new sights.

As I grow accustomed to the city, I stop looking at the little things around me. I walked past the woman that I rent from and babysit for yesterday without noticing; she stopped me, and only then did I realize that I had been staring straight ahead not taking in any of my surroundings, only trudging off to work without a second thought. On my daily Metro rides to work, too, I notice less and zone out more. I don't know if it's habituation of my situation or mere end-of-the-semester fatigue. But Sunday I saw this: a man on a bicycle, a normal sight in Paris, but wearing a white helmet covered in multi-colored polka dots. So rarely do cyclists wear helmets past the age of 10, especially in Paris, especially in the city. What most people call normal, I call insanity. How could you possibly think that it is safe to ride through the city where everyone drives like a maniac? You vs. car, who do you think will win that one? How could you possibly stand a chance? No matter, this was a young man, probably just a few years my elder, and he was sporting his helmet with a serious Parisian look and it made me want to hug him. I would have all but forgotten it, yet twenty minutes later, riding the bus, staring out the window, I saw it again. This time, hanging in the window of a bicycle shop, the exact same white helmet covered in multi-colored polka dots. A sign, I decided. To keep paying attention. To keep seeking new sights and new ways of seeing.

This weekend, as long as the strikes don't stop me, I will go to Chartres for a day to see somewhere new. I am thinking of registering for a drawing and painting class next semester, a way to speak French more often and to learn a new skill. More than anything, it'd be a new way of seeing, perhaps something I need these days when it is just so easy to walk, eyes towards the ground, trying to ignore the gray skies and thus missing the blue ones (for when they appear, they are brilliant but how little we look when how rarely they occur!).

It is strike season in France. The taxi cab drivers, the truck drivers, some of the trains, maybe soon all of the trains, the museums, these are all the ones that are on strike now. But more to come, it seems. The newspaper this morning had a headline, "Santa Claus is a striker." I am doubtful, but it seems that Christmas will be made more difficult if the trucks won't deliver presents, if travelers can't reach their families, and so on and so forth. Can the reindeer strike too, for hire wages, better hours? That is something I'd like to see.

hiatus.

The blog has been on hiatus. I will not feel guilty for it; I was not sent to France to blog but to live. And I have been doing just that. As for my writing guilt, I've been pouring my energy into a job application that is due Tuesday. Once it is finished, I will feel myself slowly coming back into my writing life, I am certain of it. For now, though, I will tell you this story.

In 2007, I tried to take a bus in Paris. Once. Just once. I ended up so dreadfully confused and painfully lost that I vowed not to take the bus again. If I couldn't walk somewhere, I'd take the Metro. And if I couldn't take the Metro somewhere, I'd walk. It worked well enough for my three months here.

A couple of months later, someone told me that they believe that you don't really know a city until you've learned to take the bus in it. That any meandering idiot can figure out a Metro map but that the bus map takes it to a whole other level.

If so, then I am no longer a meandering idiot. I have fallen in love with the bus system in Paris. It is not the fastest way to get anywhere, because driving in Paris is a mix of insanity and ...insanity. I cannot tell you how many times I've seen cars sitting in the middle of intersections at a supposedly red light just watching as cars speed past them, seemingly not noticing that a car is clearly stuck in the middle and simply trying to not die. The buses, though, are sturdy and clean and feel, for now, quite safe. And I've learned to take them.

It started a couple of weeks ago. My friends and I decided to go to Reims on a day trip. We wanted to see the famous cathedral and the Christmas village (I. love. Christmas. villages.). We were taking a train quite early in the morning and I looked online to see the fastest route to get there. According to the RATP website, it would be faster at the time of day for me to take a bus (one that left just outside of my house and went direct to the train station) than to take two Metros. I, Kate Fussner, surprise of all surprises, was nervous. The bus? I worried I was going to end up on the other side of Paris, miss my train, lose my friends, and somehow wind up canoeing myself home on the Seine. But instead of taking the long way on the Metro, I decided to take on the bus adventure and see what happened.

The truth is, that's the best part of the story. That I shoved my nervous worries out of the way and climbed onto the bus. Because the fact of the matter is that taking the bus was quite easy. Early on a Saturday morning, no one is out and so there's little traffic, fewer stops, and the city looks beautiful above ground. Below ground, the air feels more stale, the sun is further away, and the visions of Paris are non-existent. Above ground, I saw the neighborhoods coming and going, I saw how they piece together, and I started to recognize just how well I knew the landscape after all.

