Place Republique
Two days ago it was bright and sunny and felt like winter might have cracked and spilled over into spring. But today it's cold and gray and wet. A normal January day in Paris.
I'm staying in the Place Republique, at the top of the 3rd Arrondissement, about a 20-minute walk from here to the river. In Paris, you have to know your Arrondissements, because that's how everyone knows where anything is. For example, the sales started a week ago, so everyone is shopping. My favorite shoe store was having a sale. Usually, I go to their store near the Place Vendome, in the 2nd Arrondissement. But that's where they had the clothing sale, and for shoes I had to go to their store in the 8th. The dreaded 8th.
I hate the 8th Arrondissement. I can easily spend a month in Paris and never set foot in the 8th. It's where the Champs Elysees and the Arche de Triomphe sit patiently among the throngs of waddling tourists wearing Hard Rock Café sweatshirts and eating Gauffres -- these sickeningly sweet waffles with cream oozing out from all sides. It's the Fisherman's Wharf of Paris. Yuck. But I have to go there because that's where they have the narrow shoes.
Very few stores in Paris sell narrow shoes. In New York, I normally get shoes at Faragammo, who makes B and C widths. They make them, but they don't sell them in Paris, at least not on the Rue de Foubourg St Honore in the 2nd. Europeans have wide feet, shaped like bricks - D and E widths. Americans have less wide feet, C and D widths. The only place you can get a B width is at a few stores in the 1st that cater to tourists. So I go, and the shoes are unbelievable and they're all on sale, so I try on every pair they have that fit. And the two salesmen in the store say what most salespeople say to me: That monsieur's french is very good. They always say that in a tourist store, because they're used to Americans who speak no french at all. In a retail environment, my french is quite workable. I may ask for help with a few words, but there's no question of having to revert to english. In normal conversation, however, I can't hold up my end because when the subject changes I'm lost. Also, French people aren't that good at slowing down, and normal-speed french is too fast for me. So they usually speak english with me if they can. My goal is to walk into a store someday and have them not say ANYTHING about how good my french is, but instead just converse normally without it being an issue at all. That's how I'll know my french is pretty good.
At the gym
The gym I joined is great. Thank god they don't allow smoking in the building, or I swear the French would sit on the machines and puff away. I've been taking some salsa classes, which require a good pair of new shoes, and which have way too many women for the few men that manage to show up. Unfortunately, the women are used to dancing with men who can't dance, so they usually lead me, rather than the other way round. I haven't been injured but it's much more fun when only one person is leading.
I've decided to stick around for another month. Not because of the chameleons, but because I am interested in the idea of buying a flat here. The chameleons arrived two weeks ago, from Morocco, in Sophie's pocket. She just picked them up in the market in a small box like you'd get Chinese food in, put them in her pocket on the plane ride home from Marrakech, and took them out after clearing customs. She got them because of the bonsai tree. Sophie is Cory's girlfriend. She's going to a French state school for diplomats and has just been transferred to Brussels for the "practical experience" portion of her education. She's working with the EU - very cool. Soon we will all have Euros (in two weeks, most of the French Francs have been sucked out of pockets, drawers, handbags, and mattresses, and replaced by these nondescript bills that are so politically correct you can't even play Liar's Poker with them).
So before going off to Brussels for six months, she went to Morocco with her family, and Cory asked her to bring back a chameleon for the bonsai tree. Cory is my friend in Paris. We met online about seven years ago, when the Internet was still up-and-coming and we were both building web sites. His multimedia company produced the CD ROM of The Little Prince and many other exciting titles that actually still sell in France (The interactive CD-ROM market in the US is mostly gone, having been killed by the Internet, but in France it's alive and well). And his current company produced Amazon.com’s number-one current bestselling e-book, a treatise by Noam Chomsky on the 9/11 disaster. What? You haven’t read an e-book yet? Well, you’d better get over to Amazon.com and check them out. So I often stay with Cory in Paris and he stays with me in San Francisco.
