De Ce Monde Secret de l’ Amelie Americaine

Leaving is hard to do…

10 a.m.
Leaving Paris, it turns out has been more difficult than expected. Charles de Gaulle airport is very confusing. The cab driver dropped me off at the wrong terminal. Not that I knew which one was the right one, when he asked me. Then the ticket information person sent me to the check in line that was entirely overrun with three large groups of Chinese tourists who were not taking any actions to actually checking in…but had chosen to simply block the check in entrance, and the airline employees were refusing to let others by. Thought of all thoughts, “Maybe I will have to spend another night in Paris.” C’ est la vie. I am not entirely opposed to the idea. I don’t know exactly what is in store for me back in the Big Apple. But I must at least pretend that I am trying to get back home.
I engage another airline agent at another line and I am redirected back a “less crowded line”, i.e. the line I just escaped at the other end of the terminal. I race to another line, and find that it too is over run by multiple tour groups leaving at once. I go back to line number two. The agent looks at me sternly and says I have to go to the line I was told to go to. I stand my ground and say that it is far too crowded for me to get through. She relents, and lets me through.
I look at down at my luggage cart and realize that I have left my artwork either in the cab or in my hotel room. For a moment I thought this was the deciding factor. I should abandon any hope of traveling home today, take the train back into the city and retrieve my precious cargo. I prayed that I had in fact left in in my hotel and not the cab. I know that the hotel will hold on to it. I ‘m seriously considering this option…when I look up at the television monitor and see a news ticker announce that all train operators have decided to go on strike. I will either have to shell out another sixty euros for a cab or simply get on the plane and go home. This time, I relent, I will try to go home.
I check in my bags and walk to the security check in. By some act of cruel act of G_d, all the tour groups have made it through the luggage check in and are now waiting, for their turn at the security check in. The line simply doesn’t move. We all wait, a disorganized mass of humanity standing huddled together in no distinguishable line. Finally the left side moves, and none of the tourists are in that side. I jump in…my flight is scheduled to depart in just under 30 minutes.
make it to the front of the line. The security guard looks at my passport and proclaims that this line is for Europeans only! I protest! According to my ticket, my flight is already boarding. I turn around. The line he wanted me to go into was not even a line. It was all the tourist groups I had tried to evade in my luggage check in.
I make a run for it. He says something in French that I pretend that I don’t understand. I submit my carry on luggage to the security search and find my departing gate. For all of my obnoxious American behavior, it turns out that my flight is delayed by at least an hour and a half.
I order myself my last french “un double cafe”, and true to form I spill most of it on the nice white tile of the terminal floor.
Je t’aime le rive gauche 10a.m.

The hotel ordered me my cab to the airport at a prompt time. I am sure that they just wanted to make sure that I was securely out the door and off of their hands. The driver was nice young man who had a picture of his child on his dash board. He occasionally talked to his wife on his cell phone while we made our way through the city to the highway that lead to the airport. I always try to be very courteous to my cab drivers, even the smelly ones in New York. There are certain jobs I was never meant to do…and I feel it is only proper to be nice and reward those who do them. Driving a cab in a major metropolitan city like New York or Paris, is one of those jobs.He had obviously chauffeured plenty of tourists. He pointed out various monuments. We drove right past the Champs Eylisee and the Arc Triomphe. It was all very nice, however, I already missed the charm of the arroidessment where I had spent the majority of my vacation. So I said,”Je t’aime le rive gauche”. He looked up at me kind of strangely and I realized that I had just told him in my broken french that I loved him on the left bank. oops. I laughed and said that my french was bad. He said that his english was just as bad, and we had an uncomfortable little laugh.
“And so it is just like you said it would be”

