When in Fashion, Always Watch Your Head

Below the gently sloping hipped-roof of an unassuming three-storey building in the Marais, a rafter of wide width protrudes dangerously into the work space of the Stella McCartney Press Office. Normally a rafter of this sort would fade from one’s consciousness and become invisible along with the other construction elements of the building. Since space is at a premium in this attic office, however, the rafter runs the length and is directly above the work desks of the occasional interns and low level employees who come to staff the Paris Show Room whenever Fashion Week enchants the city and the world.

Roughly thirty times per day for two and a half weeks, interns and visiting staff members ducked their way under the white painted rafter and proceeded to walk half erect to their respective work stations. As a row of low standing filing cabinets occupy the space behind the pathway, the scene of Stella staffers making their way to and from their desks is amusingly similar to that of the “8 ½ floor” in Spike Jonze’s 1999 film, Being John Malkovich. Any levity the office arrangement offers onlookers is overpowered by a sympathetic “Ouch! That had to hurt” sentiment whenever an unfortunate intern neglected to clear the space and ran full force into the rafter’s unforgiving constitution. These incidents of private pain and public embarrassment afflicted each and every intern who was unfamiliar with the surroundings. And, I’m sad to say, afflicted me twice. Thankfully, the frequency of such incidents diminished as our internship progressed and our subconscious survival instincts learned how to navigate such danger areas.

As the interns’ heads bruised and swelled from their run-ins with the rafter, I was somewhat surprised by the other swelled heads to be found amongst the fashion fabulous crowd of Paris Fashion Week. Rather than being afflicted with injury, these heads were inflated with attitude and whenever I came across such big-headed fashionistas, I couldn’t help but think, “how cliché, how passé, and how unfortunate they don’t get it.”

Fashion is a strange world. It is a living art form that strives to be in step with the collective beating heart of the masses. Good designers are able to keep their finger on the world’s style pulse for years and great designers are able to do it for decades. These designers fashion clothing to enhance and liberate the wearer’s beauty for others to see. After roughly six months of tireless strife bringing the designer’s seasonal fashion vision to fruition, all the hard work cumulates in a parade of “perfect” women and men animating the clothes on the runway. How a garment moves with every forward step of the model is critiqued by hundreds of discerning eyes in the audience and millions of viewers around the globe.

The single greatest elemental state-of-being with which a fashion model can enhance a garment is confidence. A calm collected disposition of a model adds intangible value to a garment and elevates clothes that simply compliment physical attributes to the status of true desirability in the minds of buyers and reviewers. Fashion conscious consumers not only want the “look” the model wears, they subconsciously want his or her confidence too. Thus, despite the old adage that clothes make the man, we have to conclude that a certain amount of one’s inner temperament is also an important element of one’s style.

Unfortunately there exists a minority of people in the fashion world who mistake having confidence with having attitude. To be sure, it’s an easy mistake to make as confidence is inherently nuanced. For this naïve minority, confidence is only seen superficially as being above concern and is emulated with a type of misguided extremism. This aggrandized caricature of a fashionable man or women is slipped on, zipped up, and worn like a costume by precisely those people who will never reach the upper echelons of the truly fashionable. The legendary status of the Audrey Hepburn and Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis variety is only reached by fashion icons whose state-of-being rises high above mere confidence and inhabits instead a state-of-grace. Confidence, in its essences, is being at peace with yourself despite your surroundings. Grace, by contrast, is being at peace with yourself and being magnanimous with others around you. Ironically, the dismissive self-centered caricature of a “confident fashionable person” worn by the naïve relegates them farther away from their desired fashion status rather than closer to it.

Before and during the Stella McCartney Autumn/Winter 2012 fashion show in Paris’ ornate Hotel de Ville, it was my job to keep the hungry and crafty fashion photographers at bay and in their respective places. In between chasing down photographers who had snuck backstage or onto the “front row” to snap shots of such celebrities as Anna Wintour, Salma Hayek, Alicia Keys, and Sir Paul McCartney, I was able to survey the crowd of eight hundred or so guests. While the vast majority of the fashion elite in attendance occupied, I am sure, a sensible state-of-being on the confidence continuum separating the naïve from the graced, one man in particular exuded the type of savoir faire that the legendary fashion icons possess.

