Paris Journal: Heureux qui comme Ulysse
May 22As the school year grinds to its inevitably rushed and sleep-deprived end, droves of American students are spending their last 40 euros on a taxi to Charles de Gaulle Airport. And after spending the better part of a year in France, it's the final few weeks that crystallize the nebulous notions of home and abroad. The idea of home is, after all, no simple matter of geography. Home is a dropping of defenses, a feeling of release. For as every expatriate, immigrant, emigrant and study abroad student knows, an adopted country is seen through a special lens that magnifies differences - good and bad. Unfamiliar odors on the street, for example, can seem charmingly exotic - or intensely disgusting. And the whiff of a familiar cooking smell can transport one across oceans. Since food is inextricably tied up with culture, comfort, and family, its power to relieve what the French call le mal du pays (homesickness) is profound. Finding familiar foods when abroad can take on the character of a quest. My American friends and I have happily overpaid for pancakes with butter and syrup in a place called Breakfast in America in the fifth arondissement. The same meal would have cost a third as much at IHOP, but the International House of Pancakes seems not to have a Paris franchise, oddly enough. Still, we ate our overpriced pancakes with a sense of gratefulness - relief, even. Another friend has conducted a rigorous months-long search for authentic cheesecake in France only to conclude that no such thing exists. A cursory search of several ex-pat websites reveals that she is not the only stranded American frantic for cheesecake. There is an American foods grocery store in Paris, but the prices are a cruel joke: five euros (six dollars!) for Skippy peanut butter? The American embassy should protect its citizens from such scandalous profiteering on necessities like chocolate chips. Of course, Americans' burden is light in this respect: our culture has infiltrated deepest jungle and darkest tundra; all but the most remote corners of the globe. Have you ever been to a country where you couldn't order a Coca Cola? (In France, Coke usually costs more than wine, which does seem rather through-the-looking-glass.) Another odd aspect of living abroad is having one's interior and exterior lives take place in two different languages. It is strange and disorienting to have my English-language daydreams interrupted by a stern professor asking a French-language question. When these two linguistic worlds collide, the result is often unintelligible - a personal patois comprehensible only to other members of the same liminal universe. This universe can be quite pleasant when populated with agreeable characters, which explains, no doubt, the popularity of expat caf?©s. But it's stepping out of the caf?© and into the street where one's otherness is felt, for there are cultural gateways that sometimes seem impossible to pass: proper use of the formal and informal versions of the second person, for example, and how and when to faire la bise, the double kiss on the cheek that accompanies greetings in France. Even seasoned expats can be thrown by an unexpected double bise, or a handshake in a professional situation. But the experience of being an outsider at least engenders a certain generosity toward foreigners in one's own native land. I thought as much when I spoke recently with a French student who was considering studying at Tufts next year. Her first question naturally addressed the question of food, so I described Tufts' dining halls in what I thought was a favorable light. Waffle night! Pizza every day! She looked horrified. "But can you find a good French baguette?" she asked. (I couldn't have scripted it any better.) But then I thought of my soul-wringing desire for pancakes and looked at her with what I hoped was a sympathetic expression. The girl had le mal du pays already, and we were chatting in a caf?© in the Saint Germain des Pr?©s. "Prepare to be disappointed," I said, "in the coffee and the bread." (And the cheese and the pastries and the wine, now that I think of it.) The next day, I asked my American friends what they would miss and wouldn't miss upon returning home. Several themes emerged: they'll miss the coffee and the bread, of course, but also the myriad of little things that make Paris unique and different than what they might otherwise call home. "I'll miss the quaint cobblestone streets but not the dog [crap] they're covered in," said my friend Jessica. "I'll miss the pastries but not the vulgarity of the men on the street," said my friend Lucy. Indeed, few - if any - American girls will miss having French men hear our accent and ask us if we "know ze French kiss." The rising sense of anticipation of returning home was perhaps best captured by the 16th century French poet Joachim du Bellay, though he lived in an era before airplanes, high-speed trains, or the automobile: Happy is he, who like Ulysses, has made a fine voyage, Or like he who has won the Golden Fleece, And then returns, experienced and knowledgeable, To spend the rest of his life among his kin! Or, in the words of the Anglophone writer Oscar Wilde, Paris is where all good Americans come to die. So I guess I had better get out of here.
