Le Printemps

"When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest."
A Moveable Feast, Hemingway

One perfect spring day erases all memories of bone-chilling January.  We've had enough for a year of Januarys over the past week or two.

There's a reason people write songs about Paris in the spring time.  It is the air that captures me.  Spring air is exhilarating everywhere, but it is perfect here.  Perfect humidity that feels like velvet on your skin.  A temperature so welcoming that windows seem to open by themselves.  And the scent is heavenly- every flower seems to burst in to bloom at once, and I've felt like I've lived in a perfume bottle the past week or two.

It got to the point where I was overwhelmed with feelings of guilt when I walked to the bakery after class last week.  I couldn't believe I got to experience that afternoon, that perfect weather and perfect bread, without doing anything to earn it.  I'll probably have to pay for it in July with a strike on the Metro on a 95 degree day.  But it will be worth it.

Hemingway wrote about that spring in Paris from old age, looking back on a halcyon portion of youth.  Living in it now, I know that spring, even in Paris, doesn't eliminate the trials of life.  But he was still right.  Spring is joyful for its own reasons, and it is easy to be happy in spring in Paris.

St. Sulpice, perfect place for a late evening picnic

Spring in Tuileries

Happy in front of Notre Dame

Spring flowers

Inspired by these (it's snowing flowers!)....

I made these! 

Our walls are pretty bare here, and its a challenge to come up with decorations that we won't mind throwing away in a few months.  Tissue paper flowers were a perfect solution today. 
Also, we've been thoroughly enjoying our bike lately.  It's purple and white and really beat up, but a blast to ride around town especially with both of us on it.

Tom showing off his mad skills on the BIKE

and riding off into Flower-land...

Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons

In lecture today the professor used a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon to make a point.  It's one where Calvin doesn't want to learn math, and his dad is trying to teach him.  Calvin says he'll never need math, but has dad challenges him to name a job that doesn't need addition/subtraction.  Our professor was making a joke about geologists, and thus changed it to have Calvin claim he wanted to be a geologist.

I think I was supposed to be proud of learning math enough to be an engineer/economist/whatever, but really it made me proud of something else:

Without even thinking about it, I knew what Calvin actually claimed he wanted to be in that cartoon (I'm at least 95% sure it was 'a caveman').  So, I guess the message is, thanks to mom and dad for giving me money to buy every single one of the Calvin and Hobbes books at the Scholastic book fairs that came to middle school every year, and for not nagging me when I read every one of those books dozens of times.

(If anyone wants to fact check me on the answer being caveman, feel free!)

(p.s. the title of this post is the title of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes book)

Home

Statement 1: Paris is not my home.

Question 1: What is my home?

1056!

 

Obviously this is the best answer, and I miss our house dearly (and Torrey).  It seems somewhat flat and cheap to define home as only this building though.  We have resided in it for less than two years.  Being definitively not at home in Paris, I have been trying to digest what home means to me.  The easiest answer seems to be the things I miss the most, the scenes and people I find myself thinking about with a smile, or focusing on when feeling isolated and 'home'sick.

In class I often find myself daydreaming of restaurants and bars in Denver, places that are fun, bright, and familiar.  Places, however, that I rarely visited.  We don't go out to dinner or for drinks very often, so to define home as these rare occurrences is odd. 

With can of Dale's in treasured Dale's coozy.

I also frequently crave (and write about) the good beers I can have in Colorado.  But in reality, drinking beer is not the foremost activity of my leisure time in Denver, nor are my happiest times there associated with tasting good beer.  In reality, I am happiest at home when I am busy and challenged, and my craft beer experimentation generally is a function of free time and boredom.  Last fall, between graduate school, frisbee, and planning for France I bought perhaps a handful of beers in 4 months (while this was partially due to the backlog of homebrew we had, we didn't even come close to finishing off the homebrew either).  Thus, while Colorado beer may be a taste of home for me, it is not a foundation of home.

Some of my best CO memories are with these people, and only one lives in CO now.

