Reflections Unfit for Just a Week

All of my experiences and ideas from Annecy in five weeks are such that I could probably see and do in two weeks in Paris. That is what a mere handful of days in this city has done to me, with every emotion, feeling, and thought possible occurring all amid meeting new people (hello, ridiculously attractive Parisian men!), seeing touristic sights, seeing other sights, eating, and somehow finding the time to also appreciate the boat I am staying in. I have seen and done more in these short days than I perhaps did the entire time I was in Annecy, if we're not including the trips to other places that happened in the same time period. This probably has more to do with Annecy being small than it does anything else, but the effect that it produces is sort of remarkable, a sudden reminder that there is in fact a world of things to do and see and that there are places where news actually happens, instead of is heard about and remarked upon. There is a sense of real life and the real world in Paris that I like, but that has the price of being a little bit overwhelming to get used to.

While I can say that I connected to the people in Annecy, I have done so all the more in Paris, perhaps out of necessity. Here there is no institute to be comforted by socially, there is nothing social for me at all unless I find and do it myself, so it has become some kind of game or art while I've been here. It's worked well. What I have found is that the stereotype of the rude Parisian is almost absurdly unfounded, perhaps aided by fluid French, and that if you just talk to them frankly and friendly, they genuinely appreciate what you have to say and listen to you. I have talked to dozens, if not hundreds of people in Paris. Perhaps more than Annecy, in fact, something that stuns me and also serves as a reminder that I am actually in a metropolis that has twice the population of the entire state from which I hail. There's so much energy and so much life that it's almost jarring. People are out and about, living their lives, being tourists, spending money, begging for it, working, partying, laughing, and doing everything imaginable at all hours of the day. They are always going and going and going. And they're still French, because the line they walk while they're going makes no sense. Heh.

I read that the city is the most visited city on the planet, with roughly 2 million people in it any given month of the year, and that is only taking the famed center of town within the Boulevard Périphérique into account. That is a lot of people coming from everywhere in the world. A lot. And you can totally see it everywhere you go. You hear English almost as much as French in some places, and then you hear a little bit of everything else in between. African languages with which I am unfamiliar, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and so on. They're all there, they're all seeing the same things that everyone else comes to Paris to see, of which there seems to be no end. There is always something else to see and do in Paris, and I am convinced that even Parisians never actually see or fully understand and appreciate all of the monuments and colossal artifacts of history laid out for them throughout this city. To list all of the things I have seen or done would perhaps take an entirely new blog. I don't have that kind of time.

What I do have the time for, though, is to say that despite all of that, despite the rocky start and all of the tourists and the occasionally sharp French man and all of the negative things, and indeed despite all of the magically positive things that I've seen and done so far, the city of Paris works itself into your conscience and doesn't let go. You want to stay in this city, you love this city, you "synergize" with this city because this city is so human it's hard to believe. Paris lives, sleeps, eats, and breathes the human element of its existence. Everything about it, from the way the city was built and rebuilt, to the monuments signifying victory in a human conflict, to the museums for human enrichment, to the world class universities for human development - everything is human, in a way that is difficult to explain to the inhabitants of motorized, vehicle-driven elsewhere. Very few places have I been where I feel so at ease walking the streets at any hour of the day, where I don't get lost until after getting along the same route a few times, where nothing is familiar and everything seems it all the same. I have had the sensation while walking around town of a certain déjà vu, that I never actually left my home town and that I am in my appropriate place, more than once. It happened once and then it never stopped happening. I don't truly know this city, but it feels right. It must have felt right to hundreds of thousands of other people too, because that is what it is famed and storied for. Hemingway understood, and now I and countless other people are coming to the same understanding as well.

Perhaps that is the purpose of engaging so fully in a place and time, perhaps that, in and of itself, was the reason I came to France.

