café les éditeurs

grâce à sharon i have discovered a wonderful new place to read, study french, and sip les cafés au lait. both of the books sharon gave us as bon voyage gifts (french or foe and the whimsical gourmet's guide to paris) have provided invaluable insights into french culture and how to break past the tourist-level life. the latter book is the one that led me to les éditeurs and if you could see it you’d know why it’s « so lisa ». the streetside, front row of café tables are backed by floor to ceiling windows which are today opened wide to the lovely early fall day. this bright, elegantly efficient exterior gives way to a warm, dare i say cozy, interior of red and soft mustard tones deepened by the dark wood floors and tables. the tables, set in couples, are three very neat rows deep, and run wide. unlike many cafés, which are often imposing in the chaos of tables, chairs, and cigarette-dangling hands, this café approaches symmetry… and comfort! several times i’ve thought to myself that spending hours in café chairs would be the end of my back. but here the chairs are a soft, cushioned red leather, and the back row is actually a long and very pleasing bench. this is where i’m seated now:

and for the coup de grâce…the walls of this café resemble a library! the wooden shelves are filled with books – everything from travel guides to history books to novels. i'm not going to lie, it feels a little like home. for DC-ers, it’s almost like busboys & poets - only better of course because instead of weird paper maché fish lamps there’s a grand chandelier; and instead of smelly 14th street it’s the carrefour de l’odéon, busy to be sure but tree-filled and, well, parisian.

update: since i first wrote this, i’ve taken chris to les éditeurs and he is equally smitten. he found an english book on stalingrad while i read a french guidebook on south africa.

allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé!

so goes the opening line of la marseillaise, the french national anthem, which i triumphantly sang upon chris and my receipt of our 3-year visas! and believe me people, this was indeed a glorious day.

i suppose the day rightfully began 2 days after our arrival in paris when we learned that we would have to return to the US to pick up our visas in person. comment? (say what?) chris had been given the impression the visas would be mailed to us. not only was this not true, but we needed to return tout de suite. so, a mere 15 days after arriving in paris, we returned to DC for 48 hours of consulat fun.

since we walked out of the consulat with our visas this cannot qualify as one of those catastrophes of beaurocracy. n éanmoins, we do have a funny tale to tell…

in gathering our paperwork, we found varying lists of which documents it would be necessary to provide the consulat. most mysterious were the widely discrepant requirements for photos: our attorney told us 5 photos, one part of the consulat website told us 2 color photos, and another part of the website said 2 black and white photos. i decided to ignore this last one, but we did bring 5 photos just in case.

the photo adventure continued at the consulat. the young lady who greeted us (if you call it a greeting) first said we each needed 1 photo. a minute later it was 5 photos, and we were please we had come prepared. 20 minutes pass and we are called back to the window where she proceeds to return 2 pictures. chris and i can barely stifle the ironic laugh – NOWHERE did anyone say 3 pictures – but stifle it we do because our french ambassadress definitely doesn’t sense the irony.

around the fourth or fifth time we were called back to the window the consulat lady cracked a smile – but what we did to merit this smile remains a mystery. Much like the real photo requirements for le visa de long séjour.

nouvelle résidence (à partir de 1 octobre)!

yay! new apartment! much as we love our rue st. placide apartment, chris and i can hardly wait for a place we can walk around without bumping our heads and can actually share a bed... yeah, don't think i posted on how we can't both sleep in the bed because one side of it is slanted and will seriously mess up your back. so i sleep in the bed and chris on the futon, which he actually loves. what was that about paris being romantic????

anyway the romance of home will definitely return in this place. it's very particulière, unique, dare i say bohemian. it may be hard to put it all together so there's a key below...



photo 1: the entryway - i'm standing next to the kitchen doorway to get this shot. the door is forward on the right; on the left are closets; and in the right foreground is the "bathroom" washbasin.

photo 2: kitchen - you could see the tiles of the kitchen doorway in photo 1, there are 2 steps down into it, and it is fully equipped. there's a thick glass ceiling to the kitchen that lets natural light in, and it is big enough to seat several people while cooking.

photo 3: bathroom/multi-purpose area - come back up the kitchen steps and instead of turning right (back to the doorway) you stay straight and are in this area. left to right you have the toilet room, shower, then stale (chris's boss who came to the signing with us just to make sure we understood everything). behind stale is a bathtub formerly owned by ingrid bergman (uh-huh, that's right), and finally there's a stand with the tv on the right wall.

photo 4: the tub deserves it's own pic, right?

photo 5: loft bed - come around full circle in the multi-purpose area (i.e. further to your right from picture 4) and you have the stairs leading up to our loft bed, which is actually quite comfortable. there's just enough room to sit up in it.

photo 6-7: living room - the pics of the living room don't do it justice. it's huge and beautiful with lots of seating and a table big enough for entertaining! this was truly the only apartment we looked at that had such room. the big windows look out onto a very busy street, but miraculously when they're closed you can't hear a thing.

