Leaving Paris Pt. 2
Still got it. OM10
For somebody that doesn’t like traveling further than the local I’ve somehow managed to live overseas a little more than anticipated. And when I’m here there’s a lot to keep me here. Yes, one misses friends and family and the familiarity like crazy, but it’s easy to sugarcoat your time away and pick the best bits to remember. For example, I miss the beer in Berlin. Going out on a 20 and coming home a wobbling mess with change in hand, even after a dodgy kebab. I didn’t speak German so I miss the way you could walk through busy streets and feel like you were by yourself as you weren’t listening into other conversations. I really miss the way you could trundle down to the supermarket and come back with a crate of longnecks for 11 bucks and spend the week drinking fine pilsners in your bedroom. I really miss the beer.
With Paris it was harder. I had to interact further than pointing at something on a menu and grunting in a Germanic way. I had a bank account here, bills, and regular haunts. I didn’t make friends more than ‘that guy with the missing tooth I see at the pub sometimes’ but I was still somebody. I won’t say I became Frenchified. Spent a lot of time in brasseries, drank a lot of wine, yes, but still on the outside of the people. Anyway, these are the things I found about the place.
The City
Tourists can be annoying but complaining about tourists is just another humblebrag. Oh, we have a city so beautiful that millions of people visit every year. Our lives, they are ruined.
On that, I don’t think the French are rude, or at least I don’t think it’s down to them being French. I like to think that people can be arseholes on their own without making excuses based on culture, race or anything else. So you might get a dud waiter or some jackass in the street. So nobody wants to help you with directions. Try living in a city where you get around on a moving metal tube full of sweaty tourists and accordion players and see how cheerful you are.
The only thing I really hated was walking anywhere. Pedestrians were the worst. I strongly believe that the French could have improved on the Maginot Line before WWII, and instead of constructing forts along the border, they would have been better off building a series of market stalls, pavements and turnstiles, which would have left German tanks and infantry divisions stalled indefinitely.
The People
Compared to Australians I think the French are more reserved. You’ll find out pretty quickly if an Australian doesn’t like you. They’re easy to read. With the people I knew in Paris it took three months before I kind of got that maybe they weren’t too annoyed by the fact I was talking to them or that they had to spend time in my company, which I chalked up as a win.
French women are very pretty and stylish but they don’t age, they harden. French men in their 30s and beyond set an unfair standard for the rest of the world. I saw a guy talking on his phone in the street, lounging with his leg flung up and over a railing. It looked like the most uncomfortable and ridiculous pose to consider but damn it he pulled it off. Some men look at fashion examples like Beckham or Clooney to emulate, but all I have to do is think of that contortionist and wonder whether he would approve of my clothes or not. Probably not. But then I do come from a place where tucking your wifebeater into your footy shorts is considered swanky.
The bar where I spent most of my time. OM10
The Food
I walked places with a baguette in hand. There is a reason why the French are depicted this way. Baguettes are fucking delicious.
The food in general was pretty choice but the real standout was the boulangeries. If you go, don’t waste your day on selfies in front of the Mona Lisa. Find a good boulangerie and ham out on éclairs for the afternoon. Find a park, put down a towel and turn yourself into a fetid mass of pastry crumbs and gluttony.
Coffee was meh but it’s boring talking about coffee. As a guy from Melbourne it’s expected. I used to live with a barista whose boss had met every donkey of the Bolivian farmer he bought his beans from. The tasting notes for the coffee at that place read like breathless erotica for caffeinated beverages. I mean I like coffee but that was some next-level nonsense.
You can’t get a decent flat white in Europe. The lattes in Sweden are ok. Milchkaffees in Berlin are alright but hard to pronounce with a hangover. In Scotland they taste like scalding transmission oil. So you just don’t drink them. Switch to what the locals are having. Here, the espressos started out like wolverine piss but with some dedication and sugar I got to liking them.
Wine with lunch was good but not exactly new for me, however much I could now bellow ‘it’s cultural!’ if I drank too much in the afternoon.
The Language
The language was fun. When I got here, I could remember the remnants of a few French courses at uni some years back. I wished I could have remembered more. It’s hard learning a language in the country. You don’t want to speak it when somebody repeats what you said back to you to make sure they got it. Yes, I said ‘croissant.’ I’m standing in a boulangerie. Pointing at a croissant. Was my pronunciation that bad they were confused by the noises I was making?
Early on I bought some music gear off leboncoin and I had a coffee with the guy selling it. We spoke English together, thank Jesus, and he made the comment that when people asked him in the street ‘do you speak English?’ he would give the Gallic ‘err, err, quoi?’ rather than a ‘yes, I do.’ The other side to that is looking like a foreign imbecile when you’re trying to say things in their language. Usually they will give up and switch to English out of pity. I didn’t like being an idiot in French. I prefer being an idiot in English where my idiocy is self-inflicted by choice rather than language proficiency.
Later on, as I progressed, my French was like a box full of words and phrases. Fine for simple things, like ‘Yes, I said croissant,’ but for anything more complex it was like trying to put together an op-shop jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing.
I could nearly make it the whole way through contributing to a conversation or telling a story, but usually it ended up like this:
Me (fr) – Do you often have in the country the… the… the thing… like a ham… it has been known to eat apples.
Me (fr) – So there I was, beer in hand, when the cop said to me… something… it wasn’t good… about a fish, perhaps?
Me (fr) speaking about L – I’m just out on a date with my daughter!
I did however get very competent at saying ‘I don’t speak French very well.’ But when you say that fluently they assume you’re being modest, not understanding that out of everything you could possibly say in French that’s the thing you’ve practiced the most. And Parisian French is fast. Telling them to slow down has no effect. So they keep belt-feeding Parisian French at you while you’re all ‘Oui, c’est ça, c’est ça’ and hoping like hell they didn’t ask a question.
I mean if I could live anywhere and all the tropical beachside bars were full Paris would be on the short list.
stumbling through the camino 