Terrible Love

They wanted to separate us. They have brought us together.

"We don't need to go into work if we're afraid because of the raid" came the message in our intern-WhatsApp-group. I had just woken up and was unclear what the others where talking about. What raid? Where? And why would I not go to work because of a raid? Huh? Turns out they were talking about the raid by police in Saint Denis yesterday, during which the cousin of the alleged mastermind behind Friday's attacks blew herself up and numerous others were apprehended or killed. 

Friday night I had met some friends near the Centre Pompidou for drinks and dinner, and just as we were deciding on pizza or thai food a message came through about there having been attacks at the Stade de France. I didn't even know really that a football game was happening, so I thought it might just be soccer violence. The others whipped out their phones as well and as the news began getting progressively worse and the sirens of police vans increased we all decided to head home. Once there, I spent the rest of the evening with the couple I am staying at, all glued to the TV and watching as the death toll went steadily up. Friends kept messaging if everything was ok, that they'd just heard the news. When the death toll reached 80 people and the siege in the Bataclan was still ongoing, I decided to go to bed, that this could only get worse.

Change. Love. 

The next morning I woke to dozens of messages and Facebook asking me if I was safe. It was strange to find out that we had been to one of the restaurants, Le Petit Cambodge, a few weeks ago because it features on a Buzzfeed list of places to eat at in Paris. Or that at 19 I had been to the Bataclan to see TV on the Radio, or that friends couldn't get home because the whole area had been cordoned off.

I packed my bag and walked to work, thinking that the thesis waits for no terrorists. The Marais, usually brimming on the weekends, was empty, the city deserted. Somehow, after unusually sunny November weeks winter had come in this night of terror. At a pedestrian crossing a siren could be heard approaching and for a split-second the man next to me and I looked at one another, a moment of dread in thinking "what has happened now?".

Fight hatred with this thing we call love. 

Even at work somehow I could get nothing done, sifting through report after report on what had happened. A friend was at the office as well, recounting how he'd been in the 11th and how they'd remained in a restaurant until the early hours of the morning, telling morbid joked to pass the time. People were posting #PrayForParis and changing their FB photo to the Tricolore whilst others were critiquing that the Beirut bombings had been ignored and that the whole attack was because of an extreme belief in one religion. On Instagram, "430 million interactions–that’s posts, likes and comments–were created in these first 24 hours, with people in more than 200 countries participating".

Saturday we were supposed to go to a concert, now cancelled, so we gathered at a friend's place, ate together and drank wine while discussing the events. Somehow after tragedy strikes one needs others to make sense of how this could happen, after 9/11, after Charlie Hebdo, after increases in security. Who was behind all of it? And what was the aim?

The Other is your friend.

Sunday marked the beginning of a certain defiance in the city of being told to remain indoors, of being afraid of when the next attack might come. The sun was shining and everyone was out, walking on the banks of the Seine, talking and laughing. For the past week, I have seen the same spirit in the roads of the city: people in cafés, people in restaurants; a father explaining during an interview to his young son that they might have guns but that we have flowers, and that flowers will always be stronger; graffiti stating that this event has brought us closer together; and an article by Andrew Street following the words of Vonnegut in stating "if we fight each other, we create fresh hells for ourselves. The enemy can only win if we do the fighting for them. We're a whole lot smarter than that. God damn it, we've got to be kind".

On Monday, the office had a general meeting to discuss the weekend's events and ask if anyone wanted to say anything. It was odd and awkward, thinking that anyone would want to talk about their feelings in front of 30 colleagues. Instead, people stood in office doors and huddled over lunch, explaining where they were on Friday and whether they knew of anyone who had gotten hurt. Some were saying that the Charlie Hebdo attacks earlier this year felt markedly different, because one could easily say "That has nothing to do with us, that is not our fight". But now, it was an attack on society itself and the values it guards most closely. It was an attack on the freedom to go have a beer after work on Friday or see the prostitution exhibit at the Musée d'Orsay or enjoying a night of head-banging with your friends. This time everyone was affected because it was a terror that goes against our very way of life.

Perhaps because of this life goes on. People are opposing statements against this being "the fault of the refugees" or "the muslims" or other hateful thoughts that creep in and make you not see the other as human and equal and as having the same rights as you. People seem to be wanting to be kind, because despite the governments bombing ISIS and the media whipping itself into a frenzy, there is no way other than trying, at the very least, to be kind.

The silence of pain is at times stronger than the cry of hatred. 