The Paris Saga, the Worst Kind of Debut

Paris, gay old Paris. Or so they say. Having left Annecy, I have to pinch myself when I find that I am actually sitting on a boat in Paris, a massive, historic city that I did not previously know. Leaving Annecy happened extremely quickly, with Valérie (the second host mother, because I moved and oops didn't write about it) helping me get to the train station and my platform and N arriving to say goodbye and see you in Boulder and so on. The train itself was a smooth ride, as much as the TGV is or can be, and it took exactly as long as anticipated. When we got to Gare de Lyon, it was almost surreal, because all of the surroundings were already familiar from arriving, and I had a sense that this wasn't such a mortifyingly huge city after all. I schlepped the good schlep back to the boat, had an awkward encounter with the owner as he went over all of the details of staying there, signed a contract, and then the day was started.

Except, was it? Where do we go from here? That is the question I asked myself, thinking about what to do with the days by myself that I have before my parents arrive and everything changes yet again.

So I was supposed to meet one of the girls, B, who was studying at IFALPES in Annecy in my class and also happened to be coming to Paris the same weekend as I was because she was leaving to go home (to Colombia!) the next week. We decided to meet in Paris, naturally, and hang out, because exploring new places with friends is nearly always more fun than doing it solo. The problem with this plan is that we were planning on meeting by the metro station Bastille, which is right where my house boat was located. Me being a dumbass smart person and not realizing that oh wait, metro systems usually have multiple entrances for large, connecting stations, I overlooked this, and we ended up not finding each other. She didn't get a French phone, so it was always going to be more difficult. This ordeal went on for about 45 minutes before I went back to the boat and the wifi thereupon, hoping that perhaps she would have internet on her iPod as well, where miraculously we found each other and reworked our plans in order to meet at Notre Dame cathedral. Find the horse monument, she said, you can't miss it, and we will meet there. Done.

I was glad that we were able to successfully rework our plans and find each other, because I had already developed a lot of unanticipated stress from the change of scenery, not being completely familiar with where I was, not particularly knowing anyone in the city, not knowing anyone in the city (for the duration I would be there) that spoke the language I was more comfortable with, and so on. Much as this trip has been about being by myself, any new change of scenery amounts to starting over and it can get to be a bit much rather quickly.

So we met at Notre Dame as planned, me finally seeing her as I was literally sitting on the statue that she told me about so that there would be no chance of getting lost again, and we took a boat tour on the Seine, wherein we learned about the numerous bridges of Paris and saw monuments and generally went delirious with hunger. When we got off the boat, we were practically nonfunctional, so we started walking around looking for somewhere to eat. We crossed the bridge off of Île de la Cité and moved onto the area around métro Saint Michel, where there is a great wealth of food options, and we ended up stumbling upon an extremely busy and extremely small Lebanese to-go place. They specialize in shawarma, which was perfect for both of us, being starving and not fed enough meat throughout most of the trip. After a short ordeal paying for it, we got our food and sat down by the Seine, finally truly enjoying Paris and pinching ourselves that we had been in Annecy mere hours earlier.

We made it! We made it!

We got on the metro after our food, it finally getting dark out, and discovered how to get to the Eiffel tower, walking along the quai to get there and taking many, many photos. We spent enough time to get as many photos as possible and ended up walking through Champ de Mars toward the metro again, where we decided to go to the Louvre area and see what was around. After more photos, we decided not to walk all the way back, because it was late and there were enough drunk people out on the streets to convince us that the metro would be the better option. This is where we decided that tomorrow we would meet at the tower of Gare de Lyon, it being a famous monument on the outside of the building, and that if for some reason we couldn't find each other again, we would go straight to the Eiffel Tower and find each other there, in the middle, underneath it.

The Louvre at night is pretty! But dead. Let's continue to get our tourist on.

So I woke up early the next morning, excited for the day, and definitely hungry. I ran out of the boat, getting through the metro to Gare de Lyon as was planned, and then waited for the amount of time we said without finding B, so I decided to go back into the metro and I would find her at the Eiffel Tower. With a stroke of luck, I actually found her wandering around inside the metro station, which at Gare de Lyon is ridiculously confusing, a labyrinth of repeated entry and exit points just to get onto the metro or change lines. We were both relieved, but also starving, and so we headed out toward the Eiffel Tower together, excited to be touring the city with a friend for the day. The stops on the itinerary were to go up to the top of the Eiffel Tower, go to the Louvre, and then take a walking tour around the city. It was going to be a good day of touring. We got through Champ de Mars again, pausing to take photos, and then we went up to the Eiffel Tower and got in line.

