Appendix A

Say what you want, but parties are essentially a performance art. Each cast member arrives perfectly primed for the evening, knows all his lines, and has the same role: to be as perfectly attractive and well-spoken and witty and intelligent as possible. The proportions of the variables may vary depending on who’s throwing the party, but some combination of those four traits is always necessary. Sometimes there’s so much pretense involved that it stops even being fun. And the worst part is that much of the time, the only prize for doing well is having to keep the pretense going.

One complaint that almost all of the Erasmus kids have is that they meet too many people. I know, I know – boo hoo, cry me a river – but trust me, it becomes a problem when you show up at a party that someone you happened to meet a month ago has also come to. He remembers your name, and you don’t remember his. This happens at least once a week – sure, not always at parties, but it’s a permanent annoyance in the Erasmus experience.

What’s worse is that there’s no tactful way to admit that you don’t remember a name. There’s always the classic “introduce someone else to them so they have to say their name” routine, but since everyone else has done this already, they know what you’re trying to pull off and if you’re going to make it work, you have to be really suave. And you can just forget about it if the guy you saw two weeks ago is the only person there who you’ve seen before at all.

I believe that ultimately, the only acceptable solution will be some kind of heads-up-display like fighter jet pilots use. Looking at the party through your pair of electronic glasses, you’ll see above each person’s head their name (Jane), country of origin (Finland), field of study (ethnobiology), relationship status (Facebook: “It’s Complicated”), and highlights of your previous conversations. When you plug the glasses in to charge at night, everything is sent to your computer, and you can search through for highlights. Who, for example, was it that compared Americans to large children?

The last two or so weeks before break were packed with Christmas parties. All Christmas parties are pretty much the same: mulled wine, mistletoe, Secret Santa games in any of ten languages. By this time of year, the internationals have become homesick, and they recount misty-eyed descriptions of their late-December family traditions to each other. Somewhere in the background, a fireplace is quietly crackling.

Generally I’m the only Jew around. It’s usually not a big deal. While I don’t flaunt the fact, if I’m asked about – say – my Christmas traditions, I’m not shy to say that I’m not actually Christian.

Are you going back home to the States for the holiday?

No, I’m going to be travelling around a little bit.

Aren’t you going to be sad to be missing Christmas with your family?

Well, what can I say? I’m Jewish, so Christmas isn’t a huge deal for me, and when will I get to travel around like this again?

A few people have even started to engage me a bit. One girl asked me if I celebrated the new year on January 1 like she did. I answered that yes, it was true, we had our own Jewish New Year, but that we also lived in the Christian world. Of course I celebrated New Year’s Eve!

The second-to-last Christmas party I went to was held at an apartment in my neighbourhood. I live in a pretty swanky area, and the guy who held the party, Douglas, was a guy who I’d heard about a number of times but hadn’t actually met: like me, he was a Montreal resident living overseas. Unlike me, Douglas was a Francophone, but his accent in English was much better than mine in French. He lived in an incredible apartment, and I can only guess that he was renting a room from the probably-elderly people who actually owned the place.

Douglas’s party had a much more classy ambience than most of the student-run events I’ve been to. Low-key lounge music played in the background over the crackling of a fire in the fireplace and the quiet background chatter of other guests. I had unintentionally dressed for the occasion, with a nice sweater and polo shirt on, but a few of my less clairvoyant friends wore jeans or, worse, soccer jerseys. They almost immediately felt out of place.

My first social misstep took place as soon as I walked through the door. Douglas’s roommate answered the door – but not knowing if it she were host or guest, I had no idea what actually to say. I stammered and semi-introduced myself, finally feeling relieved as one of my friends noticed my entry and greeted me. My presence was therefore valid. Following the roommate’s direction, I placed the bottle of white wine I had brought on the kitchen counter.

For me, the party started slowly. There wasn’t much mixing among groups of people so I, staying true to the atmosphere, stuck with my friends. They were less than enthused about the party and had decided to mix a pot of their favourite drink: calimocho, a combination of one part cheap red wine to one part coke, which apparently comes from Spain – though I’m not sure something so obvious can really be credited to any one country.

