by Oliver Gee
And so I did. And I wished I hadn’t. Two gin and tonics. Two normal drinks. And they cost more than I’d pay for a month of groceries.
“You look pale,” Lina said to me. “Are you alright?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” I lied. “I think that liqueur went to my head, that’s all.”
“Shall we get a nightcap?” she asked.
“No!” I shouted, in panic. “No,” I repeated, but this time more gently, coolly. “Let’s go for a walk”
I paid for the drinks and we left the hotel. I didn’t mention to Lina that it had been the most expensive round of drinks I’d ever paid for in my life. I just pretended I was the kind of journalist who typically popped into Le Meurice for a casual gin and tonic. Thank God we didn’t get a room, I thought.
Before calling it a night, we headed back to the Seine for one last stroll along the river. We cut through the deserted courtyard of the Louvre, past the glass pyramids, and stopped at the Pont du Carrousel bridge. We laughed, we smiled, and we watched the barges glide by. I remember thinking how lucky I was to be standing with a woman like her. It was a perfect Paris moment.
That Valentine’s Day still rates among the best nights I’ve had in my life. Cheap champagne, expensive gin and tonics, and the woman of my dreams on my arm. If you’d told me that in three years I’d be proposing to that same woman on that same bridge, I’d have believed it.
CHAPTER TWO
A roommate, language lessons, fruit flies, and terror in Paris.
2.1 Settling in
I made my first cheese and wine faux pas within the same hour. And while it wasn’t because of my terrible French, that was a factor. You see, I’d figured that after a few months in France I’d have re-learned French fluently. Or at least to a strong level. After all, I’d studied it at high school and even university. Surely, it would all come flooding back to me if I was surrounded by Parisians, ducking into boulangeries, befriending the locals. But as it turned out, I was hardly advancing at all. My colleague was British, my work was mostly translating French into English, and I was spending a lot of my spare time with Lina, a Swede. My priorities were way out of order, I decided. It was time to concentrate on learning French. And since the French classes I’d signed up for were yet to begin, I had to take matters into my own hands.
After a few more encounters with Stephane, my neighbour from Grenoble, I suggested that we try to do a language exchange. The plan was that we’d each grab a bottle of wine, set a stopwatch for half an hour and then only speak French. When the alarm went off, we’d switch to English and we’d continue switching every 30 minutes until we ran out of wine. We organized our first class, and I offered to host it at my place. It’d be the first French guest I’d have at the apartment, and I was determined to make a good impression.
In an attempt to come across as a competent Parisian host, I’d gone to rue Montorgueil to grab some wine and cheese. I’d gotten that bit right; a good Parisian host would absolutely be prepared with cheese and wine for their guests, and they take great pride in doing it well.
But I got the wine bit wrong, to begin with. When I’d asked the shopkeeper for something cheap, he had shuddered, and reluctantly suggested a Bordeaux. It was even worse with the cheese, the buying of which is an art form in France. You’re supposed to go into the shop, have a lengthy discussion with the fromageur about what’s particularly tasty this season, explain what you plan to eat with the cheese, maybe taste a piece or two, pause and consider; then make your purchase and be on your way. I didn’t know all this, of course. Cheese shops aren’t even remotely common where I’m from in Australia. So, I walked in, surveyed the counter of cheeses, and asked for a mix.
“Certainly, monsieur, what would you like a mix of?”
“Well, your best hits, really. A bit of everything,” I responded.
“Could I interest monsieur in our aged hard cheeses? This Comté is 18 months old.”
“Sure. And with it, maybe just a little bit of this and that would be perfect,” I said with a smile. Gosh, what a great customer I was! Not too fussy, happy to accept whatever was on offer.
I didn’t realize it at the time, nor for a good while afterwards, that I was essentially offending the fromageur. He was offering me his best, and I wasn’t even interested in listening. He seemed to give up.
“Perhaps monsieur would like our pre-packaged cheese mix?” he said, pointing to a dusty looking corner in the glass display.
I said that the mix of cheeses sounded perfect. He handed me a plastic box with what looked to me like an exciting variety of cheeses, all in different colours and shapes. Yellow cubes, orange slices, there were even some green bits in there. All pre-cut and ready to eat. Oh what a treat, how Stephane would be impressed with my wine from a wine shop and my cheese from a fromagerie! I took my haul home and set it up on the vintage suitcase that I’d balanced on a box, my dining table for the next two years.
He arrived right on time and broke into a grin immediately.
“Eet’s time to learn Engleesh, wino,” he said.
Again with the wino. What could he mean? I ignored it again.
“Stephane! Welcome! Bienvenue! Shall we start in English?” I said.
“OK, sure,” he said, his eyes taking in the feast I’d laid out on the table. “But first, what the hell is that? Is that cheese? What are the green pieces? It looks like fruit salad,” he said with a laugh. “And let me see that wine. Bordeaux? What is that, cat piss? Let’s start with my bottle, it’s a Côte du Rhône from near my hometown. And remind me to teach you how to buy cheese after I teach you how to speak French.”
