I've been a bad, bad blogger. Clearly I have been swallowed up by "mes études" lately and have neglected sharing the wonderful banalities of life in Paris. Here are some joyous tidbits of my life for those of you still crazy enough to follow along:
Tuesday:
After meeting with my professor for my class, la france multiculturelle, I created a series of questions to ask locals in le marais when I set out on my quest for interviewees. I decided to start my interviews with the chinese community.
Clearly, I did not realize how difficult my assignment was going to be. I thought the biggest problem would be my french, not theirs, but almost every local I spoke to didn't want to answer my questions because they did not feel they could speak to me in French. True or just a brilliant strategy to avoid talking to a silly american student, I was about ready to cry until a young woman offered to answer my questions by email. I haven't gotten a reply yet, but I have hope.
After such a lack of sucess with the chinese community, I decided to head to a place where I at least culturally identified with the group of people I was going to interview: the jewish community on rue des rosiers! This turned out much more successful, though it posed problems of it's own.
I stopped first oustide the famous l'as du falafel, where I saw 3 young men talking among themselves (it was only 10 am at this point, so the long lines had not yet formed). I introduced myself to the men, and asked if they could help. Much more warm and welcoming than the chinese community, they at least looked at my paper before giving me an excuse: they didn't want to talk about their lives, their childhoods in particular. Desperate for an interviewee at this point, I told them that they didn't need to answer every question, and I wouldn't even take notes, let alone record their voices. This satisfied the youngest of them, Chai, who agreed to have a conversation with me about his experiences in France.
A young Israeli from Tel Aviv, he learned to speak French working at the falafel stand: "avant d'arriver ici, je ne savais dire que 2 mots en français. Ils étaient falafel et shwarma." (Before ariving here, I only knew 2 words in french. They were falafel and shwarma.) Chai gave me a lot of good information about the young israeli community in the Marais and shocked me by saying that he preferred the falafels here at l'as du falafel over the falafels in Israel.
Feeling grateful for the excellent material (I even got a portrait of him with my camera), I bought myself a falafel and hung out with the staff.
Wednesday:
On the way to school today I listened to a French man butcher some American songs on the Metro. I was treated to "loosing my religion" and some other sounds that sounded less like English and more like moaning. I mean, the French have such great music, why did he feel the need to sing American songs? I wondered why this man was getting so much money from old women for singing words I know he himself did not understand. But then, I thought, perhaps he was wiser than me, knowing that French might prefer English songs in the comforting sounds of their own familiar accent. Still, I wanted to let him know that I really didn't believe anyone would call him "da spahs koh-boy" (the space cowboy) or "da gangs her off lahf" (the gangster of love).
The rest of my day was pretty academically spent until 6pm when I got the chance to go to dinner with some French students at a restaurant called "les penguins". The dinner was great -- quiche, steak, and apple pie -- all I ever wanted after an exhausting school day. I also really connected with about 4 of the girls, so we exchanged numbers and email addresses. One of the girls goes to high school in my neighborhood, so it would be very easy to meet up.
I'm now exhausted and contemplating crashing but have so much left to do before photoclass tomorrow!
Total Damages Tuesday and Wednesday:
falafel: 5 EUR
cookies: 1,01 EUR
2 chocolate bars with noisettes to share with my class for my "exposé" on chocolat: 1,50 EUR
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment