Feeling a little more French

By Dan

I am reading a book about the history of Paris, “Seven Ages of Paris” by Alistair Horne, and enjoying it very much.  Right now I am in the chapter about Henri IV and what Paris was like in the late 1500’s and early 1600’s.  It sounds completely unlivable:  filthy, regular epidemics, daily hangings, violence – very medieval.  It is strange to think as I read it that this is the city that I now live in. 

A couple days ago we went to the Pompidou Center, and afterwards wandered into an old church right next to it.  The church, Eglise Saint-Merri, was built in the early 1500’s and really left an impression on me, thinking about the conditions under which it must have been built.  I tried to read more about it online when I got home and there wasn’t much available.  I thought it was very big and impressive, but the small blurbs online make it out to be just another small 500-year old gothic church in Paris, and it doesn’t appear to be much of a tourist attraction.  The Pompidou Center itself was our first museum trip and it was a success – easy to get to from our apartment and featuring a kid-friendly interactive exhibit on building that Joseph really liked.

Some other firsts this week – we had our first picnic with another family we recently met, and we had our first evening drink sitting outside at a very nice bar near our next apartment.  The bar scene was especially enjoyable:  a quaint little square with lots of people sitting at outside tables talking and reading and drinking, and a small outdoor theater adjacent to it.  Today we went to the outdoor market and got cheese, pate, a baguette, and fresh tomatoes for a salad for lunch – incroyable.

what is the plural of rendez-vous?

By Dan

We’re meeting enough people suddenly that we now have to juggle social engagements.  It is a nice problem to have.

A couple days ago a new friend of ours who has taken us under her wing invited us over for brunch – our first social rendez-vous in France.  We were so excited we arrived 15 minutes early, walked around the block a couple times, and got there 1 minute early.  Our friend met us at her door and apologized for being a little unprepared – she explained that she had invited a few friends over for dinner the night before, and 4 friends had turned into 20, and they didn’t leave until 8a.m.  She had just woken up when we got there. 

She and Danielle walked down the street for groceries, leaving me and the kids in her apartment.  I asked if I should shut her front door while she was out.  Because the apartment belongs to an artist friend of hers, with artwork everywhere, she said that passers by will sometimes walk into the apartment thinking it is a studio.  I thought this was an argument for shutting the door, but she seemed to think it was a reason to leave it open.

So that was how our brunch started.  It turned out to be a delicious meal and a nice time.  Joseph was very charming, eating well and playing with her dog.  Rachel was unusually fussy, which rarely happens, but manageable.  We drank wine, and milked her for all the information we could about living in Paris.  She is French but lived most of her life in New York City so we had plenty to talk about and she was a wealth of information.  She is also an aspiring designer, with many designer friends, and has promised to make introductions for Danielle – which is great.

Later the same day I met an old high school classmate for coffee.  I have walked by 500 cafes in my two weeks here, and two of them have been Starbucks…  and he took me to one of them.  It couldn’t have been more different than my earlier brunch, but we had a very nice time catching up.  In his defense, it was raining and Starbucks was the closest option from where we met – and he was very apologetic about the choice.  It was interesting that no one I saw there got coffee to go as they do at home, though it was clearly an option.  The coffee was not served in paper cups but in large ceramic mugs intended for consuming on the premises.

Meanwhile we continue to get the lay of the land in our neighborhood and we’re feeling much more at home already.  We had our first meal at a restaurant for lunch the other day – an Indian/Pakistani place that we’ve walked by a few times and it always smells great.  Lunch was really good – we sat outside, Danielle had Chicken Tikka and I had a lamb special – both awesome – and Joseph sat in a chair eating rice and bites of our meals.  It was a huge success. 

There are so many ethnic restaurants in this neighborhood and we’re really looking forward to working through them.  There are tons of Asians here, and I’ve seen many Chinese restaurants, some Vietnamese, and a few Japanese.  There are also many North African restaurants, and some Middle Eastern.  Lots of cous cous.  As far as typical French – there are plenty of little brasseries and cafes, but they don’t really stand out.

