You may have heard that Paris has been besieged by heatwaves (“canicules,” as the French call them) during the summer months in recent years. This year has been particularly scorching, with the late June heatwave hitting a record-setting 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
In mid-June, this Tintin meme came across my feed…
“Two heatwaves in one month, what a summer, huh?” “It’s still spring, captain.”
And Paris is not a city designed for high temperatures.
Fortunately my apartment has managed to stay relatively cool. I have no A/C, but I also have no windows with southern exposure — just east and north. So as long as I have a fan spinning in each room, it works pretty well for the first week of a heatwave.
My friend Sara was visiting from San Francisco during the late June heatwave. Our initial strategy was to go to museums — first the Louis Vuitton Foundation for the Alexander Calder Exhibition and then the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection for whatever it was they were showing — because museums have AIR CONDITIONING.
But aside from getting exposed to some amazing art, after you get to the museum and then travel back from the museum, you’re really no better off than when you started.
So the next day we just hung out at the apartment. Fortunately, Sara is a veteran of the Burning Man Festival, so she is very well versed in the ways to keep cool without air conditioning, even in extreme temperatures. These might have included a series of gin tonics and Evian aerosol misters to augment the effect of the hand fans.
Sara also scheduled visits to three champagne houses during her visit. Only 45 minutes by train from Paris, these are easily accessible. The first, at Taittinger, had me making plans for the next canicule. It goes like this: 1. Book a tour 2. Get myself “lost” in the caves where the temperature is a lovely 55 or 60 degrees 3. “Survive” just drinking champagne for three or four days until the heatwave passes 4. Find my way back to the surface, making excuses about how I just “got lost”
Sara also scheduled visits to three champagne houses during her visit. Only 45 minutes by train from Paris, these are easily accessible. The first, at Taittinger, had me making plans for the next canicule. It goes like this:
1. Book a tour 2. Get myself “lost” in the caves where the temperature is a lovely 55 or 60 degrees 3. “Survive” just drinking champagne for three or four days until the heatwave passes 4. Find my way back to the surface, mumbling semi-plausible excuses about how I just “got lost”
During a heatwave, you also find other ways to cope. One of them is by not cooking. So for instance gazpacho is AMAZING! Which you can make yourself or find readily available at the regular or organic supermarkets here. Not the French-inspired vichyssoise that you might expect, but gazpacho. Because apparently I’m not the first one in Paris to think that heatwave + gazpacho is an amazing combination.
Also, oysters! Raw. On the halfshell. And no that old thing about months with R doesn’t matter. Oysters are perfect for a summer heatwave. Ive had them several times this summer and they have been delicious. Even if not quite as good as the ones in Seattle. Just saying.
Also, during the summer, the French have this thing they call “rosé piscine.” Literally that’s “swimming pool rosé,” meaning “rosé that you drink while lounging around the pool,” and amounts to “rosé wine with ice cubes in it.” Both to cool it down and to water it down.
And so I was having dinner with a friend at a little Italian place not too far from my apartment. It was reasonably hot and the place had no air conditioning. Normal. I ended up ordering a glass of red with my meal. And then I noticed that the French woman at the next table asked for ice cubes with her red. Which I’d never heard of before. I’d thought it was just not done. Red wine and ice cubes. But it was true that the red wine was not exactly at cellar temperature, was decidedly warm, so ice cubes would help bring it to the proper temperature, even if they diluted it a bit.
So I asked for ice cubes as well, though they never did bring them. But I learned an important lesson. During a canicule, ice cubes are always in order.
During one of the canicules, as an emergency measure, the City of Paris decided to open up the entirety of the Canal Saint-Martin for swimming, though they posted gendarmes on the bridges to keep people (meaning mainly daredevil teenaged boys) from jumping off them. It looked like a lot of fun even if in the end I opted not to join them.
Hope you’re staying reasonably cool wherever you are!
The other night, my book club all come over to my apartment to discuss our latest read, Colette’s “Claudine à l’école” (“Claudine at School”). As it was first published in 1900, I’d expected a pleasant if somewhat milquetoast novel, but I ended up lapping it up as the title character is an impudent and fearless 15-year-old schoolgirl in a French village who recounts her maneuvers to seduce her 19-year-old schoolmistress and then how the other schoolmistress steals her away, and then how the schoolmistress’s younger sister develops a crush (mostly unrequited) on Claudine, alongside all the other intrigues and silliness of a small town in the provinces. So it was a lot of fun to be able to discuss and laugh over Claudine’s adventures with my fellow book clubbers.
