31 July 2014: Oy vey, shmear!

Oy vey, shmear!

There's a trend I've noticed in Paris that strikes me as peculiar. No, it's not the fashion of women wearing men's brogues with everything from dresses to shorts—borrowing from the boys has been "on trend" for decades, and, truth be told, the shoes are pretty cute. Nor is it the pervasive e-cigarette boutiques that have popped up out of nowhere, selling "safe" smoke and all kinds of flavored tobacco juice. (Yes, folks, you're still inhaling nicotine; yes, it's still bad for your lungs; and no, you still don't look cool doing it.) Nor is it the fad of grown men wearing full beards and clothes they clearly stole from their little sisters. (I blame the hipsters for that one.)

While these oddities are noteworthy, the trend that has boggled my mind the most over the past several weeks is a food-related one: bagels.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of bagels—I used to have a Noah's onion bagel with vegetables, lox and sun-dried tomato shear every day on my way to acting class in college (always followed by copious amounts of mint gum, of course). I love how simple, flavorful and satisfyingly bread-y bagels are, the way that they seem to cram a whole loaf of chewy bread into one sleek ring of doughy deliciousness.

What I don't understand, however, is why there are bagels everywhere in Paris. Seriously. You picture the products of Parisian boulangeries and you see oodles of croissants and macarons and baguettes dancing before your eyes, right? Well, insert a plethora of bagels into that foodie fantasy and you'll start to get an accurate picture.

Every café serves "les bagels"—there seems to be no French word for them, they simply appropriated the English term, like "le hot dog" (a sorely misleading food product if ever there was one: a French hot dog consists of a sausage burrowed into half a baguette smothered in spicy Dijon mustard and then covered in melted cheese—the ballpark fan in me cried the first time I had one...then realized that it was actually quite delicious, though misnamed). There are posters and signs everywhere proclaiming the beauty of bagels, and they share prime window real estate with the tortes and macarons meant to entice passersby.

Baffled by the bagel craze, I asked a French colleague of mine if she knew why bagels were suddenly so popular. Is it because cafés think they're all the rage in New York, so they want a piece of the "authentic" Big Apple action to lure tourists? Is it because French people are rediscovering '90s fads in food as well as in fashion? (Crop tops and flatform shoes need to go back to the time capsule from whence they came.) She simply shrugged and said she didn't know—in fact, she hadn't really noticed.

Which means one of two things: the trend started not long after I left Paris in 2010 and is now such "old news" that Parisians just accept the intruding baked goods as part of their gastronomical terrain; or we're on the eve of a carb-pocolypse and we'll soon be bowing to our bagel overlords.

In either case, I think I'll stick to baguettes.

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27 July 2014: Happy Birthday

Happy birthday

I was sitting down to write a blog about something delightfully Parisian when the date hit me: July 27. 

My mom would have been 64 today.

My mom, Jane Goldman (that's her on the right, during her first trip to Paris with my dad in 1983), died on January 10, 2007 after a nine-year battle with breast cancer. People usually say "battle" for anything to do with cancer, but for my mom, that word quite accurately describes her experience. She was cursed with a particularly virulent form of genetic breast cancer that her aunt had been fighting since her late 50s. When my mom was diagnosed in 1998—three days before my 12th birthday—we had no idea what lay in store: a mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation, reconstructive surgery, more chemotherapy, brain surgery, another mastectomy, more chemo and radiation, more brain surgery...you get the picture.

For one year, between 1998 and 1999, she was pronounced "in remission"—a frighteningly misleading term that makes it sound like, "You're out of the woods!" when it in fact means, "You can be cautiously optimistic until we find that the forest has grown more trees."

During that brief respite, when my mom's hair had grown back in its lustrous silver shade but much straighter than before—I inherited her (previous) unruly, voluminous curls—we took a family trip to Paris, the first time I'd ever set foot in the city. It was on the eve of the millennium, so the Eiffel Tower was partially obscured by a giant countdown clock and festooned with twinkling lights that still dance a dazzling show on the hour to this day.

I had been studying French in school, so I couldn't wait to finally test my language skills in the wild, as it were. I think my parents were more excited to take the opportunity to celebrate my mom's potential recovery that (realistically) might never come again. They were right.

When I moved to Paris the first time at the age of 24—four years after my mom had died, just a few months prior to my 21st birthday and subsequent graduation from college—I realized how much my impressions of the city had been informed by that first trip. In revisiting monuments and museums with Joshua (my then-boyfriend, now-husband), I couldn't help thinking how much I wanted to call my mom and reminisce about the times we'd seen those places together for the first time. I also missed my shopping buddy—my mom never met a store (or sale) she didn't like, a trait that I've proudly inherited.