And of course, dreams of home are first and foremost dreams of friends and family.  But neither is this paradigm linked to a concrete home.  We live in a transient and new city in Denver, and our connections run shallow.  There are many, many people that we are proud to call friends in Denver, but in reality they are only a part of the close relationships with which we are blessed.  We have no immediate family within a thousand miles (albeit very loving members of Margaret's more extended family).  Nearly all of our closest high school and college friends are on the East Coast.  I certainly am not complaining, but can I really call it a longing for home when I find myself missing good times with my pledge class, or playing cards with family in Indiana?

Question 2: Why can't my daydreams and longings in Paris define my home, and what are they defining instead?

Looking at the previous three paragraphs, I am struck by the thread that all three dreams of home are dreams of indulgences and times of pleasure.  This is a good thing- I am no masochist yearning for times of pain and hardship.  But relying on daydreams to define home is really defining our earthly pleasures, which is not the goal of this search.  Home, to me, cannot just be a source of pleasure because I do not think man is meant solely to search for pleasure; man and home are both meant to be more productive.  Our home should also be a place of growth, of solace and challenges, of nurture and labor, of procreation and aging.  It should be enmeshed in community and productivity, not just sustenance and frivolous pleasures.

Fruits of our labors.

Question 3: Who cares?  Why are you trying so hard to define your home?

Neither Margaret or I have a default place to call home from our upbringing.  Each of us moved around multiple times before high school, and our parents had moved away from the town in which we attended high school before we graduated college.  So perhaps there is some innate questioning and rebelling from that.  On a larger scale, I think this sort of searching is a facet of our generation.  The generations before us succeeded in shrinking the world, and perhaps marveled at their ability to move across continents or communicate across the globe.  For us, mobility is perhaps taken for granted, and the hyper-specificity of engagement allowed by the internet means interest groups no longer take much dedication or work.  There is a significant subset of our generation that is engaged in exploring what it takes to have firm roots in the face of these issues, and I think Margaret and I fall in that category.  I am more interested in the slow-ripening fruits of physical community than the shallow, obligation-free communications of the internet or the jaded elitism of global travelers.

On a more personal scale, this feels like a pivotal moment in our lives.  When I graduate I will most likely enter employment in an industry with jobs nearly anywhere on the globe.  We are young and don't have children (though we do have a mortgage), and will have very few obligations.  We may never have a greater opportunity to decide where our future will be located.  Being removed from many daily activities during our time in Paris means that we have had a great deal of time to think all of this over.  Defining home is the first step.

Question 4:  So, where are you from?

Denver, Colorado.  But it takes time.

French Beer!

Due to the preponderance of wine, France is not a hotbed of good, interesting beers.  That's not to say they never drink beer... I would guess that a good percentage of people getting early evening drinks as they sit and chat in cafes have beers.  But it is really just a choice of Budweiser-types (Heineken, Kronenberg, etc).  Not really my type, so I haven't tried much beer here.

Yesterday afternoon, however, we went to Cave à Bulles, a beer store in the middle of Paris.  We found it on some of the American craft beer websites, where it was highly recommended as the best (only?) source for good beer in Paris.  It certainly lived up to that reputation.  It's actually a very small shop: maybe a 15 ft. x 15 ft. room with shelves on all four walls.  Far smaller than I was expecting, but it still looked like an oasis.  They sold bombers or single bottles of only French beer.  Honestly, France doesn't have any distinct unique styles of beers, just variations of standard European styles.  But apparently there are a few small craft breweries pumping out those styles, and the guy who owns the store seemed very enthusiastic about them.

We bought four bottles and tried the first one last night.  It was called Biere de Brie Ambree (an amber ale), and it was excellent.  I would describe it as a brown ale, with a very delicate fruity flavor.  None of the nutty, toasty flavors I associate with most American-style ambers or browns.  Instead, it had a light, but good, aroma that was sweet without being tart (maybe apples or really ripe berries?).  The taste was very smooth with a sweet flavor well balanced by some earthy hops.  It was 7.5% but didn't feel like it- not thick and heavy at all.  We really enjoyed it.  It kind of reminded me of a darker oktoberfest (a little more malty than the Spaten oktoberfest, or a lighter version of Avery's The Kaiser).

So we definitely enjoyed that experience and look forward to trying the other three bottles, and going back to the store.

