Welcome (back) to Paris. Sound familiar? I decided to come back nearly as last-minute as I did going to Madrid, having had issues attempting to book my flight with Vueling and their poorly designed online reservation system. I ended up taking Aigle Azur instead, an airline which approximately no one seems to have heard of before, but which also seems to be perfectly decent anyway, except for having had to pay an exorbitant amount for my ticket three days prior to flying. Oh well. Any company would be expensive in that case, I suppose.
So I'm in Paris, but the trip as it has developed has been an extremely different séjour than last time, there has been no sense of wandering aimlessly, of being a tourist figuring his way through a grand city, of learning how to be and what it means to be, in an almost literal sense, alone in the world. Instead I am visiting (and staying with) friends, seeing as many of the numerous people I had become acquainted with the last time around as possible and certainly meeting plenty of others. The experience has allowed me to be much more connected with the city on a personal level; I am no longer overwhelmed by the busy nature of commerce owing to its size, instead with friends I can breathe easily and enjoy new places in any given part of town without over-thinking anything. I can order my coffee and gelato without thinking anything special of it just for the sake of having been coffee and gelato ordered in a city often considered a living museum. I have taken no pictures whatsoever with my camera despite having brought it. I have instead been received as though I were at home, enjoying speaking a language in which I have no inhibitions for want of experience and confidence, one in which I can express myself adequately well and more or less completely, one in which I need not switch to my native language in general when I find myself short of understanding something.
Thus lies the difference between Paris and Lisbon for me, but although linguistically life may be easier, let me not mislead you into thinking that Paris is so much the more homely for me than Lisbon. That would be a disservice of an order of magnitude, as I will explain. I am not Portuguese in any given sense; I am neither yet a full-time resident nor was I born with any kind of cultural inheritance that might make up for the legal disparity. Nowhere is this more true than when I am going about living my life in Lisbon however I may do so, observing all the time how typically or not I am American and drawing comparisons of that in direct relation to native Portuguese people, everyone noting well the distinctions involved when a foreign person arrives to integrate themselves fully, slowly as it may happen. This is to say nothing of the linguistic issue. And yet, being in Paris for me has allowed me to see from a perspective of appreciable cultural as well as physical difference — much more so than Madrid, which is close enough in relative terms to Portugal physically as well as culturally —the extent to which I have adopted a Portuguese spirit and feel most at home in Lisbon. Mannerisms of all things, from the hours at which I prefer to dine to linguistic quirks that fit more flexibly in situations than English or French, have become my own in an inadvertent way, myself only noticing that I behave in such a manner when outside of the environment where such things are routine. It has taken stepping completely outside of so-called Iberia to realize the way in which I have become Portuguese in some way.
I feel completely at ease and at home in Paris, able to communicate fully and effortlessly, not having any problems navigating the city however large, transitioning seamlessly into my cultural surroundings such that it is no one's immediate assumption that I'm not from or at least very well acquainted with the city. And yet, Paris is not home. It may never be, in a literal sense, but in a more philosophical way there are pronounced obstacles that render it foreign. I have written about the ways Denver and Lisbon are similar, and I believe that at a profound level this impacts the way I feel toward Paris. I'm not from somewhere so large, nor have I ever lived somewhere nearly so large, and so much as I am content in it and prefer it to its natural opposite — I adjust extremely poorly to sparsely-inhabited areas —, I am not a product of it. It is too large and too expensive to become quite so intimately familiar with even after a long time; it is, owing to its size, almost inherently impersonal. It is a city saturated with tourists and people chasing their own dreams of Living in Paris, their version of being a privileged youth vagabond "finding themselves" in Europe, people from everywhere but France figuring out their own abstract ideas of what it means to be French and trying to be accordingly so. For better or worse, there is a distinct lack of cultural fixedness in Paris, the clichéd concept of a typical Parisian being something that exists only as an element of cultural mythology so far as I have discerned it, Paris cosmopolitan and fluid in reverse correlation to Lisbon's provincialism and rigidity.
This is all to say that I have become more deeply attached to Paris than before, more personally connected to it, but I will be happy to return to life in Lisbon, to life at home. I miss Lisbon already, the way that someone without a wandering soul misses the creature comforts they have from their lives wherever they may be based. In Lisbon I have found something of a base, a place from which I can quench my thirst to know and discover more of the world yet unknown that itself has become so of my own doing. I may always feel a bit like a wide-eyed child seeing the reality of the world for the first time despite that being very much less the case as time goes on, but I at least have somewhere to return to, relax, and feel the comfort of being myself completely uninhibited. Paris is a delight, but a delight as a guest.
