We’ve been in Paris a little over a month, and have exactly one month left before coming back home. It’s been several weeks since I’ve done any blogging. (I’m glad Rachel’s been picking up the slack.) When we first got here, I was eager to set up a blog and keep a diary of all the exciting things we’re doing here. It’s not that we’re not still doing cool things (we’re going to Germany tomorrow), but it’s that we’re becoming so accustomed to everything that makes living Paris so different from our lives in Massachusetts. If I go back and re-read my first few blog entries, a lot of it was me pointing out unusual and unexpected things that we’d seen. A month later, most of these things seem normal. Some of the things I wrote about turned out to be flukes, not typical of Paris atall. This goes a long way towards answering the question of why I wanted to live somewhere different for an extended period of time. How long does it take before you’re able to tell a fluke from true local flavor? start to feel at home? settle into the local routine? become a regular at a local restaurant? know your way around town without a map? I’d say for me it took about one month.
Have you ever visited a new place for only a few days and wished you could live there? A few days or even a week… it isn’t long enough to get a feeling of a town or city. In fact, visiting a place for too short a time can lead to false impressions. For example, maybe you visited Paris and you found: a beautiful open market, some very dirty sidewalks, a completely empty restaurant, the crowded Metro, etc. How do you know if that market is daily, weekly, monthly (or even yearly like the flea market we encountered on our first weekend here)? The street might have been dirty on Tuesday, but maybe that’s because they clean that street every Wednesday. The restaurants was empty because you were there at noon, which is not when the Parisians eat lunch. Maybe the Metro was busy because it was rush hour… This trip is about experiencing the rhythms, the flow, the repeating cycles of a place, which you simply can’t do without spending long amounts of time there.
When you’re bustling around on a week-long vacation, you’re constantly encountering new situations, but you’re completely excused from having to learn any details. You don’t have to learn your way around as the map and guide is always in hand. You can struggle through buying some Metro tickets, but you don’t actually have to remember how it worked. That restaurant on the corner might be closed on Mondays, but you don’t have to remember this because next Monday you’ll be gone. This transience creates a very temporary connection to a place that (at least for me) is quickly forgotten and replaced with false memories based on my photos. This trip is about creating real memories, and learning the intricacies of life in Paris.
These are the things that differentiate “living” from “visiting”. And the truth is that before this, I’d never lived anywhere outside of Massachusetts. When I realized this, it became unbearable. ”Let’s live somewhere else for a while,” I said to Rachel, and this trip was born.
How long before I’ve ridden all 14 metro lines, visited all 20 arrondisements, learned to speak enough French to have an engaging conversation, and learned to distinguish a glass of Côte du Rhone from a glass of Côte du Sud? Maybe not on this trip… But for now I’ll be satisfied to be au fait with the streets of Montmartre, to be able to understand immediately when a shop-keeper tells me the total (and not cheat by glancing at the cash register), and to get a friendly “ça va!” from the server when I go into the local café.
This entry reminded me of the Paul Bowles novel “Sheltering Sky” in which a distinction is made between a tourist and a traveler: “the difference is partly one of time….Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.”
Ken, I enjoyed your blog very much and hope that you, Rachel and Sonja can have many more experiences like this one! It is true that visiting somewhere for a short time can give false impressions.
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only a page”!
I agree with this post. I am glad you are lucky enough to trully live somewhere outside MASS and trully get to be fully into another culture. People need to travel more, and get out of their comfort zone, and experience something new/different than the norm. way to go! Cheers!!
My favorite “live in another country long enough and it all becomes clear” story has to do with the bus that I took from the Aoyamas to work everyday in Toyama. By the last day I was taking the bus I could understand every stop, every announcement, fares, etc. except for the first thing the driver said “Sori-wa wan man bus desu.” I finally asked Midori what he was saying. She was surprised because she said it’s English. “This is a one-man” bus meaning there was no conductor or ticket taker. Eighteen months on the same bus and I still didn’t get it.
I was very interested in what you said about the temporal aspect of memories from travel. I have to admit that the memory-to-image ratio for me is very high … I can look at a particular image, and remember exactly what was happening at the time I took it. In fact, if I set up a ‘collection’ or ’set’ in flickr, and didn’t put all the shots I had taken of that place, I start to get itchy for seeing the ones I left out!