Leaps and Bounds

Happy Leap Day! Don’t ask me how to say that in french cause I’m not sure what they call it. Today marks a bit of an anniversary because I was originally supposed to be on a plane headed back to sunny Daytona on this very day. I was going to make the “leap” back to the US, so to speak. :-) But I have to say, although I love all my friends and family at home, I’m quite glad that the Delta flight is somewhere over the Atlantic without me aboard. If I had to leave today I wouldn’t be ready. So I am thankful for this reprieve, and for the traveling it allows me to do. Tomorrow I head for a couple days in Portugal and then on to Spain for a brief visit. I’m quite excited and ready for the near 70 temps this weekend!

After being sprung from the centuries-old stone buildings of ScPo two weeks ago I’m sure you’d all like to hear how I’ve been running around Europe and spending all day sitting in cafes. Instead I’ve spent a lot of time in my apartment trying to plan trips and researching jobs and and other much less glamorous daily activities, cooking, dishes, laundry, cleaning, etc. Living in an exciting destination for an extended period of time means that life goes on as normal, despite the gilded monuments and the troves of artistic treasures in your backyard. Back in the fall I was chatting with someone online and he asked me what I was doing that night, if I was going to go eat some wine and cheese under the Eiffel Tower. I told him the truth which was that I was going to be putting on my PJs, cooking some dinner, and reading several chapters about France’s diplomatic relations with Germany. He acted shocked that I wasn’t out living it up in the city every night. I reminded him that I wasn’t here on vacation. I had homework and classes to go to and the mundane aspects of life to tend to. I don’t think I ever discussed this so here’s a look at what my days were like.

My normal day during the semester went something like this:
6:30- wake up in the pitch black cold, stumble over to turn the lights and heater on, put water on stove to boil, check e-mail and facebook
6:45- put on the news via FoxNews.com or CNN.com and listen to the top stories while putting on my layers of winter clothing and fixing myself up, make occasional disgruntled comments to the computer when something particularly ridiculous is being reported, or argue with an “expert” who doesn’t seem to understand basic logic, prepare hot beverage (tea, coffee, or hot chocolate depending on time of my first class, the amount of sleep had, and the temperature outside) in my extremely American travel mug that keeps things hot (or cold) for 3 hours. It’s amazing, I don’t care how un-French it is.
7:25- Put on external layers, ie. scarf, heavy coat, and on particularly bitter days- gloves and a hat, shove travel mug into school bag, grab keys, iPod, and metro pass.
7:30- descend 6 flights of narrow winding stairs quickly without losing my footing and skiing down the carpet runner, exit into still pitch-black and freezing-cold Paris morning, walk 3 blocks to the line 12 metro, descend into the underbelly of the city and wait 0-4 minutes for a train, find seat, flop down and zone out while listening to something on the iPod, frequently country, or try to write legibly while finishing French homework and avoiding the temptation to ask the native French speaker next to me to do it for me.
7:50- exit at Sevres-Babylon and walk 5 blocks to ScPo (still in pitch-black cold), arrive at 27 and enter with the other bleary-eyed students with 8am classes, grab a copy of Le Figaro, Le Monde, or the European Wall Street Journal off the table of free press in the entryway and ascend the stairs to an overheated classroom.
8:00- take out caffeinated beverage and read the front page while trying to make my brain switch to another language and waiting for the teacher to arrive, wonder at the ScPo students who show up for an 8am class in very chic outfits and slightly yearn for UF where you can roll out of bed and go to class in your pajamas without causing a single raised eyebrow, try to focus on someone lecturing in French for two hours who has a tendency to tell vaguely related stories with no point, and/or listen to one or several student oral presentations given by A) a french student speaking rapidly and mumbling their words or B) an international student with an incomprehensible accent reading from their paper
10:00- Class is over and it’s finally light outside, proceed to next class, or hang around ScPo or go to the library if there is an assignment or reading to work on, otherwise head back home.
Sometime in the afternoon- return home and then a varying combination of- cook lunch, run errands, read for class, watch some TV while cleaning, write a blog, upload pictures, go to climbing class, or Bible study, or meet a friend for coffee, cook dinner, etc. etc. you get the picture

This was the basic schedule but it varied from day to day depending on what time my classes started and which class it was, etc. I will say I had it easier than my other ScPo friends because I did not have to take a full course load since I only needed 8 credits to graduate. And of course, while I say that life in Paris is just everyday life, that’s not entirely true. There were plenty of days when I would get done with class and then decide to walk over to the Latin Quarter to get some lunch, or to go stroll along the Seine and sit in a park for a bit, or head over to rue de Rennes and do a little shopping.