Of course, Stephane’s English wasn’t this good, but these were the points he made in a mixture of English, French, and gesticulations. Wild gesticulations when it came to the cat piss bottle of wine. And after the first 30 minutes of French, I can admit that my efforts at speaking his language were as bad as my cheese choosing.
But the language exchange was a handy way to learn, at least for me. Our rule was if you didn’t know a word, you couldn’t say it in your native language. I had to try to explain it in French (and Stephane had to explain it in English). Because when it comes to language learning, it’s too easy to resort to just dropping in English words when you’re lost. Or to say “Oh, how do you say this?” and so on. So we ruled that out from the beginning. And as excruciating as it was for both of us, we struggled through and got to know each other the hard way.
Stephane told me that he wanted to learn English so he could watch the new Game of Thrones episodes without having to wait for the local TV channels to dub them into French. He explained that he was studying finance and had dreams of moving to New York or London. He added that he didn’t have a girlfriend but was on the lookout. I told him that I was a journalist who played basketball. He thought I was crazy to move to Paris when I was from Australia, a sentiment I’d hear countless times from other young French people over the years.
It was a pleasant treat to get to know my neighbour, even if he didn’t have an appetite for my green cheese. By the time we reached the bottom of the second bottle, the cat-piss red wine I’d bought, it felt like we were both somehow fluent in each others’ languages. And I suppose we were pretty drunk. He took his leave and staggered across the top floor corridor to his own chambre de bonne apartment.
“Zairs a new episode of Game of Thrones, I think I’m ready to understand eet, wino,” he said.
As he shut the door, I figured it out. Wino had nothing to do with my taste (or bad taste) for wine, not at all. He was saying “right now”, but instead of doing the unrolled English R, which can be tricky for French speakers, he was switching the R for a W. So right now became wight now, or wino in a Grenoble accent. I never understood why he said “right now” to punctuate so many of his English sentences. Maybe it was a “lost in translation” thing; maybe they say “juste maintenant” all
the time in eastern France. Who knew? I certainly didn’t, but I took it to be one of Stephane’s charms. And anyway, I had other things to focus on, wino.
2.2 The admin
If you’re thinking of moving to Paris, or anywhere in France, you must be prepared for administrative difficulties. Specifically, you must be ready for rejection. That’s just how it is, you’ll apply for something and you won’t get it. And the reason will be ridiculous. There’ll be a missing signature. Something won’t be stamped. Your dog’s dental records will be out of date. Who knows. But there will be something. And the number one, ultimate secret for beating the system is to expect failure and smile when it happens. It’s the only way to go.
And you know what? It really works. When you expect that things will fail, then you don’t mind when it all goes pear-shaped. It’s like a Jedi mind trick. You almost end up leaving happier when you leave whatever office it is without having gotten what you needed. Because you will suffer failure: it’s part of the process. I’m convinced French admin workers are relieved when there’s a document missing and they get to send papers to another desk. I can sense their satisfaction.
And I learned all this pretty quickly.
One of the cruel ironies for a newcomer in France is that you have to do all the hardest admin at the beginning. You can’t wait around to improve your French if you want to open a bank account or get a social security number. Nope, you have to do it immediately: and though it hurts, you’ve gotta rip it right off the wound, like a bandaid. A lot of expats move to France with their French loved one, making the journey infinitely smoother: but that wasn’t my situation. I was single, clueless, and desperately unprepared for the pain that came with peeling that bandaid off gently.
When I opened my bank account, for example, I was once again reminded of how impressive Sweden was, compared to France. In Sweden, I waltzed into a bank, asked to open a new account, and had one in minutes. In France, I had to book a meeting, endure that meeting for over an hour, and then leave the bank with a pile of documents as thick as a short novel.
When I arrived, the banker took me into a little office and made me sign ten lengthy documents, once for him and once for myself. Yes, that’s right, 20 signatures.
“This, monsieur, is for online banking. You want online banking, yes?” he said.
“Well, yes, please,” I responded.
He printed off another few pages twice, one set for each of us.
“And monsieur would like a bank card, yes?”
“Yes, please. But do we really need all this paper?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“This is just how we do it in France,” he said.
But if I thought the bank was bad, I was in for a real treat trying to set up my social security account. The fact that I can be quite unorganized with these matters didn’t help. The first time I went into the social security offices, I went simply with the goal of finding out exactly what I needed, right from the horse’s mouth. I took the afternoon off work for the occasion. When I arrived at 2 pm on a Thursday, a sign out the front informed me that the offices were closed Thursday afternoons. Of course.
The second time around, I came armed with the necessary documents. Some of the online forums I visited suggested that a translated birth certificate might not be necessary, so I chanced it that an English one was fine. But I was wrong, of course. I had to get an “international apostille” sticker on the back of my birth certificate - which meant that it was now an internationally-recognized document. Then I paid a ridiculous amount of money for an official translation of my birth certificate, which I still consider to be the easiest translation job in history. “Born here, named this”. It was high school French at best. When I finally submitted it, they still didn’t accept it because there was no official signature or translation on the back of my birth certificate, the side that had nothing besides the apostille sticker. The word apostille was French, for God’s sake, but it wasn’t translated, signed, or stamped, so I had to start all over again and head back to the official translator.
