Are you also going to Paris? Buy one of these:
Next to my wine opener this is 100% the most useful object I own. I don't know whether there are a lot of string theorist in Paris but there should be; the idea that space contains 3 linear and 9 curled-up dimensions would get a lot of traction here. This is a city where straight always veers slightly to the right, and turning north is an excellent way to end up miles to the south. If you're like me you're bound to end up if not lost then at least not where you intended, which makes the metro a godsend. Sad as it may sound the Paris metro is fast becoming my most reliable source of joy in this city (although I may just have an erotic attraction to modes of transportation--ask Stephan about the time I wanted to fuck my bicycle). I can't put my finger one it but something about the metro just makes me smile, something about the way the trains come every five minutes, the way the tunnels only occasionally smell like urine, the way the rubber wheels sound like a jet engine instead of a rabid cat, or maybe the way the padded seats cushion your ride without exposing you to flesh eating bacteria
Tonight my plans were to go to Le 9B to get my dance on but sadly those plans fell through, mostly due to rain but also due to some timidness. Yes, I understand that the latter is completely ridiculous and totally unacceptable; I promise it won't happen again. Instead I wandered down to the Sorbonne in the neighborhood of L'Odéon, thinking it might be a bit like the NYU neighborhood and that I might find a college bar or something. Stepping out of the metro with characteristic giddiness, I hadn't walked for more than a block when I found the perfect place. At least, it seemed like the perfect place at first. Then, I don't know, something came over me and I had to leave.
I started walking with no particular destination in mind. The night was cool and very rainy. Neither my very slight umbrella nor my thin flannel shirt made significant contributions to my comfort, so to keep warm I kept walking. First I walked past L'Odéon, stopping at the gate to gaze up at the giant theater. I walked by a bookshop selling side by side both The Coming Insurrection and an illustrated guide to mollusks of the Mediterranean. I walked up tiny streets where the owner of a watch repair shop sat outside and smoked, probably reflecting on how ridiculously antiquated his business was. I walked around the Jardin de Luxembourg, which by day probably trounces any other park in Paris for both natural beauty and sheer Parisian-ness (I'm eating a crêpe while a boy in a blue suit sails a model boat in a duck pond against a backdrop of perfectly geometric trees. Fuck). The park was of course closed, as are all nice things in Paris at night; peering through the gate at the empty park suggested something mysterious and sinister.
After a long time walking I finally came to a bar. This bar. When I went in there was no one inside save for me, the owner and one or two of his friends. I ordered a Guiness and, still feeling a little shy, started reading a music culture magazine. This, apparently, is something you can do in France: walk into a bar and expect not only to be offered a free magazine but also to be able to read it in peace. Anyway I continue leafing through my magazine and sipping my drink when I hear a voice to my right say, "Selon moi, elle est bonne, quoi?" Several things about this sentence brought me immense joy. Let's go through them one at a time.
I fucking love it when French people end a sentence with the word "quoi", meaning "what". Imagine saying the equivalent in English: "I like the color green on a car, what?", as in "I like the color green and I invite you to disagree but I will hit you, just hard enough to let you know that you really shouldn't have contradicted me." You have to understand the inflection isn't confrontational like you might think, but rather more like how you might inflect the word "no" in the sentence "Apples make a pretty good snack, no?"
The word "bonne" makes me crack up to no end. Bonne means good, as in "Man that was a good cake," but also fuckable, as in "Yeah, that cake was so good it was practically fuckable." I like bonne particularly because it's one of many hilarious traps hidden in the French language where a very common and completely wholesome word can become, in the wrong context, downright filthy. Take for example "J'ai chaud" -- I'm hot, which can so easily become "Je suis chaud" -- I'm in heat. Worse still is the word "baiser", where the noun is a sweet peck on the cheek but where the verb actually means "to have sex with, vulgar". Bonne falls into the same category--I always imagine a slightly sheepish substitute teacher accidentally describing someone's daughter as "bonne". English doesn't play these games; it would be very hard to want to say "good" but accidentally substitute the word "fuckable".