I think I’ve mentioned my book club a few times, or as we call it in French, “l’atelier de lecture.” It started out at the Paris LGBTQI+ Center, but after six months or so, they asked us to leave as there simply wasn’t enough space for us to meet there. So one member of the group suggested we could start meeting at their apartment near the Place d’Italie (or the “Place d’It” as the Parisians call it since they seem to abhor words with more than two syllables), in a modernish high-rise apartment building with elevators that stop only on every third floor and stairs to access the floors in between. Fortunately Linh’s apartment was on a floor with an elevator stop.
So we met at Linh’s place for a year and a half or so, everyone bringing snacks and things to drink. It was always very convivial, with ten or fifteen young people (plus me) squooshed into a largish living room (by Parisian standards at least). But at the beginning of this year, Linh was obliged by their landlord to move out, and they were able to find a new, though smaller, apartment right in the center of Paris by Les Halles.
During their move, though, we needed to find a new place to gather. Several people offered their apartments, and mine was picked as it’s the most central. I have to admit I was a bit nervous about inviting the group to my place though. They are all in their twenties or early thirties, none of them have much money, and I was worried that seeing my admittedly slightly enormous apartment would put a distance between us.
I needn’t have worried. Yes, the first time we met at my apartment, they were slightly in awe of the size of the place — it’s about three times the size of the average Paris apartment — but they quickly settled in and started catching up as they nestled into the sofas in the living room.
When it came time to eat and actually discuss The Book, I had assumed that since it was just a bunch of snacks and so laid out the food on the table as a buffet, putting the chairs against the wall. This had worked well when I’d had a number of my American friends over — they would load up their plates and then go back to the living room and sit on one of the sofas or huddle in little groups in the dining chairs scattered about the room.
But no, not the French. The French immediately started grabbing the chairs and settling in around the table as if for a formal meal. And it wasn’t like there was even any question as to whether this was how it should be done. That’s just what you do in France. I chuckled quietly to myself.
So everyone sat down and started passing potato chips and dips and cheeses and salami and the obligatory baguettes, sliced and in great quantity (thankfully they’re only 1.30€ apiece), and “tartinables” (things you can spread on bread to make a “tartine” such as soft cheese with garlic or shallot and herbs, hummus, nutella, etc.) and fruit and salad around the table and filling each other’s glasses and discussing discussing discussing. It was all very lively and convivial with spontaneous peals of laughter, like a big Sunday family dinner.
This Wednesday there were nine of us. After dinner we retired to the living room or had a tête-à-tête in the kitchen or stayed at the dining table nibbling and talking. In the living room, some were sprawled haphazardly across the sofas, some lying on the rug, some crouching over to scratch and pet my cat Gertrude as they continued to discuss. In the entryway two were sitting on the floor looking through a tall stack of books one had pulled out of a knapsack.
Even though this is just the fifth time the group has met at my apartment, it seems to have already become a bit of a tradition to pose for a group selfie in the lobby of my building on the way out.
As winter was drawing to an end, I have to admit I was getting a bit bored with cooking the same tubers and roots and greens that I had for months. But now it’s Spring! And we’re getting the bright, fresh spring fruits and vegetables back in the markets. Yayyy!
Now this may sound weird, but I am not a great lover of strawberries. I want to like them, and sometimes I do, but I tend to shy away. Maybe it’s because of the always very disappointingly hard and flavorless ones I’m used to in American markets.
But a few years ago I was here in Paris with my friend Kyle, and we passed by a produce market, and the strawberries caught his eye. I was dubious, but how could I deny him on his first trip to Paris? They turned out to be delicious — succulent, flavorful, tender, juicy. Exactly the way you want a strawberry to taste.
A few weeks ago, I was at the produce market just up with street and noticed that they had beautiful strawberries in little wooden baskets, so I picked one up, remembering the lovely ones I’d had with Kyle. These turned out to be just as luscious! I just cut them up and mixed them with a bit of sugar and a drizzle of herbal liqueur from Italy. So good!
The other thing I picked up that day at the produce market was two bundles of asparagus. Asparagus is everywhere in Paris this season. I’d had some lovely ones, roasted but served cold with a chive vinaigrette, when I was at a little wine bar with my friend Jessica. And since then I’ve become a little obsessed. I’ve made them that way two times since. Also so amazingly delicious!
At the beginning of the year, I decided I really needed to buckle up and work on my French. Like actually take classes. I’d been in a bit of denial — I mean I have a piece of paper, from Berkeley no less, that says I speak French. Surely that should be enough!
