Girls From the North Country

“Please, let’s get out of this place,” a man in khaki shorts insists to his family just off Paris’s anthill, the Place du Tertre in Montmartre. Now that summer is in full swing, I can hardly blame him. The deserted streets of January, the cool air flowing freely through the Louvre and spoken French have been replaced by sunshine, long lines and iPad “photography.” The tourists have claimed Paris for themselves and we can either beat them or join them…so I’m joining them.

Before I get ahead of myself by declaring that there’s sunshine in Paris, we need to backtrack to when my friend Amanda arrived on May 23. Following a week or two of post-finals life (who’s counting at this point?), Amanda flew in from Minneapolis to join me in my shameless pseudo-vacation lifestyle for a week. It reliably rained on and off the entire week and I think she got to see about two hours total of sunshine. That’s Paris.

It being Amanda’s first time in Paris, I did my duty of showing her the best of what I know Paris can offer. I tried my hardest to fight my new nocturnal tendencies and get us started each day at a reasonable hour (in my post-grad life, it means anything considered A.M.) with leisurely cappuccinos and croissants every morning at Le News Café (78 rue d’Assas). Some highlights: a show by local Minneapolitan Jeremy Messersmith at Les Trois Baudets (64 boulevard de Clichy) where we bizarrely ran into other Augsburg students, window-shopping and Berthillon ice cream on the Ile Saint-Louis, playing the old untuned piano in Shakespeare and Co., winning the weekly pub quiz and a pitcher of cocktails at The Highlander (8 rue de Nevers), watching people play pétanque in the Jardin du Luxembourg, warming up with a coffee at the classically-Parisian Le Consulat (18 rue Norvins), strolling the gardens at Versailles, graduating from the American University of Paris at the Théâtre du Châtelet, having a pizza party in my tiny apartment with my friends, an unexpectedly non-touristy boat ride on the Bateaux Parisiens at night, and to-die-for steak dinners at both my new favorite, À Bout de Souffle (17 bis rue Campagne Première) and my old favorite, La Bastide d’Opio (9 rue Guisarde).

Amanda is one of those friends with whom you could maintain the same friendship even if you only saw her once every ten years. I was so grateful she shelled out the big bucks and vacation time to flâner les rues (We once got to 26,000 steps in a day), laugh, eat, stay out too late and remind me of home. My friends here in Paris started noticing my Minnesotan accent (“Root beer”) and it was so fun to have two of us for a change.

You betcha. 

Rachel

Eglise Saint-Sulpice

Jeremy Messersmith

Musée Rodin

At the top of the Eiffel Tower

Jardin du Luxembourg

Admiring my lovely view

Le Consulat

Versailles

A visit to the Palais Garnier with Matt

Before our boat cruise on the Seine

Berthillon ice cream- quite simply, the best!

I Know Places

"How I wish my friends could be with me for a moment to enjoy the view which lies before me."

          -Goethe, 12 September 1786

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    "I'm going to push you to have more confidence in knowing what you want," my advisor said to me this week during our meeting. He's right. I probably should, in a lot of areas. What he was getting at is that I need to figure out what I want to work on for my directed study this semester and ultimately, my thesis. It's hard for me to grasp that I'm at the academic level of having to do a thesis or that I could even be capable of it. I have the mindset of the underdog and to be really successful at this, I'll need to drop that. My school has a lot of Ivy League-ers and once again, I've been thrown down among the youngest and least accomplished. I have a lot to prove, but I still don't know what I want, in my program or in my life.

     Orientation week is now over and I'm looking forward to classes starting tomorrow. I'm taking five classes: Communications and the Global Public Sphere, What is Cultural Translation?, Translation Workshop, Historical Systems of Cultural Translation and a directed study. I'm also going to try and audit a French course, if possible since it's free for grad students. I felt like it'd be weird to be in Paris and not be taking a French course. I've been continuously enrolled in French courses since I was fifteen. I think it'd be good for me, since my classes are all in English and everyone at school speaks English. I'm actually surprised to find I'm a rare breed in that I speak French pretty well. I can't imagine coming here to live and not knowing a lick of French, but there are plenty of people in that boat. They'll learn.

      On Friday, the cultural translation (CT) program had an eight-hour meeting to introduce ourselves and for the faculty to introduce themselves. I tried with every speck of energy in me to not fall asleep. I haven't had coffee yet in Paris and oh boy, do I need it. To top it off, we sat in a circle, so I'm sure all my new, impressive and distinguished professors thought I was narcoleptic or hungover.

My campus

      That night, we had a cocktail hour and Bateaux-Mouches night for the graduates, which was awesome considering we got free dinner, wine and a ride on the Seine (Not technically free, since our orientation fee was five hundred euros). For the rest of the weekend, when I wasn't attending optional orientation activities or trying to clean my slightly dirty apartment (I opened the fridge today and almost gagged. The American dollar doesn't take you far in terms of getting a spacious, clean place to live, let me tell you.), I've been reacquainting myself with my favorite Paris haunts. Yesterday, I spent my day on the Ile Saint-Louis and in the Latin Quarter, eating Berthillon sorbet, browsing the bouquinistes and sitting in the sun with my eyes closed in parks. This week has been so hard, so it was nice to walk around by myself and not have report to anyone or have any sense of time. I don't yet have a phone and I didn't bring a map, either. That is freedom if I've ever known it.