Ich will keine Schokolade

There are essential choices to be made in life.
Cats or dogs.
Pants or skirts.
Blond, brunette, red or black (or any other colour, really).
Vanilla or chocolate.

Today, we chose chocolate, all the way.

The day started out with a marvelous sunset above the city roofs before heading into the Musée d'Orsay an hour before opening to see the Misère et Splendeurs exhibition again, this time without the masses and the space to notice the details or contemplate with the other interns the practicality and positioning of a special intercourse chair made for a corpulent king whose name I can't recall but who was a frequent visitor to the higher-end Parisian brothels before being crowned. In glass counters we discovered century-old condoms, business cards for the ladies of the night touting Swedish massages and multilingual abilities as well as small pamphlets for brothels that look identical to the ones handed out now also in the North of the city for marabouts that can cure any ailment.

A rare sight: the Musée d'Orsay, empty. 

Manet's Olympia, where no photograph could do its beauty justice.  

From the exhibition we headed across the Seine to Angelina, an eatery famed for its hot chocolate and Mont Blanc patisserie. By coincidence (or rather Instagram scrolling) I had found @desserted_in_paris, a pâtissier who posts daily photographs of beautiful sweet indulgences. I started making a list of places to stuff my face at and Angelina happened to be one of them. The four of us ordered the hot chocolate and two pastries to share. Postcolonialist me shuddered at the calling a hot chocolate "L'Africain" or the one pastry a "Negresco", but this did not distract from pure chocolate overkill. The hot chocolate is basically melted dark chocolate in what I suspect to be half-and-half, with the Mont Blanc consisting of a mound of chestnut vermicelli resting on a meringue and cream base. The Negresco is the perfect combination of meringue, light dark chocolate mousse, dark chocolate icing and dark chocolate shavings to round it off. Had we not shared them I think I would have gone into a blissful but necessary chocolatey coma.

Sweetness!

Hot chocolate and Negresco. 

Their signature patisserie, the Mont Blanc. 

Right next door to Angelina is the Galignani bookstore, which focuses on art and fashion books and has an admirable English book selection at the back with two comfortable leather reading chairs. They have a copy of Ondaatje's The Cinnamon Peeler which I am waiting to buy at the end of my stay here, kind of as a reminder of this city and a reward for finishing the thesis (one can hope and pray and actually sit on one's behind to make this happen).

From there we trotted back reluctantly to sit at our computers and do menial work of unimportance.
What a day.

Girl

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec - Au Moulin Rouge (1892-95)

Until mid-January, the Musée d'Orsay is hosting an exhibition entitled Splendeurs et misères. Images de la prostitution, 1850-1910 which delves into the lives of prostitutes as represented in art in the early 20th century. The museum's employees were striking, so on the day that I went the museum was overrun with people. The prostitution exhibit was overcrowded and hard to enjoy as everyone bumped past one another. What I got from it was a) to return another day because what I did see was excellently curated, b) that black and white porn films from 1909 are awkward when viewed with about 40 other people with a median age of 60 and c) that in the past 100 years, things have changed as much as they haven't.

By coincidence I live in the area that the exhibition centres around. Montmartre housed most of the brothels and bars where the girls could work, as well as offering cheap housing for artists like Manet, Degas and Picasso. The exhibition also details the world of higher class escorts who catered to the extremely wealthy and mostly managed to marry someone with a title, thus ensuring their livelihood. But for most women, prostitution was what they had to do to survive: in addition to being washerwomen, maids or bar ladies, they had to supplement their income by selling their bodies in order to survive in the city.

Now, a century later, the street between the Moulin Rouge and Anvers consists of sex shops and tourist stores. To the left of my door is the what seems to be the gay leather sex-wrestling outfits store, and to the right the dildo one. Then there is the Sexodrom with various floors (and their are urgently looking for a sales person, judging by the sign that I have walked past daily in the last weeks). All of them somehow have signs that just read 'Sex', so I am not sure about the specific customers that they cater to. It can't just be tourists that get lost on their way from the Sacre Coeur to the Moulin Rouge. These shops must survive because there are actually enough people buying 50-Shades-of-Gray branded handcuffs and pleather suits and porn on DVDs.

