Writing this has been on my agenda for a few days, but after arriving home in Paris, then seeing my room mate off to Berlin, I have had a rather unproductive batch of activity, colored by a mild cold (which seems to have been Greece's parting gift). At any rate, here come some tidbits about the trip, bullet-style.
The strange thing about traveling, these days, is the sense of having manifested something. When I was younger it was more about the act of departure and arrival -- the sense of moving away from people and coming back, the age-old idea of a trip that changes you, even if it is just for a weekend. While much of that still stands, it feels different. No longer do tray tables inspire scrawled journal entries about how exciting it feels to be in transit, to know the sensation of geographic movement. Now I mostly try to sleep, I get knots in my back, and I try not to drool in public. The taste of once-frozen dinner rolls and mid-morning vegetable spread isn't much condolence.
I think maybe the romance surrounding air travel died on a flight from Atlanta to Seoul, when I spent four of sixteen hours in the airplane bathroom, throwing up and trying to stay conscious. I have worked hard to train myself into napping uncontrollably, if only to avoid thinking too hard about my digestive tract and all the things I have put it through in life. The romance of being in transit has completely fallen away; transit is hardly time to reflect on the places one has seen, or time to ponder where one is going. Rather, it is a miserable experience one must endure between bursts of life. Here are hours not wasted, but folded somewhere into time. Though geographic movement seems to take forever while it is experienced, once you have arrived it seems quite sudden. Suddenly you are home. Suddenly it is tomorrow. Suddenly it occurs to you how terrible you smell, how long you have been awake, that you have been on your computer for six hours, and that, for the second time in a day, the only meal you can assemble is farfalle with butter and a glass of apple juice. It would behoove me to remember to stock a little something in the freezer for Sunday arrivals, when all grocery stores and markets in France are closed.
The strangeness and the delight, as I said, concern the manifestation of a trip -- to plan from start to finish, to assemble tickets, to gather information. Even choosing destinations can inspire disbelief. One moment there is a voice in your computer, and a few years later you are visiting a friend in Bosnia. One evening you see a photograph and decide you must experience its subject directly. One month you are collecting signatures on campus, then suddenly you are alone in an airport, about to move to a foreign country for a year. Each journey can be traced by its own string of events, but as you experience them they can feel quite disconnected. It is hard for me to convey how many times I have stood before monuments or looked out on a view and had an experience that abruptly changes from witnessing the site to an awareness that I really am there, that I decided to do something that seemed impossible and accomplished it. Sometimes it feels almost by accident. So often while traveling you are too overwhelmed for clarity, but every now and then a moment hits you and you realize you are standing in the spot you imagined you'd never reach, or that you'd only be able to visit thirty years down the road. It's freeing. Anything seems possible when, even if only for an instant, you feel you've controlled the course of your own life.
When trying to capture this sensation, I often return to this video, which ends with, "The end goal of this project, both in its vlog and
documentary form is to share people's reasons and motivations behind
their trip. Most importantly, to share what makes or drives a person
to leave everything behind: their routines, their friends, the things
that are comfortable to us and give us a false sense of security.
There's an infinite number of stories and paths chosen that lead to
leaving it all behind. But even more important than sharing these
stories is doing so in a way that helps break down the myths and false
fears that people put up. Because, in the end, it has almost nothing
to do with the bike and everything to do with setting out to accomplish
something that is intimidating, that is unknown to you -- something you
know you have a good chance of failing at, but doing it anyway, and
slowly but surely, proving yourself wrong."
My days in Paris are numbered, and so, it seems, my camera finds itself out and about more frequently. Here are some recent highlights.
Philip, Drew, and Daniel on the escalators of the Pompidou.
Drew on a pedestrian bridge.
Drew retrieving some photos from the old school photo booth at Palais de Tokyo.
Sunset on the banks of the Seine.
Philip, Daniel, and I at sunset on the quai.
Kite flying (well, sort of) at the Parc des Buttes Chaumont.
Me, giving Philip a hair cut in my apartment.
From the old school photo booth at Palais de Tokyo, when Logan was here during his spring break.
