I used to live here

I’ve lived in 6 cities long enough to know them like the back of my hand: Kinshasa (then Zaire), Brazzaville (Rep. of Congo), Newark (Delaware-USA), Haifa (Israel), Paris (France) and Pasadena (California-USA). 

Walking through Paris today was interesting because I instantly relived my time here in overheard bits of conversation, the whiiiiisssssshhhhhh of the departing metros from their platforms, the natural instinct I’ve always had about the city streets and finding my way around even the most obscure parts of the city. 

You would think Paris is the hardest place to get over leaving. The city equivalent of “the one that got away” whom you’ll always wonder about, even when you’re happily married, one hopes not, but still. I may even have posted something about this a few years ago, when I was still in love with Paris, and had just moved to Pasadena, and was still feeling around the shape of my heart, worried that it was the shape of Paris, and would never conform to any other city. 

In the end, Paris was just another city. It wasn’t hard to get over, but I love to write, and when I write about places, I get questions about how I can love all these cities, and do I love them equally, how can I bare to leave them if I love them so much, and how I can live in other places, don’t I feel like I’m cheating. It’s almost as if we were talking relationships, and we are. For city girls, the city is a relationship, just ask Carrie Bradshaw. 

The truth is, I love and I leave, at least cities. I need it to keep writing, I need it to feel like I’m alive. I’m someone who cannot have a routine even for the most mundane of things, like driving to work, foods I eat, things I do, and so it naturally extends to places I live. 

I’ve noticed that between two and three years of incessant exploration is my quota for a new city. After that time, I need a new city to explore, and maybe I can keep coming back to it. I just keep adding notches to my belt, and each one is like I never left it. there’s something deep inside of me that needs to feel all these comfort zones, all these cities all around the world that I can be dropped in, at a moment’s notice and be able to disappear in, swim along, and never be found, because I know them, like the back of my own hand, I know them with my eyes closed, I’d know them by sight.

I think that need is deep-seated in me. Much more powerful and deep-seated than the need to settle down and own a house. And I think that need comes from the fact that I was a kid who grew up astride five cultures: American and French, Middle-Eastern and African, and finally Baha’i, and I’m never comfortable choosing one. I’m sort of a bee that way, I like my garden vast and diverse. 

What’s the opposite of a bee? A sedentary animal…Are there any? I wonder.

4-strap heeled sandal at Maje

screaming taxis

You know you’re in Paris (and therefore no longer in Congo) when you get yelled at by cleaning ladies for asking why the only bathroom in the baggage claim area is closed. 

You know you’re in Paris when a screaming match ensues with a cab who refuses to take you because he thinks you chose his cab instead of going to the first cab in the order of arrival (who had refused you because you had four suitcases). He then proceeds to insult you. 

You know you’re in Paris, in case you were a little confused, when the next cab refuses to take you solely because he saw the last cab driver refuse you, without asking you why the cab refused to take you. You then have to patiently explain the entire last ten minutes of argumentativeness and close-mindedness on the part of the last cab driver before this guy starts yelling at you, telling you that you should have reported the abuse, and that this, my friend, this, is why Paris cab drivers have such a terrible, and unjust and undeserved reputation. You comment he refused you without investigating, he says, well, you know, I wasn’t going to take a chance. You wonder why people wonder what’s wrong with France. 

You know you’re not in Congo, however, when you’ve gone through customs and haven’t been asked for bribes. When you’re wearing sandals and your feet aren’t dirty. When you turn on the shower and the water pressure actually feels strong. When you’re surfing on the internet, and there is no loading time for anything. When random people who don’t know you insult you. This just goes to show that my theory that you will always enjoy Paris more if you’re a little clueless. If you’re French and have lived here, the amount of smugness, rudeness, underhanded comments, just plain mean-spirited things people say are enough to never make you regret your decision to leave this town. I find Paris easier to love and fall in love with in transit. Less bull-’merde’.

Familiar doesn’t make you belong

It’s interesting being back after the last few years I’ve had. The last time I was home was in 2005, four years ago, after I left Israel where I’d lived for two and a half years at the Baha’i World Center. I was on my way to Paris.