Not surprisingly, the French I learned in school tends to be more academic or literary — to the point that French friends have said I can sound a bit like a professor (but I like to tell myself that maybe it’s just the glasses). So my main goal has been to learn “oral” French, the version that people use in more casual settings. Or in other words, to “worsen” my French.
So I started taking an advanced class with a local expat organization and I’ve also started working with a private tutor. I particularly love working with my tutor, Antoine, because I can delve into the intricacies of meaning and usage. I’ll often present him with a series of more-or-less synonymous words — while I can get good definitions and examples of usage from my online dictionary, what I can’t get is how formal or informal they are and whether people actually use those words or whether they’re primarily literary or old-fashioned or on the other hand something that the twenty-somethings say but I really should not.
And now after weeks and weeks of rain and clouds and chilliness, this week in Paris it swiftly turned into a heat wave. Not horrible — the highs are right around 90 degrees F — but still warm enough that I’m quite content to stay at home in my cool apartment.
In the months since my last missive, I’ve been settling into the new apartment and the new neighborhood, getting everything set up, figuring out my favorite shops, cafes, my metro routes. My cat Gertrude loves to perch on one of the five mantels or on the balcony overlooking the street or go galloping down the long hallway connecting the front of the apartment to the bedrooms that my friend Joey had dubbed The Bowling Alley.
And it turns out the new neighborhood is quite a bit more lively than the old one. I discovered one morning at 4 am (don’t ask why was up that early) that the cafe across the square from my apartment was not just open but buzzing. I checked their hours on Google Maps, and it turns out they’re open 24/7/365. Good to know in a pinch. Fortunately my bedroom is in the back, away from the hubbub.
In between all of that, there have been, um, a few trips — to the Dordogne for a queer writing retreat, to London to see theater and art, to the French Basque country for a spiritual retreat, to Sete on the Mediterranean coast, to the US to see family and friends, and to Denmark with friends because it’s almost legally required to vacate Paris in August.
(Photo credits for the last five photos: Kris Martin, Sara Gorr, Randy Schwartz-Diaz, Randy Schwartz-Diaz, and Dawn Niederhauser. Oh yeah, and the rainbow bagel photo is courtesy Dani DiPietro.)
And in between all of that, more hikes outside of Paris and more art exhibitions. Speaking of which, this past Saturday, Dani and I went to one at the Musee du Jeu de Paume called “The World According to AI.” Which was very cool. Everything from AI-generated portraits to AI-generated poetry to AI-generated films to AI-generated botanicals photos of plants that don’t exist.
One of the things about art exhibitions in Paris — they don’t exist in a vacuum, they are talking to exhibitions past and possibly also exhibitions future.
Because the Jeu de Paume exhibition made me think of other exhibitions I’ve seen in Paris, such as one at the Grand Palais from 2018 titled “Artists and Robots,” about robots designed to create art and artworks that incorporated robots.
The first two photos below are drawings by a robot of (if I remember correctly) a taxidermied fox and a bird of some sort. It was fascinating to watch the thing work — I wish I’d gotten a photo of the whole apparatus. Then Dwain going deep into the Matrix. And finally virtual flies buzzing around to replicate the image of me and Dwain being captured by a video camera.
And then it also reminded me of another from 2019 called “Computer Grrrls,” a feminist exploration of art and technology, at the Gaîté Lyrique. Ranging from the history of women in computing (going back to its earliest beginnings), to digital artwork by women artists, to women artists using technology to imagine more positive futures, to women artists’ critiques of technology. Quite a range and often quite funny and surprising as well.
And then there was another exhibition around art and technology at the Gaité Lyrique before that. And now Dani and I are planning to check out a new exhibition at the Centquatre next month called “Illusions Found: New Utopias in the Digital Era” (https://www.104.fr/fiche-evenement/les-illusions-retrouvees.html). Looks amazing and can’t wait to see it!
Okay, I think I knew from the time I accepted my current apartment in the 14th arrondissement that this was just going to be temporary. I took it because it was the first apartment I was offered, and I had to be out of my Airbnb place within a few weeks, and it was fine. I hoped that maybe I would come to love it, but no, in the end, I didn’t.
So at the beginning of the year, I started looking for a new apartment. This time, I had time. I was very specific about what I was looking for. I wanted it to be in the 11th arrondissement. That was the neighborhood I had originally wanted to find an apartment in. It’s more vibrant, more counter-cultural, more queer, and okay, more classically Parisian. It turns out everyone else wants to live there too. So landing an apartment there is a bit of a challenge.
