un nouveau jour
It’s a beautiful, cloudless morning, my first in Paris. With morning comes my first realization that I have forgotten something important (my camera charger, lost somewhere in the detritus of boxes that litters my bedroom floor) and, soon, my first Continental meeting with the other members of my program (in which I’ll be given another precious opportunity to make a fool of myself asking more questions I should know the answers to).
It seems impossible that 36 hours ago, I was asleep in Scottsdale. Paris is nothing like it, to say the least. After arriving at Charles de Gaulle around 9:30 (late, like everything else I was involved in yesterday) and spending half an hour (!) trying to figure out how to make a call, I spent about three battling a series of trains. After buying my ticket for the RER (the lines which serve the outlying suburbs of Paris) - a more difficult task than I expected, owing largely to the fact that I was just one in a sea of confused tourists - the train was mysteriously delayed about 45 minutes. After making it to Paris proper, I ran from one end of the metro station to the other three or four times, luggage fluttering behind me, shoving various (seemingly identical) tickets into various slots before at last collapsing onto the necessary train.
When I finally arrived at my destination, a charming, seven-story building (beginning, as the French do, with floor zero) not far from the Arc de Triomphe, I met Kent, a friendly software engineer and American expatriate who also lives in my landlady’s apartments, and soon after, my landlady herself. Mme de Sars is a practitioner of old-school landladying, the kind I’m only accustomed to reading about in novels - preparing little meals for her tenants, interred in miniature cells scattered throughout the building, and cheerfully chattering to us in French (which neither Kent nor I have much aptitude for), smiling gamely at our stuttering Franglish responses (which, although she speaks little English, she seems to understand with ease).
My room, more reminiscent of a dorm room than anything else, is comfortable if small, with a sink, a refrigerator, and some rudimentary furniture. I’m the only one of Mme’s tenants on the seventh floor, and the other residents are shadowy, mysterious figures, large Gallic men with cigarettes dangling impossibly from their mouths. The elevator resembles a phone booth which, after being beaten repeatedly with several sledgehammers, was shoved into a seven-story closet. Sound carries unexpectedly well - when someone uses the bathroom, some thirty feet away, it sounds like he’s pissing in a concert shell, and I have prime tickets.
After being briefly whisked around the premises, I sunk thankfully into a seven-hour nap and, after being led by Kent on a brief tour of the neighborhood, a deep sleep.
Which brings us to this morning. It’s almost nine now, and breakfast is served only until 10 - I’ve got to remember my priorities!