Reims was a beautiful but small and gray city. A one time visit that I am glad I had, to see the cathedral that I studied and to see a marching band made up entirely of men dressed in Santa suits.

Winter does feel as though it is beginning to settle in. It is grayer, it is colder, the days of sun feel short and the weeks of darkness feel long. But there is a warmth in the air this year that I can't quite pinpoint. It is a comfort, it is an awareness that, like me, many of the people I know are seeking ways to feel at home. I am constantly reminded of this transitionary state we are in. "Find a job." "Find a place to live." "Find a home." The seasons seem to ground me and say, "Just find a way to enjoy this. It'll change soon enough."

we are golden.

Le dimanche.

Sunday is my favorite day in Paris. It was this way when I lived here in 2007 and the trend continues now. It is a day without guilt, without responsibility, without the pressure to get out of bed or even the option of running most errands. Aside from a few pharmacies and local open air markets, things in Paris are closed. Forgot to buy a birthday present on Saturday? Too bad, it'll have to wait until Monday. Wanted to mail a letter? Sorry, it's not going to happen. Perhaps you thought you might finally remember to pick up that thing you've been wanting to buy but keep forgetting? Forget it again. You'll have to wait. Because on Sundays, everyone sleeps late and takes long walks and traffic slows down and even the trains run with less frequency. In America, I think this would drive me insane. In fact, I know that it does. WHY can't the post office be open on Sundays? Who do they think they are, those people at Staples, thinking that they can close early when I MUST have photocopies now? In America, there is the big expectation of NOW. Things must be done now. The deadline is now. In America, I am punctual to a fault. I've adopted my father's and my mother's senses of time: I am always on time, if not early. In Paris, I simply don't have the same sense of time, especially on Sundays. It doesn't mean that I won't make it to my appointments, that I won't make it to the places that I've said I'll be. But I do not need to stress about it the same way here and I am hoping that, in the coming weeks and dealing with more French bureaucracy to get my social security settled, I will let go more of my American sense of the immediate and give into the French sense of the "eventually."

I spent a lot of time this week, embarrassingly enough, being homesick. It is not something that I am proud to admit: I'm twenty-two years old and every time I get a cold all I want to do is be home. Clare and I finished up a fabulous vacation together here in Paris and, the moment she left, I was congested and miserable and wanted to spend the day in bed being some ridiculous version of Kate Fussner. This ridiculous Kate googled "chronic sinus problems" to see if I might have some foreign or rare disease that would allow me to fly home to America to be treated. Mind you, not by doctors, because I was not so homesick or actually sick that I wanted to see a doctor, but be treated to a bowl of matzoh ball soup by my parents who still spoil me and be welcomed to watch "The American President" over and over again until the VHS finally breaks. But the Kate Fussner crazy didn't end there. Finding no source for my chronic sinus hassles other than the fact that I had been sharing a small space with someone else who had a small cold and that I'd be babysitting a small child with a week-long cold (both of which are legitimate reasons to get sick), I succumbed to the emotional miseries of googling, "dealing with distance" and "missing home." Well, that does nothing for anyone with a third of a brain, and I realized this before the google search response had even had time to load. I know how to deal with distance. I know how to deal with missing home. And today my sister reminded me of this.

We were g-chatting and discussing my concerns with making the most of my time in Paris. I've been encouraged by many, and in some ways I feel almost expected, to travel around Europe while I'm in Paris. I have already come this far across the ocean. Shouldn't I see the sights? Shouldn't I be seeing all of Europe while I still can? I booked a plane ticket on Friday that decides when I will return to the US in the Spring and suddenly had second thoughts. Shouldn't I stay longer since I already have the visa? Shouldn't I be seeing Rome, Venice, Florence? Pop on over to Madrid and Barcelona? Head down to Marseille to enjoy warmer weather? Really take advantage of the time that I've got here? But the problem was that I didn't feel like these were my concerns at all. To me, these thoughts felt more like suggestions or expectations of others. No one specifically, but the general idea from those around me, and those crazy movies where everyone goes backpacking and couchsurfing and hostel-hopping, and those novels that jump from location to location as if that should be everyone's dream.