There is a certain seediness to it all. As with the red-light districts of other cities, it seems like something to poke fun at, something where tourists can enter and as a joke buy a little somethin-somethin. But just as in the 1900s there must be a social and cultural undercurrent now that accepts the need for prostitution. What is that need though? Is sex really a need, something that should be pencilled into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or added to the Ten Commandments or whatever system of belief it is that humanity adheres to? What are the implications when ever increasingly the body comes at a price? And here, I am not just talking about literally paying for the sexual services of a person, of money exchanging hands. No, what are the consequences of when social media become sexual media? As much as apps such as Grinder, Tinder and here, adopte un mec (jip, "adopt a guy") are used to simply connect with other (mutually interested and interesting) people, one cannot deny that most of them are also used as hook-up apps.

I find it all disingenuous. Everyone searching for easy accompaniment, for no-strings-attached, for emotional uninvolvement and not knowing anothers names, and yet everyone somehow seeming so damn lonely all the time.

Sugar

For a while there everyone seemed to be talking about food trucks, with it culminating in the food-truck-film Chef about a chef losing his restaurant job and going on the road throughout select cities in the US. The only time I remember eating something truckishly was a childhood holiday to the Virgin Islands, where we stopped to grab the best frozen yoghurt ever from a turquoise caravan. All I can remember is hundreds of hundreds-and-thousands, which at that time equalled happiness.

However, this gaping hole in my foodie history was filled last week as we first went to Le Food Market, located between the Metro stations Menilmontant and Couronnes. Various sellers offer dishes from all over the world and in between the food stands there are benches to sit at and enjoy your meal. The aim is to make the market a monthly event and to promote good quality food at reasonable prices. All of the dishes were priced between 6-12€, which is about equal to what you would pay for a 'petit plat' at lunchtime in a restaurant.

We queued at the Cafe Chilango to get tacos filled with beef and chicken, and one of the girls had a burger from Burgers de l'Amour. We also grabbed some pasteis de nata for breakfast the next morning before heading to the absolute highlight: the ice-cream rolls. I had seen videos online about people on an Asian vacation (Thailand perhaps? I can't remember exactly) getting ice-cream rolls. Luckily, the trend has travelled to Paris so BOOM ice-cream rolls at Le Food Market. You choose your flavour (chocolate-pear, thank you kindly), which gets squirted in different layers onto a freezing plate. By quickly scraping together and then spreading apart the mixture, the liquid becomes solidified quite quickly. The last step is then to said scraper to create four or five individual ice-cream rolls, which are then topped with either chocolate or caramel sauce and a choice of nuts or pralines.

I had expected the ice-cream to be more of a novelty and not necessarily to be particularly tasty. The assumption was that the rapid freezing would perhaps cause more ice crystals to form and thus the ice-cream to be crunchier than expected. It was not. It was delicious. Easy as that. Delicious. 

Saturday evening was spent at an actual food truck event, where the Carreau du Temple had local trucks outside and French-Korean food inside (in light of it being the French-Korean year). It was difficult to decide what to get, but I ended up with great grilled cheeses and L had a Mexican wrap. No ice cream this time though.

Most interesting is the astounding lack of vegetarian options at both events. Even the grilled cheeses only came in poulet or boeuf (chicken or beef), which I find a bit difficult. Certainly, one could probably ask for a vegetarian version (it's grilled cheese, so...), it was just rather evident that the majority of trucks and stands simply did not offer it on their menus. After bringing this up with the other interns, all of them agree that being vegetarian or vegan in France is much harder as products are difficult to come by and/or excessively expensive. Whereas in Germany one can easily find soy and other substitutes at more or less affordable prices, the supermarkets here rarely have soy mince or rice milk or whatever it is you'd need. Even the two vegans in the group are ordering steaks and burgers here, stating the lack of options both in the supermarkets and when going out. So for now I have entered into an uneasy compromise with myself: eating out means eating everything, eating in means meat-free dishes. I think the best solution to this would just be living off of ice-cream rolls.

I could drink a case of you darling/ I would still be on my feet

Paris is a filthy place. People living in a constant state of cramping: apartments are tiny, the metro is packed and the streets overflow with people, so even if this is big city living it should rather be called small space surviving. For now I live in a small studio on the 7th floor, which consists of two rooms. The one contains the bed and a small table, whereas the other has a shower, a sink and two stove plates. All you need, basically. Oh, the toilet is outside on the corridor and is shared between the 4(?) studios on this floor. The building sits between sex shops and small supermarkets near Pigalle in the 10th arrondissement. When I stand on a chair and look out of one of the windows I can spot the Eiffel tower in the distance. There is constant noise, even though I am at the back of the building: in my room itself the fridge makes alarm-like sounds whilst the electricity metre is an eternally spinning circular silver thing that sounds like an eternally spinning circular silver thing. Then there is the school next door whose electronic bell rings at strange intervals and the kids playing basketball on the court in the road behind the house. This cacophony is expanded by occasional squeals of a siren, hearing my neighbours through the walls and on weekends the music from the clubs in the area combine into an audible mess in the ever colder turning air.