Wearing his signature blue house-brand workman’s jacket purchased from the Parisian BHV department store rather than a designer suit, 83 years-old New York Times “street fashion” photographer, Bill Cunningham, seemed thoroughly out-of-place seated in the envied front row among the fashion elite. While Mr. Cunningham’s aesthetic appearance belied his current standing in the fashion world, his gentile and unaffected temperament spoke volumes about his future status as a fashion legend. This unassuming man of advanced age exhibited more uninhibited appreciation for art of fashion than nearly any other guest at the Stella show. The only guest who openly appreciated the designer’s hard work more was Stella’s own father, Sir Paul McCartney, whose pride was evident in his exuberant applause at the show’s end.

As dismayed as I am by the fashion minority who don’t get it, the naïve who mime confidence rather than effortlessly exude it, my faith is reinforced by the ones who do get it. Mr. Cunningham’s open delight and graceful disposition and the unapologetic fatherly pride Sir Paul McCartney had for his daughter’s hard work were inspirational in their sentiment and, in a way, point to the true heart of fashion business. For what else is the fashion industry but the business of making others look beautiful? The fact that these two fashionable gentlemen chose to celebrate what really matters in the world of fashion—that is the hard work, artisanship, and vision that is needed to create beautiful garments—rather than merely celebrating themselves should be a lesson to those young professionals currently entering the business. And, (after my short stint working with other dedicated people to execute a fashion show) if I were to offer advice to those entering the business, it would be to always remember to watch your head.

Traveling Europe “On the Cheap” and Subsequently Surviving the Purgatory of a Ryan Air Flight

We came to Paris because we wanted to travel in earnest. We wanted to employ our meager savings to suck all the experience we could from this fine continent. Every ventured journey from the “moveable feast” we now call home has swelled the borders of our understanding a little farther. Perhaps the most useful aspect of our newly acquired knowledge has come in the form of budget travel techniques in general and how to survive flying the dreaded Ryan Air in particular.

If we are leaving Paris by train, we rejoice in the fact that our travel is from city heart to city heart and the un-pleasantries of air travel are able to be avoided. The lack of Ryan Air suitcase Nazis, out-of-the-way airports, long security lines and cramped seating arrangement makes “riding the rails” a decidedly better option while traveling. Alas, the small windows of weekend freedom Lisa and I are able to devote to travel typically nullify the option of train travel. Indeed, reaching the other side of the eastern Alps or the southern Pyrenees mountain ranges in less than ten hours necessitates logging on to the Skyscanner and Bookings websites to see what deals are to be found. The stressful hours spent checking ticket prices against arrival and departure times, researching which weekends are the cheapest to fly, and what airport option is best are all worth it when you strike gold and find competitively priced tickets on a non-budget airline.

“Striking gold” with competitively-priced non-budget airline tickets are incredibly rare events and the vast majority of frugal travelers are force to book with the “no frills” airlines, the worst of which by far is Ryan Air. As Lisa and I are now seasoned travelers on that horrible airline, I feel it prudent to offer two survival tips to those who may someday find themselves seated in a dark blue airplane seat starring at a headache inducing bright yellow upright seat-table. Firstly, before embarking on such a flight, it is of primary importance that you have an iPod, iPad, or some other personal entertainment device along with noise-canceling earphones. Take pains to ensure that your device is fully charged and on your person before you enter the plane. These indispensable items will save you from going mad or committing murder when the Ryan Air Flight Attendants commence their relentless sales pitches over the loudspeakers peddling everything from smokeless cigarettes to charity-funding lottery tickets.

