Three Cities - Munich, Lyon, Paris. A plane, a train, a bus. Warm brown, cool blue, cloudy grey. One friend leaving a place she has come to know as home, one in a limbo between leaving and staying, and one who has made her new city her home.
Paris
Barely 5 minutes on the night bus, and a man asked, 'Excuse me, could you move forward to sit wit that guy? My friend and I would like to sit together and there are no more double seats left.' I obliged, and sat with the guy just in front of me, while the man who had asked and his female friend sat behind us.
Mistake.
Throughout the bus ride, the two talked. And what conversations. The girl was obviously English, the guy was obviously French, and also quite obviously flirting with her. He told her that his different body parts could sense people's deepest emotions, and that talking to her made his heart feel like a rock. Then he pressed her for information about her parents, she told him about her Mum's depression when she was pregnant with her and after she was born. He tried to attribute it to her father, and suggested her father didn't show her enough love. She completely rejected that notion. Good for her. Then they talked about auras, and travelling, and pent up anger and writing.
When we stopped for a short break, and they got out to smoke, I looked at the guy beside me who gave an exasperated smile and said 'Those two...they don't shut up, do they?' When 'those two' came back on the bus, and started their conversation again, I had to bite my lip to stop myself from laughing when the guy beside me turned round and said 'excusez moi,' and then whatever the french is for 'would you please be quiet'.
His plea didn't work, but I did manage to get a couple of interrupted hours of sleep before we pulled into the Quai Bercy Bus Station in Paris, I picked up my suitcase and realised I didn't know where the metro station was. I began walking in the general direction of where everyone else seemed to be going, and was slightly surprised when someone asked me 'gfvskjng metro rgkbksgdns?' (the gibberish is because the someone asked me in french)
Also the someone was the noisy guy from behind me in the bus.
I told him I didn't speak French, but that I was also trying to find the metro station, and he asked in the ticket office for directions and offered to bring me there. (If he hadn't, I would have probably followed him at a distance close enough to keep up but far enough not to be creepy)
On the way, he asked where I was from and when I told him 'Singapore' he said he'd been. I asked him what he remembered of it and he said 'There was a girl. She broke my heart.' After listening to all his stuff about auras and how his heart felt like a rock to the girl on the bus, I almost couldn't take him seriously by that point. But I did reply, sort of. I said 'Oh,' and then changed the subject.
We got to the metro, and after buying tickets and going down to the platform, he asked me what my name was, and I asked him what his was - Antoine, like the author of The Little Prince. He asked if we could keep in contact on facebook, but at that point my train came, so I said 'Sure, if you can find me,' as the doors closed. He hasn't found me.
I got to Pasteur station early, and having received a text from Hannah saying her bus was delayed, and being cold and seeing no Simren at the station, I decided to find Simren's place on my own. I figured that since it was a straight walk one way from the station, if Simren came down to find me she'd have to walk past me anyway, in which case I could save her some walking.
I found my way into her apartment complex, up in a lift with a folding door and outside her apartment door. There were two doorbells, and after a brief dither I pressed the top one, 'brrring', and heard a muffled commotion and padded footsteps and Simren pressed herself out, gave me a big hug and told me that everyone was still asleep and I had pressed the doorbell that sounds in the whole house.
Oops.
We sat in the kitchen and talked for a while, about how she's settling into Paris, and then remembered that Hannah would need picking up from the station, so we walked down, found her, and we all sat in the kitchen with hot cups of tea and talked for about three hours, as quietly as possible to avoid the sleepers. (The sleepers were Simren's house mate Siril, her boyfriend Connor, and the residual dregs from a party they'd had two nights ago - Oskar and Sam.)
I went out to wash up and change, and walked past blonde hair blue eyed Oskar smoking out of the window. Embarrassed about waking everyone up, I sort of scurried past and slipped into the bathroom without speaking to him. After we'd all got ready, I met Connor in the kitchen and we talked for a while about WOOFing, something I really hope to do, perhaps in Easter or Summer.
Hannah, Simren and I went for a long walk - from her place to a croissant shop nearby, then to the Jardin du Luxembourg, where Hannah and I had been in the summer of 2015. They are much greyer and more bare in winter, and I had to remind myself in my mind's eye what they look like when the sun is shining and children and playing with boats in the pond. It reminded me of how I had the impression of Hyde Park as a dreary and dismal place, having only been to it in the drizzle, until I went there in summer with Nat and realised how beautiful it actually is.
I was due to meet Weixin for lunch, and found her at the Hotel d'Ville metro station with the rest of her family as well. We ate at Hank Vegan Burger, and it was probably the best vegan burger I've had (I know I say this every time I eat a burger but they just do keep getting better!) I had my burger with fig jam and a thick layer of melty vegan cheese, because that was the closest I was going to get to a cheese platter in Paris!
