Paris Sweet Paris

Home sweet home. After a 1 hour flight from Houston to Dallas, a 4 hour flight from Dallas to Boston, and  a 7 hour flight from Boston to Paris, I have arrived. My roommate Tiffany, is one of my closest friends at Wellesley, and we made our own dinner last night with another Wellesley friend and a girl from Harvard. I made noodles with eggs, tomatoes, and cabbage, and Tiffany grilled some chicken nuggets. We are staying at the Hotels Citadines, an apartment-style hotel with a small kitchenette and a bathroom. We didn't need to buy any cutlery, bowls, plates, or anything to cook with. All we needed was our own ingredients, such as oil, sugar, salt, and - always for me - vinegar. We bought these at a supermarket called Carrefour close to our hotel, as well as some fruits and vegetables at the night market, which reminded me of Beijing. Actually, many things here remind me of Beijing: the night market, the skyscrapers with fluorescent lights, this apartment-hotel...even the Carrefour because there is one right in front of my parents' apartment in Beijing. The Chinese call it: jia le fu, meaning home-joy-blessings. It really means "crossroads."

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I've been trying to be more French in the way I act, observing and then imitating. The line for the checkout was really long last night, and as I was waiting, I tried to stand like the French, with my stubby nose pointing towards the ceiling. But then I realized that all the French people around me weren't standing like that. In contrast, they were fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughter, workers, vendors, white-collars, blue-collars. They were people doing their weekly shopping, tourists unfamiliar with everything around them, or exchange students studying the beautiful French language. And I, I was a foreign student, not American, not completely British, not completely Chinese, and definitely not French. But I assumed something of the entire French population that is just as wrong as someone assuming that Christians are just Bible-reading self-righteous ignorant converters.

Before entering the country, I expected the French to be as hearsay had warned me: rude, chauvinistic, egotistical, ignorant, arrogant, provincial. Even our first meeting here was a meeting about "l'homme francais," skills to be street-wise (walk and don't stop in streets; don't smile at guys because they'll take it the wrong way and think you're interested...), and the sky-high prices. But last night at Carrefour, I was taken aback by the people here in Paris. Of course, it's a big city and diverse people come and go, so the residents are used to broken French. All the same, the shopkeepers, handsome young man selling shrimp, the bakers, the butcher, the Arabic at the candy store (yes, there is a Haribo candy store here with Bounty and Twix and fizzy cola bottles and fizzy apple strings -  I took a time machine back to my childhood), the taxi driver with a funny sense of humour, the guy at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame who threw up his hands during mass, the hotel receptionist who was patient enough to listen to my question in broken French, and of course, Madame Egron-Sparrow, the director of the program who celebrated our arrival with a savory traditional dessert called galette des Rois and a few drops of throat-burning (or stomach-warming) champagne - all remind me of home.

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The best memory so far has to be tonight at a restaurant called Cafe Panis (panis: bread in Latin). Our waiter was special. When we told him that we would be studying French in Aix-en-Provence, he said: Aix? That's the countryside. Paris is a city. It's better. It's the best.

When I asked him if we could take our leftover food with us, he said: No. I said: never in France, or never in this cafe? He said: the French throw everything away; they like to waste things. Sorry. That's just the way it is here. I said: Oh. And then he said: Just kidding.

The food was absolutely heavenly. I ordered a Croque Madame with salad and fries. A Croque Madame is ham (jambon) with melted cheese and a fried egg on a toasted piece of brown country bread. He handed us some tomato ketchup, but I wasn't sure what it was (it could have been chilly sauce like at chinese restaurants), so I asked him. And he said with a smirk, "Ketchup. It's not blood."

We told him that he should become an actor. He said, pointing to a young waiter next to him, "Not me. He's the actor." I said: No, I don't believe you. He said: Yes, really. Jean-Luc Godard.

Jean-Luc Godard was born December 3, 1930.

We tipped him well.

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Anyhoots, we have 2 weeks here. I wish we could stay longer, but I'm sure Aix will be just as - if not even more - exciting. We have a French literature class each day starting from tomorrow (10h00-12h00) and dinner with our director on Friday and some excursions to operas, museums, cathedrals, museums, old hidden streets, cathedrals, museums, gardens, the Louvre of course. Tiffany and I plan to go to the Eiffel Tower tomorrow.

Many more adventures to come...

Please pray that I'll get over the jetlag tonight!