The wonders of Paris - Food and the Delicacy of Independant Travel -OR- How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Butter

Paris has a singular smell. Cold paint thinner hinting with concrete and detergent, similar to the UK but sharper, wiser, more independent of Europe.
Julien picked me up at the drizzling airport and we arrived in St. Mande, just barely outside of the main city on the eastern edge by the Bois de Vincennes. With this smell suddenly blooming in my nose, flashbacks of my first trip to Europe shook me and warmed me again, that smell, that smell, that Europe smell, like cold, night washed metal, some form of city perfume that was so entirely not Los Angeles. Prickling all over we strolled down in the dusk to his place, up the winding wooden stairs that echoed our steps, to the bed until I collapsed on his mattress drooling on the red duvet, pulled in piling swirls around my head.
When I woke up, daylight had passed and though my eyes were wrung out on jet lag, I popped up and crept downstairs to the background voice of Julien. He was being cool as always, even after a year, but I didn’t care anymore, my flush of energy after an hour long nap was unwounded by his boyish superiority complex. He took me out to the bakery just across the street from his place and, like a good authority figure, bought me whatever I pointed at, in quick, quiet French, sliding metal chocolate coins over the counter as I slipped the deliriously beloved "Chausson au Pommes" into my hands. Oh my dear Chausson...
Squealing with the purse of apple pastry cupped in my hands, buried against my nose, I trotted (he stepped) down the curb to take an introductory stroll of the small town. It was a like a miniature Paris, sharing the same traits; tall stacked buildings with small square windows and slanted grey and blue rooftops like the top of a trapezoid. It was harder to tell at night, but it seemed to wind around itself at every turn, with it’s shoe repair stores and green lit pharmacies crowding the curves. We continued on toward the park; bright black night, lights glowing frosted and billowing out at the edges from tall wilting street lamps, frayed into the rest of the black...everything seemed so sharp and clean. My cheeks battled the cold and the flurry of it carried up to my nose. With the pastry stuffed against my face I must’ve looked like a 5 year old, beaming at the simplest of things; a golden light in a bedroom window, an elderly couple holding hands in the darkness of the park. I murmered sweet nothings to the Chausson and gasped at the width of the cobblestone. Julien’s eyebrows lifted or tightened as he escorted his oh-so-American food-luster as discretely as he could up the slowly lifting street.

I had come to Paris to see the band Muse in concert. It was the end of October and getting cold but not yet snowing, not yet losing leaves. I had just left my recent ex-boyfriend behind in the San Fernando Valley, to sit at perfect cafes and feed culinary wonders to my slowly diminishing curves, to live the life that Paris promises. I had three weeks to spend with the platonic charm of another ex, L’ex Francais, Julien, who I had met long before the beautiful sparkling Southern boy who I was now trying to escape. No matter how much I loved the weight of unrequited love, the weight of dough and butter resting in my hand like a sleeping kitten was what I needed now, and this was the place to be. Details don’t matter. It was Paris, and Paris’ role was a given: Highly romantic and essential setting for either the milk of a broken heart or the blood of a new love. Thank god for getting dumped, I knew exactly where I was. I would do as I pleased until Julien's friends arrived around the 2nd week and we’d crash into Bercy stadium to see Muse with the rest of the cult.
Until then it was just me creaking my way around the well-bred, simple two-story apartment, made of iron colored window lace, white paint and wooden floors, and tables smoothed down to their nails. In the morning I would wake up while Julien was at work and turn the same color as the walls hitting the sunlight. Opening the windows was like kissing them, they were crafted so well. I gently took them in my hands and pushed into the morning sky. There I was met again by that smell, cold, cold city air breathing bitter sun into my mouth and closing my eyes at the same time. Leaning out the window in my pajamas, I would gaze at the tops of heads and hints of green from the park at the end of the narrow block like a indoor cat. Turning on the tv for company, and fluency by osmosis, I’d barefoot into the white tiled kitchen, lit by cloudy light, and drink a small glass of blood orange juice. Scaffolding draped itself and billowed plastic curtains against the window, and on some mornings a mix of French and Spanish from the workers peppered the air like clucking chickens, echoing from above while I smiled in the shower.

