It has been a rainy weekend and so, since Saturday afternoon, we've been indoors and I've figured I could maybe make my own post here. Today I went out in the morning and bought a Sunday (London) Times and some baked goods, and the rest has been a mix of reading and not-quite-working. Yesterday it started raining sometime when we were in the Metro on the way from the stop near WH Smith English bookstore and where we thought we'd hit the "Paris Plage," the arrangement of beach chairs and even sometimes sand along the Seine for the Parisians who can't get away in August. Or something like that. So the second part of our trip was less successful than the WH Smith part (we got Abby a couple of the Harry Potters and some guidebooks for ourselves; we hadn't felt we could fit in the volume or weight to bring those items on the plane).
It was a very grueling couple of months between operation prep, operation, hospital recuperation with a few hiccups (from a distant perspective; scary then), returning home only to move to temporary quarters five days later, adjusting to that (an incredible favor from a friend, but not quite what we were used to, especially lack of air conditioning and partial laundry facilities), returning Sydelle to some sort of strength, the mad rush to get all the stuff done for the move, etc. But the good news is, she is much, much more healthy than she had been for quite a while. She can do much more walking than she had been able to do, and can climb stairs into the Metro in ways that I didn't think would be possible after I'd scoped out Paris a bit at the end of April. It's not perfect, because she gets betrayed by her feet (nice blister at the moment) and we both need to be in better shape. But she can walk enough to get a blister. I doubt I'm losing weight, and I have a knee that can get very painful very quickly, but I'm also sometimes taking steps two at a time, and it has been a while since I did that.
There's a lot of other adjusting in everyday life. The second-most-obvious one is to living in a fairly small 2-br apartment, furnished in ways that are OK but not what we're used to. There's a sofabed but it isn't quite long enough for me to take a nap! We need a different bed for Abby (hers is really designed for a smaller kid -- I saw it in that section of IKEA). There is a really fancy washer-dryer (it does both), but good luck figuring out all the buttons and options and the dryer part of the process takes forever and leaves things wrinkled, if dry. Sydelle has posted on that. But I think we're learning it. I'm not sure how to turn the oven off, or when I've turned it off (though it's not on now, so I guess maybe I've figured something out). There are no screens in the windows because there aren't bugs, sort-of. I killed a bee the other day and a couple of mosquitoes. This after telling Sydelle and Abby that we should leave the windows open at night because there are no bugs and the apartment is stuffy. The French use various anti-bug things that you put on a shelf or plug into an outlet. I'm not sure if they'd be allowed in the U.S.; instructions say something like, "don't use this if you have an aquarium because it will kill all the fish." I know because I bought one and put it in the outlet Friday. It was recommended to me by Margaretmary, a colleague from the modern languages department who spent the last year here and was very kind in giving advice and passing on a few useful items like a "kadi" (shopping cart). We're on the fifth (French 4th) floor and there's an elevator but it's 37 inches by 32 inches. I measured it. This works because it only has to serve six floors and two small apartments per floor. Still, a family returning from the market or with strollers has to ascend in shifts.
The most obvious difference is language. My French just isn't good enough for accuracy, even with my rather expressive hands and face. It is true that more people speak SOME English than used to be the case. But we do not live in a touristy area, and ability to speak English is not as common as some reports have it. For example, I had to go pick up a key to the apartment for Abby, and that took a long while (not helped by the fact it had been left in a different name than I expected, but harder than it would have been if two of us had real command of the same language). IKEA is very difficult -- difficult anyway of course, but try asking how to find a sheet of a different size than normal; blank looks in response to whatever it was I actually said. Or, for that matter, finding out which is the right train to take to IKEA (which led to a nice 40 minute wait somewhere in the Ile-de-France for the train back to the right station after the train I took didn't stop there). Or arranging delivery (thank god I found someone who did speak English, but I don't know what happens when the actual delivery person calls sometime next week). Or learning about alternative cellphone plans (intentionally difficult everywhere, but even harder). Or understanding what the voice mail set of options on my own phone is saying. Or figuring out what-next when the dry cleaner doesn't have your laundry (not sure how that one is going to work out).
On the one hand it's easier for me, as I know a lot more than Sydelle and Abby do. On the other hand, that makes me feel especially bad because they have to depend on me and I make mistakes. Same thing with directions. We go somewhere and I know a useful bus is nearby but I don't quite know where; or something turns out to be a greater distance (poor Sydelle's feet) than it looked on the map. It's a new and complicated place, and I always have my Plan de Paris with me, and I'm pretty good, but I'm usually navigating; I'm rarely just going. That will change, but it's definitely an adjustment. Public transportation is excellent, but often crowded and again, complicated. It's an extreme case, but when I went from the school where we took a week of French classes to IKEA I took three Metro lines, a train and a suburban bus. Face it, driving is easier. Well, driving in Cleveland -- I'm not sure about driving in Paris!
Then there are the fun things like setting up bank accounts (and I'm still not entirely sure how I will get money from Cleveland to here). And not having everyday friends, or at least work-acquaintances. Informal human contact, nonmarket human contact, is rather scarce at the moment. We saw Margaretmary a couple of times and another colleague once; and we have a "parent partner" from the school Abby will be attending whom we've seen a couple of times (their daughter and Abby have made friends, which is part of the point). But having much of anyone other than each other to hang out with will take time. It's hardest on Abby because her friends are a much bigger part of her life. Or maybe she's just more vocal about it. She, however, spends a lot of time talking with them on e-mail and has even skyped once or twice. Sydelle doesn't talk about it as much but it can't be easy. It's not good for me but my life has been basically work and family for the last decade anyway. The difference is the lack (until people return at the end of August) of a place to go for work and such socialization as occurs there.