I started out by updating my dossier, the pile of documents you have to send to the real estate agent or the owner when you submit your application. It can feel a bit intrusive, especially as an American where it feels like I have to provide much more documentation than usual since I don’t have the most critical things French landlords are typically looking for — French income and French assets.
Initially I didn’t have much luck getting appointments for showings. Then my French friend Linh told me her apartment-hunting strategy. Sign up for alerts with all the apartment listing sites. As soon as an alert comes through, if it interests you, send a message through the app to request a showing, and then, more importantly, and not more than an hour after the listing was first published, call the agent to schedule a showing.
I have to admit that I’m not big on phone calls with strangers in general, and in French it’s even worse. But I was like, if that’s what I have to do, that’s just what I’ve got to do. And after a few calls, I got used to the questions they usually ask, so it got easier.
With the new strategy, I started getting showings. Initially I was a little indiscriminate. Meaning that I would go for viewings at apartments that were maybe not quite perfect but close. Just to get a feel for the market.
After that, I started getting a little more picky. I mean, my current apartment is fine, so if I’m going to move, I really want it to be perfect. Unfortunately, my definition of perfect is very similar to a lot of other people’s. So for some of the showings, I’d show up, and there would be twenty other people waiting to get in. Ugh! And that was just for one of several showings. I knew that they would never pick me over dozens of French people with French incomes and French assets.
And then, a few weeks ago, there was a listing that really looked wonderful. Everything looked great — exactly the neighborhood I wanted, classic Parisian style, good size, balcony, everything I wanted. So I reached out to the realtor to schedule a showing.
The address was 77 avenue Parmentier. Now I have to admit that I have a soft spot for double numbers like 77. I was born on 11/11, so elevensies are kind of my lucky number. But I was like, it’s way too much to hope for. Just being in the 11th arrondissement would be enough. I told myself, just focus on the apartment itself, don’t worry about the elevens. I probably won’t actually like the apartment, and it probably won’t work out anyway.
But it turns out I really liked the apartment. And then, the day after I submitted my dossier, I found out that they liked me too. They accepted my application. The first time my application had been accepted on this round. What the f***!?!?!
And then there was a bit of nail-biting because the rent was toward the upper end of my budget and the stock market had just been, let’s say, tumultuous. But I re-ran the numbers and came to the conclusion that I could do this. So I accepted the offer.
Even so, I had twinges of guilt. Toward my current landlord, who was kind enough to provide a place for me in my hour of need. Toward the people in the neighborhood who I’ve gotten to know a bit and who I’ll now be leaving.
And at the same time I’m also very excited about the move. Every time I go to the 11th arrondissement, I just feel a bit more alive. When I tell French people I live in the 14th, people say, oh yes, it’s very “calme” which I take to mean “sleepy.” And I’m also very excited about being able to really create my own space in an unfurnished apartment, since my current one is furnished.
So for the last couple weeks I’ve been madly shopping for furniture. Which is one of the things I was really looking forward to when I moved over here — shopping for furniture in Paris! But it turns out that’s one of the things about living in a new country, you don’t necessarily know where to shop for things. And Paris has a LOT of furniture stores. Fortunately I’d gotten to know a few of the furniture stores from when I moved into this place, and then I’ve been able to lean on my expat friends for recommendations.
So the furniture search has been fun and exhausting. There was one day when I visited ten different stores. In some ways I’m glad I’m doing it now rather than a year ago. I think a year ago I would have just replicated the decor I’d had back in Seattle — even if a few things are exactly what I had in Seattle, like the dining room chairs I’ve ordered. Now I’m feeling maybe a bit more French, a little more bold. And also like I have more of a sense of who I’m creating a space for — now that I’ve developed some friendships here, I can picture who I’ll be having over for dinner.
And for the wild parties my friend Joey has already started planning for my new place. How did that happen?!?!? Although, I will admit, I am looking forward to them…
As I mentioned in my last post, when I first arrived in Paris, I was a little freaked out by how inadequate my French was. Even after five years of high school French classes and a bachelor’s degree in French literature (with honors, even). I mean, surely that should be enough!
After I arrived in Paris, I thought it might be interesting to take classes in French (rather than on French) on topics that interested me. So last spring I enrolled in a class on illustration offered in the adult education curriculum of the City of Paris.
Many years before, I had read David Sedaris’s “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” I think I had dismissed his horror stories of the French education system as him being a neophyte. I mean, I had a degree in French literature, so surely my experience would be better!
