Love Hate Relationship

So, in personal relationships I don’t look for a love-hate roller coaster of passion but prefer laidback drama free dating. However, geographically, it’s a different story.

Typical question from Americans back home: how's Paris? Even after being here a year, the answer still depends on the day and its various living-in-your-second-language challenges...

On Thursday, it was: Well, I thrive on hardship, urban misery and surrealism, so I enjoy Parisian life. It's kind of a similar taste to bitter espresso, dark chocolate or smoking unfiltered cigarettes. If you're neurotic, anxious, pessimistic and only happy when it rains, you would enjoy Paris. It rains a lot here, the summer of 2007 widely acknowledged as the worst June-August weather in French history and attributed to global warming. Paris is kind of teen angst but in a more glamorous and sophisticated form in your late 20s (latest possible 20s, if you’re facing your 29th birthday like I am) and that is why great writers, philosophers and pretentious intellectuals alike lived and continue to live here.

However, Friday’s answer was very different, as if the French national healthcare system that filmmaker Micheal Moore is so enamored with slipped everyone some government-subsidized prozac overnight: I feel like I’ve made so much progress—I can now read a French book in one evening and I'm starting to feel like I have some real friends here who understand my French and even claim that I speak it well. My students are all absolutely lovely and even though I speak a lot of English in my job, I now have more contact with the French than I did last year and we often discuss French culture. My students love explaining Symbols of France to me, like the car the deux chevaux and singer Michel Polnareff, and you have to admit that the Fete de Musique is one of the all-time greatest urban events. Paris in August is also incredibly pleasant because it contains fewer Parisians (even if more rain) since everyone is out of town on their European annual month of vacation, leaving the metro uncrowded and the supermarket checkout lines on Saturday afternoons remarkably short.

All I can do is enjoy the highs and try to be prepared for sudden rollar coaster drop off lows. I catalogue the good days-- like pasteries at Angelique’s and riding the ferris wheel at Tuilleries with Kim and Cory, champagne tasting in Reims, Music Day with Tiffany, swimming in the lake at Annecy with my cousins, Bastille Day with Kate, and every single delicious dinner I’ve had at my favorite Ethiopian restaurant-- to remember on the rainy days.