But -- it IS Paris. One lucky thing is, after the first few days the weather became beautiful -- Spring, not Summer. (even including the rain) Beats me why, but we'll take it. Then there is the fact that one CAN walk around and there's stuff everywhere. Much of it involving food. The boulangeries and patisseries -- oh, my lord. There's a famous bakery (at least, I'd heard of it), the Boulanger du Rue Monge, no more than half a kilometre away, I'd guess. It is really, really, really, really good. But I have to think about whether to bother going that far when I want something. Less than two blocks to the right of our apartment entrance is a bakery that is open something like 7 am - 8 pm every day except Wednesday, and hasn't closed for August. And it's very good. To the left of our complex entrance, maybe 50 yards, is what I'm told is a superb bakery; I only got to try one thing before they left for the month but I believe it. On the walk Abby will make to the Metro to get to school there are two more serious bakeries; only one is open now but, since we took that Metro to our French classes this week, we can attest that it, too is really good. Aside from being superb, the other good thing about the bakeries is, they're affordable. Good baked goods are cheaper in Paris than in the states. This is very different from, say, chickens. The French must not eat a whole lot of chicken; more precisely, they probably buy them cooked, because uncooked are even more expensive. Same with other meats: they must get a lot of their animal fat from butter, because meat is quite pricey. I'm going to eat more eggs now that I'm here, and figure it's all good cholesterol.
The general run of vegetables, fruits, etc all appears to be much better than in the U.S.. I'm not sure if that is just because it is Summer, or if it will be true in the winter, too. Sometimes we can't find something, and I wonder if that's because of different eating habits or because it actually isn't in season so it isn't here. We couldn't find celery yesterday. But the food really does seem less industrial. We've found gelato that can't be beat, too -- though we would very much like to make it to Italy for comparative purposes.
Strangely enough, we've been here two weeks but have yet to go to a museum,except for a quick walk with my sponsor and colleague around the one attached to the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers where I will be working (which is actually quite cool). We've looked in on a couple others but not gone in. In part this is because my definition of tourism has been to explore the stores and just walk around. But we've done a lot of looking at the Eiffel Tower in the course of our travels, and Abby and Sydelle went to the Sainte Chappelle, and we got to the "Paris Plage" (the beach) once (we went by yesterday in part because we wanted better pictures). We walked the Rue de Rivoli to the Place de la Concorde one day and another day stayed more within the Jardin de Tuileries along the same route, checking out the amusement park that is set up in the Summer (horribly expensive rides, but lots of greasy dough with sugar). Sydelle and Abby went to the Luxenbourg Gardens, and we wandered the Marais a bit through Rue de Rosiers to the Place des Vosges. We have spent a lot of time in the Rue Mouffetard market, which is just a few blocks from our house (not quite so wonderful as I'd hoped, but not bad, either). We'll actually go into some of this stuff, we tell ourselves, when there are fewer tourists in the lines. We wanted to go to the Louvre today but the rain was discouraging. Maybe tomorrow. The plan is to go to the fancy restaurant in the Eiffel Tower for Abby's birthday in October. But on the whole, we've emphasized settling in over tourism. We have a year, we figure.
A few other things stand out. We like our apartment. It is well equipped in many ways, well-lit, in a nice complex, fine location, etc. Small, but do-able. I'd been worried that our bed would be too small, but it's not -- about three inches wider than a queen, and somehow that's fine, even though I'm used to a kingsize. There's lots of little quirks about life. A lot of this may be more general to Europe than just France. But pillows, for instance: the norm is to have square pillows. Good luck finding cases for U.S.-style pillows. For some reason our apartment has mostly U.S - style pillows but mostly French cases. They also don't seem to believe in top sheets. The norm seems to be to have a fitted bottom sheet and then have a cover on the comforter, and change the cover the way we change sheets. This is logical enough, except in the Summer. Blankets do not appear to be so common, either, judging from what is on shelves in the stores. People dry a lot of their laundry on racks in their bathtubs, it appears. Newspapers are in French. Or really expensive. And they don't appear to have "Sunday papers," or comics. The microwave doesn't have an on/off switch. You turn some button to set the time and that also starts it (stop turning, and it will start 'waving). Good luck finding unscented laundry detergent. Or, if you don't speak French, figuring out what a lot of the stuff in that section of the market is. I was surprised to find that there are a lot of products for which there are multiple languages on the labels, but none of them is English. In the U.S. we're used to French/English because of NAFTA and Canada, so it's surprising to find French/German/Italian/Dutch/Croation (or whatever), without English. It's August so a lot of stores are closed, but they really do close for lunch, in a lot of cases, too. Except by going, you can't be sure when stuff will be open. Even the frozen food store next door closes in mid-afternoon.
How about that? It's a foreign country. Which I guess is the point. It was time to get out of the rut. I hope it works for all of us! Meanwhile, I'm realizing I have a bunch of work to do. Work work, not just acclimatizing. Yikes!
cheers to all,
Joe
No comments:
Post a Comment