Second and fifthmost, my last weekend in Paris until Halloween has been the shit. And not just because of the perfect fall weather of yesterday and the rediscovery of Regina Spektor's "Ne Me Quitte Pas". It was the sort of weekend where, despite of the threatening cold cold autumn, I found myself complete caught up in the city, in the smells, the bizarreness of everything and how cool the bizarreness is.
Thursday night I stayed up until 4am doing laundry and watching French movies and then chilling with my brother Mathieu. Got a tour of the basement, which is very funny and full of lots of extremely French things, like old croissants forgotten, half-eaten, Mathieu's old ferret cage ("Elle est mort. C'est dommage."), some bikes, and lots and lots of woodworking equipment. Went to bed, read 50 pages of "Love in the Time of Cholera," my last book that I brought with me. Also dommage. Woke up Friday morning and took the train to Montmartre for some shopping at Tati at the suggestion of Jack Bee.
Tati is basically like a huge sketchier TJ Maxx and they sell everything. From kitchen supplies to sexy lingerie to clip-on pearl earrings to toys for children (presumably full of lead). They also carry a wide variety of trousers, which was my m.o. on my shopping excursion. Tried on about 20 pairs of pants before settling on a pair of high-waisted not-quite-charcoal grey trousers with a belt around the waist. They're very short for my legs, but frankly, that's kind of the point. Then I stumbled upon a gorgeous purple cardigan that I pretty much couldn't live without. Yes, I now own even more purple stuff. Basically I've been obsessed with tucking in shirts and short pants, moreso because of all of the adorable Scandinavian girls in my French class that rock the high-waisted look with a huge variety of cute tops. I wish that I hadn't been told that French people wear only black, when in actuality they dress exactly like me on cute days back in the States. I would have packed differently.
Anyway, after class on Friday I came home and had dinner with my family (burgers, which they eat separately from the bun) and then sat on my computer watching French YouTube videos with my window open, listening to the rain. Now, you may recall me mentioning a couple of nice young French boys that I and my friend Caroline met last week along the Seine. One, aptly named François, seemed especially cool and spoke very good English so we weren't totally confused by each other and so through the ever-useful tool of Facebook, we contacted one another and made plans to go out for drinks on Friday night. However, I was feeling a bit sluggish, especially with the rain occurring in its very French manner of pouring insanely for 20 minutes and then stopping for an hour so that puddles may form, and then starting again profusely. But once I texted Abby, her enthusiasm was contagious and I, without washing my obscenely dirty hair, put on my new sweater and a scarf (crucial accessory) and trudged out the door to the RER.
Met Abby, went to weird Australian bar to meet François where my main concern was that I didn't really remember what he looked like. ("I don't know, he's French-looking, I guess.") But we found one another and he was with 3 friends who all spoke varying degrees of English but mostly French and we all went to the hookah bar. For the record, French people are ALL ABOUT hookah. They call it "shisha" (the whole hookah, not just the tobacco) and pretty much every French person under the age of 30 either has a hookah or smokes it religiously. So, we sat outside for a shisha and chatted, in varying degrees of Franglais, about jobs and Paris and classes and tattoos and pretty much whatever. They were all very nice and funny, except for one named Clement who was basically silent, but he comes into the story later.
Then we chose to go towards "Saint Mich" (which is French slang for, you guessed it, Saint Michel) to roll and smoke a joint (which French people do on the street or in the park, pas de probleme). It's not technically legal, but it's Friday night there's shittons of people around and cops aren't going to just come up to you and fuck up your life like they will in the US. Of course, as soon as we began to walk it started pouring rain, so we retreated under an awning of "Claire's" the tacky mall jewelry store for our little sesh. I was pretty tired and not the most lively that I can be, so I was kind of weighing the options of going home soonish. But the boys were very cool so I elected to not be a huge pussy on a Friday night. What kind of girl am I?