First there was sound, and then there were the masses of people. MASSES of people. Endless streams of humans everywhere, always moving somewhere in haste. In a city of millions, the individual disappears. It is like an amoeba, swallowing up everyone into anonymity. Paris is a bit of a depressing city in this regard. All of living on top of one another and yet no one and nothing matters, all replaceable, all just cogs in a machine.

And yet there have been moments where the myth that is this city presented itself. On a bad day, as I was leaving the metro, a man on roller skates with ballerina lacing whizzed past. Another time, an Algerian man helped a woman from the French Antilles with her suitcases and after 6 metro stations they exchanged business cards. Another intern keeps buying a begging woman food for lunch. On Wednesday I walked to the Seine, met a friend for a McFlurry, and walked back. Yesterday we went to a food market and had rolled ice cream (ok, I like any type of ice cream, rolled, flurried, scooped...). Tomorrow there is the Anish Kapoor exhibit in Versailles. On Sunday the city is partially car-free. Last weekend the journées du patrimoine (cultural heritage days?) enabled anyone with an ID to get into the Élysée Palace (and other no-go ministeries and museums and and and) and check out the president's office (more on the 6.5 hours of queuing I'd like to get back in another post).

So despite a waft of urine on occasion hitting your nostrils, despite the millions of others trying to eek out a living here, despite excessively high costs and tiny spaces, well, despite all the negativity, I'd gobble it all up again, come back for seconds and even thirds. I'd drink a case of this place because nowhere else is misery this closely accompanied by magic.

I walk until

We ate Paris. There is no way around it. We turned the city of love into the city of a love for food.

It already started on the train ride to Hamburg: all I had were some delicious cherries and a chocolate flavoured milk, still bought the evening before in Denmark. The cold had not left Germany yet, so I was dressed warmly in jeans, sweater and leather jacket. Upon my arrival in Paris, the layers had to come off. Finally, it was hot.

The first night was spent reuniting with an old friend and her fiancé, in the city by coincidence. We bought a baguette and cheese (and wine), headed to the Ile de la Cité and sat down amongst Parisian youngsters also enjoying the heat, the river and some impromptu jamming on a guitar. B and JH and I just fell easily into old conversation, caught up on gossip and contemplated our futures. After having spent six weeks in Nantes shooting a TV series, both of them were ready to go home, and as she said it, be around 'our people'. By my mense. Another friend, also from SA but now in Toronto, posted something about how all we are is the communities we surround ourselves with. I don't know what it is, but we all seem to have a strong sense that were we are is not home. We long for long dinners that end in the kitchen at 4AM, for cheap wine, for boerewors and braais, for speaking Afrikaans, for fresh fruit that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, we long for our people.

But how do you reconcile wanting to be there with also wanting more than that? I don't miss the crime, I don't miss having to have a car, I don't miss enormous shopping malls and traffic and fear and poverty and politics and problems. Yesterday I went to a free film screening at the university and at 1AM cycled home all by my lonesome. The impossibility of this at home! This nomadic lifestyle is walking the line between missing home but knowing there are other choices one could make.

Choices like what to eat next, haha. The rest of the week was spent hanging out with my friend L. Even buying groceries together was a tiny adventure: we went to Lidl, but getting there involved walking through a couple of streets where it seems all the hair and nail studios of Paris have lined up. They cater for African hair, so we weren't really eligible for getting our hair done. But even more fascinating were the guys hanging out in front of the salons: fit young men with gold chains would approach women on the street to get their nails and hair done. What would the job description be? Hustler? Nail-pimp?In Lidl itself we were treated to the spectacle of an older couple (75ish) being accused by a younger lady of being inhuman, and then shouting at one another whilst the rest of the store looked on. Not a bad start to the week, I think.

Lidl lunch. 

