Lost in Translation

     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.

Love, 

Rachel

La Mer

As a mother, one of the advantages of your daughter living in Paris is that you just won’t be able to resist going to visit her, so it’s practically considered a need to book your plane ticket. As a daughter, some of the advantages of having your mother come to visit—especially when you’re a poor graduate student—are that, for a little while, you’ll be able to abandon your days of living in former servants’ quarters, eat dinner in restaurants that include such rarities as dessert and wine that costs more than €3 a bottle and maybe even possibly be spoiled by The Air-Conditioning in a hotel.

Such a glorious event took place in July, when my mom hopped the Atlantic and became my temporary roommate for two weeks. Besides living like a modest Kim Kardashian for two weeks, I was really just spoiled by having so many laughs with my favorite woman in the world. It being her third time in Paris (the first in 2006 and the second in 2012), I felt an enormous relief in not needing to herd her from one tourist line to the next and instead got to show her the places where, to me, Paris actually feels like Paris and not some really convincing extension of Disney World’s Epcot.

On her first day, I pleaded with her to go with me to Hôtel de Ville (which is City Hall, not a hotel as people usually assume) to watch the World Cup match between France and Germany on a huge screen among thousands of Parisians. Though France ended up losing, it was still great fun to tip back a few pints, get overly invested in the game and show Mom something that the tourists in line under the Arc de Triomphe probably had no idea was even going on.

Watching France lose to Germany

Another day, I took her out to Versailles, which she hadn’t seen since her first visit to France. I’ve been to Versailles five or so times just in the last year alone, so in order to make it a little more special to the both of us, I bought us tickets to Les Grandes Eaux Nocturnes, the fountain and lights show that happens every Saturday night in the gardens during the summer. After a few glasses of wine—something you really can’t ever drink in the palace gardens—with the sun beginning to set, Classical music and bubbles in the air, the fountains flowing and fire torches shooting up out of the lawns, Mom turned to me and, misty-eyed, said it was one of the best days of her life. A glass of Bordeaux can make you start saying all sorts of things, but it was proof enough to me that I was giving her the vacation she so deserved.

Wining at Versailles

NICE IS NICE

For the next week, we headed down to the French Riviera, or the Côte d’Azur. This was a region, like so much of France, that I’d never seen; the closest having been Marseille and Arles when I studied abroad two years ago. We started with four days in Nice (pronounced like ‘niece’). Despite being a veritable city with a metro area of more than a million people and cultural and historical sites to offer tourists, I loved ignoring all of that and spending all of our time just strolling along the waterfront on the Promenade des Anglais, small-scale gambling in the Palais de la Mediterranée, eating copious amounts of Italian food in Vieux Nice and drinking mojitos-fraises while reading Bret Easton Ellis’s horrifying American Psycho in between intervals of swimming on the rocky beaches and sunburning the absolute shit out of myself (Whenever I get sunburnt, I always say it’s the ‘worst sunburn I’ve ever had,’ but this one probably was. I couldn’t walk without wincing). No schedule, no museums and no maps. Did I really learn a damn thing about Nice? No—and it was awesome. This is not the way I usually travel and I should really do it more. But maybe I should read something a little less nauseating while I do so.

Vieux Nice

My little gambler

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY

One day we took a regional train over to Monaco, which only took about a half hour. Maybe it’s my general disgust for people who flaunt their wealth, but I didn’t like Monaco at all. Like most people, I thought of Monaco—which was almost never—as a place with beautiful beaches, historic buildings and gorgeous vistas. It’s true—but it’s a tiny, incredibly artificial, sterile and bland version of Nice. The beaches—of which I don’t recall seeing any for swimming—were ports for enormous yachts, the buildings were all freshly painted and looked like plastic and the views were the exact same as in Nice. It is also outrageously expensive (we ended up just buying sandwiches and eating on a retaining wall next to the palace), since it’s home to the highest number of millionaires and billionaires per capita and the lowest poverty rate on the planet. The attitude here is strictly look-at-all-the-money-I-should-be-donating-to-charity-but-am-instead-blowing-on-myself and after passing so many people wearing Chanel and Prada, I thought, “these people really do think they’re their f*ing khakis.”

Smiling in Monte Carlo, but really just wanting to fight a Monacan.

