Ramblings en Voyage: le 2 avril 2019
Except that it rained something terrible today, it was an exceptional day. The difficult thing about doing a study abroad program in Paris, and I say difficult knowing just how annoying this will sound, is that there are so many things that you want to do in Paris that it's unbearable to have to be in class for even four hours a day.
We met our professor outside the Metro station Philippe-Auguste today. It was gloomy and grim, with angry gray clouds hanging over the otherwise picturesque buidlings. I'd been waiting inside a café near the metro with a few other students from the program, and ventured outside reluctantly only because we'd spotted our professor looking around for us outside the station.
The first thing we did felt quite fitting actually for the weather: we visited a cemetery. Le cimitère du Père Lachaise, famous for the famous people buried there. It was quite beautiful actually. Very green, with Christian and Jewish and Buddhist tombs alike. Is there such a thing as a Buddhist tomb? I know not.
This cemetery is exceptionally beautiful, and boasts of famous names that include Rossini, Molière, Chopin, and interestingly, a man named Parmentier, who apparently introduced the French to potatoes. Which the French thought to be base because of the fact that they grow close to the devil.
Because of its exceptional inhabitants, this cemetery is extremely expensive to be buried then. Therefore, a family usually buys just one plot of land, in which all of the members of that family are buried together in a sort of configuration not unlike des lits superposés: eternal bunk beds. The professor's words, not mine.
There is a very beautiful love story that is told in this cemetery. There was once a bishop, un évêque, of the Chartres cathedral. This cathedral has always stuck with me because my art history class in high school looked at it briefly: it's absolutely stunning. It's said to be the most beautiful Gothic building in France, and I remember thinking that it was the most beautiful building I'd ever seen. And then, that I hated art history.
Side note here: there are some simple distinctions to be made between a church, a cathedral, and a basilica, and it's not just the simple distinction that I'd always held in my head (a church is what I went to for choir as a little kid, cathedrals are big churches, and basilicas are big cathedrals. Were that life were so simple). In fact, a church is just the basic unit of religious worship — I'm not not proud of that terminology — and cathedrals and basilicas are types of churches. A cathedral is simply a church that has a bishop; they tend to be bigger because they are a symbol of power for a powerful man. A basilica is dedicated towards the saint whose tomb or remains rest somewhere within this church. Saint Peter's Basilica → Saint Peter's B(body)asilica. An infallible mnemomic.
Even sider note: a convent and a monastery are not differentiated by the gender of their inhabitants, but by the extent of their contact with the outside world. It's quite simple: a convent has none. And there lies the reason that convents are for women. There's definitely another article coming about that.
Anyways, there was this bishop, and he adopted his niece Héloise, who had just become an orpheline. During this time, education for females was basically unheard of, but this évêque wanted nothing but the best for his niece. So he had her educated, meaning that she was exposed to the company of one young Abélard. In case you also can never tell the gender of names, much less French names Abélard is a guy. Un mec.
They fell in love, and in the carefully phrased words of my professor, "they fell in amour so much so that she became pregnant." So subtle are the French.
The bishop was furious! A pregnancy? Upon his niece? He probably wouldn't even have accepted the explanation immaculate conception, not when she bore his name. I kid, I joke.
Well the bishop wasn't happy, and he expressed his unhappiness with this outcome by putting Héloise in a convent, and castrating her beloved Adélard. They were kept apart for the rest of their lives. But touchingly, they wrote love letters to one another for the rest of their relatively long lives, and those letters remain some of the earliest and most powerful love letters ever.
What the bishop could do in life, he could not prevent in death. The two lovers were reunited in the cimitière, their shared tomb an eternal tribute to a love that couldn't be during their lives.
Les restes d'Héloise et d'Abélard sont réunis.
Our next task of the morning was to embark on une brève excursion to Belle-Ville, in the 11th arrondissement, to check out the marché en plein air — the outdoor market.
Before going, our professor turned to us, and repeated once more what she'd been telling us for days at this point: that the French aren't racist, just curieux. Genuinely. "They'll call out things, they'll shout in English, expect to hear some Ni Haos because they can see that you're Asian. But the French are not racist, simply curious. They love to hear about your origine ethnique."
