Old Friends and New Friends

You know those people you’re friends with on Facebook who you haven’t actually talked to in years, but you like each other’s pictures and statuses all the time?

Well, Sara Davis and I hadn’t had a conversation that wasn’t via Facebook picture comments in about seven years. We were friends from the time I was around 11 until I was 14 or 15, when our families stopped going to the same church. I have photos of us playing ice hockey with broomsticks at a church picnic where we’re wearing long skirts over our snow pants.

Seven years later, Sara commented on one of my photos from my recent road trip in Croatia and Italy; she said that she was about to embark on a Euro trip for seven weeks and was a little nervous, but when she saw my photos her inspiration was rebooted. I was so happy that photos of my life were inspiring for someone! And, of course, I asked if she was coming through here, and she was, and that’s how we decided that after seven years we’d meet each other face-to-face again – in Paris.

We met at Sacre-Coeur, since it was right by her hostel. It’s always weird to me seeing someone I haven’t seen in a long time because for some reason I always expect them to unrecognizable, and it’s always surprising how much they look the same. This is silly because it’s not like people’s feature can really change that much, and it’s especially silly since now you can see people’s photos on the internet every day; still, I was shocked at how much Sara looked like she did when we were 13. Older and prettier, definitely, but still…Sara. I don’t know why that’s so weird for me. I guess because it transports me back to where I was as a person at the time I last looked at their face.

Sara was travelling with her friend Gwen, a sweet, bubbly girl from Cambridge, N.Y. I loved the feeling of being in Paris with people who knew my hometown, especially after always having to explain to European people that I’m not from New York City when I say I’m from New York.

Again, thanks to Facebook catching up was just a matter of filling the spaces between statuses and photo albums while we wandered around Montmartre. I made a list of all the places I’d want to see if I were spending only a day in Paris, so the girls could get as much out of the city as possible before moving on.

Playing tour guide in Paris was one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. I loved that I had been to each of these places multiple times and could give cool tidbits of information and know exactly where I was on a map of the city without looking. It felt like Paris was my city, and I was overwhelmed with love for this place that felt like home as soon as my flight landed; and now I know it well enough to show people around! It’s so exciting.

Sacre-Coeur, Montmartre area, Jardin des Plantes, tea and middle-eastern baked goods at La Grande Mosquee, Le Marais, Champs-Elyeeses, the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe….Many metros later we made it to the Passy market by my apartment and bought a baguette, cheese, fresh figs, cantaloupe, and some other things and sat at my table in the sunshine eating dinner. After, we drank our coffee, and they got their first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower from my rooftop. At dusk we walked to Trocadero and bought nutella crepes and then walked to sit in front of the Tower. Walking underneath it with them I was filled with the same sensation I had the first time I walked beneath it. While we took our time searching for a good spot to sit, Gwen and Sara said that of all the cities they’d been to and all the tourist attractions they’d seen, that was the most amazing, and it was the first time they experienced the feeling of, “Oh, that’s why people travel all around the world to come here.” And then they said that Paris was one of their absolute best moments yet. And then they said it was hugely because of me and my energy and excitement about the city, and I was so incredibly happy to hear them say that because I wanted more than anything for them to have a good time and to fall in love with the city as I had, and knowing I’d shared that with them made me incandescent.

Gwen, me, Sara with our crepes

At 9 p.m., the Tower glittered, and we sat in silence watching it as though it were a movie screen. Afterward, Gwen was wiping tears from her face, and I thought that was a perfect finale for their day in Paris.

The whole day I kept thinking about my 12-year-old self being told, “Hey, you know your friend Sara? Well, pretty soon you guys aren’t going to see each other anymore, but it’s cool. You’ll meet up again in 7 years. In Paris. You’ll eat crepes under the Eiffel Tower together. Oh, and you’ll be the one showing them around, since you’ll be living there.” I would have looked at the poster of the Eiffel Tower I had hanging in my bedroom when I was that age and known I was having a whacky dream.

