So the turn-around between my graduation from USC and leaving for this trip was about 12 hours. This means that in the course of one week, I encountered the scariest final in existence, packed for a month in a foreign country, and moved all of my accumulated college crap out of my house. Oh, and graduate from college too. Once all that was out of the way, I had a lovely cross-continental plane ride to grapple with the fact that I had just divorced life as I know it, and I was too busy to even notice. I would leave, and when I came back, everything would be completely different, and not even in the abstract kind of way.
It made me cranky.
Of course the first thing I did upon deplaning in Charles de Gaulle is get berated by the charming security fellow who thinks I should be in the other line for customs (or whatever).
Glad to see they'll like me here. There is a group of Tennessee tourists with fanny packs and mom jeans in front of me, and their voices make me want to punch them in the face, so I figure I must have at least THAT in common with the French.
After a thirty minute walk and a lot of begging for directions, taking the wrong elevators, moments on the verge of tears, and steering around wobbly children from every country on the planet, seeing my Paris roommate, Diana, was the happiest moment of my life.
Although we had been gravely warned to stay off the metro when coming from CDG into the city, the snarky man at the tourism desk seemed to think we could handle it... and, being poor, we opted out of dealing with swindle-happy cab drivers. Despite lugging suitcases that could have easily smuggled in a six year old, we managed to navigate through the uber chaotic Gare du' Nord (metro hub) and catch our train to the 11th arrondissement, off Oberkampf. We then stood on a street corner looking pathetically lost until a nice French man came and showed us how to find our apartment, which turns out is about thirty seconds from the train stop. Awesome.
So Emilie, our new landlady, let us in and takes us up a 3sq foot elevator big enough for two people, or so says the sign, but really if you have a bag (which we did), you can ride up with your luggage and pray that the creaky, lurchy, coffin-on-a-pully makes it all the way up to the 6th floor (penthouse-- woo hoo). Apparently we are quite lucky to have any elevator at all though, so I shall try my best to make nice with it, lest it drops me to my death out of spite.
Emilie shows us our new home, a study in la vie boheme, complete with a giant cracked mirror, spanish tile floors, a trumpet/tambourine/guitar/bongos. The bathroom door is painted floor to ceiling with some sort of Mayan/African/Tiki face. It is lovely. The shower is elevated about 2 feet above the floor, so we must climb up into it like a lofted dorm room bed. There's a little hot water heater up high above the toilet, and if you accidentally touch it, you burn off your hand/hip/head/whatever appendage. The shower head is a hand held, and the shallow basin that collects the water fills up in about 5 minutes. I believe the trick will be to light on our feet and move quickly.
Our first order of business when we settled in to our new place was to feed ourselves. So out we went, and we walked, and we walked, and we walked, and we discovered that really the only things that are open on Sundays are cafes. The custom is to sit and linger in an outdoor cafe for hours at a time, staring at people as they go by. No joke, the chairs aren't oriented around the table--they're set up like a movie theater so people can sit and judge to their hearts' content. We figured we should try to do as the French do. When in Rome (Paris), right? So we ordered wine and escargot and croque moissiuer and lingered as long as we could until we ran out of things to say.
We went home to unpack and nap... for 7 hours (oops). We woke up at 8:45 and realized we missed our 7 o'clock dinner rendezvous with our professor. We called and apologized, then we figured we should find some food (again--our priorities are straight). We went wandering around the neighborhoods, and there were so many little cafes open that we couldn't decide! We probably walked 2 miles down the street, then by the time we turned around and walked back up the street, everything was closing or too expensive. So we wandered to the other area near our apartment, and all we found in our price range was McDonalds. We walked grudgingly up to it, ashamed at the utter cliche of eating off a dollar menu on the first day in one of the culinary capitals of the world, and then we noticed a creperie across the street! Alleluia! So I stumbled through my order, picking something random, and it turned out to be ouef, fromage, et thon (egg, cheese, and tuna). He made the crepe right in front of us on this little round griddle. Salty, cheesy heaven. So we walked around with our treat and accidentally found our way home. Then we went back to sleep. Eat, sleep, eat, sleep. Day one, voila.
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