Colombian in the color of Barack Obama

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I think I'm doing pretty well at adapting to life here in Paris. Really upped the inefficiency, cut back on the inappropriate jokes and yelling, stopped smiling so much, feign coughing fits as a result from 'smoking too many cigarettes' in order to cut the queues. But there is one thing I have fucked up on a weekly basis for three weeks now, and this is the fine art of remembering to BUY your food for the weekend on Saturday. Because Sunday sees an entire Paris shut down, no stores, no markets, no grocers. No nothing. And for somebody like me who is used to only stocking liquor and water in the fridge, this becomes a real problemo. Sunday noon rolls around after a rough night and you think, Man I'm hungry...I wish I had somebody to hand me the delivery menu. Until you realize, shit you're in France. They don't do delivery here. Alright then, I guess I can throw some running shorts and flip flops on, hop downstairs and pick something up. Until you get down to the boulevard and are hit by another moment of realization that no cafes or restaurants are open for take-out. Meanwhile you're standing there looking like a total hobo (completely acceptable in some other countries, including America and Hong Kong) and all the snooty Parisians pass by you wrinkling their noses while their dogs shit next to your flip-flopped feet. Well crap, I guess I can try to self-cater and whip up some eggs or eat some jam off a spoon or something. Until you walk three blocks to the nearest grocery store and you're staring at a very cold "fermé" sign. And while you sit and try to come to terms that you will in fact starve today, France further kicks you while you're down with the realization that this exact same thing happened last Sunday and the Sunday before, and you are in fact a trés stupid, stupid tourist.

My first Sunday I distinctly remember starving, period. The second Sunday, I ate raw spinach and a tomato, as I could not even buy the cooking oil to cook the spinach with. So OK, I'm a stupid tourist, whatever. The point of this little schpeil though is not to focus on that point, but instead join me in wondering, "How bizarre?" Apparently I'm not sure how it is in France, but for countries that have normal relationships with their dairy products, Saturday and Sundays are the biggest shopping days of the week. You know why? Because people of other countries have to go to WORK from 9-6. What kind of country stunts its economy by issuing a LAW prohibiting business operations on one of the two biggest spending days of the week? I guess the kind of country whose commercial bank managers try to force an international client in crisis mode to go to LUNCH on the third day of a running funds crisis. And this is the country currently in rotation of running the EU right now. I don't even want to go into the fact that most stores in Paris are also closed on Mondays. Last Monday I started spearing squirrels in Jardin du Luxembourg across the street.

So there's something I must share that I admit I am not all too proud of. I steal from the city of Paris every day, and not in any romantic metaphorical sense, but I have literally stopped paying to ride the Metro. I'm not a cheap person, and a Euro sixty won't break my bank. But you just don't understand how EASY it is in Paris. I live about 10 steps from the Luxembourg metro, and nobody ever mans it. Yeah, I could walk the 20 min, or I just have to climb down those stairs and wait a stop. A tip to anybody that may care for the next time you are in Paris: A hop, sideways scootch, or a duck under the bars is all it takes. There is even a DOOR that opens on the side for strollers. And to be honest, I don't carry coins all the time and I can't be bothered to get change back from a 20. Perhaps I wouldn't be so tempted if say, they made the turnstyles and doors a little tighter, or the bars to jump over a little higher. Or perhaps if the French actually worked and had somebody to man the little ticket counter like normal, operation-conscious countries did. Or perhaps if their country wasn't constantly trying to charge me 6 Euro 20 for a Coke in a cafe, and if they really must at least also agree to rip me off on Sundays. I'm also not some strange freak about this either, in fact I've never done this in another city. I see Parisians at every station, every stop, doing the same thing. The way I see it, Paris is asking for it. We're really just doing our part in infrastructural natural selection, slowly but surely moving Paris towards a more efficient system. People like me are good for Paris.

The other day I saw the funniest thing here yet. A ginormous American tourist had gotten stuck in the doors of one of the metro gates while trying to rip off the system. Like actually stuck, can't pull her either way, need to disassemble the equipment, stuck. I laughed so hard I swear a little pee came out. On one hand, you sort of feel bad for them because hey, they're fat. Life is hard enough for fat people, and that's quite a compromising position to be seen in as a fat person particularly. On the other hand, they shouldn't have been cheating the system in the first place, and you just want to pull our your phone and record that bitch and send it right in to Bob Sagat for your easy money.

