J'ai le coeur brisé

Like many people around the world, I'm heartbroken over today's fire at Notre-Dame de Paris. It could have been worse, and I'm very grateful for the work that the firefighters did to save the main structure. But so much was lost. I'm glad I got to see the cathedral when I did. I hope to see it again someday, but I don't think it will ever be the same.

I took this photo in June 2011, just after I caught my first glimpse of the cathedral from across the river, in front of the Hôtel de Ville (on the left). I'll always remember that moment.

The Panthéon as a humanist monument

I felt a particularly strong hankering for Paris after reading this article by Kevin Dolgin at TheHumanist.com.  After noting that Europe, and in particular France, are in many ways more congenial to humanists than the US, the article sketches the history of the Panthéon, France's secular monument to some of its greatest people, and describes its ambiance. I remember being moved as I walked through parts of the crypt, and this piece captures the feeling very well:

"Churches do inspire awe, they are humbling, and are perhaps designed to make one feel small in the presence of God. The Panthéon has a similar effect but is devoted to an altogether humanist ideal: feeling awe in the presence of human greatness. Where a church belittles humankind in comparison to an abstract divinity, the Panthéon celebrates humanity: one inspires submission, the other emulation."

Paris, I miss you

This time last year, I was in Paris. The anniversary of the day I flew out came and went last week, and I find that trip haunting me in a way that few trips ever have. (One year ago today, my schedule included Notre Dame, lunch outside within sight of Pont St. Louis, where a few musicians were playing, a concert at Sainte-Chapelle, and a twilight walk home across the Seine. No wonder I'm feeling nostalgic.) I am homesick for a foreign city. This seems like as good a time as any to write up a list of some of the things I want do on future visits to Paris:

• Spend a sunny afternoon in the Luxembourg Gardens with a book. 
• On the summer solstice, hear as much of the music festival as I can. 
• Stay long enough in the city that it makes sense to take a couple of weekend train trips someplace.
• Visit a wine bar.
• While away an afternoon people-watching and writing at a Left Bank café, and then do the same thing the next day at a Right Bank café for comparison.
• Take more long walks by the river.
• Go to the top of the Eiffel Tower on some gray winter afternoon when there's no one there and look at the city in peace.
• Visit a flea market.
• Rent a bike from Vélib' and ride through the streets of Paris.
• Revisit the Musée d'Orsay now that the construction there is (I assume) finished.
• Have a conversation with a Parisian that goes beyond "Où sont les toilettes?" or "Un comme ça, s'il vous plait."
• Spend Christmas in Paris.
• Visit Sainte-Chapelle on a sunny day.
• Learn where to shop for ordinary things like socks and toothbrushes and cheap pens and spiral-bound notebooks. 
• See some of the museums that were closed when I was there last year (the Musée Picasso, the Musée de l'Homme).
• Visit more of the side streets, squares, gardens, and small museums that are off the tourist circuit. Enjoy the hidden treasures I find, knowing that I will never see them all.

Waking up in Paris

I continue to process my memories of the Paris trip and to try to fit my experiences into my existing mental framework. I'm also going through some of the photographs that I did not put in this blog on the day I took them. However, I want to start with a photograph taken by my friend and traveling companion Jay Hook.

This was taken on the morning of the first day I woke up in Paris. That morning we set out, eager and curious, to explore our new neighborhood, the Marais. What is so touching to me about this photograph is that I wanted to be photographed in such a photogenic, beautiful place, and I didn't really grasp that I would have many, many opportunities to sit in beautiful squares and parks and be photographed. (And sitting is, of course, the yin to walking's yang, the other half that gives the first half much of its meaning.) I had thought of Paris as a sort of highlights reel, and for all the planning we did, I thought we would hasten on foot from highlight to highlight. Before we left, I noted particularly lovely or noteworthy streets to walk down, but I didn't really understand that so much of the city was going to be such a pleasure to walk in, even the parts in between all the places I noted as special. Of course there were busy streets and traffic and crowds, but I was never very far from someplace like this, and even on the busy streets, the buildings were more often than not eye-catching, harmonious, and beautifully proportioned. The streets themselves were often lovely, either narrow and picturesque or broad and tree-lined.

Before I went there, I think I saw the city as something like a landscape where humdrum flat areas are punctuated by mountain ranges. On this first morning there, I thought this square was one of the mountains, a high point in the landscape. I didn't realize that to a large degree, it was the landscape, the quotidian experience awaiting me when I stepped out the door. Until Jay told me, I couldn't remember the name of this particular place, charming as it was, because I sat in so many like it. (For the record, the photo was taken in the Jardin Saint-Gilles-Grand-Veneur.) The monuments and churches and museums and big gardens were high points, but they were more like individual peaks in the Himalayas than like the Rockies rising up from the Plains. I can't help wondering how my perspective on the city would change further with prolonged exposure.