I would be in Paris for a year and a half, working for a small Baha’i non-profit, dedicated to developing public information resources in communities throughout Europe. Living in Paris would turn out not to be what I had hoped. I had envisioned it being a classy, successful, artistically rich, sensory stimulating experience. In the end, I was unemployed for a year before I found a job, I lived in a nice neighborhood but wasn’t able to transition into a different kind of job. The artistic bit was true enough, but it’s not enough to live on, and I never found a community of like-minded people, and never really made very close friends. Things just weren’t what I had hoped, and I wasn’t enjoying myself. It became old fast.

So I moved to Pasadena, and got a job working for Disney for the next two and a half years. I had envisioned myself in video games making a career for myself, but my imagination didn’t carry me much further than where I currently was. I soon realized I wasn’t cut out for corporate America, and there wasn’t any room it in for me either, so there was no love lost there. In the meantime, I sort of grew attached to Los Angeles.

The sprawling city, the diverse population, the strange Angelino version of Congostyle that I came to appreciate, all were things that made living there an OK experience.

I’ve never belonged in any of the places I’ve lived, no matter how much I loved them or how well I came to know them. Not Israel, not France, not the US, not Haifa, not Paris, not Pasadena  or LA. None of them ever felt like home, which is why even now, when I’ve been gone from the continent for more than half my life, I still answer the “where are you from” question with “I’m from Congo” because, quite simply, it’s the only small, dusty, difficult to like part of this planet that this girl can walk on and not need any explanations for. Everything is second nature to me, and it’s such a weird experience.

Pasadena is undeniably the nicest place I’ve ever lived in my life, with its flowering purple jacarandas, trash pickup every Tuesday, no bugs and hardly any flies, tree-lined streets, paved roads, grassy sidewalks with flowers planted in rows, clean buildings, glossy storefronts, well maintained apartments, people who pick up their dog’s shit, electricity and running water, no bad smells EVER. 

Even if I now know the city like the back of my hand, even now that I can take the freeways to cross the city in less time than it would take to take the streets, familiar doesn’t make you belong. In the end, where you are from is not a matter of choice, it just is.

No one needs to understand or validate it for you, it’s just an internal feeling, and you’re lucky if you know where that place is. Some people come to it later in life, some people never find it, some people never question it, some people never have to wonder. Regardless of where you’re from, I think that it’s obvious to people where your home is from how you speak of it, how you represent it in your art, drawing, writing or photography. There is something to be said about experiencing and sharing something totally foreign to you, because you look at it with fresh eyes, but the way you speak about the place you know the best is the one time I feel you will really get people to connect with you. For me, when I write about Congo, it’s so familiar that the words spill out and I end up sharing my journey, baring my soul with each window I offer on the country and people that molded me.

There are so many theories on identity. Marguerite Yourcenar, a giant of French literature famously once said “ma patrie, c’est les livres”, claiming her identity, and sense of belonging in books. I agree with her, that each person finds their belonging in a place or thing of their chosing, but for many people, the place of your childhood and formative years are often  a very powerful cornerstone of their identity. That’s why I never really found another place to belong to.

Paris at 5:49 AM

I  broke down and bought a day pass for wifi. I couldn’t sleep anymore, I caught up on my sleep deprivation and have been wide awake for an hour.

Landing in Paris last night was not something I was looking forward to. I had to get my luggage, get on the Air France Bus, get to the hotel…but of course, I forgot I am in Europe, where public transportation is actually practucal. The airport was perfectly well organized, I got off the plane, went through an empty security check, made a left and arrived at our baggage claim. I waited about five minutes, and then exited and found the Air France bus five minutes later. The driver was very funny and friendly, and I realized what I’ve missed about France. There is an underlying sense of humor about everything people say. Even business people, talking on the phone are always semi-joking about things. Sarcasm and subtle jokes are everywhere.

This is a good example: I went up to a guard at the Musee d’Orsay when my family was with me and asked him “Where is Van Gogh?” the guard turned to me and without a moment’s hesitation replied “Van Gogh is dead.”

