habits

Je suis desolee.
In English, I have this unnecessary and somewhat unpleasant, although completely well-intentioned, habit of apologizing for everything. It is something that my mother and father have been picking on me for years, some sort of force that keeps me from doing anything but apologizing, even when things aren’t my fault. “It’s raining outside.” “I’m sorry.” “I was late to my meeting.” “I’m sorry.” “The Eagles lost again this weekend.” “I’m sorry.” Regardless of the conversation, regardless of whether or not I was even involved in the momentary instant of annoyance, I am sorry for it. It’s a habit that I’m working on I swear, but apparently I’m doing it in French too.
My HF and HM comment on it after the first week.
“Why do you apologize so much? Stop apologizing. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I don’t know. I say it a lot in English, too. I can’t help it. I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry for being sorry?”
“Hm. Apparently.”
These conversations take place in quick French – my French is definitely improving – but what’s funny is, I think they sound even more ridiculous in French. For whatever reason, I find that my defenses don’t hold up as well; I find myself relaxing more and accepting the fact that there are parts of my life that just don’t translate and there are parts that do that maybe shouldn’t. Like the fact that I’m sorry.
One night at dinner my HF and HM ask me about my religious background. I don’t remember how it comes up but they are curious as to whether or not I’ll be celebrating Yom Kippur this week, that is, if one can actually celebrate it. I explain that I’m Quaker, and they ask if this is Protestant, and I say, it probably was at one point but it’s remarkably different. They ask me to explain and I begin to realize that certain words just don’t translate. Try to explain to someone what the Inner Light is in French. Oh, you know, the lumiere dedans. I’m sure there has to be another way to say it, but I don’t know it, so I wing it. They are fascinated. I am confused. I feel like I’m describing something that is entirely maniacal. Inner light, community and peace, they must think that I’m some crazy granola-eating-birkenstock-wearing-child-of-some-crazy-granola-eating-birkenstock-wearing parents.
“Is this a religion from the sixties?”
“Actually, the 17th century.”
“Are your parents Quakers?”
“That’s even more complicated.”
“Are there lots of Quakers?”
“Define ‘lots.’”
If there’s one thing I’m picking up here, it’s something about the art of conversation. They enjoy a good banter, they enjoy a good question. They have endless questions, my HF and HM, but they are genuinely curious in a way that my family in Bordeaux was not. I feel less like a neighbor being spied upon, a curiosity, and more like someone they are trying to actually understand. It is in the middle of this conversation, when I am just starting to get frustrated because I feel like I sound like I am out of my mind, that my HF speaks up and says something so wonderful, so delicate, so thoughtful that I hope I can translate it without losing its power. He says,
“The issue is that there are really two types of religion for everyone. There’s the part that you outwardly practice, the part that you attend services, you make changes to your life, you join a community, you act upon. That’s the part you can discuss. But the part that is within you, that part of you that only your heart, your soul can know, that’s the part you can’t really discuss. In any language. It just doesn’t translate into any words.”
I am sorry for not being able to explain more of the former or the latter, but I am told that I have no reason to be sorry.
Each day here matters. I’m seeing the sights of course – climbed the Eiffel Tower, and the bell towers of Notre Dame, and the Arc de Triumphe – already been to the Musee d’Orsay, the Louvre, the Jeu de Paume and have plans to see four more museums at least– already seen one piece of theater and am scheduled to see five more – been to two famous cemeteries and seen the Moulin Rouge – had coffee at the café where Amelie worked in that wonderful movie – and have found my own little café where I like to write and read on Tuesday mornings. I’ll start my internship this week working in a third grade classroom for a bilingual progressive school called the Ecole Aujourd’hui. Each of these things are great – my classes, my host family, the fact that I can go to a local Boulangerie to pick up the bread for my family (they’ve assigned me that daily task) and they know who I am there. But the moments that take place in conversation, when I am thrown completely out of my Anglophone world and put at a table with two incredibly curious and lovely adults, those are the moments I can hear myself (in French and inside) expand. Changing habits, thinking more.

getting lost.