As always, there are a variety of photo adventures over at the flickr stream.
A few of you have submitted your votes (it's a good system, don't you think? Let's me know what you think is interesting, and gives me a jumping-off point and a greater sense of purpose), so today's program will include an exploration of the landscape of my life as it has been shaping up recently. I expect by the time I finish, it will have been a long and winding hike through the mountains, but perhaps we'll find a view of the horizon and someone can claim they see what's coming up ahead. That person will probably not be me.
With every month that passes, I toss around phrases like, "It's hard to believe there are only ____ months left in Paris," if only to remind myself that this magical year will come to a close, and that Paris will not, in fact, remain my daily backdrop. Today there remain less than two months, and before long the countdown will be in days. Already I am putting off things like getting a haircut or seeing a film -- things that will be cheaper to do in America.
I have a lot to go back to, so it's not as if I'm dreading my return. But it's hard to fathom what it will mean to leave Paris, and hard to convey to others even a fraction of what I think it will feel like. I suppose the closest I can come with people my age is this: remember your freshman year of college? Your new friends, your new lifestyle, the parties, the road trips, the late nights, the sense of community. Imagine as a freshman on the eve of exams, you knew you'd go back to complete another year of high school in the fall. It's hardly a sentence; there are classmates you'd love to see again, perhaps you miss your hometown, etc. But there remains the fact that life has changed quite drastically, and returning to the same setting you found yourself in a year prior might feel a little strange. Nevermind that they literally speak a different language, don't have delicious bakeries on every corner, and have considerably less museums to visit.
I keep thinking of a Czech proverb I learned recently, "Kolik jazyku znas, tolikrat jsi clovekem." In English, it's something to the effect of "you live a new life for every new language you speak. If you know only
one language, you live only once." It's not as if Paris will vanish overnight -- a culture forever lost, a second Atlantis -- but access to French culture and language in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, can be a bit limited, even with the help of French clubs and tutoring jobs. The little songs everyone sings to each other here cannot be exported; the cadence of my usual "merci, au revoir" at the bakery door won't be quite so beautiful and effective when I take my coffee and bagel from the disgruntled old woman at the café in the bottom floor of the university library.
As for questions about the future (to touch on the high school comparison once more), it's a bit like being a junior in high school and having people ask you where you'll be going to college before you've even taken the tests you'll need to apply. So perhaps we'll start with something more immediate. I've applied to a number of internships with museums and magazines, hoping to find some work in New York or D.C. for the summer. Most of what I've applied for involves exhibit creation or research, film archiving/restoration, or art editorial work. So far I have a rejection from National Geographic in D.C., and an interview with Harper's in New York. With about fifteen applications submitted, I hope the net I cast is wide enough, but it's still a bit early to tell. I'm still waiting to hear back from others like the Holocaust Museum, the Smithsonian's Postal Museum, the Notebaert Museum in Chicago, National Geographic Adventure, a book arts internship in Brooklyn, and a number of other small libraries and publications. If I don't find anything I'll spend some time at my parents' and maybe return early to Tuscaloosa for summer school and work.
Other definites: a fall schedule that includes Intro to Linguistics, Printmaking, a seminar on ethnography and culture, Spanish 103, and a science credit I need to graduate. After missing the dark room so fiercely this year, I regret that there's not room in my academic schedule to take photography, but I can still work as a dark room monitor. Hopefully I'll have the time to create more work for my portfolio.
Which brings me to the Post Undergrad Question. What will Glynnis do with her life? I remain of the mentality that opportunities present themselves, and that one needs only to be willing, brave, and ready. And that in the meantime one should work hard and stay busy doing things one loves. This whole Paris for a year thing? A crazy opportunity that presented itself via supportive parents, two generous scholarships, and an academic advisor who asked the question, "Only for the summer? Why not go for the whole year?" Oh yeah. And there was a lot of paperwork.
So with the opportunity mentality in mind, there are a number of directions I'm considering. I'm hoping one of them will suddenly become more appealing and plausible than the others, and soon.
