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{ Category Archives } Life in France

Ghost Town

Cheesus Crust, I pity the tourists in Paris this summer. We had about a week or two of real summer weather in July, and then it all went downhill from there. Last weekend it rained for two days straight, alternating between drenching rain and piss-rain. Lila was glued to the window, tapping it and shouting, wondering why she couldn’t go to the park for her daily pigeon-chasing and sand-eating activities. I lounged on the couch and pretended that it was a Manila thunderstorm outside. It was pretty believable.

So for mid-August, the weather has thrown us all out of the loop. But obviously it has pushed Parisians to flee the capital in search of warmer temps. Paris in summer, if you’re staying in Paris of course, can be calming and eerie at the same time. Walking along the streets, you see announcements taped to shop windows, declaring their reopening dates.  It’s a ghost town. Your favourite boulangerie is closed, as well as the drycleaners and the brasseries. Grocery stores are still open, but lines are shockingly nonexistent, so the tellers have time to shoot the breeze with you.

The usual suspects at our park are gone as well. Biscuit Benjamin, a kid who sprays you with biscuit he is eternally munching on as he engages you in not-so-witty conversation, has been missing in action for the past week, as well as Serious Sophie (who never laughs, obviously). The members of the Tricheur* Gang have dwindled down to two from the usual eight (their game of Touch Ball always end up with one of them bawling “Tricheur! T’es un tricheur! Waaaah!”) and I really miss Jackpot Joseph, who practises his breakdancing in the sandpit (not very clever, but the younger kids always stand around and watch him in awe).

Hopefully the temps rise in the coming days. This morning it was cold and windy but dry, so I got Lila dressed, plopped her into her pushcar and made a little tour of the park. It was shortlived as it was colder than I thought, but I could see that it made her happy, being outside again. In the coming weeks, Parisians will make their way back to the city, store windows will change their displays from summer to fall, and children will swarm the park once again to make the most of the remaining days of this year’s summer – the summer that never really was.

*Tricheur = Cheater

Currently listening to:
Deerhunter
Microcastle

2010 08 17 Comments (8)

Angry Stormy Suffocating

I am wrapped up in angry, stormy and negative thoughts these days. It’s been almost two months that I’ve been alone with the baby, in a city where I have no relatives to whom I can hand her over to for a few hours of rest. I know I should think about my husband who is having a rough time as well, but in my head I can’t help wishing that the situation be reversed. I am losing this psy-war battle of 24/7 babytime. I would love to be able to wake up knowing that someone else could change her diaper, or give her breakfast. I would love to be able to have a few hours to myself. I hate that people lie about visas to appease worries, I hate that people let things stretch until Ramadan, I hate that people don’t care about letting families stay apart, and I hate that we will not be able to celebrate our child’s first birthday together. So this is how it feels to suffocate. I have the utmost respect for single mothers, or single fathers. I don’t know how you do it.

(Sorry, I just need to let it out, and this blog is all I have. But seriously, isn’t it sad to not have the whole family together during your child’s first birthday?)

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But cripes, thank god we have some good news on the music front !!! Listen to Arcade Fire’s newest album The Suburbs here.

Currently listening to:
Arcade Fire
The Suburbs

2010 08 03 All Families are Psychotic
Music Comments (13)

The sun

summer

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summer2

summer3

I thought it would never come, but finally, summer showed up this week. And what a difference the sun makes. Everyone seems happier. Children play in the streets up until 9 pm. People have swapped coats for shorts, and the sunglasses are out again. It’s been a tough week for me, and I’m sure it won’t change any time soon, but the sun helps. So much.

Currently listening to:
Crystal Castles
II

2010 06 24 Comments (5)

Personnes

monumenta1

monumenta2monumenta3We trekked to the Grand Palais one Sunday to see Christian Boltanski’s Personnes, the third installation in the Monumenta series. Boltanski had scheduled his exhibit to be shown during the coldest time of the year, and then the heating was off as well, so you can imagine how pissed off I was, after standing in line outside for 30 minutes to get tickets.