The other big Ryan Air survival technique has to do with the boarding queues and when to leave your comfy seat in the terminal to stand in line. With the exception of those who pay extra, boarding priority is given on a first come basis. While waiting for your Ryan Air flight to board, you may notice people starting to queue up about forty-five minutes to a half-hour before the flight is to leave. When this happens, you have a decision to make: stand uncomfortably in line and get a good seat on the plane or wait until the line thins and gamble on getting a bad seat. If you are traveling solo, you have the luxury of waiting comfortably until the line thins. As most Ryan Air planes have rows of three seats on either side, couples usually take up the middle and window seats leaving a sprinkling of isle seats available for late boarders. If, however, you are traveling with someone else and would like to be seated next to them, you should give up your comfy seat in the terminal and stand in line. While there are many other little Ryan Air survival tips, the two above are the most impactful in terms of making the flight a tolerable experience.

Of course you can avoid employing such survival tips altogether by simply not booking with Ryan Air. Unfortunately, this sometimes proves to be difficult. Ryan Air is like a corporate spider. It weaves a web of enticing prices to attract unsuspecting budget travelers. Ever should you find yourself mesmerized by the seductive dance of Ryan Air’s pricing practices, remember “caveat emptor!” or “buyer beware!” as the prices you see are not all that they seem. Ryan Air charges everything a la carte. They charge extra for refreshments, pillows, and boarding privileges. They charge extra for “web check-in” and “text flight status update.” The CEO of Ryan Air even famously quipped that he’d like to start offing “standing flights” so he could start charging customers for the luxury of sitting down. The only thing holding Michael O'Leary back from launching his “standing flights” initiative are the pesky safety regulations. Buyers should also be aware that Ryan Air often uses inconvenient and less desirable airports to save on costs. For example, Ryan Air does not fly from Paris’ two major airports but rather from Beauvais, which is over an hour and a half outside of the city. One should always be mindful of how far away a Ryan Air airport is from the desired destination and should always factor the inevitable incurred costs of getting to and from such airports. Only after evaluating all the extra costs of a Ryan Air ticket should you resolve to purchase.

Traveling Europe “on the cheap” is possible. However, in order to do so one will almost certainly have to fly Ryan Air at some point or another. Remembering the cautions and survival tips could make a significant difference to one’s bottom line and one’s sanity. Flying Ryan air is not the worst thing in the world granted one is prepared. If one is not, however, the degree of affliction one will endure will probably fall somewhere between Chinese water torture and waterboarding. While I have been fortunate to have never endured such grotesque hardship myself, I have flown Ryan Air without the proper precautions. Narrowly surviving that experience beseeches my humanity and obliges me to warn others of the perils of flying the Devil’s own airline, Ryan Air.

Meeting Family

The connection of my family to the Old World has long since been severed. Growing up there was little talk of our ethic origins except for the occasional reference to being of amalgamated European decent, or, more crudely put with an eye towards tongue-in-cheek humor, “European mongrels.” For as many places as we traveled in Europe and for as many times as we made the journey, we were always embraced by the continent as tourists and never as family.

Lisa’s family's connection with its ethnic origins is infinitely stronger than mine. One of the very first personal details I learned about Lisa is that her roots are not merely Italian but more precisely, and perhaps more importantly, Sicilian. When asked of my family origins, I am always forced to rattle off nationalities as if they are spices to be added to a never-been-tried sauce. “Oh, I am a little German, with a pinch of Irish, and maybe a dash of Welsh and English.” I’ve even heard that we have a little Native American in us, although I am not really certain how accurate that rumor is. Lisa’s family, by contrast, never had to speculate about their ethic lineage, for they still have living breathing relatives in the “old country.” And, I am happy to say, we had the great pleasure of meeting them on our recent trip to Sicily.

Since having relatives in Europe is completely unknown to me, and since Lisa’s contact with her Sicilian relatives was confined to their sporadic trips to the U.S. over the years, we really did not know what to expect when we flew into the Trapani airport a week before Christmas. While we did not want to impose on them during the understandably busy holiday season, it was the only lengthy period of time away from school that we had and it seemed absurd to travel to Sicily and not try to meet up with them at least for a meal. I don’t know how Lisa envisioned our interlude with her Sicilian relatives, but my pseudo WASP upbringing informed me that it would be a polite, slightly awkward, dinner that would enable us to become more familiar distant relatives and then we would part ways. It is clear to me now just how different the white Anglo Saxon approach to distant relatives is from the Sicilian approach.