So that's as much an update as I can give you concerning my life, the future, and everything, without degenerating into whines about how all of it will be more difficult and competitive with today's economy. As more news rolls in and as the time inevitably passes, I'll try to keep the internet up to date on any new developments (beats repeating all this uncertainty ad nauseam via email, video chat, and phone calls). But until then, I suppose it's best to enjoy all the questions of youth, eh? The answers aren't always as important as we'd like to think they are.
In addition to researching internship opportunities (and mailing off about fifteen applications), I have been my usual busy self, stretching time between seeing the city, reading, school, and social engagements. The good news is that my February intensive six-hours-a-day French course is over, so I have more free time. What's more, I can officially state that I received my first rejection letter from National Geographic. While the intern apps are still rolling out via the French postal system, I've begun a new set of classes at the Institut Catholique de Paris, the school I'm attending this semester.
Here's the course load. Pretend like you're interested:
In other news, travel plans are shaping up for the semester. First up are American visitors. Last weekend Melinda, a graduate of UA's French program, came to Paris. She's been living in Nantes and we finally managed to cross paths. We saw Fontainebleau and Victor Hugo's house (pictures forthcoming). Next up are three other Alabamian friends who found affordable tickets and have nothing better to do for their spring break than to visit me. Immediately following is a trip to Dublin, to see another Alabamian friend from high school who's studying at Trinity for the semester. The following weekend I see Adis in Sarajevo. Then for spring break I'm going to Greece for a few days with friends. All I can say is that even with terrible service and inconvenient airports, thank goodness for RyanAir and easyjet alike. Though most of my savings are now pocket lint, if there's anything left over I might hop over to Casablanca for a weekend. All of which is to say that if you have any tips or recommendations for any or all upcoming destinations, please send them my way.
Things I owe you, now that I fixed Movable Type (it's been broken for about two weeks, making it impossible to update until I found time to reinstall everything):
Cast your vote in the comments for which should come first.
One thing about living in Paris that's hard to get over: art. Having never lived in a city littered with museums, it's fun to try to keep up with it all. Nearly every weekend I meet friends to see something that's showing, and it always seems the rest of Paris is there with us. Insider tip: always go to exhibits during the week, if possible, and never go to see something on the final weekend. My room mate and I tried recently to see a Picasso exhibit at the Grand Palais. It was so popular that they decided to open it 24/7 for the last few days, and when we arrived one morning at 6AM, the wait to get in was still five hours. Going to museums in Paris, it seems, is as natural as loitering at a shopping mall when you're thirteen, live in the American suburbs, and can't drive. Imagine if I'd had my entire adolescence to ride the metro and drift through museums, rather than hang around the local Barnes and Noble. Oh, Paris. How early you begin to culture your children.
For Christmas, I received Robert Frank's The Americans. At the time, I didn't know there'd be an exhibit of the very same work upon my return to the city. I went with a handful of people who had never heard of Robert Frank or of the book, and I felt a little obsessive examining every photograph and explaining the number of times I'd studied each one--of how Frank and the book had changed photography.
Seeing photography in person can be strange; sometimes the photos
aren't as sharp as you had imagined, or you can see a chemical splotch
on the print, or maybe you see something tiny that you had never
noticed before. With Frank's work, I was surprised to see the
structure of the film grain, and how much more present it seemed in the
prints than in the book.
In addition to The Americans, the exhibit also has some of Frank's work on Paris, which is a contrast of architecture, content, and time period, but also of style. His work on Paris seems completely different to me. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find much of it online, but I highly recommend the book.
It's strange to live in a city so photographed. Many of the places constructed hundreds of years ago remain unchanged, and photos I've studied that were taken in the 1830s look nearly identical to the city I live in today. Other areas have been erased or hidden. But there's something thrilling about finding yourself in an art gallery looking at work by a master, and discovering your street corner featured prominently in one of the photographs. That will be a moment I never forget.
Also included in the exhibit are two films that Frank made. One of them is black and white with characters and a loose plot, which I didn't find terribly interesting. The other was shot by Frank in his own home, where he interacts with his wife, talks directly to the camera, and does things like chop through brush or get friends to move heavy trees through the yard. There's something really delightful about seeing where an artist works, and finding out how he interacts with people. If Robert Frank had a YouTube page, that film would be on it.
