Paris

It's been over a month since I've last posted on this blog, but more importantly and notably, it's been almost two weeks since I've been in Paris.

Paris. France. Paris! A city and country I've dreamed of visiting since I took my first French class in high school (more or less on a whim). Yet this is not merely a quick visit; I am studying and living here for a little over four months.

In some respects, that can be a short amount of time, but in others, quite lengthy indeed. I'm not one who deals well with goodbyes, and so parting from family and friends is always a great emotional ordeal.Add Paris to the mix, and four months, and living alone, and being over 3,000 miles away from home, and having Skype as the only means of tapping into my permanent life that I left behind—suffice it to say, it was not an easy transition.

And so, I deliberately chose not to post anything as soon as I got here, and I even felt the need to retire my camera on the shelf for a few days—not to gather dust, but to allow myself to absorb the first hours and days here, the preliminary moments of foreignness that hit me all at once as soon as the airplane landed in a snowy Charles De Gaulle airport.

I was met with sharp pangs of nostalgia and longing for my loved ones back home. My former dream to visit Paris had whittled down to a bygone, inaudible whisper in a matter of minutes.

This is why I chose not to post or take photographs or do anything of that sort, because I knew the first days would be academic, orientation-related activities that would fill my time up without leaving room for exploring the city I would be living in for the next several months and acquiring a proper sense of it. So I dared not fashion prejudgments of the sacred land of my dreams, dreams that had become (quite palpably) tenuous. But I knew that there was more to the city than the icy winds or the cold beds of the hostel that all students remained in until we were given our housing assignments.

I need not dwell on or recount those first few days, for they were comprised solely of arduous meetings and presentations and activities as part of our orientation, and they offered little taste of the true essence of Paris—especially since the hostel was in an area far removed from the heart of the city, devoid of any welcoming atmosphere. It felt like I was still in some part of New Jersey, and perhaps such a similarity would foster a kind of consolation, a comfort in familiarity. Yet the result was the opposite, and so I came to understand the nature of the initial malaise I encountered during the first few days of being in Paris—a complete lack of belongingness. Back home, both in New Jersey and in New York City, my existence is anchored; I have links, attachments, groundings. I know people, I know how to get to that café or that library or I know what highways to avoid during rush hour, I know the fastest way to get to the MET on the subway, I know how long it takes for an L train to arrive late at night. But I knew little of Paris, at least when it was real, right around me. Thus, I could not simply navigate my way out of the heavy and restless ennui that characterized the first few days. My presence served no purpose, and I didn't know the city well enough to wean some kind of purpose from it.

This is, of course, natural, and I noticed that this general feeling was not particular to me; many other students in the program echoed the same sense of disconnection from the world, a feeling of insignificance and ignorance of the surroundings, of not belonging here. That is the underlying discomfort and challenge in traveling to a new place—ridding yourself of the strings that fasten you to a particular location and thus create a relationship between you and "your place". This was not "my place", but I couldn't expect it to be. Not just yet.

Despite initial complications with housing/apartment assignments, I ended up in a chambre de bonne. Historically, a chambre de bonne was a small apartment for the domestic worker of a middle- or upper-class family living in the same building. Over the years, these small studios have been rebranded as studettes, for they are mostly rented out to students nowadays. The space is tight, but has all essentials. With each day, it gains more and more a kind of quaintness and charm in its modest possession of all that one needs without taking up much space. (I'll try and take some pictures of it some day soon.)

After settling down in my own dwelling, there was a new feeling of "my place". I could look at and explore the city anew, and I have to say, the city is beautiful. But the problem with saying "it is beautiful" is that such a phrase is overused and overheard to the point of rendering it completely banal and insubstantial. "Paris is beautiful" is both true and not true, because Paris is both beautiful and more than beautiful. The inherent difficulty in expressing Paris's appeal and wonder is that throughout my life and the lives of many others, Paris was a place only and always framed by a postcard or photograph or computer screen. To see Paris was to see an image of the Eiffel Tower, the most well-known icon in the world.

