Monday 25 May 2015

Brussels



Brussels in February = freezing. So the majority of my time there was spent in food establishments, leading me to the conclusion that winter holidays are the best holidays because you have an excuse to eat all the time.




 Yep, Grand Place is beautiful, and so authentic. Especially the Starbucks.




 House prices aren't crippling here, so you will actually be able to afford to stay somewhere nice. On my au pair budget, I stayed in a big room with a double bed in a historic townhouse in a nice neighbourhood.




 The architecture is stunning, especially the Dutch-style townhouses we've come to associate with New York.



The city is crammed with history and yet has an energetic and youthful vibe. My favourite tourist pamphlet quote was "Brussels - it's ugly and we love it." Disclaimer: ugly part of Brussels not pictured here. 




Mokafé in the Galerie du Roi exists, for which we should all be thankful. Stunning architectural surroundings, prices half of those in Paris, and hot chocolate liberally laced with rum? Thank you, Belgium.




The original Léon de Bruxelles is still serving up moules frites, and the waffles are flowing - just with icing sugar, mind, or everyone will know you're a tourist.



On the whole, Brussels was a lot of fun. I would recommend it if you're in the market for cobblestones, crooked buildings and an overdose of saturated fat. 
  

Thursday 7 May 2015

Winter in Paris: Making It Tolerable

I’m a frequent sufferer of the winter blues. While some people delight in winter (you know the type...usually some doe-eyed girl going “big snuggly jumpers and Christmas films and hot chocolate and snowmen!”), long evenings, cold winds and permanently grey skies make me feel like crawling into bed for about 4 months. In my naïveté, I had imagined winter to be an altogether more joyful affair this year, simply due to the fact that I was in Paris. Wrong. Winter sucks everywhere. Arguably even more so when you live in a 500 year old building with no central heating and just one mini radiator for company. There was a rather sizeable hiatus in this blog – just assume I was hibernating. Here are some pros and cons of a winter in Paris. Because winter isn’t even interesting enough to warrant one fully written and paragraphed blog post.

Pros:

1.       The metro is warm.

2.       You are spoiled for choice with museums and exhibitions, cinema and shopping, so it’s not too hard to distract yourself from the wintry hell that is your current existence.

3.       Miserable weather frightens the tourists away. Winter is the only season where you’ll be able to walk on your own street without feeling like you’re in a human traffic jam, and get into museums without queuing for half an hour. Apart from the Catacombs. Stay away from the Catacombs.

4.       Restaurants are far less crowded in January so you can get a table without a reservation.

5.       Metro steps, lift-free apartment buildings and general walking from place to place means you’ll be as fit as you were the previous autumn by the time you finally put your trainers back on in spring.

6.       Working strange hours means you can sometimes take a 3 hour nap in the afternoon. This will not affect your sleeping pattern whatsoever as every instinct tells you to just sleep all the time.

7.       Staying in bed and binge-watching The Mindy Project all day is free. Therefore, you will actually have some money by the time spring rolls around.

8.       At the risk of sounding doe-eyed, pitching your camp in a cosy cafe with a huge coffee and a book is an agreeable way to pass a few hours.

9.       If all else fails, you can take a leaf out of the Russians’ winter survival book and drown your sorrows in cheaper-than-water wine.



Cons:

1.       When the metro is busy, you will be crammed into a space roughly the temperature of Delhi in July while wearing full winter clothes. Exiting the metro and adjusting to the frigid air is even more painful.

2.       You will need to sleep in 17 layers, lest you should perish from hypothermia in your own bed during the night.

3.       Working strange hours means there will be depressing days where you enter and leave work in pitch darkness.

4.       Puffer jackets are the go-to winter garment for Parisians. This doesn’t really impinge on your life, but they’re just so ugly.

5.       Leaving your apartment to go and buy milk is the biggest excursion you want to make.

6.       You will wear variations of the same outfit every day for the whole winter. My go to was jeans (blue or black), boots (flat or heeled), black long sleeved top (I have about 7), woollen jumper (I have the same in two colours), coat (I alternated black and grey), hat and scarf (I rotated 3 sets). They say you have to suffer to be beautiful. I can assure you I did neither.

7.       Unless your friends come and watch bad TV with you, you will not see them.

8.       Date night = making plans to go out for wine and dancing, but actually staying in bed with tea and Gossip Girl.


9.       Eating everything in your apartment in lieu of actual entertainment.   

Friday 9 January 2015

Paris under Lockdown

It’s 6PM, and I’m walking home to the Latin Quarter after meeting a friend for coffee. We met in a café close to Les Halles, and did a little vintage shopping in the Marais. There’s a baguette tucked under my arm. To all intents and purposes, this is a normal day, but there are many signs that life is far from normal here in Paris.

To begin with, there are the sirens. A near constant stream of them, every ten minutes or so since the morning of the 7th of January, when the initial attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices occurred.  Often, they fade into the background, just another aspect of noisy Parisian life. As my friend notes, “it could just be a robbery somewhere”. But the numerous convoys of police cars, including many plain-clothes cars (and even, in a bitterly humourous moment, an ordinary bus topped by a comically small blue flashing light), would indicate otherwise. Whenever one goes past, people look up from their newspapers and phones, trying to guess where it is going and why. Any one of them could mean a new attack somewhere, one that they haven’t found out about on Twitter yet.

