The biggest lesson I’ve learnt from this shaky video, filmed throughout our last month in Paris and quickly cobbled together back home, is that I really need to get some sort of camera stabiliser. The second lesson is that it was a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful place to live for half a year. Adieu.
paris
“La canicule” is French for heatwave
Never has the title of my blog been more apt than during this last week in Paris (for those who don’t know, it comes from this Belle and Sebastian song). Temperatures hit 39 degrees, a peak I don’t think I’ve ever experienced in my life before and would be quite happy to avoid ever experiencing again.
Being a Brit, and never having blogged about the weather, I feel I have so far betrayed my national stereotype, but I am going to fully make up for that now. It was hot. Really really hot. It has just about cooled down, which means I am able to sit down and type this without sweat dripping from my pores into my keyboard. This time last week, I was sitting on the balcony desperately eating ice cream, wondering how sleep in a non-air-conditioned flat that was 33 degrees was going to work. It turns out, it wasn’t.
My main issue with the heat was clothes. I believe you can divide people’s dress sense into two categories: summer dressers, and winter dressers, and I am committed to the second camp. I like jumpers, I like black skinny jeans (sorry not cool anymore, but nothing beats them), I like turtlenecks that make me look a little bit like Steve Jobs more than any other item of clothing. I love wool and tweed and leather. I do not, however, know how to be chic in the heat. Having a job means slobbing about in tiny cotton shorts and a vest top is hardly an option, but neither is my loyal work wardrobe of jeans and a nice top.
I am lucky enough to work in an air-conditioned office, but to get there requires a metro journey. Not at all the dream in a heatwave. Tubes are sticky and smelly at the best of times, but during la canicule they were unbearable- imagine Dante’s descent into hell, only a bit hotter. For the first time, I made no effort to get a seat, in the knowledge that the distinctive sound of thighs ungluing themselves from faux leather is not one anyone needs to hear in the morning.
I ended up resorting to some pretty strange tactics to cool down, including putting wet socks on my feet (didn’t work), putting my pyjamas in the freezer (didn’t work) and crowning myself Chief Air Current Implementer, attempting to create a draught between the flat’s two windows…. didn’t work. It was less “travel south until your skin turns warmer”, more “travel south until your skin is swathed in a permanent layer of warm sweat”.
To top it all off, on Friday morning my best friends in the world descended on Paris to visit me, which obviously sounds great, but actually they selfishly made the flat even hotter. I joke, of course (but have I made it clear how hot it was??): it turns out Paris is a pretty cool place to herd about town, even when it’s not cool at all.
Les Berges de Seine, in my opinion, are the coolest of the many cool places Paris contains. On our short, hangover-fuzzy visit there, we climbed a giant hexagonal structure, lazed in hammocks and played Uno in a tipi. Cool and cooling, and I hear Paris Plages is due to kick off there any time soon. Add to that Bastille Day on Tuesday and the Tour de France making its final leg along the Champs Elysées in a couple of weeks time, and I’m starting to think I could bear this heat, if only to stay in Paris a little while longer…
An unexpected French love affair
Paris has long been the city of romance, the ideal location for lovey-dovey couples to come and stare into each other’s eyes and romantically clamp a piece of metal on a bridge (to be later removed, to the chagrin of still-lovey-dovey couples and the probable relief of no-vey-dovey couples).
My own Parisian love affair has been of a rather different nature, and one that would make it difficult to leave a padlock on a bridge with my loved one even if I so desired. Said hypothetical love lock would have to say EG RG, because it is with tennis, and specifically the French Open, Roland Garros, that I have fallen hopelessly in love over the last two weeks.
I have never been a big sports fan, neither playing nor spectating, but something about tennis has taken hold of me. It began with seeing the Eiffel Tower, a giant green tennis ball dangling between its first and second levels, and wondering what exactly it was for. A couple of weeks later, I found myself over in south-west Paris, wandering around the grounds of what Wikipedia informs me is widely considered to be the most physically demanding tennis tournament in the world.
Roland Garros has a wonderful evening visitors ticket system which allows you to enter the grounds after 5pm for just €12, granting you access to any of the outside courts and giving you the option to queue and pay extra to upgrade, if desired. I was quite happy just to be there, even if it was during the colder first week of the tournament. We managed to catch a Murray, Jamie to be precise, playing a successful game of doubles, as well as joining an excitable crowd outside the big screen on Suzanne Lenglen to watch Frenchman Monfils pull off a fifth set victory against Cuevas.