I’ve had more than my fill of calimocho lately, so I found an opened decent-looking bottle of red wine and filled half a plastic cup. For some reason, it’s easier to talk to people while holding a cup. My theory is that having your hand occupied means that you can’t lock your arms, and therefore appear to be more open to conversation. A friend adds that at awkward pauses, you can take a sip while you quickly figure out what to say next.

Later on, as I stood talking to a girl from my French class, Peter – a tall Italian student who I know reasonably well at this point – grabbed me by the shoulder. There was someone he wanted me to meet, he said.

Peter led me to a girl who was sitting on a large, stuffed chair that looked like the lost middle third of an old couch. Her name was Evelyn, she had a narrow face surrounded by strikingly black hair that pulled itself into large coils, and she would be studying management in Vancouver next year. At first, she seemed roughly as pleasant as any French person I’ve met randomly at a party: that’s to say, somewhat cool but civil. Gradually, over the course of five or ten minutes of conversation, she started to soften up. And then:

“So you live in Montreal, but is that where you’re from?”

“Actually, I’m from the States,” I responded.

“Oh,” she answered.

So the slightly self-deprecating “actually” didn’t make the pill go down any softer like it usually does. I took a sip of wine while I tried to figure out what to say to a person who was very visibly unhappy about my place of origin.

“Oh?” I said. “Why ‘oh’? Have you been to the States before?”

“I spent three weeks of a summer at a program at NYU,” she said. “It was interesting.”

“Interesting?” I prodded.

“Yeah, it’s an interesting place,” she said.

I said nothing. She seemed on the verge of adding something else about New York. Then, her back straightened.

“I’m going to get a drink,” she said sharply. “I’ll be right back.”

Anyone who has been to a fair number of parties knows that that’s code for “this conversation is over.” So as Evelyn disappeared into the kitchen, I sauntered back to my friends. They were in the middle of a conversation about being intellectual in Paris – how cliché it was, and yet how they felt that if they didn’t spend time in cafés discussing the finer points of life, they were not living up to the Paris experience. I slowly slipped into the discussion.

So did Evelyn.

“This one here-” she said, pointing to me “- is probably an intellectual.”

My friends shot wry glances at me.

“North Americans don’t usually consider themselves intellectuals,” I shot back. “Any of the other people in this group can quote more Plato than I can.”

To make a long story short, since this post is already far too long, this conversation finally taught me what I needed to know about the clashes in personality between Americans and French. They consider us superficial and don’t understand how we can invite people into our houses that we barely know; I explained to her that we consider warmth and welcomingness as very appealing characteristics and that dinner parties, to us, were ways to get to know people and not to show them that they had made it. I explained to her that the French often came off as cold, snide, snobbish, and uncaring. She told me that I had too much class to be American, and she would have pegged me from my good pronunciation and non-loudness as being English. And last of all, to my laughter, she explained that the dominant stereotype of Americans was that we were all overgrown, blimp-sized children.

I have only one thing left to say. If I had had my pair of glasses, I wouldn’t have had to recount this entire story to know where that quotation came from.

—–

Going off to Brussels tomorrow morning. Bruges, Antwerp, or Luxembourg may follow. I’ll take pictures and try to post. Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it. As you know, I don’t.

It’s practically a law of the Earth: the corner bakery will have croissants. The tides will roll in and out, the seasons will change, and the corner bakery will have croissants.

And so it was that on a particular Sunday, my corner bakery did not, actually, have croissants. Or pain au chocolat or much of anything else, except for apple turnovers. And I was not in the mood for apple turnovers. Being out of cereal and bread, if I was going to eat anything that morning, I was going to have to find it first. I would be meeting a friend at the Centre Pompidou, way downtown, at 2. Mission: breakfast.

Generally speaking, not being able to buy croissants at this bakery is not a huge loss. I don’t like the lady who runs the corner bakery, and she doesn’t seem to like me; maybe she hates English speakers, or maybe she’s experiencing job burnout, or hey, maybe her marriage is lacking. If another bakery were present, I’d almost certainly patronize them instead.

