I finally made myself sit down and create my last monthly video of my thirteen months in Paris. Normally I would have them finished and posted on the first of the month, but this time I just couldn't get myself to put it together knowing this was the last of my footage and the last memories I'll have of Paris...until next time.
In case it wasn't clear what I've been doing this summer
other than traipsing around the Riviera and London, I've actually
been working on my thesis, a translation of a book called Paris: Quinze promenades sociologiques (English: Paris: Fifteen Sociological Walks). The
second reason I chose this master's program (the first being, well, Paris) was that,
like most master's programs abroad, it was only one year in duration—two
semesters of classes and one summer session where you write your
25,000-word-minimum thesis. Knowing what I know now, I am so glad that I went
this route for grad school, because I don’t know if I had it in me to have
done two years back at home. School has always come pretty naturally to me and
I’ve always done pretty well when I’ve tried really hard, and okay when I haven’t.
But grad school is different.
I had to work the hardest I’ve ever worked. There was no
sliding by or cutting corners. The readings were chock-full of complex ideas by
writers and translators who I’d never heard of but that my classmates seemed to have almost known on a personal level. I was the one who showed up to class, barely
having been able to get through a dense, forty-page article on what it means to
be a native informant in cultural translation, having extracted the most minute
kernels of meaning out of it, and then spending the rest of the class period trying
to keep my deer-in-the-headlights look under control because I actually didn't understand any of it. Nothing was easy. I don’t
think there was ever a single moment of complete clarity where I confidently
showed up to a class thinking I had the field of cultural theory figured out in
any sort of way. I was constantly thinking to myself, why in the world did I choose this incredibly expensive year of torture
over teaching English part-time?
Almost the entire time, I would keep prefacing that I was new
and very green to translation. But, underdog as I was, I am so
glad that I did it. I proved to myself that I could get through a year among
some truly brilliant classmates and professors who are entirely more passionate
about translation than I ever care to be. I’ve always felt completely average
in everything that I do and grad school confirmed that to me—but hey, I was
able to roll with the best of them. It’s okay and, frankly, almost a relief to
not be the absolute best at something. It reminds me of when I got to Augsburg,
intending to be a music major and realizing I was no longer the best pianist of
the bunch like I had been at home and that I was actually pretty terrible at
music theory. If I had to go back and choose a master’s program, there’s no
doubt in my mind that I would choose something different, but it is what it is.
There was something very humbling and refreshing about learning a new art form
(and translation really is an art form that Google Translate will never be able
to replicate) from scratch and sitting back and just learning from other people
who are dedicating their lives to transferring the experiences of one culture and
language into another. It’s a rigorous field that is both underappreciated and taken for
granted.
Matt came to visit me for a little over a week in the beginning
of August after his London program ended and then my friend Megan who I’ve been
friends with since our freshman year at Augsburg was in Paris for a month-long
program before heading off to Bologna, Italy for the year. Saying goodbye to
the two of them—Matt goes to school in Indiana and Megan will be in Italy until
next summer—was hard. I don’t like saying goodbye and I don’t like being left
in Paris, my favorite place in the world, without anyone to share in it with
me anymore.
The latter half of August, I devoted myself to getting
serious about my thesis and there were days where I wouldn’t leave my tiny chambre de bonne at all. I started with
the goal of only translating about three chapters of the book, and the more
time that has passed, the more I've added to it. While we were allotted just the summer to
complete our theses, no one in the history of the program has ever finished by
September. Even though I participated in commencement, I don’t officially
graduate until I’ve turned in my thesis, so I hope to submit and defend it via
Skype by December so I can graduate this semester.
On top of translating from sunrise to sunset, I moved from my
room with a view. I moved myself and my seventy-three bags of hell eight
minutes away on foot to the rue Saint-Jacques in a studio twice the size of my former room. Let me just say that you can’t really complain about moving until you’ve
singlehandedly carried a fifty-pound suitcase among other luggage down the world’s
steepest spiral staircase. It gives me a whole new respect for the donkeys in
Santorini that I once refused to ride up the 500 steps of the caldera. I feel
you, donkeys. I feel you.