But once inside, everything comes together, and even the freezing temperature makes sense. Used coats are arranged to form neat squares on the floor, rusty poles at the corners and a light tube in between; sixty-nine squares of cloth that make you wonder about the people who wore them. At the very end is a mountain of clothes and a crane hovering over it. The crane grabs a handful of clothes with its claws, makes a slow ascent, and then releases the clothes into the air so they flutter back down into the pile, over and over.

What completes the atmosphere is the sound. A rhythmic beat, but not steady. Sixty nine recorded heartbeats echoing throughout the vast space of the Grand Palais. It’s quiet enough to be disturbing. It feels like being surrounded by hundreds of ghosts.

Shivering in my coat, I think of how appropriate the title of the exhibition is. Personnes. In French it means nobody. And also, somebody.

Currently listening to:
Grizzly Bear
Veckatimest

2010 03 12 Arty Stuff Comments (2)

The sun for several hours

The sun came out this morning and suddenly the flat was lit up with the promise of spring and the end of this goddamn winter. And then several hours later the grey and the wind and the cold took over.

Seriously, we’ve had enough! Give us back the sun and heat already!

Go Go Smear the Poison IvyCurrently listening to:
Múm
Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy

2010 02 22 Comments (7)

Summer, indoors

Currently listening to:
Wilco
[The Album]

2009 08 20 Stuff that happens to me Comments (6)

It’s a win-win situation

Currently listening to:
Mardi Gras Bb
Alligatorsoup

2009 01 06 Comments (7)

To recap

We returned from South Africa to an apartment whose entire floor surface was littered with all the crap Julien and I had accumulated for the past two years.

After a week of head-scratching, we managed to fit everything into 3 trunks to be shipped, 4 luggages to check in for the flight back to Paris, two backpacks and two laptop cases to carry with us in the plane. We said goodbye to friends (another post on this) and bid our goodbyes to 2 years in Qatar.

We left 30°C Doha and arrived in 2°C Paris. It was a Friday night, and the peripherique was packed. It took us one hour and an extremely talkative taxi driver to get from the airport to the 15th arrondisement, as we were crashing at Julien’s cousin’s flat for a week until a room at the aparthotel we’d be staying in would be available.

After a weekend that comprised of an exhibit (From Miro to Warhol), concert tickets (Black Angels, December 8th) and various cocktails with friends (overpriced Mai Tais, chardonnays and a strange banana rhum cocktail at a snotty cafe close to the Eiffel Tower), it was time for the dirty work: apartment-hunting.

I have a lot of stories to tell about apartment-hunting, but I leave that for another post; needless to say it included 90 euros worth of phone credits trying to book appointments for apartment visits, nonstop walking under the rain and cold, numerous cups of dégueulasse McDonald’s coffee in order to use their Wifi, and a surprisingly huge number of apartments viewed that I would never dream of living in.

We are now in a hotel near La Defense. We wear creased clothes straight from our luggages. We spend our two day weekend lazing around, hanging out at FNAC, getting lost in the streets, checking out the Christmas markets. We cross our fingers for a good apartment to come our way soon, and look forward to the exciting possibilities life will bring us in the following months.

Currently listening to:
Metric
Live it Out

2008 11 30 Moving
Travel Comments (11)

Paris

I haven’t forgotten how beautiful this city is, but being here is different from remembering what it’s like. Like yesterday, when I was in the Metro, I found myself reverting to the old habits, like automatically boarding the second carriage, and taking the foldable seat next to the door. I realised how nice it was to people watch, wondering what people were thinking, making up stories of where this person was going and what kind of book he/she liked to read. Or like yesterday, at the bus stop, some people were smoking and stamping their feet to shrug off the cold, and the smell of the cold and the smoke reminded me of those winters when Julien and I would walk to the nearest tabac in the snow to buy cigs.

It started to rain as I walked to the metro station from Julien’s grandmother’s flat. I passed that little store that sells second-hand Japanese goods, then turned the corner and passed the Korean store, and looked over the building tops to see the Eiffel Tower against a backdrop of gray clouds.

I walked all the way to Rue du Commerce and had lunch at a Chinese traiteur. I sort of missed the taste of the Frenchified Chinese food, which is what I used to eat all the time when I was living in Paris and couldn’t be bothered to cook.