Feeling good about administrative things on our list, and being settled, we decided that this would be a good time for a day trip while the the weather is nice and I’m not too busy yet.  Yesterday we decided to head out to Versailles in the morning, not far outside Paris but more ambitious than anything we’d done yet.  It turned out to be the second time in my life I got all the way to the gates of the palace without going in.  The automatic ticket kiosks were broken, and the line to buy them at the office was over an hour long.  Since we don’t tolerate lines well we strolled around the town of Versailles a little, and hopped on the train back. 

We rode seven trains in all that morning – Joseph loved it, though he was a handful when we weren’t on the trains – and salvaged the day by detouring past the Musée de la Sculpture en Plein Air, an outdoor sculpture garden along the Seine.  The sculpture garden was extremely nice, with a playground that finally allowed Joseph to shake it out a little while we sat down and enjoyed the scene.  Train rides – or more specifically changing lines and getting in and out of the station – is fun for him and exhausting for us.  At every transfer there are multiple staircases where we have to carry both strollers.  We were wiped out by the time we got to the sculpture garden.

This morning Danielle took Joseph on his first play date with a family we met at a playground.  It sounds like they both enjoyed it, and they came back with some much needed loaner toys to keep him busy.  I walked with Rachel to an appointment I had for health insurance, and when I got there I discovered that they did not take credit cards for what I was buying and I had to go to an ATM for more cash.  The woman said “if your baby doesn’t cry much you can leave her here with me while you go to the bank.”  I had known her for all of 2 minutes, and wasn’t about to leave Rachel in her care.  But she was very nice and I thought it was interesting that she offered.  Afterwards I walked along the edge of Cimetiere du Pere-Lachaise, the largest and most famous cemetary in Paris.  It looked beautiful but I barely scratched the surface of it on my walk.  It is only a 20 minute walk from our apartment and I’ll go back.

Parlez-vous Anglais?

By Danielle

Although I am technically French I am not fluent in the language.  I grew up in a French speaking household (my parents spoke French to each other, and I understood a lot of what they said) which I think helps me squeak by in day to day affairs. It is my dream to be able to carry out effortless conversations in French, which I realize is a slow work in progress. In September I might be able to sign up for evening language classes through the marie (town hall).

There are many occassions when a person says something to me in French and I understand them completely.  But I can often only respond in what is probably a first grade level of communication. It is both frustrating and comical, but at least i can generally be understood. When I need to ask a question I try not to fall into the trap of asking if they speak English, but on occassion they will voluntarily answer my French question in English, just to make life a little easier I guess.

Numbers are a problem for me regardless of the language. The numbers 11-15 do not click in my mind quickly, which is not good because 70-99 rely on them. For example the word for 94 is “quatre vignt quatorze” (four twenty fourteen). You have to know the words for numbers, and do math. Life is cruel.

What is also a challenge is talking on the phone. I don’t know why it makes a difference in comprehension but it does. I recently scheduled Rachel’s doctor’s appointment for vaccinations and I was pretty pleased that I had made it all the way through without crashing and burning. When I hung up the phone I nearly high-fived myself.  

But then I had a horrible phone conversation with a lady regarding an appointment to discuss supplemental health insurance. It was excruciating for both of us. I apologized several times at the end of our talk and she shrugged it off, “il n’est pas grave” (“it’s not serious”).

The Bastille

By Dan

Everyone we have met has commented on how nice the weather has been this August in Paris – every day is partly sunny, slightly breezy, low 70’s, and just very pleasant.  Yesterday was the first day of solid rain almost all day and it was a really bad day for Joseph – being mostly trapped indoors in a small apartment without much to do.  He was a handful, for the first time since we’ve been here.