Icon. That is the point, here: Paris has always been beautiful from afar to the point where it has become an icon for everything—gastronomy, fashion, architecture, art. But when you walk into the courtyard of the Louvre, when you turn on a random street corner and suddenly the real Eiffel Tower is pasted against the sky (and it is lot bigger than I thought it would be), you realize that it isn't a postcard or photograph or computer screen, it is the real thing. The streets are often cobblestone-like, every building retains its old structure and beauty, there is a general charm laced with everything you see—and that is precisely what makes it so difficult to fathom at first. Everything is almost too beautiful to be real, too beautiful to exist outside of a postcard. But it is real, and when you are in the middle of it, when the buildings are real around you, when the intoxicating scent of bread wafts from the open doors of boulangeries that are sprinkled on every street, when an old man seated by the edge of a bridge starts playing an accordion as you look over the Seine, evoking the spirit of Paname (although Parisians will roll their eyes at the slightest sound of such accordion tunes)—this is when it becomes overwhelming, almost to the point of disbelief. I can't believe I'm here. But then after a while, you realize you are here, and that it is time to accept it and live it and breathe it and take it for everything its worth.

Late one evening, Jackie and I decided, on a whim, to go out to eat somewhere. I say "late" despite the fact that it was 10:30pm—early evening, by NYC's standards, but by the standards of Paris, where stores and restaurants close much earlier, it was late. When we opened the door outside, it was snowing softly, and the streetlights painted everything with a soft orange glow much unlike the sickly orange streetlights found in the U.S. that I find induce a vague, dizzying nausea. There is no such harshness here. The air was sharp and cold as snowflakes fell on our eyelashes. It was quiet, but not eerily so. The quietude that reigned was one characteristic of snowy nights, a quietude of tranquility. As we walked towards slightly more bustling parts of the 16th arrondissement, a group of teenagers were congregated at the corner of an intersection, laughing and throwing snowballs at each other. We couldn't help but smile at them, despite the fact that we were probably not much older than they were.

We ate at an Italian restaurant, then went to a McDonald's. Not very classically French, and yet at the same time, it felt so. I'm not a frequenter of McDonald's, but in Paris, they have frappés that come in a pistachio flavor—subtle, with a sweet aftertaste, akin to the scent of almond extract. I may sound silly for heightening the grandeur of McDonald's food and drink, but really, everything is heightened in Paris (including the prices, of course). It was quite strange to have something taste so good from a place that I would never normally visit back home, precisely for its characteristic subpar quality.

We walked back to the apartment as the snow continued to fall. The next day, the snow continued, and Jackie and I went to the marais to hang out with a fellow NYC friend, Logan. This time, Jackie and I agreed that we would pick up our cameras and finally take pictures of the city to which we were beginning to warm up (despite (or sometimes because of) the icy cold winter that surrounded us).

We ate at a falafel restaurant and afterwards, walked all around the narrow, winding streets of le Marais, then made our way to the Notre Dame, the Louvre, the pont des Arts. Snow, I learned, is quite rare in Paris, and yet my first week and a half constituted little else. It was an added fortune to see the city covered in it. Snowball fights became a common occurrence, and as I held my camera's viewfinder to my eye to capture a snowy street, a woman passed by and said "C'est très rare !" And that was exactly it: it was rare, and so everyone was taking advantage of it, not just us newcomers. A bunch of adults were having a snowball fight in the middle of a random street; on one of the bridges, a snowball fight erupted between passersby on the bridge and a bunch of tourists on a sightseeing boat on the Seine just underneath. I couldn't help but laugh. It was all unrealistically quaint, or—dare I say—cute? I'm not a terrible fan of that word, but when you see complete strangers having snowball fights between the top of a bridge and a boat underneath, smiling and laughing and acting like children, how can it be anything else?

