I had planned for this post to be about my visit to the Catacombs on Friday. But I didn't get to go because it was closed due to "ventilation problems." Meaning the toxic dead people fumes might cause me to join the dead in the museum. Oh well, I guess I'll get over it and get to go some other time when there's no danger of me turning into a zombie. So instead I'm going to talk about all the things I love about living here. In recent weeks, I've dwelled a lot on the negative (which is consistent with my stage of culture shock). But in reality, the positive experiences have outstripped the negative so far. A lot of my American friends here are only semester students, and will be returning home in just over a month. I have absolutely no desire to join them. Would I like to be with my family at Christmas? Of course I would. Do I want to give up this experience just so I could spend a few short weeks with my family doing the same thing we do every year? Absolutely not. There are so many things I love about being here, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
One of the things I'm enjoying most about Paris is the big city experience. I'm a small town Texas girl, and probably always will be. By European definition, Sherman Texas at 35,000 people isn't really a small town. But in the States it most definitely is. While I have lived in Atlanta for the last couple of years, I've generally avoided the big city experience by attending a college with less than 1,000 students, going to a church about half the size of Covenant in Sherman, and spending most of my time in Decatur and not Atlanta proper. My sister may live close to New York City, but I'd never visited until this past spring. And to be honest, I enjoyed my visit, but will probably never really like New York. I've often heard that New York is the Paris of the States, but I'm not sure I agree. I've heard a lot of complaints about how dirty and gross Paris is. Yes, there's trash and unspeakable dirt and grime on the streets in certain areas. Yes, sometimes the people are rude or overly friendly (by which I mean following you down the street telling you how they'd like to take you home). But there is so much more to it than that.
It is by far the most beautiful city I've ever visited or lived in. This time of year it's pretty rainy and cold. There are probably three or four cloudy or rainy days to every one nice day, but the architecture is beautiful and there's nothing quite like living in a city that has centuries of history just waiting to be discovered. Above all, the walkability of the city is one of the things I enjoy the most. A couple weeks ago I got a pretty bad cold and needed some meds. My host family was on vacation, so I needed to go out to a pharmacy and get some myself, as well as hopefully some food for lunch. Because I was sick, I didn't want to travel far or get on the metro or anything. But that's the beauty of Paris; there's pretty much anything you might need within an easy five minute walk from most residential areas. Where I live, there's a 24-hour pharmacy (which is pretty rare, even in Paris), a grocery store, and several sandwich/crêpe stands. So I didn't have to get on a train or a bus to get all of this done. It took all of fifteen minutes, and then I could get home and attempt to sleep off the cold. After living in Decatur for two years (a year and a half of that without a car) where the closest pharmacy is a fifteen-twenty minute walk one-way and the grocery store options aren't fabulous without transportation, it seems like heaven to me.
Some of the people here who complain about the city talk a lot about how gross the metro is. Yeah, it's dirty and doesn't smell fabulous, but the efficiency really makes up for it for the most part. After spending a year and a half trying to get around Atlanta in a timely fashion by MARTA, the public transport system, I'm happy to take a metro train or bus that isn't completely clean if it gets me to my destination quickly and efficiently. I've been taking the bus more than the train recently because I've discovered that they are generally cleaner and the people are nicer. Sometimes they take longer, but I'm generally not in a hurry. As an added bonus, you get to actually see the city as you commute to school/church/home/wherever. Sometimes if I have some time leftover in the afternoon and I'm not ready to go home yet, I'll get off the bus somewhere that looks nice and walk around for an hour or so. Sometimes I'll catch the bus a couple stops down, or if I'm close enough to home, just walk the whole way. As long as you know how to work the metro system to your advantage, you can be perfectly happy with it. When I was in Atlanta trying to get around without a car, I was always wishing for one. Here, if I could have a car I wouldn't get one; partly because I'd be terrified to drive here (think NYC taxi, only worse, since there are pretty much no clearly marked lanes), and partly because the public transportation is generally faster than driving.
The last thing that I love about living in France is the food. I'm not just talking about the stereotypically fabulous French food. That is good. What I love is the freshness and natural taste of food here. When I buy something at the grocery store and want to know what's in it, I don't have to wade through a paragraph of things I've never heard of to find out if it has lactose in it. All of the ingredients are clearly spelled out and there are rarely any preservative chemicals in the food. The fruits and vegetables look and taste better than I'm used to store-bought food tasting. There's no high-fructose corn syrup, and generally very little artificial flavoring. People have been asking me how I'm losing all this weight. Part of it is that I'm running two or three times a week, but a large part is the difference in the food. I'm more careful about what I eat, and I very rarely eat between meals. Most French families eat after 8pm. Most nights in my family it's about 8:30 before we sit down for dinner. Yes, that's a little late and I'm generally hungry before that, but the dinner is filling and I never go to sleep hungry. At school back in Atlanta, on weekends they stop serving dinner at 6pm. I would almost always go to sleep hungry or eat something right before bed that wasn't good for me. Here, I eat with enough time for my body to digest the food before I go to bed as well as not so much time that I'm hungry before I go to sleep. That's part of the secret. The other part is going to stay secret for the time being.
So my point is I may complain a lot about some of the things that have been happening recently, but I wouldn't trade this experience for anything in the world. This week I've gotten to see Christmas decorations start to go up in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Next month I'll probably get to go ice skating near some beautiful landmark with all the wonder that this city can offer a small-town girl from Texas. I get to live here. Not forever, but during what is probably one of the most formative periods of my life. I get to experience something amazing and wonderful, something most people never get to experience. So bring on the cold, the rain, the hail, and the snow. I'm living in Paris!
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