Paranoia

I've never lived in a city before. Even though I am reassured that Paris is a safe place by lots of people, I get the shivers when I walk home alone at night sometimes, even if my neighborhood is probably among the safest in Paris. Maybe I'm paranoid, but in my experience, better to be paranoid than to be naive. So my advice for walking around Paris after midnight, don't gawk at people, wear something that doesn't bear all, be around people you know, and speak french! Every time I've been approached negatively it's because I'm speaking English. Just use your judgement. Don't go home with that cute guy or girl at the bar the first time you meet him or her. Don't talk back to someone who is harassing you. And don't drink so much you don't even know what arrondissement you are in. I don't want to chide you all, I just want to give some advice.

I have no limits in Paris. I can go out whenever I want, I can be with whoever I want. Its not Smith though. You can walk back home through downtown noho at 3 in the morning and you might see one person, and they will say goodnight nicely. In Paris, you walk home at 3 in the morning and you have men walking next to you trying to get you to sleep with them or calling you une sale pute. Being abroad is fabulous, but don't forget the things that could happen if you let yourself go too much! Think of the repercussions, we are women in a city we can't control...

Sophie, could you hand me the knife? Wine and jokes about the apple bread with ham. And oranges. Did you guys see that movie? The White Ribbon? Oh lord, don't see it. The violence was inexcusable. I finished my sculpture! and Really, Sophie, just take your time over there. Podcasts and Brushes on the metro, staring at a woman in white dreads. Men in superhero masks in the hazy 9 degrees Celsius. Scaling stairs of the kilometer-long Bibliothèque Nationale mountain, between the book-tours and the city-light-shimmering river. The stairs make lines toward the horizon. I didn't forget my keys again, thank god, and the cat tears toward the kitchen and the food bowl when the door clicks. Hi, Virgule, it's nice to be home.

Home. That was Paris tonight. Rob asked us to write again, now that chapter one, "the Romance of Jet Lag," is over. But the city just felt foreign during the first phase. To run past the Venus de Milo (and the millions of tourists) in the Louve because I know I can see it later, to successfully make appointments in French over the telephone, to laugh at the jokes in my sculpture class, to realize there are many more beautiful Gothic cathedrals in Europe than Notre Dame de Paris, to know people, to be fast in the metro and get asked directions — that's way more romantic than snapping a picture of the Eiffel Tour.

I have a life here. A life in a beautiful city. A city named Paris.

A little more than a month after arriving in Paris, I hopped on the 2h15 Eurostar train to London, where I spent a long weekend exploring and visiting with some family. Two days after getting back, I headed back to the train station, this time for an almost 14 hour night train ride to Berlin.

For me, these travels were the first time I had truly traveled alone – all by myself on the way there and back, figuring out where I was staying all by myself, where and how I was going to feed myself, what I was going to see, etc. I was worried before leaving that I might be lonely or that I might not have fun being all by myself. And, it certainly was a little nerve wracking to sit on the train on the way over to London thinking about staying at a couch surfer’s house (a guy that I had never met before) and it really wasn’t fun at all to arrive in Berlin and get absolutely soaked in the rain about 30 minutes after arriving (at least it would have been more bearable if I had been with someone else!).

But, overall, both trips were fantastic. I came away feeling like my eyes had been opened. Paris has been one experience, but it is not all of Europe. And, it’s one thing to hear about how life is different elsewhere, and another to experience it. I learned that I am totally capable of taking care of myself in a foreign city, and that one of the benefits of traveling alone is that you have the complete freedom to do exactly what you want, when you want, without compromising with other people. For me, that meant fitting lots of things into the very few days I had in each city. But, in both cases, I came away feeling like I had gotten a breath of fresh air.

Two months into Paris, as much as I love the beauty of the city and the amazing opportunities it provides, I find it can be cold, exhausting, and more than anything else, conformist. I hope that these are only my initial impressions, but my travels gave me a welcome break from these experiences of Paris and a reminder that other cultures and ways of life exist only a few hundred kilometers away.

The people I met in both London and Berlin were so friendly – from the tour bus guides that I asked directions from, to the sales people that I discussed the New York/Boston commute with, there was an openness and an ease that I have yet to discover in Paris. In Berlin, especially, I got the distinct feeling of it being a young city, one in which people still feel that they have the liberty to experiment with their physical representation of their identity and one in which its residents feel that they have the power to shape their city.

Part of my very positive experiences in both cities were thanks to my couch surfing hosts. London was my very first couch surfing experience, and a wonderful, wonderful introduction to the community. As Jonathan, my London host described to me, in so much as it is a leap of faith, couch surfing helps restore faith in other humans and is a welcome change to the “stranger danger” mantra we so often hear. Within 20 minutes of meeting Jonathan, he had given me keys to his wonderful flat in Canary Warf. Sophie, my host in Berlin, took her entire Sunday afternoon and evening to show me around the city. In both cases, couch surfing allowed me to connect with somebody in a way that wouldn’t have been possible unless I already knew someone in the city. It was a guaranteed connection into the life of someone who lives there, with very few expectations put on the relationship.

At this point, I am excited to be in Paris and to “profiter” as much as I can from what is here. But, more than anything, I am excited to be in a new continent in a place with easy access to many countries, cities and people and to be at a time in my life when I can take the time to travel.

