December Holidays Part 2: A Short and Probably Heartwarming Reunion, a City at Night and Metro Mice

In trying to write this belated and multi-part Christmas epic, I’ve learned something about myself: for some unholy reason I do not have the brain capacity or energy to write during the workweek. Hello, weekend. Kind of.

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While I was working on sentence equivalence and high school-level geometry questions in a cubicle on the second floor of a Rue St. Honoré office building, mere blocks away from the Louvre and the river, in Paris’ 1^st arrondissement, my older brother Jay was arriving at Charles de Gaulle airport, and into a land of foreign words and names. Armed with but an iPhone and heroically intermediate German skills, he managed to successfully navigate the RER from the airport to the city proper and then the metro to our Paris hostel. What’s more, while waiting for me to finish my test, the little bugger got sick of watching American basketball in the hostel lobby (weirdest/classiest hostel I’ve ever stayed at) and decided to venture out and find the Eiffel Tower, red Canton Basketball duffel in tow. Despite it’s intrepid hide-and-seek skills, he managed to find the large metal tower (relic of the 1889 World’s Fair as much as the modern need for radio and television transmission), snap some photos and witness a French-Algerian military ceremony at les Invalides, quite possibly featuring Zinedine Zidane.

After I finished my test, I arrived at the hostel before Jay had made it back. I didn’t have to wait long, though, before he and his large red appendage walked through the door, and after a short and probably heartwarming reunion scene, the dogs of war were officially let slip upon Paris. But not before a well-earned nap.

After we both had some time to rest up, we made a plan for an informal jaunt around town and struck out into the night. Snaking our way underground, we emerged from the metro at Rue de Rivoli and made our way through the eastern entrance of the Louvre.

Having successfully admired the Pyramids and l’arc de triomphe de Carrousel and just how huge le palais du Louvre really is, we continued on along the river, hunger growing ever slightly as we swallowed up the city lights. We were aiming for my old district, nestled between the hip and gay and the Jewish districts, and for the apartment I briefly rented on Rue de Guillemites. Smaller than most modest living rooms, and bereft of hot water for half of our stay, for me and three classmates that apartment served as our point of access into the city’s Dark Romantic corners, when we lived and breathed and studied in Paris for an intensive month in the spring of 2010. On our way, Jay and I ran into a pleasant surprise at my old metro stop, where the city had installed an ice rink in front of sparkling white lights hanging from the Hôtel de Ville. Convinced I was just winging it, I was surprised at how easily I found my way through the narrow, cobbled streets which I hadn’t visited in nearly a year and a half. Soon enough, I was able to point through scaffolding to the windowsill—on which we spent many a spring afternoon perched—that I briefly called my own.

At this point I think I can very reasonably say that—after hours of walking and sightseeing, combined with the weight of jetlag pushing down on Jay’s shoulders and the fatigue of a four and a half hour standardized test weighing down mine—the City of Lights had burned such a wandering hunger through our eyes, down into our stomachs, and up and to the left to place a flaming hot grip so strong upon our collective Fleischmann soul that only the falafel most beloved by both Lenny Kravitz AND Celine Dion could quell the demon-child grumbling within our visceral parts. Dramatic much? I think not. After that completely sensible and not ridiculous sentence, let me just say that it’s not every day that you get to eat the most glorious falafel in the history of the world. Just sayin’.

After satisfying the basic human necessity to eat, we got a quick café at a nearby bar and walked ten minutes to l’île de la Cité and Notre Dame.

Trying to let sink in the idea that it’s almost Christmas regardless of the lack of cold and snow and family, we sat and admired the giant stone building, with it’s 20 meter Christmas tree and lit up façade, and decided to grab some drinks on the other side of the river. A few hours later, without an exact idea of when the metro stops in Paris on a Wednesday night, we tried to head back to the hostel and spent the next half hour waiting, and then running up and down the metro stairs in search of phantom trains--feinted by ventilation fans--our only companions the five mice who called that station their home, and an electronic sign telling us a train was coming, eventually. That night, we took a taxi home.

Tomorrow, we would be among the first to climb to the top of Notre Dame de Paris, we would visit of the graves of France’s most honored dead at the Panthéon and we’d watch the glimmering lights of the city through a gray and misty winter haze from the steps of the basilica of Sacre Coeur.

December Holidays Part 1: Today, Early Vacation, Fumes

These next couple posts have been a long time coming. It’s been difficult turning them out.

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As I sit in a very newly renovated apartment, with double paned windows and white washed walls that reiterate your every sung conviction back at you, distracted by the TV my roommate is laughing at and by music on YouTube, I’m noticing how much has happened in my life since the 14^th of December, one month ago today.

My last couple days have been unique in their tumultuous own way: hectic and dull, still and dynamic, stressful and then relieving. With unrestricted internet access for the first time in almost four months, with no GRE to study for and with the feeling of Winter finally settling in around me, my weekend, to start, has been overloaded with information, and uninspired. Finally settled into the new apartment, I woke up this morning with the idea to photograph horses, and the muscles on their necks, firmly planted in my head. I feel as if I’ve emerged from the sort of seclusion of a wooden cabin in the forest, which was coldly disguising itself in the dull masquerade of a fourth floor apartment atop a solid concrete design, white and dusty and white, to find myself in a setting of very similar aesthetics, but now with neighbors and a television connection, a shower with a door and a meter missing on one side. We'll get to how I got here later.

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The December holidays started two days early at Lycée-College Brocéliande when a fuel line broke somewhere within the heating system of our building, Building C where the male boarding students also live. Our apartment was flooded with gasoline fumes, and my brain was flooded with a chemically induced daze. Suddenly caught up in a very real and stressful fog, worsened by the fear of potential consequences for the then-fast-approaching GRE, I avoided my apartment for days and stayed at colleagues’ homes the following weekend, trying to get in last minute studying before my GRE on the following Tuesday. After a reassuring and comfortable couple of nights at the home of an amazingly accommodating friend and colleague named Joanne (the antics of 10-year old son and 5-year old daughter included in the experience for free), I set off for Paris on 19 December, a Monday.

My means of transportation from Guer to the big city was arranged through my favorite pragmatic website, covoiturage.fr: a carpool with Gilles F, a recently divorced, middle-aged man of somewhat conservative political beliefs, fitted with a graying buzz cut and glasses that frame fairly gentle eyes, who, by either profession or pastime (throughout the whole five hour car ride I was never quite certain which), is an avid historian and family history enthusiast. He was an extremely chatty man, who let me have my say but seemed perfectly content to share his own stories and, in the intervening silences, to pose me questions with an air of polite interest.

Arriving in Paris by mid-afternoon, Gilles dropped me off at l’Etoile, that crazy, crazy thing that encircles the Arc de triomphe and which some people might be inclined to call a roundabout but rather reminds me of pictures I’ve seen of city streets in southeast Asia, swarming with mopeds and motorcycles and humanity, and I sent a text message to my roommate that read something like, “j’suis à Paris. putain, les touristes.”

I stayed at a hostel in the 9th with a summer of love, rock and roll, Beatles kind of theme and, accompanied by a short novel named after the city of Rome, ate a dinner of gnocchi served by a quietly flirty waitress at a pizzeria down the street. The next morning I took the dreaded 4-hour exam that has occupied a medium-sized space in the back of my head since no later than September, and as I pushed open the glass doors of the testing center, said a big fucking "hello" to vacation.