Midnight in Paris

This weekend I finally made time to see Woody Allen's latest movie, Midnight in Paris. It is such a loving and gorgeous tribute to the beauty and romance of the City of Light that I found my eyes filling with tears during the opening sequence, a leisurely tour of various Parisian streets and monuments set to Si tu vois ma mère (written and played by Sidney Bechet, although I can't find the name of the orchestra he was playing with*). I thought to myself that if the movie went on like that for another hour and half, sans action, I'd still sit there and watch it.

But of course I loved the story too. (Spoiler ahead!) It's long on magic and charm, with a bit of mystery that is simply part of the magic and needs no explaining, a Parisian time travel fairy tale for grownups. A group of Americans (Gil, a successful screenwriter  who wants to write serious fiction, Inez, his bossy, crass fiancée—no, I didn't like her, but she wasn't meant to be likable—and her conservative parents) are visiting the city on business. Gil falls in love, not just with the 21st century Paris he's staying in but with the 1920s Paris he somehow visits every night. The differences between the life he wants to live and the one Inez pictures for them are obvious early on, but it takes him a while to sort out which world he belongs in: Jazz Age Paris, the expensive Malibu home and lifestyle that Inez wants, or 21st century Paris by himself. I was enchanted by the scenes set in the 1920s (and in la Belle Époque, which he also visits briefly), and of course I was delighted to see present-day Paris, too, especially so soon after my own visit. Although the characters are sometimes painted with broad brush strokes, the movie is witty and observant and thoroughly enjoyable. And in the end, Gil makes exactly the choice I would have made in his situation.

The timing on this movie happened to be perfect; it's a love letter to a city that I have just fallen in love with. It's also about themes that have always resonated for me: time, memory, the pull of the past, the appreciation of the present. For all the nostalgia in which the movie is steeped, it ends with a message of hope for the future. Speaking of nostalgia, it was interesting to see which things made me most nostalgic for the city. It wasn't just the obvious things, like the river and the buildings I recognized and the sidewalk cafés, but little things like the street names on the sides of buildings, the green crosses marking pharmacies, the Vélib' stands with rows of bicycles available for rent. This sparkling tour of Paris past and present left me thinking of how I can spend more time there in the future.

*Update, 7/10/11: As far as I can tell, Woody Allen used this recording of Sidney Bechet playing with Claude Luter and his orchestra.

Whose streets?

Ever since I've arrived back home, I've been trying to articulate something about why the streets of Paris felt so comfortable to me. Part of it has to do with the fact that they seemed very well used and very well looked after. My first Sunday in Paris was Pentecost Sunday, which I was told was still a big enough deal in France that some things might be closed. (As it turned out, the only closure I ran into was the crypt at Notre Dame.) Still, as I walked through my neighborhood at around 8:30 or 9 in the morning, I saw what looked like city employees out sweeping and hosing down the streets. I saw plenty of shopkeepers or other staff keeping the sidewalk clean in front of a shop. Cigarette smoke was about the only thing I encountered that I found really unpleasant, and there wasn't as much of that on the streets as I had feared. (I think smoking is no longer permitted in some indoor venues, for which I was thankful.) I had read about problems with dog poop on the sidewalk, but I saw very little of that. I don't remember seeing much litter either, other than cigarette butts and sometimes Métro tickets.

People were generally polite; I was very rarely on a street that had no other pedestrians, and as heavily traveled as the streets were, everyone had to be polite to keep the experience from being miserable. What I felt was a subtle but distinct sense that the streets belonged to the people who were walking on them, and it was important that they be pleasant places.

In some parts of the US—not everywhere, but it's not uncommon—public areas seem like something you have to get through to make it from one enclave to another, a sort of no-man's-land that might or might not be well-tended or pleasant. An enclave might be home, an office, a store, or a mall: someplace that belongs to a distinct entity. Public spaces often feel like an afterthought. Theoretically they belong to all of us, but here that sometimes seems to translate into belonging to no one. Even in Bloomington, which is not a dirty city, you run into trash, especially fast-food trash, on the sidewalks. Several summers ago, it took me months to find out who was responsible for a path that I used to walk to work every day; trees and shrubs were growing over the path, making parts of it impassable and pushing pedestrians into tall grass bordering a shallow ditch along a busy street. Eventually someone figured out who the owner was and told him or her to fix the problem, which he or she did, in what struck me as the most begrudging way possible (someone showed up with a back hoe to trim the shrubbery, which of course looked for weeks like...well, shrubbery trimmed with a back hoe).

