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.