Finally, the only picture to which the man could have been referring was of a 14-year-old girl. I turned to him "Mais elle n'a que 14 ans," to which he replied "J'aime beaucoup la lumière, la composition, c'est un photo très bien réalisé." Apparently the fact that the girl was 14 was not as worth of commentary as the white balance. I guess as things go that's pretty French.
Before long a couple other regulars joined the conversation. One in particular strolled into the bar with an actual fucking beret, flinging his cigarette underhand into the street as ordering a glass of wine with the same fluid gesture. He walks up to me, shakes my hand, then says, "Je suis Claude. Mais que fais tu dans ce bar pourri?" Oh Claude. What am I doing in this rotten bar? Hoping that exactly you would walk in.
Claude actually brought an important fact to my attention, which is that there is another sector of the French language that I cannot understand in any way: racist jokes. Actually the first few words were usually comprehensible, short phrases along the lines of "Vous connaissez tous l'histoire des trois juifs?" or maybe "Il y avaient deux blondes dans un avion". After that, however, it's just a string of nonsense. At some point there's a question, someone else prompts the lecteur for an answer, and then the whole bar bursts into laughter, except possibly for the one or two parties present who might have felt the joke was at their expense. I wanted to try to tell the joke about the three blonds hiding in the barn, where one hides with the cows and yells "Moo", one hides with the pigs and yells "Oink", and the other hides in a sack of potatoes and yells "Potatoes", but I couldn't remember what sound cows and pigs made in French (It turns out the answer is "meuh" and "groin", respectively).
After I felt I had enough I stood up, offering "Merci à tous pour les blagues dont je n'ai pas compris un seul mot," before heading out into the night. Outside I chatted with Maelle, the girlfriend of one of the guys inside, who apologized for her "bof" friends. I've looked up the word since but can't quite figure out what it means, although it seems at some level to be the exact opposite of "bobo". Someone should really write an international field guide to social pigeonholing, I thought, as I made my way back to the metro, listening to the sounds of sleepy laughter fading into the distance.
Next to my wine opener this is 100% the most useful object I own. I don't know whether there are a lot of string theorist in Paris but there should be; the idea that space contains 3 linear and 9 curled-up dimensions would get a lot of traction here. This is a city where straight always veers slightly to the right, and turning north is an excellent way to end up miles to the south. If you're like me you're bound to end up if not lost then at least not where you intended, which makes the metro a godsend. Sad as it may sound the Paris metro is fast becoming my most reliable source of joy in this city (although I may just have an erotic attraction to modes of transportation--ask Stephan about the time I wanted to fuck my bicycle). I can't put my finger one it but something about the metro just makes me smile, something about the way the trains come every five minutes, the way the tunnels only occasionally smell like urine, the way the rubber wheels sound like a jet engine instead of a rabid cat, or maybe the way the padded seats cushion your ride without exposing you to flesh eating bacteria
Tonight my plans were to go to Le 9B to get my dance on but sadly those plans fell through, mostly due to rain but also due to some timidness. Yes, I understand that the latter is completely ridiculous and totally unacceptable; I promise it won't happen again. Instead I wandered down to the Sorbonne in the neighborhood of L'Odéon, thinking it might be a bit like the NYU neighborhood and that I might find a college bar or something. Stepping out of the metro with characteristic giddiness, I hadn't walked for more than a block when I found the perfect place. At least, it seemed like the perfect place at first. Then, I don't know, something came over me and I had to leave.
I started walking with no particular destination in mind. The night was cool and very rainy. Neither my very slight umbrella nor my thin flannel shirt made significant contributions to my comfort, so to keep warm I kept walking. First I walked past L'Odéon, stopping at the gate to gaze up at the giant theater. I walked by a bookshop selling side by side both The Coming Insurrection and an illustrated guide to mollusks of the Mediterranean. I walked up tiny streets where the owner of a watch repair shop sat outside and smoked, probably reflecting on how ridiculously antiquated his business was. I walked around the Jardin de Luxembourg, which by day probably trounces any other park in Paris for both natural beauty and sheer Parisian-ness (I'm eating a crêpe while a boy in a blue suit sails a model boat in a duck pond against a backdrop of perfectly geometric trees. Fuck). The park was of course closed, as are all nice things in Paris at night; peering through the gate at the empty park suggested something mysterious and sinister.