I sat next to a fun older woman, and we talked about the second World War, she telling me stories of her childhood, and my sharing stories my grandma told me about being a cop in Vichy, in occupied France. It went by fast, and I got to the hotel painlessly.

Then I went out for an Indian dinner at the restaurant up the street, and completely content, went straight to bed.

I looked at my schedule last night, and I have 12 hours in Casablanca! I guess that means I get to leave the airport and explore. I plan on eating massive amounts of Moroccan food and sweet mint tea.

Then…I have to go through the ordeal of entering Congo. OH BOY.

the blur, the present, the future.

I‘ve been sitting here thinking about Paris. Flipping through the last month of my journal, trying to feel like I was there again. And feeling nothing. Do you know that sense of disconnect from memories?

I have the hardest time recalling the past.

So I read through the memories, walking across le pont des arts at dusk, the Palais du Louvre, wandering in the enchanting Père Lachaise cemetary, yada yada yada…I don’t want to bore you with them—this isn’t a walk down memory lane, don’t worry—but what I’m trying to figure out is why they feel like they happened to someone else. I can’t remember what it felt like to take the last metro home and walk down rue Brochant, even though I can see myself doing all of that, like a movie. I can see the scene, hear the soundtrack, picture the actress…but I can’t feel it.

So my mind tries to run through why I feel that sense of disconnect with the past, any past, no matter how clearly I recall the memory…and it could be because I am not in that environment now, because I live six thousand kilometers away, because my current surroundings are so different. I suspect it is a bit of all of these reasons and because I’m myself experiencing and thinking different things.

Perhaps the most difficult thing with memories is not recalling the instants, but trying to remember what it was like to be you at that point, because lessons, experiences, interactions you’ve had since then have become such a part of you that you can’t dissociate yourself from them long enough to remember what it was like not being you right now.

Maybe it’s better that way…the saving grace of memno-amensia?

My what big ears you have

Now that I’m interviewing for Disney I think it’s time I posted my favorite EVER story about my time in Paris. Which happened months ago.

I should preface this by explaining that I used to have this horribly beaten up Discman that I hardly *ever* listened to, it didn’t close well, and had stickers all over it that I’d (shamed face downward looking) peeled from lamp-posts and metro stations across Europe. Mostly obscure bands with offensive logos that looked really cool.

Anyway. Continuing on…I had previously invested in some amazing headphones. BIG headphones. BIG silver fancy Sony earphones, because I wanted to get a fantastic sound, and the ear-buds really hurt my ears. I looked everywhere for the right kind, with big enough “ear-pads” (what are they called?) and a great sound, and finally settled on the not HUGE but medium sized ones.

Sometime in January, probably, I was walking out of my apartment building, towards the train station. It was a freezing cold morning, and at that point, the shiny big silver headphones kept my ears from freezing. I had a big scarf, a warm jacket and I was just so happy, listening to my music, all proud of my lovely new investment that set me apart as a “serious” music lover–whatever. I was walking with a spring in my step.

As I neared the end of the street, I noticed an old man, dressed in frumpy brown and grey, who was taking his frumpy brown and grey dog (remember how in 101 Dalmatians, all dog owners ressemble their dogs? How TRUE is that observation? It never ceases to amaze me).

OK…nothing extraordinary yet, except that as I was got closer, I noticed he was laughing quite heartily and pointing in front of him…in my general direction.

I did what any person would do. I looked behind me. At the empty morning street. The empty, freezing, wet, miserable 8 AM morning street, I might add.

I slowed down…as I got closer to him, I pulled the headphones off and looked at him, and he said to me…

“You have big EARS, Miss! (laughs) You have such very VERY big ears! (more laughs) You..you..You look like MICKEY MOUSE! (real belly laugh this time)”

He stood there, having a frank laugh at me, and by this point, I was laughing so much, we just kind of looked at each other, and he walked away.

I looked at my headphones…watched him walk away, imagining the smile on his face and thought…”hell, he’s right. I have a tiny face. These headphones are way too big for me!”

