Je ne suis pas mort

As the day comes to a close, so marks the end of my first month in Paris.  A short month I'll admit, but a month gone by none-the-less.  This feels like a good a time as any to talk about general impressions or catch up on my overall mood while my fingers gain back some tingling sense of warmth.  Perhaps I should have worn gloves today.  C'est la vie (perhaps the most profound cliche I know in French other than "Je suis").  France as a whole - well I can't comment - but Paris I know something about.  I thought living in Chicago was a rather grand adventure, or at least I thought I knew what it was to say that I lived in a "big" city.  True, Chicago is large, massive compared to those two rivers I grew up along but nothing compared to Paris.  Paris makes Chicago look like downtown Milwaukee on a Sunday.  Anyone who as ever been downtown Milwaukee any day of the week will understand what I'm trying to say.  The streets here are packed throughout the day and into the night.  The cartography was invented along the rivers and the expansion of living and the only city planning was done around large monuments and round-abouts surrounding large monuments with very little attention being payed to the streets webbing from those points.  There will be at times grand boulevards fed into by countless minor streets and avenues some too small to fit a grocery cart and yet somehow big enough to merit their own name.  There are no alleys and yet arguably there are hundreds.
Montmartre is a ratted nest of uphills and downhills that ranges from sites of romantic era beauty to modern-day pornographic schmooze.  Which affords its own beauties I suppose, but something more appropriate for the walls of the Pompidou than the Louvre.  The downtown, the central arrondissements (1-4), are a never ending examination of grandeur and excess topped in a mansford roof.  There is hardly a turn that doesn't lead one to a picturesque living gallery: a quaint cafe along the quai, the impression of a palace, and La tour eiffel faint but always upon the horizon.  There is no question about the magic of the City of Lights.  Though as far as romance goes - I'd prefer the country.
The Latin Quarter is under frantic practical use by several universities and institutions, yet it is dressed up like a painted dancer for tourists.  Maybe that can be said of most of Paris but the Latin Quarter most of all.  I spend a lot of time there, the Sorbonne is located just south of the River Seine in the fifth arrondissement.  My practical course is just off Rue Dante with a view of Notre Dame out the window and only a block away.  I cross the courtyard of that famed cathedral at least once every day on my way to class coming from the metro stop at Chatelet - Les Halles.  After class it has become my habit to go with Eren to some cafe, a new one every day, and share a meal over some confused French conversation.  Confused mostly on my part I admit.  In the time it takes to shuffle down a street and find another I've already seen the entire color spectrum possible to the human eye (perhaps a bit limited in my eyes, but that's another matter).  Expensive, colorful, and frantic.  For all that is said of European leisure I've never in my life seen so many people running.  Running to what? for what?  I don't know.  My play-it-cool rule about never running unless it is life threatening seems a bit out of place here, and I'll admit I've dashed after a train or two when I know missing it would only mean waiting two minutes for the next one.
To the west in the 7th arrondissement there is not much to be said.  It is what you might expect of an area inhabited by that bridge to nowhere.  Expensive, chic, and even more expensive.  That's not to say that the rest of Paris isn't, but considering that the 7th is more strictly (high-class) residential than others in that middle band of the city makes you wonder if the price is exclusively warped for the sake of tourists or the chic homeowners of Paris.  Either way, it is what it is, and there's not much to see.  I would never go there again if I didn't intend to see the Musee d'Orsay a few more times and finally reach the top of the Eiffel Tour.  It does, though, lead one to suspect (as many forgettable neighborhoods do) what fine restaurant is hidden away in those trés chic streets.  Maybe none at all.
As for my own neighborhood (the 20th) I find it absolutely pleasing.  I wouldn't have liked to be anywhere else.  It's labeled as a "working class" area, but like all of Paris it doesn't look like work at all.  The attitude and the lack of flash on the other hand give it away, and the only tourist attraction happens to be in my backyard.  On the weekends when the supermarché Franprix is closed they hold a huge open air market in the middle of the street.  I've looked at several guide books and none of them say anything about the 20th other than Pere Lachaise, and honestly, that's a good sign for me.  If I was in Paris for a week I would get a hotel downtown (with God's money) and never leave the single digits.  But I'm here for four months, and this is the perfect place to be.
My only experience with the outer rings of Paris has been a brief and fruitless trip to the upper northwest in search of a package.  Several days ago I found a slip in my mailbox - how long it had been there I do not know but I only saw it that day - from UPS letting me know that they tried and failed to reach me and my package would be waiting at their main facility way out on the opposite side of the city.  If I didn't pick it up by May 1st it would be shipped back to the US.  What package?  Good question.  My mother had said Uncle Terry had sent me something, and I was suspecting this was that (though exactly I still don't know).  I had the good sense to leave behind my bag when I left, as I soon found out the trains were packed to the brim that evening.  Attendants at major transfer stations were forced to shoving people into the cars and manually closing the doors.  To watch each train leave was like seeing twenty people crammed into a speeding telephone booth with their eyes bulging up to the glass.
At the end of the line, I departed (or was released) out onto a rather ordinary looking street.  The multi-story apartment buildings were still though less ornamental, there interspersed with beleaguered cafes and empty lots.  I walked down Victor Hugo and kept my eyes to the ground.  On my right only factories.  It was dusk, and soon it would be night, and I had it in my mind to get out of there before it got too dark.  It took some luck to find the UPS station, it was settled back among the factories, mixed in with forty or so other loading docks in a less than pedestrian friendly zone.  After talking briefly to a worker smoking against the building I found the entrance and was buzzed in.  The man working spoke no english, but he spoke slowly enough for me to understand.  I showed him the slip I'd found and he asked why I hadn't come sooner.  I don't know.  I just didn't see the notice until today - I check my mailbox daily.  He took my slip and disappeared for almost an hour while I waited listening to another worker talking to her girlfriend on the phone.  There was an automatic coffee machine in the waiting room and workers filtered in and out to fill up a cup for fifty cents a pop.  When he returned he explained (or I gathered as much) that the package had already left to be sent back to the US, because it had been at the dock for the maximum five days.  He had called and placed a hold on it (it would be somewhere in Germany by that night), and asked for it to be sent back.  I gave him my email address and he said he would contact me when it arrived.  Okay.  Despite my best efforts I ended up walking back to the station in pitch black.  I would not recommend visiting northwestern Paris if you can help it.
