Baby Steps

VIP Update: My life in Paris just got a whole lot better on tonight's metro ride home!




As my rheumatologist has been telling me that I will never heal until I do things that make me happy (with the suggestions of listening to music, watching YouTube and writing), I decided to sidestep a bit and shed the blog-posting, but substitute in another potential mood-elevator: a move. Unfortunately it is not back to the land of anglais and Target, but it is to an area where there is lots of anglais being spoken, Pop-Tarts being sold down the street at the Real McCoy Café, and a next-door neighbor that is a bit too glamorous even for this Madame: the Grande Dame herself. I can’t say it has all been peaches and cream, but once we pieced through the sour milk and rotten peaches, a more edible dessert begin to take shape (and in the color “piscine”). For what IKEA charged us to deliver synthetic shee in way too many pieces, we could have educated a large village in Africa (and would have been spared the migraine). To date, we still don’t have some of our bouquet d'anglais channels working on our TV (after multiple phone calls and a walk-in to the store), but we do have a wealthy neighbor across the way who got a satellite dish installed yesterday, so perhaps I will just settle for a pair of binoculars to watch my Kardashians. And as I sit here and type, my laundry is going in my washer and dryer (yes, miracles can happen), and the rain is pattering on my windows, but not blocking my view of the Eiffel Tower. I can’t say it is heaven (since angels speak English), but it is one step closer.

View from our pad

Billy the Bosnian Goat is laying quietly on the floor eagerly awaiting the arrival of the pillows for the couch and chairs from America :)

Please take note of the steer head against the piscine (pool) colored wall

Post-move (and once Internet was installed), I have taken my docs advice and combined YouTube with my desperation to exercise. As I have been wearing a back brace daily, which now bursts open on its own volition (making a loud noise since it is Velcro), thus forcing me to pull my dress up in public to re-fasten, it's a sign that I am far from French in my eating habits. And unlike the French women, I need to exercise. So, until I am able to walk the Champ de Mars or stroll through the Tuleries, I have decided to start working on those areas not affected by my back. My solution: a daily fist pump routine with Pauly D and Keenan to “Beat dat Beat” on YouTube. I may be a sausage from the chest down, but my arms are going to be ready for sundresses on the Jersey Shore this summer. I have my doctor to thank for this life-changing discovery.

As we continue to travel, the fresh air, fresh pretzels (thanks to Berlin) and the excitement of somewhere new still intoxicates me and helps me to relax. Although I am sure the airplane does not help with my back, the idea of getting out of Paris does, so travel has not ceased throughout my period of the Hunchback of Moi. Last weekend we were in Berlin, which was an amazing mix of history (the Berlin wall, the division between East and West Germany, the Gestapo Headquarters) with new life amongst sorrow (including a Vapiano -- the quickest way for anyone to feel better). There were pockets of streets that were filled with a buzzing new energy that is helping to rebuild the city. Our suitcases restrict us from heavy shopping on our weekend jaunts, but we did come home with our new porcelain steer head that complements the piscine wall quite well. Combined with the goat skin from Bosnia, we are on our way to starting the Paris post-petting zoo. Perhaps that will help us to pay for more travel (and no longer our medical bills as we got our carte vitales!!).

The Wall -- avec some francais

Bradenburg Gate

The Holocaust Memorial

As Spring is here, and the pigeons are chirping in their nest next to our skylight, I dare say that things are starting to swing back up. Last night we went to a talk on the four pillars of French identity, the first one of them being equality before money. Agreed. The second one was the French language. Forget it. This made me realize that I can get part of the way to being French, but there is still a great divide, and I won’t ever make it past that one. So, instead I will walk down the street and and order diet A&W Root Beer in English and sip it as I stare at the Eiffel Tower from my new flat. I think I feel my back getting better already….

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And as I am doing blog catch-up, I would be remiss not to mention Athens, Greece. This was a weekend of ultimate bliss and was a much needed dose of sun!

Entrance to the Acropolis

Changing of the Guards

Travels to Siberia

What to say about the Russian embassy in Paris, where I spent three mornings in the past two weeks getting our visas for our trip next month to Moscow and St. Petersburg? For starters, it's in Siberia. Few places I've been to in Paris proper are more than a five-minute walk from a Metro, but this is one of them. (Ian Frazier explores this figurative sense of "Siberia" at the start of his fantastic book, Travels in Siberia, which has helped to kindle my own Russo-philia.) Once you get there, you then must wait along the iron fence ringing the embassy, for there is always a line to enter the consular services office, where visas are processed. Security at the front door is handled by a 50ish man in a dark suit who looks like a young Captain Ramius. He somehow manages to smile faintly with his mouth, while glaring at you with steely eyes hidden underneath a prominent brow. It's highly unnerving -- at once welcoming and fear-inspiring. And thereby indicative of the process that unfolded once inside and, based on what I've heard and read, of the country we'll visit.

Churchill once referred to Russia as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." This is very much reflected in the visa-application form for Americans. It's two pages, with spaces of varying sizes (though most of them are small) for entering even more information than I can recall the French government asking of us before we moved to Paris, including the names and addresses of all schools we've attended since high school, all the jobs we've held, all the countries we've visited in the last ten years and whether we're experts in explosive devices. And it must be filled out in black ink, in duplicate, which I learned only after first submitting ours in blue. This error gave me the opportunity to observe the consular office in detail, as I sat at a communal table filling out new forms in black (other people at the table were doing the same, or cutting out passport photos and affixing them to their applications with Embassy-provided scissors and glue), and as I stood in line again that day and the next (I had to come back with the black-ink forms signed by Ashley), and the following Wednesday (to actually get the visas):

- The walls have wood paneling that probably dates to the de Gaulle administration.

- The furniture includes two La-Z-Boy-like leather chairs the same 1960s shade of brown as the walls, one of which broke while someone was sitting in it my second morning there.

- Behind the service windows I saw some bulky phones with curly cords that clearly were also of the same era. The red one looked like it might have once served as Khrushchev's hotline to the White House.

- Every so often I heard a burst of staticky Russian from the windows that appeared to be reserved for Russians, where the consular workers had to use some ancient intercom system to talk to the applicants.

Maybe someday some of that oil, natural-gas and mineral money will trickle down to the Paris embassy. In the meantime, visiting it is a very Kafka-esque experience.

Fortunately, behind the window at which I ended up was a polite, helpful consular officer who spoke English. She showed me my mistakes, told me how to correct them and referred to Ashley as "Mrs." throughout the process ("Here Mrs. must sign the application."). It was thus to her window that I returned on pick-up day, after I discovered a mistake on my visa (Mrs.'s was fine). She remembered me from the week before, told me to come back in fifteen minutes et voilà: the error was corrected, and at last we were good to go to Russia. Which goes to show how important it is to know the right people. Especially in Siberia.

-- MBB