1. Le Petit Bateau

My wife and I are spending a year in France, give or take a few months and depending on how long she can get the University to keep paying her to do it. If we had done this a decade ago I'm sure it would have been easier: we wouldn't have nearly the same amount of stuff that we actually cared about and therefore needed to find a safe place to stash for a year; we wouldn't have a cat that we love with the kind of love you usually only see in crazy cat ladies and who needed a loving home while we were gone; and I think our level of expectation of comfort would be different. But regardless, this opportunity came along and what kind of fools would we be if we passed it up because things might not be as comfy, or we might not have as much stuff, or we'd miss our cat more than I'd miss a foot, or I can't speak French? Big damn fools, that's what.

 When Megan finally got the go-ahead for her year in France, I left most of the arrangements to her, especially where we would live in Paris. Any of the apartment-for-rent sites would all be in French and, not trusting Google Translate's ability to grasp nuance, I would need to keep asking Megan what this or that meant anyway. It fell out, though, that one of her French students, a woman that had had her wild student days in Paris in the '70's, kept in touch with a friend there who had a room to rent. Though she (soone to be known as Landlady) said it was quite small and the pictures she sent seemed to corroborate what she said, the price was excellent and the location (location, location, as they say) was superb: right in the middle of Paris, Metro stops just a short block or so away. What did we need with a big apartment? We'd never be in it; we'd be out in Paris! Who cares if our toilet's down the hall? Megan gave the nod to the landlady, we managed to pack a year's worth of stuff (mostly clothes) into ginormous backpacks and we made the Crossing.

Stick along after the break for more details.

 It is indeed a tiny apartment. By tiny I mean eight square meters, something around 60 square feet. Into this space put a couple sets of shelves, two small futons that fold from half-couches into beds, a thin table that two people could sit and face each other at, and a chair. We had two chairs, but one of them broke within five minutes of us sitting in it. Set against a wall, abutting the largest set of shelves, is a sink and two hot plates; if you give it long enough the larger one will boil water, if the top is on the pot.

There's a shower stall set into the other end of that wall, which you get into by squeezing past the other end of the big set of shelves. The water is hot coming out of the snakehead (I don't know the official name for those heads set on a flexible hose) but drains slowly out the hole in the floor so that you finish the shower in sudsy water covering your feet.

 The toilet is down the hall, and has a broken seat that slides dangerously when you sit on it. This would be more of an annoyance if we shared it with someone else (the whole toilet, not just the seat), but it seems as though we're the only people on the floor that use it.

The futons must stay folded as couches until we are ready to sleep, for as beds they take up all the available floor space. 

For all of its tininess, it's hard to get things in the apartment to fit in a picture; there's not enough room to step away  to get things in frame.

Even when folded up one must inch carefully past them to get to the sink/hotplates or wiggle into the chair at the table, which stands wedged up against the slanting outside wall.

 To do one thing you must put away the other thing you were doing or the place quickly becomes unmanageable. Our window gives us a very nice view out over the rooftops of Paris, and off to the right you can see the Eiffel Tower. At night it lights up and sends two spotlights swooping across the city like a lighthouse beam.

All of France is blurry like this at night; it's not just because I was leaning out of a window.

For this, and the required compartmentalization and economy of space and movement, we call our apartment Le Petit Bateau dans le Ciel, The Little Boat in the Sky.

Note: not outside our apartment. Also, no copyright infringement intended to the  Petit Bateau corporation.

But to reach our little boat we must first scale the rigging, brave the 111. We are on the 6^th floor, the top of the building. In the US it'd be the 7^th, but the French call the ground floor zero and count up from there. Six floors, six flights of stairs, one hundred and eleven stairs in all.

At first, as each return home was a torture, I would count each stair, feeling my calves and quadriceps begin to burn, the temperature rising as we left the cool marble floor below, the sweat breaking out down my back. But now, three weeks in, I just count the landings: nineteen, thirty-seven, fifty-six, seventy-five, ninety-three...one eleven.