I’ve heard some friends say that Paris is no longer a romantic city for them because they’ve lived here. They’ve said they’ll have to find a new city to be their exciting romantic city. Maybe I would feel the same way if I had lived here for years and years, but at this point, having spent almost a year of my life living here, I can say that Paris has not lost its charm. Yes it’s not exactly new to me, and certain aspects of it have become commonplace, but living here has not dimmed the City of Light’s glow. It amazes me how places I have been a hundred times can still be thrilling. I guess to me it is like the beach. I’ve lived in Daytona for about 17 years and the beach is a familiar friend, and yet, there is still a feeling of excitement and a moment of wonder when I stand there watching the waves of the Atlantic race up on the sand. It’s maybe because with the ocean you feel like it can never be fully known. As much time as you spend there and as much as you learn about it, it retains its mystery. That’s what Paris is like for me. As much as I study about French history, as many guidebooks as I read, and as much wandering as I do, I don’t think I can ever uncover all of her secrets. There is an excitement in discovery and a soft, but persistent call to continue searching. I understand now why men like a mysterious woman. I normally don’t subscribe to the practice of all inanimate objects- cars, boats, planes, cities- being referred to as “she” (which is why my Ford Focus is named Gerald), but if any city is a woman, it’s Paris.

So since I’ve been free I have been enjoying the relatively stress-freeness of my life. It’s been a tad boring because most of my friends are gone on their semester break trips, have gone home, or have to work during the week. I got to make some new friends recently though. My housing agent/friend Mr. Dressner gave my contact info to a girl from Missouri who had just arrived for the second semester at ScPo, and she emailed me and asked if I wanted to get together sometime. We met for coffee at Les Deux Magots and I had a lot of fun passing on my acquired wisdom regarding life at ScPo and living in Paris. Celeste had only been in town a few days and hadn’t met anyone yet so was still a little lost and isolated, but I’m sure once she does the integration program she’ll have plenty of friends and really enjoy being here. I’m always impressed by people who are willing to come here not knowing a soul and without a command of the language. We met again several days later for dinner at my favorite greek sandwich place near St. Michel. I also had fun hanging out a few times with Zach who had been staying with my pastor and his wife for two months. Denise, the pastor’s wife, used to babysit Zach when he was little and so their families have been friends for years. It was nice to have another southerner around for a while, even if he was a Tennessee fan.

Oh! And one of the best “snobby Parisian” stories comes from having coffee with Zach. We were at Les Deux Magots (it sounds like I go there a lot but really it was only like the third time in 6 months), sitting on the enclosed terrace watching evening fall on the St. Germain-des-Pres church, and at the table next to us was this older proper Parisian woman. Now the background is that Les Deux Magots is one of, if not the, most famous cafés in Paris (Hemingway, Sartre, and others used to frequent it back in the day) and it’s in an upscale part of town. Well we’re sitting there and you can tell by the way they greet others and the wait staff that many of the people there are regulars and come by everyday. We had been there for a while and Zach is pretty tall and he had his leg crossed and because, like all Parisian establishments, tables are crammed together and there is very little space, his foot is touching an empty chair at the next table. Mind you it wasn’t like he had his feet propped up on the chair, or that he was jiggling his leg, or really doing anything that could possibly bother someone, his foot was just barely touching the seat of the chair. Apparently, and this was news to me, that is some horrible behavior by French standards. The little lady at the table turned to him and gestured towards his foot and starts off in a reprimanding tone and poor Zach, who doesn’t speak French, was just staring at her trying to figure out what she wanted until I explained what she was saying. “Sir, you should take your foot off the chair! People sit there and it is not proper to put your foot there. It is very bad manners!” etc. etc. I was chuckling slightly because I had never seen a Parisian openly chastise someone for their “bad manners” although I had heard stories. Zach moved his foot and we sat for a while longer and all was well, until....Zach stretched out his legs. Oh the horror! Long-legged Zach’s feet didn’t extend past the table and chairs but apparently they were too close to the aisle according to the self-appointed safety and propriety police. The tiny woman reached over and touched his leg and in a tone of utter distaste informed him that “You musn’t put your feet in the walkway! You will trip someone, that is dangerous and very impolite!” Zach looked at me and said he thought it was time to go and I quickly agreed because I was having a hard time controlling my laughter. So a word of caution if you find yourself at les Deux Magots- better be on your best behavior or a stern Parisian woman will give you a good talking-to, even if you don’t speak French.

My other “new” friend, isn’t really new at all. I had several French penpals a few years ago, and the one I got to know best was François from Toulon. This was back in 2004 sometime, and we wrote pretty consistently for a while. We kept in touch when I came to Paris last time but since he lived in the south we never met. After that we didn’t keep in contact very much, just a couple emails over the last years. Well back in December François joined facebook and found me on there. It just so happened that I was in Paris and now François is here for school at Paris X in Nanterre. We caught up a bit and discussed meeting up for coffee but it was during the holidays and Della was arriving for a visit and then I was swamped with school work and exams as was he, so it kept getting postponed. Well this week, after about 4 years, we finally met.