But being told that this should be what I want from my time here is not the same as it actually being what I want from my time here.

My sister said, in her wisest words,

"Don't do shit just because you think it's what gets done. It's your party, dude. Do whatever the fuck you want."

Perhaps not her most eloquent moment, but it was exactly what I needed.

I came to Paris to live in Paris.

That is exactly what I am doing.

And living means having bad days, it means blowing your nose over and over and over again, even though it is just as unattractive in Paris as it is in Narberth, it means having those insane moments where you google things just to see what happens (and I can only admit this here because I am certain that everyone else does this too...Except for those of you reading this who still only type with one finger at a time...you probably don't google things to try and solve your emotional/physical ailments, you probably read Sartre instead...), it means having those days where you're late for everything and you've once again misplaced your cellphone and you spent way too much time watching MTV Europe instead of writing a coherent story.

This forming of a post-college life abroad does not feel like an experiment in international living so much that it seems to be an experiment in living in general. What is this pressure to live everything right this moment, to see all of the sights now, to see everything, to take everything in all at once, to store store store as if I may never have the chance again to cross the ocean ever? It's not invited to my party. I think my party is going to take my time and live everything as it comes, stuffy nose and all, and to not applaud myself for googling my own miseries but to accept it and say: if I am truly trying to make this place my home for the year, I have to give myself days where I am just. living. Nothing more, nothing less.

Because without those pressures, without those worries that I am not doing every moment of this trip to Paris absolutely-perfectly-and-absolutely-on-time, I actually really like my life here.

(Photos below courtesy of Clare)

(where I live)

(female artist exhibit at the Centre Pompidou)

(post-picnic photo in the Luxembourg gardens)

(boat ride along the Seine)

en vacances

This was a week to play tour guide.

With a ten-day vacation ahead of me, I braced myself for a full day of babysitting Andy (he got dressed up in his Batman costume and acted out all of "The Dark Knight" for me) and then celebrated with an eight day visit from Clare. She's here now and is making me blog, knowing that she looks forward to Sunday updates and wouldn't want others to miss out on what we saw this week.

This was not the first time that I've played tour guide to this city, nor was it the first time that I was greeted by a visitor who could not stop saying, "I'm in Paris. I'm in Paris. I'm in Paris." Paris has this romanticized image that is perpetuated by every movie/book/tv show ever, and rightfully so. It is a beautiful city, a city to walk and to fall in love with, and I was prepared to show it off. This was not my first time up the Eiffel Tower, nor the first time up to Montmartre and the Sacre Coeur, nor was it my first time persuading my visitor to try chocolat chaud from "Cacao et Chocolat" or dragging them onto a boat ride to see all of the major monuments along the Seine. This was not my first time negotiating in French with waiters and translating the suggestions of shopkeepers to save my visitor from having to make the "I'm sorry, I don't understand" face. (It's a quickly muttered, "I'm sorry" followed by an immediate, "Dammit. I spoke in English" finished off with a few rapid blinks and a slight shoulder shrug.)

But for me, this was the first visitor that I've had since I moved to France for the second time and what I noticed most was the change of routine. That is to say, I realized that I've been building a routine (go teach, go pick up Andy, watch Gremlins with Andy, eat dinner, go to bed, repeat) and that I hadn't noticed how settled my life here was becoming. Clare and I have had this great mixture of seeing monuments and catching up with each other, waiting in line at the Eiffel Tower but also escaping to cafes on side streets, sipping espresso in tiny cups and laughing about the bizarre European outfits/haircuts/the fact that rollerblading is still fashionable here. Something about the fact that I already got to show my life to someone means to me that I'm somewhat proud of the life that I am living here, I'm more at ease now than I was in the first couple of weeks...that somewhere within me I believe I have a life here that is worth sharing with the people I love.

Perhaps this is backwards of me to say but what shocked me most this week was the realization that I feel more like an adult here not when I am getting up and going to work but when I am given free time and can do what I please. Going to work, writing lesson plans, picking up Andy and making him wash his hands before his snack, these are the things that I am supposed to think make me an adult. I have a job, I have an income (maybe?) and I have a daily commute. But my daily commute does not make me feel like an adult.