But this was Sunday morning, and finding places to buy baked goods on Sunday morning in Paris – the capital of a country which has a mandatory 35-hour work week and which nearly entirely vacates to the beaches for an entire month every year – is no simple feat. In my head, I listed the four or five bakeries near my apartment. One, the self-proclaimed “Golden Baguette Winner, 2004,” would be too expensive to buy a simple breakfast from. Two more would certainly be closed. That left two: one which I didn’t remember the location of well, and one whose hours I couldn’t remember.

So I set off for Place Victor Hugo, home of the bakery whose hours I couldn’t remember. I walked to the curb and then, seeing that the bus wasn’t coming, started the five or ten minutes on foot. The air was humid and cold. Paris may not be as frigid as Montreal, but in terms of raw units of early Winter drabness, it still gives its younger cousin a run for its money.

I negotiated the roundabout to look for the bakery. True to the day’s luck, it was closed. And here, I reasoned that I might as well just wait for lunch. I turned around and walked to the bus stop. I perched myself on the bench under the overhang and waited.

And waited.

It seems that I had picked the wrong day to try Place Victor Hugo for croissants. As I was bundling up to leave my apartment for breakfast, the Parade of Horses was working its way through Paris from somewhere south-east of me: probably the Trocadero or the Eiffel Tower. And therefore we arrive at the famous physics problem: if a man leaves his apartment for a croissant and walks southeast at a speed of 5 kilometres per hour while a parade of horses walks toward him at a speed of not-fast-enough, will the man have enough patience to wait for the bus which is stalled behind the entire parade of horses?

A complicated question indeed. And it turns out that in this case, that particular man was surprised enough to see a mob of men on horses dressed as French Revolution soldiers that yes, he waited through it. In fact, the experience was more than a little surreal. It was a pastiche of the last six centuries of history: the procession of revolutionaries was followed by mobs of jousters and Davy Crocketts. Every so often, two horses would be followed by a carriage, invariably full of bored children and waving men in tuxedos. A few people awkwardly strode past on donkeys.

The last squadron of American frontiersmen glided past the now-packed bus stop after about twenty-five minutes. It was followed by a number of police on mopeds – and then, appropriately, a rather ineffective street sweeper. Then, a long queue of cars. Then, my bus.

Enough. I threw up my hands and started walking home. And about here, I think it’s about right to paraphrase a Mitch Hedberg joke: if you want to rewind a parade, just walk forward faster than it’s moving. And as I walked toward home, it at first didn’t strike me that the parade no longer seemed to be moving forward – that the parade was rewinding before my eyes.

Then, as I crossed the street, I saw it. The parade was trying to turn a corner. And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the St. Patrick’s Day parades in Montreal or New York, but there’s a reason they don’t turn off of St-Catherine Street or Fifth Avenue. They get stuck.

The police on the mopeds at the back of the parade fanned out across the intersection to try to keep the oncoming cars under control. Traffic started to stall all the way back to the Arc de Triomphe. The sound of car horns pierced the ear from every direction. The horses were visibly perturbed. And I handily beat the bus home.

But none of this is particularly important. What was important was this past Tuesday: the date I would be absolutely, positively receiving my carte de séjour, i.e. my non-temporary French visa that would cover the rest of my stay. It turns out that this is a pan-European Union thing; my friend in the Netherlands has one, and my friend who will be going to Italy has to get one upon his arrival. I can’t recap the entire saga thus far because it would take way too long (and plus, I’ve already written it here), but let’s just say that I’ve been strung along with the carte de séjour process for my entire stay here thus far.

My medical visit was scheduled for 3:30, but as I’ve learned from my last few runs-in with various bureaucracies, you are never the only one to receive a given date and time. So I arrived at 3 to beat the 3:30 rush. I presented my convocation to a woman at a desk, who told me to take a seat in the waiting area to wait my turn. To my left, an asian guy, clearly a college student, spoke in English to an Arab-looking student. He had apparently been called back in the middle of January, after his scheduled December return to China to see his family. This would not pose a problem, except that his original visa into the Schengen Zone was single-entrance . . .

After fifteen minutes in the waiting room, I was called in to a second room – a chaotic rectangular chamber with two rows of back-to-back chairs, surrounded on all sides by smaller check-up rooms. Like a game of bureaucratic Whack-a-Mole, middle-aged men and women in white lab jackets popped in and out of the doors calling the names of carte de séjour applicants. After twenty minutes, my name was called by a short, grey-haired black doctor. He shook my hand and instructed me to hang my coat and bag on a hook on the wall. He took my height and weight.