Maybe property owners in Paris have the opposite complaints, about official entities who are forever hounding them to keep their property from infringing on public comfort; I don't want to romanticize the city just because I know it so little. All I can really say is that because so many people walked and took the subway, and because parks or green spaces were everywhere, and because most people seemed to treat public streets and even subway stations as worthy of a certain amount of respect, the experience of being out and about felt very good.

I'm reading The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris, by John Baxter, and was struck by the following passage. He is describing the ease with which Parisians navigate the streets compared to new visitors:

Well, this is their habitat, their quartier, as familiar to them as their own living room. Because that's how Parisians regard the city—as an extension of their homes. The concept of public space doesn't exist here. People don't step out of their front door into their car, then drive across town to the office or some air-conditioned mall. No Parisian drives around Paris. A few cycle. Others take the métro or a bus, but most walk. Paris belongs to its piétons—the pedestrians. One naturally goes à pied—on foot. 

I have to disagree about no Parisian driving; I'm pretty sure a lot of those motorcycles I saw belonged to Parisians, and surely not all the cars belong to visitors. But still, this echoes a lot of the things I'd been mulling over and trying to articulate. It's no wonder the place felt like home to me; any place that belongs to its pedestrians is bound to!

Bathrooms in Paris

I suppose a logical corollary to any discussion of food and drink is a discussion of bathrooms. Public restrooms are indeed, as I had heard, much more scarce in Paris than in most big US cities. However, although I often had to wait in line for a public restroom (nothing new there; I'm a girl so I'm used to it), and sometimes even pay to use one (typically half a euro or less), the European restrooms I saw were much more private, and I never encountered a really dirty one. The doors and walls in the stalls typically go clear down to the floor, which was a pleasant surprise.

In an apparent response to the bathroom scarcity, public toilets appear in surprisingly roomy sanisettes at random intervals along Parisian streets. (The standard model evidently does not accommodate wheelchairs very well if at all, but for a public toilet sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, they are more spacious inside than I had expected.) A map of the neighborhood typically appears on the outside of the sanisette; as you approach one, you may be unsure whether the people clustered outside are waiting to get in or just consulting the map. These unisex bathrooms are cleaned automatically after every use. Many of them are free, and my understanding is that by 2014 all of the ones in the city of Paris will be free.

The first time I used one turned out to be one of those adventures that are more amusing after than during, but the second time was much nicer. For starters, the first time I used one, it took me a long time to find one so I was mildly stressed to start with. Then I was not sure the door was locked. After I got in and pressed the "close" button on the inside, I couldn't understand the voice that greeted me in French as soon as the door was closed, mostly because it startled me to be spoken to at all. I wasn't sure if it was telling me the door was locked or telling me to lock the door, and I couldn't see an obvious "lock" button. So it wasn't 100% clear to me that I had done all that was necessary to avoid being walked in on, and I was on a very busy street corner. (I learned later that as soon as you close the door, the "occupied" light comes on outside, and you are safe. I realized later that the button with a pictograph obviously representing someone talking would probably have repeated the most recent message for me, but at the time all I could think of was that I hoped it wouldn't talk to me any more. I hear that some play music.)

Here I must say a word about French toilets. All the ones I saw were designed to be low-flush, and hence were more cylindrical than the ones in the US, with smaller tanks. You almost always have a choice of two buttons to push to flush, depending on whether you want a big flush or a little flush. Either way, the tank seems to fill up quite quickly afterward, leaving me feeling, back here in the States, like my toilet is a huge water hog because the tank takes forever to refill. (I never saw a normal-flow toilet anywhere in Europe, which made me wonder why the low-flush technology hasn't caught on more in the southwestern US. I really did like the low-flush toilets, and I'd like to install one in my house.)

So in my first sanisette, I pushed the small flush button, and nothing happened except that a voice told me something useful. I was fairly rattled by this point; I got that it was telling me I had chosen an option that conserves water, but I couldn't figure out the rest. Maybe it's telling me the little flush is out of service? I pushed the big flush button, and got another useful response in French that went over my head, and then pushed the small button again once or twice, waiting for something to happen. Eventually I gave up, washed my hands, and departed, befuddled. I believe now that nothing happens until you push the button to exit, and then the bathroom goes into flushing/cleaning mode in preparation for the next person. I hope it took my multiple button pushes in stride.

One last word on this indelicate but essential subject. I had read online that toilet paper is often scarce in public restrooms in Paris, so I brought along about a dozen of those small packets of Kleenex that you can carry in a purse or pocket. For what it's worth, I never needed to use any of them. Even if I had needed some, I probably wouldn't have needed a dozen packets, so this was definitely overkill. At least I'm all set for the allergy season.