From the moment we met up with them to the moment we said adieu, they were nothing but warm, welcoming, and exceptionally hospitable. We were picked up in Trapani by two of Lisa’s relatives and driven an hour and a half to Palermo, where most of the family lives. Along the way, we made a side trip to see where they harvest salt from Sicily’s Mediterranean coastline and once we reached Palermo, we were given a historical and architectural survey of the old city. Wide-eyed and passively along for the ride, we were taken to “Auntie Nancy’s” for lunch. Filing out of the quintessentially small European elevator, our guides opened the apartment door and we were surprised with a dozen smiling welcoming faces to greet us in unison. Happily overwhelmed, I looked over to Lisa and gave her the, “oh my god, were you expecting this?” kind of a glance. They wasted no time in ushering us to the dining room where we were seated at the honorary head of the table and given special wine glasses. After a delightful lunch we retired to the living room to enjoy Sicilian deserts along with Sicilian desert wine and were informed that the family had made up a room for us so we would not have to stay in a hotel. It’s a strangely difficult position to be in when you don’t want to be a burden but, at the same, you don’t want to be rude by rejecting someone’s hospitality.

After our first few attempts of, “oh no, there’s no need to put us up, we’ll stay in a hotel” were met with confusion and then firm insistence, we dropped the subject. As that first day gave way to the second and then the third, Lisa and I slowly learned that the family had no intention of allowing us to tour Palermo without a relative to guide us. They took turns taking us everywhere in and around the city. They cooked unbelievably delicious meals for us in their homes and introduced us to the amazing array of “typically Sicilian fare” at some great restaurants in Palermo. Any mention of financial contribution on our part was immediately castoff. As the days progressed, we realized the futility of our polite, not wanting to be a burden, resistance to their hospitality. We gave in to fact that they were treating us as family quests and we allowed ourselves to be embraced as such. When we did, the abstract notion of having family in Europe that we possessed when we set out for Sicily was replaced with genuine familial relationships, albeit distant relationships.

I can scarcely convey how nice it was to meet Lisa’s relatives in Sicily and how the sincere hospitality they gave was the next best thing to being with our immediate families back home for the holidays. I only hope that we are given the opportunity to reciprocate that hospitality if and when they decide to travel to the United States.

The Spirit of Travel

When lecturing, travel writer Rick Steves likes to recall his first experience in Europe at the age of 14 and how, at first, he resented traveling with his parents to Scandinavia to visit relatives. All he wanted to do during his summer vacation was play with his friends back home in the States. As the days and weeks passed by, young Steves’ teenage angst diminished and he came to love the Europe he initially loathed. He then recalls the realization he had when he saw a group of backpackers not much older than he was hopping on a train without a parent or guardian in sight. He remembers looking at his parents and thinking, “My god, I don’t need you! Those kids have all of Europe as their playground and I can too.” At that moment, Steves vowed to make annual pilgrimages Europe and has been keeping his vow ever since.

While my teenage self loved Europe straight away, I can relate perfectly to Rick Steves’ dream of a self-led European adventure. Always striving to exert my travel independence from my parents, I recall at age twelve pleading before the parental judges a case that I was convinced was devoid of logical flaws and was sure to meet their approval. Like a good lawyer, I acknowledge the weak parts of my argument and admitted that, yes, twelve years old is a young age to be traveling alone to Europe and misadventures were bound to happen. “But,” I added with presence, “we learn from our mistakes and think of how proficient a traveler I’ll be if I start making those mistakes at twelve rather than at age eighteen when most ‘normal’ people start traveling independently.” To my surprise, the logic of my case failed to sway my parents and the motion was never carried.