A few photos:

Potsdamer Platz in Berlin..

The gardens at Heaver Castle, outside of London

The Houses of Parliament in London

and if you want to check out other photos I've been taking, I post them at: http://parisjya.shutterfly.com/

When I knew I'd made the right choice studying abroad....

I felt I had to share this gem:

I'm taking a class on the Romantic Apocalypse at the Sorbonne, which is divided into three parts, the discussion section in French, the discussion section in English, and the 100-person lecture. The lecture generally tends to be interesting, but kind of irrelevent to the books themselves; the professor herself said that the lecture is pretty much to give context for the four books we're reading and, to that end, has been lecturing on Revelations. She finally finished that today and gave us a brief list of works influenced by the notion of the apocalypse as revolution which, you guessed it, included Les Miserables, a novel of which I am inordinately fond.

After pointing out that Hugo called himself Saint John in another poem, that Hugo wrote the work not only to comment on the vast social inequalities of his society and the ideal New Jerusalem that would be a New French Republic, Madame la professeur asked the room at large if we remembered "ce magnifique personnage, Enjolras", the gorgeous, golden-haired (Hugo goes deliberately out of his way to say that the handsome Enjolras said something and cannot keep himself from mentioning Enjolras's hair whenever Enjolras appears) leader of a group of revolutionary students and Hugo's living symbol of the logic of the Revolution. The professor then proceeded to lecture at length about his similarities to the angels in Revelations.

She actually did not finish telling us the rest of the list of works featuring the apocalpyse as revolution because she spent too much time talking about Enjolras's hair.

I kid you not.

5 helpful hints for the liberal arts major studying abroad

Things I Have Learned The Hard Way At the Sorbonne:

1. The History TDs (discussion sections) start after the CM (lecture). This is the exact opposite of the French Literature courses. No one will tell you this, or pity you when you become hopelessly lost.

2. The Sorbonne works on its own lines of logic. For example, the course offerings for French Literature are not in the French Literature hallway. They are in the Philosophy Hallway, because, apparently, whenever you are looking for answers you ought to turn to philosophy.

3. The bookstores near the Sorbonne will always be sold out of the books your professor strongly urges you to read/ form the basis of your literature course. Amazon.fr is a better bet. If a book is sold out both on amazon.fr and in the six bookstores you visited on Saturday, it is better to just give up. The professor will, in the next TD, absent-mindedly remark that the book she assigned has been out of print for the past year and she will send out an e-mail with a scan of the book.

4. If there is no one on your floor in the evening, while you are laborously copying out the course offerings no one thought to post online, chances are you have been locked into the Sorbonne. Head south for what I believe is a subterranean passage that leads to various lecture halls and the only unlocked door. This is the only way out, not that any of the guards will let you or your fellow bewildered students that.

5. Not all the staircases let you get off on the next floor. A staircase can take you directly from level one to level three for no easily discernible reason aside from malice.

The Best Sandwich Ever

It was somewhere between 2 and 3 am on the nuit blanche, and a few of us were ready to call it a night since things were getting crazy in the streets. But first we needed serious sustenance. We tried to find a falafel place in the marais, but they were all closed! Failure. So we headed over near boulmiche since there are little stands all over. And then we found it. The best greek sandwich money could buy. It was perfect. Meaty, onions, cucumbers, yogurt dressing, and perfectly seasoned french fries in a pita! I highly recommend this hole in the wall. If you go to rue st. Andre de beaux arts from the St. Michel entrance, it is the second greek sandwich place on the left. Only 4 euros. Heaven.

green paris

there is literally quite a lot of green. as cities go, paris seems to be well treed (an invented but necessary word). but there's also the other kind of green, the kind that signifies an ideology, a lifestyle, a cultural movement, and a guilt complex capitalized on by corporations. paris, although it has its overlapping highway moonscapes (out somewhere i don't really have to look at them), warm car exhaust winds, and lots and lots of pee (which definitely counts as a pollutant, if only to one's nose), feels pretty clean for a major metropolis. here are some reasons why:

>two-button toilets: yes, that is the technical term (not really. i think the technical term is dual-flush). fairly simple math: small button is for small flushes, big button is for bigger ones. but, having grown up in extravagant america, it took me a while to figure this out. just think how much water they save (in case you don't want to do it in your head: about 2/3 of what is used by a regular toilet). and they're everywhere.

>carbon taxes: they're not in place yet, but sarkozy has said that over the next year taxes on the emission of co2 will be put in place. let's hope.

>timed hall/stairwell lights: because people forget to turn them off, and then polar bears die.

>density: paris is small. as such, it has an incredibly efficient public transport system, the possibility of walking places, and less far for cars to travel as they go on their merry, planet-killing way.

>vélib: bicycles, for almost free, everywhere. i personally hate riding bikes. but as a general practice of the parisian population, i have to give it a (green) thumbs up.

everyone know those online tests you can take to calculate your ecological footprint? if not, go take one:

http://www.myfootprint.org/

the reason i mention this is that if you click on the u.s. as your residence, your footprint is automatically much larger than if you click on europe but all other entries remain the same. and now you know why!

p.s. i've left things out. if anyone wants to share more, please do.