There are about a dozen doors on our floor; these used to be, like, servants' quarters or something. However, in the intervening years between when people kept their servants living in tiny nooks over their heads and now, it seems that different people have bought two or more of these nooks at a time and knocked doors between them so that two tiny apartments have become one medium one. I believe ours is the only one that is still unmodified. Some are unoccupied, and I've only seen the guy at the far end of the hall from us once; he may not even live there, just use it for...something. This'd be a terrible place to use as storage. The three other apartments on our end of the hall are all occupied, one on our side and two across the hall.

Directly across from us is a young lady that I've only seen once or twice. Her apartment is two bateaus in size, two of our nooks with a door connecting them. Of course, I'm just assuming how the arrangement works; I haven't been into any of their apartments. We hear her watching French TV and singing along to French pop, if not very skillfully then with a lot of heart that is quite cute. She has regular visitors: girlfriends that we can hear chattering back and forth, and one fellow who huffs and puffs his way up the stairs with some frequency. Call this neighbor French Barbie.

On our side of the hall, past us as you walk from the stairs, is a girl I have never seen. I hear her, though. She may have a single-bateau apartment as well, but I'm not sure. She likes to listen to bad American music, like Daughtry and Oasis and Finger Eleven, bad covers of songs that weren't that good to begin with by bands that sound like the Dixie Chicks with less harmonic talent. If you like any of those bands, I apologize for mocking your interests. We hear her through the wall and through our mutually opened windows; it gets stuffy in here quickly with them closed, which makes me fear for the winter. Call her AngloFille.
         Addendum! Turns out she's Polish. We thought at second that she was Russian (at first we assumed she was French), and I can't think of any sort-of cute nickname for her about Polishness, so call her Russian Revolution.

Then, across from AngloFille, on FrenchBarbie's side of the hall, is a guy whose apartment is, I believe, three bateaus in size, two side by side and and another one in an L-configuration. At least, the apartments on the lower floors (same space, but only two apartments per floor, one on each side of the stairwell) have that shape. But again I assume, for I have never been inside. He is tres chic with his skinny jeans and his styled bleached hair and his classy shoes. I have seen him more than anyone else; he is coming and going at all sorts of hours. He likes to listen to bad techno at home, late and loud. Well, it might not be all that loud, but the hall is a good amplifier. Call him Monsieur le Club.

Trips out into the world must take into account the 111. You must first descend them (not so bad, though people say that down is harder on your legs than up) and at the end of your voyage, as you sail back into our courtyard harbor, ascend them back to the heights. If our apartment was lush and inviting, if we had lavish accoutrements, blazing Internet and a widescreen TV, if our neighbors couldn't be heard whenever they talked on the phone or got an instant message, then perhaps we would be more leery of braving such a trial. But we have none of these things at our home, plus we're in frakking Paris! Why on earth would we spend all of our time in the apartment? Already our legs are strengthening; even without the 111, I've done more walking here than I've done eating and drinking, and I'm trying to do that as much as time and money allow.

Yeah, that's an insane amount of shellfish, made possible by my more-generous-than-we-deserve parents. Thanks guys! Oddly, with all of this, no melted butter was provided.

Paris is ours to behold. The entries that follow in this blog will be my take on things. Sometimes I might sound pissed; understand, O my friends of French persuasion, that even when I seem to be directly criticizing the culture, bureaucracy, weather (I would never criticize the weather; I love the weather here!) or whatever, I am railing more against my inexperience dealing with it. Or maybe I'm not; maybe I really am criticizing it (I'm looking at you, bureaucracy!).

The first several posts actually go back in time. When we first got here we were scrambling to find places with “free” wifi (more on that later) and so I didn't want to try to setup and manage a blog on cafe wifi access. As of now we still don't have it at home, but it seems on the horizon and I'm more comfortable with how these things are put together. So I wrote things, saving them for posting later. They're written as though whatever it was was happening currently, because I want to preserve the way I felt when it was happening, not looking back with the benefit of hindsight.

I hope you enjoy this thing.

-Nat