Feeling as though the battle had been lost but the war was still up for grabs, I switched strategy and pressed for incremental travel emancipation rather than total freedom. Citing differences of interests, I petitioned for and received more and more “free time” on our trips. In London, for example, my parents were interested in learning of the history of Westminster Abbey while I preferred learning more about the history of the iron maiden at the Torture Museum. I was granted an hour or two of independence to gawk at horrible torture devices and they were free to stare at stained glass and stone-cut tombs.

As I accumulated more and more free time while traveling with my parents, I realized that the travel “misadventures” I predicted at age twelve were more than mere rhetoric for my argument, I realized that misadventure abounds when the young and naïve travel. If this blog was a movie, right now there would be a montage playing that would start with me getting horribly lost while trying to find Abbey Road and winding up in the London suburbs. The montage would then go to a shot of me spending way too much on a crappy knock-off watch in the streets of Bangkok after being convinced of its authenticity and would cumulate with a scene of me spending hour after paranoid hour trying to find my hotel in Amsterdam after visiting a “coffee shop.”

The weekend before last, Lisa and I took quick a trip up to Amsterdam. Despite my teenage misadventure there, I was very excited about returning to the city. The Amsterdam I remembered was a progressive, exciting, and beautiful place. I kept telling Lisa how much she’d like it, how laidback the people were, and I probably added a political comment or two about how enlightened their policies are. Returning this time, however, a funny thing happened. I realized that while the city itself was exactly the way I remember it, I had changed. Suddenly the cool, progressive, and enlightened young travelers I recalled had turned into retarded slackers who were too loud, too high or drunk, and there was far too many of them.

As difficult as this is to admit, my parents were right. If my parents had by some strange twist of fate let me loose to gallivant through Europe at age twelve, the European pilgrimages I would have made most likely would not have extended beyond Amsterdam’s Red Light district. And I would have been worst off because of it. As a relatively older traveler, I have only one gripe with the youth who flock to places like Amsterdam merely to experience debauchery in a foreign country. That is that while they are traveling and experiencing adventures and misadventures alike, they are missing the point. They are traveling but going nowhere. They are the younger versions of the people who travel to Japan and immediately look for the nearest McDonalds. Now, I’m not saying eating at Mickey D’s in a foreign country is any worse than eating it at home. I am saying that traveling a long way to do the same old thing you do at home is counter to the whole spirit of traveling.

While the “spirit of traveling” has been captured by artist since ink was first laid on paper and its praises are timeworn, a music group that Lisa recently discovered has the best rendition I’ve heard in quite some time. I believe the first two verses of Future Island’s song, “Give Us the Wind,” captures the “spirit of travel” well:

We set out to find something to hold

When seeking truth the answer is the road

When seeking wisdom the journey is you home

Fight through the wind, fight through the rain, fight through the cold

We left ourselves behind on dancing wires

The love ones we’ve left back home will be our choir

Let the doubters be the stick, the thorn, the brier

Fight through the wind, fight through the rain, dance in the fire

The Necessary Pain of Travel

In 1869 the American Publishing Company started printing and sending out copies of Mark Twain’s newest book, The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress, which chronicled Twain’s travel adventures through Europe and the Holy Land aboard the USS Quaker City. Contained within the humorous tome of nearly 700 pages is a line that continues to inspire men and women to pack their bags and hit the road. “Travel,” he wrote, “is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness...” Eleven years later, Twain published another book that featured an essay entitled, “The Awful German Language,” which comically criticizes a language spoken by tens of millions of people for its nonsensical structure and then proceeds to make recommendations on how best the language can be improved. While there is little doubt that Twain’s essay on the difficulty of learning a new language was written in a tongue-in-cheek manner, the dichotomy of his musings nevertheless brings to light a pain that is endured by many expatriates and seasoned travelers. That pain comes in the physical act of expanding the scope of one’s worldview by traveling and exposing oneself to cultural difference. Perhaps if I frame what I am trying to say in more personal terms, I will be able to convey my point more clearly.