I met Simren, Hannah, Connor, Sam and Oskar at the Republique station, after waiting for a while and trying not to fall asleep whilst reading A Journal of a Plague Year. Trying not to fall asleep because every time I shook myself awake and looked around me, there was a man on my right looking at me with a menacing grin as if once I did fall into sleep's clutches he would pounce and eat me up.
We took the train to a place where we were supposed to see one of the best sights of Paris, but it was such a cloudy, drizzly day that we didn't see much, but the rotating light of the Eiffel towel beamed round like the Eye of Sauron.
Then we went to a bar, and on the way there Sam told me about Orwell's novels - Animal Farm, Homage to Catalonia and 1984. Having read Animal Farm and 1984, and bits and pieces of The Road to Wigan Pier, I want so badly to read more Orwell (Summer 2017 plans) starting with Homage to Catalonia, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Down and Out in Paris and London.
We stopped to get some spices on the way back in a small shop where the spices were kept in sacks and wooden drawers (I imagine that is how Simren always shops, with the little back alley independent hawkers who over time become her friends, never in the impersonal shiny alleys of a superstore) and then headed back home. Simren and Connor parted from us to find Lebanese bread, so we went back to the apartment first, and also let in a cat which seemed to find that terrain familiar for it automatically curled up on the sofa and submitted to stroking.
Over dinner, Sam, Siril and I got into conversation about colour after I mentioned how difficult it is to describe 'cold'. I was delighted that someone shared my interest in colour and sound and sense - and who knew about the 'wine dark sea' and the two blues of the Russian language. I almost felt we shared as secret, although across the table Hannah said our conversation was too intellectual.
Then we watched Planet Earth II, then we went to bed. Then we rose into another cloudy day, and walked cloudy streets again. But I suppose that is the thing about Paris this time, and oddly despite not doing as much, and the city not being as 'pretty' as it was in the summer I was here first, I found myself falling into a unexpected attraction to it.
Walking in a city with no particular notion of where you are going, but with someone beside you you love and trust - there is a sense of expectancy tempered with timelessness and perpetual now. In Cambridge I have a notebook dedicated to the future - I write down plans, 8.30am to 9am breakfast, 9am to 10am read The Waves, a programme my life to detail it cannot follow but which provide a written surety that there is something to be done and there is a motivation to do it. But that programming means the future is certain, set, six years bond. It means spontaneity is hushed, experience is tempered with anticipation. But when you have no plan but to put one foot before the other, something awakens. Nothing is boring because nothing is in a state of stasis or waiting for the next thing. The thing is the now is you and the grey stain of chewing gum on the pavement and the iron taste of blood when you bite your lip one time too many, and conversations about Mali, and the rattle of spices in a pull out drawer, and the gradient on an artist's painted mug.
We walked to a big graveyard - talking about timelessness, what better way than to remember eternity? Death is eternity for me - and tried to find Oscar Wilde's grave, bumping into two men who were trying to find Jim Morrison's grave. Wilde's grave had a glass panel before it, which was covered in lip stick stains, and the words 'The Dandy' scrawled on it in pink. Flowers strewn inside. Mum frowned and said it was a defacement when I showed her a picture, but I think that if he'd been alive, he'd have rather liked it.
For some reason as we walked out of that graveyard, I grew warmer and warmer and took off first my coat, then my jumper, craving the whispers of wind through the wool sweater I had on underneath. Perhaps it was midwinter madness, for Hannah and Simren were cold. But I wanted be bare for whatever was floating through Parisian air (and in truth I was warm).
We found a little bar, and drank tea (except for Hannah, who had a mocktail - alcohol is bad for the voice) and left. Connor was craving noodles, so we went to the nearby Thai restaurant and I had my first green curry.
The next morning, we had blue skies for the first time in Paris, but also knew that the clouds were saying goodbye. We went to the market, I was given one roasted almond by a smiling vendor. I dropped my metro ticket in a tray of paprika. We picked out clementines, potatoes, carrots. And then, like the women in A Thousand Splendid Suns who banished all men from the kitchen for the bonding ritual of cooking, Hannah, Simren and I roasted the sweet potatoes, made guacamole, tossed salad and danced to Bollywood songs like the carpet-tearing parties of our childhood while Connor stayed in the lounge, barred from our frenzy of nostalgia.
Lunch was more refined, the roasted vegetables, salad and guac, with a taste of lebanese bread dipped in olive oil and za'atar. Then we had to leave, not before one last walked round the block.
The metro took longer than we thought, but we got on the coach in time, and drove back under skies scratched with luminosity and I wondered how artists captured light in painting.
“Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.”
― Isabelle Eberhardt
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