A friend from my graduating class in high school is spending the semester in Europe studying Spanish in Sedona, Spain.  We were never close, since at best we said hello in the hallways and sat at opposite ends of Mr. Bolus's Algebra 2 classroom.  Despite this, he discovered that I'm living in Paris for the year and let me know via facebook that he planned to visit the city during a week off from school.  I helped him find a hostel, and we met for dinner.

I waited in the pouring rain at the Saint-Michel fountain--a popular meeting place in Paris, since it's near a metro stop and in a neighborhood packed with restaurants and boutiques.  When he emerged from the metro, we huddled under my umbrella and waded through the flooding pedestrian streets lined with restaurants.  I asked what kind of cuisine he'd like, since in Saint-Michel you can find almost anything, and we settled on something traditionally French: raclettes.

Raclettes is essentially the French equivalent of fondue, but the burner and serving style differ.  Click the picture above for a bit more of an explanation.

Despite sitting down in a raclettes establishment, he ordered fondue, and I had coffee and dessert.  Afterward, we headed to Shakespeare & Co. to find a dictionary for him.  Notre Dame is just a stone's throw from the bookshop, which he noticed immediately.  Dictionaryless, we crossed the river as it began to rain harder. 

We stood before Notre Dame huddled under umbrellas for a good twenty minutes as he stared at the facade in disbelief.  My sneakers filled with water.  As he marveled at the cathedral--the fact that he "could reach out and touch it"--I marveled at his reaction.  Though moments of pure tourist delight still strike me several times a week, many of the city's monuments, in my eyes, have fallen from iconic status to mere historical landmarks.  They still hold some magic, but when you study for massive art history exams in a library that's almost literally in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, the monuments begin to morph into a pleasant backdrop for everyday life.  The longer I'm here, the more I understand how a number of Parisians have never seen their city from atop the Tower, or how New Yorkers have never visited the Empire State Building.

The interstices folded into the relative mundanity of daily life still harbor moments of absolute glee--the same kind tourists experience during short visits to iconic cities.  My room mate and I attended rescreenings of the Presidential and Vice Presidential debates at the Cinéaqua, an aquarium with several movie screens.  The aquarium is situated next to Trocadero, so each night that we attend, we emerge from the dark of the theater to see the Eiffel Tower shining blue before us, the rhetoric of American political candidates still bouncing through our brains. 

The glee, then, manifests itself at a slightly different level.  The sight of the Tower excites us, since we've just been flooded with images of home and the familiar via CNN.  But the blue of the Tower also creates a surrealism that, if I stop to think about, exists in most of my daily activity.  If the economic crisis we're experiencing really does make the sort of history everyone's predicting, years from now my grandchildren will interview me for homework assignments, and I will tell them that when the market crashed I was huddled in the corner of a Parisian café writing and sipping coffee.  That for my twenty-first birthday, as the economy continued to slide, I flew to Prague for the weekend.  Though there's no way to know today how the events surrounding the crisis will play out in the coming years, it's humbling and strange to compare my experiences with my grandmother's during the depression of the 1930s.  I've interviewed, videotaped, and written extensively about her experiences as a child of the Great Depression and a teenager during the second World War.  For her memories of pot liquor, I have memories of pastries for breakfast.  For her friends enlisted in the war, I have friends dotting the European continent to attend its major historical institutions. 

It is an especially strange time to be a member of my generation, which, since its birth, has lived in the wake of the Baby Boomers.  As many systems buckle or become outdated beneath the leviathan of our parents' generation, I often wonder how or when we will restore and create new systems.  Certainly many of these issues crop up during election season--the depletion of Social Security, the failing health care system, etc.--but I think that ultimately members of our generation must hold offices before these problems will be directly addressed (at least in our interest, rather than in our parents'); the Baby Boomers still comprise an enormous part of the voting population, and not all of them will vote in the interest of generations that succeed them. 

Though many of these failing systems may be repaired to accommodate our parents and those that directly follow, it's possible that the same repairs might not last long enough for my generation to reap the same benefits.  Combine this with the fact that the job market is extremely competitive, that there may be high rates of unemployment come graduation time, that the real estate market may still be suffering years down the road, and that it's harder (or at least less desirable) than ever to take out loans, and you have a strange picture of what members of my generation may face in the coming years. 

Certainly we will survive--compared to the Great Depression, we hardly ever hear anyone going on about the oil crises of the 70s, and our parents weathered plenty of economic dips during our youth.  (My parents have been quick to remind me that I was born just a few days before Black Monday in '87.)  But the bleak picture the media has painted in recent weeks creates a strange dissonance with the way many members of my generation are living.  Many of us, for one, are studying abroad, as this has become the norm in many college curricula.  Others live in the bubble of University Life, settled into large dorm rooms with kitchenettes, sorority houses with personal chefs, or apartments with satellite TV.  Some of us can't remember our family's first computer, can't imagine life without text messages, and cannot comprehend how anyone managed to leave the house without a cell phone.  It's possible for the less adventurous and more ignorant among us to arrive in a college classroom without knowledge that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict exists (I kid you not--in a UA class on social conflcit this summer, one student had never heard of it).  Then again, I've met my share of Americans here, some younger than I, who speak four languages--scholars who make me feel I've been fumbling through life and studies with foolishness bordering lunacy.  Yesterday I had lunch with a friend from class at the Sorbonne who gave our waiter a lesson on Farsi in French, and bid him goodbye in German.

All in all, life as an expatriate is strange.  Even without an economic crisis back home, my life wandering through Paris is so far from anything in Tuscaloosa, both figuratively and geographically.  Though it's not my first time in Europe, it is the first fall since I began college that I've managed to totally escape football season, which this year is larger than ever.  The idea of returning next fall to endure city-wide traffic jams, Wal-mart aisles emptied of beer and soda, thousands of intoxicated fans wandering campus mid-day, and the sounds of Bryant-Denny roaring with 100,000 people kind of scares me.  Reverse culture shock, indeed.

Still, though, there is something to be said for standing with stars in your eyes before Notre Dame in the pouring rain, nearly brought to your knees in disbelief.  This kind of delight, this kind of displacement, this kind of reality check--it's something I'll never get tired of.