I wonder when I’ll see Sara again. For all I know it could be in 20 years in Hong Kong. Life is so weird.

Metro selfies with Daria

I’ve been getting together a lot with the girls I met at the picnic. They’re so fun. This past weekend was a highlight. On Friday ,Vera, Daria, Sara, and I met at Chatelet and went to a couple bars on Rue de Rivoli, right by Sara’s place. We spent a huge chunk of the night chatting with a gay couple sitting near us. One guy was Israeli and very beautiful and had a nose ring, and the other guy was French and bald and said hardly two words, but he smiled a lot. The Israeli guy convinced me I have to go to his home city of Tel-Aviv someday. I never would have even considered that a travel destination before, but apparently it’s lovely and active, and every other person is gay. Obviously, I found this extremely surprising, but it’s just another testament to how bleached our media is. Of course, I only know the Israel I read about in the news. I never would’ve known any of the cool things he told me about Tel-Aviv. He said he missed it there because he has a lot of energy and Paris is too sedated for him. He likes the action involved with the problems in Israel, he said. His boyfriend (not the guy he was sitting with) is black, he told me, and after gauging his personality I joked about how he and his boyfriend, a black Jewish gay couple, had all the reasons in the world to protest, so it was perfect for him. He thought it was the funniest thing in the world that I had the gall to say that to him.

The next morning, I woke up at 8 a.m. to the sound of rain on my moon roof window, so I sat up to shut it, but I noticed the sun was shining; so, I stuck my head outside and the sky was pink and the sun was shining, but it was sprinkling, so I knew there was a rainbow somewhere. Directly opposite the Eiffel Tower I spotted it – a perfect rainbow arching across the buildings on the other side of my street. I fell back asleep with that image in my mind.

At 5 p.m., or 17h, I met the girls at Vera’s place. They were reading a recipe for “American style pancakes” and putting the ingredients in one by one. Daria was reading the recipe to Sara, who was putting everything in the bowl. “Ok, now do I put the milk in?”

“No, you do that last, I think,” Daria said.

“You said that about the last thing. ‘Do I put this in now?’ ‘No, you do that last.’ Should I just put it all in at once?!”

It was so cute to walk into that. When I make pancakes back home I barely measure anything – I just throw together the ingredients and whip them up. I took a photo that I like to call “How Many Foreign Girls Does it Take to Make an American Pancake?”

They came out pretty good. They were half as thick as pancakes you’d get at a diner in the U.S., but still Sara kept remarking on how fluffy they were. I guess in Belgium pancakes are in between the size of a French crepe and an American pancake. Pancake culture.

Germany, England, USA

Sara had to go home to babysit, but she was replaced by another Sara, who is from London. (I swear I’m not making people up and just calling them all Sara.) We had some drinks before leaving for the metro to a boat party in the 7^th. We were cutting it really close for time before the boat left, so when we got off at our station we started running through the streets of Paris. I got to play guide again, since we were on Avenue de New York right by the Eiffel Tower, which I walk all the time. We arrived just as the boat was leaving. It was already coasting along. We were too late. That didn’t deplete our happiness for an instant, though. We were still drunk in Paris at night. We found a bar with fun music, flashing lights, and people dancing on the bar. The bartender was wearing pink suspenders and motor boating the female bartender’s boobs while he poured my whiskey. We danced the night away without spilling any drinks.

I was sure the second bar we went to was a gay bar. It was filled with men, the walls were pink, the ceilings were painted with fluffy clouds and hung with disco balls of all different sizes, and the decorations were what seemed to be random souvenirs – a Statue of Liberty Lamp, postcards from Russia, a longboard, an enormous Shrek mask with an anarchy symbol on the forehead. 

When I told Vera I thought it was a gay bar she asked the guy closest to us, and he gave us the strangest look when he said no. “It’s not a gay bar,” she said to me smilingly, even though I had heard the guy.