Now that I'm living here a second time, four years on, I'm still discovering parts of the city that I hadn't yet explored at age 13, or even 24. I'd love to be able to call my mom and rave about these new experiences and discoveries—I even catch myself eagerly awaiting her overseas visit so we can hit the shops and walk and talk. But most of all, I wish I could see her smile as we traipse down the city streets—like in all those pictures from 1999, when she thought maybe, just maybe, she was out of the woods. I can picture her grinning from ear to ear below the Eiffel Tower or smooching at the camera in front of the lip-shaped fountain at the Centre George Pompidou (that's Josh and me, above, at that same fountain in 2010).

But even as I write this, missing her on her birthday, I know that she's somewhere—still smiling.

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25 July 2014: Pits of Despair

pits of despair

It has been said that the French are the cleanest people in Europe—I assume that means they take lots of showers, and after all, they did invent the bidet (better known as "the crotch fountain").

However, if you've spent any time in a crowded metro car with any number of sweltering French people—old, young, shaven pits or au naturel (yes, that's still a thing)—you might notice that the majority of your fellow travelers may want to up the shower quotient.

Deodorant, it seems, is favored by some, though not all, of this city's chic inhabitants. While sometimes it seems like an age thing—it's rare that I'm slapped in the face by a wall of pit odor when a young adult pushes past, versus an older woman trailing so much perfume and pit odor that she could fell a farm animal—I'm sad to report that the idea of universally slathering one's underarms with the chemicals necessary to help you win friends and influence people (and not kill them with your stench) has yet to reach even the stylish populace of Paris.

I used to think the prevalence of weaponized underarms was perhaps a fault of the shops—they must not stock the stuff, so poor Parisians have had to wander around the city having just taken a shower, yet smelling like they just ran a marathon (to be fair, those taxis are hard to flag down). But I've now perused my fair share of pharmacy aisles and the beauty department at Monoprix (the French version of Target) and I've discovered that lack of access can't be the issue—there are more sticks, rollerballs, antiperspirants, gels, creams, sprays and natural brands than you could—well, shake a stick (of deodorant) at. So what's the stinky secret?

Having now spent the better part of two summers in this odiferous metropolis, I think I've got it figured out: you can shower and slather all you want, but nothin' beats the heat when it's wetter than a sauna in the shade.

When someone asks, "How's the weather?" and they immediately follow it up with, "I hear it's humid this time of year," you either want to punch them or lock them in the bowels of the metro during rush hour in a wool sweater. Preferably both at once. To say "It's humid" is like saying, "Puppies are cute," or "Crossfit is silly"—both are true, but the amount of understatement is absurd. 

Paris in the summer is wet, even when spontaneous cloudbursts aren't pouring down on your head—only to reveal beautiful sunshine the moment your suede shoes are officially ruined. You're in a constant state of stickiness, and that fabled "glow" that makeup brands promise isn't hard to come by (in fact, "dewy" and "you look like a drowned rat" become frighteningly synonymous). Thus, no matter how many coats of deodorant you apply—and no matter how many black shirts you ruin with those telltale white marks—there's just no escaping the icky, sticky, stanky mess of it all.

While summer might feel like the "pits," there is a silver lining: you always have an excuse for gelato.

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23 July 2014: Fortress of Sillitude

Fortress of sillitude

A woman in a skin-tight ringmaster's suit whips a gong. Three tigers prowl below her in a stone courtyard, baring their teeth at the rusted gates. A spandex-clad songstress dangles from a trapeze, grasping at a key floating just above her head. A comedian plunges head-first into a container of cockroaches to find a ping-pong ball—without using his hands.

This isn't some frat boy's beer-induced fantasy, it's a French TV show that's been on the air for 25 years called Fort Boyard.

Needless to say, it's my new favorite show.

Fort Boyard was first broadcast in 1990 as Les Clès de Fort Boyard (The Keys of Fort Boyard) and is considered the precursor to many of the world's best-known game shows like Fear Factor, in which teams of celebrities compete in all kinds of crazy tests—some based on physical endurance, some on trivia, and most on pushing the participants' boundaries. (Wikipedia describes it here.)

My husband and I stumbled upon this show one night after dinner while we were flipping channels, our minds nearly mush from days of bank appointments, interviews and other "rendezvous" that required us to jump brain-first into a language with which we are familiar at best. (I've never flop-sweated so much in my life as when trying to communicate bank information to a man in a business suit at our local Parisian bank branch. Banks are confusing enough in my native tongue!)

When we lit upon Fort Boyard, we were immediately struck by the ridiculous set—the show is shot in the actual Fort Boyard fortress in France, so picture imposing stone walls, thick iron gates...and campy, indoor fun-house sets that are incongruous, to say the least—and the fact that a woman was standing barefoot in a tub of scorpions answering questions put to her by a man in the silliest "old wizard man" costume you can imagine. 