Um, well, maybe not so much. What I had failed to factor in was that all of my high school and college classes had been geared toward people who had learned French as a foreign language.
So even though the lectures in my Paris classes were in more or less proper French, the professors were still speaking (in their heads at least) to a native French-speaking audience.
And then I probably should have paid more attention to the fact that, during the first class I took this past spring, the illustration professor lost her sh*t when another professor seemed to be scheduled for the same classroom and started yelling at him.
Or when she made one of the other students cry, also in the first class, I don’t really remember for what, but you can imagine. Apparently there were a bunch of complaints from the other students following that incident, and a survey was sent out, and there was a monitor at the next class. But for whatever reason, I’m not sure why, I decided to tough it out.
I had thought than in an academic setting, I would be able to understand pretty much everything. And I did understand a good chunk of what the professor said (though definitely not all), but then when the other students would pipe up, I understood practically nothing.
Compared to the other students in the class, I was competent but definitely not inspired. I did manage to make a decent drawing of a pigeon during one of our excursions to a park a block away from the school. The assignment was to draw in INK (I was used to sketching in pencil, so this gave me the willies) by first watching and then drawing from memory with our LEFT HAND and to capture its MOVEMENT. This one turn out fairly good, I think. The other ones, not so much.
In the end, though, I decided that illustration was maybe not my forte.
So this past fall, I decided to enroll in a class that was a bit more along the lines of what I’m reasonably good at, a class on the History of Contemporary Photography. I had taken a number of photography classes in the University of Washington’s adult education program and at the Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle, and I thought it would be good to get a better understanding of contemporary photography and that it would be interesting to see that from a French perspective.
Which it was. After all, the French actually invented photography, and two of the streets in my neighborhood are actually named after earlier pioneers in photography (rue Niepce and rue Daguerre). The class was an interesting mix of French (Eugène Atget, Marcel Duchamp), Franco-American (Man Ray, Berenice Abbott), American (Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Barbara Kruger, Gregory Crewdson), Canadian (Jeff Wall), and German (August Sander, Hilla and Bernd Becher, Otto Steinart, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff).
This is Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray’s “Élevage de poussière” (“Dust breeding”) from 1920, an early use of photography to capture an ephemeral work of art…
Nevertheless, the class was oddly dry and was heavy on “talking points” about the various photographers and schools. Each class would begin with the professor prompting students to provide a recap of the previous lesson. The discussions on the photographers were focused on biography and didn’t provide much illumination on their philosophy and technique.
At one point, the professor made a point that one photographer’s framing was exceptional. One of the students asked what made their framing exceptional. The response was, “Well, you just have to look at the photographs!” Buzz. Wrong answer. I wanted to understand their motivations, their process, their techniques. This was not helpful.
For this spring, I looked at the options for classes to take, but nothing really grabbed my eye. And then after a moment I realized, the class I really needed to focus on was my driving class. Not sexy or even very interesting, but necessary. My Washington driver’s license was no longer valid in France as of September, so if I wanted to be able to drive in France, it was a must.
There’s kind of a weird thing with French driver’s licenses, though. There are a bunch of US states that have reciprocal agreements with France that they can exchange driver’s licenses. Meaning, that if, for example, you have a Pennsylvania driver’s license, you can exchange that for a French driver’s license with no fuss.
Washington is not one of those states. So in order for me to get a French driver’s license — mind you, that’s only so that every once in a while I can rent a car and drive off into the French countryside where the trains don’t go — I have to go through the whole French driver’s license process as if I’ve never driven a car in my life, like I’m a sixteen-year-old. Ugh!
In France, to get a driver’s license, you first have to pass the written test, and then you take a minimum of twenty hours of driving lessons, and then you take the behind-the-wheel test.
I took practice written tests, and even after reading the codebook from cover to cover, never managed to pass. Yikes! I will say that the French written test is considerably harder than the American one, with questions like, if you’re traveling at 50 kilometers per hour, how many meters does it take you to stop? (The answer is 25 meters — you take your speed, lop off the zero, and square it. Like that particular tidbit of information actually does you any good.)
And then there are all the French road signs, which in many cases can be quite different from American ones. Like this “no pedestrians” sign…
Or “no parking”…
Or the fact that at an unmarked intersection, you have to yield to cars coming in from the right. Which can also be marked this way…
Or the signs that indicate you can park on one side of the street during the first half of the month, and then on the 15th between 8 pm and 9 pm, you have to move your car to the other side of the street, and then move it back between 8 pm and 9 pm on the last day of the month — a whole concept that does not exist in the US…
And they expect you to know all these things. None of which were covered in my nine years of French classes.
