A little under two years ago, I was packing the contents of my world into two large suitcases and heading for Waterloo to embark upon the third year of my Modern Languages degree, most of which I was to spend in Paris. The first month of that year was one I shall never forget, mainly due to the remarkable nature of moving lock, stock and barrel to another country, but also because of the detailed notes I kept about my trials and tribulations across the Channel in October 2005.
Picture a small, rickety desk in a small, rickety flat in a small, rickety area of Paris, as a crisp autumn sunrise creeps into the winding alleys of the Marais quartier...
2nd November 2005 - rue Charlot, Paris, France
I am on my Year Abroad now, and can sit gazing out of my window over the rooftops of Paris on a fresh autumn morning. A 10-minute bus-ride and I am at Notre Dame. A 20-minute tube-journey takes me to the foot of the Eiffel Tower. I cannot move for gorgeous bistros and warm crusty baguettes.
So what is Paris like? For one thing, it is the bureaucratic capital of the world. The paperwork is mind-boggling. Moving one’s entire life to another city is no small task, and in France they relish the chance to make it even more difficult by asking you to fill out an endless array of forms and documents. Inevitably, you will be sent to some monolithic concrete building in the outskirts of Paris, where an emphysemic receptionist with bullet-proof hair will direct you through a maze of badly signed corridors, at the end of which you will find a waiting-room. You will then sit in this waiting-room for anywhere from an hour to a week, at which point you will be called into a dingy office where you will be handed one measly piece of paper (which they could have just given you in the waiting-room, I might add) and will be sent off to the other side of the city to have this form stamped.
A no less arduous process will await you at yet another of Paris’ bureaucratic institutions, where you will finally be called into an even dingier office to have a weather-beaten old woman stamp your form. When you ask why it is that the form-giving-out office and the form-stamping office can’t be situated in the same place, the woman (after casting a disdainful glance of which only the French are truly capable) will reply in incomprehensible French that it is necessary under Bylaw 493 Subsection 7a of the Législation Administrative Nationale etc etc.
After many protracted and exhausting treks around the capital, you will ultimately be referred back to the same office at which you started, where the various stamps and forms you have amassed like bizarre souvenirs of your gruelling journey will be ceremoniously filed away in a filing cabinet the size of Luton, never to be seen again. Have you ever wondered why France hasn’t been invaded for 60 years? “You want to invade us, Monsieur? Well, please take this form to…” Exactly.
But on the whole, Paris is much like London, or any other major metropolis for that matter. It is very cosmopolitan, and you are as likely to hear English or Chinese on the underground as you are to hear French. One thing the French do very well, however, is customer service. As long as you are friendly yourself, you are always guaranteed to be received with a beaming smile and a hearty bonjour. Be careful, though, not to incur the disdain of a Frenchman. It is bewilderingly easy to do. For example, one way to wipe the smile from a Frenchman’s face is to say ‘bonjour’ to him at any point after half-past five in the evening. You will see a look of contempt wash over him, he will look at you with a cocked Gallic eyebrow and say, in a tone dripping with scorn: ‘bonsoir’. You are left feeling very sheepish, taking embarrassed glances at your watch and making gestures and mumblings that amount to ‘So it is!’, before beating a hasty retreat, often in tears.
It seems that more people live on the streets in Paris than in houses, and unless you intend on joining them, you must begin an unforgiving trawl through websites, magazines and noticeboards to find somewhere to lay your hat. Finding accommodation in Paris is not easy. It requires an awful lot of stamina, patience and common sense – qualities which will evaporate within a few hours of starting your search. My first encounter with Parisian accommodation seemed to good to be true, and indeed turned out to be so. Some six weeks before I was due to leave, I received an e-mail from a friend in Paris informing me of a gorgeous flat available for rent. It was available from September to May. Perfect. It was in Montparnasse. Perfect. It had a separate kitchen, bathroom and balcony. Perfect. And it was only €450 per month. Bonanza! Unable to believe that I had been spared the agony of flat-hunting in Paris, I gleefully e-mailed the proprietress to firmly state my interest and ask to finalise the details. This was Saturday 13th August 2005, my birthday. I received a prompt reply giving me more details and some supplementary photographs. I replied to confirm that I would indeed like to take up the flat. I then heard nothing. Not until a week later, now the 20th August, did I receive a reply, curtly asking me to describe myself, my life and my means. This I did without delay. That was the last I heard from my reticent landlady-to-be. Come the 27th August, now only a few days before the lease was due to begin, I finally got a response from her phone number (whose answering machine was full of my increasingly stressed enquiries), whereupon she bluntly told me that her friends were coming to view the flat the next day, and she would let me know within a week. Needless to say, she didn’t.
