We are home, we are safe.

Life continued as normal yesterday evening. I was grocery shopping when the attacks began, and I went out for supper while they were taking place.  After learning about the attacks while at a restaurant in the 5th arrondissement, we made it home safe – via metro, before our line shut down completely – and watched in shock as our street filled with emergency vehicles en route to help those in need. This morning, the city is cast in a grey light and people walk slowly down the crooked sidewalks.

My deepest, heartfelt sympathies are with those who lost loved ones in last night’s attacks.

We are home, we are safe.

Where do we go from here?

 

pumpkin pasta, sun-soaked statues, fresh flowers, and one incredible violin.

Trekking through the southeast edge of France, we travelled by bus through the French Alps, underneath the Mont Blanc, and emerged from the speedy auto route tunnels into uncharted territory. This was my first trip into the rest of Europe since moving to France in August, and my inaugural voyage happened to be with the ensemble in residence for a week in a famous fiddle town known for its violinmakers, pumpkin pasta, and its flat countryside which rivals the plains of Regina, Saskatchewan. As I stepped off the bus, the strong winds blowing through the streets brought back memories of my home land, but the boldly-coloured buildings, lengthy lunch breaks, and supper hours that make the French tradition feel like a mid-afternoon snack, contrasted to that through which the prairie wind gusts back home. Then the bells rang in the town square and a violin sounded through the ancient cobble-stoned streets, and as I soaked in the rays of the evening sun on that quiet street, I remembered that this was Italy, and I was in the birthplace of the world’s most valuable and precious stringed instruments: Cremona.

Cremona’s beautiful town square and 12th century cathedral.

Paris in the springtime.

As Paris emerges from its grey blanket of cloudy days, chilly temperatures, and early sun-downs, so do I emerge from my winter, blog-post-less, hibernation. I was beginning to wonder if someone changed the sky’s ‘default’ colour settings to grey, and it was almost as if the entire city breathed a sigh of relief as the clocks sprung forward an hour and the sun began to shine its beautiful rays once again.

blossoms in the 7th arrondissement.

Café culture.

In the months before moving here, I created a reading list. The list represented an aspiration of mine. It served as a symbol of my wish to immerse myself in literature influenced by the place I was soon to call home, ensuring a well-researched first impression. Not a day would go by that a friend, family member, or colleague would fail to mention one of their favourite reads on the city, and each time a title was mentioned, the list lengthened. Regrettably, most (read: all) of my reading lists tend to air on the side of being optimistic, idealistic, far from realistic, and unfinished. I read all the time, but I don’t rush it. I approach each new book as a new piece to study, making notes in the margins, and often re-reading pages and chapters several times. Reading for a deadline kills the magic, in my opinion, so when I am reading for pleasure, I take full advantage. Alas, as the summer season passed before my eyes, the Paris reading list slowly made its way to the bottom of the pile. I found myself having read but one of the selections on my ambitious list by summer’s end.

The one Paris-inspired title I did read before arriving (The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway) proved to be an interesting addition to my notions of life before and after arriving. Hemingway’s masterfully-woven depictions of Parisian life, and the disillusioned post-war generation, were at once a pleasure and a pain to endure. Despite the fact that these themes of post-war literature are prevalent throughout the work, the reader lives it through the eyes of the main character, a man who expresses himself in beautiful, heavily-veiled metaphors, and spends the majority of the first part of the novel living the ‘good life’ with friends at the brasserie and only facing his real problems in his darkest moments. Though a detailed analysis would be more than enough material to fill this post, the ending would be spoiled for those who haven’t yet read it. (Book club, anyone?) Anyway, in the context of my recent arrival in the city in which the main character’s journey begins, I couldn’t resist investigating. I wanted to find out if the way of life depicted in this work still remained embedded in the Parisian vie quotidienne. So, without hesitation, I made my way to a local brasserie.

La fête des vendanges.