Je me suis perdu encore.

On the nights that I eat with my new host family in my new apartment in my new living quarters in Paris (that’s right, goodbye youth hostel, hello real Parisian lifestyle), they ask me about my day and the sites that I’ve seen or the classes I’ve gone to and the ways I’ve been getting around the city. They are very kind people, and extremely intelligent, in ways that surprise me not because I expected them to be stupid but because I never expected them to open up so readily, so quickly, when I’ve only been living here for five days.
A lot has happened in these past five days though, and that means I should probably back up for a moment and ground myself once more in my new living quarters. I left the youth hostel on Saturday, and was thankfully picked up in a car by my host father. It seems weird to call him that because this living situation is different from Bordeaux; it’s a real contract with a certain number of dinners per week, real rent, a security deposit. It’s more like I’m becoming a real person but have a wonderful family who has taken me in to be a half-daughter/half-tenant. For the purposes of privacy and so that I don’t end up getting sued for something I write, I will refer to my host family only by the initials HF (as in host father) and HM (host mother). I think that will keep things private enough, at least for now. Besides, maybe I can come up with witty things that the acronyms can stand for. But that’s for another day.
I’m living in a beautiful apartment in the 16th arrondissement. It’s a really lovely area, with shops that I cannot afford to go into but also with little streets of cobblestone that house smaller shops, smaller surprises, little parks and places, and a lovely farmer’s market (or what we in the states call a farmer’s market but here is simply the norm) right down the street. I’m less than a block away from a Metro stop and a 15 minute walk from the Metro stop that takes me directly to school (only 20-25 minutes on the Metro takes me right to school). My room is simply furnished with furniture mostly from Ikea (why is it that I am always with the Ikea families?). I have a balcony, my own little Parisian balcony, and beautiful old shutters that I close each night and open each morning to keep out the noise of the street and the eyes of the neighbors. It’s fantastic.
My HF is a chef (who teaches the courses for Vassar and Wesleyan students and workshops for the public as well) and an interior designer. He refinishes apartments and makes them look beautiful with bright colors and spiffy looking contraptions. He very much likes making small spaces into great spaces by hanging hooks on the walls to hang colorful folding chairs, tables that fold into smaller and smaller tables, hidden washing machines, things like that. He tells me that he likes people most of all. When we first meet, he asks me the things that I like and the things that I dislike. I answer fairly quickly that I like writing and traveling and swimming and reading, and I dislike music that is too loud and mushrooms (although I am starting to find that I do like them after all). He says that he likes people, watching them and learning about them and just standing out on the balcony and thinking about what their lives must be like. He dislikes aggressive people; he says that they scare him and he prefers to live a more quiet and peaceful like. I like my HF very much.
My HM is an editor, who dresses in clothes often made of linen and reminds me a lot of someone I’ve met before but cannot ever seem to remember who or where. She is very precise in all of her speech and mannerisms, very direct in all of her questions, and fires the questions at me in such a way that might seem a little intense but in fact mostly seems like genuine curiosity. My HF and HM are definitely….members of the 16th arrondissement. While they break the traditional stereotypes of this area by knowing all of the people in the markets by name and striking up conversations with complete strangers just to amuse their curiosity (waving to tourists on tour boats on the Seine), they also attend monthly Philosophy dinners at a local restaurant and enjoy yoga sessions privately in the apartment with a woman who comes to work with them. It’s a different world I am living in, but no doubt one filled with curiosity.
At the dinner table at night, I tell them that I got lost again today for the third day in a row. The thing I am having a hard time explaining though is that I am actually allowing myself to get lost. I carry with me three different maps of the city at all times, each one with various levels of precision and discretion – one masked as a journal with just the basics and the metro, one clearly a tourist map filled with great information for the museums, and one that is blatantly street maps for all the city but at least that one is one even Parisians often have to carry. It’s not that I’m unprepared. It’s that I want to get lost. I want to wander the streets because I have the time right now and I want to see what this city has to offer. And each time I get lost, not only do I find something useful like a new Metro stop I didn’t know or a sacred spot I didn’t know I should visit, I find something a little greater, a little less tangible, something I really did not know I was looking for.
Today I found fall. I wanted to post a picture but I cannot seem to get the program to work well enough tonight so I will tell you this. I got lost and ended up at the Cemetery of Montmartre, and walking through it I looked up and just above the enormous tombs I realized I had forgotten entirely that the shifting of the seasons would begin so soon. The side of an apartment building was covered in leaves and as they moved up along the building they went from bright greens to lesser greens to yellows to brilliant, brilliant reds, the leaves clinging to the building and clinging to each other as the days get darker a little sooner one-by-one. Classes have begun, I’ve moved into my place for the semester, and I’m finding myself more settled than I expected, more ready to get lost than ever before, just to see, just to see what questions will be asked and what little trucs I might find along the way.

