I'm on balls duty tonight

It's a night of depression. Enough said. Drink up your cup.

Santé!

Tuesday.

I decided to drag myself to Starbucks this morning to have a small French study session with myself in peace and quiet where I actually would be able to fully concentrate. Who knew that cafes would have such a calming impact on me… Well, it went all well and good until the clock hit noon and the ‘lunch-crew’ (as I took the liberty of naming the floods of people flowing in) filled the place up with their loud jibber jabbering and with the loud noise they made with their silverware thumping and scratching on their plates. It didn’t really help the situation when four, very loud ladies chose to spread out next to me so after two hours of pristine, hard-core studying I wrapped up my one-person study group gathering and went to meet Mel by the metro station to go get groceries. We’re living the poor-man’s life here in Paris, living on basically salad, crackers, tinned veggies and the occasional frozen fish now and then. Real fancy, I know.

Tomorrow is my audition with Happy-town (Disneyland), and whether it is to drown my sorrows or celebrate my success we have settled on going out for drinks afterwards. It will most likely be a shindig of depression though.

Wish me luck!

Gros Bisous

Frida

"Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved"

Update numéro deux.

The story about becoming regulars at a bar…

We have been set on becoming regulars at our ‘favorite’ (a.k.a; least sleazy) bar called Le Sully, and before we started going there we asked ourselves how it was possible, in the least apparent kind of way, to accomplish this… To Mel’s despite, I realized that you have got to find a bartender to victimize and flirt with. You’ve got to use what you’ve got, and in our case my innocence and my tendency to smile a lot was working in our favor, and in just a short matter of time we were well known and recognized.  We obtained free drinks in less than a week, and who was our poor victim you may ask? Well, he is a transformer-boy doppelganger who plays the whole Britney act, pretending to be good but actually is a douche deep down inside, at least according to Mel... I like him though, he protects us from creepers and he always shines up and talks to us whenever we go there. And now two weeks has passed and we have finally made our first French friend on account of our success – Jamel! He is an old, cheerful and utterly crazy man with no front teeth and no other skills than the ability to down alcohol like water with laugh cuter than a baby’s. Some would probably turn their heads twice seeing us enjoy the company of this fellow, but we love him and his companionship. He is a frequent costumer at Le Sully, even though he works at another bar, and he is friends with everybody and anybody who goes there. One of the main reasons for us loving him is the fact that he hasn’t hit on us once, and he is bursting of life more than anyone I’ve ever met before. To everyone else, our newfound friendship with this man may seem a little peculiar, but in just a few days Jamel has turned to be somewhat of a vivacious, adoring French grandpa to us. He tells us his life story in his rapid and tremendously hard to understand French, and he gladly answers every question we ask him.

But even if I wish it could be, life in Paris doesn’t only exist of drinking coffee and other more fun liquids at bars. On Wednesday I have an audition for a job at Disneyland Paris, and I am very nervous about that, even though I’m pretty set on going back to school to start learning French again. By coming here I have realized how hard the actual speaking-part still is. The need to be able to speak perfectly is very important and to be able to just communicate doesn’t quite cut it for me anymore.

I will start posting pictures soon, I’m just a little bit too lazy for that at the moment, but it’ll get better. I have a little fun fact about our 10^th arrondissment though, we read in a travel guide book that tourists should ‘avoid this area entirely’ since it’s famous for its multitude of prostitutes and pickpockets. But even though every French person we meet and tell where we're living to mostly laughs awkwardly and crinkles their nose, we still can’t help but feel completely safe here. It’s not like either one of us would want to walk around alone in the middle of the night, but this is home to us, and we love it here.

Can’t really write much longer, I have dishes to wash and a whole bundle of dirty laundry to sort out... What a vie au fromage, right? Not quite yet… I have yet to find my cheesy, Parisian life!

Bisous mes amis!

Frida

I love waking up to the smell of cheap wine

So, I live in Paris now. It certainly is a big change from the sunny, warm and oh-so-easy life down in the French Riviera where the only big concern I had was to wake up in time for class every day. I feel as if my life has actually begun here in la ville d'amour and the responsibilities flooding over me just seem to grow bigger and bigger. The reality really is poles apart from what I had predicted it to be. Or like we tend to say nowadays; La réalité est une salope. I imagined that there would be boulangeries giving off that wonderful scent of freshly baked baguettes and croissants in every street corner but instead Melanie and I managed to rent an apartment in a seedy Turk quarter where our highly anticipated boulangeries were replaced by kebab shops. Don't get me wrong, we love our little area, and we are already to a great extent adored (that's a lie, try: stared at) by all the Turkish/French men, having words like 'Princesses!' shouted after us as we stroll on by the many kebab shops, exploring the surroundings of our new home. Sure, we have our boulangeries, brasseries, boucheries, poissoneries and marchés des fruits within a hundred meter radius from our cozy little pad, and the cafés and bars surrounding us are very close to the number of kebab shops around. Don’t worry, Paris is still very much French.

We do try to go out every night to make French friends, but it's so much easier to end up at home with a cheesy movie and cheap wine when we have the company of each other. Yeah so as you may figure out, as long as we have our boxed wine in the fridge our lack of friends won’t disperse. To be honest, even when the wine does run out, our set of friends really doesn’t seem grow any bigger nonetheless. Everything is easier when you're two. Making total fools out of yourselves by buying way too heavy, way too big, and way too many things at IKEA and trying to transfer it all back to our apartment by using public transportation is fine when you have someone to laugh it off with, and being stalked by creepy French men is okay when you have someone to joke about it with later.

So what do we do with our days when I'm not busy applying for jobs and Mel’s not in school, cutting bangs on each other (correction: having Mel cut bangs on me), watching horrible movies that we wish were our lives or we're just being idiots?

We try to read French poems by Victor Hugo at cafes, we’re being artsy by the Basilique du Sacre Coeur and we dream of spring and summer and sunny days when we can toss the boots and the jackets, even though the weather has been exceptionally warm for January. Give me summer already! Give me short shorts, thin sundresses and iced drinks in the sun on our rooftop!

“Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.”

We’ve decided to make the best out of this winter though. It’ll be awesome.

Alors, mes chéris, à bientôt!
Frida