We got coffee at Starbucks (yes, my suggestion, I know I am ridiculously American). It was strange, the slight awkwardness of the first conversation with someone you already know fairly well. My French is slightly better than his English so the conversation was mostly French until I told him he should practice, and from then on it was back and forth without any rhyme or reason. I was impressed with how easily, for the most part, we could communicate since often with young people I have a hard time with their slang and mumbled words. I have to say “for the most part” because there were definitely a few times where one of us was trying to explain something in both languages and the other one would just be sitting there with a perplexed look on their face. Certain words with an unfamiliar accent are just impossible to understand, like me trying to say Mitterand the way the French do, and François trying to say Ronald Reagan, but he was very sympathetic and didn’t make fun of my French mistakes, for which I am grateful. All in all it was really pleasant to finally meet him face-to-face and we made tentative plans to get together again sometime before I leave.

Well I need to get to sleep so I can be coherent when I try to pretend like I speak Portuguese tomorrow. A bientôt mes amis!

Free at last, free at last...

Greetings one and all. On Wednesday 13th February 2008, just before 11am, I exited a Sciences Po classroom and made my way down several flights of stairs. I sat on the bench in the peniche and waited for Cassie, who I knew would be following me shortly. I had just finished my exam for “Grande Nation: Modern and Contemporary French Foreign Policy”. It was a two hour essay exam with a choice of 2 topics. I chose the topic about the importance of rupture and continuity in french foreign policy since 1870. I don’t honestly know how I did because I’m never entirely confident that I understand what the ScPo professors want, but I thought I did fairly well. I wrote about how France’s perception of itself as a “Grande Nation” has underlied it’s foreign policy for the last 140 years, despite the fact that France’s glory-days are largely behind them. I won’t bore you with the details, but I didn’t think I did half bad. I was feeling relieved to have it over with, as I saw Cassie coming down the stairs. She grinned and walked over to me and before I could ask how it went said, “You just finished college!” It caught me off-guard and I paused a moment and said that strange sentence again- I just finished college? The reality of it washed over me and I stood there in the middle of the peniche smiling like a crazy person. Over the previous few weeks people at home and here had often asked me if I was excited about being almost done with school. I said “sure”, but I hadn’t really thought about it. I had been trying to focus on passing my exams and not on reveling in excitement of finishing college. I honestly didn’t think that it would be anything very thrilling. I really think at first Cassie was more excited about it than I was, but Cassie’s boundless enthusiasm (one of my favorite aspects of her personality) was contagious. The combination of sleep deprivation, caffeine, and the jittery relief of being finished with exams led to an animated conversation and goofy goodbyes as various friends passed through the atrium on their way to and from other exams. Each time Cassie informed someone that “Lyndsey just took her last exam EVER,” my smile got a little bigger.

I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing that I’m probably the only person at Sciences Po that just finished college. People don’t typical pick their last semester of college as the time to go abroad. Because of that I’ve spent this semester in limbo with basically nobody else my age around. In the undergrad program at school my friends are all a year or two younger, while my friends at church are mostly finished with college and thus a year or two (or more) older. It’s alright, I’ve never been very good at “normal”, why start now?

Anyway, the group in the peniche dispersed towards more exams or to begin their semester break travels and I walked out onto rue Saint Guillaume and into the cool February sunshine. I was exhausted and giddy all at once. Three back-to-back nights of cramming for finals meant I needed rest, but I was too pumped to be able to sleep. I walked the long way to the metro, enjoying the fresh air and my first sip of freedom. I put an energetic song on my iPod and fought a losing battle with the corners of my mouth that jerked involuntarily upwards every few minutes when the thought “no more school!” crossed my mind again. When I made it to the apartment I was going to do the Rocky run up to my door, but I live up 6 flights of narrow winding stairs and I had a collective 8 hours of sleep over the previous 3 nights, so I only made it up about 2 flights in that manner, and then resigned myself to a more leisurely climb to the top. After I recovered though, i did dance around my apartment for a while.

That evening was a going-away dinner for my friend Abe who has been here working for 6 months. Several of us met at a cramped chinese restaurant over by Espace St. Martin and passed a pleasant evening eating weird food and conversing. It, like all oriental food in Paris, made me miss American-chinese food. I know it bears no resemblance to authentic chinese food, but I don’t care. Some of the real stuff is good but I’d trade it for some food-court Chinese. Oddly enough “chinese” food was my last American meal. During my layover in the Atlanta airport I sat at a counter eating Panda Express’s orange chicken and some beef and broccoli with steamed rice while discussing Macs and the ridiculousness of Charles-de-Gaulle airport with a pilot. Hard to believe that was about 6 months ago. It was late by the time we finished and parted company in the street and my tired was finally catching up with me. I said goodbye to Abe as he got off the metro with a hug and a semiserious “have a nice life.” Hopefully someday down the road our paths will randomly cross again, but unfortunately that may not be the case with Abe or most of the friends I’ve made these months.