And then lastly, I probably mentioned at some point that at the beginning of 2023, I joined a book club at the Paris LGBTQI+ Center. For the first six months or so, we met at the Center, and then shifted to meeting at the apartment of two of the members, Linh and Robyn. All the other members are folks in their twenties from across the LGBTQI+ spectrum and from a variety of backgrounds. And in the past few months we’ve expanded our scope to also watch and discuss films together.
Typically an evening will run like this… We show up at Linh and Robyn’s carrying supplies for l’apéro, basically snacks, wine and other beverages. Their apartment is, I imagine, fairly typical for French twenty-somethings with its somewhat crowded mismatched furniture, bookshelves overflowing with books and manga, posters plastering the walls, a tiny kitchen.
We settle in on the sofa or cushions set on the floor or on the mismatched chairs, trying to avoid knocking things over. We talk about everything and nothing while setting out the snacks, which usually include various types of chips, several baguettes, things to smear on the baguettes like soft cheeses, hummus, guacamole, etc. A bit of wine, soda, fruit nectar, that sort of thing.
Once everyone arrives, we eventually get around to discussing the book, things that we liked or didn’t, passages that spoke to us or that maybe we didn’t quite get. This goes on for quite a while of course.
And eventually Linh hauls out her laptop and we select our next book and/or film from the ones that people have proposed and that she tracks on her Excel spreadsheet. And clean up and exchange hugs and bisous and head out. Usually the whole thing lasts around four or five hours, maybe six.
This past weekend we had one where we discussed a memoire by Catherine Patris, a doctor who led the AIDS Division at France’s Ministry of Health from 1993-1995 , called “Ma planète SIDA” (“My Planet AIDS”). Linh had met Catherine at the LGBTQI+ Center and had invited her to join our group for the discussion.
The book speaks of her struggles, her moments of fierce pride for what she was able to accomplish, the human connections she formed with people also engaged in the fight against the disease. It talks of her efforts to stay on top of the rapidly evolving medicine and the state of the epidemic, to transform the division from a cold bureaucracy into a one where human emotion and passion had a place.
She recounts the difficult negotiations with the Ministry of Health’s leaders to act more quickly and more boldly, with activist organizations like ACT UP, who stridently criticized the AIDS Division for not acting more quickly and more boldly. Of the frustrations with being caught in the middle.
She tells of meetings where, as she looked across the room, it struck her that most of the people sitting there would not be alive within in a year or two.
So after reading all this, it was amazing to be able to meet Catherine herself that afternoon, nestled into Linh and Robyn’s sofa. Catherine and I were the only ones in the room to have experienced the AIDS crisis firsthand, even if from different vantage points.
There were points during the discussion when everyone was laughing together, others when everyone’s eyes were wet, hers included.
She talked about how the real problem is shame, and the reason discrimination is so problematic is because it induces shame. And that the only cure for shame is kindness (“Le seul traitement pour la honte, c’est la tendresse”).
On the way home, I ended up taking the same métro train as Lu (far right in the photo). He/they said it had felt like a family dinner, which the French traditionally consecrate their Sunday afternoons to. And I certainly felt a bit like, here and elsewhere, I’m starting to find my family here.
I know it’s been a little while since I’ve posted. Last spring ended up being a little much, and then I got out of the the habit of posting and, well, you know how it goes.
When I arrived here a year and a half ago, I found myself being very self-conscious about my French. The mind-warp between being pretty freaking good at speaking French for an American and being pretty sh*tty at speaking French compared to actual French people was a bit difficult for a long time. I really struggled.
But then somehow magically, a few months ago it seemed to get better. I was reading a lot of books in French, my vocabulary was definitely growing, I was talking more with French people, like actual conversations and not just « Bonjour, madame ! I’d like a croissant. » And I think somehow some of the anxiety I’d had seemed to lessen, so I could just dive into the slightly chilly water of speaking French and start swimming.
So that’s been very nice. It used to be that after I’d been speaking French for a few hours, I’d get a headache, partly because it just requires more mental effort to speak and to understand, but also because my cheeks and jaw muscles would ache because speaking French simply requires more muscular strength to pronounce.
So I’m feeling like I’m a bit over the hump. I can have a fairly normal conversation in French without having to think about it too much, without having to formulate a sentence three times before figuring out something I know how to say in French, though that still happens once in a while.
I mean, don’t get me wrong — when a bunch of French people start jabbering to each other, I’m still pretty lost. But not quite as much as I used to be.
