L'informel

From what I can discern, Americans have this perception of Parisians as being very haute couture, very chic, very formal. On our first day of orientation, our French program directors propagated this notion. French families, they said, were often far more formal than American families; parents are addressed by the formal pronoun, bedroom doors are always kept closed, and one never wears sweatpants to dinner. My friend’s host mother, a Countess whose family castle is visible on postcards throughout their house, once patted my friend on the head as she was leaving for class – not out of fondness, but to make sure her hair was dry before she went out in public.

Burping, admittedly frowned upon at home, is a punishable offense here. Another friend of mine accidently burped at the dinner table (sometimes it just has to happen), and her host brothers have been critiquing her for it ever since, trying to subtly work the loveable nickname “Burpy” into every conversation (they are 15 and 22). Personally, I hadn’t realized this phenomenon until I was buying a bag of apples at Monoprix, and the cashier burped almost imperceptibly. I looked up, startled by the first burp I had heard in 4 months, and our eyes met. She blushed and giggled, handing me the apples and wishing me an overly enthusiastic “bonne journée” – suspicious behavior, as Monoprix cashiers never giggle but rather berate me for not having exact change, and that day I was paying with a 50.

But there are a few things for which the stereotype just doesn’t hold true:

1. The Opera

Although daily dress is generally much more formal than the equivalent American wear, the French don’t dress up to go to the Opera. When I think Opera, I think tuxes, champagne, the pages of my neighborhood’s ridiculously-named society magazine, Gentry. Here, think upscale baseball game. I went to see Le Barbier de Séville a week ago at Opéra Bastille, one of the two grandest venues in France, and was confronted with trucker hats and jeans (albeit very nice jeans). During the intermission, those who hadn’t had dinner scarfed down boxed sandwiches, the kind that you see in vending machines and wonder how long they’ve been sitting there. While I will always wear a dress to the opera (sometimes I like to get dressed up, okay?), it’s kind of refreshing that the opera does not seem as stigmatized as being for an upper-crust elite. I welcome the trucker-hatted.

2. Classes

This one really shocked me, as I had been told that classes were, in fact, conducted much more formally than at home. People never slouched in their seats, never spoke, and were never late – if you were, the teacher had the right to send you away. Lies. In my experience (and of course this is sure to be a generalization), classes are much more informal than those at home. Large groups arrive late with no consequence. People constantly talk over the lecture. The most formal thing people do is to organize all their pencils in little leather pencil cases.

On April Fool’s Day, three boys in my music history class spent the entire two hours cutting out and coloring poissons d’avril – paper fish that children stick on each other’s backs as a joke. They then, of course, proceeded to stick them on people’s backs, including that of a 70-year-old woman who is auditing the course – all while the professor was still talking. On Thursday, our professor announced that we were going to take a 5 minute break, at which point the majority of the students left – for 25 minutes. There was no point in continuing the class while so many students were gone; my professor just sat at his desk, stared at his watch, slumped in his chair and sighed.

3. Sexual Harassment

Maybe it’s the politically-correct, lawsuit-filled culture that we’re so used to, but I was amazed by what I observed on a recent visit to the Louvre. Backstory: I had visited the Louvre a few times prior to this, thanks to my card that claims I am an art history student. On my first trip, the guard checked my card and said, “Ah, mais votre nom est très français!” As I have a very French last name (one of the benefits of Canadian ancestry), I get this a lot, so I smiled habitually and was about to move on when he said, “Your picture is very nice too.” I was puzzled by this. First of all, the picture on my card was horrible; they take it with a webcam in the Louvre offices when you apply for the card, and had been in the middle of saying something when it went off (however, this is still better than one of my high school ID photos, in which I was captured mid-sneeze). Secondly, this was a Louvre security guard on the job! In the U.S., I could sue him for less. Still, it didn’t really bother me, so I laughed it off and looked at Gericault.

Skip forward three months, and I’m back at the Louvre, this time prepared to take on the Flemish paintings floor. I get out my card and am prepared to flash it at the guard and walk on by, when the guard takes me card out of my hand and says, “Nicole Villeneuve! C’est vous!”

What?

It was the same guard. He gave me a huge smile, and winked. “Remember me? I am so happy now that you are here!” Uh-huh. I hold my hand out for my card.

“I am single! And you?” This is a guard at the Louvre. I am being hit on in the most celebrated museum in the entire world. I don’t know why this bothered me so much: if it really was the “harassment” or if it was purely the clashing of two opposite worlds: high culture and bar pick-up. What would seem normal in a club now, in the museum’s marble halls, felt uncomfortable and crass.