So now it’s two weeks left in Paris to close up shop—cancel my
phone plan and bank account, figure out what in the hell I’m going to do with
all of my stuff and say goodbye once again to this city I’m so in love with. But somehow, someday, I'll be back. I promise.
When I go about making my videos each month, I usually just choose a song that I've been listening to a lot that I estimate will be the right length for the amount of footage I have once it's been cut down considerably. I'd been listening to "Café Lights" by Hey Marseilles a lot and it seemed to fit for the amount of clips I had and it has some stereotypical accordion music in it--perfect for Paris, right? It ended up making for an unintentionally and borderline-depressing video because it features my best friends in Paris who have all left our great city this month. I didn't mean for it to come off quite so melodramatic, but enjoy it anyway!
“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.
Created for a final presentation in my Cultural Translation Workshop, this is a video translation of the last academic year of my life between Paris and Minneapolis. With over an hour of footage to narrow down, I chose clips depicting the constant movement and restlessness of living in two places, which can result simultaneously in both excitement and loneliness. No matter where I live, in Paris or in Minneapolis, my heart is always missing the other.
April
My regular monthly video for April, including visiting Fontainebleau, running the The Color Run 5K, visiting Annecy and Geneva with my sister, hiking on my birthday in the Alps and, of course, regular life in Paris.
A woman stands at baggage claim ripping into a new Marlboro carton, waiting for her suitcase. A couple stands kissing on the moving sidewalk, oblivious to the rest of the travelers and, to be perfectly honest, lucky they didn't get an elbowing from me as I scraped by them. I'm back in Paris, if it weren't obvious enough.
I spent just under a month back at home in Minnesota and it was as glorious as I predicted. After arriving home sans luggage (Lost at Schiphol Airport) and sans 40-euro bottle of duty-free wine I specially bought for our Christmas dinner (Confiscated at Schiphol Airport), I spent my days: sleeping till the afternoon, nourishing myself with Nordeast, frosting, root beer, oreos, bagels and peanut butter, driving cars, researching my family ancestry, watching Netflix until 3 AM every night (New Girl, Blackfish, The Shining and a feeble attempt at The Hunger Games before I lost interest), reading non-school material (On the Map: Why the World Looks the Way it Does by Simon Garfield), going to concerts, playing the piano, shopping, gambling, trying out new restaurants, getting a new phone to replace my stolen iPhone, skiing for the first time in ten years with my sister and realizing my lessons served me well from back in the day and spending lots of time with my favorite Minnesotans. But, alas, there are only so many days a person can go without putting on real clothes and not feel like they're at the Overlook Hotel. I walked around the house shouting "REDRUM!" whenever my mom had her back turned.
Goodbyes are hard, especially because I won't be home again until at least September. But it was time to finish up this master's degree and continue living my Paris dreams or whatever, so I left. I have a long road ahead of me.
Part One of my January video
For someone who loves traveling, I sort of hate it. I mean, the act of traveling...well, it sucks. No matter what, I can guarantee at least several of these will happen: I won't sleep more than twenty minutes on any flight, I'll get stuck next to the baby that cries louder than it normally would just to punish the rest of us for not having kids, I'll have no room overhead for my carry-on, so under my legs it goes, my flight will be delayed, airport security will dig through my meticulously-packed bags despite complying with all the rules (Especially at Shithole Schiphol Airport) or my ears won't pop and I'll start whimpering in agony to myself for the last fifteen minutes. Or if none of the above happen, I'll have a unique situation like on Sunday when I got to my apartment and my landlady locked me out (long story) and I was so jetlagged that I tried sleeping in my hallway against my door until she got home three hours later.