And so I resigned myself to accepting a university room offered by the Parisian Education Authority. In all honestly the idea of a “university room” filled me with dread. I had had two years of living in halls, on corridors, eating en masse in dining rooms and having to swipe-card my way in and out of every door and gate, and I wanted out. Five of my best friends were moving into a house together, and I was very jealous, I don’t mind saying. Although perhaps this story needs a fuller telling before I go on.
After many trials and tribulations, five of my friends found a house in South-central Oxford which would house them during their third-year at uni. At the beginning of the summer I went up to lend a hand with the move-in, and was greeted by a sight I shall never forget. The condition of the house was such that it left us wondering whether its previous occupants had actually been human. It beggared belief. Every single surface in the entire house was at least half an inch thick in dust, ash and grime. Beneath the sofa cushions lurked entire ecosystems of food in various stages of decomposition and in the microwave sat a half-cooked and long forgotten about curry. Rumour had it that somewhere towards the back of the garden there were Japanese soldiers who didn’t know the war was over.
But the bathroom was the true pièce de résistance. The walls were spattered with…something, as if someone had thrown excrement into the ventilation fan at high speed. The toilet bowl was encrusted as much with dried-on bleach as with filth, and the bath was no better. It was perhaps the shower curtain that really came into its own in the disgusting stakes, however. The bottom half, which lay to the right of the toilet, was yellow. Rather than protecting the floor from bathwater, its primary purpose seemed to have been protecting the bath from misdirected urine. The upstairs rooms were without door handles, which soon led to one of us (not me, I might add) getting locked in and having to be liberated with the inventive use of a key as a screwdriver. The oven was a wreck, and looked like it was made out of old Soviet tanks, there were bedbugs and the shower was a system of cryptic levers and switches. However, after many traumatising hours of elbow grease had revealed that yes, a house did indeed lie hidden beneath the grime, it looked a suitable and, dare I say it, pleasant place to live.
Now, where was I? Ah yes, the dreaded university room. Simple logic told me that for a mere €240 per month, this wasn’t going to be the Ritz, and may even struggle to be the Shangri-La Doss-House, Stoke Newington. Still, I was to be kept in suspense for the first week of my French experience while I stayed in a charming little hotel in the 11th arrondissement. (A quick side note, by the way, “charming” is actually French for ‘crap’. Don’t be fooled. Unless, of course, you find shoddy electrics and plumbing with a personality of its own charming.) My first trial was being told that my room was on the fifth floor and that there was no lift. I stood, somewhat disheartened, at the foot of an immense rickety staircase, with my entire life packed neatly into several suitcases, each of which weighed more than a small Renault. After this workout, I sat exhausted on my bed wondering what on earth I was going to do with myself for the next seven months, when I received a phone call. As luck would have it, my friend from uni who lived a brief metro ride across Paris was having her flat-warming party that very night. Armed with a bottle of wine I went over, not to return until the next morning with a hangover of apocalyptic proportions. My first Parisian morning was spent in a blurred haze of trying not to vomit on unsuspecting Frenchmen, just praying that I could make it back to my hotel room alive. After emptying the contents of my stomach (beer, wine, copious amounts of vodka and scrambled eggs, which I had apparently cooked for everyone at 4am) into the hotel-room sink, I took ashen-faced and white-lipped to the streets of Paris.
Anyway, more of that later. After six nights in the hotel, it was time to move to my university room provided by the CROUS, an organisation impossible to contact, and to pronounce, even. I was not inspired with confidence when I was told my room was on the sixth floor and that the lift was out of order. You soon learn to hate the words ‘En panne’ which hang off every piece of electronic equipment in France, none of which even pretends to work. But my day got better from this point onwards. The room itself, I discovered, was a lot better than I had expected. True, it was about as homely as an NHS hospital ward with its white walls, white shelves, white wardrobe and white linoleum floor, but it was roomy, and came with a fridge and one electric ring. As I had foreseen, I did have to share bathroom facilities with most of South-Eastern Paris, but it would do for now. I was secretly quite pleased at this actually, because the room was comfortable enough to keep me alive for the time being, but was still not good enough to house me for my whole seven months, and so my dream of finding a truly charming (English use here) studio of my own was still alive.
Excited by the prospect of cooking for myself, I went and equipped myself with all the necessary utensils and set about nourishing myself. I use the term ‘nourishing’ loosely, however. With one electric ring you are pretty much limited to what you can fry or boil. So pasta, eggs, chips and cunning combinations thereof were my principal source of sustenance. My main souvenir from my first month in Paris was mild exhaustion and high cholesterol, I fear. Keeping the place clean was a challenge in itself. The stark whiteness of the room meant that every speck of dust, hair and dirt stood out like a stain against the white linoleum tiles. My purchase of a dustpan and brush was sweetly naïve, as I spent many an hour on all-fours politely transporting dirt from one part of the floor to another, but rarely succeeding in removing it in any meaningful way. Storage space was at a minimalist minimum in the room, which inevitably lead to the disordered piling of stuff on every square-inch of budget IKEA shelving I could lay my hands on. The lack of either shelves or drawers in the wardrobe lead to yet more piling, and also meant that for my first month I never truly felt settled in and still had that horrible feeling of living out of a suitcase.