Bateaux-Mouches- it wasn't freezing like last time in January 2012!

In the park behind Notre-Dame, creeping on children and enjoying the sunshine

Berthillon sorbet. I dare you to find better sorbet/ice cream.

     I joined a few other grad students on a tour of the Latin Quarter and we passed so many memories, particularly the steps at St-Etienne-du-Mont, which were featured in Midnight in Paris and where I last spent time with my favorite Paris friends. If you're reading this, I miss you and think of you guys all the time. Come back to me!

     If I had to say one really great thing about my new school, it's how diverse its population is. I made a friend who's from Athens and her and I had a great dinner and conversation outside on the rue de Buci on Saturday night. These are the kinds of people I probably would never encounter at home and what an awesome experience it is to have.

Dinner on the rue de Buci

    Today, I put on my photographer cap and ventured into the Jardin du Luxembourg to take photos. Just as I was settled against a tree, basking in the sun, listening to a jazz band play in one of the pavilions, and thinking, This truly is the most beautiful city on Earth, a bird took a shit on my pants. That's Paris for you. You can never be too content for too long, or it shits on you.

I forgot that I'm a GIANT in France and always need to bend down for mirrors

Jardin du Luxembourg

Jardin du Luxembourg

Jardin du Luxembourg

Bird merde right on my new pants

My street

St-Sulpice, my favorite church in Paris

The Highlander. I need to recruit new team members for pub quiz night.

Jared & Taylor's lock

Enjoying the sunset from home

   
     I walked to the Institut Catholique de Paris and The Highlander, two of my past hangouts and then on to the Pont des Arts to affix Taylor and Jared's lock that I gave them at their wedding in prime real estate on the bridge, which has gotten so much fuller since the last time I saw it. I then spoiled myself with speculoos gelato from Amorino on rue de la Huchette. In Shakespeare & Co., I found the screenplay for Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, the latter of which starts in the bookshop. I got into the Before series this summer and I'm completely hooked. The other day, a few people were telling me I remind them of Julie Delpy and that they'll need to find me a Jesse in Paris. I thought that was funny and cute to say. But I hope I'm not that neurotic.

Extremely excited about this.

     Anyway, the Eiffel Tower is sparkling for four more minutes, so I think I'll go and enjoy that on my balcony before I have to be professional and go to sleep at a reasonable time. Bonne nuit, mes chéries.

Rachel

Midnight in Paris

    My last week in Paris has arrived. Thinking back to the terrified version of me who arrived at the foyer with two heavy suitcases, panting and lost, I really had no idea then how much I would love the next four months. This has been my dream for as long as I can remember and it's saddening beyond words that it's ending so soon. I'm so thankful for every street, every friend, every croissant and every perfect Parisian night I've been lucky enough to experience.

Montmartre,  5:45 am

     This weekend, we had dinner at our French friend's apartment out in one of the rich western suburbs. It was  fun having lively discussions, laughing and eating a wonderful dinner. The next night, we decided to stay up all night and watch the sunrise from Montmartre. It was not as wonderful as you'd expect, considering the 18th arrondissement is full of sketchy people at night, but it's a special memory I'll always have, watching the dark, pink sky fade to blue over all of Paris.

Versailles, the first time when we were happier!

     A few hours later, we went to Versailles for the second time this week to see the inside of the palace. It was a terrible decision. There were so many people that we couldn't move and I wasn't rested enough to be patient with people literally shoving me to get pictures of the rooms they probably knew nothing about. It's so frustrating when you care about something, have studied it for years, and hoards of people don't let you enjoy it! Stephanie and I rode the RER back home shaking our heads at each other.

I love my friends (This is Stephanie)

    I've also visited the top of Notre-Dame (my favorite view of Paris), enjoyed ice cream from Berthillon on the Ile-St-Louis (Their pineapple sorbet is to die for.) and walked all around the city, visiting beautiful centuries-old churches, like St. Etienne-du-Mont and Saint Severin.
     It's hard to wrap my head around the fact that in about two weeks I'll be using dollars instead of euros to buy Kemps ice cream instead of Amorino gelato, enjoying my coffee at Starbucks instead of a café, choosing from a limited selection of Yellow Tail wine instead of the never-ending aisle of cheap and wonderful French wines at Franprix, shopping at the Mall of America instead of the Champs-Elysées and... croissants. Oh, the croissants. I'll be pretending the grocery-store-hot- dog-bun-croissants are flaky and full of French butter (They're not.). I've been saying that at first I'll be really excited to be home and then about two days later I'll be laying in bed with my Paris sweatshirt on, crying onto a box of macarons while watching Midnight in Paris. This city really gets to you and I'm a prime example.

Rachel