La vie à Paris

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Sure, you and I run around all day yelling out to the heavens like silly children, "Paris je t'aime, Paris je t'aime!" But have you ever stopped to wonder if you ever hear back "Hey Amy, Paris t'aime! (I don't even know if that's grammatically correct yet.)" Because I sure don't. There are many things to love about Paris. And I love many things about Paris, but we've all probably heard this crap too many times so I'll move this to the back of the post. More interestingly, let's first talk one thing so far that I DON'T love about Paris because let's face it, that is always more fun. I think I may have mentioned in my last entry about Paris the complete inefficiencies that permeate this city/country. But that was more observation and judgement, like buying a video game but never seeing it in action. Well, I'm going to play this baby now, and I can play it over and over, on different TVs, with single or multiple players, and on turbo. Because when I first landed, Parisian inefficiencies hit me and hit me hard, right where it hurts - right on my bank account.

Finally settling back into a somewhat-permanent non-gypsy lifestyle, I look forward to internet access whenever I want it, another suitcase of clothes, makeup, being able to deal with your important personal particulars in a properly developed country, and walking around an apartment in my underwear. Well I may have spoke too soon. When we arrived in Egypt about 2 weeks ago, my ATM card stopped working. The story of this is long and not interesting, but basically HSBC totally fucked up and didn't send me a new card in time. Upon arrival in Paris as my ATM card was useless I decided to try getting a Cash Advance on my credit card, something I have actually never tried before in my life because I'd always had a working ATM card. At the machine I obviously don't really know my PIN so I try three times incorrectly, and the machine tells me in fucking French that it is keeping my one personal credit card. I go inside to freak out at whatever poor soul is currently manning the desk, and am I am told that I can retrieve my card the next day with my passport after some authorizations from my banks. Fine, this one is my fault, although it didn't feel good to walk around in a foreign country with no means of withdrawing cash or charging on credit. Basically I am monetarily handicapped. This is no good because I am meeting my landlord the next day and need to pay her a couple thousand in Euro cash for rent if I want somewhere to live.

At this point I realize that I really need to go bitch at HSBC now about my ATM card, they need to Express DHL this ish to me in Paris ASAP. I show up with three objectives: 1) to request an ATM card, 2) to get some cash on the spot, 3) to wire some money to Fred as it is impossible for me to obtain that much in cash from a foreign branch in one day. The woman at the desk gives me solutions to all three: 1) request the card with HK, 2) transact an emergency funds withdrawl (subject to a daily limit), and 3) send a fax to my bank with the wire transfer instructions. However, it is 4:30 and they are closing in half an hour, would it be possible for me to come back tomorrow? ... Really? Seriously? We can't do this now? Fine, as long as we take care of this tomorrow. I show up the next morning after frantic phone calls to my credit card company begging them not to block the card and after retrieving my (working!) card from BNP. My woman takes me next door and explains my situation to the manager. This takes something like half an hour, I'm not sure why. I am then left in the extremely inept care of the branch managers who proceed to take about 1.5 hours to locate the correct HSBC number for me to be calling. Really? Shouldn't they have some sort of protocol for this? You would think so, but never underestimate French inefficiency. Because by the time they gave me a working number to call, the HK offices were now closed around the world. Parfait. I am asked with a non-apologetic shrug to come back the next morning, again.

The next morning I am at HSBC on the dot at 10am and they basically take the next two hours trying to figure out god knows what to do (my situation doesn't seem to be that complicated...) and soon lunch rolls around. This particular HSBC branch has now wasted my time on 3 separate days and the whole morning, having accomplished nothing still, and the MANAGER turns to me and asks, "Eh... you will take lunch now?" Does he mean to ask me if I want to LEAVE for a "lunch break" during precious HK open hours, when I have no confidence they will sort this in the time we would have left after coming back from said lunch break? What happened to customer relations? What happened to giving a flying fuck about sorting out a BANKING CLIENT'S OVERSEAS CRISIS? I mean I can roll with the punches in most situations, but I have now been nearly without any cash or any available funds for 3 days in Paris, and I can be serious about a situation like this. Absolutely ridiculous. Fast-forwarding through a lot of angst and more incredible inadequacies in the afternoon, we finally sort everything (I basically take the situation into my own hands and it is just me using them for their intl dialing) and although it was HSBC's fault I get charged like another 20 USD to even transact the emergency withdrawl (whose daily limit isn't even enough to cover a fraction of rent due to the landlord)... and the new card won't even reach Paris for another week. Thank God for Fred whom I end up in several zeros of Euros in debt to.

So much for a happy welcome back to Paris.