As soon as I had the chance, I set about hunting for somewhere else to live. Anywhere else to live. My main port of call was the legendary American Church of which I had heard many a hushed whisper. The Église Americaine, it seemed, housed the holy grail of flat-hunting and every English-speaking homeless person in Paris made the pilgrimage to its hallowed noticeboards to trawl through the endless lists of flats, rooms and studios available. Unless you arrived very early in the morning, you knew full well that each and every one of these advertised flats had already had a dozen or more phone calls, and many a time I was greeted by the phrase ‘C’est déjà loué, Monsieur’, telling me that it had already been let.
It was a fortnight of regular pilgramiging (if you’ll excuse my butchering of the English language) before I was finally invited to view an apartment. A decidedly crazy-sounding man on the phone gave me directions and told me in no uncertain terms that he would not allow any of his tenants to apply for any housing benefits. Bewildered but undeterred, I went along and, at first, I was pleasantly surprised. It was on the Boulevard St.Denis in central Paris, and as I ascended to the fifth floor, I passed carpeted hallways which led onto lawyers’ offices and bank headquarters. I reached the fifth and, by all appearances, top floor and was greeted by your local eccentric landlord. I was waiting in anticipation to see which of these lavish hallways led to my prospective abode, and found that it was none of them. I was escorted into a lift (a fully functioning lift, no less!) where I saw the buttons for the five floors. I also saw, however, a sixth button, into which Monsieur Bizarre inserted a key, sending the lift into a convulsive ascent to a hidden sixth floor. The lift doors opened to a network of suffocatingly narrow corridors, off of which opened dozens of small doors. I felt sure that I had wondered into a George Orwell novel, and that behind one of these doors John Hurt was being tortured by Richard Burton for various thought crimes. I turned my thoughts to more positive things, just in case. One of these doors was opened for me and revealed a studio almost invisible to the naked eye. Closer inspection with my microscope revealed that there was a bedroom so small that the bed itself was on a shelf accessible by a ladder, there was a bathroom so small that someone sitting on the toilet could wash their feet in the shower without much trouble, and a kitchen so cramped that the cooker was almost in the corridor. I glanced around once more and looked back at the landlord who stood there grinning inanely. “There is a slightly smaller one down the corridor”, he informed me. Unable to quite believe this, I nodded politely and muttered some inaudible words of thanks and made for the lift, carefully avoiding a mother and her 39 children piling out of another small apartment like some sort of magic-trick. “You like?” he asked. “I’ll let you know”, I replied, and hastened back into the relatively fresh air of the high-street.
.
It was clear this was an undeclared and, possibly, fairly illegal arrangement that my crazy friend had going, which explained his desire to prevent me applying for benefits and thereby informing the authorities that this place existed. I made my way from Room 101 and went back to my university residence in a less than enthusiastic mood.
The next few visits to the American Church were equally as fruitless, until one Saturday in mid-October. Two flats on the board seemed pretty good today. One in Montmartre looked very good, and another looked promising as well, although it didn’t say where. I arranged to view the Montmartre flat the next morning. I had had a love-affair with the winding alleys and climbing staircases of Montmartre since visiting it with my friend a year or two before, and was excited by the prospect of living there. I decided to ring the second flat as well, and was greeted by a friendly American voice who told me that I could come and view the studio straight away if I wanted. In no position to turn down such an offer, I made my way to the heart of the Marais in the beautiful 3rd arrondissement and was blown away by what I saw.
This flat, nestled next to a church, had its entrance in a small cobbled courtyard tucked behind a pair of mahogany gates. Up one flight of wooden stairs, I crossed the threshold of a beautiful little studio. I walked in on a fully equipped kitchen with wooden, slatted cupboards and mosaic floor with a window overlooking the little courtyard. In the corner of the kitchen was a little door, which opened onto the bathroom, small but perfectly formed, as they say. Beyond the kitchen lay the living room, with a majestic wardrobe, a futon-cum-bed and a stack of shelves on which the television and stereo stood. Yet another door led out onto the cutest of balconies, whose table and chair looked over the street below. The sensible need to ask questions of the landlady was very nearly obscured by my desire to prostrate myself at her feet and beg her for the tenancy to this adorable little place, but I managed to retain my composure (and dignity) for just about long enough to ascertain that this flat had phone and internet, a television (with sound but no picture due to an unfortunate accident) and full working oven. “How much does the electricity bill usually come to?” I asked, in an attempt to seem studious and responsible. “That all depends on how many scruples you have”, she replied. “Absolutely none”, I replied, a little too quickly. “Well”, she said, pointing to a piece of wire jammed into the electricity metre, “as much or as little as you want with this little thing”. “Fair enough” I said, with a smile. “I think I can live with the guilt”.