We hadn’t been there two minutes before a guy came up to me and asked in French what me and my friends wanted to drink, and that’s when I knew it definitely wasn’t a gay bar. “Are you a bartender?” I asked. “No, I just want to buy you a drink and I know the workers.” Honestly, I don’t remember what I ordered, but he came back and handed Daria a beer, Vera a something or other, and me a perfect mojito, and said, “Have a good night.” Sara and Keeleigh, the two English girls, missed out because they were up at the bar trying desperately to order a drink through the crowd up there, and when they came back they asked how on Earth we got drinks. “Someone’s in love with Flea,” Vera said, pointing at the guy who had walked back to his friend and was now looking over at us smiling. We drank our drinks way too fast. Still, I remembered how to get back to the metro after without using my phone. 

Soulmate

For everyone who told me I’d find my soul mate when I moved to Paris, I just want you to know – I know I’ve only been gone a couple months, but you were right. I found my soul mate.

Her name is Brie. She’s a little cheesy, and she stinks up my apartment, but she makes me happy, and every time I see her I’m filled with excitement. I don’t get to see her much, since I don’t have a lot of money to spend, but we see each other every Saturday when the market is open. Here is a picture of us spending a Saturday afternoon together:

She gets jealous sometimes when I hang around this Swiss guy, or this guy named Guyere, but I pretty much always choose to spend time with Brie, so it’s ok.

Meeting people 'n' seeing stuff

I met a Belgian girl and fellow au pair at the language school while signing up for classes. She came over to chill the other night; we had tea on my roof and then brought some wine to the Tower and hung out there for a bit.

The next day I went to Maia’s, and her sister Jeanne and their mom came over. Professor Maia taught Jeanne and I how to make sushi. It’s not as difficult as you’d think. Maia said making the rice is the hardest part because it has to be just the right consistency. We did maki, California rolls, spring rolls … The four of us ate together and then had mint tea from the mint Maia set aside from the spring rolls.

(Jeanne making a California roll under Maia's supervision

(Me making a roll with all veggies!)

I went back over there at night and ate the leftovers with Maia and Matt, and they played some music for me by request. I love when they play Nina Simone covers. After, we took the metro to Concorde and walked to Pont Alexandre III, which is right by the Grand Palais and pretty close to Champs-Elysees. It was around 10 p.m. on a Thursday, and hundreds of people, mostly older than us, were standing and sitting along the river by this incredibly beautiful bridge, drinking and smoking cigarettes in suits. Some people were partying in the clubs in the boats that floated by us. Because it was Thursday, almost everybody was dressed in business attire because many people go right from work to this spot to have drinks and dance next to the Seine. We met up with Maia’s mom and two of her bubbly friends, who were also dressed up very nicely, and talked for a bit.

At one point Maia and I were sitting alone and a man came up behind me, put his hand on my shoulder, leaned down and asked, “Comment t’appelle?” in my ear. I took his hand and threw it off me and leaned away, but he came around the other side and started massaging me and I immediately jerked out of his hands. Maia simultaneously reached over to push his hand off me and grabbed her drink, ready to throw it at him. “I don’t want to tell you,” I said firmly, and he finally left me alone. Maia explained to me that although Parisian men are notoriously flirty, that’s not even normal here. Thank God. That image of Maia, though, poised and ready for battle, whiskey in hand, will forever make me laugh to myself.

The rest of the night was lovely, though. We sat by the river, and I could see the lights of the Eiffel Tower shining out over the city. Maia and Matt left for a 9 day excursion in Sicily the next day, so it was good to spend time with them before they left. Matt had his credit card pick-pocketed from him. At least he didn’t get stung by a bee that night.

This weekend I met up with Sara again at the Sacre Coeur. I checked out Montmartre, the surrounding area, before when I went to visit Maia at her driving school a couple weeks ago, but I didn’t go inside the church. 

While I waited for Sara, I sat on the steps on the only hill in Paris, overlooking the city. It reminded me of this hill in San Francisco where you can see the whole city, especially since I couldn’t see the Eiffel Tower. A guy was playing music on a steps a few flights down from the Sacre Coeur, and right after I thought that about San Francisco he started singing a song with the lyrics, “I left my baby down at San Francisco Bay.” Then he played two Neil Young songs.