Every day, flocks of tourists swarm Paris like bustling, buzzing, vacationing bees, hard at work to get Paris done right. Doing the tourist stroll, (i.e. taking the time to enjoy your walk down the street, gazing up at buildings to marvel at the architecture, and noticing people around you with pointed curiosity,) they saunter from tourist attraction to tourist attraction, taking photos in all the right spots and eating overpriced crepes made in tiny street stands.

Now, writing a tourist-hating article around this time would be an obvious, and perhaps widely-anticipated, direction to take on a Paris blog. However, I am pleased to report that I really do love tourists. Who doesn’t appreciate a constant flow of new, wide-eyed, awe-struck people of the world, coming to appreciate the coolness of your place of residence? In my opinion, it serves as a great reminder of just how beautiful the world can be through the lens of new perspective. Yeah, that’s right! I said it. Tourists are great.

My favourite thing about the sheer number of Paris tourists (in the Fall – the summer wave was overwhelming) is that transitioning from a studying, working, practicing, everyday citizen to a sightseeing visitor is easy. Allowing oneself to get swallowed up into the crowds making their way to the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Love Bridge, or any other major attraction, and the group hysteria alone will be more than enough to help catch a good ole’ case of tourist fever. This comes with one exception. You see, until very recently, no mob of tourists, no matter how cheerful or driven or inspiring, could have ever dragged me to the Sacre Coeur Basilica.

Revolution.

Since May, I have been to three Canadian provinces, six American states, and countless French arrondissements, departments, and regions. For the majority of this time, my suitcase has housed only the most necessary belongings, which for me, amounts to a few favourite clothing items, many, many books, and a trusty folding music stand. My possessions currently weigh approximately 49.5lbs, plus an extremely heavy hand bag, and my violin, securely packed with a surprising number of socks.  It has been an incredible season of family, travel, musical collaboration, reunion, cultural discovery, and general newness, and if I had to determine my top ten favourite activities, these would certainly make the list.

I think I first caught the travel bug when my Aunt Cathy took my cousin and I on a trip to a Scottish fiddle festival, traveling up through the UK to a remote location in Northern Scotland when I was sixteen years old. There is nothing quite like the experience of arriving in a place full of new things to discover, new people to meet, and new perspective. But now that I am settled into my new Parisian home and enrolled in a new post-graduate music program, the realization has hit me like a brick wall. Five months after leaving my Cleveland home, I find myself in a wonderful, foreign reality, and it seems that a revolution of sorts has taken place.

Un escargot.

The City of Lights. The Most Romantic Place in the World. That Smelly Stop on our Euro Trip (with Eiffel Tower). Yes, Paris is a place of many catch phrases, and it seems that everyone has their own nickname for this city.  Perhaps it is the French façon d’être rubbing off on all of us.  Maybe it’s those charming Parisians, with accents that make you feel like you just walked into a movie starring both Inspector Clouseau and Amélie Poulin. Or, perhaps it is just the smell. I’m not sure. But whatever the reason, everyone has an opinion about this city, and they’re usually not afraid to share it.

This is Amélie’s café in Montmartre!

As such, I have resolved to try and keep an open mind. Spending an extensive amount of time here affords me the luxury to take in Paris from every angle. So far, I can attest to having experienced on a nearly daily basis the aforementioned lights, the romance, and – yes, unfortunately – even the occasional unpleasant odour. Any short metro ride or walk towards the city centre will provide a cornucopia of these classic Parisian occurrences, which is likely why these impressions have transferred into the perceptions of all tourists and ex-pats that have had a taste of this city. However, give any Parisian five minutes to chatter about their home city, and you might find that a few additions have been made to the list. Yes, you will definitely hear about the smells, the romance, and the lights. But if you keep on listening, you will more than likely hear them utter these two phrases: 1) Paris, c’est pas la France; and 2) Paris est un escargot.

quiche lorraine and other news…

It’s what we use to fuel our bodies and it is central to the scheduling of our everyday lives. It facilitates social gatherings, it ranges from a potentially lethal substance to a work of art, and – most of the time – it just tastes really good. Yep, that’s right, you guessed it: I’m talking about la nourriture.

It’s hard to believe that I have been blogging about France for three weeks now and food has yet to take center stage. This is likely due to the fact that the apartment I was subletting in August didn’t have much of a kitchen (read: it had two hotplates and a mini fridge), and I had been living off of vegetables from the local market, fresh baguette, many different kinds of cheese, and cheap charcuterie (dried sausage). Yeah, I know – living the French dream! And it was pretty great. There will certainly be many-a-blog-posts dedicated to each of those food groups. (Yes, even the dried sausage – it’s a thing here.) That being said, I was beyond words when I encountered the kitchen in my new home. It is a beaut. With five gas burners, two ovens, a large shelf of French cookbooks, and a fridge full of food, I felt like I had gone to foodie heaven, and I had no plans to leave anytime soon. Okay, okay. It’s not exactly my kitchen. Anyone who has a concept of Parisian real estate prices, or anyone who watches House Hunters International, knows that there is no way in you-know-where that an apartment, let alone a kitchen, of that size in Paris would be affordable for a student. However, there’s a loophole. Yep, I get to use this kitchen, which is directly above my cosy new ground-floor suite, (mine for the next ten months), all the time! In exchange, I am lucky enough to get to cook, eat, speak French, and hang out five nights a week with the lovely French family to whom the kitchen actually belongs. Pretty cool, eh?

Ah yes, that reminds me! Quiche.

Les vacances.

Paris in August is weird. My arrival last month marked my first time in France, and I assumed that the city I saw was the real thing, that what I observed was Paris going along with business as usual. I had received a few unusual ‘out of office replies’ prior to my arrival (example: ‘Sorry, I am out of the office from July 18 to August 27. Tough luck.’) By North American standards, taking nearly two months’ holidays from a regular office job on is quite extraordinary, so I chalked it up to a few people taking extra-long vacations. “Maybe they banked up their holidays for the past few years and decided to use ‘em all up this summer,” I thought to myself. Hah.

After about a week of hearing mostly English, Japanese, and *insert non-French languages here*, on all of the major metro lines, and after seeing virtually nine out of every ten businesses displaying signs that read, ‘back at the end of August,’ I realized that something was up. Something was off. Then, it hit me: the Parisians had boarded up their windows and/or found Air B&B tenants for their expensive little flats, turned the shop sign from open to closed, and fled to the country. I was in Paris ‘dans les vacances’, which roughly translates to ‘Paris is full of tourists and void of anybody who lives here permanently, except for the few people who have to be here to keep the city going, who are all not-so-secretly wishing they were somewhere else.’

Don’t get me wrong: the retrospective realization that the Parisians had vanished was fascinating, more than anything else. Being a shameless tourist was fun, and I took full advantage of the slower paced lifestyle of the non-touristy-areas. However, a few weeks after my arrival, I knew what had to happen. If I am going to live here, I thought, I must do as the Parisians do. So I did it. I forced myself. I went on vacation. I went to Normandy.

Looking you straight in the eye..

I sit here in a tiny cafe in the 10e arrondissement, sipping strong espresso. It has been two weeks now since I first arrived in Paris. Everywhere I go, I feel as though I discover something new. Stepping into a city for the first time always feels like meeting a someone new, and meeting Paris feels like encountering a new friend who has marvelous amount of secrets, an incredible sense of historical ‘baggage’ that you notice immediately. You know what I mean.

It’s that feeling you get when you first meet someone, and despite the fact that you have only just shaken their hand, learned their name, and said a polite ‘hello’, you look into their eyes and hold their gaze for just a moment longer than usual. It is in that moment that you realize there is a whole person, a whole story, a whole city just waiting to be discovered. You realize with that first eye contact that, until meeting them, you didn’t truly understand what ‘being’ was all about. And this realization sparks a curiosity that you simply cannot put words to. All you know is your necessity to ask questions. To read. To get lost and find yourself again. To marvel at what a city can become. And simply to ‘be’, oblivious to judgement. Paris, with its people, its places, and its nonchalance, looks you straight in the eye with an intensity that leaves you no choice but to investigate.