This makes me feel like an adult:

That on a rainy Sunday, when the sky is heavy with water and the whole city seems to be mourning the looming departure of a flight to the US, that it really is okay to spend some downtime relaxing in bed, until grumbling stomachs call for a Sunday brunch, and that no adult is standing outside the bedroom door, telling me to stop being lazy. That the right to be sad, the right to relax, and the right to pick myself up again with an overpriced cup of coffee is something that I get to grant to myself now.

teachable moments.

This was a week of teachable moments, for me, for my students.

First of all, I will say this. The French may do a lot of things in odd ways, but having a 10-day vacation after only a few weeks of work is nothing that I will complain about. I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of my first visitor in Paris; I look forward to being a tour guide and a tourist for a week, and getting to show off the city that I love with more than a few weekly words on a blog.

In school on Thursday, I showed up ready to teach once-and-for-all one more lesson on French and American stereotypes. Because my classes vary in their level of ability, not only by class but within the classes themselves, I spent the first two weeks teaching the same lesson over and over and over and over again, trying to determine what level of vocabulary was appropriate for each class and what each class could handle. I thought that, in this way, I could give a similar message to all (hey! stereotyping is natural but let's not do it in my classroom, okay? great.) and give the students an idea about my ideal classroom environment (everyone should feel as though they can talk). The lesson went well every single time but by the last time (I had to teach this 20 times in all) I was rather sick of it and worried that that might come through. The class was a fairly quiet one. They had to be coaxed out of their shells a bit to share such answers as, "All Americans have guns?" and "All Americans...drive Hummers?" when the last classes had been nearly shouting, "All Americans love violence!" "All Americans are racist!" This was a class that needed a little prodding but, in the end, they seemed to understand and I wished them a happy vacation on their way out the door. I locked the room behind me and went to go get Andy at his school down the street. On my way out of the building, I was stopped by a student from the class that I had just led.

"Can I talk to you in French for a moment?"

I said sure.

She replied (translated here), "It can be hard to express myself in English, that's why I asked if I could say this in French because I know you can understand anyways. I just wanted to let you know that I really liked what you were doing with our class today. I get the message that you're going for, that we have to treat each other right if we're going to actually learn to look past the stereotypes, and I'm impressed. The Teaching Assistants in the past have been terrible. You're really good and I'm glad you're here."

I was flustered and taken aback by the comment but thanked her in return for sharing that with me and told her that I looked forward to the year.

What struck me was not only the feeling of, "Wow. A student just thanked me for the first class that I taught her," but also, "I completely understand why she wanted to say that to me in French." There are times when I am so filled with love and energy here that I want to express it and can find it so frustrating that, in searching for words, some of that natural joy that comes from living here disappears in translation. I hope that I can get to a point in my level of French where immediate emotions - joy, frustration, excitement - can come through with the same ease as it does in English. In that moment, I saw myself as so similar to my student, and so thankful for her openness, and promised myself I'd be as open in return.

This week I also took the opportunity to go again to the Other Writers' Workshop. This was the third consecutive time that I went and I'm enjoying getting a routine of seeing certain faces, hearing new parts of familiar pieces, and entering into a community of aspiring writers. For the first time, I shared some of my writing from my thesis and the response was great. I thoroughly appreciated being in a forum again where I could think about my writing and whether or not it has any impact on others (in particular, people who do not know me very well). Afterwards, the writing group's leader approached me and asked me if I might consider coming to read at an open mic that he runs on a twice-a-month basis at a bar in the 20th. It is mostly poetry, sometimes prose, sometimes song, and always a good time, he says, and he's been running it since 2006. I told him that I would consider attending but that since my prose tends to be longer than 5 minutes worth, it might not be so coherent. He then invited me to be the featured writer for the next open mic so that I could read three times throughout the night. Another moment in which I was taken aback. I took some time to think about it and agreed. So if any of you reading this happen to be in Paris on November 2nd and want to check it out, send me an email and I'll give you the location details. It should be an adventure.