In a city on lockdown, with four separate surprise attacks in the space of three days, there’s a constant sense of suspense, a morbid “where next?” Most people check the news more compulsively than ever before. If they’re like me, they assess the distance of each new attack from their home, and the homes of their loved ones. Each day brings new and tragic news, another blow to the city of Paris.

Life continues normally for the most part. People here have no choice but to continue with their working week, not cower in fear in their homes. There are, however, constant reminders of the danger of the situation. Drinking wine with my girlfriends at Trocadero, our giggles are silenced as a group of at least 20 gendarmerie walk by, blank-faced, glinting rifles poised for action. Exiting the metro at Châtelet, I can feel the armed soldiers assessing my face, my walk, my bag, for signs of suspicion.  Entering a museum, I’m met with a brusque “spread your legs”, and I’m frisked and scanned.

A local student I spoke to said “I was with two Muslim friends, and when we changed trains at Republique, 5 policemen stopped us, searched us, and asked for our IDs. I didn’t have mine, so they ran my name through the database to ensure I wasn’t wanted.” It may be of interest to note that I, a Caucasian female, was not stopped by the police at Republique the previous evening. France’s polarised religious tensions, which already run so high, have been reignited by the week’s events. Three attacks on Muslim places of work and worship happened yesterday, and the hashtag “Je Suis Ahmed” was created in solidarity. Whether anti-Muslim, anti-Islamist or pro-Muslim, everyone has a point of view on the issue.

There’s a sense of constant suspicion, but also of defiance: huge banners are placed on buildings and monuments, posters have been stuck up over regular adverts, social networks are inundated with posts, all reading the same three words: Je Suis Charlie. You only have to turn on the news to see the worldwide protests, but here the sentiment is tangible. On the other hand, there is a backlash quietly simmering away. Although a million copies of the magazine will reportedly be published next week, questions are beginning to be asked – quietly, not wishing to be unpatriotic or condone the atrocities – about whether Charlie Hebdo’s satire was an appropriate expression of free speech, or an outlet which took the joke too far and caused serious pain, for example, by mocking the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram or portraying France’s black Justice Minister as a monkey. 

Now that the three original suspects, and today’s gunman, have been apprehended, the drama seems to be over, and the people of Paris are taking time to mourn. As I walked home, the bells of Notre Dame were ringing out, and people stopped to listen, or to sit quietly and contemplate what had happened. Yesterday was a national day of mourning, with flags tied up with black ribbon, the Eiffel Tower’s light extinguished, and all government-run Twitter feeds marked with a black band in their icons. Paris’ celebrated joie de vivre is subdued. As the sun set over Paris, there was a sombre feeling in the air, but an assurance that France will never back down in the face of barbarity. As professed in a statement from French President Franҫois Hollande : "Nous sortirons encore plus forts. Vive la République et vive la France." *


* “We emerge from this even stronger. Long live the Republic and long live France.”




Wednesday 7 January 2015

#JeSuisCharlie




















#JeSuisCharlie

Today has been a dark day for Paris: gunmen bursting into the offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and opening fire, killing 12 and injuring 7. At this moment, Paris is on lockdown and the perpetrators are still armed and in hiding. A debate has arisen about the freedom of the press, and protests are taking place all over the world to mourn the victims and condemn the attack. I attended the key protest, in Place de la République, this evening. Truthfully, I’m a fraud. I set out in a voyeuristic capacity, not to make my voice heard but to see the drama for myself. Trumped up on my own ‘Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin’ sense of adventure, I was quickly knocked down a peg or two by the tangible nature of the danger. Paris is currently on its highest possible terrorism alert, and most people are voting with their feet and staying indoors. The streets were practically empty. At every metro stop, I’d catch a snippet of an announcement that was being made “...La prefecture de police...” but the doors would close before I heard the rest. Only when the train glided slowly through Richard-Lenoir station, doors remaining firmly closed, did I realise that the station was on lockdown due to “raisons de securité” (read: terrorist threat). And the amount of police officers, both uniformed and plain-clothes, at Place de la République made me unsure as to whether I should feel safe, or stupid for venturing out in the first place.  

The crowd itself, spilling out around the square’s monument, was divided into two halves, which seemed to reflect the two sentiments of the protest itself: grief at the massacre of the victims, and rage at the stifling of free expression. The far side was muted, contemplative, reverent. Faces and quotes of the victims were posted on the monument and there were candlelit shrines. The people had come not to shout, but to mourn, and to process the events of the day.  The people weren’t just rebellious students but Parisians from all walks of life. As many people have noted before me, nothing brings the French together like a manifestation. On the other side, the side with the TV cameras trained on it, there was a crowd of students on the monument itself, shouting catchy chants and clapping their hands, very aware that they were the centre of attention, teenagers taking selfies, pretty girls hanging around hoping to be interviewed, and reporters all searching for the poignant photograph to accompany their piece (In under a minute, I heard both “Je cherche un source de lumiere” and “Pardon, can I take a photo of your candle?”). It was easy to be cynical, to wonder whether the crowd was here to defend the freedom of the press, or simply to be mentioned in it. As one bypasser noted of the protest’s most ardent shouter, “How can a 16 year old know about the freedom of the press?” The young woman in question seemed drunk on the experience – but was it a desire for social justice, or publicity, that fuelled her fire?  