***
On another note, I try to go to an art exhibition about once a week. Which, believe me, does not come anywhere close to exhausting the options. Recent outings have ranged from the Surrealists and impressionist painter Suzanne Valadon (no, I’d never heard of her either, but after seeing her work, I was like, why haven’t I?!?)…
… to PopArt painter Tom Wesselmann to Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, whose signature works involve room-sized webs of yarn…
… to the street art of Paris…
I’ve also been reading about mid-century photographers like George Platt Lynes and the PaJaMa trio (Paul Cadmus, Jared French and Margaret French). One thing that has struck me — particularly with the Surrealists and the mid-century photographers, but also with other groups of artists like the cubists — is how much collaboration and interplay you see among them. I guess I’d had the idea that the great artists spent their time holed up in their studios creating ART. But at least for a lot of them, they were actually spending a good deal of time hanging out with their other artist friends, whether that was discussing avant-garde concepts or just the latest gossip at a cafe over coffee or wine, going out to soirées, engaging in torrid romances or else pining for one or another, or actually collaborating on one work of art or another. It seems like there’s a spark that can happen in circles of artists, even if we often tend to focus on the individuals.
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In the last couples months I’ve also started going on hikes outside of Paris on the weekends. I may have mentioned that I have a book of hiking trails that you can get to from the metro or (more likely) the RER, the light rail train system that serves the Paris region. I’ll pack the fixings for a classic ham and cheese on baguette sandwich, some nuts and lemonade in my knapsack, and off I go.
It’s been wonderful to get outside the city for a few hours, breath in some fresh air, wander through a forest, and often pass by a chateau or some other very French building, listen to some birdsongs, maybe see a random pony or two.
Okay, these are real hikes, some of them up to 10 miles, but sometimes it doesn’t always feel like a « hike » when there are chateaux to be seen and you can grab a glass of wine or a pain au chocolat along the way.
A few photos…
And yes, one of those hikes did take me from the edge of Paris to Versailles. It would take the king and queen two days by carriage to travel from the Palais du Louvre to the Palais de Versailles back in the day because they’d stop off at the Chateau de Saint-Cloud (since burned down). It was fun to in a way retrace their steps (or carriage wheels) over the course of an afternoon.
Hoping your spring is getting off to a good start! A bientôt!
Got back yesterday from the road trip to Normandy with Dani. Really lovely! Even if it was a little cold and rainy.
We started out by going to Mont Saint Michel, which is right on the border between Brittany and Normandy. It’s one of those sites that you’ve seen so many photos of, almost as many as the Eiffel Tower it feels like. And yet to see it in person was still just awe-inspiring.
We took the guided tour of the abbey, which was fascinating. I think the biggest thing I took away was that, even though the Mont Saint Michel seems kind of eternal, it’s actually a constant work in progress. Several sections have collapsed over the centuries and have been rebuilt… or not. In the center of the cloister, what is now lawn used to be a lovely garden, but it was leaking into the library below, so they had to tear it out a few years ago.
From there, we went up to Bayeux to visit the Normandy landing beaches. Amazing to get a glimpse of what was involved in D-Day. If I’m remembering correctly, over 2 million Allied soldiers were involved in retaking Normandy from the Nazis. For the D-Day operation, the Allies decided to create an artificial harbor at Arromanches using a flotilla of old ships and by sinking a bunch of hollow concrete structures to surround the bay and make it possible to land ships with troops, machinery and supplies. Troops scaled cliffs towering over landing beaches to reach German positions and take them out. And all this for an ideal, of freedom and equality and democracy.
And while we were in Bayeux, we went to the cathedral and also to see the Bayeux tapestry. No photos of the tapestry as they don’t let you do that, but the thing is like 75 yards long and tells the tale of William the Conqueror’s invasion of England from Normandy. Kind of like an old school graphic novel. Pretty amazing as it even includes Haley’s comet! But here are a few photos of the Bayeux cathedral…
From there we drove up to Honfleur. I have to admit that part of the draw was that two of my cousins grew up on Honfleur Drive in Sunnyvale, California. Probably kind of a silly reason. But it also looked like a very cute seaside town. Which it was.
From Honfleur, Dani and I took a daytrip up to Etretat, which is famous for its cliffs, which were painted by Monet and other Impressionists. They even had signboards from some of the spots where Monet had painted.