That is in fact the first line of a song by Damien Rice. And this is how I feel about my first trip to Paris. I cried last night think about going back to New York. Perhaps it is just a fantasy that I’ve built up from lack of real human contact, but I just feel so uncertain about what awaits me in the city, job wise, and life wise. I had dinner at the same bistro where I met Leslie on Rue de Mouffetard. I was alone, yes, but I had a opportunity to really look at the people in the room. Everyone was sitting there casually on Sunday night socializing like it was a scene out of that British comedy Coupling. They were very in the moment and alive. I don’t have that in New York. I usually keep myself holed up in my Brooklyn apartment at night. I rarely go out. If I do, it is to get food or go see a movie with a friend, and then I go back home. It is a different life. One that I ‘m not entirely happy with.If I could afford it and have a stimulating and creative job, I would love to live on Rue Mouffetard. Probably sounds so cliche to the students and Parisians who hear those words, but it is true for me today. I’m certain Paris is tough and depressing in it’s own unique way. But in so many ways I’ve been so cut off socially, so survival oriented, that I’ve dug a fox hole for myself and acted out in other self destructive ways. I’ve improved my life a lot since I moved to New York six years ago, and that is saying just how bad it was back then. But I haven’t fulfilled myself emotionally. I think that is why I have a whole scenario in my head about someone I saw in dream ten days ago. But as all humans learn you can’t make relationships happen. People who love you like that person did in my dream don’t suddenly appear out of thin air in a Parisian cafe. I wish they did.
But something about my life in New York is broken. I don’t think it is irrevocably so…or so I haven’t found out yet. Usually I’m the last to know, so that doesn’t say much, but I realize that the way I live in New York is pretty shabby. Being in Paris showed me that you can live in major metropolitan city and still be in the moment. It isn’t about how hard you drive yourself. It is about really living.

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Orba and the Musee Rodin

My last day in Paris. I took in the Musee Rodin. This time I brought Orba with me. Orba was the security guard at the museum at I worked at during college. Despite our opposing political views, I became like an adopted granddaughter to him. He made such a huge difference in my life. The Rodins in our museum were his favorite.
If I believed the “villa” that was renovated into the Musee Picasso was grand, then it paled in comparison to the estate that was the Musee Rodin. The one great thing about going to a museum that is solely dedicated one artist is that you really get to take in the journey that artist went through throughout their life. You get a sense of the imprint that the art was leaving.
For example I remember viewing a series of drawings by Picasso at a very upscale resort on Maui…basically I was sneaking onto the grounds to spend time in a world that was so different from my own. I digress. So in one gallery of this resort there were a series of cubist sketches by Picasso that depicted his various female lovers. And eventually the figures morphed into these menacing, blood sucking bug like creatures that hardly resembled the women he originally drew. Maybe Picasso, if he were alive would disagree. But my point is that Picasso constantly inserted himself into his work, he was not just drawing the image of the object in front of him, but also his reaction to the image itself.
Rodin in comparison seems to have captured their emotional states, as if they were standing there a hundred years later confiding to you their deepest pain or lost dream. They were like Orba, resolute in their dignity, yet these statues revealed deeper fissures of great sorrow and emotion. Rodin seems to have have embraced the internal conflict of the women he sculpted, her sense of drama, her charm, her own story. What it must have meant to have been truly seen by this artist. He as the observer didn’t matter as much. He captured moment for us to experience it. Was he that giving and empathetic in life.
What has been most fun is interpreting this work while not understanding the inscription or title. In english speaking museums you view a title and description and immediately you come up with a preconception, a way to react to the work before you even lay eyes on it. When you don’t understand all the words or the intention, all you have are your own ideas. It can be a point of both freedom and perhaps misguided interpretation. But it is outside of all you ever been taught, so that no matter what you have been told you should say, you are free to react as your true self.
Rodin liked angels: female angels, angels protecting the figures below them, angels transporting the dead to a better place. These angels gathered all of the lost souls and by doing so, there is now hope for something more just than what we will ever experience in this world.
So enough museum talk. Here I am, my last night in Paris. I’m depressed as hell. Of course, my imagination is in over drive. There he is the same guy who appeared in my dreams the first couple of nights of my vacation. But if my imagination has carried itself away, it only because at this moment there is a vacuum in that area of my life.
There is one thing that I noticed immediately about the couples that I’ve observed on my vacation. You see how invest the guy is in his partner. He gives her his complete attention as if she is the only thing in the room.
However, I will admit if someone did that to me, I might react badly and run.
I don’t think my biggest problem is finding people who express attraction to me. It is finding someone who really wants to know me, who see me, who I am right now and not the family bs story.
Some men act like it is a betrayal when you express yourself. David loved me to death, expressed love for me that I’ve never experience before, but I don’t think he really wanted to know my thoughts or dreams. He wanted me to fit into his big picture. Which I did not, I guess, when he turned cold as ice. And so here I am today, alone, wondering if this man really exists. Will he see me, love me and protect me, or will we pass each other on the streets like strangers. Whoever he turns out to be I can only be myself.
For days I’ve been looking for the right demitasse to take back with me to the states. I had wondered aimlessly along Boulevard Port-Royal trying to find exactly what I was looking for. Continued onto Rue Monge, when I was approached randomly by a man who smile and then asked me in English what was my name. I ducked into the shop to escape. He was probably harmless but this is not how I meet people. But on the up side, the shop was a porcelain dish shop with many affordable and nice pieces.
However, I’m not sure if there is a right way to meet the opposite sex. I definitely wasn‚Äôt going to talk to a random stranger that smiled and approached me on the street, but was I doomed to live cut off from the dating world for all eternity. No…I couldn’t spend another night alone in my hotel room. I decided to venture out again that night and see if I could reach out from the silent periphery where wall flowers become fragrant roses that attract the masses to them.
I went back to the same bistro and sat at a booth between two couples in full PDA. This wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. I moved to a table by the window, drank my pinot blanc and wondered if all this fascination with Paris was mere whimsy. Could I do this? Could this become my life? Would this give me the peace I had not found anywhere else. Would this satisfy that thing that missing from my life. Entertaining the thought of living here would require serious consideration of the English factor. But I had made major changes before. In fact moving to New York six years earlier was one those chances that I took that for a time really paid off. Then I just got on a plane with my two cats and took off to city I had only been to once. Where I had no connections, just a hotel room, and a determination to start a new life. And I did. For once I did succeeded. Was I so tired that I could drop it…just like that…like an old lover…had our time together finally reached its end?
Or was I just dissatisfied with myself. Had I sought so much safety after 9/11 that I had forgotten how to reach out and take a risk. For once in my life I really did have true friends this was another by product of that day…the margin for bullshit got a lot smaller…however a night out was usually reheated left overs and a nine o‚Äôclock movie. This world playing out before me in this bar on Rue Mouffetard felt far more alive. Maybe this was the change I needed to embrace. Did I need to relearn how to live.
It is uncomfortable coming out from the background. I’m so use to sitting in the back of the room. In fact even my production job is technically called ‚”behind the scenes”. It is where I feel comfortable. I know my job and my place and as long as I adhere to both loyally, I have always been taken care of. But was I satisfied? Was this what I came into the world to do? Not exactly. Closer than I had been, but not enough to really say I’ve done it, and now I can die happy.