Since then, everytime I’ve worn those headphones, I’ve smiled to myself and remembered the old man. It’s amazing how one person, by just being genuine can provide you with so much mileage.

pockets of silence

It’s interesting how stopping blogging leaves a big silence in your internet space, where it feels like nothing happens. That’s how I feel when I see blogs that haven’t been updated in over three, four, fifteen months… There is this zero-gravity image that comes to my mind, where the last post, which didn’t set out to be the last post, lingers in mid-air. I wonder where that person is, what they are doing, what has happened in the intervening months.

In my case as the blogger who was absent, the longer the time since that last post in July of last year, the less I remember what I used to want to post about. What makes a good post? That, and I just push it back, I don’t remember the urge to share thoughts, views, postcards, photos, moments. I don’t remember how to communicate. It’s something that happens to me, once in a while. When I was on my service trip around the world, in between offering service in various communities, urban, rural, I was alone all the time. Traveling between countries in airplanes and within them on buses, and long stretches of time alone, not talking to people who spoke neither French or English, I forgot to express the simple things of every day life. I just forgot how to talk for the sake of talking… I wasn’t on email very often, I almost never had access to phones, so I wasn’t talking to my close friends or family regularly, just sending sporadic emails. And I was processing a towering amount of experiences in circumstances where I could hardly keep a journal because I was so often on the move.

Towards the end of my trip I found myself with family very dear close friends in New Zelanad and Japan, and in my mind I was panicking because I didn’t feel I could verbalize my thoughts. When I asked them about it, they didn’t notice, but within me the last year of travel alone had left communication “scars” and I found myself having a very clear thought in my head and not being able to find the words to express them. It was quite a strange experience for someone who loves to communicate…quite ironic. To this day, I still find traces of that, when I feel like I say something and the words never left my brain. I realize I finish thoughts in my head rather than in words.

And I suppose a similar thing happened with this blog.

My last fifteen months in Paris were a whirlwind. I was so busy processing what was happening, getting oriented, experiencing them and there was not much desire to publish that experience, for many reasons. I guess I wanted to keep Paris for me… and now, when I imagine my heart, I see super-imposed upon it the street map of Paris, I walked the city so much, know it so well, in its nooks and crannies and wonders that its streets are more familiar to me than my own blood vessels, and I find it is the same shape as what I imagine my heart to be. Everything about the city’s size and streets was perfect for me, for my own set of aesthetics, it was my perfect place, just not my perfect time. And my time there came to an end, it was time to move on, I just felt that. It’s one of the benefits of having traveled a lot, you know when it’s time to pack your bags.

I now living in Pasadena, in Southern California. I’m settling in, making new friends, pursuing a new chapter of my life, and things are looking very good at the moment. I am happy.

I hope I find my voice again, so I can keep writing. It is one of the things I am pursuing here, and I hope that this blog doesn’t silence again with this post. But we will see how things go, blogs are organic, they’re sensitive things…In any case, I am happy I got to post this up. I had been wanting to put something else up here for so long. I am glad I finally found the words.

un cafe parisien

I was walking around the Champs Elysees after running an important errand and suddenly decided to go and see “The Sheepman”, a 1958 George Marshall movie with Shirley MacLaine and Glenn Ross and Leslie Nielsen. One of the best comedy westerns of all time, with a great cast and a great script was the description and that sounded good to me.

Short notice…didn’t find anyone to come with me, so I called Kelly up (she’s in London) on my cell phone just to point out I wish she were here and we could go to the movie together, and she asked me to go to a cafe in her name. They don’t really have non-chain-store French-style outdoor terrace cafes in London. So I said I would.

I raced to the Latin Quarter area (Metro Odean, in Saint-Germain-des-Pres) and wound my way into the small streets to Catherine street, found the cinema then went deeper into the neighborhood to find food and the promised cafe.