Today was beautiful again and we really took advantage of it.  We took the metro to Boulevard Richard Lenoir , a very nice boulevard where there used to be a canal.  The road is extremely wide, and the middle boulevard part of it is fenced in with fountains, gardens, benches, and playground equipment sprinkled throughout. 

Place des Vosges

We walked about 10 blocks or so, stopping a few times for Joseph to play, and ended up at the Bastille – which I had never been to in my previous visits here.

From the Bastille it is only a few blocks to Place des Vosges, the oldest square in Paris.  I had never been there either – it is a gorgeous spot – with many nice old buildings around it, including Victor Hugo’s house/museum. 

Place des Vosges

The square itself has a statue of Louis XIII in the middle, with several fountains, and a play area for kids off to one side.  Joseph got to romp around there too for a while.

Our last stop was the Marche d’Aligre, a very popular market – both open air and covered – not far from the Bastille in the 12th.  It was bigger and perhaps a little more impressive than some of the previous markets we had been to, but so crowded that it wasn’t too enjoyable.  Without strollers it may have been more manageable.  Fortunately we stumbled upon yet another playground right next to the market, and Joseph scampered around there while Danielle and I took turns walking with Rachel over to the market itself.

The day felt very much like something we would have done if we were tourists on a short vacation is Paris – but it was nice to think that we can go back there any time.  The whole area where we were walking is probably only a mile from our apartment.

Day 11

by Danielle

Something that keeps us from feeling too settled is the fact that we are in a temporary one bedroom apartment that is very spare in its furnishings. We’re a half-step beyond living out of suitcases.  We shipped a lot of items (clothes and child/baby gear mainly) to our “real” apartment and they won’t arrive for at least another week. But for now there is no good place to put the few things we did bring and my head feels cluttered when I’m not organized.

The weather is much cooler than usual. Everything I packed for myself and the kids is skewed towards heat, when in reality it is chilly (but gorgeous) most days. I’m guessing it’s in the high 60s or low 70s. This means a lot of clothes washing is going on, and we only have a very small washer, but no dryer. Fortunately I don’t have to suffer the indignity of hanging my underwear outside on a clothesline, instead I have to put in on a drying rack in our living room.  Of course Dan, like a true Rochesteran (Rochesterite? Rochesterer?) can go out in shorts and a t-shirt and think it’s perfectly warm, when everyone else is wearing leather jackets and jeans.

The apartment is nice though, great light, quiet street, cute courtyard, great water pressure in the shower. But when you come from a 3 bedroom house… well, it’s an adjustment. The good news is that Joseph is learning to be quiet when we put him to bed or down for a nap. His portable crib is in the bedroom and often when he goes down to sleep, Rachel is already on our bed snoozing (we move her to the living room when we go to bed).  Our new friend from New Zealand tells me this setup is not unusual for Paris families (she has two small kids in a one bedroom also), so i’ll just shut my yap.

Day 10

By Dan

We were at a playground a couple days ago and heard a woman speaking English to her daughter.  This doesn’t happen nearly as often as we thought it would.  We’d both like to think that before long our French will be good enough to strike up conversations with strangers and meet people wherever we go, but the reality is that we can get by doing errands or navigating the city and we’re not yet ready for real conversations.  So for now it would be nice to meet some English speakers who could help us get adjusted to life in Paris. 

With kids as cute and engaging as ours people stop to talk to us all the time, especially at playgrounds.  But over here there’s lots of hand signals, shrugs, and very strained exchanges. 

Sacre Couer

One French woman at a playground introduced us to her very cute 16-month old girl named Alma, who ran around with Joseph a little.  We were able to easily convey how old our kids are, but when she asked their names she couldn’t understand us when we said “Rachel.”  We both repeated it several times, and she just kept giving us this blank look and shaking her head.  When we pointed to Joseph and said his name she smiled and said “ah, plus simple.”  So now we need a French-friendly nickname for Rachel, or we need to work on our French accents fast.

