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.”

A Six Euro Meal and a Million Dollar View

Before coming to Paris Lisa and I collected at least forty names and addresses of “must visit” Parisian restaurants from friends and family. Nearly all recommendations were accompanied by an, “this place is amazing! I ate the best ______ I’ve ever had there.” With our stomachs rumbling as we exited the plane, we were ready to embrace all the gastronomic delights our new city had to offer us. Bring on the crêpes with bananas and Nutella in the mornings, escargots in a garlic beur blanc sauce in the afternoons and boeuf bourguignon at night! While our appetites said, “Yes, yes, yes,” our new student budget said, “Jeez, that’s expensive. Maybe we’ll come back for your birthday.” And so, we were forced to find alternative means of filling our bellies every day.

Luckily in Paris you can eat very well without dropping a €150 a plate. One of our first cheap-eats discoveries were the bakeries. For a little over a dollar USD, you can buy an absolutely delicious baguette that is still warm from the oven. We next discovered Monoprix, a store not unlike Target but about one-twentieth the size with a great selection of meats and cheeses. Combined, these two economical food establishments allowed us to create what has become our favorite lunch meal: Italian thin-sliced ham, fromage du Chêvre, and a little mayo on a warm baguette.

We make our little ham sandwiches in the morning, slide them into a Zip-Lock bag, and stick them in our backpack when we leave the house for the day. What’s better than eating these little delicious sandwiches knowing we paid about €3 a piece for them is eating them in view of some of the most beautiful sites in the world. So far we’ve eaten our cheap and cheerful lunches in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, on the bank of the Seine where the Ile de la Cité splits the river in two, on a bench in the Versailles gardens while listening to classical music and watching a fountain water show, and about a dozen equally beautiful spots all around Paris.

This morning a dear friend from Chicago is coming into town for a few days. When emailing back and forth to make lunch plans, I left the decision to him. We could either find a quaint restaurant in the Marais or bring some sandwiches down to the Seine. I have to admit my joy when he opted for lunch on the river over a restaurant. After all, the restaurants here are still crammed with tourists and it’s shaping up to a beautiful day.

There’s no doubt that Lisa and I will check off each and every restaurant on our list in the year ahead. We’ll certainly find some excuse or another to splurge a few times a month to eat classic French dishes in an amazing Parisian restaurant. But while the skies are still blue, the air is still warm, and the bistros are still crowded with tourists, we are more than happy to take our €6 lunch with a million dollar view on the side.

The Character of a Neighborhood and Neighborhood Characters

Neighborhoods are usually described spatially as specific geographic areas and functionally as an amalgamation of social networks. Looking at our neighborhood, the Marais, from a functional standpoint, it immediately sounds as if the major social networks that inhabit this geographic area are characters in a bad joke: “the Jews, the Gays, and the Chinese all walk into a neighborhood and…” What is instantly clear once you walk down and around the streets of the Marais is that these seemingly disparate social groups have coalesced to form one lively neighborhood. Add in architecture dating from 13^th Century, numerous art galleries, and a cornucopia of the small clothing boutiques of up-and-coming designers and you get one of the most unique neighborhoods in the world. This is the neighborhood Lisa and I will be calling home for the next year of our lives and while we have yet to make any acquaintances within the major social networks that give our borough its overall character, we have certainly come across some neighborhood characters that give it some flavor.

The neighborhood character with whom we have the most interaction is our building’s caretaker. Although I converse in broken French nearly every other day with this women, I am ashamed to confess I don’t know her name nor the name of her small dog that is always by her side. I do, however, know that she is a devout Catholic as she very ceremoniously gave Lisa and I tickets to hear one of her favorite priest speak at Notre Dame Cathedral during the Assumption ceremony a couple of days ago. I guess it makes sense that some priests are more popular that others but I never knew the kind of rock star status a Catholic religious figure besides the Pope could obtain until I saw the lines waiting to hear this guy’s sermon. The sheer size of the crowd convinced us that the spaces our tickets reserved should be given to people who actually wanted to see this priest rather than two Americans who thought it was a good opportunity to see the interior of the church without paying the admission fee. We settled that evening on hearing a Phish-like jam band regale a crowd in a park adjacent to Notre Dame.