After a long time walking I finally came to a bar. This bar. When I went in there was no one inside save for me, the owner and one or two of his friends. I ordered a Guiness and, still feeling a little shy, started reading a music culture magazine. This, apparently, is something you can do in France: walk into a bar and expect not only to be offered a free magazine but also to be able to read it in peace. Anyway I continue leafing through my magazine and sipping my drink when I hear a voice to my right say, "Selon moi, elle est bonne, quoi?" Several things about this sentence brought me immense joy. Let's go through them one at a time.
I fucking love it when French people end a sentence with the word "quoi", meaning "what". Imagine saying the equivalent in English: "I like the color green on a car, what?", as in "I like the color green and I invite you to disagree but I will hit you, just hard enough to let you know that you really shouldn't have contradicted me." You have to understand the inflection isn't confrontational like you might think, but rather more like how you might inflect the word "no" in the sentence "Apples make a pretty good snack, no?"
The word "bonne" makes me crack up to no end. Bonne means good, as in "Man that was a good cake," but also fuckable, as in "Yeah, that cake was so good it was practically fuckable." I like bonne particularly because it's one of many hilarious traps hidden in the French language where a very common and completely wholesome word can become, in the wrong context, downright filthy. Take for example "J'ai chaud" -- I'm hot, which can so easily become "Je suis chaud" -- I'm in heat. Worse still is the word "baiser", where the noun is a sweet peck on the cheek but where the verb actually means "to have sex with, vulgar". Bonne falls into the same category--I always imagine a slightly sheepish substitute teacher accidentally describing someone's daughter as "bonne". English doesn't play these games; it would be very hard to want to say "good" but accidentally substitute the word "fuckable".
Finally, the only picture to which the man could have been referring was of a 14-year-old girl. I turned to him "Mais elle n'a que 14 ans," to which he replied "J'aime beaucoup la lumière, la composition, c'est un photo très bien réalisé." Apparently the fact that the girl was 14 was not as worth of commentary as the white balance. I guess as things go that's pretty French.
Before long a couple other regulars joined the conversation. One in particular strolled into the bar with an actual fucking beret, flinging his cigarette underhand into the street as ordering a glass of wine with the same fluid gesture. He walks up to me, shakes my hand, then says, "Je suis Claude. Mais que fais tu dans ce bar pourri?" Oh Claude. What am I doing in this rotten bar? Hoping that exactly you would walk in.
Claude actually brought an important fact to my attention, which is that there is another sector of the French language that I cannot understand in any way: racist jokes. Actually the first few words were usually comprehensible, short phrases along the lines of "Vous connaissez tous l'histoire des trois juifs?" or maybe "Il y avaient deux blondes dans un avion". After that, however, it's just a string of nonsense. At some point there's a question, someone else prompts the lecteur for an answer, and then the whole bar bursts into laughter, except possibly for the one or two parties present who might have felt the joke was at their expense. I wanted to try to tell the joke about the three blonds hiding in the barn, where one hides with the cows and yells "Moo", one hides with the pigs and yells "Oink", and the other hides in a sack of potatoes and yells "Potatoes", but I couldn't remember what sound cows and pigs made in French (It turns out the answer is "meuh" and "groin", respectively).
After I felt I had enough I stood up, offering "Merci à tous pour les blagues dont je n'ai pas compris un seul mot," before heading out into the night. Outside I chatted with Maelle, the girlfriend of one of the guys inside, who apologized for her "bof" friends. I've looked up the word since but can't quite figure out what it means, although it seems at some level to be the exact opposite of "bobo". Someone should really write an international field guide to social pigeonholing, I thought, as I made my way back to the metro, listening to the sounds of sleepy laughter fading into the distance.
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