Sara and I walked around inside the church, where nuns  hushed talking tourists because many people were kneeling in prayer. A little ways away we wandered through the cheap tourist shops and the square where a hundred artists stood at their easels painting landscapes of Paris and portraits of people who sat in chairs. A beautiful Spanish woman played an accordian surrounded by a stand of pastel, fake flowers under a yellow umbrella with glued ferns hanging from it.

A quirky middle-aged woman sang in raspy French while cranking the handle of this strange wagon contraption and handing out candy to children who put change in her bucket. She had really fun energy, and you could just feel that she wasn’t performing for the money but because it made her happy.  

There was an au pair picnic that Sara told me about on Sunday. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have gone if she didn’t want to so badly; she already knows me well enough to know it takes a lot of texting, pestering, and encouragement to get to me to go to social events where there are a lot of people. We arrived by Champs-Elysees, where you can see the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, and the Arc de Triomphe all at once. A group of maybe fifteen ladies all our age stood around chatting. I thought we had arrived and that they were the only others, but I was very wrong. We started walking to find the actual location, but after a couple minutes I realized that the whole group was blindly following me and this German girl I was talking to because we were in the front. I stopped to see if they would stop, too, and they all did. I had  no idea where I was going, but I decided to just keep walking anyway because I thought it was funny they were all herding together in a group like my little ducklings with no idea where they were headed. After a few minutes, though, I took out my phone and found where we were supposed to be, and I lead my foreign chicks to a crowd of more than a hundred 20-something-year-old white girls sitting on the ground in little cliques speaking different languages, but mostly English and German, and drinking wine next to the river.

I talked to a group of German girls and a Spanish girl whose kids go to the same school as mine. I met two Americans. One, a guy from Texas. He looks like a bro, is really friendly and energetic, speaks fluent French and Spanish, and is an au pair, so he’s really good with kids. Needless to say, the ladies seemed to love him. I also met a sorority girl from Arkansas who didn’t know the difference between World War I and World War II and who kept asking people where she could find “bumpin’ clubs” and saying she wanted to go get more “booze.” I felt like I was back at college.

Sara, Vera, and I walked back to the Jardin de Tulieries and lay on the perfectly-groomed, soft grass surrounded by geometrically-trimmed shrubs.

When we went our separate ways, I found myself back at the Tower. I just tried to count how many times I’ve chilled at the Eiffel Tower by now, and I can’t even count. And that’s really frickin’ cool. 

 

Au Pair Thoughts

You know you’re either a mom or a nanny when you reach into your purse and before finding your wallet you pull out two mini boxes of skittles, a lego man, and a bouncy ball.

I’m really loving being an au pair. I knew I’d learn a lot coming to Paris, being immersed in a new culture and language, but I didn’t think about how much I’d learn from taking care of kids five days a week. For one, I’ve gained an even greater respect for mothers, who do this day-in and day-out for 20 years or more. Children are exhausting! I’ve always been around them, and I’ve been babysitting since Noah was born when I was 8-years-old; I’m also a natural nurturer, I think, so taking care of kids has always been something I love doing and a piece of cake. But babysitting and having siblings is nothing compared to the responsibility of nurturing them every day. Being an au pair is the closest glimpse you can get to real mommy life without actually having your own kids, but even then it’s only a peak. Moms don’t get weekends off or get paid every month for feeding little mouths and wiping butts and soothing temper tantrums.

My cooking has improved ten-fold, too. I always said I was bad at cooking, but it was never true - I was always just too lazy to cook my own food. But now that I have to cook dinner every week night for two little kids who need nourishment, I’ve had to figure some things out. Laetitia leaves a note of what’s in the fridge that I can cook that day, and it’s always something easy, like chicken or fish with vegetables, but I’ve turned it into a little class for myself where I look up a recipe every night to find a new way of cooking the food. That way I learn, the food tastes better for the kids, and they don’t get bored with plain boiled vegetables. For example, the last two times carrots were on the menu, instead of just boiling them and throwing some butter on, I added dill and pepper and some other random herbs that smelled like they’d taste good with carrots. And the next time I made a simple syrup with brown sugar, boiling water, and salted butter and soaked the carrots in that. One time I made rosemary chicken. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but cooking has actually become fun.