The other little tidbit indicating the piety of our building’s caretaker is how strenuously she attempts to inform us almost every time we see her that we should close the outer wooden shutters of our window when we are changing. Our apartment is on the second floor and directly overlooks the street. The proximity of our apartment to the street and the building we face gives passersby and our new neighbors a more or less uninterrupted line-of-sight into our living space. It seems that on our first or second day in the apartment a neighbor caught sight of one of us changing clothes and promptly informed the caretaker. Ever since that day she has spoken or mimed her warning about the shutters whenever our paths cross. Last week she even cornered another resident who speaks English and got him to tell me that I should be mindful of the shutters and the potentiality of peeping Toms. Here I always thought that Europeans were much more relaxed about the naked human body and it was us puritanical Americans who were spooked by nudity. Needless to say Lisa and I embraced our Puritanism and started closing the shutters after her first warning.

The other neighborhood characters who I have come to appreciate are a homeless man that sits next to our favorite neighborhood bakery and an old woman who hangs out in the laundry mat down the street. These two characters would just be your normal run of the mill crazies if not for some distinguishing things about them. The homeless man, who has perhaps the cutest dog I’ve ever seen, never leaves his little plot of land next to the bakery. He’s there at six in the morning and at nine at night. I’ve never passed by that stretch of street and not seen him. The old lady’s distinction comes in the occasional and variegated loud whooping sounds that she makes. In between her monkey-like cries, she’s as silent as a statue. Because the intervals between whoops are long and uneven, however, it’s easy to forget she is there and your thoughts inevitably relax back to the task of doing laundry. The moment when you’ve forgotten all about her is the moment when she hits you with a loud and startling whoop. I’ve never once heard her utter an understandable word. Only the whoops and only when you’re least expecting them.

If it weren’t for characters like these, our urban neighborhoods would be as bland and dry as toast. They add a little flavor to our day and a little color to our streets. Of course too much crazy in your neighborhood and you start to yearn for the suburbs. But in the right amounts, the crazy characters you come across in the streets of your neighborhood help to form its overall character and any urbanite definitely has a story or two of their own favorite crazy character. I recall a few of my favorites from Washington. There was the guy in Georgetown who attached a child’s sand bucket to the end of a fishing pole and would cast his line out to a group of passersby hoping to wheel back some cash. Then there was the guy, also in Georgetown, who opened the face-plate at the base of a street lamp to get to the power supply and used it to power the small television that he watched while begging for change. My favorite of them all, however, was the homeless man in Dupont Circle who used bus shelters and park benches as workout equipment. Whenever I saw this guy, who incidentally wore an elegantly groomed women’s wig, he was working out his biceps by lifting a bench or doing pull-ups on a bus shelter. He was the most physically fit homeless man I’ve ever come across. While there are many differences between the United States and France, I am happy to report that colorful and crazy characters seem to be universal features in urban areas. And, in a strange way, the characters who I’ve encountered in our new neighborhood have helped to make me feel more at home.

Breaking the Myth

A common subject that came up while discussing living in Paris was how rude the French can be. It seems that the stereotype of the typical Frenchman as being an arrogant a*^%$# continues to survive and thrive in our modern globalized world. Even the French I have known and met in America seem to hold this opinion of their countrymen. A few weeks before I departed Chicago I assisted a French family visiting the States on vacation. Upon learning that I was going to be living in Paris for a year, the patriarch took me aside and said, “You know there are the French and there are the Parisians. Don’t confuse the two.” I roughly translated his warning to an American saying that there is a difference between New Yorkers and Americans. The half Polish half French owner of a flower and wine shop that I use to go to two or three times a week when I was living in Ukrainian Village warned that the “only thing wrong with Paris is the people who live there.” Of course, as a quasi seasoned traveler and progressive thinker, I casted off the warnings as stereotypical stereotyping.

Approaching the two-week mark of our stay here in Paris I feel our experiences thus far have granted me enough perspective to comment on the subject. In a few words, yes, there are a lot of a*^%##^s living in Paris. The first glimpse of Parisian contemptuousness came when trying to retrieve my ATM card back from the bank. It took three visits to the branch and, when I had reached my limit of annoyance, I snapped on the clerk. It was only then that they felt obliged to return my card to me. Then there are the thoroughly unhelpful women at the post office. When you ask them a question about how to do something, they don’t respond, they just silently perform the task in a “you’re so stupid” kind of way. The worse experience I’ve had occurred yesterday at a restaurant in the Latin Quarter. Starving, Lisa and I stopped in to a café that was only sparsely occupied. Having been informed at another restaurant that lunch was over and they were only serving drinks, I asked as careful as I could if they were still serving lunch. The prick behind the counter acted as if he didn’t understand and another patron who was within earshot repeated what I said verbatim. Then he said in English, “sit wherever you like.” We sat at an outside table near the establishment’s chef, who was seated adjacent from us tasting mushrooms and sipping wine. After about ten minutes of waiting the chef noticed that while the prick-server/bartender had cleaned every table inside and out, he had failed to even ask us what drinks we would like. She then asked him in French if he was going to attend to us. At which, he responded “they’re tourist, they can wait” in French thinking we would not understand. A look of shock came over the chef and the prick’s faces when, having understood their exchange, Lisa and I got up abruptly and said to the a*$#%$# server, “Tourist! Aye?” and walked away. We ended up getting a fantastic and less expensive lunch from a restaurant right down the street.

