This Blog Needs a New Title

Rue Oberkamph at Sunset, originally uploaded by Miss Laura M..

We did nothing yesterday except walk, freeze, use the internet, and eat omelets with leeks and a goat cheese so mild that it hardly even registered on the tongue. J____ was unimpressed. I swooned.

“Where do I get hard cheese?” she asked.
“Italy,” I said.

The last time I ate this much cheese, in a moment of optimistic but ultimately failed vegetarianism, I came away with a cholesterol reading of 245. That’s approximately equivalent to that of an 85-year-old man who’s gunning for his third cheeseburger-fueled heart attack. At least now I’m smart enough to get some exercise and veggies along with my gruyere.

We walked from Belleville through Oberkamph and the Marais down to the Seine, to Notre Dame, where I ducked inside to get warm like some medieval street urchin. I love how the inside feels vast and intimate at the same time, how it reeks endlessly of incense. Twelve hours later, I’m still coughing.

Then I went to H&M.

Le Premier Jour

Dinner, originally uploaded by Miss Laura M..

The cheese I’m eating right now smells more or less as though it has gone completely rotten. It is a fabulously cheap camembert, one that’s been robbed of its ooze, if not its smell, by the chilly Paris weather, which is currently hovering somewhere near zero degrees Celsius. I need not translate for my American friends. It’s cold.

We landed at 10 am under iron gray skies, stuffed full of Indian food and bleary from a night of lumpy, spring-sprung cushion-seat sleep. Despite the bedhead and bloodshot eyes, though, I was mostly in one piece. This is a huge improvement for me, and one in which I take a measure of pride. I used to be one of those white-knuckle , rosary-clutching travelers , but a decade of flying—of strange statistical proof, as though I’m a one-woman clinical trial—has shown me that not everyone who sets foot on an airplane is doomed to die in one. I haven’t yet, anyway.

At some point yesterday, though, while I was crossing over from the Right Bank to the Left at midday, with the sun trying to elbow its way through the gray curtain, giving just a cruel hint of all that famously beautiful light, that maybe I was actually dead. Maybe the plane did go down over the Atlantic. And maybe this is my version of heaven: Paris on a gloomy January day, still bustling and fashionable but under strict smoking ban.

We’re staying in Belleville on the Right Bank, in a single room owned by a lovely but certifiable American ex pat named Margie. She has frazzled orange hair and wears art school glasses and she dotes on us as though we’re 12, which is undoubtedly the age of most of her guests given the price of this place. (Cheaper than a hostel and more expensive than, say, pitching a tent on the Blvd. St. Michel.) She keeps trying to tell us things we already know and give us maps we already have, but her advice about open air markets, bus routes, and France’s phone systems has been invaluable. Even if she does knock on our door eight times a day to share it.

The room is full of dried flowers, jars of tea, Margie’s lovely black-and-white photos, and the stacks of books—most of them about art—that jam every corner. None of them, it seems, were published after 1970, which gives the room the approximate feeling of a literary Cuba, as though there’s been some sort of embargo, but it’s nice to be surrounded by them, to know that there is a tattered English-language copy of Silas Marner around, if the need for one arises.

Her tour of the neighborhood took us directly through the market on the Blvd. de Belleville, and it was there, shoved about by dinner-hunting Parisians, deafened by the vendors shouting about their tomatoes (“Deux kilo pour un Euro!” which seems like a steal to me, and like you’d have tomato sauce for the next year), that I realized the gravity of what I’d done in coming here. It felt good. Like the absolute rightest thing.

The rest of Belleville is not unlike that market in its continual bustle and diversity. It is home to Albanians, Turks, Greeks, Chinese, and what Margie called le bobo, or, “bohemian” French yuppies. In the shops, baguettes cool alongside almond cakes, crates of figs, heaping tubs of vermillion harissa. We had a genuine conundrum shopping for dinner—and what a conundrum to have: The clementines (fresh enough to still bear their waxy green leaves) or honey-drenched filo pastry with pistachios? We went for the clementines, bread, bananas, yogurt, the smelly camembert ,and another wedge of hard cheese

Later at the supermarket, two women in line engage in a furious shouting match, of which I cannot decipher even a single word. If there is a better language to argue in than French—all those exacting consonants—maybe Arabic is it. This argument is conducted in both, the two women sliding from one to the other in tandem, waving their hands.