Perhaps, though, the biggest moment of the week was in the classroom on Friday. My new lesson, on Philadelphia and restaurants in Philadelphia (this is, after all, a culinary school) failed as the materials that I had chosen to share were way. too. hard. I asked the students to read a couple of restaurant reviews and to write down any vocabulary words that they had so that we could all go over them together. The students were writing down almost every word. I scrambled to make the lesson work. I slowed it down, showed them each word one by one (many of them look very much like their English translations and I thought they would notice that...they only did after seeing it many times), and told them it was really OK that they didn't understand. I tried to make it seem like I had planned it to be hard (I hadn't) and told them I had wanted to push them (I hadn't). In the hour break that I had before my next class, I completely rewrote the reviews into the simplest English for my most advanced class and created an entirely new lesson for the classes that would follow after. My teaching mentor noticed me scrambling a bit and asked me if everything was alright. I explained that the last lesson had flopped and that I was working to make something more appropriate for the next few classes.

"You learn as you go," he replied with a smile.

I am most definitely learning.

elle est trop marrante.

This is a sentence that I heard three times this week, spoken about me, in front of me, as if I couldn't hear it or perhaps it was merely that the people who said it didn't know me well enough to believe that they could just tell me directly. But I heard it anyways.

"Elle est trop marrante," a student of mine said, as I stood up at the front of the classroom, wildly gesturing. I was explaining the word "cheerleader" and how, even though in French they are known more casually as "pom-pom girls," that in fact in English we call them "cheerleaders" and they are a reality of (some) American high schools. "Not all," I said, explaining that some schools don't have cheerleaders, and some schools don't have footballs teams, and some schools certainly don't have students singing and dancing in the halls like "High School Musical." It is amazing how much Disney has created the image of the American public and the American dream. The lessons this week were on stereotypes. Using my fantastic (read: terrible) drawing skills, I crafted pictures on the board of the stereotypical American family, based on the students' ideas. Then we collected ideas on stereotypes of the French and compared what we found. The students were offended that Americans believe that the French are baguette-toting, smelly/dirty intellectuals with a hatred for tourists. The students were surprised that I was offended that they thought that all Americans were gun-toting, geographically inept dolts with a love of patriotism. But at the front of the classroom, gesturing wildly, showing them that the ideas we might have of each other are completely absurd, a student said it again, "Elle est trop marrante." And the thing was that I was trying to be funny. Because if they got that I was trying to be silly with them, I'd know they were listening.

Andy was the second one to say it, at dinner, to his mother, as he made me tell a new round of scary stories. "Maman, ecoute! Elle est trop marrante," he said as I told the new versions of the same story. Scary/mysterious noise + lots of build up + turns out to be a family member = successful not-too-scary story for Andy. The problem for me now is that I've told the story five different times and I've run out of family members. I'm going to have to start repeating family members with new scary noises or we're going to have to pick a new genre.

The third time was in the writing workshop that I've started to attend at Shakespeare Book Company. This was the second time that I have gone and I am hoping to attend regularly. The group meets on the second floor of the bookstore, in a small reading room that is packed floor-to-ceiling with old books and the smells of aging pages. At the beginning of the workshop, the teacher asked us to say our names and whether or not we had brought anything to share with the group this week. "Hello, my name is Kate and I did not bring any pages with me this week." The teacher quickly replied, "That was generous of you," despite the fact that only 5 of the 15 people in the room had brought work. Slightly miffed but knowing it was in good fun, I waited to hear the rest of the introductions and when we arrived at the teacher, he said, "Hello, my name is David and I did not bring any work with me this week." "That was generous of you," I replied immediately and the group laughed. "Elle est trop marrante" one of the women said and I smiled.

But the thing is that I have never felt terribly funny. I believe that any funny comments that come out of me are a product of the people that I have grown closest to over the years. In high school, I learned that among my friends I had to keep up with quick comments of my own or I'd never get a word in at all. When I think of funny in my family, I try to channel my sister, who is so funny and so quick that it has only been from spending time with her that I think I've found my sense of humor. Walking through Paris, I get passing glances of things that remind me of my family, my friends, and I feel better about being so far away. On a walk yesterday, I saw a West-highland terrier and thought of my stepfamily, who raised the sweetest one there ever was and who remains to this day annoyed that he has gone. In the past week, I've seen two cocker spaniels. How could I not think of home? When I tell stories at the dinner table, I think of the way that my father tells stories and I try to channel him. When I talk to my fellow assistants about art that I've seen, I think of how my father might look at it and how I never know with him if he's going to think it's absolutely brilliant or total crap (it could easily be either). And when I hear music anywhere, ever, I think of my mother.

