Conversations à Paris ...

... View of  the Seine and Ile de la Cité from the west.

Apologies for the long pause between posts. Here it is Monday, March 17 -- isn't that St. Patrick's Day? I can't even remember, and there's no sign of it here. I have been busy orienting myself, getting used to my new surroundings, and finding a niche for myself in this city.  The latter has turned out to be an amazing organization near St. Germain called Centre Internationale de l'ARC, a group of French volunteers, mostly retirees, who meet every afternoon from 14h-19h animer les tables de conversation pour les étrangers (to "animate" -- I love that expression! -- conversation groups for foreigners).  The point is to help us master the French language, of course, but the amazing thing, in this country of skyrocketing prices and gruesome exchange rate, is that it's almost free.  All they ask is a one-time donation of ten euros (about $15 now), and after that you can come as often and stay as long as you like.  Depending on luck and when you arrive, you might have the French animatrice all to yourself, or you might share him/her with 2-5 other people from all corners of the globe.   Participating in three or four sessions so far, I have met people from Brazil, Peru, Bulgaria, Japan, Korea, Serbia, Spain, Mauritania, and Mongolia.  Only one other American to date, a beautiful but unhappy young unemployed lawyer who had married a French man in the US and thought she'd be able to simply transport her American life over to Paris.  Of course it didn't work out that way.  

There is an unemployed Bulgarian man about my age who comes every day.  He always arrives looking depressed but cheers up after an hour or so of conversation and company.  He was an orchestra conductor in Bulgaria who gave up his job to follow his wife to Paris in 2005, where she had managed to land a lifetime appointment in the chorus of the Bastille Opera!  In Bulgaria, he said, he used to earn about 300 euros a month.  Now their son is also a musician, an oboeist, though the only paying job he's been able to find so far is repairing oboes.  I asked the father if, after his own experience, he had tried to discourage his son from going into such a risky profession.  He looked at me, genuinely surprised, and said of course not -- on the contrary, he had encouraged him.  Wouldn't any parent be proud of such a child?

Money, no matter how hard to come by, simply does not have the importance over here that it does in the US.  The culture truly esteems its artists, even when they're going obscure and uncompensated.

Much of the talk at the tables is about how difficult it is to find jobs here and how long the process takes.  I asked the young lawyer if she couldn't find a job with an American law firm in Paris.  She said yes, such things exist, but the application process takes forever and the outcome is often rejection or a grunt job.  Another woman, a statistician, said the only position she'd been offered so far entailed working without pay for a three-month training period!  (In the US that would be illegal, wouldn't it?)

When I am not at l'ARC, I am usually walking around the city, poking my nose in here and there and just soaking up the amazing ambience.  Our apartment is about two blocks from the south end (the long panhandle part) of the Luxembourg Gardens, as well as the fountain you see above ...

The weather has not been great -- the winds have been so strong that I had to remove the plants from the jardinières so they wouldn't blow down to the street.   It's also been rainy and cold, but I prefer it to the blazing sun and heat which I know is coming. I pretty much keep on the move outdoors no matter what (which has also contributed to fewer blogs!).  I've wrecked one umbrella this way, but you can buy them cheap  at any street market.  I like to blame the weather, also, for the fact that I have not yet gotten any good photographs of Paris.  But perhaps the real reason is that the competition is too stiff: this must be the most photographed city in the world.

Steve and I have been to the Petit Palais to see an amazing exhibit of Goya prints (I highly recommend it, if you're coming to Paris before June), two Benjamin Franklin anniversary exhibits (one at Carnavalet, the other at Arts & Metiers -- the French are crazy about this guy!), been guided around the Louvre-Tuileries-Concorde areas by the best tour guide we've ever had, and done numerous walking tours on our own.  In the evenings we've gone to a couple of foreign films with French subtitles -- good language training and easier for us than all-French films.

... Luxem-bourg Gardens again

I have had one other adventure of note.  Last week our doorbell rang; when I picked up the intercom, there was a woman speaking in rapid, distraught French.  She said she was searching for her dear friend, Mme. Bossi, who used to live on the 7th floor but had now disappeared, and did I have any idea where she might have gone?  I said no, but she went on babbling and I could see that I was not going to get off the hook so easily, so I went downstairs to speak to her.  

She was a white haired woman leaning heavily on a cane, peering anxiously in the door to the stairwell.  I let her in and listened to her long story, which had devolved in the aftermath of a fire on the 7th story of our building two weeks before we arrived (the floor above us is charred to a crisp and the whole stairwell smells of smoke).  It turns out that a certain Mme. Bossi, an elderly lady living without electricity (because she didn't pay her bill, perhaps?), was using candles to see by and eventually set fire to the building.  All the rooms upstairs were ruined, and Mme. Bossi was removed to parts unknown...

My visitor, whose named turned out to be Michelle G., implored me to accompany her up to the 7th floor to see if she could find anyone there who might know the whereabouts of her friend.  I was pretty sure there was no one there, and I was worried about her ability to take stairs (our clever elevator only stops in between floors; to get to your étage, you have to walk up or down a half-flight, thus each stop serves two floors -- ingenious, eh?).  But she would brook no argument, so up we went to floor 6 1/2 (shades of Harry Potter!).  As she crept up the final few spiral stairs to the 7th, I ascended behind her with my arms outstretched, wondering if our liability insurance covered accidents in France.

Everything on the 7th floor is charred: the doors, the walls, the ceiling, the floors (quite an experience we missed by two weeks!).  Michelle hobbled over to the black, blistered door opposite her friend's and rapped with the head of her cane.  No answer.  We repeated this down the hall, then came to some painters at work, who knew nothing of Mme. Bossi and affirmed that no one was living up there.  Michelle looked about ready to fall to pieces, so I suggested we descend one floor to my apartment and then decide what to do.  Going down the stairs was far worse than coming up; I was sick with fear, but she managed to make it without falling and rested in my living room, talking nonstop, for about half an hour.  

I tried calling my landlady for advice, but she wasn't home.  I wrote down Michelle's name, address, and phone number and told her I would have my landlady, who might know something of Mme. Bossi, call her as soon as possible.  Then Michelle asked me if I would accompany her back to her apartment, about two blocks away.  Feeling a bit as if I'd just fed a starving cat and been adopted, I shrugged and agreed -- what else did I have to do that would be more of a cultural experience?  And it was great language practice, after all.

We inched our way up Boulevard du Montparnasse and finally made it to her building.  But first she needed to get a few things at the supermarket next door, so we did that together too.  Everyone in there knew her, and she taught me the best butter to buy and the best cookies.  Then I accompanied her up to her apartment, which was also on the 6th floor, large and beautiful, with a walkable balcony running around two sides of the building!  She'd owned it for 25 years and had lived there alone since her husband's death.  She gave me a tour and wanted to make me tea, but I declined, saying I couldn't stay long.  I sat in her kitchen and talked a bit more.  She had just gotten back from seven months at her second home in Bretagne and everything, she said, was en panne (broken) -- the heat, the hot water, the toilet.  She had calls in to various repairmen and kept saying that if she hadn't been away in Bretagne, the fire in our building would never have happened, because she would have forced Mme. Bossi to get her electricity fixed!  

I finally managed to extricate myself.  She showered me with thanks, compliments, and entreaties to return for tea, which I promised to do.  When I called her this week, however, to see how she was doing, she said she was still waiting for the repairmen (en France, quel surprise) and couldn't have me over till everything was fixed.  

On verra (we'll see!).