Rasmenia

I live in France. I don’t live in Paris. I used to live in Paris.

People sometimes ask me about something going on in Paris. I can only answer with, “Um… I don’t really know the details about that. I don’t live in Paris.”

Occasionally, I’ll be asked, “So, how’re things in Paris?”

“Well, fine as far as I know. But, I can only guess because… I don’t live in Paris.”

A little over 6 years ago, I stepped off a plane at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Olivier was still my husband-to-be & I was not yet Madame Massoud. He fetched me & my Cat at the airport, along with all the possessions I could bring along with me.

He took us home, to his apartment in Montmartre. All of you who are either already familiar with the area, or who are Francophile Amelie geeks, know that Montmartre is located in the 18th arrondissement of Paris. For the rest of you, here’s a nice picture:

The three of us lived there, smooshed together in that tiny one bedroom 4th floor apartment, for just over 2 years. Somehow, we managed to get out of there without assaulting our rude & noisy neighbors with a lance. (Shut up. I could have a lance. You don’t know.) We survived the smog, the noise, daily treks across the city in the métro & being able to look directly into other people’s apartments.

Proof that all Paris apartments do not have a view of the Eiffel Tower.

Then, at the beginning of 2008, we moved. We stopped living in Paris.

Where we went: Sucy-en-Brie.

Okay, so it’s not too far from Paris. It’s about 10.5 miles away from Paris. 17 kilometers if you’re a metric speaker. Then again, you can’t get anywhere in France by moving in a straight line, so those 10 miles end up being a lot longer than one might think. After taking a bus to the train station for about 10 minutes or so, I then jumped on a train & after a total of 30-40 minutes, I was in Paris. Once I arrived in the city, I then needed to take the métro to reach my final destination.

So… for a little more than 3 years, we enjoyed our place in an apartment complex situated in the quieter, calmer suburbs of Paris. We still had smog, though a bit less of it. We still had noise, though it was different noise with less obnoxious sounds & fewer blaring car horns. We had better neighbors & a bit more space to move about in.

During our time in Sucy-en-Brie, when I’d mention that we were going out to eat, a common response was, “Wow, Paris has so many great restaurants.”

“Indeed. They do. But we’re not in Paris. We’re just eating somewhere nearby.”

“What? What’s the difference?”

“Nevermind.”

While we lived close enough to get to Paris on a whim, we did not live in Paris.

The suburbs were pretty nice. We had everything we needed, but we began to outgrow our apartment. Our nicer, quieter neighbors eventually got just as irritating as the obnoxious & loud ones we had before. We wanted to get a dog, but had no yard, only a small balcony up on the 3rd floor.

But any balcony is a great place for having booze & snacks.

We decided it was time to do that thing that grown ups sometimes do. We bought a house.

We ventured out of the suburbs & all the way to the French countryside. To put it in American terms, it’s sort of like we moved to another county. Lower prices. Different scenery & architecture. I had to get a new carte de séjour made, much like one would have to do with their driver’s license in the U.S. when they relocate to a new state or county.

True enough, Paris is close enough that we can get there easily by car or train.

But, this takes us a while. We have to REALLY want to go to Paris. No shit. We once sat in traffic for 3 fucking hours trying to get into the city on a Sunday afternoon.

Some things are consistent no matter where I live in this country. I have plenty of wine, the scent that wafts from the cheese in my kitchen reeks with the stench of a warm pile of sweaty socks. I have great health care. The natives shrug & make a fart sound with their mouths when I ask questions instead of providing a real answer. Everywhere I look around me, it’s as French as French can get.

But, it’s not Paris. That’s a place 50 miles away. A place where I lived 4 years ago. And in so many ways, another planet compared to where I now sit.

Gone are the noisy neighbors that are an expected part of apartment living in a big city. They’ve been replaced by the quiet countryside neighbors who smile, wave & invite us over for a coffee & a chat. The honking horns & smog are miles away. Now it’s all birds, squirrels & blue skies.

We definitely do not live in Paris.

In Paris, squirrels do not come knocking at the front door.

Now, when we’re meeting the locals, they spot me as a foreigner as soon as I open my mouth & reveal my terrible accent. Like anyone would do, they ask me where I’m from.

“I’m American. From Colorado.”

“Eh? Colorado? Where is that?”

“The West,” I say. “The Rocky Mountains.”

“Oh. I have a cousin in San Francisco.”

“I’ve heard San Francisco is very nice. I’ve never been there.”

This is where they look at me like I’ve just barfed up a live toad.

“What? Well… what’s the difference?”

So, like the natives, I shrug & make a fart noise with my mouth. Because I live in France.

