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| the sidewalk outside a primary school in our neighborhood |
The year has been enormously enjoyable so far, in so many ways. Challenges and annoyances are not absent but largely inconsequential. My six-months-ago self is surprised to see my current self typing these words, but here they are. Before we came, I was excited for the adventure, to be sure, but honestly expected much less from the year. I had visited Paris several times for short periods and had never been overly impressed---I don't think it cracked my top ten places to visit.
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| a carved door around the corner from us |
I have been reflecting on what has made this year so enjoyable, both because I am reflective by nature but also for the very practical reason of wanting to reproduce the aspects of Parisian life that we have come to love upon our return. I guess I would probably organize the advantages into four broad categories: the rhythm of daily life, food and drink, language, and my job.
The job is the easiest one. I'm on sabbatical. I come into work every day and decide what I want to work on. I still have deadlines (mostly self-imposed) and obligations and sources of stress, but they're pleasant to manage. I miss many of my colleagues at MIT, but, well, there are a few I'm happy to be six time zones away from. (I should say that there is no need to miss two of my most excellent colleagues and close friends from MIT: Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee. They are here in Paris with us, also visiting PSE, and we see them very regularly!)
One of the great things about being a visitor someplace is that you have no voice or stake in decisions, so you're never important enough to be dragged into disagreements. I'm sure the faculty at PSE must have disagreements about issues all of the time, but we exist blissfully unaware of them. Without exception, the people here at PSE have been very warm and welcoming and lovely.
The language issue is a tricky and surprising one, because it really cuts both ways. On the negative side, not being fluent in French causes a few problems and misunderstandings, although they are less frequent and severe than I expected. (Google translate mitigates them enormously.) In addition, I expected the language barrier to make me feel socially isolated. Instead, I enjoy the many small social interactions I have with strangers and shopkeepers and servers and neighbors, facilitated by smiles and gestures, and only sometimes accompanied by words, les politesses. These, I am sure, are the oil that keeps the machine of society running. In addition, I have many friends here who speak fluent English, so I am not deprived of deeper discourse, either. And, of course, many of the arts and cultural events are as accessible to us as to any French speaker.
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| detail of Palais Garnier |
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| view from our seats at the last opera we attended, Jephtha |
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| detail of a Monet at l'Orangerie |
The positive part of not being fluent in French is a kind of insulation. I am sure that various anti-American sentiments swirl around me on a daily basis. I would be sad and frustrated if I understood them. Instead, I am blissfully unaware. (Is blissful lack of awareness becoming a theme?)
Another positive aspect is that, even though my French remains pretty rudimentary, it has improved enormously since we arrived, which gives me great satisfaction. (I am hoping to retain the services of a tutor soon, even though increased facility with French could threaten my blissful lack of awareness.) I am also very gratified that Glenn and I have been able to give Kate the opportunity to learn French. Her French, I think, is getting quite good.
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| a neighborhood tea shop |
Food and drink in France is legendary, of course, and has mostly lived up to its reputation. I find, though, that my favorite aspects of French food are to be found in the markets and epiceries and even convenience stores, rather than in the restaurants. We have had many wonderful restaurant meals (and many forgettable ones), but we also have equally wonderful restaurants in the US. In fact, in mentally contrasting comparable French and American restaurants, I prefer the American: a less rigid rhythm of the American restaurant meal, a greater emphasis on vegetables, and a willingness to experiment and innovate that is absent in many French restaurants.
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| cheeses at Marche Maubert |
So, the restaurants, for the most part, will not be what I miss when we move back, but there is much to love about the food and drink here. Perhaps it is the fact that the convenience store around the corner sells fresh pasta and whole goat milk yogurt and peppercorns and duck rillettes and chocolate mousse and very decent wine. Maybe it is the fact that the guy at the Italian deli down the street has the most delicious finochiona and mortadella and ricotta afumicato and wants to tell you all about them. It is also the fact that the green grocer near work can be counted on to sell fresh crisp apples from nearby orchards. It is the fact that the butcher knows the very herd of cattle that produced the beef he is selling. And, finally, it is the fact that all of these things are not expensive. Many of these items might be available in the US, if you're willing to search and travel and pay dearly. They're routine here. There is a strong food culture that pervades everything, and people who care about food reap tremendous benefits from it.
