F Train to Paris

In which a Jewish family from Brooklyn moves to Paris, France for two years of work, school, and adventures.

 

Our Halloween party took place today, and E. and his 5-year-old friends (seven of them, plus one 7-year-old sister) had a great time. They came over here after having lunch in school (in France, public schools are closed on Wednesdays, and most private schools have a half day), got into their costumes, lined up for face paint, and then went wild.

We got them to sit still for a scary story and to bob for apples, then they ate their orange cupcakes, and did an art project. At that point, the party was only half over and all the activities were done! So they went wild again, playing upstairs on the landing with balloons, while the moms sat in the living room and talked.

Inevitably, the conversation turned to the usual subject: the French are both different and exasperating. The particular spin on the subject today was how annoyed one's downstairs neighbors get when one's children run around, and how they express their annoyance. (We are lucky in that no one lives beneath us.) This was amusing for a while, and then we became aware that the boys were throwing books at the girls. They were paperbacks (Goosebumps, so they were an appropriate choice for a Halloween party), so no serious damage was done, but once the girls began to come downstairs in tears, we had to break it up. As the party ended and the loot bags of imported American Halloween candy were handed out, the skies opened and it began to pour.

posted by: pariskleinmans at 20:23 | link | comments |

I walk around Paris every day, blogging in my head, but I rarely manage to get any of it down on paper, let alone actually post it here on my blog. So I hereby promise to try harder. Next week is the Toussaint (All Saint's Day) vacation--the kids have a week off from school--and we're going to Rome. After that I will become a more disciplined, regular blogger. I hope.

My washer and dryer, which haven't worked since September 1, are finally fixed, and my new refrigerator arrives tomorrow. I am beginning to feel like a human being again instead of a laundry drone, although with so much laundry to catch up on it is still my main occupation. But I hope never to have to visit the laundromat on the rue Bois le Vent again. Over the past six weeks Ralph and I have spent two hours doing laundry there every Sunday, with an extra trip for me at least once a week. A couple of times he even went to work late so he could help out with laundry, the darling. So for those who are jealous of our marvelous life in Paris, there's a dose of reality. In the past six weeks, I've been to zero museums, but I've spent an awful lot of time at the laundromat.

And my plans for the rest of this week are pretty uninspiring. Lots of errands, and some typical expat wife stuff. Today I gave myself a break and slept late to try to fight off a cold, while Ralph took E. to school. Then I went to a dance class, and in a few minutes I will go grocery shopping on my way to pick up E. Tomorrow is the refrigerator delivery and then literary salon in the afternoon, the last session of a series on Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. On Wednesday afternoon, I'm hosting a small Halloween playdate (being careful not to call it a party, for fear of someone feeling left out) for E. and about five of his American and British friends who feel Halloween deprived. On Thursday there's dance class in the morning, a ladies' lunch at a friend's house, and then a bake sale at E.'s school. (At some point in the week I'm baking cupcakes, and I foolishly volunteered to help serve the goodies to the kids in the afternoon.) Friday is the usual Shabbat shopping and cooking, which gets more intense every week as the days get shorter. Also, any last minute pre-trip errands will have to be done on Friday. Some time this week I need to squeeze in a haircut.

In short, life in Paris is like life pretty much anywhere else, except that sometimes you get a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe as you go about your business.

But here's a good example of how special life here can sometimes be. R., who is in 7th grade, went on an overnight class trip last week in connection with their study of the Renaissance. They went to the Loire Valley, where they visited a bunch of chateaux--Chambord, Chenonceau, Blois--and learned about the history of the period, the people who built the chateaux and lived in them, and the architecture. He came home full of enthusiasm and couldn't stop talking about everything they saw and did.

posted by: pariskleinmans at 11:57 | link | comments |

We did it--we survived the three-day marathon of Sukkot and Shabbat, and there are even a few scraps of food left in the house. Next week, we get to do it all over again!

This is the hardest time of year to be living away from our real home. We all miss our Brooklyn friends, and wish we could be spending the holidays with them. However, we did have a nice time today with some new friends, who we met at our Paris synagogue and who came over for lunch. We belong to the only Conservative synagogue in Paris. Most of the synagogues here (about 100, I think) are Orthodox, and there are a handful that are affiliated with the Liberal movement, which fits in somewhere between Reform and Conservative. But we feel most comfortable at Adath Shalom, which is the closest thing we can find to our home shul in Brooklyn, Kane Street Synagogue in Cobble Hill. It's about a 20-minute walk from our apartment, which means that when the weather is bad, or we're tired, or we come up with some other lame excuse, we don't actually go. Last year we went regularly in the fall, dropped off sharply when the weather got cold, and never got back in the habit in the spring. This year, we keep telling ourselves that the walk isn't so bad, and that we'll make more of an effort. But real effort required to become integrated, to get to know people, and since we're spending just one more year here, is it worth the effort?

This week promises to be insanely busy for me, between the incessant coffee mornings sponsored by the parents' associations of the boys' two schools, other PTA-related activities, and the final round of holiday shopping before Shemini Atzeret begins next Wednesday night. Last Wednesday I spent the entire day food shopping (actually, I did briefly attend a coffee morning first), filling my oh-so-Parisian shopping cart three times on three separate trips: first with vegetables, fish, and cheese from the weekly market on av. President Wilson, then with groceries at the supermarket; and finally with fruit and bread from the shops on our local market street, the rue de l'Annonciation. (The high point of the day ocurred when I arrived at the supermarket checkout with my full wagon, only to find that the store's entire computer system had suddenly gone down and none of the cash registers were working. I just couldn't face pushing a cart down the aisles of yet another grocery store, so I stayed and waited almost half an hour until they began to work again. People were amazingly well behaved, some even joking good naturedly with the checkout clerks.) I plan to try to spread my shopping over a couple of days this week, to avoid that insanity.

posted by: pariskleinmans at 19:58 | link | comments |