But I made it. I'm in Paris. Everything is fine and I'm not flying again for over a month.
To backtrack quite a bit, December was a blur. My friend Ashley from high school managed to fly out from Boston to visit for a weekend and I had a great time introducing her to Paris and to Europe in-between my classes that I couldn't skip and conference calls she had to make because she technically didn't take any time off from work. I made her walk till her feet were borderline sprained and barked at her to get off my futon, stop being jetlagged and go out, because you don't waste your three days in Paris being tired. (You just don't, Ashley.) Being cold-weather natives at heart, we sat outside with a blanket for dinner in the Place du Tertre and drank wine on the Quai des Grands Augustins, as well as hitting the obvious spots like the Louvre, the top of Notre-Dame, the Champs-Elysées and the Eiffel Tower (though she wouldn't climb it). It's a great thing to have an old friend in this big city.
Ashley & I in the Place des Vosges
The rest of the month was devoted to school. I had an awful cold for a week or two that had me going through a box of tissues a day and coughing so badly my ribs hurt. Basically I kissed any and every social invitation goodbye and hunkered down in my chambre de bonne until everything that I had procrastinated on got unprocrastinated. In the process of writing close to forty pages in a week, I was missing the simpler days of the low-stress classes of my study abroad semester and the driving passion I had for my French degree that I don't have for translation. If any college students are reading this, you need to realize your finals could be a lot worse. You could be a graduate student.
Today, the official start of my last semester of school ever (I will not be doing a Ph.D. Do not let me think that's a good idea. It's not.) and I woke up early as I always do at the beginning. I felt daunted by the work ahead of me listed on my syllabi and doubted whether I can do this as I always do at the beginning. The RER B was bursting at the seams during the morning rush hour. I drank copious amounts of coffee and admired the beautifully overcast sky sheathing the Eiffel Tower in fog. I bought a book for class, Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau, from Brian at The Abbey Bookshop, my favorite bookstore in Paris because he always gives me free coffee, sometimes with maple syrup (He's Canadian), and genuinely loves helping me find what I need. I imagine The Abbey is what Shakespeare & Co. once was before the tourists found it.
I took a long way home to avoid the RER B, taking the boulevard Saint-Michel to rue Monsieur le Prince and the Place de l'Odéon and winding through the nearly-empty Jardin du Luxembourg. The green metal chairs were all empty, a rare sight in the warmer months. January is a wonderful time in Paris because you feel like it's yours. It's not even very cold, despite all the complaining Californians and Parisians with very limited cold tolerances.
My last first day of school picture ever.
Foggy day in the Luxembourg Gardens
The pruned trees in winter always remind me of the vines in Sleeping Beauty.
rue Herschel
rue Michelet
So as I start the new year, what did 2013 mean for me? It was probably my biggest year yet. I worked my ass off applying for graduate school, got in and spent months working on paperwork which included a visit to Chicago, somehow graduated from college with Latin honors, said goodbye to my little companion Ribby, and moved back to the city that makes me so, so happy. Moving here is the hardest thing I've ever done (so much more so than my semester in college) but I've somehow gotten this far. I try to view it like this: if you're going to do something hard, you might as well do it where you want to. I don't want to have regrets of what could have been.
What Grad School in France Has Taught Me
1. You can't get everywhere in thirty minutes or less. In fact, you can't get most places in thirty minutes or less, even though Mary-Kate and Ashley taught me I could travel 9,000 miles to Transylvania in "about twenty minutes."
2. You can't procrastinate like you did back in college. I'm finally learning that starting a research paper two days before it's due is really, really stupid.
3. The Eiffel Tower is really distracting. So is people-watching from my window, Deezer, Pinterest and old Britney Spears videos on YouTube circa 2001.
4. When a professor assigns you five books to read for the semester, you read them ASAP. You shouldn't read other books for fun.
5. You absolutely cannot skip class. Period. I think back on the days when I could Ferris Bueller-it in Montmartre during my study abroad semester and no one cared. That was such sweet freedom.