For life, day to day, it doesn't amount to much.  I do very little.  I wake up, eat breakfast, and shower (on a good day) then head off for class in the early afternoon.  After, I have lunch with Eren and go home.  I sometimes pick up food from the Turkish restaurant down the block or (on a really good day) I stop by the grocery store to make myself dinner.  When I get back to my place I settle in, watch TV, read (I finally finished The Savage Detectives), write (so far only 14 pages), watch more TV, and sleep.  Rinse repeat.  The weekends I go for walks, take my reading and writing to the local cafe, and consider going to a museum.  When it rains or if I'm feeling cramped I take a lap around Pere Lachaise and then come home to shower.  Cold water, hot water.  I've been inside the cemetery four times now and still haven't found Gertrude Stein.  The streets of the cemetery are a confused labyrinth not unlike the rest of Paris, but more confined and more poorly labeled.  I don't know what will happen if I find her tomb, probably nothing, but I've been reading Tender Buttons online and feel the need to see her resting place as a sign of respect. Along that same vein I have stopped by the shared tomb of Eloisa and Abelard every time I've been in if only to recite the lines "How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!  The world forgetting, by the world forgot.  Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!" within my head unashamedly.  There's a dog carved onto the grave to represent fidelity, but considering that the guy was castrated you have to wonder if that lessons the gravity of the commitment (at least on his part).  I mean what else was he going to do?  Not to cheapen the story, it is one of the greatest loves of all time.  If you haven't read Alexander Pope's poem I'd recommend it.
Poorly masked transition.
Classes are in three parts.  I have a practical course every week day for two hours with Madame Chamblas.  She's in her early forties, but looks much younger.  She has orange hair and heavily emphasizes her nazzle R's.  I'm really happy she's my teacher actually, and I enjoy going to class.  She's fun and she makes jokes that sometimes I don't understand, but she's always so animated and lively that it usually makes me laugh anyway.  I sit near the back of the class next to some Americans and Eren.  Nothing much to say.  We're working on articles of speech.
Every Tuesday I have two conference courses that are not even worth speaking about.  In my cinema class last week we watched two films by Cedric Klapisch, the second of which I'd already seen so I skipped out early.  The first one was very good, it was called L'Auberge espangole, a comedy about a French guy moving to Barcelona to study economics ends up sharing an apartment with like five other people who all speak different languages so there was thankfully enough English for me to gather the plot.  Anna, you'd like it a lot.  As far as my French Art History class goes I'll have to let you know once I actually attend.
Lastly, every other week (today was my first class) I have phonetics.  It's surprisingly short, the woman is kind but clearly frustrated, and I sit in the back.  Today I was about the only person who spoke for the first ten minutes while she asked us what a syllable was (fun) and then had us list as many words as we could of each increasing syllable count in French.  I was forced to use ridiculous verbs like nous fleurissons (we flower) because I couldn't think of anything, and she kept looking at me like I was nuts.  Little did I know that after we made that list we had to go into the next room and put on headphones and repeat all the words we'd come up with into a microphone to listen to our pronunciation.  So, thanks largely to me and my random word choices, the whole class ended up having to repeat over and over again the most slapdash assortment of French words ever compiled.  If you've never taken a class like this (and I'm assuming most haven't) the idea is that the teacher speaks into a microphone the word you're supposed to say, then you speak into your microphone, and then she repeats the word for clarity, then you move on to the next word.  Once you go through the whole list you press a little button on the board in front of you and you listen to the two recordings that have been made.  One is the teacher talking and then overtop of that you hear your voice.  Very eery.  So once it reaches the end you can hear how your individual pronunciations either match up or don't match up with the teacher's.  Even weirder is that while you're reviewing your recording the teacher can listen with her headphones at the front of class and turn on and off her microphone to speak to you individually about the word you're on.  So, as you're listening to a thoughtless recording, fading in and out of half consciousness, suddenly the voice in the headphones comes alive! and speaks to you and demands that you try that word again.  It's very unsettling.  You feel like you're in an oral bubble of sorts and you don't know who's listening to you or what anyone else is saying.  And you're in a cubicle.  I wasn't a huge fan.  On the upside I'm sure it will help with my pronunciation.
Right now?  Drinking wine and eating chocolate.  I know, I'd be jealous too.  It's great being able to order alcohol whenever I want.  It's like my birthday already came and went.  I don't even get carded, which is good, because I'm not sure I'd even understand the question if some one asked me.  I know this is a very cliche coming of age sentiment: Ooo, I can drink legally now!  But it's the little things, you know.  It really is.
One last thing quickly - Some one commented today that I looked really dressed up.  It would have been a compliment if I hadn't been dressing this way because I literally have no other clean clothes to wear.  I'm not fancy, in fact I'm a slob, it's just that my laziness has taken on a new level of class for the time being.  I'm unnaturally unnerved by the laundromats here.

For my next trick I'm going to go take every classic cheesy tourist picture I can around the city with a big smile on my face.  Okay, that's all for now.

-John