Paris is superb because because it attracts individuals from every horizon and forges an inordinate bond between people who in other circumstances would likely never have become friends. No matter our backgrounds, we are united in the common experience of separation and our status as outsiders. The unifying factor of “foreignness” is enough to override a myriad of differences. But for most of us our time in Paris is a fleeting period, and in the end we return to whence we came or move on to other adventures. If we are lucky there will be moments in the future where we find ourselves in the same city at the same time as an old Paris pal, and we may keep in contact with our closest expat friends over the years, but in large we will move on with only memories of “our “ Paris and a soft spot in our hearts for those who stood beside us in the cobblestone trenches fighting the battle to make sense out of a beautifully bizarre world.

Duck and cover

Today is the first Wednesday of the month. And so, as I sit in my arm chair at noon watching the clouds being swept swiftly across the sunny Paris skyline, a siren reverberates across the centuries-old rooftops of the city. For a minute the quotidian sounds of traffic and voices that drift up from the street are drowned out by the eerie tones of the air raid siren. The haunting cry echoes across the city unheeded by people sipping coffee in sidewalk cafés. It is an old thread in the tapestry of Parisian sound. As historical as the countless monuments and plaques plastered on every building, and as such Parisians pay little attention to it, except to maybe set their watches. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that people here don’t notice. Parisians live with history the way Floridians live with mosquitoes- to them it’s just a given.

Nevertheless, there was a time when the siren’s wail commanded notice. It sent hearts racing and people into the basements of buildings (or up to the rooftops in the case of the crowds watching air raids during the Great War). I have to wonder if there are any people left in Paris today who remember when the sirens used to pierce the night to warn of German attack. I wonder if the monthly testing of the civil alert system that happens the first Wednesday at noon sends them back nearly 70 years. It’s strange the effect that sound can have on a person, even one who has no firsthand experience with it. I’ve seen enough movies and old newsreels to recognize the moan of an air raid siren when I hear it (although in my mind it is equally connected with Nazi bombers and an approaching tornado-neither of which are extremely prevalent in Paris these days). I remember the first time I heard the sirens in Paris, before I knew it was a test. My pulse quickened and I turned to the window in confusion, almost expecting to see bombers in V formation descending through the thick grey clouds of Parisian winter. It’s an unnerving sound.

Why do they continue to test the civil defense system? Beats me. Other than the siren, I don’t know what the civil defense plan is, and I doubt most Parisians do either. I imagine if the siren was ever actually used it would A) be ignored- people would look at their watches and furrow their brows and wonder why they are being annoyed with that noise when it is clearly not noon on Wednesday. Obviously there’s a short in the wiring. Or B) cause mass chaos- people might realize it wasn’t a test, but they wouldn’t have the slightest idea what to do. The problem being that nowadays we lack the commonly known threats that defined past generations. If you know your enemy is a Luftwaffe squadron or a Russian nuke, at least you have some idea of how to react (although in the later you may rather climb up to the roof and get a front row view since crawling under your desk and covering your head obviously isn’t going to help). But in today’s world, where the danger comes primarily from non-state actors in untraditional methods of warfare (i.e. terrorism), the civil defense system loses its effectiveness. If Paris is attacked it will likely be in a way that allows no time to warn people, as we have seen elsewhere over the past years. At this point I could launch into a nice rant here about the ridiculousness of the French tendency to cling to the obsolete, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt in this case. I don’t think the French are blind to the changing nature of the threats they face. I doubt they really believe that their siren will even again save Parisian lives. In my mind, the siren’s ominous call is a memorial. An auditory monument to the events that unfolded when the sound was first heard all those years ago. A baleful tone recalling the dark days of Paris’ past. And maybe it’s a reminder that the peaceful city we live in is never really as secure as it seems. Paris has fallen before, don’t let it happen again. Remember the past, prepare for the future.

Perhaps I’ve over-romanticized what is simply the result of a culture that likes change about as much as a cat likes a bath. Whatever the reality of the situation may be, the noon test on the first Wednesday of the month in Paris will continue to make me pause long enough to remember.


I read this in a travel guide online and thought I'd share it since I got a chuckle out of it:
Nota Bene - every first Wednesday of each month at midday you will hear the air raid siren.  For some obscure reason the Parisians keep this thing going month in, month out.  So if you're an enemy of France, they ask please don't invade during the lunch hour, on a jour férié, or on the first Wednesday of the month.  Thank you, and bon appétit.