All of this seems to add up to very little, but what I mean is that not a day goes by when I don't think of how I am living this life in Paris only because of all of the people who have helped me to become who I am. From my sassy friends to my wonderful family, I feel that here I notice how I am a little bit of each of you. I catch myself thinking, "This is something my mother would say" or "This is a movie that Nora would love" but I am thinking these things and saying these things in another language, another place, because these people have helped me get here. I suppose I am simply grateful this week for the wonderful people I have back home. This process of living and learning and becoming a teacher is only getting better by the day. And, what's more, I'm getting used to appreciating solitude, those moments at the end of the day where I am not a babysitter or a teacher or a college student or a camp counselor, but I am just myself, in my tiny apartment, with my big Parisian thoughts and my little coffee cup. Because when I'm experiencing this new independence (I'm not in a dorm, a cabin, etc. for the first time in years), the last thing that I feel is alone. I feel that I am quite funny (and wonderful) company, thinking of all of you.

the babysitter's here.

This was a week of small adventures and, what ultimately felt like, little victories. It began in the classroom, with groups of 25 students staring at me, asking me questions about my opinions on Barack Obama and Les Simpson. With the teacher still in the classroom, I dodged questions about what my thoughts were of France's president and America's religious right. I focused on topics that everyone can connect with at that age: television, movies, music, Lady Gaga. My students range in age from 14-25 so yes, some of them are older than me and yes, some of them looked a little surprised about it, but all of these introductory classes were merely preparing me for what was to come on Friday: my first day of teaching alone.

Before I got to teaching alone, though, I had other small adventures. There was the trip to Rectorat of Paris, where I had various immigration paperwork to turn in and where I was certain someone was going to throw me out of the country. The problem with French bureaucracy is that it is often confusing, unclear (it being in French and all...) and slow. These three things make such a nice pairing with my personal anxieties about being tossed out of the country at any moment merely for having signed a form in the wrong place. The slow system allows me to have weeks to mull over questions such as, "What if they wanted me to write my birth city in that spot instead of my birth state?" and "What if I was supposed to write the address of my high school and not my personal address? I mean, what is personal anyways when I am simply a jeune fille au pair trying to make a small place for herself in the big cruel Parisian world?" The trip to the Rectorat was fine. My paperwork was perfect. A small victory, a small step towards having French social security, and a big step towards my peace of mind.

And after the teaching, there was the Fete des Vendages, an adventure that cannot be fully explained in any way except that it was just. so. French. Last night, the streets of Montmartre were packed with people. The Fete des Vendanges celebrates the harvesting of the wine grapes that are grown in the city (in Montmartre). Although this tiny vineyard along the back of the hill that holds up the Sacre Coeur is probably one of the smallest vineyards in France, the celebration is anything but little. Packed to the brim with vendors selling bottles of wine, crepes, cheese, ham, ciders, and more, the cobblestone streets felt more like the Metro during a strike: one barely had to lift one's feet to be pushed along, carried by the crowd with wine in hand, to watch the fireworks shooting out over the city, illuminating the sky in celebration of this city's tiny accomplishment.

That was a celebration well earned by the city but also by the teacher - Madame Fussner or to some just Kate - who stood up in front of the class on Friday all by herself to begin teaching a very important and fairly casual lesson on stereotyping. Having no idea what I was getting myself into, I prepared a lesson with about 8 activities so that no matter what I would not run out of things to do in my 55 minutes of class. My classes work in this way: I am responsible for 10 different classes each week and each class has 20-25 students. Because I am an assistant teacher and cannot be held responsible for that many students at once (according to the rules of the assistantship), the teacher takes half of the class and I take the other half. In separate rooms, we practice conversational skills on a variety of topics with the hopes that they will improve their comfort level in French. My first classes alone were fabulous. In English, we discussed stereotyping. We talked about French stereotypes about Americans and American stereotypes about the French. We watched a clip from an American tv series and discussed when stereotypes are painful and when some are merely absurd. And when the bell sounded at the end of each lesson, I was so grateful for having made it through without having any of my fears realized. (What if they hated me? What if they rioted? What if they went on strike? [talk about a French stereotype, and yet the students agreed with that one] What if they were bored? What if they refused to talk? What if, what if, what if?)

