Discovering culture and politics:
Dispatches from Paris
Dispatch 4
June 23, 2007
A Paris cafe at dusk.Credit iStock
Right across the street from my apartment is Reid Hall, a study abroad base run by Columbia University. I went through their housing service to find my apartment, and since I still don't have my own internet, I head over there to get online. The main doors open up on a quiet courtyard, where ancient trees arch over green benches and a small rose garden perfumes the air. I sit at a table on the sun porch, checking email and browsing through the BnF's online catalog.
In an adjoining room, someone starts to play the piano. They warm up a little bit, winding their way through a few scales before launching into a wistful melody. It sounds like Schubert. Sure enough, at the end of the introduction, a soprano joins in clear, articulate German. My work forgotten, I am in another time and place as I listen. Suddenly, the lied breaks off as abruptly as it started. The soprano is thanking the pianist in English and then running off to class. I hear her exit through another door.
I decide to take the afternoon off from the library and explore the city a little bit with Grace, a girl I met at Reid Hall who goes to Harvard. On Monday, we had gone out to dinner at a crêperie on Rue Montparnasse and really hit it off, so today we are going to check out the Montparnasse Cemetery. We meet at her apartment over on Rue Saint-Michel and then stroll towards the skyscraper of Montparnasse.
When we reach the cemetery, a guard hands us a map and we pause to examine it. "Cool, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir are buried over here," Grace says, pointing. "And there's Saint-Saëns," I add. We set out on our quest, searching for names we recognize among the rows and rows of tombs. I have goose bumps as a stone angel stares down at us from atop a headstone and a Virgin Mary gazes up in anguished prayer from another. We find Sartre, de Beauvoir, Baudelaire, and Ionesco and then spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to find Durkheim. "This man just doesn't want to be found!" Grace exclaims as we finally give up. "How hard can this be? It's not like we're looking for a moving target!"
We stop at a café for a drink, and I still have heebie-jeebies halfway through our coffees. Enough cemeteries for me for one day! As we chat about school and France and wine, the dark guy at the next table looks up from his German grammar workbook and asks us where we're from. It turns out he is from Lebanon and is in Paris working for a German automobile parts distributor. Thus the German.
A visit to Paris would not be complete without the Eiffel Tower!Credit Sarah Weaver
For dinner, we buy galettes from a street vendor and eat as we stroll up Boulevard du Montparnasse. It's about 8:30 and it still looks like afternoon. I always forget about that when I come to Europe...it stays light out so late and your body clock naturally shifts back. I don't even think about dinner until around 8 or 9. Grace and I pass a movie theater and decide to go see a very educational, French movie called...um, "Shrek le Troisième." Besides the fact that we laugh the whole way through, it actually is pretty educational: the film is in English with French subtitles, but there are jokes that Grace and I laugh at that go completely over the French audience's head. The opposite is true as well; the French think that Pinocchio's nose getting longer is pretty much the funniest thing they've ever seen.
At the end of a relaxing day, I return to my apartment and call my family and my boyfriend. Everyone is glad to know that I am getting habituated to life here in Paris. Can I miss them all and love where I am at the same time, and kind of want to go back but not really? Either way, I still have a long time left in Paris and plenty of adventures waiting for me at the libraries.