March 2, 2008 Two weeks in Paris; moving on to past participles

So, it has been a quick two weeks of Parisian life in the 6th arrondisement. We arrived on the 15th of February and quickly settled into our new pied a terre which has a wonderful location and fabulous hosts, but is quite expensive for what is really one bathroom with a not really optimal shower and one very small toilet, hidden inside a closet, that is isolated on the other side of the house. The internet connection is iffy, there is no landline even just to receive calls. But again, the pluses are there and we’ve been happy. But for guests this would be a nightmare. So, we’ve been doing the Paris two step, checking every website and web-vetting an innumerable number of quasi possibilities.

Yesterday morning was typical; outside the door at 10am to meet Xavier at a superb location around the corner from the Jardin du Luxembourg. He is very nice, but the apartment is a shithole. There isn’t a single nice thing about it, it’s not clean, the paint is flaking and the kitchen cooking ensemble consisted of a hot plate….that’s it. No stove. No oven. And the price: 6,200 euro’s or about $9,300 a month! But that’s not all. He is also trying to sell the place and the asking price (no parking either) is a cool 1.2 million euro’s, or 1.8 million dollars. He vouchsafed that the living area was 112 square metres, so essentially for this broken down space that would need to be completely gutted and renovated he wanted the equivalent of $1,500 a square foot…..essentially 3 times what we got for 12th avenue. Ridiculous, but who knows.

We looked at a cheaper apartment on a 6th floor walkup and the stairs and entryway looked like a set from the slasher movie Hostel…..it was so bad it was weird. We went to another near the Pantheon and the owner is prattling on about his family and how the kids had enjoyed growing up there and I was thinking: it looks like a place a coven of crack whores have been living in. The furniture looked like all the springs were gone, the carpet was totally threadbare, the kitchen looked like an unrenovated and unclean revenant of the 1970’s and the beds were worse than those you’d find in a dorm. The place had zero class or appeal, but he still wanted $5,000 a month or so. Did I mention that most of these places have no or only a vestigial lift (think one person and one carry on item). It’s depressing, but we are soldiering on.


We passed our first two weeks at Alliance Francaise. I was relegated to complete beginner status, where I belong. Anja is the next grade up and working much harder than I on tenses and word position and prepositions and what not. We both plan to work very hard these next two weeks and then I will probably quit for the next few weeks because of guests. But we both put in the hours…up to 3-4 hours after the four hours of class every day. Our normal day is up at 7 or 7:30 and have a light breakfast of coffee and bread ‘integrale’ (with nuts and dried fruits---very tasty and healthy) with olive oil, and couple of gulps each of orange juice and mineral water, maybe a quick shower, and we’re off for our twenty minute hike up the Rue du Bac, crossing Boulevard St. Germain
at the intersection of Boulevard Raspail, continuing up Raspail to Rue Fleurus where we take a quick left for 10 metres to our classes. Raspail itself is not a beautiful street but the walk is invigorating this time of year and reminds me of similar experiences in Florence (1994/5) and Lucerne (1997), when I was studying Italian and German.

My class, like Anja’s, is (most of us will continue) an international one. We have Ray, a doctor from the U.S. who speaks Arab, is in his mid forties, and lives in Chad (here: Tchad) with his wife and two kids. He is here for now while the violence hopefully subsides back in the desert. Very cool….but not a life I could handle.

Next to Ray is the nice but most useless member of our band: Kana from Japon. She has so little command of the verbal language and also cannot understand even basic questions that it is really embarrassing. Sometimes the teacher will ask her a question three or four time and eventually, sometimes, her simple moon face lights up and she animatedly bursts out with some diaphragm originating vowel sounds that shows that she ‘got it’….but it is almost always a false alarm and is then followed by a number of additional one-off vowel bursts, as if she was trying to grunt out all the two letter words in the world that end in ‘h’….uh!....ah!....eh! and so forth. The she lapses back into her normal catatonic state. She is a hairstylist and her mom and dad run a little restaurant back in the old country. I don’t get it; why is she here wasting her money and time?

We have the beautiful 30 year old blond Inge from the Czech Republic, living here with her fiancé Mano, a native of NYC out of Indian parents. He was taking lessons too but is off now to try his hand at some investment boutique.

There is Mo from Israel. Cute and very opinionated. And Magda, here with her whole Polish family, taking some time off from working on her advanced degree in Psychology. Diego from Bresil, and Arturo from Mexico. Not sure what their raison d’etre to be here is, since neither of them looks to be studying. And Tom from Sydney…typical friendly outgoing sport loving Aussie with a good mind and a good sense of humor. There is the lovely 20 something Henrietta from Norway, also blond but perhaps less mentally endowed than Inge (or perhaps more shy).

To my immediate left is the ‘in gamba’ (very chic and cool, fast and smart) Elisabetta from near Venice. She works for La Mode (Moda?) but is following love here to Paris. To my right the bright and chunky Asian American Connie, chafing about how slow the class is going (she’s right). She is very nice, studying contract law in New York and California. Chris from NYC is to her right, very nice childless forty something, here for three years with her husband and dog. And last, at the end of the table, the enigmatic Natalia from Russia. Early 20’s, supposedly an economist in training and dancer (what kind and for how much, I wonder), living in expensive digs near the Champs Elysee probably symbiotically on some fat oligarch’s rubles (but seriously, what do I know?).

I have spent 80 hours with these people the last two weeks, not to mention our nice but perhaps not optimally organized professor, Isabelle. And that feels really kind of weird, as if at my age I should be somehow more in control of the people I hang out with, regardless of the milieu, for such extended periods. I haven’t spent that much time cumulatively with either Jaime or Frank the last 6 months….and that is sad.

Anyway, Paris. I feel like I have passed some mark of distinction by having walked the city extensively for two weeks now and having avoided every single piece of dog shit. Paris is way better than twenty years ago and has made much progress on the merde issue over the passing of time…..but the Parisiens are still distressingly filthy regarding their pets. There is shit somewhere on each street, though, interestingly, I can’t say I have actually smelled even one piece. The streets in any event are disgusting in general. Every night I hear and every day I see the endless green trucks sweeping and cleaning garbage and literally kind of watering the streets, and yet if you stop on any rue and just look, you see that each is covered with a patina of shit and gum and spit and the ever present trail of wet new, sticky drying and cold trail piss. There is also more vomit here than elsewhere, seems to me. You just walk down any main street and there will be some dog, like as not with some superior looking Paris snob holding the leash, taking a (considering the ambient temperature) steamy dump nearby or in your way.

Mind you, there are the attractions. The light is beautiful in the afternoons regardless of the weather. The place is alive with people at all hours of the day. It is a walker’s dream, with new nooks and crannies and discoveries to found everywhere. The streets are twisted like an old crones back and then a block later they explode into broad boulevards with grand vista’s, Places, and monuments. And the other stuff in all the guidebooks.

We have been eating and drinking very well, I would say. I have refound my respect for medium priced French wine and have been consuming more than my share of Graves and Cotes du Rhone with price tags in the $10-15 vicinity for the most part, and they have been wonderful (deeper and suppler than I remember, with fruit I can actually taste instead of barely find). And we have used a guide book and other recommendations to find a number of very nice bistro’s and postcard size eating establishments all over the city. We have had some extraordinary quiches (avec champignon; le meilleur!) and cheeses (none better than Clothildes cheese pie with Robluchon right here at home).

Okay, gotta go do some homework.