When we heard this woman speaking English my instinct was to grab Danielle who was sitting next to me on the bench, not out of excitement but to restrain her from pouncing.  But she was real cool – stealthily circling her prey while “playing with Joseph,” disarming her with a friendly aside, and leaving with a phone number.  Not unlike what she did to me nine years ago.  This woman was extremely nice, has two kids very close in age to ours, and lives nearby – so we’ve started our network.  Several other English-speaking Parisians have trickled into our sphere as well – our current landlord, our next landlord, a really nice woman who may be taking over our temporary apartment, and I’ll soon be getting together with an old high school friend who lives here.  Best of all, the folks at my program have been extremely helpful and accomodating – not only will I be meeting a lot of people there, but they are also helping me rapidly cross many items off our daunting to-do list – things like health insurance, renters insurance, applying for my long-stay residence permit, opening a bank account, and so on.

None of the administrative tasks are keeping us from getting out and exploring, which we’re especially eager to do now while the weather is nice and I have time before my program starts.  We’ve been to – I think – four different open air markets already and loving them.  Most open air markets are in a given spot twice a week, with the vendors setting up in the same booth each time.  There are two very nice ones where we live, covering four days of the week, and that is where we buy much of our food.  At first we were thrilled just to buy an apple, but now we’re figuring out when and where to find the fish guy, olives, spices, stuffed grape leaves, and more.  Food at these markets is fresh and extremely affordable – prices at least as good as in the U.S. if not better – wheras in the grocery stores selection is worse and prices are much higher. 

Neighborhood Cafe

On the other hand, some things here are ridiculously expensive.  Peanut butter in a grocery store was about seven dollars for a small jar.  We sat down at a cafe to get a coffee yesterday morning, something we hadn’t done yet, and spent five euros (eight dollars) on two small coffees.  The cafe/bar scene is really interesting – you never see anyone walking with a coffee or getting it to go the way you do in the U.S.  But at any given time you’ll see several cafes on each block with folks sitting there at a small table, facing out towards the street, drinking coffee or wine.

Another crazy expense – when you call a taxi, as we had to do the night I took Joseph to the hospital – you pay for the cab from wherever they were when they started driving to pick you up.  When the taxi arrived at our door the meter said 11 euros (~18 dollars), just for the privilege of getting in.  The ride to the hospital only added a few euros more.  Hopefully we won’t be doing that too much.

Playing in the sand at the Paris Plages, with the Opera and the Seine in the background.

Today we went down to Hotel de Ville, a beautiful landmark in the center of Paris and the city hall.  It also houses a massive department store, where we saw kids clothes that were way too expensive (Rachel is outgrowing or destroying almost everything we brought.)  The city set up what they call Paris Plages, where they take a stretch of road that runs right along the Seine through the heart of Paris and turn it into a beach for the month of August.  Today was actually the last day of the Paris Plages and we were glad to be able to make it down there to enjoy it.  Afterwards we ate our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches outside of Notre Dame.

A few other highlights from our first week:

• Parc de la Villette, Parc de Belleville, and Parc de Buttes Chaumont.  Three amazing parks all within striking distance of our apartment.  Each one is so big that it takes days to hit all corners and see them all.  I could write a long post about each one, but this blog post is already too long.  But we’ll be going back to each one and hopefully will gather more photos and details to convey – they are all really impressive and nothing like parks in the U.S.
• Jardins des Tuileries.  Famous gardens adjacent to the Louvre, along the Seine.
• Jardin de Luxumbourg.  Another famous, beautiful garden, this one in the Latin Quarter.
• Sacre Couer.  Basilica at the highest point in Paris,
• Arenes de Lutece.  An ancient Roman amphitheater in the Latin Quarter – from the 1st century AD.  It was re-discovered in the 1800’s during a dig, and excavated and preserved.  It was turned into a public park and now you can actually run around in the amphitheater – kids were playing soccer while we were there – and they’ve surrounded it with beautiful gardens and a playground.
• Jardin des Plantes.  Paris’s botanical gardens, which also house the Natural History Museum (which we did not go into.)