“No,” I responded. “No, I am not.” I took back my card as he told me how sad this news made him, walked upstairs, and stared at Rembrandts for hours.

La solitude

Although I was worried about many aspects of coming to Paris (Will I be able to make friends in another language? Will I be able to take exams in a foreign language? Will I even be able to buy food to keep myself alive – in a foreign language?), looking French wasn’t one of them. Sure, my fashion sense might need a little altering (my boots, scarves, and slouchy cotton dress collection has mysteriously tripled), but I figured I would fit in at least in a physical sense – after all, I am fairly thin and pale, and that’s all it takes, right? Wrong.

After spending and evening drinking cheap champagne in the apartment of a countess (they still exist), I was feeling pretty good as I got on the metro to go home. I began to let my mind wander, but unfortunately my eyes went along with it, and when we stopped at Châtelet I met the gaze of a man sitting at the station, a huge backpacking rucksack on the seat next to him. Bad move. He suddenly jumped onto the train as the doors were closing, dropped his backpack on the floor, and sat at my feet.

“Tu es rousse,” he said. “You are a redhead.”

Following this brilliant observation, this modern nomad proceeded to tell me about his previous girlfriends, many of whom were redheads and none of whom apparently liked him much. “You are very rare in Paris,” he said. “Every time I see one of you, it’s like … an apparition.”

“So,” he continued, “are you going home alone?”

As much as I disliked this encounter for its awkward, objectifying, and overly sexual nature, I hated it more for its spurring my realization that I just might not fit in the way I thought I did. Throughout the next few weeks, I would hear it on the streets: “Salut, la rousse!” Now that it had come to my attention, it was everywhere, a reminder that I would never be as Parisian as I might feel, a constant reminder of my own difference that was certainly not one of the many I had expected.

On my recent trip to Budapest, I had a similar sense of isolation when I realized, as I stepped off my “WizzAir” flight (Onomatopoeia is internationally recognized! This will be a great name for an airline!), that I didn’t know I single word of Hungarian. Usually, I like to know the words for please, thank you, and whatever you’re supposed to say when you bump someone accidently on the train, but “yes” and “no” are usually pretty intuitive. Not this time. Even the word for “yes” requires multiple syllables.

I treated this discovery with various remedies. When a woman on the street seemed to be commiserating with me about a bus that just cut us off, I smiled, laughed, nodded emphatically, and rolled my eyes in that knowing, “tell me about it” kind of way. When the clerk at the grocery store asked me something about the apple I was buying, I for some reason decided to grab my throat and pretend I was a mute. Somehow, I think she could see through this, but that was the end of the questions. When eating at a restaurant, my friends’ strategy was, when confronted with a garrulous Hungarian waiter, to wait for him to stop telling them what could have been the daily specials and then timidly respond, “…Hi?”

Before these events occurred, I thought that I had been making great strides to combat my fear of isolation. In high school, I was nervous about walking from my locker to class by myself, for fear of being forever marked as a loser. In Paris, I discovered how much I enjoyed doing things on my own. I could go to museums and only look at what I thought was interesting! I could go shopping and not wait for friends to try on things they ultimately would never buy! It was the end of caring about other peoples’ distasteful preferences! I even went to a concert alone, and although waiting for the band to start was rather painful (I can only pretend to be texting someone important for so long), when it started I was leaning casually against the wall, drink in hand, looking like an even bigger fan. “I am alone at your concert,” I wanted to say. “I don’t need other peoples’ validation or interest to like you. That’s just how much I care.”

But in Hungary, all possible forms of isolation came together when I was sitting alone at Café Pattaya, eating paprika chicken but unable to say “paprika chicken” or, for that matter, say hi to the waitress. To pass the time, I contemplated the food I had ordered (What makes tonic water taste so different from regular water?), then decided to write this blog entry (meta alert!) on a piece of notebook paper to look more productive and convince myself that I was doing the “Hemingway at La Closerie des Lilas” thing.

To me, Eating at Restaurants Alone has always been a rest stop on the way to Dying Alone Town. I first decided this in my freshman year of high school when I witnessed a man sitting alone and crying into his endless-refills bowl of pasta at our local all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant, Fresh Choice. The pathos was overwhelming. “I’ll never be like that!” I thought triumphantly, as I returned to my group of friends, who were in the midst of attaching their ponytails under their chins and pretending they had beards.

And I still haven’t been like that; my moments of solitude, so far, have been fairly self-induced. But part of me is excited to return to the U.S., where the language is easy and the redheads are plentiful. After all, too much isolation can get to a person. Paul Gauguin attempted suicide after his fruitless attempts to “fit in” in Tahiti. And that guy at Fresh Choice – well, that’s the stuff of nightmares.