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Published: September 27th 2008
At long last (hey, only a month after I arrived!), I am putting together the travel journal I had envisioned for this extended stay in Europe. The journal is mainly for my personal records; I am a bit self-conscious about assuming that others would want to read about my life in a "blog." However, it might be a nice tool to keep in touch from afar, so I welcome you to read along.
This three months in Europe is my treat to myself after three years of law school and one bar exam. I'm not sure if the proportions are quite right... three months of law school might have been more like it (that's a joke)... but I'll take what I can get. 😊 When our negotitiation team won second place in last winter's international commercial mediation competition, held here in Paris, part of the prize was an offer to come clerk at the ICC's international court of arbitration for a few months. I decided to take them up on the offer.
I am living in the 18th arrondisement of Paris, the neighborhood of Montmarte, which lies in the north of the city. Montmartre has long been famous for
its steep hills and its bohemian dwellers, but more on that in a later post.
My apartment was let to me by the American couple who own it. They live in Cambridge, Mass most of the year and come here for vacations. The building was built during the Art Nouveau period, and bears all the characteristic swirls and romantic decorative details of that era. There are curving stone flourishes over the door and windows (forgive me, architects, as I don’t know the proper terminology). I have lived in or temporarily stayed in a variety of old Paris apartments over the years, and to me one of their particular features is always the entryway. There is that comforting soft click in the door when it opens to your correct tapping in of the door code. The door is usually old, wooden, and heavy when you push it open. You typically enter into darkness, or at least gloom, and you have to search around for the light. And then there is the peculiar, distinctive smell- musty, a bit damp, mixed with the smell of old wood- I would know it anywhere. I have read that of the five physical senses, scent
is the most evocative of memory; this Paris entryway smell makes me wonder about all the people who have walked through that hallway over the decades, in a way that I never stop to imagine when in the glassy, charmless entryway of a high-rise apartment building in New York or Los Angeles, for example. My current building’s entryway has all these features, plus the walls of the hallway are lined with very delightful painted ceramic panels, showing a field of irises blowing in the wind, all at curvy angles- tres Art Nouveau. What it does not have, in the midst of all this charm, is an elevator.
That’s right, no elevator. I wanted an authentic Paris apartment, and I got one. I climb nine flights of stairs to get to the apartment. The stairs and floors are all old wooden paneling, uneven and very creaky. You make a lot of noise going up and down these stairs, and there is no other way in or out. It is not a good building for sneaking around on secret assignations- everyone knows when you are coming or going! My floor is not, as you might expect, called the 8th or 9th
floor (depending on whether you think in terms of European or American floor numbering!), but rather, enigmatically, is labeled “B4.” The floors all have different names, involving different letters and numbers, none of them in any cognizable order.
The apartment itself has two main rooms- a salon and a bedroom- plus small kitchen and bathroom. It has the characteristic rippled, creaky wooden floors, high ceilings, and old fireplaces in each room. Both main rooms also have tall French windows. The view from the salon’s window is marvelous; it looks out over the peaked hills and pitched rooftops of Montmartre. It isn’t an elegant, million-dollar view, but rather just the sort of view you want in a “bohemian” Paris apartment. It actually reminds me quite a bit of the set from the production of “La Boheme” that the Los Angeles Opera does about every third year. Mimi would look out at this very view while she coughed plaintively. Not much else to say about the apartment, except that it has perfectly functioning plumbing and internet, which makes life in an old apartment much more pleasant.
To leave Montmartre, a world to itself, and enter the rest of Paris, I
walk about four blocks down a hill to the Chateau Rouge metro stop. Some of you will know that Chateau Rouge is on the 4 line train, near Porte Clingangcourt- it is not the most elegant metro line in Paris, but provides the rider with lots of local color. Chateau Rouge marks the boundary between my neighborhood- home to a lot of young French professionals and young families- and a vibrant north African immigrant neighborhood. There is a very energetic street market by the metro every day, and it can be rather exciting to pick one’s way through it.
I have a half-hour metro ride to arrive at work at the International Chamber of Commerce headquarters, location of the arbitration court where I am working. I emerge in a completely different world from Montmarte. The ICC sits on the cours Albert, just along the Right Bank of the Seine, in the western part of Paris, near the Pont de l’Alma. Our neighbors in this prestigious strip include embassies and top-tier law firms. Just down the block is the tunnel where Princess Diana died, and I am greeted by the shiny memorial to her when I come out of the
metro each morning.
The ICC headquarters is a funny building, full of contrasts. You enter through a security area, giving the impression that you are being allowed into a very important place indeed. The first floor of public rooms exudes decaying elegance. There are white marble staircases with fraying red carpeting that needs cleaning, tarnished gold trim everywhere, lovely vaulted ceilings whose corners need dusting, and beautiful crystal chandeliers that also look like they could do with a bit of a wash. When you ascend beyond the first floor into the staff quarters, you get the feeling that you have gone down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass, into a different place entirely. The red carpets are replaced with fraying brown carpet liner. Everything is cramped and dim. Boxes of documents line the halls so that you have to walk carefully to pass someone in the hallway without knocking over something important. The two social hubs of the building are the very fancy coffee machine, where for only 25 centimes you can have any kind of fancy cappuccino you can imagine, and the old gazebo in the back courtyard where everyone goes to smoke cigarettes. While the
staff hails from all over the world, that unmistakable sense of French bureaucracy still manages to pervade. But really, would we want it any other way?
I was very lucky in my first desk assignment at the ICC. Most of the clerks are tucked into windowless closets somewhere, because the organization is so short on space. By some stroke of fortune, however, I got a desk on the fourth floor by a window that actually looks out over the Seine, and, yes, at a perfectly framed view of the Eiffel Tower. When I sit at this desk and gaze at the Eiffel Tower, I have the feeling that I am in a movie about a girl who goes to work in Paris, like “Sabrina”- with a cheesy set-piece of the Eiffel Tower out my window- it can’t be the REAL Eiffel Tower, can it? There is a stand of trees between my window and the Seine, and I like to watch the bateaux mouches slowly gliding by behind the trees.
There are about ten clerks, from all over the world. I am one of two Americans; the other is a third-year student at the University of Michigan, and
she is getting academic credit for clerking at the ICC (smart). Some of the clerks are still somewhere in the midst of their law study, and others are practicing attorneys who have decided to get a taste of international arbitration. It's a fun group, because we all share a similar mindset: we're the sort of people who thought that randomly going to Paris to work at a court for a few months sounded like a marvelous idea, practicality and exchange rates be darned.
The ICC makes up for not really paying its clerks by giving us books of meal tickets, redeemable for eight euros in any restaurant in Paris. This is actually quite a good deal, and we clerks tend to go out to lunch almost every day, determined to exploit and enjoy our small riches. Lunch has thus become my main meal of the day, and so far we haven’t eaten in the same place twice. Sometimes we stay near the ICC, and other times we venture further afield. On one particularly sunny day when no one had much work to do, we walked all the way down into the rue Cler on the Left Bank, and had
a long lunch in an outdoor restaurant- it was heavenly.
Abientot!
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Heather
non-member comment
living vicariously
Anne, I am living vicariously through you as I read about your amazing fall trip in beautiful Paris! The way you described your flat, including the entryway and the smell takes me back to my study abroad in London when I lived on the top floor of an 1890's flat and looked out over hundreds of chimney tops! I love your pictures. What a beautiful flat and view! The food sounds fantastic and the job sounds fun. Thanks so much for sharing and providing a such a vivid picture to us of your experience. Heather :)