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Free Spirits &
The Joy of Meeting a Real Friend

I’m getting a little misty eyed. I really like Rue Mouffetard. I have breakfast at a bar/bistro and did sudoku en francais….trying to not say the numbers in English but always in French: un, deux, trois, quatre….etc. I feel like I’ve had my first real taste of European life. This feels like another place entirely. I’m cultural anthropologist and I’m seeing the natives in their natural habitat. Another sandy colored retriever came into the bistro with it’s owner and laid down dutifully while it’s master sipped their cafe.
Spend the rest of the day shopping for gifts. It is that stage of my vacation where I have to start thinking about others again and what they would like for the holidays. Found another excellent chocolaterie on Rue Mouffetard along with a specialty shop that sells truffle oils and mustards. I love the mustard in France that sits on each and every bistro table. It has pep, a little zing, maybe it’s horseradish. Whatever it is…I’m loving it. Found the most excellent place to have a cafe on the go, cafe marc…a single shot is only one euro and comes with a little chocolate covered expresso bean. I feel as if I have finally, maybe only partially escaped the jacked up tourist prices of Rue des Ecoles.
Returned to Bar/Bistro at the circular roundabout at the top of the hill. There I met a fellow Americaine, who spoke up when she heard me order my hamburger, “It is so nice to hear someone speak English.” she said. Her name is Leslie. She is a fellow blond who adventured out on her own like me, to just try something new. I respected her immensely. Finally someone who understood what it meant to try and make more thoughtful choices in life and she wasn‚Äôt asking me when I’d get out there again and start dating. She knew from bittersweet experience that some hearts take longer to heal.
We mostly talk about men and failed past relationships. She tells me about an Opera she saw about the artist Degas. I tell her about my life back in New York in the entertainment business. We laugh a lot and exchange emails. Little did I know that this person would later become a very loyal friend. She was one of the trip’s biggest surprises.

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Musee D’Orsay

Yesterday I walked to the Musee D’Orsay via Rue de Bac and Blvd. St. Germain. I got a lot of great footage of the artwork. Another filmmaker approached me and said that he had a camera just like mine and that he was asked to put it away. I didn’t see him carrying any cases. I think either he was just trying to make conversation or he was just fucking with me.

But I walked around with mine…right in the open. Security searched my bag before I entered the museum. The guard asked me what was it was and I told him honestly. He didn’t give me any problems. I had it out several times on the 1st “estage” I was quicker and more discreet on the 5th floor where there where the popular post-impressionists were hung. But no one told me to put it away.

At at the end of my visit I felt like I had gotten away with a great ruse. I walked back down St. Germain des Pres and imagined that the sirens wailing behind me were looking for me. Perhaps when they looked at me they didn’t see a cameraman, therefore they didn’t expect anything funny from me. I was just a girl with an expensive DV camera. Truly it might be a statement about my professional life all together. To look at me you would never know that I’ve been the places and met the people I have. I use it to my advantage. I am not threatening therefore I don’t get the interference as much as others might. I also don’t get taken as seriously as others do…so it is a trade off.

My only regret from my visit to the Musee D’Orsay is that that the second floor was closed with all of the art nouveau and artwork by the artist named Klimts.

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The Anniversary of the Day John Lennon Died and I was born …(metaphorically speaking)

I escaped into Le Petit Cardinal for my post dinner cafe. I sat down and prepared to write for the rest of the evening. Really I was just trying to look busy. I looked up at the room around me…there were only a couple of people eating alone like me. Other than that it was filled with friends and couples stopping in for a drink or to watch the football game on the plasma television. It was comfortable and classy at the same time.

I could live here. I found myself saying all at once. And not for the reasons I usually ran away from one city to another. Something about me was looking better as well. Despite my holiday eating and drinking habits I had managed to lose weight from all of the walking I had done. Was it true? That Parisian women don’t get fat.

Why? Americans don’t lack the drive to improve themselves. But was it as I had suspected. It wasn’t about how much I denied myself both feeling and sustenance, or how much I pushed my body on the yoga mat or in the gym. It was about being alive and present. Not tucked away, hiding myself in yet another journal with no one to connect to or share my thoughts with.

I looked out the window and watched some kind of protest or parade stop traffic on Rue Monge. The procession turned onto Cardinal Lemoine and walked up the hill. There was sound of singing and the I spotted a group of people carrying a statue of a saint up the hill. And suddenly I had the urge to follow them.

I’m spiritual but not religious. My affiliations with one religion or another is not as important as my feeling connect with ‚”something larger than myself” that can not be explained. I didn’t know why, but I suddenly wanted to find out where they were going and why.

I paid my check and exited quickly. In New York, if you blink the event is already done. Yet, as I exited the bistro, I found that there was plenty of time to inconspicuously find my place among the throng of people who had joined the procession.

I followed the parade of two hundred plus up the hill on Cardinal Lemoine. I didn’t know where we were going, but soon I found that it was further up the hill than I had been before. We past Ernest Hemingway’s former home which was marked with a commemorative plaque, and walked up the increasingly narrow cobble stone road. There was no way a regular sized car could easily drive on this street.

Rue Mouffetard

For the first time, I was transported out of the city with its major commercial stores and industrial feel into a quaint village that reminded me of a Harry Potter movie. The buildings on either side of the street were connected by a series of draping holiday lights so that the tiny cobble road was lite up with a nice yellow hue. The lights twinkled against the night.

The stores were all open for the best part of the day. The time after work, when families and singles were out after spending the day stuck indoors, getting their groceries or shopping done before they settled in the night. There were shops of all varieties; jewelry, book and clothing stores, patisseries, chocolateries, a used music store, a small movie theatre, and a variety of bistros all packed with diners. Everyone was in descent spirits. It was cold but not windy. This was the moment I fell in love with Rue Mouffetard.

Earlier that day

Rue d’ Archives in the Marais has a great independent chocolaterie with truffles at a reasonable price and boxes made out of chocolate and chocolate covered cherries that are a definite win. The shops and boutiques are accessible and well put together. But this was not my destination.

It took some time to find the Musee Picasso. After asking several slightly annoyed shop owners, I finally found the entrance to the courtyard of the converted ‚villa. To think…someone use to live in these rooms and call this home. Let‚Äôs put it this way. It was big enough to be converted into a museum.

