Appendix A

[tag]Paris, France, 16th[/tag] arrdt

How does this country hold together?

In the run-up to submitting all the study-abroad paperwork, that was the question that we asked about Italy. Italy, we joked, was a country that was basically run by no one – a country that, we later learned, couldn’t even prevent anyone from using its capital’s subway system for free. Now I’m wondering the same thing about France.

The difference between Italy and France, however, is that while Italy’s chaos seems to come from a complete lack of order, France’s [tag]chaos[/tag] comes from a surplus of it. There is so much order in France, so many functionaries and forms and offices and job titles, that nothing much gets done here either. Let me describe the course selection process a bit using, if I may, a cake metaphor. I’m too annoyed right now to be direct.

Suppose you wanted to bake a cake at McGill: you’d arrive at Shop Rite or IGA with a list of ingredients. You’d find each ingredient (class) in its appropriate aisle (department) and put it in your shopping cart (schedule). When you’ve finished loading ingredients, you check out. That means that add-drop period is finished and you’ve finalized your schedule. Simple enough.

But suppose that, for whatever reason, you happen to move to France. You want to bake a cake, with the same five ingredients. There supermarket is very easy to find and very clearly marked on the exterior; the only caveat is that you’ve been e-mailed directions in advance regarding how to enter. There is a door in front, but because of procedure, you’ll have to use the side door anyway.

You arrive at the supermarket to find that there isn’t even a door in front. Fair enough. But when you walk to the side and locate the door you should be entering, you find it locked, with no light behind it. You knock, to no avail.

But maybe, just maybe, if this supermarket is cracked out enough to require that you enter on the side, there might be doors in the back. And when you trudge to the back of the supermarket, you do indeed find doors. Fifteen of them, actually. And all of them are labelled with variations on the theme of food, but none actually mark an entrance to the supermarket.

You can narrow down which doors you need, somewhat. One is marked for people who want to cook with meat, and one for professional chefs, and one for people who are allergic to spiral-sliced ham. And somehow, through absolute sheer and dumb luck, you happen to knock on the right door, first try.

“Oh!” says the functionary apologetically. “You mean they didn’t update the e-mail? Yeah, they moved all our offices just around the corner. I don’t know why.”

Who’s they?

“Oh, I don’t know. The bureau of supermarkets.”

Which all obscures the fact that you aren’t even in the supermarket: you’re in an office next to the supermarket. And what the functionnary provides you isn’t actually the ability to purchase incredients: she gives you a list of ingredients sold at this supermarket. It’s twenty pages long. And you can’t just buy the ingredients you need, either. You have to buy a slate of ingredients – pick one from this column, two from this one, and you have to buy everything in this column. Never mind that you already have many of these ingredients. The response when you protest? Ce n’est pas possible.

When you’ve made your choices, made easier by the fact that in actuality half of the packet is completely irrelevant to you (they sell ballet slippers at this supermarket?), you go to the next office over, open Wednesdays from 8 to 10 and Fridays from 2 to 4. Another functionary will be approve your selections, assuming you bring three identity photos, two copies of your last gas bill, a bank slip, four copies of your most recent bowling scores, a signed and notarized letter from your shoe store relating to the size of your feet, and – oh! – proof of health insurance. When this man approves you, you’re in the clear. Now they’ll let you in the supermarket. And give you exactly what was approved, no more, no less.

This completely ridiculous drawn-out situational metaphor (”sitmet” – TV executives take note, I coined this phrase) is more or less what I’m going through right now, down to and including offices moving down the hall at random. I’m not going to identify what corresponds to what, but this gives you an idea. I miss McGill [tag]bureaucracy[/tag]. I really do. I’ve never been more in favour of a world takeover by McGill Ancillary Services than I am now. I wonder if they outsource?

Anyway, I did finally meet many of the other [tag]international students[/tag]. That happened at a really dorky-sounding event: a walk through one of Paris’s many gardens. Paris 1 hosts a large delegation of Germans and a fair number of Finlanders as well – and plus, since there are no students from American universities, I have become de facto Canadian here. Some of you will be really amused to hear that, especially since I’ve been presenting myself to everyone as American. But every question I receive is a variation on the theme of “In my country, we X. What do you do in Canada?”