Anyway, I could go on and on about things I’ve cooked and methods I’ve made for helping the kids to stop crying or to to eat or take a nap, but that would be boring and this isn’t a self-help nanny blog. (I am writing one of those now, though.) I will say that my “if you take a nap, I’ll let you sleep wherever you want” method has resulted in some pretty funny pictures.

I haven’t just learned from the difficult parts, though. In fact, most of the time everything goes smoothly. Gabi and Josy are just the sweetest. Every day when I pick up Josy she pounces into my arms and holds her cheek really close to mine and doesn't say anything, like she's just so happy. When Gabi's class comes out he always runs out of the crowd and finds me and Josephine and, after asking if I have a Coca-cola (I only bring them on Wednesdays and Fridays), he kisses me on the hands while I push the stroller. It's so funny. The other day when I picked them up from school, Josy jumped out of my arms when she saw her brother and ran into him so fast for a hug that they both fell to the ground, still hugging. While we were walking home, I had to keep stopping so Gabi could lean down to hug Josy in the stroller because she kept begging him to, and so finally he just held her hand and walked next to the stroller. I almost died from the cuteness.

Also, they are starting to say things in English to me without me asking, which is encouraging. They say, “please” and “thank you” and “hello.” And the other day they were looking at this funny picture on a comic book and saying, “This one is daddy, this one is mommy, this one is Josy, this one is Gabi, and this one is Pelicia,” (Josy says my name with a "P," and it kinda sounds like "policia."), and that made me so happy, that they’re including me in their family already. 

 My apartment building was built in the mid-1800s. Check out my sweet key!

These are my two front doors. (From the inside)

Weekend in Paris

I had my first free weekend in Paris!

Saturday I spent some much-needed time alone. I wandered around my neighborhood and strolled down the market by Rue De Passy, right next to my place, which I’m told is one of the best markets in Paris. I bought figs, peaches, rosemary and mint. I also stopped in a lovely little flower shop. I asked the woman working there at least twice if the price tags were correct – plants and flowers are so cheap here! I bought a whole bouquet of red roses for just seven euros! I also bought a fern, a little tree, an African violet, and a tiny pot of English ivy, and I barely spent thirty euros. Granted, the roses were about to wilt, but I was bringing them home to dry as decoration, anyway, and the plants weren’t in perfect health, but I have a bit of a green thumb, so I know with some nutrients, repotting for root room, trimming, and lots of love they’ll be lush and adding beautiful Earth energy to my new home.

At night, I climbed onto my roof and drank chamomile tea and painted my toenails while looking at the tower. It was a perfect relaxing Saturday in Paris, even though I didn’t leave my neighborhood.

The next day I ventured a little further, though. I took the metro to meet Maia and Matthieu. Maia let me go through her bags of old clothes she’s getting rid of, and then the three of us went for a quick lunch just up the street where they have fresh vegetable juices. I got a carrot, apple, ginger juice and warm pita with melted chevre, which is goat cheese, and vegetables. The food was phenomenal; the service ridiculous.

Unlike in the U.S., wait staff in France get paid fully, so they aren’t living off of your tips. This means they are much more free to act how they’re feeling – stressed, peeved, hating everyone – because their means of living don’t depend on smiling through a six hour shift of serving needy, hungry people. Needless to say, friendly waitresses and waiters aren’t common in Paris. If you need anything, you better remember it all at once, because you’ll only see your waiter maybe three times during your whole dinner – when they take your order (after you’ve waited twenty minutes), when they throw your food in front of you, and when you track them down for your check. Ours went above and beyond, though, and just barely stopped while flying by to pick up the glass bottle of water and clank it against our glasses while re-“pouring” our water. I put “pouring” in parentheses because it was more like spilling. “I would rather she just not do anything at all,” Maia laughed after. “I feel affronted by her pouring water for me.” Matthieu commented on how even after living in France his whole life, it’s still shocking sometimes how waiters treat their customers. At the end, when the waitress brought our check, she used buttery words and was suddenly super friendly, a trick to make people who were born yesterday forget all the terrible service of the previous hour and leave a gracious tip. We weren’t born yesterday.