I ate quickly and then sat front row at the terrace of a very small cafe, at the rounded corner of three very narrow but busy streets: rue de Bucci, rue Mazarine and rue Dauphine. This is the neighborhood where Oscar Wilde’s hotel was, and Moliere made his first appearance as an actor, stone buildings, aged cobblestones, narrow winding passages…

I ordered a “noisette” (hazelnut) which is espresso with a dash of milk and as I sipped it, things fell into place so quickly. This is the Paris that I love: no matter how busy and full of cars and little “mobylettes” a street is, because it is small and narrow, and because the people take over in this pedestrian of all cities, any street eventually feels pedestrian.

People spill onto sidewalk, sitting at their hundreds of cafe terraces, almost telling the passing cars: “look how far we are, we could totally take you over if we only wanted to, so count yourself lucky”. People cross in front of stalling traffic, ignoring zebra crossings and red lights, ignoring even moving cars, because they know this is their city, and they have the right of way. This is what I find admirable: in a city where everyone is in a perennial bad mood, drivers never really lose their temper at rude pedestrians crossin in front of them. It’s just accepted, and even revered. Cars have actually STOPPED in the middle of traffic for me to cross when I was on a sidewalk, one foot on the road. So uncalled for, and so…parisian.

It’s also the sounds that make it so pedestrian. You hear people talking, the rumble of voices covering the car and motor sounds. It’s not something I’ve experienced anywhere else, but then I haven’t been to Rome.

Sitting at that cafe in Kelly’s name was this rising foray into the Parisian way of life that is so unique in itself. I wrote for close to a half-hour, watching the people walk by in their very French way: the businessman with a cigarette hanging from his mouth, crossing the street, the couple arguing, the cheerful man with a side-step. And all the animated voices around me, communicating about work, about life, about Iran and Irak and I was drifting in and out of the conversations, enjoying the fact that here, people actually make time at least once a day for some, to sit outside, on the sidewalk, have a coffee, a bear or a cold drink and just talk. People here talk so much! It’s insane. I heard from a cell-phone specialist that they tried to do the “unlimited minutes after 8PM” deal here in France and they had to discontinue it because people took “unlimited” literally!

I walked out of the movie later, and lazily just walked, which is the best thing about Paris. It is a canvas for walking, and not sight-seeing but just walking. I let the streets show me the way, and stopped in this small street where a young man and woman who looked street urchins were playing instruments. They were both very skinny and dressed “a la Oliver Twist” complete with ragged short hair cuts, suspenders, leather caps. The young man was playing the violin and the young girl was playing an old accordion, but she moved in and out of her instrument while balancing herself on her toes with high steps that looked like she was being animated by strings from a high-perched pupeteer. Their music was very nostalgic, at the same time sad and funny, and so Oliver Twist kept popping into my head.

An man about sixty was leaning out of his third-floor apartment window for their performance, and I looked at him as I leaned in the dark entrance I had found as a discrete vantage point. He disappeared for a moment, and then reappeared and sent out a coin from his window to the performes. The coin bounced on the pavement and they both curtsied and nodded with a hop. I ran over and picked up the coin, dropping it into the violin case along with mine, smiled at them both and walked away.

And I realized that this is what I most love about Paris: walking away from beautiful live music at the moment I choose to.

I followed the banks of the Seine for a long time, until I came across the Solferino passage, a pedestrian bridge where about a hundred of youth were picnic-ing at sunset (at 10:30PM) playing guitar and drinking red wine and beer. I listened to a group of ten spanish-speaking singers and guitarists sing a beautiful song and then walked away, crossed over the Seine and stopped next to the Louvre to peek over the wall to the banks of the Seine where a brass band was interpreting some 80’s song that I don’t remember now with the words “I want to be alive, I want to be alive” and strangely, it was beautiful to see that dozen of musicians about five meters below me, next to the water, through the trees, holding their large golden instruments, and all of that being lit by the passing boats, red, white, blue, green lights, reflecting onto the water, making the leaves of the trees translucent, shining off their instruments, through their cigarette smoke and their hair, bouncing off their black clothes, and delineating their arm movements.

I cut across the Jardin des Tuileries and called my parents as I walked, and then continued on to Opera, where I caught the regional train home.