I think it is the set system, which once seemed so unnecessarily confusing to me, that has turned me into a tennis supportrice. Risking stating the obvious to anyone who knows anything about tennis, but the set system ensures that even after a dreadful first few points and a loss of the first and even second set, it is always possible to bounce back and come out on top. It’s why it looked like Murray might actually beat Djokovic, why even at the last few moments of the fourth set in the final between Djokovic and Wawrinka, it was always possible that either of them might win. Even as a newbie to the sport, I know I have been watching incredible tennis over the past two weeks- another bonus of tennis: it’s all over in an intense, nail-biting fortnight.
And there are some incredible places in Paris to watch the tennis. This year, Roland Garros dans la Ville took up residence on the Champ de Mars, just before the Eiffel Tower, which made for a pretty exciting spot to lie on the grass and watch. And friends’ flats with pizza deliveries are even better spots for when a storm rolls in.
It’s also been a great way to pick up a lot of new, very specific vocabulary. Une manche (a set), un jeu décisif (tie break), égalité (deuce), les ramasseurs de balles (ball boys/girls). More info on the incredibly tricky process of getting to be a Roland Garros ball boy/girl can be found here (click Le Docu top right).
I never expected to fall in love with tennis in Paris, and I never expected it to be such a whirlwind affair: racing across Paris to find a bar with a TV, surreptitiously checking the scores at work, and getting to go to the tournament itself. It was a short but sweet fortnight, though, and I will treasure my overpriced souvenir ball for many years to come. Even if I might just cheat on RG with Wimbledon in a few weeks time…
Taper GCSE French dans la mille
Taper dans la mille; to nail it
I’m not usually one to give up at the first hurdle, but there are a few things that, after a length of time spent learning French too depressing to count, I’m just not sure I’m ever going to quite get right.
The first is “Bonjour”. It shouldn’t be difficult; it’s the only French word most non-speakers know, and it doesn’t have a particularly tricky pronunciation, but I don’t seem to be quite nailing it. I say it at least 5 times during the journey from the front door of the office to my desk (security guard, receptionist, other lift-users, smiley craftswoman in the workshop, colleagues in office), and every time wince slightly at how it just doesn’t quite seem French enough. And I know it’s not, because whenever I walk into a shop and proudly proclaim greetings, the reply often comes in English- and I’m making such an effort to look Parisian (black on black on black) that I’d like to hope it’s not just my appearance that marks me out as a foreigner. It is simply a difficult word to get absolutely spot on. It reminds me of the time I coquettishly asked a French friend where in France my accent came from, did I sound like tutors I’d had from Paris or the sunny south or the Alps? “Angleterre”, she honestly giggled.
Next, numbers. I’m sorry France but sort them out. At least Swiss/Belgian/Canadian French has made an effort inventing septante, huitante, nonante for the numbers 70, 80 and 90, because apparently this was seen as a mad thing to do by the French themselves, who’ve settled for sixty-ten, four-twenties and four-twenties-and-ten. Fair enough.
Except no, it’s not fair enough. Because they also insist on listing their phone numbers in neat little pairs, and so when I face my fear of the ringing office phone and try to take a number, what I’m actually doing is a difficult exercise in complex mental maths.
Imagine the scene in English:
“I’ll ask her to call you back. Could I take your phone number?”
“Yes, sure. It’s zero six, sixty-twelve, four-twenties-two, four-twenties-thirteen, sixty-ten-eight.”
I’m getting (marginally) better at it, but it’s still an elusive skill; when someone says sixty-twelve, for instance, I’ve already written a 6 before I realise that actually sixty plus twelve is 72 so I need to cross out that 6 and write 7 and oh no they’ve said the rest of the number and hung up.
Given that I haven’t mastered these basic skills, despite having first been taught them an embarrassing number of years ago, I have managed to achieve that goal of all goals; my level of French fluency actually beginning to interfere with my English. The problem is, it’s not happening exactly as I’d like; it’s the azerty keyboard that’s made its way into my unconscious. I get home to my safe qwerty laptop and type almost all my words with a Q where an A should be, try to hold shift to write a full stop or number, and get confused when the accented characters are no longer where they’re supposed to be. Maybe I’ll achieve full keyboard fluency in my remaining three months here. Though I’ll mostly just be happy if I can say how many days that is in French- four-twenties-thirteen sounds about right.
