Shameless Self-Promotion

I just have to throw this out there into the blogosphere:

I know I’ve been remiss about posting for the last six months (during which time I moved to New York from Paris and have slowly managed to build a life for myself), but you’re going to have to forgive me. The travel site I write for here in New York, jauntsetter, has just made me Jauntsetter of the Week!

A huge welcome to all my new readers! Most of my writing hasn’t been up here lately, sadly. I write for jauntsetter nearly daily, and I’m working on a book at the moment about my travels last year (though I suggest checking through this blog’s archives for some sneak peeks, particularly the motorbike story), but I’m going to start posting regularly about my New York life, so check back often! I’m still a California girl at heart, with an insatiable wanderlust, so living in New York is its own adventure.

Stay tuned!

Street Suitors

Okay guys, time for our first ever officially interactive post! Get excited.

I’m quite familiar – as are those of you who followed my blog in the first half of 2009 – with the Indian/Southeast Asian man’s way of treating women, particularly foreign ones, on the street. I imagine it’s also similar to that in the Middle East/North Africa/large parts of Central & South America, though I base that off of other people’s stories and not first-hand experience. That is to say, to men on the street, women on the street are fair game for all sorts of harassment, particularly if they happen to look Western/foreign or not be wearing baggy, all-covering clothing (though sometimes this latter condition is waived if you are the former). It bothered me, I hated it, I wanted to punch men, and couldn’t wait to get back to Western cities where everyone would just ignore me.

My friend Michal laughed at me when I said that, and said she’d been getting harassment on the street from men since she was about thirteen; I couldn’t imagine that, remembering, at worst, only comments from skeezy homeless Frenchmen in Paris, stares and calls of bella! in Rome, and hollers from construction workers pretty much anywhere in the US. Sometimes I’d gotten compliments from homeless guys on the streets of DC and Berkeley, but it usually only made my day, because they were just being nice and hoping for some money (which, by the way, is probably one of the best ways to get someone to give you money, in my opinion).

International Language

In the last year, I have realized many times how fortunate I am to be a native English speaker; English absolutely is the international language. It’s one thing to say it, or to know it in theory – I think we all know it – but to see it in action is another thing entirely. This evening, on the way home from one of the most frustrating, upsetting days I’ve had in a long time, I had my entire day turned around by another example of English’s international quality.

I got on the métro going home from work, and a couple stops later, at one of the major interchanges, three Korean backpackers got on, clearly just fresh from the airport or train station, on their European tour, heading to their hotel. I obviously felt a warmth and affinity for them, considering how recently I was in their shoes, and I even smiled to myself when I could tell they were congratulating themselves on getting to Paris, excited to get started on exploring the city. I’ve been there so many times, and there is little that beats that feeling of arriving somewhere long-awaited (where you don’t speak the language) after an arduous journey; you get on that last bit of public transportation that will take you to your destination, you can finally put your overstuffed bags down long enough to make your shoulders stop hurting, and you suddenly feel like you have conquered the city already.

For a while, they talked a bit amongst themselves, and then just sat contentedly, not next to each other, unfortunately. And then, a young Parisian guy, who was sitting next to me, asked one of the Korean guys where they were from. In English, heavily accented. The Korean guy laughed nervously and tapped his friend, who clearly spoke a little more English, but was working on unfolding a map. “Korea?” asked the Frenchman. The first Korean guy nodded, “Korea. Yes.”

When his friend finally had the map worked out, he showed it to the Frenchman and said, “We are going here,” pointing to a métro stop. The Frenchman thought for a second. “Twenty. Yes.”

“Twenty minutes?”

Life in Little Berlin

This weekend, my friend Susannah came to visit from Arles, where she’s teaching English on the assistantship program. Thanks to her need to experience as much of Paris as possible in one weekend (she studied abroad here too, but living in France away from Paris can cause strong pangs of longing for Paris, so she needed a good dose), Alfie and I did not spend the whole weekend sitting in our apartment, but rather got off our butts and explored our neighborhood, at last. And we have dubbed it: Little Berlin (or, Petit Berlin).

Why, you may ask. We all love Berlin – coolest city ever, I kid you not – and in our rainy-Saturday explorations, we realized that our neighborhood resembles some of our favorite parts of that city. A similar artsy aesthetic pervades the area, in architecture (a mixture of 70′s modern and varying degrees of old), the retro-chic cafés (one of which actually serves bratwurst and currywurst) and coffeeshops (real coffeeshops!), the plethora of vintage shops, and just general coolness of everyone walking around. Inasmuch as I would move to Berlin in a heartbeat if I spoke any German, I feel like we’ve won something.