If you find yourself in Paris before the 22nd of March, don't miss it. Here's a link to the exhibition page online. You can read more about the exhibit or what else is showing at the museum here.
Around Paris
Paris: culture and news
Restaurants and food
If the French have taught me one thing, its perseverance. Before I left the States, a professor who had studied and lived in Paris for a number of years gave me these sagely words of advice: learn how to argue in French. Loudly. Her suggestion stood out from the more typical "bon voyage!" sentiments I garnered from others, and though I knew I was in for a ride, I probably should have taken to heart what she said. It got me thinking that the entire process of getting settled here
closely resembles a Role Playing Game, be it Zelda, Final Fantasy,
Oblivion, and countless others. There's an overarching story that
you'll be following, but for the most part you're placed in a strange
land with little knowledge of what to do. Your experience points are
low when you first start out, and the only way to improve your standing
-- and get closer to achieving your goal of saving a princess or the
entire world -- is to complete a myriad of seemingly random quests. You'll wander around aimlessly until you get a lay of the land, and
then you'll want to start getting things done. When you're ready to buy
that shiny new sword you visit the shopkeeper but he won't give it up
until you travel to the snowy mountains on the other side of the
continent, kill 20 trolls, and return with their gemmed chalice. When
you finally return to the shopkeeper he notices that one of the rubies
is missing from the chalice, and again, won't sell you your sword until
you commandeer a boat to take you to an island where you need slay a
giant goblin, grab the ruby, and head all the way back to town. By the
time you get your sword it's been three straight nights of playing and
you can't even remember why you were even playing this ridiculous game
in the first place. Rinse and repeat, and you have a pretty good idea of what it's like
to set up camp in a new country. It's an endless stream of running back
and forth, not having just the right things, forgetting the exact thing
you needed, not understanding, and not being understood. You've paid
your hard earned cash for this game and dammit you're going to get your
money's worth no matter how convoluted the storyline is. Now if I can only find that one cave where the +3 Repel Bureaucracy amulet is hidden. When I return to the States, most of my incredulous stories will be not of the places I've visited or the monuments I've seen, but of the hours I've waited in line, the papers demanded of me, or how one completes otherwise simple tasks while a resident of France. Like that one time I tried to make a simple return at FNAC because I'd bought the wrong textbook. I had to go to two separate desks on opposite ends of the store, where two separate women handwrote receipts of very long numbers on carbon paper, and handed me one of the three copies. Only then was I able to return to the caisse, where the woman operating the register handwrote another form full of long numbers, stapled all of them together, and finally gave me my reimbursement. Despite the fact that, like any store in the United States, the French have computer-operated cash registers with barcode scanners. It seems to me that the French like to work near computers, rather than with them. I was pleasantly surprised today when I went to my French bank (my bank account has its own horrific and ridiculous paperwork story) to solve a problem, and accomplished it on the first try. Part of perseverance and part of daily life in a foreign country is feeling like a moron on a regular basis. In today's case, it was asking why I can't access my bank account online (answer: that wasn't part of the contract I signed), why my card didn't work when I tried to buy groceries (answer: there wasn't enough money in my account), and why it seems that a check I deposited didn't go through (answer: I deposited it incorrectly). Sometimes it pays to be an obsessive pack rat and keep receipts so that when a 220€ check disappears into automated teller never-never-land, someone can track it down for you even if it will take a month. After signing a new contract that allows me to see my account online, checking my card to make sure it works correctly, and putting a recherche on the check I incorrectly deposited, the young teller assured me that "Nous sommes vraiment desolee, hein? Je sais que c'est un très longtemps." I assured her that, "Non, c'est vraiment ma faute. Merci bien, c'est gentil," then confessed that "c'est toujours comme ça en France, pour moi. Toujours compliqué! Complètement different aux États-Unis. Je me trompe beaucoup." She assured me that her sister experienced the same trouble when she moved to Rome, then shouted a "bon courage!" as I left. Customer service and efficiency may not be France's forté, but if you get over the fact that you're going to feel like a moron a few times a day and persevere, you can get things done. A little manners and some humility can go a long way; so far I've not needed to resort to the French pillars of argument. Speaking bad French and lightly playing on the "stupid, helpless American" stereotype can apparently be effective, too.