Matthieu had to go home to continue working on his memoir, so Maia and I spent the rest of Sunday together riding around the city on her scooter. We were goddamn glamorous.

First we went to two “kilo shops.” A kilo shop is a thrift store, except instead of having fixed prices on everything, you put the clothes you want in a basket on a scale and the item’s weight determines how much it costs. For example, there was this rad jacket I wanted, so I found one of the scales around the store and stuck it in the basket. The jacket had a green tag, which indicates the price per kilo for that item, so I pressed the green button, and it weighed it and told me the price was thirty-one euros. Voila! Such a cool idea.

After that we hopped back on the scooter toward the 5^th arrondissement. I interrupted us singing our own rendition of Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation” to say we should pull over and look at the art at the stands along the river because I needed art for my apartment; I immediately found exactly what I was looking for. Paintings of pressed flowers on thick, rose-pink paper, five euros a piece.

Maia maneuvered the scooter through rows of traffic until we arrived at La Mosquee de Paris, or The Grand Mosque of Paris. It’s a beautiful mosque with a 33-meter high minaret, and apparently it served “as a secret refuge for Algerian and European Jews … they were provided shelter, safe passage, and fake Muslim birth certificates to protect them from German persecution.”

Everything about this place is decadent. I’ve always loved Middle-Eastern architecture, with its arches and pillars, intricate mosaics, and generous use of golds, reds, and blues. We sat at a tiny table in the bright courtyard under fig trees and surrounded by mosaics and drank mint tea in glasses and ate flaky honey pastries.

We spent the rest of the afternoon browsing the shops in the 5^th, including a book shop and a store with a thousand scarves and dangly jewelry, and getting coffee.

I got back to my apartment just as the sun was setting, ending a perfect weekend.

Monday was the kids’ first day of school! It was Gabi’s first day of “real” school, and Josy’s first day of our equivalent of pre-school. I met Gael, Laetitia, and the kids in the morning at a café by their school, about a ten minute walk from my place. They had already ordered me a café allonge because they’re awesome.

At ten thirty, a crowd of parents and youngsters dressed in navy blue and wearing backpacks the size of their bodies crammed into courtyard at the center of the school, and a woman read the children’s names in a microphone, announcing what class they’d be in. I thought that was too much for the first day, especially for a bunch of kindergartners who are already either really nervous or extremely hyped up. I was cripplingly shy at that age, and I know I would have died if I had to have my name called in a microphone my first day of kindergarten and then walk in front of a whole crowd and stand in a line while people clapped. Poor Gabi suffers shyness like I did at his age, and so his morning was a little rough. He cried as he was hustled off in a line through a classroom door, looking back desperately with tear-stained cheeks at his mom. When we picked him in the afternoon, though, there was no hint of that nervous shyness, though, just as I suspected. He was back to his happy self, holding his best friend’s hand and flashing smiles to show off the new hole in his mouth where his tooth used to be.

I also had a first school experience today. After leaving Gabi at school, Laetitia, Josy, and I spent the late morning figuring out the bus system to my school; Laetitia found out for me that I could show up at any time that day after 1 p.m. to do my oral exam and sign up for my courses, so I took the bus back to Place Victor Hugo after having lunch with them at their house.

It was pretty uneventful – I just had to speak in French with a woman who helped me sign up for classes, and I met a really nice girl from Belgium who I’m probably going to hang out with. School doesn’t start for me until September 29, right around when Maia leaves for school in Lille, so I’m going to try to do as much daytime and nighttime exploring as I can until then.