Now completely switching gears for the more normal reaction to Paris, picking up from where I left off last... if I said that I hadn't written for weeks because I was kidnapped by the belly-dancing mafia in Cairo where I last left you, would you believe me? ... Sorry, but my excuse is something far from exciting and unexpected. Ex monetary-issues the first four days, I have been going in Paris, loving eating and dancing with it, at about 100 mph and honestly haven't had much down time (since I had access to funds). Any diligence I took with me from employment has been sucked dry out of me by the five daily hours of class. And to be honest trying to recount life from two weeks ago always yields rather dull story-telling, comes out to a lot of "on Monday we ..., on Tuesday we ...," etc; so je suis désolé, everybody. But because I am lazy and tired, and some of you are explicitly asking what I have been doing for two weeks, I'm going to subject you to this should you want to continue reading. Hold on tight, this is going to be very Wham-Bam, Thank-you-Ma'am.

1. J'ai un cours français intensif a la Sorbonne. For five hours a day, every day du Lundi par Vendredi, for eight weeks, I pay precious Euros to have a very petit French man drone on in indecipherable French in my ear. Four hours of grammar and an hour of phonetics lab. And very small he is, I'd put him at 60 inches max. Oh yeah, and he's like 22 years old. Seriously. But really I can't complain about his teaching so far. Except the Sorbonne method is to only use French, ever. Explaining grammar, taking tests, giving instructions, everything. I am in a complete beginner class (débutant absolu), and I can assure you that I don't understand 50% of the grammatical rules he tries to explain to us - but somehow they think that is OK. Eventually you learn to figure it out yourself and see the patterns in French, so I suppose it is extremely frustrating and requires a TON of concentration but it seems to work. I can't imagine how hard it would be for somebody who had never taken Spanish, Latin, etc to figure out concepts like conjugating. Not for stupid people. My class has about 15 people in it from all over the world, surprisingly only one other American. Not surprisingly, there are a few stupid people in there too. No public comment on what nationalities they are.

2. J'habite dans un appartement sur Boulevard Saint Michel. I live on the top floor of a beautiful traditional French building on St. Michel, a huge street that divides the 5th and 6th arrondissements. I live on the 5th side, behind me I have the Pantheon and the Quartier Latin, and in front of me on the 6th side is Jardin du Luxembourg, no joke. I have a full view of the Eiffel tower which is amazing at any hour of the day. At night it glitters in shining lights every hour on the hour. I absolutely love the flat, I feel like I'm living in a movie. My neighbor is a French man named Wolf who actually speaks very good English. He has been both wonderfully charming with me, and also horribly bitchy when he asks me to turn down the music. I haven't really figured him out yet. I'm sure he will star in a short story of mine on here soon, though. His girlfriend lives with him, and I am very grateful that I never hear them having sex through the "wafer-thin walls."

3. J'ai fait quelques nouveaux amis à Paris. As I settle into a semi-permanent life here, I will need to introduce a new cast of characters as they are likely to make recurring appearances in the blog. I will avoid overload and try to phase them in gradually. Of course I will need to start with Frederic whom you have already met in my first blog about Paris. I love hanging out with him and his friends in Paris because they try to speak to me in French and constantly correct the elementary sentences I can actually construct after 6 days of class. One of these friends named Emmy is an absolute delight. She is from Lebanon and works in the perfume industry (big surprise here in Paris.) I can't say I have any funny stories about her, but that's probably because the best way to describe her is that she is a doll. Nothing bad or creepy will ever happen with her around.

On a very opposite side of the spectrum is Laurie, an Irish girl from London whom I met salsa-dancing at the Bastille last week. Picture a very petite girl, very thin, heavy smoker, crazy peroxide blonde hair, sparkly headbands, talks slowly and heavily accented like she is on horse tranquilizers. I can foresee her single-handedly screwing up my (already fading) American accent. She is talkative, direct, but very sweet. She has so far been my 5am partner in crime. We tend to hang out with a tall Dutch guy named Christian, completely straight-laced gentleman, can't hurt a fly or let a girl go thirsty at the club. Walks you home no matter where you are, collared shirt still tucked in at at 5am. Comes to Laurie and I awkwardly when girls at the clubs stalk him to have his babies.

I have also reunited with Mirella, the Brazilian Olympic alpine skiier whom I introduced in the blog about Selcuk/Ephesus in Turkey. She has been here for a month already taking French, painting, and cooking classes. She has found a fabulous samba club here in Paris up to Brazilian standards. And for the past week, an ex of mine from Paris has been back in town. Alfonso is a blast from the past at 4 years ago, half-Panamanian, half-French, 100% French demeanor. We've been going around the city, him showing me his favorite spots and us catching up on our lives since the last time we met in Shanghai/HK a year ago. We seem to be going on once a year, each time somewhere different around the world.