Metro Stories

I hate getting behind on blog updates. As soon as things start to happen, you tell yourself you can’t post about them until you’ve covered the stuff that came before, and then, next thing you know, you’ve found a job (at a documentary film production company), you put a deposit on an apartment, your boyfriend comes to visit, the two of you get caught in the Great Eurostar Crisis of 2009 but still manage to get to England to spend the holidays with his family, you get caught in the Great Snowstorm of January 2010 in Britain but manage to get back to Paris anyway, you move into your new apartment and start working full-time, and then it’s just impossible to catch up on everything on your blog.

There, I think I’ve caught you up now. Moving on…

Below Freezing

Winter has hit Paris. Full on. I think the average this week is -1. Celcius, that is. We’re in Europe, remember.

My nose is permanently red, and my face is dry and burnt from the cold and wind. I rejoice in the metro, however smelly it may be, because I know that the more people there are packed into a car, the warmer I will be for that brief period of time. Our office is cold anyway – everyone wears scarves inside all day – but walking outside immediately induces a feeling that cuts straight to the bone and takes hours to dispel. Alfie doesn’t have gloves and his fingers are perpetually dry and raw; this is not helped by hours of washing dishes at work.

Musings on a Life of Travel

Crisis averted.

Welcome to the ups and downs of my life. Now you now what it’s really like living the jet-setting life: terrifying. You’ve been warned. You’ve tasted the depths of my despair. One day you’ll be walking on air, the next day you’ll be plummeted into hopelessness so deep you want to disappear under the covers and awaken to find yourself seven years old and at home in bed.

Why do we do it?

Panic

Often, we find ourselves sliding backwards, if you will. We think we’re moving forward with jobs/apartments, only to find a new hurdle appear that tries to send us falling backwards. The last few weeks have been about learning to deal with these beat-downs and circumvent them. At the moment, though, come Sunday, we have nowhere to stay for at least one of us, and we’ve been trying to deal with this to little avail. So, I’m putting a plea out into the universe for something within our minimal budget that can sleep three people for next week; if anyone has any suggestions, ideas, connections, I will be eternally grateful. Otherwise, you may be seeing me at home in January. If you want me to be home in January, then start sabotaging this post immediately, but I like to think that my readers are more kind-hearted than that.

I really hope I didn’t do something to karmically deserve this, because then I feel I must have something even worse coming.

The Accidental Local

I have been in Paris for going on three weeks now, and it is amazing how quickly one falls easily into routine. Perhaps this is because I have traveled so much this year, and so establishing a lifestyle for a short period of time has become second nature, but I really didn’t expect it this time. I assumed that everything would be transient until we had our apartment, and then everything would become concrete. While this is still true to a certain extent – I have yet to join a gym or yoga studio because I intended to find one near where we were living, which we don’t know yet – I have also somehow managed to develop a little life for myself here. Maybe if I didn’t know the city so well, I would have to spend more time adjusting and exploring before I could settle, but, since I know Paris better than many Parisians, I’ve basically dropped back in and picked up almost as if I’d never left.

Paris Inhospitable

Je recommence!

After a wonderful summer in Turkey and all over Europe, and then back in the US for several months of fall to visit friends and family and make some money, I have started what I like to call “The Great Europe Adventure, Round 2.”

As you all know, I spent my junior year abroad in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne and just generally living up the Parisian life. Now, I’m back. This time, however, I am jobless, homeless (but for the kindness of some lovely Brits whom I didn’t know two weeks ago), and somewhat aimless. This time, Paris seems far more cruel and inhospitable than it did last time; no one wants to house us, because we are foreigners and therefore don’t have all the million papers that French landlords like to have (I learned yesterday that this is because it is pretty much impossible to evict a renter in Paris, even if they don’t pay you for months, so it makes sense that they like to have all the assurances); no one wants to hire me, because I am American and not a student and therefore not staying for a long time (read between the lines here). Not to mention that it is also rainy and freezing, which started immediately upon my arrival, apparently. I believe a conspiracy may be at play here.

In spite of it all, however, Alfie (my intended future roommate/friend of Willa’s who also wanted to move to Paris and recent Oxford graduate) and I have found numerous things for which to be thankful (or, as we like to say “Parisians to be Thankful”).