A Friend in Town

“SALUT” IS ABOUT EVERYONE

In French, the word “salut” is like “hey!” It’s a casual hello and also a casual goodbye. Convenient. It can also mean a salute, like in the military. Up until recently, these were the only definitions of this word that I was aware of. I was walking home from Monoprix (like French Target) and there were a couple clean looking, middle-aged guys with a big sign that said "pénitence = salut." People walking past them were keeping a big wake, but didn’t steer as clear because I was puzzled by what their sign meant. They caught me staring and reeled me in. They asked me what I thought about "salut." Something about the way they asked made me think this was some sort of survey, so I said "I don't know if my opinion counts, I'm a foreigner." They said "salut" is about EVERYONE. Oops, they were evangelists. Turns out it also means "salvation." It was too late to turn and run, so I talked with them a little about the different meanings of the words "pénitence" and "penance" in French and English. They claimed that in French it's not so much about "punishment," i.e. whipping yourself or wearing a barbed wire garter like the dude from the Da Vinci Code. They said that in French it was a very good thing. Hmmm. Then they pulled out pamphlets for their church and I decided not to stick around to hear all the details. I told them I had my own faith and wished them a good day. Now I’m kind of regretting not grabbing a handout though, you don’t see a lot of evangelists in Paris (I’m told it’s illegal) and I want to know what it said.

Pick a key, any key, for a fee

         Chris Welsch needed a new mailbox key after a stroke of bad luck on Pont des Arts. His landlord was making it almost entirely impossible to find a replacement, so Chris said he’d throw a little cash my way if I could help him figure out a solution. It turns out that the mailboxes/mail keys for apartment buildings in France are privately owned by outside companies. Anyone can go to a mailbox headquarters and give an address and a mailbox number and get a pair of keys by paying 11,30€. No questions asked. It’s probably bad for me to be putting this information out into the world, but there you go.

YOU COULD SAY OUR PATHS HAVE CROSSED BEFORE

         Katherine Jacob and I have coincidentally ended up in France together through the same programs twice now. The last time I was in France, studying in Avignon, it turned out that I was not the only Marquette student at my school, despite it not being a Marquette program. Katherine had found the same school in the same town independently. We also knew each other because we had been in the same French classes every semester since I started taking French at Marquette. That’s less shocking because Marquette has a small French program, but ending up in the same town for study abroad was pretty remarkable. This time we both found the TAPIF teaching program independently. Katherine’s in a high school in a small town outside of Rennes, up north. This week is the Toussaint (All Saints) vacation all across the country. We don’t have classes, so she decided to come hang out with me in Paris for a few days. She got in on Monday afternoon (despite her original train being cancelled) and stuck around until this morning (Friday). We managed to get in a lot of picnicking, pain au chocolat (so good it hurts), a ballet, and some sight-seeing. It was a good ol’ time.

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

Katherine is a ballet fan, so she wanted to see one while she was here. Tuesday she went over to the Opera house to see what the options were and found that there was one happening that night and that she could get us tickets with “restricted visibility” for 8€ a piece. We’re both working with the same sorry budget, so we decided to give the 8€ seats a try.

         I had never been to the Palais Garnier before. You normally have to pay 12€ just to go inside. It’s beyond ornate. You could spend an hour staring at the ceiling and only be able to take in a fraction of the detail. I was silly and didn’t bring my camera, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. Or google image search. Or go there. 
The auditorium has a chandelier that’s as big as my house. There are huge faces sculpted at the border of the ceiling that watch over the stage and the audience. I wonder how many shows they’ve seen.

         The one downer is that the whole place smells exactly like homeless Parisian people. It’s weird. Being in Paris for a month, I’ve only recently learned to recognize that scent. I’ve never smelled it anywhere else. It’s distinctive and if it is a bodily smell, then it is not one that I’m familiar with. I’m not sure what it is, but I can assure you, it’s not pleasant. I don’t understand why a luxurious Opera house would share the same smell as the people who sleep in the subways here, but it is undeniably the same scent.

         Our restricted visibility allowed us to see half of the stage. It was kind of a bummer when they danced stage right. We could tell from the crescendoing music and applause that they had just done something really sweet. But half the stage was still enough for us to catch some impressive dancing and to piece together the majority of the plot. Paquita is a gypsy woman who’s running with a rough crowd. She’s the hot gypsy of this particular clan and has a gypsy pimp who isn’t being very good to her. A prince charming shows up and they fall in love, of course. The Gypsy Pimp is not down with this and decides to kill Prince Charming, but Paquita warns him and they run away together. Then they go to a ball and they find out that she’s actually his long lost cousin and so she’s of noble birth and they can get married and be happy forever. In the ballet, this last part was demonstrated with dramatic gesturing towards a painting of a man, followed by a lot of celebratory dancing. We had to look on Wikipedia afterwards to figure out what the heck was going on with the finale.

PARISIAN DINING

After the Ballet, we went to dinner and I decided to try Steak Tartare for the first time. For those of you who don’t know, that’s raw beef served with a raw egg on top. Protein central. It’s a really typical Parisian meal, you see people eating all the time. The waiter, noticing that I am a foreigner and a girl, responded to my order with a french “You know that comes raw, right?”

I assured him that I did, but I think he still assumed I was making a mistake. When he brought out my plate, he gave me every kind of condiment they had. I liked it. I probably won’t order it again because I like other things better, but it’s definitely worth giving a try.

         When they cleared our plates, the guy heard us speaking English and asked us, in English, if we wanted anything else to eat. I responded in French and I think that pissed him off because he mocked us when we asked for the check and then didn’t come back to our table for about 30 minutes. We stared and followed his every move and he actively ignored us while he smoked a cigarette, stocked the bar and flirted with a table of annoying American girls sitting a little ways from us. We finally had to ask a second time. The waiters here are either awesome or the stereotype of a rude Parisian, there doesn’t appear to be much in between.

That’s all I’ve got energy for at the moment. I’ll write some more later. Probably tomorrow. later y’all