Though I have officially gone on the defensive about being American now. That was with a Polish girl who I met at the international student office. I also tried to explain to her the glory of youforgotpoland.org, but it was in vain.

The only other thing to say, really, is that today I visited the Grande Arche de [tag]la Défense[/tag], and the surrounding malls, with the French cousin of a McGill friend. The Grande Arche is the modernist counterpart to the Arc de Triomphe, and much much larger than it looks in pictures. It’s surrounded by the area referred to as the Défense, which passes for Paris’s central business district even if it isn’t in Paris proper. More on that when I actually go over there with a camera.

So I think it’s time to get out of McDonalds. Tomorrow is bank account and cell phone day. Wish me luck. I’m hoping they’ll accept only three copies of my latest bowling scores. I mean, I have a good excuse: when I went to make the copies, I didn’t have proper proof of health insurance.

[tag]Paris, France, 5th[/tag] arrdt, near the [tag]Sorbonne[/tag]

The very fact of arriving in England struck me immediately. As Daniel, who I stayed with, would attest, I spent the whole span of my stay intermittently noticing it – “gee, I’m in England!” But Paris is different. It hasn’t hit me yet.

Maybe it’s because I’m still working my way in. I’ve hardly met any French people, and I’ve barely come up against French culture. Maybe because school hasn’t started yet, so there’s no direction to my day-to-day life. Maybe because everything I’ve done so far in Paris is tourism-related and it’s like I’m living in a kids’ picture book about France. But I really don’t know.

I’m in a haze. Example: I completely missed Rosh Hashanah. I’m extremely embarrassed to have done this. The holiday is marked in my day planner and I brought formal clothing and [tag]Jewish[/tag] garb more or less expressly for the high holidays. If I were anywhere in North America, there is virtually no chance that I’d have missed this date.

But get this: on the morning of the holiday, I happened to be meandering through a somewhat Jewish neighbourhood, and passed a synagogue. People were streaming in and the police had cordoned off the block. And what thought did I have? “Gosh, they’re much more observant of Shabbat morning here than they are where I’m from.” And talk about [tag]faux pas[/tag]: the evening before, when I also should have been in services, I had sent an e-mail to the umbrella campus Jewish organization asking what kinds of events they held for international students.

I guess there’s always Yom Kippur. It’s one more thing to atone for. “Avinu Malkeinu, our Father and King, inscribe me in the book of Doesn’t Forget Important Things.” (Actually, if He did that before next Sunday evening and not after, I’d be much happier.)

(If you’re not Jewish and didn’t get any of the above two paragraphs, you can start reading here again.)

In the last few days I’ve criscrossed the city. I haven’t done much formal tourism, but then I rarely ever do. I walk places. Here is a summarized list of what I’ve done since Friday:

• I registered at the International Student Centre. It’s less bureaucratic than I’d thought it would be, but then, the big fight with the police prefecture is still to come.
• I found the university. It’s gorgeous, covered in scaffolding, and in the lovely St-Germain area.
• I checked out the Eiffel Tower. It’s a big metal triangle situated on a foundation that appears to be built entirely out of tourists.
• I had a café au lait on a patio. Yummy and overpriced, but that ought to show me to never buy anything in the posh neighbourhood where I live.
• I’ve been back and forth on the avenue des Champs-Elysees a few times. The Arc de Triomphe is that avenue’s western terminus and only about ten minutes’ walk from where I live, so I occasionally just meander over. And it is pretty cool just to be able to nonchalantly say, “oh, I went for a short walk on the Champs-Elysees, no big deal.” (Aren’t I an ass?)

Today, feeling a little defeated and with legs still sore from all the walking I’ve done in the last few days, I relaxed. I got up late, and A sent her son J up to see if I wanted crepes! A and I got into a long conversation about religion, politics, and everything else. Later, I did my obligatory McDonlalds-and-Internet run. I organized some of my paperwork at an outdoor cafe; when it started to rain I went home for dinner.