Running Paris
Although this title might suggest otherwise, no, nobody has asked me to be in charge of Paris. Although, often I wish they would, because there are certain things about the city that make absolutely no sense to me. First amongst these things is the topping-up system on the French métro equivalent to the Oyster card, the Navigo. The way it works is that you top up your card for a month at a time, but instead of running from a month from the day you buy it, it runs for the month you’re in; top up for March and you can use the metro until the end of March.
All sounds quite neat and simple, until you realise that this involves long queues of grumpy Navigo users waiting to top up their cards on the 1st of April, and not just because it’s a cruel April fool but because this actually is the system. Why the cards don’t just last for a month from their purchase date, thus staggering the top up times and eliminating these queues, I can’t understand. And that’s just one reason why I should run Paris.
For now, I’m contenting myself with just running in Paris. For more on why I’ve chosen to do such a strange thing, please see here (and also please donate if you are that way inclined). My training, if it could be called such a thing, is going reasonably well. Well, it’s going. I have been on some runs.
GPS proof that I have done some running!
It turns out Paris is a surprisingly pleasant city to run in. I had visions of coughing my way through polluted, congested streets, running quickly more to get away from rapidly approaching vehicles than to improve my average pace. But there are many lovely parks; I enjoy Parc André Citroën’s futuristic right-angles, the gently curved paths of the Champ de Mars and the floating island that is the Île aux Cygnes. The Parisians seem to enjoy them to, especially on a Sunday morning along the banks of the Seine, where many of them can be seen running merrily along.
They really do seem to wear a lot of clothes, though, even when it’s pretty balmy. I still haven’t seen anyone in less than full leggings and a long-sleeved top, and I have come across many people in a full tracksuit, as well as one woman in a puffer jacket (shudder) and scarf. I’m impressed by their heat management, especially as I suffer from serious red face when I get going.
The other oddity I have noticed is not found so much amongst the runners, but along the other Parisians. When running along a pavement that is perfectly wide enough to accommodate 2 or 3 people, individuals tend to walk right in the middle and refuse steadfastly to move one way or another to let me pass. It’s not just when I’m running either, so I can’t blame it on a general annoyance towards other people trying to get fit (been there, understand that). People just don’t like moving out of the way for others. Being British, I tend to be the person that eventually gives in and goes on the road, but I do wonder how far I’d have to run towards someone before they made any effort to move. If I ran Paris, I’d definitely make a by-law on that.
Untourist Paris: Sink plug shops are not in the guidebook
There are certain parts of Paris that don’t quite make it into the guidebooks. I’m not talking about secret bars and cafés; I’m afraid I don’t yet have any regular Parisian haunts that I’ve discovered and am now revealing to you. I mean the shops where you buy an ironing board, where you can find a replacement sink plug, and insider knowledge of which metro, train and bus are required to get to the nearest IKEA. It’s not very glamorous, this part of life, but it is a fact of life, and one that is quite the struggle when you don’t know which shops to go to.
For this is the problem with these particular Parisian addresses not being listed in the guidebooks, or on Trip Advisor: I had no idea where to go. Aside from IKEA, that stalwart of reasonably priced duvet sets and small fluffy rats to place in the fruit bowl à la Ratatouille, I did not know where to start. It sounds an easy thing to find, a replacement plug, but where do you start? It’s hard enough in a familiar city sometimes, but in one you don’t know at all, and that’s foreign, it’s basically impossible. After around 2 hours of searching, I found one, but then 4 days later found there was a shop literally 2 minutes from my door that sold them cheaper. C’est la vie.
The obligatory trip to IKEA, meanwhile, was much more fun because I got to go there with Rebecca, my chère chère flatmate, sharer of copious bottles of €3 wine and fellow woman on the quest for cheap tea towels. Though I missed the ease of a trip there in my mum’s car (not to mention the generosity of her purse), our little Swedish-tinged adventure to Thiais actually turned out to be quite amusing. I think making our way through the bus, train and metro back, Rebecca with a rolled up mattress on her head, me with an enormous holdall of household essentials/small fluffy rats, may be one of the highlights of my time here so far. It probably still won’t make it into the Lonely Planet top 10, mind. But traversing the underground maze that is Invalides, replacing the lyrics of Destiny’s Child Independent Women Pt. 1 (‘This Jömna on my head? I bought it!’) to the tune of our purchases, is still going firmly in the mental happiness bank.
