Monday, September 22, 2008

Qu'est-ce vou - WHAT DO YOU WANT?

Day deux in the city of light.  

Still getting over my jet lag and not quite as settled as I had hoped I would be - I am staying in a temporary apartment until mine is finished and ready to be moved into (the painter is taking his time), which will hopefully happen by Wednesday.  

Today, however, was rather momentous in its own right as it was the first day that I ventured the Parisian undergrounds and took the metro to meet my cousin at Saint Germain des Pres.  The physical state of my feet is a testament to how much I have feared dealing with the ticketing system and what I believe to be the very confusing web of metro lines, numbers, and colors.  But today I limped down the stairs to the ticket counter and tried by best - 

"Bonjour. Un billet, s'il vous plait?"

"Quoi? Que-es skdlfi awlskdhti alksdhti (this is a jumble of noise that I will assume is French that comes spewing out the woman's mouth although she refuses to look at me)?"

"Ummm. Un bill-yay?"

"'Allo?? Qu'est-ce sdkjig?? sdklfiwoeiht?(Now there were a lot of hand motions toward the list of prices and packages and vacation deals) Oui? ou non? (I think about here she started poking her finger against the window partition) Ekhtiwiok...WHAT DO YOU WANT?"

"What? Um. A ticket. One ticket."

At this point the very huffy woman behind the glass throws approximately 10 metro tickets into the tray and swivels the display around bearing a price that was way more than I wanted to spend at that time on metro passes, but as I felt that this woman might start shooting laser beams out of her eyes, I paid, grabbed my tickets, and ran into the fray of people who shuffled me onto my first metro.

Success.

I made it to Saint Germain in one piece and wandered a bit while I waited for my cousin.  Saint Germain is a trés chic part of town - I think I passed a Gucci, Yves Saint-Laurent, and Dior each within a stone's throw of each other.  I continued down roads without a map or any real purpose other than to blow some time when I came upon a road that sounded vaguely familiar - Rue d'Odéon.  This was the road that was the original site of Sylvia Beach's American bookstore and sanctuary for expats - Shakespeare and Company.  If this sounds familiar to you, its probably because I was blabbing about this bookstore most of last semester as it was the subject of one of my seminar papers. 

It was very strange being on that street, looking up at the sign that declared this building was the birthplace of James Joyce's Ulysses, and celebrating my little victory by myself as other people kept walking along this rue that had very little (if any) significance for them.  Where the bookstore used to be there is now a very swanky little boutique.  God knows what they thought when they looked out the store windows at a windblown girl grinning like an idiot staring up at the building.


1 comment:

Alyssa Panning said...

Katherine!
Oh I love hearing about your adventures! I'm sorry we didn't get to talk before you left. I can't wait to hear more about it there. I bet your french is already 12 times better than when you arrived. Do you have skype or a phone number there?
Alyssa