Emily Wolfteich

I have not slept yet.

It has now been four days since my arrival in the City of Lights, and thank goodness it’s Sunday and no one does anything or I don’t know how I’d continue. I thought that my first few days would be difficult, as any adjustment is; I thought that jet lag would hit me, that I wouldn’t fit in, that I would be uncertain of where I was or how to get to where I needed to go. I thought that I would be lonely.

Instead, I’ve spent the past three days going everywhere and meeting everyone I possibly can, engaging in snowball fights, building snowmen, tasting French wine and cheese, and freezing under the Eiffel Tower. I have crossed myself in Sacre Coeur, had a tiny coffee in Montmartre, sang along to Benny & the Jets in front of le Moulin Rouge, met Parisians and Australians, fallen in and out of love with countless French men, and argued about relationships at 3 in the morning over wine acquired from a bookshop in the Marais. French wallflowers at a club have expressed delight over both my almost-proficiency in French and over my “charmant” American accent.

And, of course, Paris in the snow. It’s been snowing almost since I arrived, and since this is apparently rare in France, the Parisians have gone mad with glee. I’ve seen more snowball fights here than anywhere before (including two that I participated in, one with a ten year old under the Eiffel Tower and the other with a Moldovan on the bridge over the Montmartre cemetery). As my friend Laura said, the snow makes the cold worth it. Two days ago I went to an aperitif at the apartment of the cousin of a friend, where I was surrounded by chattering French people that I could mostly understand–and, being from DC, I can recognize a political argument in any language. Everyone was monstrously kind to me. I even found the one other person in the world who knows one of my favorite authors, Arturo Perez-Reverte. We left after the Metro had closed, but played in the snow instead, building unwieldy snowmen and tossing clumps in the air just to watch it fall against the night. We split a taxi home since several of us lived in the 17ieme, and that was my first view of the Eiffel Tower–at 3am, darkly rising out of the earth, deserted. Moments later we soared under the Arc de Triomphe and the taxi driver laughed at my expression in the rearview mirror. “Magnifique, non?”

The next day my lovely friend Laura and I decided to explore Montmartre. Our grand plan was just to walk in an upwards direction, and we figured we’d eventually get somewhere important. I was unimpressed by our metro stop at the bottom of the hill (where were the writers, the cafes?) but I wanted to see the cemetery in the snow. But because, like DC, Paris freaks out at the hint of ice, the cemetery was closed, and we were left with taking photos through the slats of the poorly graffitied bridge–whereupon we were promptly hailed with snowballs thrown by a Moldovan gentleman who apparently really wanted our numbers. Luckily we eventually shook our shadow, and got sandwiches to munch on as we continued up and the streets became more cobbled and became narrower, and slowly melted into the Montmartre I expected, waited for–so much that it almost seemed false. It was crowded with tourists and salesmen, the most I’d seen in France so far, which made it harder to picture it as the intellectual Mecca it is. I live in a residential area and hadn’t gotten to the more famous parts of Paris yet, and so it almost surprised me to hear English again.

We went to Sacre Coeur and then down to Le Progres for a coffee, and then went to hunt for a boulangerie. This proved to be a more difficult task than we expected. We ended up in Pigalle, the sex district, where we fell over ourselves laughing at the signs and the sounds. We thought the area around the Eiffel Tower might have a boulangerie or seven, and I hadn’t seen it yet, so off we went. I don’t care how touristy it sounds–le Tour Eiffel is truly breathtaking. That was also my first view of the innate romance of Paris, and, if you had the right person, how very very easy it would be to fall in love there. Under the tower there were too many other people, but before you quite got there, there is a small pond on the side, and a small boulevard of trees covered in snow, and it was almost too lovely.

But it was getting dark and getting cold, so we parted ways. That night I went out on a pub crawl with my friend Jordan and some of his friends from his program at the Sorbonne. A French cultural experience it was certainly not, but it was a lot of fun. We all stayed up late and argued about relationships, and luck, and how we should live.

But though I’ve had a marvelous time so far, and know that only good things (hopefully) are ahead, one of my favorite memories of Paris will be walking home from my neighborhood boulangerie–the exquisite, French, absolutely perfect experience of carrying a warm baguette home in the snow. That feeling alone might have welcomed me to France better than anything else.

I have not slept yet–but in a city like this, how do you find the time?