IN THE EAGLE’S NEST

For the remainder of our week on the Riviera, we stayed in Èze (rhymes with ‘fez’), a nearby village I probably first came across while curating my Pinterest travel boards (Oh God, did I really just admit to that?). The town is perched like an eagle’s nest around 1,000 feet above the sea, about the height of the Eiffel Tower, and is an idyllic—though meticulously manicured—medieval village maintaining a certain level of charm that is clearly sustained through the influx of tourist money and not by any real industry. Towns like these have clearly lost the ability to be self-sufficient ages ago. Èze, like many of Europe’s beautiful and historic towns, is a place sadly devoid of any obvious locals, evidenced by the abundance of spoken English alone. You sort of just have to go with it and ignore the fact that the village is only still thriving because it’s part of the tourists’ playground. Despite all of this, the town still has many quiet spots like the semi-neglected cemetery behind the yellow church where you can smell lavender and olive trees and hear cicadas and nothing else—a far cry from the ambulances of Paris.

Ever since I studied art for a month in Italy during college, I’ve always traveled with a sketchbook at the ready. One afternoon, we found a quiet restaurant called La Taverne that was closed until dinner, but they reluctantly allowed us to have a glass of red wine on their terrace. I began to draw and the owners, who were taking a break and enjoying each other’s company and that of their neighbors, came over to have a look at what I was doing. They were so impressed and asked if I did it comme métier, as a job. I said no, and they were shocked. The owner asked if I’d make her a painting of the front of her restaurant and she’d pay me for it. No one has ever offered to buy my art before (I even feel weird calling it that) and I feel wildly uncomfortable when I get the slightest of compliments, but I couldn't say no. While I sketched, she kept coming over and bringing Mom and I wine, bread and appetizers. She was so passionate about art and asked me if I knew the artist Archimboldo, and I said no. A few minutes later, she came running back to our table with a coffee table book under one arm, and told me all about his art. “For me, he is like Dalì,” she said, glowing. When I finished, she asked if she could kiss me on the cheek and told me with such sincerity, “To me, you are a discovery.” She gave us aprons with the restaurant’s name on them and promised to put my painting on her business card. I’ll never forget that.

La Taverne's owner and her daughter with my painting

LAST TRAIN TO PARIS

No trip is ever complete without a clusterfuck mishap, and ours came in a very expensive way. Èze has an hourly bus that circulates between the village and down to the seaside, taking about twenty minutes one way. On the day we left, we got to the bus stop three scheduled buses ahead of time. And just my luck with timing, no bus arrived for the next hour and a half. By the time we made it to the seaside train station to catch our train to Nice, it had already left. In full-out crisis mode, Mom sat in the baking sun on the side of the train platform and I paced, knowing we were screwed. We hopped the next train and once we were at the Nice station, we realized he had missed our train to Paris…by five minutes. FIVE MINUTES. It was the last 5-hour TGV (high-speed train) of the day, so we had to pay an additional $300 to take a 12-hour night bus and share a six-person cabin hardly bigger than the WC. Thank goodness Mom had the sense to get us a six-pack of Grolsch.

Finally back in Paris, we were able to laugh it off and forget about the whole thing. We walked around the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, explored the far-flung corners of Mom’s favorite neighborhood, Montmartre, relaxed on a Bateaux Parisiens tour on the Seine and drank panachés (beer with lemonade) at Café de Flore. Most importantly, we got to witness the Bastille Day fireworks over the Eiffel Tower. During La Marseillaise, France’s national anthem, I looked around at the thousands, seemingly millions, of singing Parisians looking up at their nation’s symbol, the Eiffel Tower. I got a little misty realizing how finite my time left in France is and how good this country has been to me over the past few years. This is my first home chosen as an adult and I know, even when I'm back across that ocean, that I’ll always have Paris.

Parc des Buttes Chaumont

Before the fireworks on Bastille Day

YOU ARE YOUR MOTHER’S CHILD

Not long after Mom arrived back in Minnesota, her father died. It wasn’t a surprise; he’d been declining for months. I’m glad she was able to come and make memories with me and put aside the tough realities of life and be the hilarious and warm lady whose hugs I miss the most during the hard times in Paris. I can’t believe I missed both of her parents’ funerals because I was living in France two separate times, but I’m content in knowing that I got to spend the majority of my life knowing the two of them, visiting them when they needed it, and admiring their love for each other and the rest of us. If I could sum up Grandpa in three words, they’d be happiness, generosity and golf. He had an exceptional heart and was one of the least selfish people I’ve ever known. He was an extraordinary man and I miss him.

Love,

Rachel

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!