The one shocker of the trip was the complete lack of what I would term normal pillows. The French sleep on square pillows. Square. This was completely incomprehensible to Rebecca and I, given that it is just not a useful shape for a pillow to be. You have one of two options; first, to lie completely on the pillow thus elevating your shoulders too- defeating the point of the pillow which is to maintain your head higher than the rest of your body and prevent neck strain. Alternatively, you can just lie on the bottom half as if it were a proper rectangular pillow, but this forces your toes off the end of the bed and frankly seems like a waste of good feathers. Having lived with these things for almost a week, I don’t think I’m ever going to be a convert, but I can attest to their usefulness in sitting up in bed in the morning. Maybe the French just adorent breakfast in bed.
This week I also started my first ever proper office job. I won’t be blogging about my work for reasons of professional integrity (oooooh I have professional integrity now), but for those of you that are interested, I will be working as an intern in communication and image for Hermès until the end of July. I will say, though, that my first day lunch in the Jardin des Tuileries overlooking the Place de la Concorde, with the Eiffel Tower glimmering in the midday sun, was not half bad. Levons notre verre à la vie parisienne.
A château, a hamlet, and a Parisian apartment
C’est fait; I have moved to Paris. I am living in Paris in the springtime (cue music). One day in the near future I will be able to say sentences that start with ‘when I lived in Paris’. I’ll know ‘this little place in the 15è arrondissement’. I might even develop a truly Parisian sneer. I’m already on board with their uniform of black jeans layered with a black top and black jacket, and maybe the odd bit of grey on a very joyous occasion. It’s surreal. I feel a little bit like I’m playing at being a Parisian adult and at some point someone will collect me and tell me it’s home time, but until then, I’m rolling with it.
Yesterday I visited the château of Versailles. It was as grand and overbearing as one might expect from Europe’s largest château, although in many ways I preferred its vast preened gardens to the almost blindingly gold interior. You can rent a golf buggy to drive around Versailles, which I was massively keen to do until I found out you have to be 24 for the privilege. Not a proper adult yet, then. The perfect age to visit Versailles, I have calculated, is 24 or 25, the only two years where you can get in for free if you’re an EU citizen, and get to whizz a golf buggy around the gardens.
Better still than the gardens themselves was Marie-Antoinette’s little hamlet, located in the North of the Versailles complex. What I loved most about this was not exactly the buildings of the hameau, cute and rustic though they were, but the entire concept behind them. Frivolous Mazza (as her friends definitely didn’t call her) escaped bustling Paris to the château of Versailles, then had to escape the château to a smaller massive palace, the Grand Trianon, then to the Petit Trianon, and finally jacked in the whole living-in-a-castle business. To be fair it must have been terrible. Instead, she ordered that a hamlet be built for her in the gardens, so she could play at being a peasant. Like the best game of pretend ever, only she was 28 at the time so you’d think she could have plenty of fun riding one of the golf buggies instead.
This hamlet was built on almost exactly the same site where a previous village was razed to build the Grand Trianon, so it seems like a lot of hassle could have been saved by just going to live there in the first place. No wonder they chopped her head off.
Back in Paris, I’m trying to apply Mazza’s love of the simple life hameau philosophy to our little slice of Parisian real estate, which is, er, basic, to put it generously. The area is wonderful, the local boulangerie does fabulous croissants, and we have TWO local fromageries. But the flat is fairly typically Parisian; there are many things that do work, but in a slightly “quirky” way. They quirk. Not bad, just not brilliant. Still, I suppose this is to be expected of a huge city on a minuscule student budget, and mostly I’m just happy to be living with a good friend, near cheese. I’ve got a week to get myself in order, then I’m off to work on Monday, joining la foire d’empoigne (rat race, or literally the funfair of grabbing) as I metro off to my actual job. Dressed in monochrome, bien sûr.
“It’s not a long holiday. It’s a short life.”
This title is perhaps the most precise summary of the year abroad that I have written so far. Which is a shame, because they aren’t actually my words. This phrase was the inspired thought of dear Rebecca, as we sat together on a metro in Paris, pondering the confusions of the year and wondering how we might ever find somewhere to call home there.
It is a short life. You have to go to a new country and essentially create yourself as a bureaucratic, systematic, (HYDROMATIC) human being there, a process that basically involves lots of forms. Lots. More than you can imagine. I’m talking a metric shit ton of forms. A short life contains just as many forms as a full-length life, just in a much shorter space of time. It’s form density. There is a home to find, bank account to open, phone contract to sign for, plus friends to make, supermarkets to find, favourite cafés to discover, language to learn, train network to decipher. All things that are already a part of your current life, but that you have to do all over again in a new country for it to ever feel like home.
