À nous deux maintenant!

It is already the end of my first week in Paris.  Probably I ought to have known that I would not have time, nor be calm enough, to produce any prose pretentious enough for this blog's pretentious title before now! 

 It is exhausting to arrive in an unfamiliar city: bus tickets and pedestrian crossings hurl the newcomer into consternation.  He wonders what use it was looking up the French for 'anvil' when he can't ask for a filled sandwich on the top shelf.*  He makes a public nuisance of himself trying to see what everyone else does as they glide through ticket barriers, without going through himself.  He (literally) cannot get his head around looking in the right direction as he crosses the road.  However, the question mark hovering above my head is at last beginning to fade and I think I have recovered enough to record my first and raw impressions...

1. This is real! Here am I, not merely staying but living and (soon) studying in Paris!  The great slabs of parchment-coloured apartment blocks with their cast-iron balconies are real;  the broad straight corridors of the avenues penetrating through the city are real; and, outside the classroom and lecture theatre, the French language is real.                                
2. Some of what the British imagine about the French is actually true!  They really do carry baguettes down the street, for instance  (and who can blame them: heavenly manna or some other celestial panary essence falls daily from Heaven onto the shelves of a million boulangeries).  Another example is the proliferation of paperwork involved in the opening of a bank account (just in case any worldly riches come my way – one never knows!) which testifies to the famous French bureaucracy.  Motorists give the impression of making up the rules as they go along,  though I feel that Parisian driving is no more aggressive than London's for the greater reliance upon motorists’ discretion.
3. There is more graffiti in Paris than in London: a warning which drivers of pristine white vans should heed.
4. The French are not slaves to their mobile phones.  There are plenty around and in use, but in public they are no more evident than books or newspapers.
5. More people – and certainly more young people – smoke in Paris than in London. 
6. Plenty of time is taken over meals.  The sort of food which, in Britain, is beyond the powers of the average wallet and palate, is in France expected, duly received and savoured in the company of one's beloved, one's friend or one's newspaper.
7. The French language is supremely beautiful (and therefore deserves its own blog-post!).
8. There are moments of euphoria when I feel that France is better than Britain.  No!  No!  I didn’t mean that!  I think this the general effect of arriving in a foreign culture: that certain particularly noticeable novelties make the whole seem better or worse, even though it is always composed of the currents of goodness and corruption.  In the same way that turning a kaleidoscope produces a new pattern (that might be called better or worse) but does not alter its nature, the human condition is borne here in slightly different ways, in some ways better, in some ways worse, even though the human condition is invariable.

I shall write soon about Meudon, the town to the south-west of the city where I am living.  Here is a panorama of Paris from the Observatoire at the top of the town: visible are the Tour Eiffel, the Tour Montparnasse, les Invalides, the Seine and La Défense.  Eugène de Rastignac had a view like this (from the north-east) at the end of Le Père Goriot.  He too was a student unfamiliar with Parisian society (though he was also fictional): so like him I can say, ‘À nous deux maintenant!’

Click to enlarge... I Spy 20 points for each landmark.

*enclume (f).  One of these days it will come in useful, mark my words!