Paris Meets the U.S...

Faithful readers,
This is my last boring post before a series of colorful {and hopefully interesting} updates on my various adventures throughout Europe begins to appear. I apologize for my blog being so de rigeur, but I happen to like chronological order. Hold your horses; the fun stuff's coming.


{Tuesday, October 28}
Sunday through Tuesday were homeworkful for preparation for {trumpet fanfare} Miles' visit! For those of you who don't know, Miles is the brother of my former {last year} and future roommate, Melanie, and he and I had met maybe once or twice before, and not for extended periods of time, but he's wandering around Europe and I thought I'd give him a decent introduction to the City of Light. So, Wednesday night he, Monica, Melissa, Cody and I {I can almost hear your gasps of surprise} went to St Michel {again, shocker} for dinner before strolling up to the Louvre for a visit that turned out to be relatively unproductive due to our propensity for joking and lengthy discussion, but was fun nonetheless.


Miles making the patented Caroline Awkward Face at the Louvre.


So, we may or may not have had a stereotypical night in Paris.

Thursday after class, I ate lunch with Miles, then we encountered a crazy woman from St. Paul, MN who told me not to live in France because she did, and it ruined her life. A very awkward conversation overall, considering it's a very real possibility for me. Bemused, we then walked to the Cimitière Montparnasse, one of the largest cemeteries in Paris, and wandered around it for an hour and a half. The only 'famous' grave we were both excited to see was that of Jean-Paul Sartre, which was pretty cool.



Afterward, I ran home for family dinner, hoping to leave the house early enough to meet Miles and go to Melissa's to watch the French version of "The Office" {I know; we're so cool}. Unfortunately, I left a bit later than I wanted to and presumed, due to his proximity, that Miles would be at Châtelet by the time I got there. This was not the case, because he broke one of the golden rules of Paris: if you can take the metro and you don't have spare time and you're unfamiliar with the area, do not try to walk somewhere. He was one stop away on Line 4, but instead got lost and wandered until I'd called him so many times that my phone ran out of credit because he has a US cellphone. I paced around a corridor at Châtelet and got accosted by a rapper with a stutter who was clearly more concerned with spraying it than saying it and who asked me to bring him to the US with me. I politely declined. As soon as he asked if I was waiting for my boyfriend, as if by magic, Miles called with his current location {glory hallelujah and hooray for free incoming calls}, and I told him to go across the street to the metro station and take the train to Châtelet, where I would wait for him on the platform.

As if it weren't already 10:30, the RER decided to take its sweet time such that the platform was more crowded than I've ever seen it, and hilarity ensued. The train was so full that I easily could have spent the entire ride with my feet off the floor and still have been in the same position. Apparently, it's not as difficult to get close to Parisians as we thought.

We paid half-attention to "Le Bureau" at Melissa's before having to head back shortly after our arrival...but not shortly enough, evidently, because my new 'shortcut' got us to Opéra at 1 AM...about 5 minutes after the last train. Try as we might to interrogate the high school-age boy about the Noctilien {night bus}, he had never taken it before {imagine that}. So we laughed {probably shouldn't have had that much Coke at Melissa's} and took a taxi back - it ended up being less than 5 € for each of us, which isn't too bad.

On Friday morning, Miles and I went to the Musée d'Orsay, where we saw a wicked trippy exhibit of Picasso's adaptations of Monet's "Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe" - a Cubist interpreting an Impressionist, so you can imagine how intense it was. We actually sat down for a while afterward to clear our heads. Then we met up with Monica & Melissa for lunch at a pizza place in the Latin Quarter, and the four of us journeyed to the Cluny Musée du Moyen Âge {Middle Ages}.


Miles: Do you want to know why Roman statues often have no noses? Because when they were conquered, the soldiers would run through the streets, defacing the statues by cutting off their noses.
Caroline: ...DEFACING them, huh?


Diabolique.




