Paris 1

Paris is hallowed ground.  It is a lodestone towards which a metal needle inside of me has been pointed for many years, a place that has been built up in my mind, shaped, added on to, remodeled with new wings, towers, wall-length windows, a castle made of words, and all that accompany words…fantasy, half-truths, the seeing through others’ eyes.

Paris was the place I was most intent on visiting in Europe, and it was the first trip I took outside of Spain.  As one of the most hyped and romanticized cities in the world, my particular fantasy began early in college, as I began studying philosophy my sophomore year.  Sartre was my introduction, my first taste of French thinking and style, its independence, its liberties, and its convolutions. 

Around this same time, after finishing the requirements for my minor in Spanish, I started taking French, and continued for 5 semesters or so, concluding with a literature class that focused primarily on the 19^th and early 20^th century.  At the same time, as I delved further into philosophy and especially “critical theory” writ large, I became further enamored with the French modus operandi, the panache that surged through all the author’s work.  And then of course, there are the others, the non-French, who called Paris home for whatever length of time and whose enthrallment with the city is infectious. 

Among those who I came into contact with:  Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Hugo, Zola, Flaubert, Voltaire, Jarry, Apollinaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Proust, Artaud, Breton, Tzara, Dalí, Picasso, Miller, Hemingway, Stein, dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Godard, Eluard, Man Ray, Duchamp, Bataille, hell even Owen Wilson. 

I wanted to be the flâneur, to wander the streets, absorb the buildings, drink wine, eat cheese, sit on a terrace and watch the people go by. I flew from Madrid to Beauvais on a Ryanair flight, landing at the airport around 7:30 and boarding the bus for an hour or so ride into the city proper.  It was dark, and I got the impression that the scenery wasn’t that impressive anyway.  Once we got into the city however, things picked up speed, took shape.  My heart jumped a little bit as I got the first glimpse of the illuminated Eiffel Tower in the distance. 

I was staying with a friend, who is and has been an au pair for a French family for the last year or so, and who had recently started working at a tiki bar in the former red light district of Paris, right by the Moulin Rouge.  By the time I got off the bus, she was already on her way to work, so I had to make my way there from Porte Maillot, in the western part of the city.  Finding the metro proved difficult, and then my data ran out on my phone, leaving me mapless and disoriented.  I took shelter in a large shopping center/hotel near by, where I was able to get wi-fi, and contact my friend and recharge the credit on my pay as you go phone plan. 

The tiki bar, called Dirty Dick, a name which was kept from the previous tenants, was right next to Metro Pigalle, and once I found the metro stop at Porte Maillot, was easy to find.  Once I got to the bar, I greeted my friend, who I hadn’t seen for over a year, and talked a bit, but since she was working we couldn’t catch up that much.  All the employees wear Hawaiian shirts. Bottles are thrown from the length of the bar from one barkeep to another.  Drinks are lit on fire (evidently cinnamon is flammable) and served in giant conch shells. 

I got discounted drinks, so I hung out and talked with a friend of my friend’s, an LA native who has lived in France for the last 10 years, doing various things over that time and now has just opened up an English language school.   We hung out at the bar, and covered a pretty broad swath of topics, ranging from living in Paris, to parallels between the structure of the electron cloud model and the structure of the universe (or universes) to Tinder, which I’ve found is ubiquitous in Europe. 

Near closing time, we left, grabbed a couple of beers (Kronenbourg 1664) from a quicky mart (I know they don’t call them chinos in Paris…but I don’t know what they do call them), and walked back to his apartment, where we hung out until my friend got off work.  The biggest takeaway I got is that Paris isn’t an easy place to live.  It’s not the fairy tale it’s made out to be, which is obvious and makes sense, but it is still always more affecting to hear from someone who has lived there and been through the various trials and tribulations that are concomitant with living in a city, especially as a foreigner.  Paris has its issues, as do all places, but it seems to be a less safe city than Madrid for example.  Both this guy and my friend had been mugged at some point in the city.  It’s also just expensive, and Parisians are notoriously cold to non-Parisians, whether French or foreign. 

At the same time, in the end, he was very clear about the things he loved about the city, that despite the various issues, it is still a unique and beautiful place to live. Little things, streets, views, restaurants, cafés are what impress themselves into your mind.