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?”