It should be noted that these parks and gardens are not small.  Most of them are 50-100 acres each and have several miles of trails.  Most have a playground somewhere in them, if not carousels, pony rides, puppet shows, and more.  We’ve seen a lot but we’ve barely scratched the surface.

This is not my beautiful house!

by Danielle

My first impression of our neighborhood was not particularly favorable. I consider myself a “city person” but I also am the first to admit that Washington, DC (where I have lived most of my life) is not your typical city. Currently we are not in a posh or touristy neighborhood like the Latin Quarter, but it turns out we are in what some people call a hip spot.

This was not clear to me at first but now that my eyes have adjusted I can see the signs. A mohawk here, some piercings there. A small art gallery, a design studio, a nightclub, and so on. It’s mixed in with Chinese, Turkish, Algerian, Jewish and French shops.  When they are closed they pull down metal doors (like garage doors) over their entryways. This proves to be too much temptation for the graffitti artists, and it is everywhere.  At first I thought it was shabby looking but now I am enjoying it very much.

The farmer’s market style shopping is incredible. Every day there is a market going on somewhere within a ten minute walk. We visited the Belleville market this morning (3 blocks away) and it was an endless display of fruits, veggies, fish, meat, cheese, clothes, shoes and so on. Good prices and extremely appealing looking. The sellers call out, trying to woo you over to shop with them. But they are not calling out in French, or English, but I think a North African language but we don’t know which one. They are very charming, offering samples and enduring our tragic slaugher of the French language. Dan was most excited to find fresh spices (I think he got turmeric and fenegreek?), and I was tickled to see leopard print ballet flats for 2 euros.

Day Five

by Danielle

One of my concerns about moving to Paris was, how am I going to make friends with moms on the playground if i don’t speak fluent French? It turns out that in this neighborhood (Belleville, in the 19th arrondisement) French is just one of many of languages you will hear on the playground. I can’t even begin to guess the ethnicities of the people we see, which I find refreshing but quite unexpected.

I’ve been pleased to see that there are tons of young children in France. Strollers everywhere. This is good news, until you realize that the Paris Metro does not have elevators and very few escalators. It has stairs and lots of them (don’t ask me what people in wheelchairs do, I have no idea). People are very nice and offer to help carry your stroller down or up. But then you have the problem of the turnstiles or exit doors, which are very narrow. You have to take your child out of the stroller, help him through the turnstile while carrying the stroller over the turnstile (all while wearing the infant and a diaper bag). It’s exhausting, and I’m not even doing it alone yet, Dan is doing most of the hard work.  

Additionally, our apartment is on the second floor (here they call it the first floor) and there is no place to leave a stroller in the lobby. So more carrying of kids, strollers, diaper bags, groceries.  We’re totally pooped by the end of the day.  I’ve already gone down one pants size from all this motion… hey wait, maybe this whole stairs problem isn’t so bad!