photo 8: guest bed / couch / cuddle area - you can also see the loft bed above.

expats in paris!

this weekend, in the midst of chris's recovery from his first week of work and of much apartment-searching angst, we were blessed with a visit from fellow DC expats! sarah and andy have been living in london since january, and all the travelling they've done in the last few months makes me even more eager to get settled so we can really start exploring.

the four of us spent saturday wandering around monmartre, stuffing ourselves with pasteries, and picnicing on champs de mars. it was a bit surreal and great, great fun. some pics....

sarah and andy at the bottom of stairs leading up to sacre coeur

sarah and me - picnic of fromage, baguette, and wine, bien sûr!

la belle tour eiffel

la journée

some of you have asked what exactly i’m doing with my time here. chris has started work, i’m no longer writing a dissertation, i'm a lady of leisure, non? NON. pas de tout, mes amis. so, i describe for you un jour typique:

we both get up around 7.30. i make coffee in the french press (don’t think i'll ever go back to drinking the jus de chaussette, i.e. sock juice, from an american drip pot), get chris off to work, and listen to the french news while stretching out my very tired back (more on that in a minute). around the time chris leaves for work i get on the computer and start working on finding an apartment. this involves reading and writing mostly in french - a good, but time-consuming exercise.

i would compare finding an apartment in paris to finding one in NYC – with the notable exception that hiring an agent wouldn’t get you much of anywhere here, so you can’t even pay for peace of mind. every day i find a new website, which means every morning i have more sites to check for new listings.

around 11.30 i'm ready to get out of the apartment. so i get dressed; and as i mentioned before, dressed means complete with lip gloss, perfume, and an outfit très chic. i have to say that i'm so amazed at my newfound ability to get dressed that i almost feel like taking a picture documenting each day's achievement in chic. in the states, such a departure from my daily uniform of workout clothes would only have happened on an occasion. hence the picture-taking impulse.

i'm dressed and out, now where to go? shopping, you say? HA! i say. first of all i can’t afford anything (a subject for another time). but shopping on the whole is really beside the point right now. we need a place to live, so i hit the streets. yesterday i clocked 10 miles on the streets of paris. i rode the metro once, to get far out into the 16th arrondissement (hereafter, arrondissements will appear only as numbers), and walked all the way back in and around.

the point of all this walking is three-fold:
1. to explore the neighborhoods, so we can make an educated decision about where to live.
2. to stop at countless, tiny independent agencies which are otherwise un-findable, but which just might have the diamond-in-the-ruff apartment.
3. to exercise like a french woman. maybe, just maybe, if i walk everywhere like les françaises, my thighs will also magically shrink to the size of nicole richie’s.

chris gets home from work around 21.00 (although last night it was 22.00). we’re both exhausted, but have a slew of things to tell one another, so we head to a restaurant or piece together a dinner (our kitchen right now is too small for real cooking) and collapse around midnight with a pleased palate and an aching backs that i pray are just being worked out more than usual and not something more permanent.

so, you see i am not at all a woman of leisure. not that that would be such a terrible thing in france, as working here is not nearly so tied to one’s identity as it is in the states. in fact, "woman of leisure" and the snide smirk that goes with the term don't even translate here. the closest translation would be une femme qui ne s'adonne qu'aux loisirs, or une femme qui ne s'adonne qu'aux petits plaisirs de la vie. in other words, a woman who devotes herself either to luxury or to lifes greatest pleausres: the little ones. what could be more beautiful? maybe when all this apartment searching is finished i should consider a life so delightful.

either way, the real question is at the moment is not “what am i doing with my time?” but rather, “where should we live?”

la vue depuis ma fenêtre

voilà the view from our window at 32 rue saint placide. for the next two months we will live here, in the heart of saint germain. 2 blocks from the rue raspail open air market. 4 blocks from the jardin de luxembourg. a step away from le café nemrod. our (very) local café is always packed, and we decided this must mean it's good. testing our theory, last night we went for dinner as soon as chris got home from his first day at work (à 20.30! bit of a mix-up on the metro). we went comme c'est typique in paris - e.g. what is "dressed up" for an american, as you can tell:



one must not be mal élevé here, which so far includes everything from not getting properly dressed for the day (i know my family has laughed at my no-sneakers rule when touring paris, but it's quite serious if one wants to really fit into a neighborhood without becoming the local american joke!), to murmuring instead of speaking en haute voix, to not swinging one's umbrella like a bored five year old (ok, i might have made that one up by myself, but i think it's probably accurate).

on the other hand, it's not at all to mal élevé to open and close the window in one's lingerie. the young french lady directly across the street from us does it all the time, and i must confess no blush comes when i do the same. i think it has something to do with l'esprit séduisant that is so infectious here. there is nothing wrong with getting pleasure from looking pretty, from looking at someone pretty, or from being looked at as pretty.

et de ce fait, i resolve to always get dressed for the day and la vue depuis ma fenêtre est toujours si belle.