Everything is calming in one way or another, as if the city wishes to ease your worries or concerns or anxieties in any way that it can. That is the true beauty of Paris—its subtleties, its feelings, its unexpected moments of smile-inducing delight and charm that simply cannot be channeled into words, in part due to their complexity and in part due to their complete novelty. Like when you realize the Eiffel Tower is not just a pretty monument seen in small photographs, but also an excellent directional compass when trying to find your way around the city. Or when restaurants stop serving food late at night but you have no where to eat or buy food, and so an elderly restaurant-owner lets you in anyway because he knows how hungry you are, and then proceeds to ask you about life and school and what you're studying. Or when you buy a pain au chocolat without the boulangère even recognizing that you aren't originally from here. Paris is daunting at first, but if you scratch at the surface, you uncover its richness, its layers, its intricacies. It is a city that does not merely present itself, rather a city that must be explored and experienced, for it is only through direct experience that one can understand the true, elusive wonder that has come to characterize the City of Light.



Lots of photos below.

From the plane

First photo of the Eiffel Tower (I had to take it, okay)

Logan

Jackie

Snowball fights

Le pont des Arts, where couples write their names on locks, attach them to the sides of the bridge, and throw the key in the river below

Crêperie

Random news reporter

Louvre

The street I walk down to get to my chambre de bonne

On Profanity

First and foremost, hi, I'm still alive. I just haven't really been around on here mostly because I have been dealing with rather unremarkable days that haven't driven me to write anything here. But this blog isn't dead, okay. I promise.

Anyway, although it seems to be a touchy subject, I find profanity to be absolutely fascinating, not necessarily due to its content but rather its idiosyncratic use. Most of us do use some kind of profane language now and again, some more than others, some only in certain situations, etc. I don't want to explore the various instances and psychological conditions in which cursing is used, because that is a bit beyond the scope of what I do want to address here. Instead, I want to focus on a rather interesting facet of profanity, namely the use of profanity in a language that is not one's mother tongue.

Let me elaborate. My parents were born and raised in Macedonia, where they grew up learning Turkish, Albanian, Macedonian (the official language), and a slew of other languages that are all so similar to Macedonian that nearly every citizen living in Macedonia consequently and naturally becomes a speaker of Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian, and other Slavic tongues. My parents immigrated to America two or so years before I was born. Over the years I noticed something interesting when it comes to my parents' use of profane language. They rarely curse in their mother tongues. My parents mostly speak Turkish between themselves, but generally speak English when talking to my sister and me, since it is the language in which my sister and I are fluent. The only times my parents curse in Albanian or Turkish is perhaps when they are incredibly angry, and even then the "curse words" are actually very connotatively mild, never truly extending past a mere flash of angry diction into pure, harsh, profane meaning. Instead, the intonation of the words seem to be enough to express whatever anger is at the base of the argument or discussion.

In English, however, my parents do curse, even when they are not upset. My dad can spit out the word "shit" in regular conversation with a chuckle, or even drop the f-bomb, which naturally catches my sister and me off-guard. When we were younger, we'd exclaim: "Dad, you can't just say things like that,  those are bad words!" to which he would laugh, along with my mom. It was indeed amusing to witness, but what was even more interesting was that they would never use such words when speaking Turkish or Albanian.

If I myself curse, there is some sort of internal force that recognizes the profanity of what I am saying and seems to poke at my conscience. Whether or not it makes me feel really bad is not the issue; the fact remains that I am aware that I am using profane language and that I experience a sense of severity, of impropriety, even if using profane language no longer makes me feel guilty the way it would when I was younger. Nevertheless, my parents could comfortably curse in English, whereas for me cursing was always a great ordeal of cognitive and emotional dissonance, an internal struggle of morality.