Our culinary tour took us to L'As du Fallafel, which was a lot of garlicky sauce with a couple of fallafels tossed in a pita bread, and which L really liked and I really did not. After having stalked Jamie Oliver's head pastry chef on Instagram, I insisted on going to L'Éclaire de Génie, which has fabulous looking éclairs and barquettes with wonderful flavour combinations. L wanted some froyo instead, but as we found none in the Marais she settled for a McFlurry. I should have maybe saved my 7€ and gone for a McFlurry, too, since the berry barquette was somewhat disappointing.

There was a queue of 30 people at l'As du Fallafel, and at the place right across the street just one lady.

Éclaire de génie. 

We explored the Marché des Enfants Rouges (oldest market in Paris), which hosts an arrangement of food stalls, but as we were there rather early we didn't sample anything. Instead, we headed back to our quartier to get some ice cream at Baci Bisou, a place near the Quai St Martin. I got fleur de lait and noisette topped with Nutella and white chocolate (all in mofos), soooo good.

We tried some really terrible spring rolls (none of the Chinese eateries we saw make them fresh, they are pre-deep fried and then heated up in the microwave), some decent baguettes, some great pains au chocolat, a great Mars cheesecake at Berko and probably some things I can't remember right now.

Berko cupcakes

Food choice for other Fête de la Musique attendants quite obvious...

On Sunday night we were exhausted from the Fête de la Musique, and the place we had intended to go to was already closed. Instead we ambled into a Pakistani/Indian place called Sheezan which turned out to be the best thing we ate all week: the prices were incredibly affordable, the food authentic and well-spiced and it was a very comfortable atmosphere to eat in, almost like being in your mother's kitchen. Also, they had mango lassi, so I was pretty much sold from the get-go.

Sheezan

Mango Lassi

Lamb Korma

Our last supper was at a Mexican joint whose name I can't recall. They have a set meal where you can choose three different tacos or tortillas with a drink, or a burrito. The tortillas are either with maize-meal or normal flour, and were well proportioned. Sadly they got my order wrong, so instead of the tortilla with nopales and cheese I got mushrooms and cheese, but they were tasty nonetheless. I remember eating nopales (cactus leaves) only once before, when our gardener in Mexico showed us how to prepare them and made a delicious meal. I mean, it must be quite a feat to get an 8-year-old to like cactus leaves.

Viva Mexico cabrones.

It was good to be back in Paris, blanketed in anonymity, free to disappear among the crowd.

Paris (Aeroplane Remix)

Bonjour-eh.

Paper Aeroplane

Soft sunlight falls over the city, as though it were a late Free State afternoon and not an early winter's morning in Mzansi. The buildings are carefully folded origami, God playing Tetris badly with their arrangement. Row upon row of trains like tiny pieces of Lego. I try to spot the Nelson Mandela bridge, but we are already passing over Ellis Park Stadium. When the FNB Stadium appears, tiny from this height, I poke my neighbour and say: "Look, it's Soccer City!".

The silly man only replies that the one in Cape Town is prettier, and that we'll pay for these stadia for years. How can you not appreciate the view, Mr Suit? Johannesburg is saying Welcome Back, and you fail to acknowledge her beauty.

You see, I came home, yesterday. It was only one week, but it felt like time had stopped; it felt as though I had been given a time-out from my life just for a week. Here, the news regarding Zuma's painting was still the same, I had missed nothing at the university, and all the people were still exactly as I had left them.

But Paris also felt like going home.  I still know my way around. I still know how to surf the metro without holding on or falling. I still know where to get what I need. Seeing my friends again felt like I had seen them only yesterday, not two years ago. Getting on the plane back here felt like coming home and leaving it at the same time. Sure, Paris is not where my family is, where the house I call home is, where most of my friends live, or where I feel like I know every corner. But that city is not a stranger to me either. It is like being a perpetual tourist and being perpetually home-less at the same time; it is feeling a sense of belonging to more than one city.

The hello goodbye boys

My hangover has stolen any attempt at being very articulate from me. In a few hours, the plane and I will be heading north, so I'll see you in a week ( avec des cadeaux).

Ne me quitte pas

Oh yeah. This time next week I'll be in Paris. It is different from a holiday, because I have no need to go see the Louvre or the Sacre Coeur or climb the stairs of the Eiffel Tower. I just want to spend time with my friends, and smell a different air. I am so excited to sit in the Metro and watch people. Or to buy books which I cannot order here. Or to go to H&M. Or to eat a fresh baguette with the supercheap Mozzarella that floats around in a little bag on top. Or Kinder Pingu. It will be great. Greater than great. Awesome.

So excited. SO excited.