Unfortunately from a paperwork point of view (and it’s surprising how fast this becomes your primary point of view), I had decided to split my year abroad. But happily, Rebecca had been equally naïve, and even more happily, our second placements were both to take place in Paris. And so, whilst the weight of forms hung heavily over me as I jetted off to Paris last week, it was lifted by the comfort that at least this time I wouldn’t be alone whilst getting my life in order. Almost falling off the metro due to the weight of your suitcase is a bit tragic and embarrassing alone, but with a friend it’s mostly just funny, especially when it’s the friend doing the falling (sorry Bec).
I cannot mock her too harshly because I made a much greater error shortly after arrival at Paris Charles de Gaulle, the largest and most bizarrely empty airport I’ve ever been to, in accidentally abandoning my rucksack on a bench. This rucksack contained my laptop, money, phone, but most crucially a huge amount of, you guessed it, forms, without which I might as well have got straight back on the next flight to England. I was convinced that, in the 10 minutes before I realised it was missing, it would almost certainly have been blown up by a bomb squad, but to my great relief and some quite impressive traversing of floorscalators, it was exactly where I left it, forms and all.
My hero.
And thus, generously hosted by Walter, our flat hunt commenced. Paris is a horribly cruel city in which to find an apartment. Everywhere you look there are apartments. Taunting you, because none of them seem to be actually available to rent, and certainly not for a short period to students. The subject of how to find a Paris apartment has been covered in numerous blogs, and so I’m not sure I have much to add to the wealth of advice out there except my own anecdotes.
The very worst flat-viewing experience we had was also the first. Having wildly underestimated the size of Paris from our map, we thought we would stroll from the Eiffel Tower down to the south-east of the 5th arrondissement, which was a nice idea until it started raining chats et chiens and we realised that Paris is actually pretty sizeable. Not only had the landlord told us the wrong address, but when we arrived we were surprised (naïvely, I now realise) to find that there were other potential tenants viewing it too. Within a minute of entering, these two jeunes hommes had declared that they were willing to take it, and would it be okay for them to send their paperwork that afternoon? We exchanged a glance and quickly left, hot-footing it to the nearest McDonald’s. For the free WiFi, I tell you. And okay, also for a McFlurry and a small cry.
This was probably the lowest low, however, apart from a time where a woman on the phone would not stop repeating “c’est pas pratique!” (It’s not practical!) when we called to enquire about her apartment, where one person would have to traverse the other’s bedroom to get to their own. This was clearly listed in the advert, and so I’m not sure why this lady was quite so keen on insisting on the impractical nature of her apartment, or who exactly she thought it would be practical for, but I quickly gave up and moved on.
Eventually, we found our luck with an advert posted on the announcement boards at the American Church in Paris. This was something we’d read about but that I’d hardly believed could actually be a source of success, but we’re really happy with our newfound home, even if we haven’t moved in yet. More details and photos to come when we have, but for now I shall just share my own personal point of glee- it has a balcony with a view onto the Eiffel Tower. I feel like I’m winning the short life game already.
However, one big hurdle jumped and I remembered that I still didn’t really count as a person in France because I didn’t have any of the human being numbers that my new forms required. A phone number. A social security number. A bank account number. Not only does each of these things take a good hour of research, another very decent hour of queuing, and a conversation with an uninterested French person to sort out, but you are somehow supposed to intuitively know the order in which to get them. I couldn’t get a bank account without an address, nor a SIM card without a French bank account. It is a horrible bureaucracy trap, especially because the French bloody love forms. They adorent forms. When opening my bank account, I was asked for a photocopy of my landlady’s ID. To be clear, I wasn’t opening the account for her. This was just something they wanted 3 copies of.
Whilst we’re at it, why does everybody want 3 copies of everything? I understand one for them, one for me, one for… who? It remains one of the great mysteries of our time. I can only conclude that somewhere in the middle of rural France there is a mad aristocrat called Monsieur Bureaucratie, to whom everyone sends their third copies. He then proceeds to fill his great country chateau with them, basking in a room filled with forms, and the warm, inky scent of photocopier paper.
There are no shortcuts to the successful short life, but luckily there are friends, food and cheap wine. Not to mention beautiful cats. Paris, you’re next.
Ellie's Year Abroad Blog 