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| Sandy on a walk |
These points hint at my last category, the rhythm of daily life. I have always known I love cities and how they shape one's day-to-day existence. Growing up in the suburbs of Indianapolis, I longed for trips into town to see the (few) skyscrapers and go the Ayres department store and tearoom and visit the City Market. In Cambridge (England), I lived at Churchill College but wished that Churchill had decided to rehab some old buildings in the center of the city instead of building a new campus a couple of miles outside when he established it. Briefly, I lived in Boston's Beacon Hill, and I loved every minute of it, even though I couldn't afford it. Our first house was in Cambridge (Massachusetts), near Harvard Square, but we outgrew it when our third daughter was born and, reluctantly, moved to suburban Newton. Now I am living in the heart of Paris, and I could not be happier with my dense, urban neighborhood. I love walking and taking the buses and the Metro, and I never miss my car. Our commute is by RER or Metro, and I enjoy that it includes several minutes of walking on each end. We have boutiques and bakeries and fromageries and restaurants and bookstores and cafes all within a five-minute walk of our apartment. Kate or Glenn or I run out to get milk or butter or eggs or fruit or bread most days, because it's so convenient. If we don't have anything interesting for dessert, we take a stroll out to the Amorino or Grom for ice cream after dinner. We take walks in the Luxembourg Gardens regularly because we don't have a fenced-in backyard for Sandy. We eat dinner late, we stay up late, and we sleep late. We have two opera houses 20 minutes away. The theater across the street is outstanding. We can pop into a museum on a lazy Saturday afternoon. I have not stopped being amazed and delighted by this abundance and how it dictates the routines of our daily lives.
There is, of course, another side to the coin. There are serious criticisms, many of a political and economic nature, that I could levy against the French, but those issues mostly do not affect my daily life, perhaps because I'm foreign and white and Christian and upper-middle class. I am not oblivious to them, but my focus here is more narrow, on issues that my own personal experience informs.
Which brings me to my attempts at obtaining the appropriate visa. For all of the griping we Americans do about bureaucracy and the competence of government, I can say that it is outstanding for the most part, compared with what I have experienced here. As a general rule, all levels of government in the US try to innovate and increase efficiency and view their job as serving citizens. Government websites in the US are clear, user-friendly, and designed to be helpful. (I would say that website design in France in general is atrocious.) For instance, the innovations that the Mass DMV has implemented in the last twenty years have made getting a drivers' license much simpler over that time. Large construction projects in Massachusetts are now timed to avoid the worst disruptions, with lane closures often happening on nights and weekends. This type of responsiveness seems largely absent here. Another example: the State Department's website for passport applications offers a clear flow chart (available in multiple languages) which leads one straight to the appropriate form, along with instructions for filling it out. This type of process has not been invented in France. French bureaucracies seem stuck in the 1970's and proud of it. The process of extending our visas to allow us to stay a year has been entirely opaque, cumbersome, and frustrating. It has involved obtaining and translating multiple documents, waiting in long lines at the prefecture, being told to submit the wrong forms, being corrected several weeks later, resubmitting different forms, all with weeks in between each step. And we're not finished yet. It is also about to become expensive, since we will have to pay a substantial tax to finally obtain the extensions.
I will also say that we have experienced mixed quality in the educational system here. Kate is attending a private school, but it follows the French national curriculum. What is one inevitable result of a mandated national curriculum for everyone? It's simply not very advanced. The math curriculum for troisieme, for instance, seems to be a full two years behind where Kate was in Newton. (Luckily, we are quite capable of supplementing, and we, mostly Glenn, has been doing so.) Surprisingly, though, her most substantive and high-quality class seems to be her English class. I wonder if that is due to the fact that there is not a mandated curriculum for English in the French schools.
I will also be happy to be able to access our networks of excellent doctors, dentists, optometrists, orthodontists, veterinarians, etc., back in the US. (The medical system in the US is a disaster in many ways for many people, but my medical system in the US is pretty darn good.) One aspect of the medical system here that I will miss, though, are the affordable and efficient house calls (SOS Medecins). Luckily, we have made little use of them, but it's so nice to know that we could.
And the tap water here is terrible. And I miss my ice maker.
So, can we reproduce the aspects of our life that we have come to enjoy so much here? Moving into Boston or Cambridge from Newton is quite possible, of course, but will have to wait until Kate graduates from high school. Nothing to be done about the insulating properties of not knowing the native language in the US, but I suppose I don't need as much insulating there as I might elsewhere. And I will try very hard to maintain the French that I have acquired here and help Kate to do so as well. Food and drink? There are many things I will miss, but I'm pretty sure I will manage well enough upon my return to Boston, bringing with me a newfound love of various cheeses and other delicacies. The permanent sabbatical is going to be the toughest to swing. (Perhaps that's just another name for retirement.)
Even in this overly-long post, one thing that I cannot neglect to mention is the dear friends we have made this year and the connections that we have been able to renew. These friendships have been so instrumental to the quality of our lives here, but I cannot say that they have been an advantage of Paris over Boston. We left behind wonderful and dear friends there, as well, and anxiously await reconnecting with them when we return. We are enormously fortunate.
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| bench outside of Shakespeare & Co. |
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