My First Week in Paris

Where do I start. This trip started as most trips to Europe do; watching the sunrise as your plane lands and thinking to yourself, " I am ready to go to sleep.... if I am going to have a successful trip at all I am going to have to stay up for the next 14 or 15 hours." The guy who drove me and a group of other Americans coming here to study fashion for a month was from Sri Lanka, ( an island off the coast of India). He asked me my name six times and each time he would nervously look at his the paper with all of his clients name on it and say, "O.K." I thought that I would try and impress all of my new friends from the fashion world when we got in the car and tried to speak french to him. He looked in the rear view window and in broken english said, "I no undstand yu." After 40 minutes of stop and go horrible morning rush hour traffic I arrived at the Cite Universitaire.

The Cite is a huge huge huuuuge campus with no professors and no classes. It was built for the demand of housing for all the international students that come to study in Paris. ( I guess musicians aren't the only one who thought this would be a good place to study.) They have tennis courts, soccer fields, and cafeterias. You walk around this place hearing French, English, Portuguese, Spanish, German, and lots of other stuff. My roomate Joseph is a fantastic guy from New York who grew up with Rob Ostler. He is super artsy and always wants to have long philosophical discussions about what pieces of music mean or what art is. I comply because I love being nerdy like that.

The Professors here come from all over the U.S. but most are from Juilliard. Dr. Lasser is this Penguin like intellectual who struts around the stage of our class room saying things like "If Grieg had written a C instead of a B there how would this piece differ." All of the music nerds (myself included) ooh and aah when someone arrives at something we consider interesting. He kind of reminds me of Kevin Spacey in 21 with his pompous "I'm an intellectual" air which he will occasionally avert from to appeal to the crasser side of all of our minds. For instance someone asked the other day "But wouldn't that disagress with Schenkers principle of..." and then he interrupted with a sly "oh who gives a damn about Schenker," and the room of Dr. Lasser embryos chuckled. I think 21 Kevin Spacey and Dr. Lasser should go get a beer together. They would like that.

Church on Sunday was a wonderful experience. I found that when Americans are speaking french about gospel related topics it is very easy to understand. There is a fair share of Americans in the Paris Ward and there are 6 sets of missionaries! Six! For one ward! This guy got up to bear his testimony and you could almost feel the tension in the room. He was one of those guys that gets up every month and embaresses himself and makes everyone uncomfortable. He proceeded to talk about his belief in Napoleon Bonapartes ideals, read a poem that he had written, and some other stuff I didn't quite understand before the bishop put a note on the pulpit which I am sure said something along the lines of wrap it up. He did and everybody breathed a sigh of relief. Thank goodness for people like that to keep things interesting.

After church this great family from Utah invited us over for dinner. The shirtliffs have been living here for a few years because of his work and they had a ton of different American members of the church over for dinner. It was a real homey Sunday dinner feel and it did the heart good to feel that familiar family spirit in a foreign country.

One of my favorite things about music festivals like this is the quality of concerts that we get to attend. Whether it is your peers or musicians that come from all over to teach master classes and perform it is spectacular and powerful. Last night Dr. Boyle accompanied this man with an amazingly beautiful baritone voice. They played song cycles by Schuman, Barber, and Dr. Boyle, and  the music was awe inspiring. Afterward a man walked up to the baritone and kissed him on the mouth which left the thought in everyone's mind "Is that like a french thing....... or are those two old gay lovers." Either way its kind of weird and best not to think about.

Another thing that often accompanies shifting your bodies schedule ahead 9 hours is illness and I have had my share of that. I have had pretty bad fevers for the past little bit that have spiraled into a nasty cough. Anyway I have taken advantage of this misfortune by sleeping till 12, taking lots of tylenol, and going to the park to read A Tale of Two Cities. Reading a famous book about Paris, while one is in Paris, feels rather epic.

One thing that amazes me is the way the economy runs here. It seems to thrive on small buisnesses. Where as in the United States when one opens up a restaurant it is either going to have crazy success if it catches on, or fail. Here they are everywhere. People make their whole livelihoods off small crepe stands, little pastry shops, and other small buisness ventures. One can go get a degree of making bread and cheese here and start a buisness with little fear of it failing. It is something that Americans with our walmarts, fast food, and huge chains of convenient stores find kind of baffling. I walked around for a couple of hours tonight and saw hundreds of full cafes. The Mcdonalds were full too of course, but France is going in a direction that way that I find admirable in a lot of ways.

Well anyway one week from now at Midnight we will be watching Harry Potter 8 or 9 hours before you do. The Harry Potter craze is just as big here as anywhere. There are posters everywhere. I think that a French Harry Potter Midnight experience will certainly be memorable and might be fun to write about. Bon soir.

Ryan