Speaking of dinner: I’m running out of ideas for things to eat. The problem is that all I have to work with culinarily is a microwave – not even a fridge. Anyone have any ideas? I mean, French TV dinners are much better than American ones, and don’t even contain copious amounts of fat, but it’s still no way to live. I miss cooking for myself. Anyone have any ideas?

[tag]Paris, France[/tag]

Have you ever noticed that no one ever uses the word ‘jubilant’ in conversation?

“Happy birthday, Sam! You’re 20 years old – how do you feel?”
“Me? Absolutely jubilant. Elated. Irresistably exultant.”

That’s because “jubilant” is a ridiculous word. No one uses the word “jubilant” because no one is ever that incredibly amazingly irrevocably happy.

Or at least, I sure as hell wasn’t jubilant on my flight into Paris. A little giggly? Maybe. Trembling in my chair? Yeah, maybe some of that too. Add to that the one thought that replayed itself over and over again like a ten second long CD track on repeat:

God. Ten months is a long. long. time.

With the Normandy coast in view and the sun starting to set behind it in dusty shades of yellow and orange, I started to write a list of everything I thought I was going to miss about North America. Chrome-coated Jersey diners, maybe. The immensely comical Quebec language disputes. The pointless New Jersey-New York rivalry. The New York Times, and maybe even its crossword, even though I’ve only completed it once. Et cetera.

Charles de Gaulle Airport is weird. At first glance out the window of an airplane, the entire airport looks like the result of an UFO crash. There’s a cylindrical building with a distinct extraterrestrial feeling to it that the road drives through as if it were part of some pulmonary system. Terminal B, where my flight arrived, looks suspiciously like some kind of pod that will burst any day now, spraying eggs across the surrounding landscape. The underbelly of this airport is clearly built using organic space-age technology unknown to the rest of mankind.

Which all fails to explain why it took four times as long to get my bags in Paris as it had at Heathrow. The distance those bags had to travel in Paris couldn’t have been more than 200 feet, while at Heathrow it was easily three times that distance. (Though Heathrow, far from being extraterrestrial and organic, looked like some kind of 1980s industral accident involving lots of plastic tubes – much as I imagine Three Mile Island.)

I made my bus transfer perfectly, even uttering my first unceremonious words of French: “Excuse me, does this bus go to Porte Maillot?”

“Yes, thirteen euros,” said the luggage handler with a surprisingly friendly grin and a surprisingly comprehensible accent.

I took an empty bank of two seats on the left side of the bus. Two Asian tourists sat on the bank opposite mine. I kid you not: they took flash photos out the windows whenever the bus passed anything larger than a bridge.

I’m staying temporarily with A. She’s a nice, easygoing woman who reminds me of one of my mother’s quilting friends. In exchange for a small room on the top floor of her building, I’m babysitting her son, J, for 12 hours per week. This won’t be such a chore: J is cute and very precocious. In fact, J reminds me of myself at that age, down to and including the obsession with dinosaurs. My challenge will probably actually be to keep his brain stimulated when I babysit him.

But I’m not there yet. My university registration is the first thing to work out, but I still have to get through the linguistic issues. Yesterday I went out around 9:30 PM to try to find something to eat – enough of a challenge in itself at that hour. When I did find a nearby Japanese take-out place -

“Est-ce que vous voudriez dcouvttt ?”

That blur at the end was either “un couvert” – a cover – or “du choux vert” – cabbage. Those phrases have very similar sounds, and both were possibilities at that point. Indeed, none of the containers were covered, but then, the attendant seemed to be looking at a bowl of some cole slaw-looking salad.

“Oui, bien sûr!” I said. Yes, of course!

* * *

Fak on est rentrés deçus
Tout mouillés et abattus
En croisant les écolos
Dans le portique de McDo . . .

As you might still expect, I’m still adjusting to the absurdity of this situation. There’s no Internet at home or at school, so for now my only connection to the Internet is the local McDonalds. I’m working on getting a phone number, and I don’t want to distribute A’s address. So for now, the best way to reach me is by e-mail. Barring that, you can watch for me on AIM or MSN, or even simply post a comment on this blog.

Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to go finish my frites. The atmosphere in this McDonalds is just jubilant.