A few days before I left for France, I watched the film Two Days in Paris, which has much to teach about how one argues and accomplishes things with the French language. This scene is particularly helpful. It lacks English subtitles, but it's easy to get the general idea without understanding French. It begins quite innocently, quite formally. And after it escalates, one must always deny that one has argued, that one is responsible for anything. If all else fails, one can insult another by accusing them of slighting France's image, or else one can call them a tourist. These, my friends, are pillars of French argument.
Since my arrival in September, I have run the gamut of French bureaucracy, utterly and completely. After months of struggling for air, I surfaced with the only trophy one can win: the carte de séjour -- a residency card. To get a carte de séjour, one must stand in line for three to five hours with around twenty official documents: an original birth certificate; a financial guarantee from your study abroad program; a financial guarantee from your parents, signed by a notary, stating that they will support you; a bank statement belonging to the financially responsible party; an enrollment letter from any and all schools you plan to attend in France; a copy of your student card(s); enrollment verification from your study abroad program; a copy of your passport; a copy of your visa; a letter from Campus France, an organization one must register with in order to obtain a visa; a copy of your landlord's identity card; a current electricity bill; an attestation de domicile signed and dated by your landlord, who confirms that you do in fact live where you say you do; copies of all aforementioned documents; etc. etc. so on and so on and forever and ever. Should any of these things not be up to par, or perhaps if the woman letting people through the line is in a bad mood that day, you will be turned away without explanation and forced to wait in line again. And to get your carte de séjour, you must make it through before your visa expires or you will no longer be a legal visitor in France.
Once you make it through the line, which of course comes only after several attempts, you get a recipisée (a temporary carte) which only suffices until you show up for your medical appointment where they test your eyes and take a chest x-ray to make sure you're not blind or infectious. If you miss the medical appointment, it cannot be rescheduled, and you are, as the French like to say, dans la merde. I hestitate to describe more of my experience getting my carte, since remembering the whole process is almost as painful as living through it the first time around.
Life in Paris is beautiful, and truly one of the most delightful things I've ever experienced. Whether or not the French planned it this way, it seems one must pay for life here -- especially when one is not French -- by enduring long lines, refusals, mountains of paperwork, and banking errors. Living in a foreign country is a lot like being a character in a game. I frequently return to this entry, written by Mike Cosentino about his own experiences in France. He says it so much better than I can:
It's hard to visit Venice and not feel like you've stepped into a postcard -- especially in winter when the waves of tourists are thin and the sun hangs low, casting an orange light over everything. I saw the city briefly a few summers ago, but this time was even more taken with it; travel seems to delight me most when the stress of squeezing in all the famous monuments has been removed, and I'm free to wander aimlessly and lose track of time. It is not hard to imagine Venice in the 1500s as you're strolling along the canals. After all, the city is depicted in many paintings at the Accademia. We only stayed in the city two days, one of them fresh off the plane and without sleep, but since it was a second visit I feel I managed to see what I came for. I even managed to wander into some artisan book shops, which you'll get to see once I get further along in my photo editing.
We've since taken a train to Florence, where we're staying the next few days before heading to Rome.
I'm currently waiting for a flight in the Greenville airport, about to head back to Europe with the family in tow. We'll be in Italy for about ten days before I go back to Paris for my second semester. Not sure what internet access will be like in Italy, but the silence here may continue for a while. It has been a lively break, and though I failed to make it to a Waffle House, I did manage to squeeze in fried chicken, cheese grits, general home cooking, a chocolate malt, and some American cinema. Thanks to everyone who had me as a guest, and if you were my guest it was lovely having you.
See you guys on the other side of the pond. Here are some photos from the break. Happy 2009!