When Julien got up for work he was nothing but French, an open book and secrets of his culture seeping everywhere like water from a broken pipe. Did you know, for example, that the French freeze their vodka, cut their pizza with a fork and knife, and wear the same pinstriped jeans everyday? He drove me delgihtfully insane - smoking and talking too loud when I was trying to watch t.v. at night, calling me over to cuddle with him before he fell asleep, shouting "Putain!" at the computer screen when Paris lost a match. I could’ve cradled myself in the charms of cameraderie, my little square of the apartment, for the entire trip. But sooner or later, I had to have coffee and I had to have bread.
It was a few days, however, before I got up enough courage to actually order something on my own, other than "une truffe" from the St. Mande Chocolatier on the corner. Je parle Francais un peu, but I was locked into the polite, intimidated silence that so many Americans have likely experienced. So I would shatter around on an empty stomach for hours, forgetting my appetite, distracting myself with the blurry black and colored poster walls of the metro, and the antique streets pulling away in every direction. Until one afternoon I finally found a café that smiled at me. Inside it was starkly warm and pulling off my gloves I approached the Frenchman watching my arrival.
"Un café, s’il vous plait" and that was all I could manage. He had broken his conversation with an older woman who wore "French" on her face as deeply lived and elegantly as the city itself, and they were now both casually clinking ceramic behind the counter and paying no heed to my obvious origins. It worked! The secret code! French! just for my one, splendid espresso. After a minor debacle involving dropped coins and a midol pill, I blushed and settled into a table facing a world of stone and flowers. A rattling cup and spoon, slow French music, sweet woman’s voice in French, man’s voice like bubbling water, spoons in a jar, change jingling, kids calling, buzzing motorcycles and ocean-sounds of cars... the café had bloomed around me. A row along the top of the wall was decorated in a black band with little pictures on it saying, for example, "plat du jour" or "croque pain poulain" painted in cartoon images of wine glasses and slices of bread. This was my first city breakfast and I wanted to be alone, slowly consuming these views and thinking my own English thoughts, and I was left alone. After countless years of artists and writers flocking to their city for inspiration, Parisians seemed to know the importance of being independent, because, as I soon found out, the city personifies independence.
Before I left I caught a sweet smell, like rose flavored hookah smoke, "un Chocolat" and "ah oui, exacte" from invisible customers, while the machine rose up again, frothing. I left in love with the bar mistress’ voice and the shake of coffee grounds on metal.
Back outside, I immediately skirted across the street and bought an earl grey chocolate truffle with a picture of a blue ship painted on the top. High on caffeine I came to the conclusion that I should probably look into gathering some little orange tangerines from the farmer’s market one day on the way home so as to have a more balanced morning routine. A morning routine! In Paris! The domesticity of the traveler, what bliss...
Gratefully, I began to sink into this role of cultivated loner over the next week. It helped when Julien not only came down with a bad cold, but a big deadline at work as well as a sprained ankle. It was comical actually, especially when one night I caught him vacuuming in a flurry on both feet, drunk and scowling at scattered bread crumbs on the floor before retreating to the couch to smoke and pout about the stress.
Forced to venture into the city alone everyday now, and often well into the night, I was able to slip between it’s cracks one metro stop at a time, from St. Mande on the yellow line straight into Bastille, Hotel de Ville and the Louvre in no more that 15 minutes. On the metro when the windows became mirrors in the black tunnel, I stared into the space of reflected faces, the flat slipper-like sneakers, dark knit sweaters and skirts with stockings in different patterns. Everyone was so cold looking, cool like colors, not temperature, in a winter shade of character that I had never seen in the bleached out population of LA. They were beautiful faces, winter faces.
On my big shopping day I started out on the sunny Rue de Rennes past the Ecole des Beaux Arts, my fat and buttery "crepe mixte" heavy in my hands, oozing heat all over my fingertips. I walked hour after hour through streams of quickly moving Parisians rushing down the same one-way sidewalks as if they were all late for lunch or for an art class. I would shop, get cold outside, sweat sweat sweat inside, carry my jackets, sweat, go outside, cool, then cold again, back inside for heat, and sweat again, feeling beautifully peeled away in my exposed dressing room skin. Back outside I caught the faces once more, this time without reflection. Each person looked completely independent of the other, yet they were all flowing through the same veins; cells working toward the common goal of keeping something greater than themselves alive.

When looking up into the visage of a looming church or the blackened walls of buildings, I found the same was true of the city itself. There were the quintessential "must sees" of Paris: L’Opera, L’Arc de Triomphe, Le Louvre, holding court ever so subtly, despite their blatant lineage. But alongside them sat the equally dignified creatures of everyday life, from the Librarie Monte Cristo, which bought and sold Jules Verne books, to Muji the Japanese design store to Chez Papa, a youthful bistro serving deep bowls of salad layered with potoatos, melted fontina and fethered prociutto, to my personal favorite, Miroirs Anciens. From shops designed to sell one thing behind their colored doorframes, to the Euro equivalent of Target, they were all as full of quiet, established pride and style as the people themselves. All serving their purpose.
Eventually I graduated to ordering brie and tomato crepes for dinner in the Marais, and laughing it up with the waitress when I made an unintentional double entendre involving "La Toilette". I would pick up a small steak wrapped in brown paper and some "Desperado" in a giant bullet shaped beer can for Julien on the way home, and we’d eat, cutting haricots verts and meat together with our knives in one bite. With the Southern boy thousands of miles away in the flat lined night of the valley, Paris revealed it’s infamous hand for me to kiss. I was being courted by independence, in fine details falling quietly in twists of falling yellow spades from it’s black trees, and black chocolate cake breaking apart into creme anglais.