This is where everything in Paris came crashing down and the whole day and the trip up to that point turned to complete and utter shit hell.

We decided to grab some food at the kiosk we saw just across the way from us one at a time, I would go grab something and tell her what was on the menu and then she would come back and we would be able to hold our place in line. There were two lines forming at that point, so it shouldn't have been too bad, but then I went for my coffee and beignet, and I came back and B was absolutely nowhere to be found. I scaled both lines up and down twice to no avail, feeling caffeinated and desperate. All of the stress of Paris from arriving amplified beyond my own comprehension when I realized that we weren't going to find each other again, and so I got in line and went up, hoping that she might have stayed in line and that we would either find each other on the tower or at the exit. With no such luck, I went over to the Louvre area, realizing that I was probably not going to find her there either, and then I went back to the boat and lost my shit broke down from the turn of events. I knew a couple of French men living in Paris, so I texted them and got unnecessarily cold replies back about not being able to see each other that day, which only made matters worse, and so it was that I ended up getting myself together and traversing the town on foot by myself, not knowing what to do or where to go.

I walked through the Saint-Germain-des-Près neighborhood, a well-known artsy and upscale neighborhood of Paris, where I found a small bookstore and got a gift for one of my friends, had lunch at a hole in the wall there, and saw plenty of interesting things, public art and otherwise. I went from there to Île de la Cité, where I went back to Notre Dame and saw more of it, strolled through all of the old streets there, and then went to Hôtel de Ville and saw the things there were to see on that side of the river. It wasn't such a bad tour, but I was distraught and my nerves were frayed, so I could only appreciate it so much. I knew that she needed to go back to her hotel later in the day and then catch a train back to Annecy, so I decided that perhaps I would run into her and went out to look for her, where I ended up finding her on the metro on her way back to the train station. We took the metro together and I showed her where her train was going to be departing from, having taken it both ways already before from the same place, and we said our goodbyes, laughing about getting lost at the Eiffel Tower. From there I voyaged on to Sacré Coeur at the top of the hill in Montmartre, having to wriggle my way out of one of the famed scams by a random African man and some yarn, and got home at the end of the day completely exhausted.

Well, at least they know what they're selling, right?

I wasn't kidding. Interesting, and also disturbing.

Things ended okay and justified, but I'm not sure if I love Paris yet.

Outro, Perspective

I leave Annecy with a certain sense that I've crossed a threshold in life and discovered a little bit better what it means to live as someone independent of all that is familiar from the comfort zone of growing up. I came here alone, knowing no one and being unsure of how well my French would hold up at first and, indeed, it was surprising to find that I can somehow still manage to take advantage of this brilliant opportunity thrust at me in every way imaginable. I hold no particular nostalgia for the town itself, it being very small and certainly provincial, but the situation of the town in the Alps and the unique culture that comes from that is something that I appreciate at a basic level, having had the opportunity to try and experience as many things "Savoyard" as one could in the short amount of time given.

Ciao, joli little town.

When one day L, N, and I decided to go to a cafe and sit and have a drink together, because at some point we have to realize that we are technically in a group studying abroad together, but also that we're genuinely curious to make further acquaintance with each other, we talked about something that stuck with me, a thought that I've come back to repeatedly in the space of us being in Annecy.

There is a concept that we as people tend to romanticize places, objects, and other things of varying levels of permanence in our lives, because these places and things become attached in our memory to the emotions and feelings that we have experienced in or with them. Conversely, we also romanticize places and things that are seemingly nice, but that we don't know, precisely for the reason that we are unfamiliar with them. Many people go to Europe because they have a romantic notion of European life, cities, and people, overlooking the differences between countries and not necessarily realizing that people live similarly there to how we do elsewhere. When you travel for short periods of time in these places, the romantic notion of them gets reinforced, because you don't spend enough time to see the banal, everyday things that people have to do to pass the time and to function in society. We hold onto our mythical idea of Europe as a magical wonderland because we are ultimately too ignorant to say or feel otherwise about it.

We are sheltered in the United States by the umbrella of national unity, of a culture that does not differ so profoundly from state to state and region to region as most areas of the rest of the world in a similar geographic footprint do. We go back and forth between our cities with no barriers, with an ease that is a uniquely North American concept. In this way, there is a certain idea that to cross a national boundary is a special thing, that to go between historic cities implies a drastic change in how life functions, as though culture produces fundamental differences in how we perform basic things such as cooking or sleeping. The idea that we carry in the US that cities are cities and to move between them is "normal" or not particularly eventful is something altogether lost in Europe; that is to say, the idea that cities are just cities and it is necessary to engage with people, things, and concepts other than the built form of somewhere to truly discover what makes that place special doesn't really exist. We consider Europe special for the sake of being special.

This isn't to say that Europe isn't nice or that life in European countries is bad, in fact, it has no bearing on that whatsoever. It is to say, however, that the complexities of life make everything more difficult than they appear on the surface, and that within the walls of the beautiful aged buildings real life happens that we can not possibly as outsiders comprehend without thrusting ourselves into it. Everything is more gritty than it first appears, whether that is for better or worse.

The more I travel, the more time I spend in such remarkably different corners of the world (Russia, Miami, now France), the more the concept of romanticism for a place is a little bit unfounded, although a draw to particular places is certainly founded. My lack of nostalgia for the town of Annecy itself perhaps stems from the fact that I carry an understanding with me of the idea that we are all actually remarkably similar as human beings, working, eating, sleeping, wishing, dreaming, and playing all in similar ways and certainly to an end that would appear to be the same. This seems to be true even of places that are drastically different in their socioeconomic character, although it is certainly easier to observe the similarities between Western nations. It is for that reason that Annecy is not a place that has become romanticized in my mind, somewhere I will truly yearn to experience again the way I have these five weeks. I have a fondness for the Alps, the Savoy region, and indeed the way that life functions here, but I also have a strong sense that I will return and it will be "normal" all the same. If I end up in Geneva or Lausanne as I would like to, life will continue normally, and I will engage in things that will make me appreciate those cities, but in parting from the region I don't objectify it as something marvelous for the sake of being marvelous. The connections and contacts I have made in Annecy will remain and I will revisit them with pleasure, and that is what I feel a connection to.

It is also necessary to say that the atmosphere of being one in a group of international students, people who have come to do the same thing in the same place from every different corner of the world, is something that I appreciated profoundly in Annecy. Making contacts with people from places I do not know and becoming friends with them, learning about how our cultures effect minute differences in our day to day quirks and patterns of habit is something that I will never stop appreciating. The unique set of circumstances that allows this to happen, for all of us students to communicate in a patois of all of our different languages, going out on the town all together and enjoying ourselves...it is moving. I can't appreciate the homogeneity of my home city, and indeed many American cities. Diversity exists, and there are people from everywhere, but it is a patchwork and not the utter diffusion of people that inspires all of my sensibilities.

I may not miss the built form, but I will miss the people and the experiences that I had with them.

"En Allemagne" As Paroxysm, or What Happened?

Let's fast forward to the next day after the road trip saga and for the same reasons as before, the decision was made that N and I would skip class to go to Allemagne, this time with just E, because C wanted to see other places and they were getting travel fatigue with each other. It was a wise decision all around, quite frankly, and so I met up with J and E to take advantage of the national sales week dubbed "les soldes" at Zara. It ended up being the last time I would get to see J in France as well, because she was leaving for Germany for a week the same day. It's a large enough country, though, that we wouldn't be seeing each other in Germany either. E and I found things, me being the more effective shopper and spending significantly less on the same amount of items. There's a Jewish joke in there somewhere, but we both are, and so it doesn't really work. Somehow upon returning home I managed to meet my host father and N at the same time driving in opposite directions at the entry of the cul-de-sac, which worked out well, because I had yet again forgotten to get the host family any kind of gift (oops) and didn't really want to leave a note.