Once again, my mind was able to come up with many situations that were much scarier than the reality. The reality is that I think these first few classes actually enjoyed themselves.

But my favorite small victory for this week that I will share is this: when I came home from school on Thursday, I picked up Andy and brought him home and he asked me to tell him a story. Video games and movies had been banned for the afternoon because of Andy's behavior at dinner the night before but I told him not to worry about it. We sat down on the couch and pulled blankets over our head and surrounded ourselves with pillows. We were in some sort of cave together and Andy held up the flashlight to my face and told me to tell him a scary story. "Not too scary," he said, "Just a little bit scary. I like stories a little bit scary." And so I invented a story on the spot about a little boy named Andy who lived in Paris and the girl named Kate who babysat for him. They were home one day and they heard a "scratch scratch scratch" upstairs. They had been playing chess downstairs and Andy had been winning many games in a row but they kept hearing a "scratch scratch scratch." They crept up the stairs to investigate, Andy with a light saber in hand, and they heard it again coming from the kitchen. "Scratch scratch scratch" they heard, and Andy thought it was a thief coming into the house. He crept into the kitchen, ready to strike since Kate the babysitter was too scared and ....It was just the hamster, Capone, scratching at his cage because he was hungry. The end.

Andy loved the story so much that he made me tell it twice more. And then again at dinner, to his parents, who were amused and also impressed that Andy was as into a made-up story as he was his Batman video games. A small success for the babysitter and living proof that victories existed before the days of technology, a fact that surprised and impressed Andy, and crushed another worry of mine, that I would never connect with an 8 year old boy and would end up resorting to living in a box on the street rather than be the jeune fille au pair. My mind, inventive as it is, was calmed this week by the slow and patient acceptance of the new life I am living.

in the garden.

In the streets of Paris, there is so much to take in. The homeless woman breast-feeding her baby as she begs for money just a block away from the homeless man who has a box of bunnies and a sign that explains that both he and the bunnies could use a break. The tourists who are lost and who hold their Paris Practiques upside down, searching for a rue that they won't find if they keep holding their map like that but no one stops to suggest a simple redirection. There are the musicians -- in the streets, on the subways -- some who carry instruments, others who carry the sounds of their own voices and, my personal favorite, those with karaoke machines. It seems to me that if all of the musicians in Paris got together and formed one single orchestra, they could sell the karaoke machines for a profit, choose a sizable and central location, and have some sort of united band that could garner money, attention, fame. Something tells me that they are not interested in this idea, but I like to imagine as I am walking to pick up 8 year old Andy from school that they could line up on the Boulevard Montparnasse and play a piece so loud and so full that the cemetery there might come alive somehow.

In the streets I also see people pissing. It isn't an important observation, to be certain, but in this past week alone I have 8 people in broad daylight (this is not even counting those I have seen at night) stopping in the street to piss. Women, men, children, adults, everyone gathers to piss in the streets of Paris. This is one of those unfortunate realities that comes from living in a city that I had forgotten about, those things that we don't want to admit, along with the catcalling/name-calling, the drug offers, and the solicitations in another language that I can understand just enough to say, "Laisse-moi tranquille." In the mall not far from my house, where I took Andy for our first outside-of-the-house adventure together (he wanted to buy The Blues Brothers and The Gremlins on DVD), I saw a man spank his crying child as crowds pushed past (totally unfazed) to get to their destinations. These are all odd things to take in and I only write them down now because I think that these observations mark for me my understanding that my romantic city of Paris is also sometimes vulgar, sometimes upsetting, sometimes confusing and often baffling. I live in a different world now and it is in some ways the same Paris that I lived in before, but I am not necessarily the same person who was here two years ago.

In the garden though, that is where I learned the most this week. In the garden, I learned how to "utiliser la force" when playing Star Wars with Leo and Andy. They taught me how to wield one or two light sabers at the same time and how it is possible to die eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve times in a single game and have it not matter at all. After all, the game can't continue if the babysitter cannot be killed yet again. In the garden, I learned middle school slang words watching Leo play badminton with his friends, inviting his little brother to join them even though he has yet to really learn how to wield the racket. I learned how to quiet down Al, the pug, who is excited by noises that no one else seems to hear and loves eating badminton birdies. I learned games can be invented and re-invented. I learned that card games which come with poor instructions in both French and English can be played nonetheless; in the garden, we sat for hours playing our version of "Miam Miam", a sort of Slamwich card game that required us to devise our own rules when the directions were too confusing.

And when their parents came home in the early evening, and they ran upstairs to say hello ahead of me, I learned that the garden (which has a full grown tree with a swing and space to run and to breathe) struck me as one of those safe spaces, those lucky finds that I am so grateful to have access to. Away from the main streets with their car horns and small daily disasters, there is a small yet spacious garden where I can see the evening coming on without having to share it with those distractions, where I can learn what it means to grow up in a city, and where I catch myself reflecting in a mix of both French and English, a small triumph or perhaps merely the exhaustion setting in from the end of another well-lived day.

welcome back.

I've been avoiding this first posting because I feel as though it has to be this sort of thrilling combination of situating everyone with where I am and impressing upon them in some way what it is that brought me back, how I saw that as the week unfolded, how I learned that I was meant to come back. All of this felt like an immense pressure (Kate? Putting pressure on herself? Mais, non!) but the pressure disappeared two days ago when I finally started to settle in.

The first few days were loaded with introductions, re-immersions into a language that had gotten rusty in my brain and so many new faces, a new area of the city, a new lifestyle, that I felt overwhelmed. I was suffering the worst case of jetlag that I have ever had, averaging about four-five hours of sleep a night, and struggling to make sentences in either French or English. The last time that I was lucky enough to live in Paris, I lived with a family that required me to only speak French (they signed a contract, in fact, stating that they would do so despite the mother's fluency in English). This time I am living a truly bilingual lifestyle. My host mother is American and my host father is French; their hope is that if I spend enough time babysitting their two sons (ages 8 and 12), both will gain more confidence and ease in English. My days have been a mixture of struggling to regain the French I lost back in the States in my daily interactions and then fetching the children from school, feeling astonished at my sudden inability to form sentences again in English after working so hard to speak proper French. The mother in this family does it flawlessly. She can string together sentences that are half in French, half in English, and it seems to me that she is unaware of the switching between languages. She has been so warm and welcoming to me (she herself was twice an au pair and knows what it can be like, for better and worse), and I am so grateful that I can say that I think once again I have hit the jackpot and been placed with with a safe, caring, accepting and entertaining family. (A precious discovery of the week for sure was the 8-year-old boy's lesson that girls too [see: me] can play video games or perhaps better yet the 12-year-old boy's question [on the first night] as to my religion and my host father's subsequent decision to hold up a flashlight to his mouth to show me his Inner Light). These are, I believe, good and genuine people.

None of this sounds bad when I write it out but when living on four hours of sleep a night with lingering sinus pressure from the flight and genuine language confusion, I felt lost. I felt that I could get through the individual moments, make every appearance to be comfortable and to be glad to back to Paris, but in reality I couldn't remember why I had decided to live in Paris again. I felt homesick more than I wanted to admit to anyone and worried that I had most likely romanticized my time abroad here. Maybe this city life that I had remembered was nothing more than memories made more lovely by the longing that distance creates.

Until I got on the Metro. It wasn't until my fourth day here that I finally left my new neighborhood (having felt like I knew enough about it to not get too lost in it) and got on the subway for the first time. I've never been a city girl (the New York Metro makes me nervous, always) but something about the Paris Metro took the pressure off at last. It was not just the music playing in the cars by the musicians begging for a coin or a chance, nor was it coming above ground on the line to see the Eiffel Tower and cross the Seine to visit some of my favorite neighborhoods. It was not only that I recognized the feeling of the train's bumpy tracks nor the sudden recollection that it is the riders who must press open the doors (which will not open automatically). It was that this was the first transportation system that I ever learned on my own and that by learning it, I had once made Paris my home. On Friday night, I went out with some other Teaching Assistants from England and Ireland, and as we navigated the Metro to our destination, one asked me how long I had been here. I replied, "Just since Monday" and she remarked that I was doing awfully well leading the group to the destination having only been here a few days. I responded, "Oh but this isn't the first time that I've lived here." This was me coming back. And this was Paris coming back to my life once again.