And then on Friday, on the way back to Paris, we stopped at Giverny to see Monet’s house and gardens where he painted the waterlilies. Again, one of those things where I’d seen the paintings so many times, at the Musee d’Orsay and the Musee de l’Orangerie and the Musee Marmottan Monet in Paris, and still so lovely to see the house and garden that inspired it all.
And then we got back to Paris. Good to be home!
The first thing I did, after petting Gertrude of course, was to go to the produce markets to restock the kitchen. And to my surprise, there were all sorts of new veggies! Peas and radishes and cucumbers!
So for lunch today I made a salad with a poached egg, goat cheese, radishes and cucumbers. And for dinner I sauteed peas and carrots and fennel and green onions, and had that with Ossau Iraty cheese (I think) and mashed potatoes with creme fraiche and chopped chives scattered over it all. Gotta love chives!
The first clue was that, when my friend Kyle was here a couple weeks ago, we were able to have a few picnics. Three to be exact. In the space of a week. I forgot to take photos of the first one along the Seine, but here are the second (in a park near the Marche Beauvau) and third (along the Canal Saint Martin)…
The second clue was that Gertrude has been shedding like a MF. Had a buy a cat brush and two vacuums to keep up with all the fur. And my eyes are still itching.
The third clue arrived this evening. All the bars on my square have set out tables onto the square, expanding their little fiefdoms from the space under their awnings as they’ve done all winter. One of the bars (the sports bar that I hardly ever go to) has a live band playing rock music (even American, like “A horse with no name,” Cyndi Lauper’s “Time after time” and other favorites).
This week has also been filled with the notorious French red tape, including figuring out how to get a notarized translation of my Washington driver’s license and figuring out how to get an apostille for my California birth certificate so I can get health coverage. But it seems to be working itself out. Fingers crossed!
And tomorrow Dani and I head out for our Normandy road trip adventure! (Which was why I needed the notarized translation of my Washington driver’s license, ofc.) Even though I’ve been to a number of regions of France, I haven’t been to Normandy. Yet. And the trouble with Normandy is that there are a shit-ton of things to do and see there.
The days are getting warmer and longer, thankfully. Last week I woke up to sunshine streaming through the window and decided I wanted to take my bike out for a spin. It had been a couple months…
So I hopped on my bike and headed out toward the Bois de Boulogne, a massive park on the western edge of the city. Google Maps recommended a route that would take me along the boulevard that circles the city, but I opted instead for the route that would take me by the Eiffel Tower. Because really you can never get too much Eiffel Tower.
From there I biked across the Seine and headed west toward the park. Just as I entered, there was a lovely lake with an island with some kind of 19thcentury ruin on it. Then I biked by the Louis Vuitton Foundation with its Frank Gehry arcs of glass. But much of the park was just slumbering woods, the trails muddy and the trees not yet leafed out with their springtime greenery. So a bit dreary on the whole.
I was just despairing a bit when I happened upon the Parc Bagatelle on the western edge of the Bois de Boulogne, which bills itself as a botanical garden. I cautiously ventured in through the gates, not sure what to expect.
It was so lovely with the dappled sunlight and peacocks promenading randomly around the gardens and luxuriant fields of narcissus and daffodils. It felt like a portal to Spring, in such a French way.
A few days later, Dani and I and our friend Lara went to a stage performance that was very not French. We had tickets to the Rocky Horror Show in version originale (meaning English) and were super excited! Dani and I had both been huge fans of the movie back in the day — I first saw the movie in tenth grade at a church youth conference, which you might be dubious about until I tell you we’re talking about the Unitarians here — and were curious to see the original theater version that the movie was based on. When we showed up that the theatre on the Champs-Elysees, we were blown away by the very modern entrance…
Then we made our way into the actual theater. It felt like we’d stepped into the 1920s, with the colorful art deco decor, the arcs of booth seats nestled around tables, and the massive chandeliers overhead.
We had a blast! Dani and I were both singing along — I couldn’t believe I still remembered (almost) all the words! Can never get too much of the Time Warp! Such a fun night!
And then the other thing I’ve done recently to to sign up from some classes — a French class with the Alliance Francaise and an illustration class with the City of Paris — both to learn some stuff and to improve my French, since both classes are taught in French. With the illustration class, I was a little concerned I’d gotten myself in a little over my head, but it seems to be working out.
Yesterday we had an interesting exercise to go to a park next to the school and observe something in the park for two minutes and then do a contour drawing of it for two minutes using our non-dominant (for me, left) hand while trying to capture a sense of motion. I like how this pigeon turned out…
I hope Spring is starting to pop for all of you, too!
A Simple Life in Paris 