The French hate the summer tourists here in Paris. They run rampant all over the city, especially thick in the area I live in and frequent most, St Michel/Jardin du Luxembourg/St Germain/Latin Quarter. And there is a difference in hating just tourists, and hating the American tourists. Somehow I thought only the "better" Americans made it out of the US to travel. Well, that's certainly not the case in Paris. It has been so long since I've heard the ultra Laguna-Beach-esque "Oh, my, GAWD" and "like, seriously, he was like, totally..." I mean, everywhere. And I love being American as you could probably tell from some other entries and I don't want to make it sound as if I'm one of those that think I'm so international that I'm now too good for my countrymen... but come on people. I guess Paris is just one of those universally-desired vacation destinations where you get, perhaps unfortunately, everybody. Sure we have some cultured Americans, but for the most part, people, we sound embarrassingly stupid over here. Especially bad are the high school/college kids you have traveling, due to whom I have decidedly deemed "man, we were SO drunk it was AWESOME" absolutely the most obnoxious thing to hear people spewing. And guys, we definitely are fat. We are the fattest tourists running around, and the 20 yr old girls with their spandex tanks stretched with muffin tops boiling over do not hide that fact very well. I have American tourists running up to me like their lives are about to end, their eyes bulging and their fat rolls heaving, "ohmigoshdoyouspeakenglish???" Yeah. "thankGAWD!" Kill me, kill me now.

This past weekend I was reunited with two American tourists that I didn't mind so much. Since I left Tucker and Reilly in Dahab, Egypt a month ago, they have been sweating their balls off in Luxor and expelling from all orifices all over Pamplona at the Running of the Bulls. I am pretty sure they have had massive digestive problems in every country I have met them in yet which actually is a little peculiar. Finally they make it to Paris, their last stop before they head back to the US. It is surprisingly refreshing to hang out with fellow Americans (the good kind) as I actually don't have any American friends here in Paris. They have of course been to Paris before so their time here was relatively relaxing and spent just kickin' it in their favorite nooks. On Saturday afternoon after we wait for like half an hour for a table at Cafe de Flore (Hemingway haunt - Tucker is obsessed with him) Tucker throws in the towel and they let me take them to La Palette where I met Alfonso last week. Matt Dillon is sitting behind us with a busty blonde. I could not stop staring, I am pretty certain this is the absolute closest I have ever been to a celebrity bar sitting next to Ivanka Trump in MGMT101 (which I think doesn't really count because it's school.) From there we spend the night on the Seine drinking on the peninsular point of Ile-St-Louis which in itself would have been good enough. Somewhere through the night though, Tucker and Reilly (they play in a band) are tempted by the sweet strum of the guitar and before I know it we are sitting with a group of Frenchies jammin on their guitar, singing to the Beatles til 4am or some ungodly hour. They teach us French and African songs and we teach them Tenacious D. I am sad to see Tucker and Reilly go the next day.

I do have other routines aside from losing 3 pounds every Sunday, getting a Euro 60 discount on every crepe I buy off the street, and making fun of fat tourists although these may just be my favorite ones. I think it's about time I wrote more about my French course as I've received many questions on how classes at the Sorbonne work, how I like it, etc... so knock yourself out... My 'Absolute Beginner' class comprises about 20 students from all over the world.. Somehow the distribution isn't skewed towards any one country, the UK, US, and Mexico in the lead with about 3 students from each. Throw in a Finnish here, a Chinese there, a little Venezuelan and Brazilian, some Korean and African. Many of the students in the course are in college and are being forced by Daddy to spend time in his native France. Some of them have taken something like 4 years in school already but still tested into the Absolute Beginner class which really makes you wonder. About a third of my class are a few years older, traveling or learning for employment purposes. There is one male named Lucio in our class (Manav has been moved to the Elementaire level) and he skips class probably every other day. Tells you something about the masculinity of the French language.

I couldn't actually tell you the name of my professor. His last name starts with an "M" but to be honest I only address him by "professeur" anyways. As stated before, he is 22 years old which seems sort of irresponsible of the Sorbonne, and he is shorter than I am. He is a little chubby with barely any peach fuzz, and comes to class in a tweed (yes, tweed) jacket and sometimes if we are lucky, a tie that his mother probably bought for him. Only when we're well behaved does he bust out the jackets with the leather elbow-patches, and I have my fingers crossed for suspenders any day now. He still styles the hair on his head high up to the sky as if commemorating the Boy Band Era, and I'm not sure he even has hair down there yet. I can't complain about his teaching however, and I am sure his French grammar is up to par. What needs some work is his anger management. You can imagine how difficult it is to control a class of agitated females that are no younger than yourself. You can also imagine how difficult it would be to control your hormones in this situation, something he is failing miserably at as it is embarrassingly obvious that he is in love with Sara-Louisa. He actually moves us into assigned seats when we talk between exercises, and throws hissy fits when we miss answers at the board. He clearly suffers from Little Man Syndrome. Other classes do have normal Sorbonne professors, I'm not really sure what happened with our class. I think it's still too early to really get a feel for him yet.