While I was there, playing at being a journalist (and ultimately failing, what with my stunning point-and-shoot camera and blog), I came to see the ugly side of it all: while citizens were coming together, genuinely mourning and expressing fury, the place was swamped with reporters taking photos and looking for their story’s angle. You can’t fail to see the irony in the situation: that the sincerity of a protest in favour of press freedom was corrupted by the presence of the press itself.



N.B. I arrived at the protest later on in the evening, not when it reached its peak at around 8pm. 


Monday 1 December 2014

Terrible Food Photography: A Celebration

Most of you probably don't realise just how small my apartment is. My 'kitchen' makes the Little Paris Kitchen look like Versailles, and it's difficult to whip up a gourmet feast when your cooking options are limited to one hot plate, a toaster, and a miniature oven. I consequently get very proud when I actually cook something edible, and like to send lots of mundane photos to my bestie with the caption "Look, I made this!". The food's not always bad, but the photography is. Think of all those wonderful artistic food photos you see on Instagram, then look at these ones. I like to think of it as a celebration of bad food and worse photography. The culinary equivalent of un-Photoshopped celebrity pictures, and a reminder of how far you can come with a 10 square metre apartment. Hey, I haven't caught food poisoning yet.

"I bought a toaster today. See burn marks."


"My zeal for mozzarella made my omelette haemorrhage"


"I actually bought some vegetables. I am a grown up."


"I got so excited about making apple crumble that I started eating it before I even took the photo"


"This is not what the Buzzfeed Food picture looked like"


"All of the ingredients came from a can"


The Little Paris Kitchen: your dream, my nightmare.

The Only Treadmill I'm Close To Getting On

It has been FOREVER since I've written a post. But I've been busy (and boring). So shoot me.

I can't go on pretending that my life is more interesting than yours. Yes, I am in Paris, and therefore it will always have a romantic sheen, and it's a lot easier to do exciting things at the weekends, but for the most part life just continues: I work, I go to school, I see friends, I eat (infinitely more than I should. My friend coined the term "Frenchman fifteen" to describe the ubiquitous and almost mandatory weight gain), and sometimes I do cool stuff in the city I call home. C'est la vie. But life here isn't crammed to the rafters with enough adventures and escapades to fill a weekly blog post on my social life alone. And what's more, this blog runs the risk of turning from a cynical albeit unoriginal gap year chronicle to a treadmill of my terrible photos of Paris. I write, I do not photograph. There are lots of tourists here with swanky DSLR cameras and tripods, and I can assure you, their photos of Paris are much better than mine. So my intention for the future is to write more about the city itself, what it's really like to live and breathe here (answer: cramped and polluted, but awesome neanmoins), rather than giving my few readers a rundown of my uneventful social life. Ca a l'air bien?  




...Next time. This is the obligatory "what I've been doing with my life in the past month" post (my mum would be very disappointed otherwise). So here is:

Some Cool Stuff I Did (But Can't Be Bothered To Write About At Length)


Went for a ramble with a friend from my old neighbourhood. We rambled so far that we ended up on the outskirts of Paris and had to rapidly ramble back in again. We also ate omelettes and whinged about French men, but I think you had to be there, really.


Spent an extremely touristy day. We started off by going up Notre Dame (correction: we started off by queuing up for an hour for the privilege of going up Notre Dame), which was completely worth the wait for the view and the architecture. I got to show off as we all pointed out where we lived to each other, and I live a 5 minute walk from the cathedral. We then walked along the Right Bank to Jardin des Tuileries before finishing our day at the Christmas market on the Champs-Élysées, which I can only describe as hell on earth. Enforced cheerfulness, no! I'm English, for Pete's sake! 


    Experienced my first Thanksgiving. And it was an experience. Pumpkin pie = delicious. Old and new friends = another reason to be thankful. Eating sweet potatoes cooked in butter and sugar topped with marshmallow as part of a savoury meal = this is why you can't have nice things, America. I've also been told to refer to it as "Turkey Day" rather than Thanksgiving, because conscientious Yanks are no longer so thankful about that time they committed genocide. Weird.  


    Felt like an actual Parisian for a whole ten minutes. Walking to meet un jeune homme at Place Saint-Michel in my most "mais, c'est trop simple!" Parisian outfit, I was asked for directions, in French (and could actually give them!) on two occasions. One of the people called me Madame rather than Mademoiselle, which was simultaneously awesome and horrifying. 



    One day, I'll be able to write insightful and witty social commentary. But for now, enjoy my crap photo of pie.