Lisa and I have now lived in Europe for three months and four days. Since our arrival we’ve seen many splendid things. We see the stunning bouquet of Paris’s lights blossom whenever the rain slicks the cobblestone streets and the gentle red glow of each streetlamp is reflected in such a way that you feel like you’re living in an Impressionist painting. We’ve seen Medieval castles and wine vineyards in the Loire Valley and Chateaus situated in perfect pastoral landscapes in the northern French countryside. We’ve seen narrow canals spanned by 15^th century footbridges resting in the shadows of towering belfries in Bruges and we’ve seen the flat-stoned beaches of Nice where the green piedmont of the Alps gives way to blue majesty of the Mediterranean. In the last three months Lisa and I have seen many beautiful things that we will never forget. But perhaps more impactful to our lives is the pain we’ve endure in order to see those beautiful sights.

Believe it or not there is pain in travel and much more pain in living abroad. There is physical pain, the kind one’s back experiences from the unnatural act of being over 30 years old and sleeping on a futon mattress, and there is psychological pain. The psychological pain outweighs the physical pain every time because it can afflict one’s ego as well as one’s cognitive mind. Being a stranger in a strange land means this type of pain will spring up in the most unlikely places. Places such as a French bank. Merely entering into a bank here for the first time challenges a foreigner’s faculties and can assault their ego with the elaborate sequence of buttons, intercoms, and doors one must navigate in order to reach the teller. If you think of all the booby-traps the Goonies had to disarm before reaching the pirate ship you’ll get a more or less accurate understanding of the difficulty level of entering a French bank. Just as in the movie, the last challenge is the hardest. You’re confronted with a set of glass doors separated by a small room only big enough for one person. You press the intercom button for the teller to unlock the first door and when you hear the buzz you enter the small room and hear the door lock behind you. Seeing another intercom button next to the second door you press it and wait once again for the buzz to unlock the door. The buzz never comes. Giving dagger-eyes to the teller who is assisting a customer but could easily buzz you in, you commence to press the intercom button relentlessly assuming that they are ignoring you. While you are cursing the French and straining your brain to figure out how and why you’re locked into this glass coffin in the middle of the bank, the crushing blow to the ego comes. Fed up, you aggressively push on the second door only to realize that it was unlocked the whole time and the intercom was not actually signaling the teller at all.

While many of you out there might be tempted to reduced the pain of these types of mishaps to mere “pains in the ass” and leave it at that, I contend that I was compensated for the pain my ego and mind suffered the day I stood for a long three minutes inside the glass security box at the bank. I contend that my pain was compensated with knowledge. For that day I learned not to automatically assume the worst of people. I assumed that it was the teller’s sick sense of humor that locked me in that box when really it was my own ignorance…although, I should go on record here and say that I think that the security sequences to reach a teller at a French bank are absolutely insane. But how metaphoric is that glass box for a life without travel? You observe people from afar and make assumptions about their morality without ever meeting them face to face. That is the “prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness” that Twain wrote was killed by travel.

Killing one’s own prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness with travel is painful. It’s painful to the mind, the ego, and, at times, one’s back. Sometimes the traveler laments the pain with a little tongue-in-cheek humor the way Twain did with “The Awful German Language” or the way a lot of expats I know talk about the French. But while cultural differences and even entire languages are sometimes the butt of a traveler’s joke, a tinge of both love and pain can always be detected when they utter it. And when a traveler returns home to native soil and looks back on all the pain they endured while abroad, they know that the pain was the necessary pain of growth.