There are certain places around the globe you can go to that just don’t seem real.  Standing before certain buildings, monuments & natural wonders can often be a very surreal experience, feeling less like a day out of real life & a lot more like being on a movie set.

Or, more accurately… in an actual movie.

Whenever I go to Washington D.C., it feels bizarre to me, as though I’ve been inserted into the middle of a news report, or some exciting action flick.  I’ve constantly got my eyes peeled for a bad guy to come tearing through the crowd, pursued by a determined hero with a pistol in his hand.  I periodically check the skies for aliens, who as we all know, only land in major cities with well-known buildings & monuments.

I have yet to see this during a trip to D.C.

As anyone can imagine, Paris is no different.  In fact, for Americans, it’s probably even more surreal.  Seeing something like the Eiffel Tower for the first time is an awesome experience.  I first saw it 12 years ago.  I’ve lived in France for almost 5 years & it still impresses me whenever I see it.  It’s something that I grew up seeing in movies, paintings & photographs of faraway places.

Every time I tuned in to my favorite TV show, there was Paris in the background.

It wasn’t a real place.  It was a character in a movie.  It was a fantasy, a place where fictional characters go to have adventures & fairy-tale romances of mythical proportions.

When I decided that I would be moving to Paris, my destination wasn’t a place of real-life or fictional fantasy.  The truth is, I was too caught up in the whirlwind to really think much about it either way.  So, I packed up my shit & headed for Paris – Montmartre, to be more precise.

You know Montmartre… you’ve seen it before, even if you haven’t ever been to France.

Well… just to name a few.

One thing I can say for a fact is, the Montmartre that I lived in had nothing to do with the Montmartre that I had seen in these movies.  In spite of the fact that I had seen my own front door in Amélie.

Montmartre is my favorite part of Paris. It’s multi-cultural, full of artists & bohemian types & definitely feels more… Parisian.  However, actually being there, living there amidst the day-to-day just doesn’t feel as quaint as movie Montmartre.

"I don't remember seeing so many cars or Americans in Amélie."

One of the first things I noticed after I moved in with Olivier was the blackness.  A layer of blackness on the walls, ceiling & windows.  Black shit every time I blew & picked my nose.  I freaked out.  I cleaned everything from top to bottom: wine bottles, book spines, windows, inside & out… little corners of shelves & baseboards all had to be sterilized & polished.  Once I got the entire place clean & had all of the black shit out of my nose, it was time to start over.

So… what was all of this nasty black crud?  Air pollution.  With the shit floating in the air, combined with the humidity, there would eventually be a residue that would stick to surfaces in our apartment & would of course, wreak havoc on sinuses.  Granted, being from a small town in northern Colorado, I was a bit hypersensitive to chunky black air.

But, at least life in Paris was tranquil, aside from that, right?

Uh… no.

Rush hour was especially fun, when hundreds of motorists would sit bumper to bumper on every street surrounding our apartment, honking their horns nonstop – I guess because if you honk a horn for 10 minutes straight, it can actually cause a traffic light to change colors, or can magically give the person in front of you the ability to drive their car through solid objects, allowing you to finally move.

The bar down the street, while it was a fun place to hang out, insured that we would always have plenty of shouting drunkies roaming about in the street below our bedroom window at 3am.

There were the upstairs neighbors, who enjoyed jumping up & down on the cardboard-thin divider between their apartment & ours, dancing to Bollywood music at midnight, blasting techno at 4am, or throwing parties on a Tuesday night.

Did I mention that behind our apartment were 2 schools?  Yep… a middle school & an elementary school.  Recess was deafening.

Quaint?  Tranquil?  Not exactly.  A movie-like fairy tale?  No fucking way.

Needless to say, I didn’t get much writing done during those 2 & a half years in Montmartre.

Sure, going for a walk around the area was nice from time to time… as long as you manage to avoid the countless herds of tourists.  The well-known stairs of Montmartre do indeed add to the charm & are undeniably picturesque… as long as you’re in good shape & are not in a rush to get somewhere.  Hopefully, you don’t mind being covered in sweat when you arrive, either.

I've found it helps to pack a bag of supplies.

I sometimes have to laugh when someone says to me, “Ooh!  Paris!  You’re so lucky!”  Sure, I am lucky.  I know this.  And there many things that I love about Paris.  But there is always that fucking problem about where the grass is greener.  When someone would say this to me, I would automatically think of driving my car on big, open highways in America, rather than standing around in a hot, dirty métro station.

Better yet is when you get to ride the métro with someone who shouts their hard luck story to everyone on the train, begging for money.  It’s staggering how often this happens.  Occasionally, there is some sort of urine surprise or passenger who seems like a plague victim, which is fun, too.