Note to self: don't attempt to drive through Switzerland on a Friday afternoon when everyone is getting on vacances. It doesn't work.

Our 5 hour drive ended up taking 8 1/2 hours, rendering us tired and willing to laugh at stupid shit almost anything, that is, until we got to Lake Constance and N's GPS system decided that it was going to be absolutely retarded and refuse not to route us to the ferry that takes cars across it, saving a decent chunk of time, but also bottlenecking in high traffic periods (go figure). N is a remarkably laid back guy, laughs at anything, tones down the seriousness of most moments, and always find a bright side to anything, because he doesn't like it when people bitch too much. At the lake, however, after already having sat in traffic for six hours all the way through Switzerland, all bets were off. We weren't sure if he was going to break the GPS or not, but he gave it a punch and seemingly tried, silencing the passengers as he called his father for advice (who was in India!) and proceeded to laugh about doing just that. Much relief on the side of a German road after we all waited a few hours between restroom breaks as first footsteps in Deutschland, an Autobahn experience, and heavily aggressive driving around the lake later and we arrived. To say it wasn't fun would be a terrible lie.

We arrived to this. Justification for our drive? I think so.

So we got there, settled in, changed our clothes, and then all realized that we were absolutely starving. So hungry. We needed some hearty food to nourish our travel-fatigued souls, and N wanted to show us (one of) his hometown, so we headed out, where we discovered that in that particular region of southern Germany, chives grow wild in the forest. It smells amazing. I had such dissonance as we were walking down the path down the hill, smelling the hearty fragrance of what looked like regular grass (which N proceeded to pluck and point out was in fact chives as one would grow in a garden anywhere else), being hungry, but then realizing we still had more to go, to see, and do before eating.

The town itself is nice and very small, but it is (or seems, to one who is otherwise unfamiliar) very typical and German, being very clean and the people friendly, but to the point. This is where Germany and France differ. There is a concept of dolce far niente in Italian, or the sweetness of doing nothing. In French there is joie de vivre or bien-être (joy of living/well being), sure, but I think the real analog would be something like "joie de s'occuper de rien", or "the joy of caring about nothing", reflected in the dirty state of French cities, the illogical lines in which French people walk, and the attitude of Parisians famously stereotyped the world over. I don't know any German, but on the contrary, the town itself was remarkably clean, everything in its proper place, and they seem to take things like service and public well-being a little bit more seriously. I enjoy it, but it's foreign still.

Oh, and there's a market too. Pretzel, anyone?

Our dinner was amazing. The quality of German food was surprising, and the extent to which German baguette is better than French baguette is both ironic and stunning. We had weiner schnitzel, some kind of spätzle, and other food that was all hearty, heavy, and delicious. Finally having good German beer instead of the same pitiful selection of Belgian beers that we were accustomed to in Annecy was not so bad, either. The smallest amount on offer anywhere is 0.5L too, so that was a nice perk. The town is also considerably cheaper than anywhere I've been in France or Switzerland, so the good just kept rolling in. We went out to get more beer afterward and soak in the German atmosphere, having good conversation with good company in new places. It was great, and then our walk up the hill back to N's house was aided in great part by the liter of beer consumed prior. We got back, classed down the great quantities of champagne we drank by doing so in regular glasses, and the night was done.

The next day was the day we were going to take E to Zurich so that he could catch his train, but N wanted to make sure we had time to see the market in full and eat breakfast before heading out, and so we did that. We had a real breakfast, with good coffee, and eggs! Real eggs! The breakfast E and I got was called, suitably, the "American" and included French toast ("lawl") too. It was a much-needed relief from the stale baguette, confiture, and nasty coffee of France. After discovering the town on foot a little bit, finally purchasing my host family a gift (right before leaving! great timing.) of strange German chocolates, it was time to leave the land of many letters German and efficiency. Goodbye, language I don't understand, goodbye magical new land.

Did you really think I was not going to take a photo?

This sums up our sentiments.