When in Paris…

This evening, after returning home from school, I received a little package from my mother. Enclosed was a letter and a book on “Charming Inns and Itineraries” in France that she thought might be useful for our upcoming trip to Nice. At one point in her letter she commented on how Lisa and I were probably busy with school and recalled her own educational experience in Europe. “When I was living in Bergamo,” she wrote, “I was living in paradise, but my reality was lectures, projects, exams, etc…” As I was reading those words, still exhausted from a full-day of studying and a three-hour lecture, Lisa was having a telephone conversation with her mother and telling her about our plans to travel through Sicily and Tuscany over our Christmas vacation. That moment crystallized perfectly what the last few weeks have been like for us. Monday through Friday Lisa comes home after 9-12 hours in the Kitchen learning dough rolling techniques from a heavy accented Frenchman whose highest praise is, “C’est pal mal” or “that’s not bad,” and I come home from a day full of studying and lectures. But on the weekends we’re zipping off to Chateau country or Bruges or the French Riviera. Just in the last three weeks alone, I’ve spent three days at Chateau Just and two days in Amboise in the Loire valley where Leonardo de Vinci spent the last three years of his life. In three days time, I will be on a train again to Evian, France to attend a global conference on sustainability and then I’ll be home for two days home before setting off to Belgium with Lisa for the weekend. It’s been surreal and life-changing to say the least. But perhaps stranger than doing homework on a train bound for Amsterdam or flight to Milan is the little everyday changes to my behavior that I’ve noticed occurring right here in Paris.

For example, since I’ve been here I’ve stopped wearing khaki pants or shorts of any kind, regardless of how hot it is. As in other major cities throughout the world, in Paris being a tourist is not a good thing…unless you’re buying something or over tipping and then it’s fine. American tourist, I fear, now occupy a lower rung on the preferred tourist scale as far as Parisians are concerned and, for men, there’s no “tell” (as in poker) greater that says “I am an American tourist” than looking like you’re about to go play golf. It’s not that I am ashamed of being an American or wearing khakis for that matter, it’s a city survival thing. Not knowing the language, the culture, or your way around a city makes you not only vulnerable but a target. It’s as true in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago as it is in Paris. As I try to minimize my “tourist look” by uncomfortably wearing jeans in 80 degree weather or using the map on my phone rather than a fold-out one, I am astounded at how many people bury their faces in paper maps while on the street and how many money-belt bulges I see hidden under sweater-vests. It like these people are wearing signs saying, “Please come rob me or, at very least, be rude to me.” I’ve been pretty successful camouflaging myself as a Parisian. I’m rarely bothered by the gypsies who work the tourist crowds and on several occasions I’ve been asked for directions by people on the street. Any pride I had for blending in, however, is immediately taken away when the person asks for the directions in French and I am forced to admit that I don’t understand what they are saying.

While the change in dress is a device I reluctantly use to avoid being annoyed on the street and I cannot see foresee myself adopting it long term, there are other changes that I actually enjoy and hope to continue. One such change is bringing my own grocery bags with me while shopping. It’s something I noticed straight away here. Nearly everyone uses their own canvas shopping bags. In some stores they actually charge you extra for the plastic ones. At first bringing bags with me to the grocery was sort of awkward and I only did it to avoid looking like a tourist. But now I like it.

The last little change is that I have started riding a bike to and from school. For years in Chicago friends of mine preached at length on the virtues and freedom of riding a bike in the city. But whenever I was near converting to religion of cycling, I would hear a story of someone getting hit by a car or someone’s bike getting stolen and that was enough to keep me faithful to public transportation and taxis. Here it’s different. First of all, I didn’t have to invest in a bike but rather paid the equivalent of $40 for a year’s subscription to barrow bikes when I need them. Velib is what they call it and in Paris you are never more than 300 meters away from one of their green stands. You press your little card to the machine, punch in your code, pick your bike, and you’re on your way. No more smelly homeless people sitting next to me on the bus, no more suffocating train cars packed to the brim with commuters. Navigating traffic, I admit, is a little scary. A few times I took the wrong road, was faced with an onslaught of vehicles bearing down on me and was forced to quickly pick my bike up and physically carry it over the curb and onto the sidewalk where I embarrassingly walked it to a calmer street. There are few things more humiliating or ungainly than carrying a bicycle onto a median in the midst of traffic and whenever I’ve had to do it I always imagine a unified fit of laughter coming from the cars passing by. But despite some inelegant growing-pains while learning which roads to take and which to avoid, I’ve done pretty well here on two wheels. The trick, I have found, is to follow a real bike riding Parisian and do as they do. If they feel comfortable going around a stopped bus, then you go around the bus. If they suddenly stop at an intersection, they you stop too. When they yell at a car and look back at you for collaboration, you nod approvingly in solidarity and shrug your shoulders as if to say, “what a dick!” By following the Parisians and doing as they do, I’ve become a convert to city cycling.