So, then we went to this little street right by where I used to have class by Notre Dame called Rue de la Huchette, which is just a little tiny primarily pedestrian street lined with bars and restaurants and apparently this place that we went to which was unbelievably fancy and Parisian, with loud loud bad pop music and overpriced drinks and tons of gorgeous people and steep stairs. So we danced and the two remaining boys, François and Clement (the silent guy) bought us shots and after a couple of drinks and a wee bit of dancing, no part of me wanted to go home anymore. Clement ended up just being shy and not speaking a lot of English, which of course was the reason he wasn't super-chatty with us and our bad French accents. But after a few drinks, talking to anybody is a million times easier, in French or in English (but especially in French), so we friendlied it up after our third vodka-champagne shot (surprisingly delicious, even for my diminishing palate for vodka in every form).
One point: the boys insisted on paying for pretty much everything we drank until Abby pulled out her credit card and laid down the law that she was going to buy shots now, no questions asked. But, as a former person with money sometimes, it was a HUGE treat to get treated for once, as opposed to having other people taking advantage of my generosity and "live your life" nature. I was basically ecstatically happy at #1 being out with French people, especially French boys and #2 dancing ridiculously to bad pop music (including the millionth time I have heard "I Got A Feeling" by the Black Eyed Peas since I've been in France).
Funny anecdote: A tall blond French boy came up to me and asked me to dance, and me, being friendly and carefree and slightly drunk, started to basically salsa with him so as to chat and avoid him trying to molest me. I learned that his name was Mathieu, he was 19, extremely handsome, and also a super duper creeper. First class. Within 3 minutes of meeting me, he felt comfortable caressing my cheek and hair, which made me basically burst out laughing and mouth "HELP ME" at Abby over the shoulder of his creepy white sweater. She did, pulling me back towards her and yelling "desole!" at poor Mathieu. Luckily 5 seconds later he had some drunk 25-year-old sitting on his lap. We made fun of him for the rest of the night.
Drunk and happy, we smoked cigarettes in the cute little cave-like smoking room downstairs (since you can't smoke inside anywhere in France anymore - luckily everywhere has huge door-like windows for the cafe crowd). And as will happen in even numbers of boys and girls, we had sort of paired off with our respective French boys: me with François and Abby with Clement formerly known as the asshole. At 5am we left the bar, Abby and I happy that the metro started to run again in 30 minutes, rendering our late-night transportation worries non-existent. We proceeded to amble around the streets of Paris in the 5eme for about 45 minutes, pretty much just making out in the most Parisian of ways (i.e. in public, although I suppose that at 6am there's not a whole lot of public). The French are all about keeping their love out in the open though, and the only other people on the street at that time were doing basically exactly the same thing as us, with slight variations and specific destinations. Arrived home, delirious with joy, champagne and exhaustion, at around 7am.
Anyway, the point is that this week, I have a dinner/wine date with a French boy, tomorrow I am going to the ballet, I have fabulous new trousers, and this was only Friday.
Saturday was spent sleeping, recovering, and then trekking across Paris to Sally's house for drinks, dinner, movie, and a little French party that her host brother Benoit was throwing in lieu of their parents being out of town for the weekend. Found a Domino's pizza in France!! It was just as delicious as at home and they were having some sort of sale where every pizza was under 6 Euros. Hollaaaa. So two pizzas, a 12-pack of Heineken and whiskey-gingerale-lemon drinks (YES I FOUND GINGER ALE) later, we smoked hookah (what did I tell you!) with Sally's cute host brother in his little basement apartment and found out that French people like Crystal Castles and (more expected) Phoenix and not just the Black Eyed Peas, Bob Marley, and Justice.
Sally's house was beautiful even though her bathroom's ceiling is extremely low and she does not have a shower, but only a bath. Oy. But her room is unbelievably French and fabulous, with curtains and huge windows and a smell vaguely of mothballs and sunlight.
I love those girls. It's pretty wonderful. Life, that is. I've spent all of today inside reading/Skyping/writing postcards/thinking about Morocco and my trousers, as well as a bit of homework. Blech.
A bientot!
No comments:
Post a Comment