“Stand at the line,” he said as I stepped off the scale, pointing to a scabby-looking piece of duct tape on the floor. He walked to an eye chart across the room and instructed me to read letters from it.

Then, pulling a laminated card from his lab coat’s chest pocket, he walked toward me. He pointed to a place on the card.

“Opportunité,” I said.

He pointed to another place.

“Bonheur,” I said. Happiness. Was this some kind of subliminal message game? Indoctrination by health test?

Regardless, I passed the eye/literacy test and was sent into the next hall, a stubby enclosure with three small doors coming off it. The attendant instructed me to wait there. Sounds good – by now I’m pretty good at waiting.

One of the doors clicked open and the arab-looking guy from the first waiting room walked out.

“Please enter and lock the door behind you,” said the attendant. “And take off all the clothing above your waist. They’re going to take an X-ray.”

Awesome. I entered the small chamber and locked the door as I had been told. Another door, opposite the first one, had a sign in about ten languages instructing the applicant to take off all the clothing above his or her waist. I placed the papers I had been given – my file – in the pocket on that second door.

After a few claustrophobic, half-naked minutes, another man in a white coat opened the second door.

“Please follow me,” he said quickly.

He led me to an X-ray machine – a flat, white metallic surface about one metre by one metre, and instructed me to give it a big hug. Which I did, but not without wondering how many sick, hairy dudes had already done the same thing today and whether this plate was regularly disinfected. Fortunately, I have not been sick since the X-ray was taken.

The process was over in a minute, and I was sent back to the other room to dress myself. I left the dressing room clothed and was sent back to the second waiting room.

I sat for another fifteen minutes before I was called in by a friendly-looking 40-ish female doctor. She advised me to sit down on a plastic chair, facing her, and hung my X-ray on a fluorescent-backlit box.

“Well, Monsieur Imberman, your X-ray is looking pretty good,” she said with the gravity of a doctor announcing that her patient had three days to live. “And,” she went on, “it looks like you didn’t have much lunch today!”

“Not so!” I said. “I actually ate pretty well. Beef bourguignon. It was pretty cheap too, from a school cafeteria.”

She laughed. “So I take it you’re a student then, I take it? What do you study?”

“Geography,” I said. “In Canada, it’s more about urban planning, but here I’m a geography student.”

She asked me what the difference was, and I replied with my stock answer about how glaciers and mountains bored me. After about five minutes of this sort of banter – seems the doctors are also supposed to assess whether applicants are decent human beings as well? – she sent me back to the waiting room. Again. It’s like Whack-a-Mole for applicants too. We’re both the whackers and the moles.

Only this time, I was armed with the large, life-sized X-ray of my chest. Otherwise she was going to throw it out, and hey, maybe someone will ask for my chest X-ray.

Unsurprisingly, I received a clean bill of health, as attested on two separate sheets of paper: one for me and one for the police prefecture. And I was sent down the hall to actually receive my carte de séjour.

My fingers tingled with excitement. I waited for ten minutes in line. Was this the moment I’d been waiting for? Would the gods of bureaucracy smile on me today? Would the skies open up and bestow upon me the ticket to a real life in Paris?

Pfft. No! Of course not!

“We’re sorry, Monsieur Imberman, but your card just hasn’t come in yet.”

Oh.

So the next magical date is December 22. Brilliant.

It never ends.

I have this vision of going back to Canada in another ten months and having them call me up the day school starts back up there. “Monsieur Imberman!” they’d say. “Your card is ready! You only need to come in and have these four vaccinations.”

But at this point I’m pretty resigned and philosophical about all of this. Waiting is just part of the French experience, I keep telling myself. And at least I’m pretty much settled now. I’ve got a fridge, a French press (for my coffee) and hot plate, and the other day I stocked the fridge. Life goes on.

And best of all: now I have a giant X-ray of my chest that I have no idea what to do with. It doesn’t fit on any of my shelves, so right now it’s resting against the wall behind a cabinet. I’m thinking of hanging it up and making a little shrine with votive candles and incense. Or something.