4. J'ai faim... toujours. People are always wondering how the French eat such rich foods but don't get fat. People, it's not that big of a mystery. Their portions here are miniscule. My stomach has already shrank considerably but since I need the same caloric intake to not bowl over in pangs of starvation on the Champs Elysses, I have to eat like 7 times a day just to stay any shade of satiated. I bet if you really tried you could compact each of their meals into a Gerber's pot. Or a contact lens case. And the whole question on how they have such an intake of carbs, those baguettes every meal? I know how, how nobody here gains weight. These baguette sandwiches only contain one slice of deli meat in each of them. I can barely taste any meat, nevermind any nice bloody tinge. How fattening really is a piece of bread for every meal? I mean that's what they feed prisoners in jails, and look how thin they manage to stay.

5. Les vêtements ruraux sont de mode à Paris. It's funny when you look around the streets of Paris, what I call "peasant clothes" seem to be all the rage here. Light, floaty, shapeless kind of clothes that lend you to prancing and frolicking through wheat fields. Which is all good and parfait except they sell these dresses for like 30 EUR, when in America I think I would pick them up for like, 5 USD at a thrift store. I expressed my amazement to Alfonso and he got all huffy on me, telling me that the fashions in Paris will hit America in like 2 years. Ah, well. When in Rome... (or I suppose Paris...)

6. (Finally...) Je suis heureuse. Life in Paris is wonderful. Tons of concerts, films, festivals, museums, sights, people, bars, restaurants, events, markets. The whole city is like a big piece of art. There is never any reason to go bored here unless you're trying to (or have no money). And the many parks around are great places to do that as well. I walk without direction all too often, because getting lost is never really like getting lost as any new area of Paris is like another wing of a museum. The skies don't get dark until 10:30p, the warmest part of the day normally rolls around at 3/4p. A typical weekday for me is simple at class from 10-4p, afternoon spent shopping at the markets for fresh fruits and produce or walking through random streets/galleries, an early evening jog through the jardins, dinner plans nearby in Odeon, St Michel, or St Germain. At night you can relax at a cafe on the street, inside at a bar, dance your face off in the clubs (any day of the week), brown-bag it on any of the bridges/banks of the Seine, possibilities here are really endless. Hopefully I'm in bed by 2 or 3, or 6a in recent cases. Luckily my classes start rather late in the morning. And so the days roll on.

In addition, it is surprising how fast this is happening but I can see my French developing already. I can loosely read pamphlets on the street, I can have simple conversations with French strangers. I blast French music in my flat, I order in French at restaurants and at the markets. Words like "Merci" and "Bonjour" come out without thinking or translating now. I get approached for directions on the streets - in French! With such intense immersion though in the grammatical rules, spellings, phonetics though I am worried I really am losing even more of my English language. The other day I wrote that I was in phonetique lab. I asked a friend, d'accord? while trying to make plans, unintentionally. It doesn't help that most of the friends I have made here, while not all native French, don't speak English perfectly and I'm always hearing convoluted pronunciations and have gotten accustomed to foreign phrases and expressions. Funny, the day I met Jorge, a half-Colombian/half-German from Madrid, I told him jokingly that I crack myself up. For the next hour he thought I was a huge crackhead. I laughed and quoted Whitney Houstons, "Crack is whack! Crack is cheap!" He didn't get it. Yikes, we'll see how this goes...

I'm afraid this entry came out somewhat "typical." To be honest I haven't taken many pictures of Paris at all - I've fallen out of tourist mode a little here, enjoying the permanence for awhile. It's great to have another suitcase of normal clothes, access to internet whenever I want it, makeup and heels (I almost fell over when I first tried walking in them again.) The Middle East has really messed up my alcohol tolerance, but at least now I'm a cheap date! I haven't even made it to any of the sites really, been busy just living here. Rest assured though I will definitely dedicate some good time to visiting the sights in sunny weather with the camera. I also promise to not wait so long to write again, but here is at least a quick download on my new life here in France.

My mother has been asking me if I miss the family. I answer in full honesty that I don't. But I don't miss anybody, at least not in a sad way. How can you when you are living in Paris?

Bisous de Paris!

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Photos

Frederic + me
Fred's birthday @ Les Papilles, my first proper French dinner with French people, in all French...

Mirella and me
walking from the Louvre to Odeon. Pont Neuf, River Seine

Parisian exes
Alfonso, some street near Montparnasse

Laurie
she is crazy

the 5am faces
some club under Montparnasse

The Perfect Guy
Dutch Christian

Emmy, Fred, me
@ Jack Johnson

"this one, really..."
Khalil and Fred debating which bottle to go with