5. Google Calendar is sometimes the only thing keeping my life intact. I'm holding on for dear life.
6. Sleep can be the most fun part of the day.
7. Saturdays, and even Fridays, are legitimate study days. For the first time in my life, any weekend day is now fair game to get things done.
8. Chocolate and wine is sometimes a meal. After spending most of my life with a certain nonchalance toward chocolate, I've recently realized that everyone's right. It's pretty good. And it sometimes replaces meals when I don't want to go get real groceries.
9. Doing your master's in France before you're 26 is really smart. In a word, discounts. I can get into any national museum for free and get reduced prices on a lot of things.
10. Doing your master's in France before you're 26 makes you the youngest. Everyone else has time to figure out their lives for a bit longer than me. When people ask what I was doing before this career-wise, I have nothing to say. I'm the eternal underdog.
11. Wine and croissants will never let you down, but the RER will. My frown has been turned upside down so many times thanks to them.
12. Coffee is everything.
13. Grad school in one year instead of two means everything is overly intense. Good luck trying to hold down a job on top of it.
14. Grad school in one year instead of two is a relief. I probably wouldn't be doing this at all if it were two.
15. Be really passionate about what you choose to study. It's so much harder if you're not.
But the main thing I've learned from Paris is that you don't have to do what everyone else is doing. Let everyone else live up to those underlying expectations for what your twenties are supposed to be. I'm having a great time doing what I truly want to do.
I don't really know how, but it's easy to forget how lucky I am to be living in Paris. Maybe it's because life here has become so routine that I forget that it's really the Eiffel Tower that I'm looking at from my desk when I'm typing out my papers and blog posts or that I forget if the conversation I just had was in French or English. When I'm falling asleep at night, the Eiffel Tower's search light lights up my room as it passes. Everything is just so normal, so quotidien, that I forget how far I am from home and that this, however comfortable it is, will never truly be my hometown. I cross the Seine like it's the Mississippi, but it's not. It takes looking at a map to really have it register in my brain that I'm over four thousand miles away from where I grew up. It's really humbling to constantly receive blank stares when you tell someone where you're from and they have no idea what it even is. I usually just agree with people when they think it's Indianapolis or that it's "the city with that car race." Basically my entire existence is lost on people here. Unless I tell them I was born in Texas.
I haven't really blogged in a while because I'm such a perfectionist; if I can't write something perfectly, I lose interest. I just can't do it. This really applies to school. I feel like my brain is so muddled all the time and that I'm being pulled in so many directions that I can't be as productive as I need to be. My directed study adviser, after I was obviously struggling to stay awake during our one-on-one meeting, told me to eat more fruits and vegetables because "Il faut nourrir le cerveau comme les muscles." She's right. I can't realistically keep eating a baguette, a croissant and a ham-and-cheese sandwich for every meal (Yes, I ate all of those as one meal on Friday).
This brings me to school. I have four or five weeks left until the semester is over and I have to write a twenty-page research paper, write a 5,000 word travel essay, write a travel feature article, prepare and teach a translation workshop, read two books and finish translating the article "La force des cultures" by Philippe d'Iribarne. Most of the time I feel like I'm treading water and my head keeps bobbing below the surface. And that is a horribly stressful simile because I'm terrible at treading water. I never passed all six levels at swimming lessons and had to retake level four three or four times. So this is how I feel about school, essentially--like I'm drowning.
No matter how much I love Paris, I constantly think about how easy it would be if I didn't throw myself into this situation. What if I had just graduated from college, gotten a job and found an apartment? That definitely would've been easier than shelling out all the money to live in one of the most expensive arrondissements in one of the world's most expensive cities and less mentally taxing than having to say everything, however minor, in another language. I miss coming downstairs in the morning and people are happy to see me. But I was meant to be a drifter. I mean, the signs that I'd one day live abroad were already there when I was eight and writing travel journals.