Sometimes it’s almost enough to break your spirit, but that’s why you have to laugh.
Despite my struggles, I did have a few early victories. One was when I limped into the town hall on crutches after a cycling accident. I exaggerated that limp and let my voice falter when I handed over my papers. I winced at the mere effort of signing something. And the woman took pity on me, and helped me.
But nothing compared to the magic of occasionally saying I was Australian. Once I went to the Town Hall of the second arrondissement to set myself up as a tax-paying journalist, rather than a tax-paying citizen, after I heard rumours that there would be added benefits. It was a complicated procedure that called for French language mastery far beyond my own talents.
There was a young man behind the desk, whose thick glasses made his eyes seem twice as big as he sized me up. I asked him if he spoke English.
“You know,” he said in fluent, but heavily accented, English. “We’re told we don’t have to speak English with people - even if we can.”
He looked across the room as if he were about to sell me drugs. As if he could get in trouble if he was caught speaking English with me.
“Where are you from? America? England?” he said.
When I said Australia his eyes went almost frighteningly wide behind those glasses. His dream was to visit Australia. He’d been looking into the one-year work visa that was popular among many young French people. He was going through all my papers as he talked, chattering away about kangaroos, Sydney, and famous Australians.
“Tell me,” he said. “What do you think of us French people? People say we are arrogant and rude, and there is a bit of truth to that, I think.”
With my mind clearly on the importance of his help, I answered that I didn’t think the French were rude at all, which was actually true. I honestly think it’s all one big misunderstanding that comes from language criss-crossing, cultural differences, and too many tourists. But I didn’t get into it then.
We kept chatting, he seemingly oblivious to the fact that there was a long queue piling up outside his small office. He asked what kind of vegetables we grew in Australia, except he pronounced it veg-er-ter-bles - four syllables, which I realized I actually preferred. All the while, he was flipping through my documents, ticking boxes, and explaining how I could get journalistic tax deductions in the years to come. Finally, he said I was set up as a tax-paying reporter in France and that I’d be getting generous returns if all his work was approved.
“I’ll come back with good news,” he said, leaving the room with my papers.
And he did. All I had to do was go out of his office and ask the woman at the front to co-sign a few documents. I was amazed; I’d tackled the dreaded French taxman and it was actually a rather lovely experience. When I got to the lady at the front, I offered a friendly “Do you speak English?” with a strong hint of an Australian accent to see if my luck would continue.
“Non,” she grunted. “On est en France, on parle français.” We are in France, we speak French here.
Ah. Well, you can’t win them all, I suppose.
2.3 The neighbours
“It’s part of your job contract to date a French woman,” my editor repeated.
I made sure to peruse my contract, just to be sure, before I introduced him to Lina, who I’d been seeing a lot more. The editor was dismayed. He was convinced that the only way I’d ever understand France was with a Frenchwoman on my arm. He was probably right. There’s no quicker way to learn a language than to be immersed in it. Weekend visits to the French in-laws. Whispering sweet French nothings in the bedroom. Watching as they manoeuver the ridiculous French admin for you (if only!). Oh, the benefits were surely endless. But I had a Swedish woman instead, meaning I was doomed to improve my Swedish and forever languish in French language purgatory.
One spring morning, Lina had stayed at my apartment after I’d gone to work. She texted me with what she called good news and bad news. The good news was that she’d washed the sheets. The bad news was that she’d thrown my pillowcases out the seventh-floor window.
“I didn’t mean to do it, I was shaking the sheets out the window and I didn’t know the pillowcases were in there.”
“So what happened to the pillowcases?” I asked.
“I can see them. They’re on someone’s sunroof seven floors down. But it’s not our apartment block, it’s next door, and I don’t know whose door to knock on. I have an idea to get them back, but you’ll have to help me.”
Lina was waiting for me when I got home, armed with a big ball of string and a few pieces of metal.
“We’ll fish them back up!” she said, with a half-crazed look in her eyes.
“That’s the plan?” I said with a laugh. “You’re going to try and hook them from the seventh floor?”
We spent the next two hours dangling 15 metres of string, weighed down with a few nuts and bolts, and trying to hook pillowcases with bent pieces of wire. The feeling of pure elation to eventually hook each of them was surely greater than any fisherman at the Seine River had ever felt. If only we could have seen the faces of the Parisians below when they saw the white pillowcases being reeled upwards past their kitchen windows.
As it turned out, we’d hear from my neighbours quicker than we thought. My phone rang a few days later and a man introduced himself in English as “Andrew from downstairs”.
“I got the note you left, so here I am, calling you back,” he said.
I’d slipped a note under his door after noticing his doormat was in the design of the Union Jack, the British flag. On the note, I told him that I was on the top floor if he ever fancied meeting a neighbour.
“Great! If you’re home now, come up for a drink,” I said.