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.