Of course these experiences are only half the story. The whole story is that for every a*^%## server and b*&^% post office employer we’ve come across there have been five amazingly helpful and pleasant Parisians. Perhaps the most helpful came from the French involved in bringing my iphone back to life after I attempted to jailbreak it. Not only did the busy Apple store near the Louvre restore my phone to proper working order without a hint of judgment, the phone store that helped us set up our European phones sent us to the nicest guy who unlocked our iphones in a few minutes and for a nominal fee…he even gave Lisa a free scratch-resistant film for her screen and applied it so perfectly I became envious. I really would have been screwed if it weren’t for these helpful Parisians...iphones in France cost about $900 USD!

Being a city dweller most of my life, I know how annoying tourists can be. In Chicago I took the back streets to get to work so that I encountered the least amount of slow-moving tourists as possible. In D.C., I couldn’t stand it when a tourist didn’t know the unwritten rules of riding the Metro and would block the moving left lane on the escalators or would stand in front of the train doors while getting on rather than off to the side. Patience is certainly a virtue I do not possess in abundance. And honestly if I met my Parisian-self now, I’d probably think he was a bit of an a$$#%&. But being a foreigner, a minority, these last two weeks has exposed me to the not-nice feeling of being unjustly judged, of being dismissed as a stupid tourist. Judging someone while remaining ignorant of their true character is a sickness. But let us not make the mistake of thinking that it is a sickness that only afflicts the French and is concentrated in Paris. The truth is that we all catch it from time-to-time. The truth is that there are a$*@#*&s in every town and every city throughout the world.

Becoming a Pedestrian in Paris

A week before Lisa and I left Chicago for Paris, my mother sent us a book entitled, The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris by the Australian writer, John Baxter. True to her long history of book-giving, Mom thought the book would be inspirational and add to our wonder of the city we were about to embrace as home. Baxter, an ex-pat living in a neighborhood in Paris that is famous for the literary geniuses who have lived there, would occasionally spend his time away from writing to give walking tours to the type of people interested in where Hemingway and Fitzgerald would get drunk. The book he wrote about these tours painted a picture of a truly pedestrian Paris, a Paris meant to be seen and experienced on foot.

Of course when I was reading this book while taking Chicago’s public transit, it was somewhat difficult imagining myself as a “flaneur” who sauntered down city streets for hours on end. Growing up on the East Coast and spending most of my time in large fast-paced cities, I was conditioned to walk with purpose. Weaving in and out of pedestrian traffic on the streets of D.C. or New York became my normal mode of walking. Moving to Chicago I found that while the pace was a little slower than back east, speed was still integral to walking and you always walk to get somewhere.

Paris is infinitely different. Still firmly rooted in its medieval pedestrian past, the city lends itself to those who walk and walk slow. In the last ten days, I have found that walking in Paris is like a Buddhist trying to reach enlightenment…the trick is to not try to get anywhere, but to realize that you are already there. I am not going to lie; it’s been difficult shedding the old skin. At least twice a day Lisa has to tell me to slow down. But when I do, I am able to not just see Paris, but to discover it.

So far on our little Parisian adventure, I’ve discovered the Jardin du Palais Royal (Royal Garden) hidden in the thicket of narrow streets in the city’s 1^st arrondissement. I have discovered the Seine at sunset and the Notre Dame cathedral at night. I have discovered the tiniest gas station I’ve ever seen place inconspicuously amongst the sex shops of Pigalle and I have discovered a vista of the Pantheon from Luxembourg Gardens.

Today, Lisa and I are going to meander our way down to the Ile de la Cité to go see the stained glass of Sainte-Chappelle and who knows what kind of discoveries we’ll make. While I may be uncertain about what I discover today, I know that whatever it is, I will discover it as a pedestrian.