The course itself is an eight-week intensive French course consisting of two 2-hour blocks of grammar lecture and a 1-hour phonetics lab daily, five days a week. Everything is taught in French, English is not allowed in the classroom. We are learning at a ridiculously fast pace, and honestly I do not understand all the grammatical rules we are being taught because, hey, I don't speak French yet and our professor really needs to slow the fuck down when explaining them to us! The phonetics lab supplements the grammar lectures, and actually I quite enjoy it. You sit in a room of cubicles with sound-proof headphones on, repeating after the phonetics professor into your own mic a series of sounds, words, and sentences. At the end you listen to how dumb you sound, and re-record on the original track over and over until time is up or you fall victim to food coma. During this time the professor rotates around each of your lines to coach you and provide comments for improvement. Surprisingly she never has much to say on my line and constantly tells me I lack the typical American accent, très bien! I still think I sound pretty idiotic, similarly to when you hear yourself on your message recording, but hey if it's good enough for her, it's good enough for me. We also are coached through making series of extremely nasal sounds, learning to hold our fingers under our throats and over nasal passages to feel the difference between this "e" and that "e." The Sorbonne method in this sense is actually very thorough, in all seriousness I do think that the phonetics labs have been very important in the process of learning.

Three weeks into classes and one of my favorites is a small female named Sara-Louise. Sara is Colombian/British and currently lives in London. She is very atypical of the people I normally take liking to: small and spritely, exceedingly sweet to everybody no matter how bad they smell, straight-laced and goody-goody with a very high-pitched sing-song voice. She speaks with a ridiculously heavy English accent, and she throws up vehemently every time she consumes alcohol. Her redeeming characteristics however include untainted English grammar, a hidden hatred for animals and children, an aversion to team sports, a boyfriend that is half Ethiopian, and the suggestion that I spend my upcoming birthday finding a small French child and lighting him on fire. When I tell her of my post-Paris Bogota plans, she breaks into stories about her politician grandfather whose house was broken into while his wife and children were tied up. She laughs half-heartedly and says it's a little funny now, then goes totally grave when telling me that "Colombia is very dangerous." Then she cocks her head at me, "But you could pass for Colombian, maybe." I heard from my other Colombian friends they only target wealthy Colombians? "That's true, but they also target foreigners. Just don't ever speak English. And act really poor." I'm don't know, I'm just not that worried about it yet, I mean-- "Oh and don't really get involved with drug lords. Yeah."

Today Sara and I buy copies of "Le Petit Prince" and also a copy in English on our way to Montmartre, the "Paris of story, song, legend, and lies." Two of my three French ex-es have raved about this book from their childhood so I figure it can't go wrong, and if anything it will be a fabulous pick-up gimmick here in Paris. We start reading them together on the Metro to the Sacré Coeur, poring over every phrase for minutes before giving up and me switching hands to the English version. I suppose this was a pretty amusing sight for the local French, a little Asian girl huddling with a little Colombian girl in the corner reading aloud in terrible elementary French with three copies of a children's book laid out before the two of them. The aim is to read about 5 pages a day after class in the grass at sunny Luxembourg, and hopefully we will have finished it in a month. I'll be sure to let you know how this goes.

Did I mention before that an old Parisian woman stopped me in the street near class and told me I was "the color of Barack Obama" the first week of class? She found me again today and told me the same thing.

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Photos

Jardin du Luxembourg
I get to run here. Every day.

Montmartre
Pigalle station

Tucker, me
what a night

Cafe de Flore
6.20 Euro for a Coke. Fred loves this place though.

"Understanding the United States Today"
"post-Bush..."

isn't this just the sweetest thing
Tucker and me, Jardin du Luxembourg

Anne-Laure
sits down in the middle of the street, Marais, at 5am to play a song before parting ways

British passports are ridiculous
"Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State requests and requires in the name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to let the bearer pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer assistance and protection as may be necessary."

Sara, me
Sacré Coeur