Firsts

This weekend I did two things for the first time in over two months (i.e., since before we left Colorado).

Month 2

This post is a few days late, but we have now lived in France for two months.  You can see my post from the first month here.  Since I haven't written much the past few weeks, I'll use my monthly review to give a little bit of a synopsis.

February was a bit of a struggle, as February often is.  It always feels like the coldest, darkest month, the month that has to be lived through to access the joys that come other times of the year.  The days never seem to slip by in easy moments... you have to earn your victories.  And the cold certainly makes you grateful for a warm house, loving spouse, and full belly.


Most surprising evening of the month: some of the Spaniards in my class invited us over for dinner on a Thursday evening.  I was expecting something low-key and relatively quick, as we had class the next day and some studying to do (clearly I had never been to a Spanish dinner before). They had 12 people in the room, making miracles happen with our student-living arrangements.  We ate raclette, a French dish/experience kind of like fondue, but 3000 times better (the smell of fondue disgusts me).  Our dinner party that evening included 3 Spaniards, 3 Americans, 2 Russians, 2 Venezuelans, 1 Peruvian, and 1 Nigerian.  We sat and talked and enjoyed an ebb and flow of courses and by the time we excused ourselves at 11:45 I had laughed harder than at any time up til that point in Paris.  Of course, 11:45 was early for them, and 6 or 7 people were still deep in conversation when we left.  Made me very excited for going to Barcelona in April.

Worst part of the month: French germs.  I normally don't get sick very often, but kept catching minor colds and infections in February.  Don't worry, I defeated the French (germs).

Second worst part of the month: French homework.  I know I said we don't get much homework, but we do have a project due for each class, 3 or 4 of which were due at the end of the month.  We still had class all day, but of course our minds were with the projects.  So we spent all day having our time taken away from the tasks we really needed to be doing, and then had to finish up the important tasks on our own time late at night.  Kind of like a bad week at a real job, which is unfortunate because I thought the whole point of graduate school is to escape the working world for awhile (kidding!).

Haircut:  Successful, once I persuaded her that I didn't want it tres court (very short).  No buzzcuts for me, thank you.

Baguettes:  Still awesome.  I want to devote a whole blog post to my love of the baguette, but still haven't decided on the proper form.  So you'll have to wait.

Looking forward to: Rome and Barcelona!  We booked our tickets for April break and leave in a month.

OK, that's enough for now.  I should be back to regular blogging, now that all the projects are done.

Faire du Jogging

This past Sunday, I ran alongside 30,000 other athletes in the 19th edition of the Semi-Marathon de Paris.  Every form of running- as sport- is called "jogging" here, which is terrible when I have to talk about my interests. Saying that I "make jogging" doesn't even sound like it should be a sport, and removes any sense of challenge that "running" invokes.   

Just another stop along the Metro...no big deal, it's only a castle

Another view of Chateau de Vincennes, where the race started.

Despite the lack of appropriate french vocab, I was impressed by the turn out of runners. The slowest start line category you could be in was 2:10, and the course closed at 2:50 after the start. No semi-marathon walkers allowed in Paris, apparently! We began the course at 10am in front of a castle (how European), ran through a huge park and into the city along the Seine, to the Bastille and back through the Chinese district.  All sorts of ethnic bands played for us along the way while fans yelled "Allons y!" and "Allez allez!"  They even printed everyone's name on their bib, so we could receive some personalized cheering. :)  

The ridiculous white trash bags we all got to stay warm

In the wake of the start

All the white trash bags discarded. Tom watched as an industrial
sweeper machine sucked them all up in less than five minutes

Running towards the Bastille

The free-sample-loving American in me was a little disappointed by the post-race fare: oranges, bananas and Powerade. I could've done without the plastic trash bags before and after, in exchange for a peanut butter bagel or breakfast burrito. But everyone else seemed more focused on the free post-race massages, which was a decent perk.  Overall it was a great race with excellent fans and beautiful weather; what more can you ask for? 

I did it!  1hr51min

Tom loved these urinals. It's really unfair that nothing comparable exists for women.

Semi-marathoners! Marcos, myself and Juan Pablo