As Lisa and I continue to punctuate our hectic school weeks with weekend trips all over Europe, there’s little doubt that the places we visit will widen the scope of the our worldview and leave us forever changed. But perhaps more impactful to our lives are the tiny day-to-day changes that are occurring as we engage in what the French call “metro, boulot, dodo” and what we call the daily grind. Whether our aim is to avoid the hassle of street-gypsies or to get from point-A to point-B without having to squeeze in under someone’s armpit in order to fit into the train, the result is slight incremental changes to the way we live. In anthropology, they call this type of change, acculturation. It happens when one goes through first-hand and prolonged exposure to a different culture. Having gone through a little acculturation myself I cannot help but be reminded of the old adage, “When in Rome…,” or, in my case, “When in Paris…”

Rouge Tape

Along with wine and cheese, the French have developed a reputation for producing some of the finest bureaucratic procedures in the world. A common expression here amongst expatriates when discussing the long, complex, and seemingly ambiguous measures one has to take when acquiring things such as a visa, a bank account, or a metro ticket is that the procedure is “very French.” Having been in Paris a month, Lisa and I have yet to figure out why the ineptitude and redundancy found in administrative dealings are assigned the “very French” label. While we are still unclear on the cause of French red tape, we have become fairly familiar with the effect. In a word, that effect is annoyance.

On Lisa’s first day at her pastry school, the American expat administrator warned the students that the school was “very French” and they would probably get annoyed with how things were run. The administrator’s words of caution were well received by the students who had already noticed that their schedules for the week were incorrect due to negligence. Ironically the blame for the error fell on the American expat herself. I was given the same word of caution from my school. Although the “very French” label was watered down to “the French, you’ll find, have a different way of doing things.” The example the speaker used was what to do in case of an emergency. He asked the Americans in the audience what numbered they dialed when they needed urgent help. A loud and unified “911” rang out immediately. Then he asked the French in the audience the same question and a soft disjointed response came back, “It depends on the type of emergency.” Apparently if you need the police, you call 17. Except if you’re calling from a cell phone in which case you dial 112. For the fire brigade you hit another two digit number and for poison control it’s yet another. There is a number for doctors that make house calls. There is a number for mobile dentist and about a dozen other such numbers that the French dial in case they have an emergency. At the end of his example he reiterated that it was just a different way of doing things and we adjust ourselves accordingly.

I recently went through the procedure of getting my “carte sejour” to complete my long stay visa. The process took no less than three hours and I made contact with five bureaucrats, six doctors, and about fifty or so visa seeking foreigners. In the three hour span, the rest of the visa seekers and myself queue up into lines four separate times. Also within that time I was weighed, my height was taken, my sight was checked along with my blood pressure, and an x-ray was taken of my chest. Why my height, weight, sight, and ribcage were pertinent to my status as a temporary resident of France is anyone’s guess.

Clearly, as anybody who has recently been to the DMV can attest, frustration arising from bureaucratic procedures is a universal feeling in the modern world. The French do not have an exclusive on red tape. Like so many other things, however, they seem to have created an art form from something that would be simply mundane in another country. We’re not satisfied with having you wait in just one line; no, you have to wait in five! Oh, you would like to make a deposit into your checking account? Well, walk passed the ATM for withdraws and passed the one for savings account deposits and you’ll find the one you need. You may think that I am exaggerating, I assure you I am not. Just Like the complexity found in a nice Chateauneuf-du-Pape, which contains nine different grape verities, the French have a way of taking something simple and adding to it until it begs either positive or negative recognition. Nothing in Paris, we have come to find, is plain. Not even their bureaucracy. And perhaps that is what they mean when they say “it’s very French.”