And then I went to a local Monoprix, where I made a tour of the aisles and found myself remembering our usual grocery list… the grilled chicken that come in those paper packs, the jambon cru, the saucisson, the crab sticks.

Browsing the alcohol section, I marveled at how different countries and cultures can be, and how we slowly adapt to wherever it is we find ourselves in, no matter how hard we try to resist. I guess that when you move around quite a bit like we do, you don’t really lose a home, but end up adding a new one to the list.

2008 03 06 Musings
Travel
Uncategorized Comments (2)

Jigsaw Falling Into Place

It never really bothered me before, and I’ve certainly never thought much about it, but only now have I come to realise that I’m losing my words.

Speaking was much easier in France. Sure, I had made a brief stop at the Land of Self-Pity and Frustration (this was a few months after arriving in France – when the high of settling in/playing tourist finally lost its luster and I kept finding myself at the counter of a boulangerie, helplessly trying to explain to a surly employee that I wanted my tarte au poireaux heated up), but afterwards it got easier. The rule is: you live in France, you learn French, you speak it. All the time.

Afterwards, I could make the switch quite effortlessly, mainly because I knew what language was fit for certain occasions. If it was with the inlaws or during family reunions, French. Friends and nights out, French. Filipino friends, Filipino and English. At a party with someone who didn’t speak French, English (I’d hang out with the only English-speaking person, because I knew what a terrible feeling it was to not be able to follow a conversation, and oh god was it nice to speak English again for a change). And so on and so forth.

Here in Qatar, though, it’s difficult to keep track of which language to use. Every afternoon, the poolside of our apartment building resembles the United Nations: people of different nationalities, multilingual children dive-bombing into the deep end of the water, shrieking in different languages. The majority speak French, but English, Mandarin, Spanish or even Tagalog aren’t too far behind. Being in a group of people who speak either one language or the other, I find myself, from time to time, translating for someone to help keep them in the conversation loop. If I start speaking in pure French, or English, or Tagalog, I don’t have a problem; it’s during multilingual group conversations that my speech goes haywire.

One of the terrible habits I’ve acquired is starting a sentence in one language and finishing it with another. Halfway through my sentence, I tend to forget an English word, replace it with the French one, and finish in French. “You have to tell me which days you’re available, or else we should… should… annuler le ticket …” Then I would cringe, wave my hand at Julien’s raised eyebrows, say, “Oh, you know what I mean!” and scurry off, trying desperately to remember the term for annuler in English.

Other times I find myself unconsciously muttering expressions in the wrong language during conversations. I’d say things like “Ben dis donc”, “Ce n’est pas grave…”, “Oui, mais bon…” with English-speaking or Filipino friends; “Seriously?” and “Damn, that blows” with French speakers. It drives me mad to feel like such a scatterbrain. I’ve secretly sniggered at people who spoke Taglish, and here I am doing the same thing, only worse — I’ve added another language.

***

During last night’s party, attended by French, Italian, and English speakers, I swore to myself that I would try to speak correctly. A few hours into the party, one of the guests turned to me and asked, “Ah, so you are of Asian origin but were born in France?

“No, I’m from the Philippines,” I corrected him.

“Ah. I just thought, since you speak French… well, it’s just surprising to see you speak French. I hope you don’t take it badly, the mistake I made. Because it’s a good thing, this globalization. God knows we all support it.”

I looked around at the people over the rim of my wine glass and realised how beautiful it is to be able to speak another language, and I got a very rare surge of pride for myself (let me underline the phrase very rare, because I hardly ever allow myself a pat on the back), thinking of the time when the guardian of our residence made me cry by cruelly mocking my then-terrible French, or when sales ladies would roll their eyes at me while I stuttered brokenly for a refund, or when a TGV ticket controller impatiently cut me off in midsentence while I tried to tell him that I didn’t understand what he was saying.

***

Anyway, I think I should hang out by the pool more often and try to get my languages straight, and try to get words to stop failing me. Practise makes perfect.

In RainbowsCurrently listening to:
In Rainbows
Radiohead

2007 10 26 Life in Qatar
Musings Comments (17)