Hubris

It’s about midnight here in Paris. The outer shutters to our window on the Marais are closed but we can still hear the muddled noise of six or so different conversations happening downstairs at the café next to our apartment. While a tangled web of German, French, and English hangs outside our comfy confines, I find myself not feeling all that comforted by my surroundings. Today was a lesson par-excellent in the meaning of the phrase “pride comes before the fall.” This morning I awoke in a good mood. I felt our jump on Paris a month before our respective schools semesters begin was going quite well. Beyond finding our apartment, setting up car service, and arranging all the other tiny little things one needs to do when moving abroad, we pre-opened a French bank account and transferred funds to it before we left the states. I also strategically procured iPhones months ago on a “GMS” network so we could “unlock” them here to use with a European mobile phone company. This morning all my/our good planning was going to be pay-off and I was feeling good about being so smart. Alas, life always has a way of making one feel like an idiot just seconds after feeling like a genius.

Stopping into the LCL bank branch that had our ATM cards waiting for us, Lisa and I proceeded to sign about 300 French legal agreements that apparently are necessary when opening a checking account. After about an hour of a half-understood conversation with the bank’s representative, he shook my cramped hand and Lisa and I were on our way to set up our new French mobile phones. But not before breaking for lunch on the Champ de Mars to eat in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Arriving to the mobile phone store after a lovely lunch, Lisa and I worked the details of new contracts out with the clerk. He asked us for one piece of information after another and eagerly typed it into the computer. Then he asked us for our bank account’s “RIB” number. I shook my head as I recalled having rejected that piece of information at the bank thinking that it was unnecessary and probably could be found on one of the 300 copies of our agreement we had on us. I was wrong on both accounts. The clerk then said we could get the number by going to an ATM down the street. I left Lisa waiting in the store as I ran to the nearest LCL bank. Armed with a six digit code the bank gave me, I confidently typed the numbers into the machine. I got an error message that I did not really understand. Again, I typed the numbers thinking I somehow mistyped. The same message appeared. Third time’s the charm, I smartly thought. Well, it turns out third time was not the charm because the machine ate our new bank card. Walking back to the store deflated, I remembered that I had the number the guy was looking for in an old email that I could access on the iphone. With a few keystrokes, Lisa and I were locked into our new contract with French carrier, all I needed to do was go home, unlock our iPhones, and insert the new sim card.

We got home from the phone store around 8PM this evening and it’s now 20 minutes passed midnight. In the roughly four hours I spent hopelessly attempting to unlock my iPhone, the only thing I was successful in doing was to break it. Something that once was infinitely useful hours ago is now utterly useless. Someone who woke with such hubris only this morning is now feeling a little crappy for having “bricked” his phone and caused the ATM to eat his bank card. Perhaps tomorrow I can get the card back from the bank and maybe even un-brick my phone at the Apple store. But tonight I suppose that I should remember that a phone is only a only phone and a card is only a card and as the months and years go by I will probably only remember my lovely lunch with Lisa in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.

The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: Our First Few Days in Paris

It’s around 9:30 in the morning on our third day in Paris. I am sitting next to Lisa, who is working on her French with Rosetta Stone, on our futon sofa that takes up 75% of the space in our apartment while it is down at night and roughly 35% of it during the day. The large window on the other side of me is ajar and the sounds of the streets of the Marais (our neighborhood) request my attention every few seconds. A motorbike starting its engine, a conversation between two French women, and the beeping sounds of the recycling truck color the city that lies just outside our tiny apartment.

Inside our small but charming apartment, finding the proper way to perform everyday tasks within our minimized surroundings has taken a larger portion of our time that we would have liked. Navigating the tight confines of the shower, for example, requires practice on par with an Olympic sport and, in my opinion, should seriously be considered by the International Olympic Committee as a new competition to add the games. One cannot so much as turnaround in the shower without inadvertently turning the handle with one’s backside so the water becomes scolding hot or ice cold.

Outside our apartment, on the other hand, is a city that is more beautiful than a simple blog-post could ever hope to describe. Within a seven minute walking distance from our front door is the Notre Dame Cathedral, the Seine river, and the Place des Vosges and we have walked to and along them all in the last two days. Last evening, we walked down the narrow medieval Rue Vieille du Temple to the Seine and Notre Dame. Along the way Lisa commented that the scenery looked like a set from a movie which got me thinking of all the romantic films shoot in Paris. Watching such films, one thinks that the directors pick and choose out-of-the-ordinary beautiful places to heighten the romantic drama of their scripts. Walking along the streets last night proved that the beautiful scenery captured by those directors and cameramen is only a small sliver of the beauty Paris has to offer. I have traveled to or lived in some of the most beautiful cities in the world, but none of them compare to Paris in this regard.