This interested me from day one, because she obviously was warning us of this for fear that we PoliticallyCorrectSocialJusticeWarriors wouldn't take huge offense at random people in the rues or on the métros inquiring where we were from, and not stopping when we responded that we were américains. And I started to wonder, what makes a remark offensive? What makes something okay to say, versus not? When is a comment inherently insulting, versus just so because society says it is? What makes another comment seemingly harmless, when it is actually really a microagression?
Thoughts again for another article.
We arrived at the market around 11:30 this morning, and it was extremely lively and colorful. Beaucoup beaucoup de couleur. And noise! We walked through this market, munching on pain d’orge, barley bread, as we went.Venders shouting out their fares, shoppers negotiating and shouting over the venders. Bustling has never been a more appropriate adjective.
The venders were, as far as I could tell today, all immigrants. They shout at each other comfortably in a way that lets you know that they run this market, that it's them out here, every Tuesday and Friday. This is the cheapest outdoors market in Paris, possibly just the cheapest market overall. You can find fresh fruit and vegetables as well as nuts, candy, and hot ready-made food for prices that would astound you. Or, if you're a low-to-no-income student such as myself, these are prices that will make you smile gleefully. It's definitely a place that I plan on returning to another day when I have more time to take a more leisurely stroll through the whole market. I'm still thinking about those plump grapes and ripe strawberries. Ooh la la.
As we exited the market, our professor took us on a little tour of the surrounding neighborhood. Les immeubles, buildings, in this arrondissement were built with very specific functions in mind.
For starters, there is no first floor in France in the same sense that there is in the United States. What we would consider the first floor in America is in fact le rez-de-chaussée — the ground floor. The floors above then start from the first floor where we would have the second, and the second where we would have the third, and so on.
This is a picture of a typical Haussmann-era building. Haussmann is the man credited with modernizing Paris: tearing down old buildings to build new ones, constructing new roads to replace old ones. The rez-de-chausée is reserved for shops and restaurants, the collective of which is called les commerces. The first story (just above the stores) is the least expensive, and the least well-furnished. These were traditionally reserved for the store-owners, who would use them only as a place to sleep at night.
The next story up is the most expensive, with its individual elegant balconies. These balconies differ sharply with the one continuous balcony that we see on the fifth floor at the top. This long continuous balcony is consistent on every building in this line of buildings, so that one could easily cross over from one building to another. And it was built exactly so that this could be done.
See, to once again quote my professor, les Français aiment bien leurs manifestations — the French love their protests. It's practically a national tradition. For the police, it's more of a national nuisance. To follow the protests closely and to make sure that they didn't get out of hand, the police would follow the marches on the fifth floor balcony. The continuous balconies allowed them to jump from building to building with little trouble. Thus, architecture becomes political.
After my last class today, I sought out a bakery, where I hoped to buy some bread and hopefully write for a bit. I rode the metro line 4 and then 9 to Boulangerie Utopie, which had caught my eye when I'd been reading about bakeries in Paris. Yes, I'm a fake local. It was a cute little bakery, with unfortunately no sitting space, and plenty of bread and pastry options. I opted for a baguette au charbon végétal (a baguette noir!), a loaf of focaccia, and a tarte au citron today. 7.30 euros. They were delicious and beautiful. I intend to spend the rest of this term seeking out every other bakery in the city that looks intriguing. My way of leaving a gastronomical mark on the city.
I ate the tart in the kitchen after I got home with a homemade cappuccino, and I thought about how at once being alone is both such a blessing and such a curse. It's difficult for me to be alone for sustained periods of time, especially because it's not something I face at college all that often. There is something both so liberating and so crushing about not having another face-à-face conversation with another human being for the four or five hours before you go to bed. That's been the biggest transition for me during this term abroad; c'est la vie. It's given me a little taste of what it could be like to actually live by myself, and it's something to look forward to.
Ça suffit for the ramblings of this parisienne today. On avance.
For more of my random ramblings in this beautiful city, read my other Ramblings en Voyage! Fondly with love, bread, and love of bread — Juliann.