20 first impressions, and lessons learned, after our first few days in France

1. Our kids are amazing.  It probably isn’t often that parents enjoy a long flight with two small children, but we definitely did. 
2. Flying first class makes a huge difference.
3. Staying up and outside all day on our first day was all we needed to adjust to the time change.  We slept for almost 15 hours that first night – with several long interruptions – and after that we were on track.
4. Our neighborhood is very diverse and very gritty – which is good and bad.  The adjustment from Del Ray is a big one.  If we don’t leave our neighborhood we don’t feel like we’re in Paris necessarily, but any crowded European city.  It also feels a little like the lower east side of Manhattan to me.
5. If someone tells you that they left you some food in the refridge, it is disappointing to find only a started jar of mustard and a broccoli stem.
6. Don’t use a Power Adapter rated for 50W on a 65W laptop.
7. The parks in Paris are incredible.
8. The city – in particular the metro system – is really bad for strollers.  But it is unreal how you can stop with a stroller at the top of the stairs going down into the metro and the first person who walks by you will grab the bottom of the stroller and help you walk it down the stairs – every time.
9. You shouldn’t pull your son’s arm so hard that he dislocates his elbow – especially if you are in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language.
10. There’s never a good time to go to the Emergency Room, Day 3 in a foreign country included.
11. Joseph is really tough.  His right arm was dangling down and he couldn’t use it for several hours.  If you touched it he would burst into tears.  But he would still stand and play with toys using just his left arm.  He barely cried from the time we left for the hospital to the time we came back, and once the doctor snapped his arm back into place he was back to his old self immediately.
12. It isn’t comforting to hear “don’t bring your baby to the hospital because of risk of dysentery and other infectious diseases,” but in my limited experience French health care is as good as they say it is.
13. In the waiting room of the children’s emergency room in hospitals here, they play movies with topless women and sex scenes.
14. It is not remotely true that everyone here speaks English.  We should have studied French more. 
15. The phone plans – at least ours – include free calls to most countries, including the U.S.  That is really nice.
16. I haven’t gotten a single mosquito bite since being here.  That alone puts it above Washington DC as a livable city in my book.
17. Challenges definitely bring us closer together.
18. Extracting ourselves from our life in Washington was pretty hard.  Starting a new life here is a lot of work too.  The actual trip was the easy part.
19. Danielle seemed a little overwhelmed and homesick at first, but was amazingly composed in a crisis. 
20. I went from feeling worse than I can ever remember feeling, to extremely relieved and happy, in a matter of hours.  It has been an interesting start.

Lastly, here is an actual conversation I had with Joseph after we left the hospital:
Me:  Joseph we’re all done.  You were so brave, I’m so proud of you.
Joseph:  Joseph take taxi.  Joseph take that blue taxi that one right there.
Me:  Joseph your arm is all better.  Look you’re using it to point to the cars.  Do you feel ok?
Joseph:  Cars over there.  Joseph take taxi again, take blue one this time.
Me:  Joseph I love you.  I’m sorry about your arm.  You were so good.  We’re going to go home and mommy’s going to give you a big kiss.
Joseph:  Taxi come this way, right there, blue one, Joseph take taxi again.

my next post will be from Paris

August 9th: Rachel’s three month birthday, and the day before we leave for France. We’ve had a whirlwind final couple weeks in the States. All of our things are now in storage in upstate New York. We had a very relaxing week in Canadice with my parents, enjoying the weather and lots of time outside. As nice as it was, we still had lots of loose ends to tie up before leaving the country. i think we’re finally in good shape for leaving. We finally moved Rachel out of our room at night, and I slept more in Canadice than I had since she was born. She had been sleeping through the night since she was about seven weeks old, but recently she has often been waking up once a night. Still she is remarkably good-natured and easy. Joseph is for the most part taking the travels in stride. Both the drive up to Canadice and back were amazing: over six hours in the car, only one or two stops, both kids either napping or being really well-behaved. Maybe tomorrow’s flight to France won’t be so bad.

We are now back in Arlington staying at Adam and Renee’s, with final visits with Eric, my sister, and later today with Monique. Kind of strange to be back in the neighborhood that Danielle was living in when we first starting going out. We talked about trying to get to Galaxy Hut – local dive bar that was the setting for some of our first dates. But we’ll probably stay in tonight and pack.

These two pictures are both from Canadice. The first is from the first road trip we ever took with Joseph. He was just over three months old. The second one is Rachel almost exactly two years later. She is about two weeks younger than Joseph was in the picture above. I have also uploaded lots of pictures to the website, from Patrice and Zachary’s visit, and from Canadice. New photos in both the July and August galleries.