This, my friends, is Fort Boyard.

We've since come to find out that the show consists of teams of celebrities competing to win money for worthy causes by completing challenges that win them keys and codexes. These challenges are not for the faint of heart, either: you might find yourself bicycling across a tightrope to grab a key, finding codes written on ping-pong balls buried in cockroaches and yelling said codes to your teammates so they can open a locked box that contains a codex—or any number of other physically and mentally daunting tasks. Win enough of these challenges and your team will be allowed to spend time in the "Treasure Room," wherein torrents of Euro coins will shower into a cage in the center of a stone courtyard where moments before tigers had prowled and you have just under three minutes to grab as much money as you can and dump it in a bucket—the amount collected is the total that will be donated to the team captain celebrity's charity of choice.

If your mind is spinning, let it. The game is beyond silly and knows it. The host wears a smirk for most of the show and flirts shamelessly with the female celebrities, and there are so many different characters—including Le Père Fouras (old wizard man), Blanche (sexy princess trapped in a white room with a white snake) and Passe-Partout, Passe-Temps and Passe-Muraille (three dwarves who run around handing out clues and locking people in prison cells)—costumes and sets that it took us a good three episodes to kind of figure out what was going on.

I think I need to go watch a few more to really nail it down...

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19 July 2014: Get There...

GET THERE...

I was awakened this morning at 7 a.m. by the sound of sweeping. Wet sweeping. Like someone was trying to sweep debris through a puddle—which was exactly what was happening three floors below our shuttered window. A man in a bright green vest—the standard uniform for Parisian city employees—was dragging a plastic-bristled broom through the leftover rain water to encourage its flow into the overloaded gutters.

You might be thinking, "How nice that Paris keeps its streets so clean."

I was thinking, "Why the F is someone sweeping right below my window at 7 o'clock in the morning?" 

Not to mention that it's going to rain again today anyway.

Paris does indeed keep its streets clean, but it does so by sending all kinds of loud and cumbersome 

paraphernalia down its tiny, quaint streets at all hours of the day and night. Our garbage is picked up at 11 p.m. every night (and often at 8 a.m. the very next morning) by a truck so large it barely fits down the narrow corridor that our windows look onto. That's right: every night a cranky, clanging machine squeezes its way down a street that is, at best, a skinny, one-way side street.

Which brings me to another, noisy point. Because the road is so narrow—and because there are so many cars in Paris, much like in America—any time there's a delivery truck, a work truck or (Heaven forfend) a taxi parked in the road doing its business, the other cars that get trapped behind it don't wait patiently for it to move (since the only way out would be to illegally back up or drive up the walls like some kind of vehicular Spiderman). No, instead—at all hours, may I remind you—the waiting car will lay on its horn until the offending driver has scrambled back into his vehicle and trundled off down the road. Irritating, to say the least, when you're trying to get work done three floors above. It's a downright mind-flogging when this happens at 2, 3 or 4 a.m.

And then you've got the revelers from the bar down the street strolling under the window, talking at the top of their lungs, when last call has long since passed and they're toddling home for the night. On a Tuesday. At 3 a.m. Or the American tourists—the accents give them away—laughing hysterically as they teeter back to their hotels (there are at least three on our street). Or the man who owns the restaurant downstairs who I'm convinced is part hyena (his laugh rattles the ears and​ the soul).

But there's one particular character in this frenzied, cacophonous fable that stands out (and in fact inspired the title of this post). At several times throughout the day, one of our neighbors clip-clops her way down the street in what must be very high heels, as it takes her forever to get from one end of the street to the next. Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop...My husband and I had casually remarked upon her daily treks to one another throughout the weeks we'd lived here until finally one night, lying there with our eyes squeezed shut, trying to fall asleep, the clip-clopping​ echoing off the bedroom walls, Joshua muttered, "Get there..." As if his utterance would hurry her along and let the ringing in our ears subside.

It was so apt that we now use the phrase anytime a particularly offending sound—giggly tourists, late-night lovers, impatient drivers—is making its way down the street, the walls and windows of Rue Augereau magnifying the reverberation like an urban Grand Canyon.

Thus, at 7 a.m. this morning when the swosh-swosh-swosh-swosh awoke me after having barely fallen asleep due to the rumbling motorbike that had started up at 6 a.m. and idled for at least 20 minutes directly below our window (I imagined its owner needed to send a Very Important Text before driving to work), all I could think as he made his slow, deliberate, brain-meltingly noisy way down the block was, "Get there..."

He was gone by the time the garbage truck came at 8.

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