Bright Lights, Bigger City

After living in France for quite a while—a whole year, in fact—I’ve grown pretty used to being an American in Paris. My French has improved drastically (even though I’m usually shy about it), to the point where I’m able to understand voicemails in French—something that I just shrugged my shoulders at when I studied abroad. I could draw a fairly accurate map of the métro without cheating and I could navigate the city in my sleep (Largely thanks to my Vélib’ bike share subscription—biking around Paris is incredible and has honestly changed my life). Beyond the basics of speaking (albeit, with non-fluency) and commuting, I also have a pretty good grasp on some cultural essentials—I don’t speak-scream anymore like all good Americans do in public, I wear almost exclusively shades of black and I know what constitutes good bread (Moi, I prefer baguettes de tradition, or simply tradis: they’re shorter, denser baguettes that are government-regulated for quality and are usually still warm from the oven). Most days, I’m comfortable being, as my favorite pizza-maker at Pernety calls me, the Américaine. I get a thrill out of living somewhere that isn’t like home in Minnesota; Paris feels like home in a different way.

And then I went to London.

Buying my tickets four days in advance, I spent a long weekend in London visiting Matt (He left Paris for a summer program there) at the end of July. For the price of an average dinner in Paris, I bought bus tickets through Eurolines (A European equivalent to the Megabus—in every way) and spent eight hours driving the same route as the Eurostar in roughly four times the timespan. I look forward to the day when I cease to carry a student visa and can afford to travel based on convenience concerns rather than budget ones.

I hadn’t left France in months and hadn’t been in an English-speaking country in over half a year, so I felt quite dépaysée. I was suddenly terrified by the prospect of ordering food, had no idea how the Tube worked or how to act on it and had an almost harder time understanding people speaking to me than I do back in Paris (Almost. Let’s not be ridiculous, we were all speaking English after all). I was back in the Anglo-Saxon World of Rules and Order—the sidewalks were suspiciously clean, and a few stores we went into wouldn’t sell alcohol after a certain time on Sunday.  Maybe it’s because London is seventeen times the size of Paris land-wise and thus has a lower population density, but the city also felt much quieter and reserved in places whose Parisian counterparts would be raucous at this time of year.

I’d been to London before eight years ago, so I didn’t feel any pressure to see anything in particular, continuing that lazy-but-it's-okay attitude towards traveling that I’d picked up in Nice. Matt and I mainly walked around—and with that whole London-is-seventeen-times-bigger-than-Paris thing, it was a lot of walking. I was happy to have a few new experiences, like eating authentic fish and chips from Fishcothèque (I never had it last time!), strolling through the dainty neighborhoods near Hyde Park and looking at art—and, suffering a bout of museum delirium, disrespectfully mocking most of it—in the National Gallery and the Tate Modern. We bought a baguette and beer for a Hyde Park picnic, drank wine I’d brought from France in Trafalgar Square, and picked up fruit in the Borough Market for breakfast. It was fun to hang out in a city that is almost exactly like America for a weekend, but it confirmed to me that Paris is the city for me, with its unmatched beauty, its liveliness—and its dog shit-encrusted sidewalks.  

Maybe see you in another eight years, London.

Rachel