We all played our respective geek roles {history - Monica, art history - Melissa, language - Miles & I}, then went to a nearby BD store, where I got to geek out even more, and to buy one of the most recent work that I'd read for class. Monica's friend Julia had invited us over for dinner, so we all made pasta and chicken up at her host's apartment in Montmartre after grabbing a much-needed coffee.

Next, the five of us took the metro to Julia's friend Vanessa's apartment for her birthday party; at this point, it was a sort of a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend situation, and Vanessa and her group were clearly not thrilled to have us there, so when everyone left to go to a houka bar, we shuffled off in the other direction and went home.

Saturday morning, Miles called to inform me that he was having a problem...namely, he couldn't get a train to Lyon, where he'd booked a hostel for that night, because it was almost Toussaint and apparently all of the Parisians were going there on vacation - 25 trains and not one seat. Surprised but determined, I invited him over to search for another escape route. We found no buses, ride shares, or planes, and the one available train ticket was incredibly expensive, which left us essentially without options. For some reason, this despair brought on the idea of hopping a train and hoping for the best. The TGV doesn't require a reservation slip, and his Eurail pass should count as a ticket. I forced him to eat some döner kebab before accompanying him to the Gare de Lyon - to which I hadn't been since my first day in Paris, which was a bizarre blast from the past. He nervously marched to platform 11, and apparently this radical plan worked out, because he didn't call me to say that he'd gotten dropped off in the middle of the countryside.

That night, Cody invited me to his family's apartment for their "chapeauter" party {a word, as it turns out, that the family invented and means 'to wear a hat'}, so I donned my beret {yes, I have one and I brought it} and headed across town. His family was really welcoming and kind and complimented both Cody and I on our French-speaking abilities. There was lots of good food, red wine in plastic cups, and French people wearing hats who were more than willing to chat with us. Not to mention the chocolate cake and the rhubarb pie, yum! We felt like we were at one of those big, joyful Christmas parties that you always see in movies but have never actually attended; people were constantly at the piano, singing arias and tunes from operettas, and to top it all off there was a lovely cello-piano duet, some of which I caught on camera {due to crappy video quality, this is available upon request}. Cody and I also laughed at the fact that us Americans think ourselves fancy when we drink wine, so we caress the curves of our crystal wine glasses, whereas in France they see it so much more casually than that. Anyway, it was really fun, and we finally got to hang out with 'real' French people. If Cody ever gets off his ass and puts them online, there will even be pictures someday.

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On another note, for those of you who are wondering, and even for those who aren't: last Tuesday night, Paris was overtaken by Obamania {oh-bah-mah-nya, as they pronounce it}. I had already slept very little in the preceding days, so I didn't go out to the crammed bars and stay out till 5 AM like a good American, but I stayed up until the TV froze at 3:30 AM, crawled into bed for a bit of shuteye, then dragged myself back out again to check CNN.com:


In case you can't tell, the clock in the bottom corner says 5:26 AM

The IES students who rejoiced the next morning {i.e. most of us} aren't the only ones. America is officially respectable in Europe, once again {for now, at least}. Some of my friends who were out the night before received hugs and congratulations and even thanks from random French people. I saw a thoroughly intoxicated man chanting, "Obama!" in the subway and, for once, none of the Parisians looked annoyed, but rather amused and even sympathetic. One of the men standing next to me during the commute home wore an Obama shirt, and one of the advertisements at Saint-Lazare bore a graffitied query: "À quand un Obama ici?" - "When will we have an Obama here?" And as Monica and I passed a store on a late-night stroll through Levallois on Wednesday night, we saw this in a store display window:





The effect of it all is surreal; I've been in Europe since before the candidates chose their running mates, so it's strange to see my country's history change from another continent. I won't subject you all to further schmaltz or a political rant; I just thought I'd share my piece of the action. If you want to see a published writer's perspective on it, check this out. French correspondent over and out.