Many people, when they would say, “Ooh!  Paris!  You’re so lucky!” have images of the Eiffel Tower & shiny boats on the Seine swirling about in their heads.  During my 2 & a half years in Paris, I didn’t wake up & look out the window to a scene from a movie every morning.

Um... unless you're talking about that one where boring people get up & walk to work.

I woke up to real life – just as real & underwhelming as anywhere else.

While looking just as fabulous as anyone else.

Paris is a big city.  Not as far as the amount of land that it sits on, but definitely as far as everything that is inside of it.  There are millions of people all smooshed together.  There isn’t the level of crime compared to a place like New York City, but it’s there, right along with the graffiti, hordes of hobos, street toughs, air & noise pollution.  Most of the movies imported to the U.S. don’t show you that & it’s easy to get deluded.

Of course, in spite of my cynicism & shattered delusions of movie set Paris, I’m still keeping my eyes peeled when I’m in the vicinity of surreal locations with great monuments because you know… when the shit goes down, that’s where it’ll happen.  Aliens & bad guys love big cities with famous monuments.

Since we’ve moved out of Paris to the suburbs, it’s been a relief.  Less noise, less black shit to extract from my nose – unless I’ve spent the day in the city – & my serenity level has been restored to normal.  As you might imagine, French life outside of Paris is just as quaint as you’ve seen on TV & movies.  Yep… every day is pretty much like this:

I used to laugh at germaphobic freaks like me.  I’d see them with their Lysol, alcohol pads & sanitizing gel, talking about “that bug that’s been going around” & I would shake my head & laugh.

Paranoid freaks.

Sitting at my desk, in the office where I worked, I’d watch my coworkers as they passed around a can of Lysol.  “Keep that shit away from me,” I’d tell them.  When someone would offer me an alcohol pad to wipe the germs away from the receiver of my phone, I would reply with a “thanks, but I like my phone dirty”.

Happily swimming in bacteria soup.

I was a drinking, pack-a-day smoker, happily surrounded by millions of dirty microscopic organisms & I enjoyed watching my coworkers sniff, sneeze & hack among the sound of misting Lysol.

Not because I’m that sadistic, but because I never got sick.

Then I moved to Paris.

Once I moved to Paris, I moved about the city the same way as millions of other Parisians: public transportation.  Gone were the days of leaving my apartment & going directly to my car.  My ass was now walking – rain or shine, night & day.  I was taking buses & trains, standing around at bus stops & in the métro stations… surrounded by people.

Gone, too, were the wide open spaces of Small Town, Colorado.  No more room to spread out.  No more personal space of at least one foot.

At first, I didn’t think much of it.  But, over time, as I began to feel more & more like a fucking sardine, something happened.  It started out small: a tiny cough from the back of the bus.  A sniffle from someone passing me on the street.  A sneeze from somewhere in the métro station.

The cacophony of illness grew louder as someone sitting across from me on the train would blast a thick wad of something from inside their face into a tissue.  The person sitting next to me would cough & gargle.  Someone standing up would sniff, wipe their nose with their bare hand, then grab hold of the pole that had 5 other hands wrapped around it.

Occasionally, while walking down the street, I would step over a pile of dog or pigeon shit, or a puddle of piss that had could have come from… well, anything.

The first year I spent in Paris, I was sick several times.  I was coughing on my wedding day.  It seemed as though I just couldn’t get away from it.  I began washing my hands with the frequency of a hardcore OCD case & making extra efforts not to touch anything when I went out in public.

Now… shopping carts terrify me.  The pole in the métro is a horrifying menace.  Every bus, train, ATM machine button & doorknob is a SARS or goddamn swine flu trying to take me out.  The stranger with the sniffles on the street is worse than a creature from a John Carpenter film.

At least HE isn't going to give me a fucking cold.

I’ve started carrying that damn hand sanitizing gel with me just about everywhere, though I really don’t use it all that much since I’ve gotten so good at not touching things.  You would be amazed at what I can accomplish by using only my elbows.

Children hold a special kind of terror.  When we go out & I see the snot on their faces, or their fingers shining with a fresh sheen of drool, I slowly back away, careful to make no sudden movements.

After two years of living in Paris, we moved just outside of the city.  While it’s less crowded for me now & I see fewer members of the snot-spewing public on a daily basis, I still take certain precautions, especially around someone who is suspect.  If I hear a sniff, snuffle or throat clearing, I am on high alert.

I've just gone to DEFCON 2.

So… over time, leaving the spread-out population of northern Colorado & immersing myself in the big city eventually turned me into a bit of a germaphobe.  I somehow went from being carefree & rubbing my filthy, bacteria-encrusted phone against my face to being one of the paranoid freaks ready to toss myself into a fucking Silkwood shower upon returning home from a routine trip to the grocery store.

In short, I have turned into this: