"I have only just realized how bold I was to travel unprepared and alone through this country...and anyone who travels alone for the first time, hoping for uninterrupted pleasures, is bound to be often disappointed and have much to put up with."
-Goethe, 26 October 1786
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It's now the second week of classes and my schedule has already changed. I decided to drop my elective, Communication and the Global Public Sphere, because I found out about an undergraduate course that is basically my
whole life dream class if there ever was one: Scripts For Travel. I get to learn how to write about travel. I'm about to be the biggest nerd I've ever been. Today, which was my first day, I turned into Hermione Granger. It's mainly a lecture course, but I managed to explain both Stendhal Syndrome and the plot of
A Room With A View to the class. What's wrong with me? I have to do extra work outside of class with my professor to make it worth a graduate course, but I think I'll be okay with that.
My
nerdiness excitement continued into my meeting with
Anne-Marie, a professor with whom I might do my directed study for the semester, or possibly even my thesis. I wasn't really aware of this or a lot of things about my program, but almost everything is up to us to decide. It's so flexible. I can literally work on anything I want to for my projects as long as they relate in some way to cultural translation. In a way, that's great that we have that luxury, but it also gives me absolutely no help in understanding what I need or want to do. Since I eventually want to work in study abroad and travel, we decided that my general subject for the semester will be "foreignness," or
l'étrangeté in French-- ultimately the experience of being foreign in a new place. I'm really interested, obviously, in the experiences of Americans in France, but that doesn't really work within my framework of translating from French to English, but we can do a research paper aspect within our projects, too, so maybe that's where that piece will fit. To flesh the whole thing out, I want to include topics like Parisians' perspectives on French people in the countryside and vice versa,
l'orientalisme (Historical French depictions of Middle Eastern and East Asian cultures- I took a whole film class on this at Macalester in the spring) and French-American relations (Why we love and hate each other). I might also throw in a few
récits de voyage by Hugo, Chateaubriand or Balzac. I'm supposed to choose really any AUP faculty member to work with and I think I'm really liking the idea of working with a French person like Anne-Marie, because she can help me when I don't know what something means in my translating and she also has the opposite perspective on the France and U.S. portion.
If I'm being completely honest, coming back here hasn't really been what I thought it'd be. I think maybe I thought I'd be strutting back in like it's only been a short break and it's back to school with everyone and everything you know. But it's totally not at all. I need to keep telling myself that it's only been two and a half weeks, but I kind of thought I'd find myself laughing on the Quai des Grands Augustins or on the lawn at the Eiffel Tower instead of slumming it around the somber seventh, desperately trying to hold onto my shitty umbrella that's more like a kite and cost less than a kebab and frites or spending hours cleaning the grime off my kitchen walls. Anyone who romanticizes moving to a new country where no one even knows or really cares what your name is has to be out of their minds. This is hard. Really hard. And I've even done this all before. That doesn't make it easier.
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| A sketch I made from my window in the middle of the night last night |
However, there are some nice moments of early bliss in this new life: Watching the Eiffel Tower sparkle from my window, drinking a
café noisette and eating
madeleines from the machines at school (Which always reminds me, Proust-like, of class at the Institut Catholique), getting on one of the new RER trains that doesn't smell like decay, drinking wine and sketching the view from my apartment late at night and those rare, fabled moments of sunshine that makes the city extra-beautiful. A specific moment today was when I left school and was going down the wet steps into the Invalides station and I almost tumbled all the way down (Whenever things like this happen, my mind flashes to the description of Piggy's head cracking open in
Lord of the Flies. Every goddamn time.) and a man smiled at me, concernedly, and asked if I was okay. Another man held the
sortie turnstile door open for me longer than needed. I like being in a country where women are treated nicely.
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| Le Recrutement in June 2006 |
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| Today |
I also ran into Le Recrutement Café in the seventh where I remember taking a picture seven years ago. It didn't feel familiar at all to me. Isn't that weird how you can remember a place so vividly and then when you go back, you start second guessing whether you ever really knew it at all? New impressions always seem to erase old memories. That happens for me in Paris constantly and I feel like I'm losing my mind.
Rachel
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