So why can my parents curse easily in English, unaffected, while my sister and I gawked, astonished, at the casual affability and ease with which the vulgarities were spoken? And why did it seem that this insouciance with profanity did not exist in the vocabularies of their mother tongues, their most fluent means of expression? There was an unease in cursing in those languages that did not transfer into their use of the English language. You have to realize that my parents are incredibly virtuous, ethical people (primarily, if not entirely due to a deeply-rooted devotion to religion and the adherence to its pedantic laws of morality that govern even the condemnation of profane language). Therefore, it isn't just amusing that they could curse in English with ease. It was simply incongruous with the otherwise principled images I had of them.

Albeit the fact that I am fluent in English (and my fluency is limited to English, seeing as I am not as proficient in the languages of my family), my parents have in actuality been speaking English longer than I have, for the simple reason that immigration to the United States called for a new desideratum--namely, the acquisition of a new language. Their exposure to English therefore outlives my lifespan, naturally and necessarily. But more importantly, the difference between my parents and myself is that I was born in America, and thus born into English. This is obvious, but it is very crucial to this discussion, because it seems to demonstrate that even though they spoke English for longer than I have been alive, it is not the duration of exposure to the language that governs the quality of the connection to the language. Instead, the true source of this whole ease-with-profanity paradigm seems to reside in some kind of innate, nearly congenital connection with a language. That is what is important. A deep connection with a language established from a very young age. It is a connection I have with the English language that they do not. Their innate linguistic connections lie in their mother tongues--Turkish and Albanian--and the fact that they do not really curse in those languages corroborates their nobler, more righteous selves, in the same way that it was quite difficult for me to break the discomfort I felt with using profane English words. Because growing up with a language does not just mean learning thousands of vocabulary words. It means the acquisition of a whole linguistic subculture that is inherently linked to the language itself. Simply put, my parents don't see profane English words as "bad" in the way I do, indeed as any other native English speaker does. They do, however, see expletives in Turkish and Albanian as carrying a weight that should be reserved only for heated, impetuous arguments, if used at all.

I've also noticed that this isn't particular to my family. One of my French professors, who does not know much English, once spoke a sentence in English on the last day of the semester. She was addressing a student while proofreading his essay, and her sudden use of English shocked everyone not just because she never used English (and thus we could never even gauge her level of English proficiency, indeed if she even knew the language at all), but because of what she said. A student had made a mistake in his paper, and she exclaimed aloud: "You should pay me for each stupid mistake here." She laughed as she spoke, and we laughed awkwardly, but the heavy French accent could not mask the use of the word "stupid" in an academic setting that would be funny if we had a professor who used such language all the time. But she was not a professor to use the word "stupid" even in French. She was always kind and strictly professional, and mistakes in class were laughed off sometimes, but not with the kind of remark she had used in English. The use of the word "stupid" may seem trivial, and on the grand scheme of things, it is perhaps quite so. But I am trying to highlight that she did not have any hesitation in saying what she did, whereas she would never have said anything of the sort in French, her mother tongue. It seemed incongruous.

She didn't have an inhibition in her use of the English language, in the same way my parents don't--at least, not as strictly as a native English speaker. Thus there seems to be something ingrained in one's mother tongue, one's language of fluency, a kind of compass that ascertains the morality, comfort, and situational suitability of using profanities, a compass that cannot easily be transferred to a new, acquired language. That's why we can easily use curse words in other languages; we don't have that strong, fundamental, personal, and emotional connection with the language because we have not been raised with it. Because saying "fuck you" does not merely involve the employment of two words, rather the tugging at hundreds of mental and emotional associations between the denotative words and their qualitative and cultural significance, their intensity, their profanity, and all their ethical implications and conflicts therein.

And to be honest, though I use profane language myself, I still can't drop an f-bomb or call someone a salope without feeling a slight internal pang at the heart that seems to scold me for my vulgarity. (And it is comical how even here, I employ the euphemistic phrase "f-bomb" to cloak the true word, whereas I can use the French version of the second expletive, uncloaked by euphemism, blatantly vulgar in its own language. But it miraculously  creates less emotional and moral conflict in my mind--because, well, it isn't my mother tongue, right?)