I spent the next couple of hours walking through the galleries. I found people watching just as entertaining as the art work on the walls. I was slowly coming out of myself and engaging the world around me. There were the artists who were sketching in their tiny moleskin notebooks trying to learn from this master. And tourists with the backpacks and cameras, taking pictures with their flashes on, oblivious to the fact that they were harming the artwork by using them. And then there was Picasso, Picasso everywhere, one building onto the next, each gallery, a journey into this man’s life.

I left a couple hours later and got lost again, this time finding myself by the Arts and Metiers Musee. I didn’t know where the closest Metro train would take me. All I knew was that these triangular streets were guiding me further and further away from where I intended to be.

However, I did find another interesting section of Paris that reminded me of New York’s Chinatown, but with far less grit. The streets were lined with wholesale shops that wouldn’t admit retail customers. But if I had a resale license, I could of shopped for purses, housewares, shoes or jewelry. The most interesting street was lined with crystal and silver jewelry for twenty per cent of price I would normally pay for a similar item back home that had far less quality.

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What I can’t change
I had a moment of sadness that hit me in the stomach as I was walked along Rue St. Germain des Pres. I exited a “Supermarche” to find some decent socks, and I noticed an older homeless woman sitting in front of the store with her dog and a sign asking for money. I ignored her and continued to shop. I entered another expensive boutique selling hand made quilts and sheets. The proprietor was playing that really sad yet cheesy Enya music, and somehow it had managed to get under my skin. I started to cry and exited the store.
Here I was in this beautiful clean city, thousands of miles away from home and the past. I was enjoying myself on a real holiday. I was happy, and all I could do at that moment was think about how awful it was that it couldn’t have been different between my mother and myself. That her illness had tore us apart and that because of it, a relationship was impossible. It was not like either one of us had a choice in the matter. The nature of her illness makes me feel like I’m in danger. Once I tried to be both the hero and the better person, and instead found myself in over my head with her problems.

How could I ever explain this to a potential partner? Especially if I find one from happy and ‚”normal” family. I have always felt as if I’d be judged and dumped. It’s happened to friends of mine. Sometimes having to explain the situation to someone is worse than dealing with the situation on your own.
What I needed was a serious distraction. Something that would move my thoughts from this sad loop back into the present, where life was full of new adventures and possibility. I wandered into a music store and listened to various contemporary french artists, a couple who sounded somewhat like the beatles. Finally the overwhelming sadness released itself. Somehow I had to find a way to fight back at this ideal that true love or happiness was not in the cards for me. Yes, I’ve been on the periphery looking in for quite some time. But this trip was not about the past. It was the hope that there was real life ready for me to take it.
That is why I like the Latin Quarter. It is filled with students that are so alive, focused and free. I stopped in for lunch at the Tabac de Sorbonne for a quick lunch. It was crowded. I sat down on the covered patio and ordered a grill cheese sandwich. The sandwich arrived. It was not so much a sandwich but two slices of melted cheese with a piece of bread between them. Ass backwards in comparison to American grilled cheese, but very tasty.
See the link below for a recipe:
http://msglaze.typepad.com/paris/recipes_meat/index.html
At the table next to mine, two students sat together doing their math homework. One was a tall, bookish man with a pointy nose and tiny specks. He was dressed as if he were on his way to a job interview. His gaze always fixated on the other one. Across the table his study partner was a striking dark haired girl with straight glossy hair and who wore complementary winter white sweater. The sweater reminded me of one that my grandma had bought for me for my sixteenth birthday. It was classy and warm.

It was then that I remembered that my grandma’s yahrzeit was around the corner on the 14th. She had been dead for fourteen years, but she was always with me. I wore her necklace when I went to the Louvre, and I purchased a keychain, similar to the one she bought during her vacation to paris thirty years ago. She was the one who never left.
It was over a decade ago when she came into one of my dreams and told me that there were two tickets waiting for me. One going to Japan where I was born, and the other going to Paris. And that I would have the opportunity to go when I was ready. At the time I was just trying to get my foot hold into the world without her. It seemed like at the time that life had no magic and all possibilities were dictated to me and were not my own. I made this trip happen, and by doing so, I fulfilled a promise.
Someday, I hope I can find a nice looking boy who looks at me like this one looks at her.
****
I found the famous St Sulpice church–that is also referred to in the Di Vinci Code. However I could not find the rose line that leads to one of the major clues in the book. Enjoyed shopping nearby, a good mix of high end and accessible stores.

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Posted by American Amelie at 8:21 am | Paris | Permalink | Comments (0)