But it was all thanks to Kelly. Her cafe request enabled the rest of the magical evening to unfold as it did, or at least it prepared me to accept it, which in the end makes all the difference.

It was a great cup of coffee, Kel.

my brother in Paris

We went to the world’s most famous air show and all-things aerial expo: le Salon du Bourget (there are practically no photos of human beings…i.e. us four that went, but there are some cool pictures of plane spare parts !!! as well as some I think, of the maiden flight of the Airbus A380, the Titanic of planes)

we also went to the Musee d’Orsay, and so can you, since Nic took pictures of almost all the works of art in the museum. Which I think is great, because now I can access them from my computer. Be sure not to miss the “Origin of the World.” It’s the one where we all look like morons posing in front of it.

Nic also went to visit Abdu’l-Baha’s apartment in Paris, in the Trocadero neighborhood (overlooking the Eiffel Tower, which he also visited) while I was in Lyon for a day. I’m impressed he managed to match the EXACT tint of the real-life Eiffel Tower on his photo gallery background. I have been trying to find words to describe that color but for some reason “taupe” just doesn’t cut it.

We met up with some old friends from Congo in La Defense…and because of “budgetary constraints” ate at…Mac Donald’s. It’s not something that readily pops into your mind when you think of Paris, but if you’ve ever lived here, you’re forced to frequent fast-food restaurants at some point, at least if you hang out in large groups of young people: they’re everwhere, they’re not expensive compared to other options, and even begrudgingly, everyone will agree that they can find “SOMETHING” to eat. Now that they have apple slices and large selections of salads (both of which I don’t eat when I end up at Mickey D’s) it gives everyone a healthy cop-out! :-) I think that this slide-show is definitely worth taking a look at, especially for those of you in the US, since you get to see what the dining experience is like at Mac Donald’s in France…

All MD’s in the Paris area have wireless internet and this one specifically is so posh (there are probably over a hundred leather couches) and well lit because it is made to accomodate the corporate crowd of La Defense…

We had quite a good time. If Nic ever puts it together, the best gallery he could compile was “Nic eats his way through Paris photo-gallery”. I was the official photographer of “Nic eating a freaking huge savory crepe, “Nic eating a big Nutella crepe” “Nic eating three pains au chocolat” “Nic eating a huge rose-shaped Italian ice-cream in the Latin Quarter” “Nic eating a delicious mini-raspberry pie” “Nic eating his third quiche Lorraine” “Nic eating a great DONER KEBAB THAT ONLY COST 5 EUROS”. It was very entertaining, and probably one of my best memories of Paris so far…watching someone eat their entire body weight in food in the span of a week. :-)

dry shaving – state of grace

Metro line 9 from Pont de Sevres, passing Ranelagh station at 11:25 PM.

No one gets on or off at Ranelagh, it’s deserted, like a ghost western-town before a John Wayne shoot-out. It looks yellow under the lights, and as we start moving away, I notice a tall, old black man, sitting cross-legged on the seat, unmoved and un-distracted. He was looking straight ahead with a vacant look, and was dry-shaving his cheeks, around a thin line of beard that ran along his jaw. The razor was one of those cheap disposable kinds, that are white and orange and can be bought in packs of 10 for a few coins. I was fascinated at his expertise, he was shaving quickly, with fuid expert motions, and it was just so beautiful. It was one of those moments in my life where everything surrounding me just dims, and the volume of the empty train just went down, as I stared at him through the glass.

I’ve had those feelings often before on late-night trains around Scotland, where we would pass a haunting scene, and I felt the same again that night, as if I were a part of some alternate world, that no one else could notice but me.

It was odd, throughout the whole busy day I’d had, nothing I’d seen or experienced had really connected to me, or had reached me in the way that I was feeling, which would be slightly confused and off-kilter, as I’m working things out lately that have been kind of heavy. Then, at the end of a particularly busy, strange, unconnected day, this random event, by its strangeness and calmness just soothed me, and I felt a surge of gratitude to the old man for having chosen to shave calmly as one of the last empty trains passed by.