interpreter of maladies.

On Monday morning I said Au revoir to ma famille francaise de Bordeaux and Bonjour to Paris. My family was very sweet to me during my last few days in Bordeaux; I found that they invited more into conversations with neighbors, introduced me as their jolie americaine, and also invited themselves to stay with me should they ever visit Philadelphia. I think that they liked me just fine.
Unfortunately, I had to say goodbye to Bordeaux with a cold, one that arrived Saturday afternoon and is just (I believe) on its way out now on Wednesday. It is a terrible, terrible thing to be sick and away from home at the same time. It has never been something that I have been very good at dealing with. All I want to do when I am sick is lay down on the family room couch and have Adventures in Babysitting or A League of Their Own or The American President playing in front of me. Perhaps every so often Dad will come into the room with a new giant glass of water; mom will call every two hours from her office to make sure that I am napping and not overdoing it. Because Dad knows I won’t drink enough and Mom knows I love to overdo everything.
But I am not home and I am pleasantly snotty, with a sore throat and a major case of the sniffles. However, I am not perturbed. Pourquoi, you ask? Because I am living in Paris.
Before elaborating, I should say this. Bordeaux is a beautiful city. The streets are mostly cobblestone, the facades of the batiments are simply incredible, each window has a balcony, each street has a complicated and romantic sounding name. It is a city filled with small parks and small museums, with a mirror of water that they will happily tell you only exists in Bordeaux (and not in Paris!). I took classes at the Ecole des Vins, where I learned words for wine tasting that I do not know the equivalents of in English. I saw a beautiful chateau in the countryside just outside of Bordeaux where a great writer, Montesquieu, spent hours toiling over books, letters, politics, and more. I saw vineyards, great expanding fields of grapes waiting to be harvested in just a few more weeks. I saw the ocean, the beach, the largest sand dune in all of Europe, and a stuffed animal of Mickey Mouse hanging from a rope that I think was supposed to be funny and decorative but instead looked a little sick and rather morbid. Either way, Bordeaux was a quiet and lovely and picturesque introduction to my semester here.
But now I am living in Paris. Our first night here, Monday night, we took a boat ride on the Seine. Now this is nothing more than a tourist trap but I think the idea is that we can get all of our touristy tendencies out of our bodies now so that we can live in the vraie Paris. This is the only moment that I will give you from Paris for the moment because I think that this is such a profound start.
We arrive a little late from our Metro stop and head up the stairs towards our first view of the center of the city, since our youth hostel is not far but not close to all those classic places to visit. Climbing up the stairs, I first notice that the sky is changing from light blue to a darker hue. Heading up the stairs to cross the Pont Neuf we look out as a group to the western sky and there it is. The sun is setting, the sky is turning all sorts of reds and pinks and blues, and the Eiffel Tower is there standing like every postcard shows that it does, and the facades of the buildings are shimmering slightly from every bit of sun that passes over them, and the water is moving endlessly but carelessly, and everyone, especially me, is giddy because this is where we live.
I call this entry interpreter of maladies because I want to remember the small conquest that was being able to describe my cold symptoms in French, without dictionary, without slipping into English, first to my French mother and then the French pharmacist who gave me plenty of medications for an unbelievably reasonable price. A small victory to end my time in Bordeaux and a grand view of the four months ahead.