On Monday last week, I received an email that I would be having my OFII (Office Français de l'Immigration et de l'Intégration) medical appointment. This appointment is required for anyone staying in France longer than six months (correct me if I'm wrong) and is necessary for attaining your titre de séjour, which validates your visa. So if the whole CampusFrance and visa appointment process wasn't enough, I still had work to do. AUP's immigration services office continually reassured me that I had done everything correctly and that the OFII was swamped with an abnormal amount of applicants, so we all had to have patience. With one day's notice, I had to track down all the necessary documents (birth certificate, passport, take pictures in a Photomaton booth, buy 58 euros worth of timbres fiscaux, find my housing certification and pick up my convention from the immigrationdirector), take off work and head to their office on the rue de la Roquette near Bastille for my medical appointment, which is just bullshit bureaucracy so the French government knows that I'm healthy and can stay in France and not infect their people. We were warned that if we missed this appointment, we would become "illegal citizens on the French territory" and thus be deported or fined or imprisoned if we were caught. Maybe all of the above. Unfortunately, with racial profiling as prevalent as it is in the U.S., the likelihood of me being asked for an ID by a police officer is relatively low, but nevertheless I didn't want to get my ass banned from France, so I made sure I was on time.
The required Photomaton photos for OFII
The day was sunny and warm and I got to Bastille early. When I left the sortie, I started smiling--I really missed the place! My internship at French Travel Partners on the rue Amelot and the nightlife back in 2012 made Bastille a hub of memories for me. I don't spend a lot of time in the onzième anymore, so it's probably one of the few places in Paris that remains part of my study abroad experience and hasn't been changed by my current life here. I like that.
The obvious thing for me to do with the awkward hour I had before my appointment was to head to my beloved Place des Vosges. I can't tell you how weird it is to realize that the last time I smelled the seafood coming from the Bar à Huitres on the boulevard Beaumarchais and turned the corner to see all the pigeons and kids and elderly people filling out the square--Paris's oldest--was more than a year and a half ago. It's some serious déjà vu and still a little sad for me that I'm the only one of my friends that came back. But again, I know I'm ridiculously lucky. The first time I ever came to the Place des Vosges, I was borderline map illiterate and constantly in fear of screwing up at my internship. I'd eat my croissant and ham-and-cheese sandwich, dropping about half my croissant on the ground accidentally for the pigeons and thinking I might not make it until the end of the semester. Sitting there now, on "my" bench (the third one in in the northeast corner) I was remembering how much I loved Paris then (despite my worries) and how I promised myself that I'd come back and do it all over again. I guess I'm pretty good at keeping promises.
Last lunch break in 2012 in Place des Vosges
I was such a professional at FTP
The actual OFII appointment went just fine. It was my first experience with French doctors and overall they're really the same as American doctors; they're just a bit more nonchalant about privacy and tend to sit really close to you. I walked out less than an hour later with the sticker in my passport that basically says "Dude, it's alright. Rachel's with me." for anyone questioning why I'm here. I'm a resident of France now, kids!
Other than work, school and residency appointments, I'm continuing to meet new people almost everyday, which is a beautiful part about living in a huge city. Thankfully, everyone we meet has been really enthusiastic about speaking both English and French with us and there's no shortage of good times. I miss everyone from home, but I'm doing my best to not let it be a crutch that prevents me from living out my dream of being here and meeting new people and learning about the world. I really wouldn't trade any of this for any other situation and someday I know I'll love helping people do what I've been fortunate enough to have done myself.
I miss you, you who's reading this, and if you're from Minnesota, see you in a month!
Love,
Rachel
Scroll down for my favorite pictures from the last few weeks. All my pictures are up on my Flickr.
Jardin du Luxembourg
Jardin du Luxembourg
Raspail station
Promenade Plantée, one of the spots Céline takes Jesse in Before Sunset