So I'm in Paris, but the trip as it has developed has been an extremely different séjour than last time, there has been no sense of wandering aimlessly, of being a tourist figuring his way through a grand city, of learning how to be and what it means to be, in an almost literal sense, alone in the world. Instead I am visiting (and staying with) friends, seeing as many of the numerous people I had become acquainted with the last time around as possible and certainly meeting plenty of others. The experience has allowed me to be much more connected with the city on a personal level; I am no longer overwhelmed by the busy nature of commerce owing to its size, instead with friends I can breathe easily and enjoy new places in any given part of town without over-thinking anything. I can order my coffee and gelato without thinking anything special of it just for the sake of having been coffee and gelato ordered in a city often considered a living museum. I have taken no pictures whatsoever with my camera despite having brought it. I have instead been received as though I were at home, enjoying speaking a language in which I have no inhibitions for want of experience and confidence, one in which I can express myself adequately well and more or less completely, one in which I need not switch to my native language in general when I find myself short of understanding something.
Thus lies the difference between Paris and Lisbon for me, but although linguistically life may be easier, let me not mislead you into thinking that Paris is so much the more homely for me than Lisbon. That would be a disservice of an order of magnitude, as I will explain. I am not Portuguese in any given sense; I am neither yet a full-time resident nor was I born with any kind of cultural inheritance that might make up for the legal disparity. Nowhere is this more true than when I am going about living my life in Lisbon however I may do so, observing all the time how typically or not I am American and drawing comparisons of that in direct relation to native Portuguese people, everyone noting well the distinctions involved when a foreign person arrives to integrate themselves fully, slowly as it may happen. This is to say nothing of the linguistic issue. And yet, being in Paris for me has allowed me to see from a perspective of appreciable cultural as well as physical difference — much more so than Madrid, which is close enough in relative terms to Portugal physically as well as culturally —the extent to which I have adopted a Portuguese spirit and feel most at home in Lisbon. Mannerisms of all things, from the hours at which I prefer to dine to linguistic quirks that fit more flexibly in situations than English or French, have become my own in an inadvertent way, myself only noticing that I behave in such a manner when outside of the environment where such things are routine. It has taken stepping completely outside of so-called Iberia to realize the way in which I have become Portuguese in some way.
I feel completely at ease and at home in Paris, able to communicate fully and effortlessly, not having any problems navigating the city however large, transitioning seamlessly into my cultural surroundings such that it is no one's immediate assumption that I'm not from or at least very well acquainted with the city. And yet, Paris is not home. It may never be, in a literal sense, but in a more philosophical way there are pronounced obstacles that render it foreign. I have written about the ways Denver and Lisbon are similar, and I believe that at a profound level this impacts the way I feel toward Paris. I'm not from somewhere so large, nor have I ever lived somewhere nearly so large, and so much as I am content in it and prefer it to its natural opposite — I adjust extremely poorly to sparsely-inhabited areas —, I am not a product of it. It is too large and too expensive to become quite so intimately familiar with even after a long time; it is, owing to its size, almost inherently impersonal. It is a city saturated with tourists and people chasing their own dreams of Living in Paris, their version of being a privileged youth vagabond "finding themselves" in Europe, people from everywhere but France figuring out their own abstract ideas of what it means to be French and trying to be accordingly so. For better or worse, there is a distinct lack of cultural fixedness in Paris, the clichéd concept of a typical Parisian being something that exists only as an element of cultural mythology so far as I have discerned it, Paris cosmopolitan and fluid in reverse correlation to Lisbon's provincialism and rigidity.
This is all to say that I have become more deeply attached to Paris than before, more personally connected to it, but I will be happy to return to life in Lisbon, to life at home. I miss Lisbon already, the way that someone without a wandering soul misses the creature comforts they have from their lives wherever they may be based. In Lisbon I have found something of a base, a place from which I can quench my thirst to know and discover more of the world yet unknown that itself has become so of my own doing. I may always feel a bit like a wide-eyed child seeing the reality of the world for the first time despite that being very much less the case as time goes on, but I at least have somewhere to return to, relax, and feel the comfort of being myself completely uninhibited. Paris is a delight, but a delight as a guest.
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