| Apartment
In Paris |
| Finding
A Place To Enjoy Your Time In Paris |
| By Will Sullivan |
| A French
friend of mine, Roget, once said to me that to experience France to
its fullest, you must live there, and not temporarily, but through each
season of one year to see how the country, the people and the language
change. Witnessing change is an important, if not imminent, facet of travel.
We don’t often
recognize that culture changes with the seasons, and why would we? Most
of our travel is temporary and those places where we choose make our homes
are often dulled by the unfortunate opiate of permanence.
To a European,
the notion of making a home elsewhere, as an experiment in adventure or
romance, isn’t as daunting as it is for an American. |
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| A great
deal of commitment and a certain blind leap of faith toward the eventualities
of living abroad, good and bad, accompany any decision be it rash and
impetuous or pragmatic and planned.
For many, this
leap simply isn’t possible.
However, there
are ways to experience the world in brief glimpses, to roll your sleeves
up and see first hand what it’s like to wake each day not to a vacation
but to those binding first moments of normalcy that compose routine of
living versus touring. All you need is a little time and the right space.
I say right, because it is possible to travel and find accommodation in
the wrong places, those that are cramped and drab; merely dwellings for
exhausted sleep, not bastions for immersion and discovery. For we often
forget that internal discovery is equally important external experience
when we travel.
So, what is
it to merely visit Paris versus the experience of living there and how
does anyone ever hope to find out without picking up and moving?The answer
is easier than you may think. |
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| You can live
in Paris during a vacation by abandoning the usual notion of staying in
a hotel, resort or guest suite and finding a home or an apartment to rent
for your stay.
I recently
took this plunge for the first time on a hunch that it would be superior
to my past experiences.
In my several
previous visits, I hadn’t been able to take full advantage of the produce
markets, the famous patisseries and charcuteries in the second, seventh
and eighth arrondissements, the deals on the cases of wine picked up during
the weekend jaunts to Champagne and Burgundy.
Cooking, eating
and drinking are never as intimate as when they become products of intimate
creation and while Paris is not without its endless bistros, cafes and
fine dining restaurants, which should be patronized to the fullest, I felt
cheated by the lack of intricacy in my tourist life. |
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Offshore Resources Gallery
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| Those around
me were wandering the markets with bags in hand, cooking with fresh ingredients
and taking up the great French national sport of sitting on le terrace,
with a cup of fresh brewed coffee, a warm croissant and a freshly printed
Le Monde while watching the grand procession of Parisian foot traffic.
This cannot be recreated in a hotel room, no matter the number of stars
associated with the establishment. It comes from lingering where life exists,
in homes, in dwellings, in building and neighbourhoods where those who
are not on vacation live.
Two colleagues
and I were conscious of this when we first began looking into staying in
Paris for a two-week journalism seminar. Hotel prices in late autumn
were affordable but when we factored in that we’d be eating out every meal
and that we’d have no way to wash clothes or store all the cheese we wanted
to buy, or cook bitter garlicky endive gratins to eat over crusty fresh
baguettes and chilled bottles of Rose for Sunday lunch, the cost of beds
and proximity alone seemed prohibitive.
In Paris, temporary
housing is endless and the prices fluctuate wildly in neighbourhoods throughout
the city. |
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| It can be
difficult to know where to start and disconcerting, often booking a continent
away, to be comfortable regarding where you end up. Luckily we stumbled
upon an advertisement for a house swap, placed by Erica Berman, an American
living in Paris for the past twelve years. While none among us had homes
with which to use as currency, we discovered that Ms. Berman operates a
business that provides apartment living, from bohemian to belle époque,
for extended stays in Paris. The prices were reasonable, the accoutrements
of home casually integrated into each property, and the chance to live
in Paris as Parisians do, enticingly possible. Ms. Berman was a model of
professionalism, treating us as personal guests rather than clients. We
were made instantly at home and provided with a local’s of glimpse of the
best bistros, markets and shops to patronize during our stay. In our first
day, we felt as though we’d integrated into the city, far from hotels and
postcards, distant from the uncomfortable notion of tourists. |
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Offshore
Resources Gallery
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| It was
possible, I know now, due to the nature of our accommodation.
The first
day in the apartment, I woke to a cool breeze and the sounds of church
bells ringing in a Parisian Sunday morning high above Montmartre. I rose
quickly in order to beat the morning rush to the patisserie, Au Levain
D'antan, at the top of the street, where the best baguettes and pain au
chocolate in Paris are still warm from the oven during the early hours
of the day.
The weather
was changing, and the wind picking up, blowing the last gasps of the
summer from the city and I clung tightly to my warm baked goods and stopped
at the market for fresh orange juice, a bit of goat cheese and freshly
ground coffee before rushing back to the flat to watch the sun rise fully
over the city. The rays shimmered off the golden dome of Les Invalides
in the distance, and the fresh herbs from the balcony garden swayed in
the warming wind. I knew then we’d made the right decision for our stay.
All of Paris;
the cafes, the food shops, the bistros, and the creperies winding through
the historic city suddenly came alive as cities do when you sacrifice yourself
to the intimate initiations of slowness.
Wandering
through the endless espaces vertes and magical arrondissements, pressure
to be or to do anything loosened, language came easier, and my cadences
slowed toward a home that didn’t feel temporary. Two weeks felt like a
year and as the leaves indeed began to fall on late September and the nights
grew noticeably chilly, I thought of my friend Roget and realized I was
seeing a true glimpse of one piece of the expatriate puzzle. For once you’ve
lived abroad for a time and learned to fall in love with foreign lands,
the sensation never fades and you consciously and unconsciously seek it
in every alley and avenue, of every destination.
I’m still intoxicated
by Autumn in Paris, the narrow streets, the clatter of activity, men in
suits and scarves with shopping bags in one hand and baguettes and purple
endive in the other; models, smoking at cafes in the fifth; beautiful women,
students of the esteemed university Sciences Po stopping into a store around
the corner from the school’s entrance to try on lingerie during a lunch
break; the caramel coloured leaves on green grass; and the smell of fresh
roasted coffee wafting above the cobblestones streets of Les Halles.
The French
do not say, I miss you, they say, Tu ma manqué, which means you
are missing to me. Thus, it is essence of nostalgia perfected in language.
For I rarely miss Paris, but it is, and always will be, missing to me.
Yet now that I’ve accessed it from a new perspective, that love and longing
have grown deeper. Like those pieces of the heart that you leave
behind when you’ve been in love, the empty spaces where memories were created
and linger within a spirit as fresh and clean as fountain spray in le jardin
du Luxembourg on a crisp autumn day, Paris is the heart of the quixotic
wanderer’s soul. I’ve left a piece of myself in the City of Light. I plan
to return to it as often as I’m able.
For more information
regarding rental housing in Paris, contact Erica Berman at www.haveninparis.com
The following
are the previous articles that Will wrote for the magazine:
To contact Will
Click
Here |
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