The Bonsai and the Chameleon
I gave them the bonsai tree as a present, and they love it. It's 25 years old, and it's shooting new leaves out all over the place. In about four more weeks, Cory and Sophie have to take it back to the Japanese guy to get their first lesson in pruning. Cory used to have a chameleon who lived in a potted plant once, and so he thought it would be a good idea to ask Sophie to bring one back, since you can get them easily in Morocco. So she brought them back. Their names are "The Big Guy" and "The Little Guy" -- we're afraid to give them real names until they eat, which they haven't. And that's the problem. They haven’t eaten in almost two weeks.
Chameleons live alone, at the tops of trees and bushes, where they eat live insects by snagging them with their long, coiled, projectile tongues. They turn whatever color their surroundings are, but they get dark spots if they’re upset or uncomfortable. They live happily in a little tree without running off. And they only eat live food, which is why we have a teeming terrarium full of worms and crickets. The worms are doing amazingly well. At the rate they’re doubling, there should soon be more worms here than there are atoms in the known universe. But the chameleons won’t eat them. They have to be live, so we lasso them with string and hang them like wiggling sausages from the branches of the bonsai tree, where the big guy happily resides. The little guy has his own potted plant, because they really don’t like to be near each other. They turn bad colors when they are in the same tree. But even though the worms are wriggling and even though we put them into the terrariums full of crickets, these polychromatic lizards won’t eat. I spend a good portion of my day wrangling worms with tweezers and thread, trying to hang something appetizing in front of the chameleons. The worms, hanging in various states of exhaustion, remind me of scenes from Pulp Fiction. I wish we could just get into a feeding routine that works, because I’m tired of throwing away the dead worms and re-rigging new ones. And that’s why we can’t name the chameleons, because we don’t know how long they’ll last without eating. They love taking showers and being warm and moist. But if they won’t zap a cricket or a worm, I’m afraid the bonsai tree will have to live its next 25 years alone.
And now the sad part. The big guy just wasn't eating and he wasn't going to make it. I could see that. So i put him in a small cardboard box, took him to the botanical garden, and dropped him off. To die. I couldn't kill him myself, and I'm sure he died within days. Even though it was more cruel, somehow it was the only thing I could manage to do. I got online and got advice from a number of people who helped me learn to feed the little guy, and the big breakthrough was getting him to drink water. Once we could do that, his appetite came back. He started zapping crickets and munching them happily. After Cory came back, the little guy did even better, so they named him Rufous.
Looking for a Pied-a-Terre
So I’m babysitting the bonsai and the chameleons, and I’m looking for an apartment here in Paris. I decided I’d look into buying a 2-bedroom place that I can rent to American tourists who come to Paris looking for something a little bigger than a $400/night hotel room. As it turns out, the market for such places is excellent – there’s plenty of demand, even at $350/night if you have a really nice place. So I’m looking for a really nice place in a really good location, and I’m learning that they’re really expensive (images of Homer Simpson saying his favorite word come to mind). I found one place right on the river that needs a complete renovation, and I’m doing the math to see if I might be able to make it work. If you know me you can imagine that I’ve already created a four-page spreadsheet to model the business down to the last detail. In fact, as usual, I’m quite proud of my spreadsheet and all its features (I’ll be happy to email a copy to anyone interested). If I could make as much money creating beautiful spreadsheets as I could renting apartments, I’d be in great shape. But you can’t sleep in a spreadsheet, and I can’t keep the line at the bottom from turning red, so I still have more work to do. Meanwhile, I’m spending a lot of my time with brokers and bankers, getting free french lessons because they don’t speak English. I realized there’s no need to pay for French lessons if you can just run around having semi-legitimate excuses to deal with French people all day. Plus, I get to see some amazing apartments that I can’t afford.
All in all, it’s been a great way to spend the last two weeks and probably the next four as well. In all of this -- lassoing worms and calculating repair expenses and tax schedules, going to the gym, trying to find decent vegetarian food, and trying to get my ankle back in shape, I’m pretty busy. With any luck, we’ll be looking for names for the chameleons pretty soon, and the worms won’t take over the apartment.
Ah, it’s 11am in Paris. I can tell because the junk e-mail from the US is starting to pour into my computer. Thank god I have a high-speed connection. I’ll be back around mid-February, just in time to get ready for skydiving camp in Florida. Then maybe I’ll write a novel called “The Bonsai and the Chameleon.” Hope your world is rotating smoothly.
From Paris,
David
