Sponge Bucket: July 2012

hellooooo! apologies once again for the lack of posting. i should make it quite clear now that i am a very lazy human who far prefers to spend her time reading and watching 'game of thrones' than trying to be witty and interesting for the sake of her peers. however, i am very much enjoying this blog — and the validation is gives me when people say nice things! — so i hope you will still keep reading, even if many moons pass by without a peep. i shall try to do better in future though!

anyways! paris! i was in the city of lights for two weeks and as such, i'm breaking my post into two, as they were two very different experiences. the first week i spent alone — the first time i have ever been without family or friends for an extended period of time full stop, let alone in a foreign country — and the second week i spent with my pal charlie. this post is about my first week. ok. so!

before i left melbourne, my very dear work comrade suzanne put me in contact with a parisian friend of hers named hélène, who we hoped could show me some sights, or at the very least take me out for a coffee. however, hélène went one better — she offered me a room in her beautiful apartment in montparnasse (pretty much the centre of paris, walking distance from the eiffel tower etc. etc.) to stay for as long as i liked… for free. yes, FREE! i couldn’t believe my luck (or hélène and her roommate's generosity!).

after a six and a half hour flight from abu dhabi to frankfurt and then a four hour train onto paris, i finally arrived at my destination. however, fairly soon i became lost in the labyrinth that is paris’s subway system and it took me half an hour before i realised (having dragged my suitcase up and down about 50 flights of stairs) that ‘sortie’ means ‘exit’ in french and my sortie was out the front of the platform i had arrived at 30 minutes prior. gaaah. anyway, hélène had recommended a nearby café for me to wait at until she finished work and i gratefully slid into one of the street-facing chairs, knocking my neighbour’s table in the process with my backpack (the french habit of putting tables and chairs so close together in restaurants is particularly irksome when you are clumsy, which i am notoriously so). after my ordeal in the subway, i felt i deserved a beverage and ordered a bloody mary. it was here I first learnt a very tragic truth: the french — while having mastered wine, cheese and pastry-based snacks — simply have no idea how to make my favourite spicy tomato cocktail. nonetheless, i downed it for the liquid confidence it would give me to be a new city by myself and waited for hélène to show.

remember what i said about being clumsy? true to form, the moment she arrived, i knocked what remained of my mary off the table, smashed my chair into the wall behind me and botched the infamous parisian double-cheeked kiss, smooching hélène full on the mouth instead. oh dear. not a good start. luckily hélène is an easy-going sort who didn’t seem to mind being pashed by an awkward australian 30 seconds after meeting. i paid for my drink and we made our way across the road to her lovely apartment. hélène’s friend emily came over for some wine and somehow, between my terrible french, emily’s basic english and with hélène as translator, we managed to have a good time.

since i’d arrived on a monday, hélène was at work every day afterwards and so i set off to discover the city by myself. i admit, it was strange when i realised it was up to me to make all the decisions. i’m so used to going with the flow and letting others take charge… which is why, i guess, i so badly needed to go on this trip in the first place! not to say i’m a sheep — i am capable of independent thought, often too much so, some might say! — but i have a tendency not to want to ruffle feathers and prefer to just go with general consensus. so to have the freedom to do whatever i chose, whenever i wanted, was two parts liberating, one part daunting. i decided to start with the obvious and set off to see the eiffel tower, of which i am very proud to say i found without the help of a map (never mind the fact that it was visible from my street and i simply needed to look up to locate it).

over the course of the week, i saw the notre dame (many times in fact… a nearby garden became my favourite lunch spot), the louvre, the panthéon, luxembourg gardens (this, too, became one of my frequent haunts), montparnasse cemetery, hôtel de ville, les invalides (where old napoleon bonaparte’s skeleton lives) and the place de la bastille, where the french revolution began. i found an old elevated railway line that had been converted into a beautiful garden, went on a street art walking tour, listened to an orchestra in the park and went to a party with hélène’s friends (where hardly anyone spoke english, so i mostly spent the evening drinking copious amounts of wine and smiling and nodding like i knew what was going on).

my main activity, however, was walking. most likely due to my initial disastrous encounter with the subway system, i chose to walk everywhere i went and thus was on my feet for hours on end. it is no wonder, then, that my second most common activity for the week was drinking wine. come 4pm, weary from another big day of walking around aimlessly, it was all i could do to drag myself to the supermarket down the road and buy a baguette, some cheese and a 3 euro bottle of merlot (and at that price, who could blame me?). to be clear, a bottle would last me about three days (sometimes two, if i was feeling particularly festive) so no-one need worry that i developed a problem. rather, i like to think i was simply living a true parisian lifestyle, whereby i would slouch around the city all day, avoiding people’s eye-contact in case of muggings (that trip to south america really did a number on me) before getting drunk and rubbing my aching feet, muttering ‘merde’ under my alcohol-infused breath.

anyway, this has turned into quite the novel. let me end by saying while i relished my freedom for most of the week, by the weekend i was desperate for a compadre. independence is good and dandy, and i knew i needed it from time to time; however, there is nothing quite like sharing a laugh, an experience — a bottle of wine! — with someone you know and love. i will have many more times where i will be by myself on this journey and that is just fine with me. but having grown up on the coast, i don’t think i’ll ever be entirely comfortable on my lonesome in a city. at the beach, you can spend hours on your own, reading a book under the sun and swimming in the ocean. in the city, you feel like you should be constantly on the move, seeing things, doing things. so I was excited when tuesday finally rolled around and there was charlie. familiar, wonderful charlie who would do all of the things with me.

i apologise for waffling on and now present the photos.