After expressing my serious interest in as many ways and languages as I could think of, I took my leave. The only thing to dampen my excitement was the fact that she told me that a friend of a friend was coming to see it the next day, and that she would let me know. Ah, I thought, remembering my mysterious correspondent during the summer whose “friends” had mysteriously materialised to gazump me.
That night was an extremely pleasant one. I went to the flat-warming party of a guy I had met at an induction meeting in my first week, and met and exchanged numbers with about a dozen new people. One was from Hungary, two were from Northern Ireland, one was a Chilean Belgian, and more than a few were American. I introduced myself to one girl with the customary “Hello, and where are you from?”. “London”, she replied. No great coincidence there, I thought, and asked where exactly. “Highgate”, she said. Now, I’m not one for clichés, but when you live in Highgate Village in North London, go hundreds of miles to Paris and meet someone who lives two side-turnings away from you, the temptation to say “What a small world!” is difficult to resist. In fact, I instantly succumbed to this temptation and proceeded to have a thoroughly enjoyable evening in this cosmopolitan company.
This “evening” actually lasted until half-past seven the next morning, at which point it dawned on me that I had arranged to view the Montmartre flat at 10 o’clock. I stole home through the dawn streets, snatched an hour of sleep, before rising, practically unable to see, and making my way northwards towards the slopes of the Sacré Coeur. In a less than cosy neighbourhood, I found the flat up another set of lift-less stairs where I was brusquely told to wait outside. The no-nonsense landlady, cigarette in one hand and husband in the other, waved a hand towards the interior of the flat. I didn’t know what to say. Rather than admit that I was too tired to actually focus on her flat or tell her that compared to what I had seen the day before her flat was ‘un hovel’ (excuse my French), I just said I would call tomorrow, and trudged home to bed.
A text message woke me not long afterwards. It was about the flat yesterday! Was I still interested? Did I want it? After calming down and thinking how best to translate my original thoughts of “Hell yes!” into more polite English, I replied with trembling fingers and, despite my exhaustion, leapt about my room with unbridled schoolgirl-like glee. I felt as if I had been granted parole, and had only ten days of my porridge to do. I actually became almost fond of my university room during these days, due in no small part to the fact that I knew I was leaving it.
I had the enjoyable and only ever so slightly smug task of informing the residence’s secretary that I would be leaving to look forward to. She had told me that the CROUS required a month’s notice before leaving, whereas the Académie had told me it was only eight days. I steeled myself for a confrontation, which I always dread. I fully expected to be told that my deposit would not be returned to me due to my short notice, and had more than half a mind to tell her she could keep it with bells on, as long as it facilitated my escape. Sense was talked into me, however, and I successfully negotiated the return of my deposit and permission to rejoin the free world.
I set about packing up my room and trying to return it to the state in which I found it (that is to say, dull and sterile). As I always do in other people’s houses or rooms, I managed to take three-quarters of the paint off the walls along with my posters, but a strange teddy-bear sticker (which was there when I arrived, I’d like to point out), covered any incriminating evidence. On departure day I decided to make my journey across Paris in two goes, and piled up all that I felt I could, in good conscience, lumber upon a taxi-driver in one sitting.
On returning for the rest of my belongings, I presented my key to reception, only to be asked if I had cleaned the room thoroughly and completely (their words, not mine). Realising that I have never cleaned anything thoroughly and completely in my life, not even myself, I told her that I would be back in a minute. On all-fours I picked up what dust and hair I could, and with my hands and nails I made what progress I could with the stains around the electric ring. It didn’t help that I couldn’t remember whether I had made those stains or if they were the legacy of the room’s previous inmate, but I decided that short of using a blowtorch and industrial bleach, I had done my best, and returned to the reception. A huge burly cleaning lady, whose name could only have been Bertha (or the nearest French equivalent), escorted me back to my room for an inspection. It was a nerve-wracking few minutes. I felt that a lot depended on the analysis of this woman (who obviously cleaned rooms between international shot-putting meets).
Despite eyeing the teddy-bear sticker suspiciously for a moment, she handed me a form to sign, which was apparently my agreement that I hadn’t stolen the ceiling or any of the walls, and I turned my back on the university residence for the last time.
2 comments:
And then what happened? Please Mr Palin, keep the gold dust coming!
Enjoying this Kaya, looking forward to the next instalment!
Post a Comment