extremely room temperature sodas, extremely varied cheeses. It seems this city somehow skipped the necessary springtime middle ground; the weather now is beautiful, but I went from wearing my peacoat a week ago to a tank top yesterday, which I had sweated through before I got off the Metro. I am not complaining, far from it, this is quite amazing. I just don’t know where all the light jacket weather went?

So anyway. Sleeping is this new task now– as soon as the radiators and furnace get turned off, the windows open, and will stay as such until October. My windows are actually very large French doors that open onto a microscopic veranda (more, really, of an extremely large window sill. If someone, for example, were to lock you out there in much the same way he used to lock you into the camp store, you’d be unable to turn around properly until he re-opened the doors). So now I sleep with the windows open, and am awoken unfailingly at least once a night because the wind has blown them partly shut and it is hot, or because the street sweeper is going by downstairs at 4am and making more noise than I know what to do with. But it’s awesome– the night air has lost that icy quality it held all winter, the promise of something warm is in the air, and I love it.

Today I walked to Montparnasse, though I could have just taken the Metro, as much for the exercise as the opportunity to feel sun on my face after a long winter of wishing I could bundle it away. On my way, I pass the Eiffel Tower (on my way ANYWHERE I pass the Tour Eiffel– I live so close to it there is no way to avoid it). I do my best to put on a Parisian uncaring face as I pass it, because otherwise the pickpockets and streetvendors and cartoonists stop me every five seconds. I apparently failed today, because as I was nearing a clump of artists, one of them hopped away from the clump, dodged a tourist family who probably would have paid him, and jumped into my path. "Great," I thought, "here we go." I didn’t take my headphones out, didn’t really even stop walking– think Belle keeping on reading her book as Gaston jumps in front of her to try to woo her.

"Mademoiselle, tu es trop jolie! S’il te plaît, puis-je te dessiner?" (Oh, you are too beautiful for words! Please, can I draw you?)

I shake my head, keep walking, but give him a polite head nod. He switches to English.

"Where are you from?"
I answer in French, to convince him as much as me that I am capable.

"Oh, the US?! I love the US! Where in the US?"
I told him, and of course was responded with "Florida! That is wonderful! I have never been there, but the weather is amazing! I lived in California for 8 months, though..."
I start walking again.

"Oh, please, someone as beautiful as you, you must be drawn!"
Now I start to waver. He wasn’t that sketchy, and I was having a really good hair day, and Paris in the spring just begs for adventures like this. So I resorted to a semi-lie.

"I don’t have any money, though!"

"Oh, that is ok, for you, I charge just two kisses!" he says, pointing to his cheeks. Now before you decide I should have run the other way, let me remind you that the double kiss is not just the way friends greet each other, but also the way strangers are introduced. I’ve kissed the cheeks of an awful lot of people I have never met before. But I must have looked a little sketched out, because he said, "Never mind. I draw you for me! It would be great honor to do it!
An incredible honor for a humble artist like me!"

I grinned. He had me, and he knew it.
We walked over to a wall in the shade, and as I sat down an older artist walked by and said to him, in French, "Oh, you are so lucky with this one, look at those lips! They just beg to be drawn!" About at that moment, I took off my tractor sunglasses, and they both let up this collective theatrical gasp.
"Oh, Mademoiselle, but your eyes! Oh la la, your eyes! How can you keep them covered up! How can such luscious lips belong to such lovely eyes! Oh, yes, it will be such pleasure to draw you!"

It was with that line that I figured out my artist was Italian, but I asked just to make sure. Oh, indeed, I was right. I assured him again that I had no money, and he looked at me as though insulted that I would insinuate he could possibly take anything so gauche as money for the honor of drawing me.

As it turns out, he lives only about a block from me (which I didn’t tell him), but which means he must make a pretty decent living turning those things out– I’m guessing the currency of kisses is not what he subsists on.

He finished the picture, added an Eiffel Tower in the background and a lamppost next to me, then turned it to me with a dramatic flourish. "Voila!"

"Oh, it’s beautiful!" I said, trying to be polite without sounding vain– how do you revel in a portrait of yourself?
"Oh, don’t say that! You make an artist like me blush!" I laughed, and he said, "I give this to you!"

"But..."

"No, it is a gift. You just promise that if you see me here again, you invite me for coffee."
I laughed, he leaned his cheek toward me, and we parted ways, me with a portrait in my hand that doesn’t look exactly like me, but close enough that I was flattered by it.

At one point the older artist asked me if I had a French boyfriend.
I invoked an imaginary American one.
WHERE DO I GET THESE THINGS?
~B