parce qu'on vient de loin

Today the woman who’s kids I tutored, as I was saying good bye after our last lesson, asked me if I liked France. I’ve been asked this question a lot- How do you like Paris? I think it’s sort of just one of those questions you ask as a fall back, like you can ask anyone and they can say whatever they want in response. But of course the response expected is always “I love it!” It’s like when someone asks how you are and you’re just supposed to say good- except it’s Paris, so you can’t just say it’s nice- It has to be “genial” which means ‘Great! (awesome, superb, etc.)’ So she asked me, and I responded, but I think for one of the first times I really meant it. I mean I haven’t been asked the question in a long time. When I first got here people would always ask me, in this order, 1. have you ever been to Paris before and 2. Do you like it. What I always thought then was that I liked it better the first time. Paris to me seemed like the type of place that you should just visit. Most of my impressions were based on the fact that Americans just like to take romantic honeymoons to the capital and kiss under the bridges of the Seine and wander slowly down the Champs-elysees.

So the first time I ever came to Paris I was about 7 I think, young anyways, and I was with my family. And all I cared about was going up the Eiffel tower and riding on the carousel. The second time I was 15, a sophomore in High school and with our school group. This was awesome. We were old enough that we thought we could just be independent but young enough that we were pretty convinced that wandering about in Paris and buying crepes was the coolest thing one could ever do. Returning here for the third time left me a little disillusioned I think.

So when people would ask me if I liked Paris and I would say yes, I was really just thinking I liked it a lot better before I had to live here. But slowly over a semester I realized that there was an entire side of Paris that I had never considered, that I had never seen just being a Tourist. I know that’s obvious, but what wasn’t obvious was that I really liked this side of Paris too. In fact I liked it better possibly than the other bit. I mean I think there’s something unforgettable about riding a tourist boat on the Seine at night and seeing the Eiffel tower all lit up and laughing and taking pictures of it with your friends. But there’s also something unforgettable about trying to row on the seine, barely understanding the French commands that you can’t really hear, and pausing to get water under a bridge as the afternoon sun lights up the waves rolling up to the boat.

And it’s not just rowing, it’s the strikes, the rugby, it’s leaving the house in the morning, headphones in, singing along as I dodge around a street cleaner’s broom, scarf around my neck on the way to the metro.

I was talking to a classmate on the way to Art history on Tuesday, talking about the upcoming end of things and how Paris has been. I find myself explaining once again that I was from the country. I don’t know when I finally decided to explain myself in this manner.. it just sort of evolved over the course of the semester. I guess I’ve just never lived in a place much bigger than Westminster in my grown up state and therefore have never needed to describe myself as a product of rurality, but here it has become useful. For example we watched “Babel” as part of a class thing and then had a discussion afterwards. Our language professor was most shocked by the scene when they’re in mexico and a man kills a chicken and then small children chase about the headless creature. He was not only shocked, but sort of immediately tied this to third worldness. But I know people who do this, they live over the mountain from me. Ok, so my family never butchered chickens in front of me – though eating my rabbit was an entertaining joke during my childhood- but it doesn’t surprise me that people would and I wouldn’t immediately use this to distinguish people from myself culturally. Or when people ask me where I come from and I say Vermont and then they ask what city I come from and I just have to say that it’s not a city- In France there are cities and then there’s “Provence”. In its purest form everything outside of Paris is Provence. So people from Paris sometimes only get where I’m from if I say “the country”.

My point of the whole rural thing was just that I was telling this girl how I had been surprised how much I’ve adapted to living in a big city. To the point where sometimes the thought just passes me by, and then I look up and see the buildings and try to ingest the idea that I’m living in one of the biggest cities in the world. Ok, it’s not Tokyo, but you get the idea. I see my screen saver on my laptop of the pictures I took of home before I left and it looks like post cards, like my brain has become so trained to look at buildings that the vast expanses of space are hard to remember. And as a picture is only a two dimensional representation of that space (thank you L’esthetique de l’image) it doesn’t bring it all back. I guess this is what they call acclimation. I just never wanted to have to admit that the stupid culture shock chart was right.. damn them.