If you come to Paris for a few days or a week, conscientiously or gladly doing the rounds from one museum to another, interspersing a cruise along the Seine perhaps, a ride up the Eiffel Tower and a meal at a nice restaurant, you will probably love it but leave without a strong sense of how people in Paris live. Where do they live? What do they do? To find out, Steve and I parked ourselves in the French capital for three months over the European summer. We observed everyday life, and to some extent, participated in it. Here are some of the observations of the small things, what stood out as noteworthy. What TV is like. How the streets are cleaned. And on a hot day, what there is to do for free.
Apartments (for of course there isn’t enough space for houses) are all around: above shops, next door to restaurants, across the road from metro stations. Ours is in a 19th century building on the Canal Saint-Martin in the tenth arrondissement. (The inner suburbs (‘arrondissements’) are numbered in Paris, in a snail-shell pattern up to twenty).
We hear the discord of our neighbours’ domestic arguments, but even though it fronts a road, our apartment is free from traffic noise: behind its thick, nineteenth century door is a corridor, ten metres long and lined with letterboxes, then a courtyard – shady and cool, even when it’s hot outside. There’s another door at the far end of the courtyard leading to our dark stairwell. The first two stairs are worn down stone and up from there the stairway is gleaming wood. On the second floor is a small landing and our own green front door, the colour of the canal water and secured with three locks.
We are not anonymous, for we are known by the concierge, M. Chakir, who looks after the building and lives in it. He liaises with tenants and owners for any maintenance work, cleans common areas and keeps an eye on comings and goings. He greets us with the same politeness as any strangers or acquaintances do: ‘good morning Madame, good morning Sir,’ when we meet. I try to remember the ‘Sir’ when greeting him, and others, in the course of my day.
We lived in the inner city, so supermarkets are small, and tend not to stock foreign foods that we are used to. Even the smallest does stock a wide supply of yoghurts and cheeses though, and alcohol, and fresh baguettes.
We shop at the supermarket, but not for fresh food, as this we buy from the local market twice a week. Markets offer maybe ten, maybe thirty stalls of fruit and vegetables. There are also stalls of cheese, dips and olives, meats, fish, sausage, flowers, clothes and toys and usually one or two (or maybe twenty, in larger weekend markets) specialty shops: Italian pasta, Spanish dishes and produce, Vietnamese treats.
The quality is high, the prices low. We buy strawberries from Spain or the smaller, deeper orange ones from France, more expensive and almost grape-shaped. We gorge on ‘flat’ peaches, like oversized buttons, juicy and sweet. Cherries too are cheap, and we eat two kilos a week, costing less than A$6/kg. Before long, we gravitate towards one stall in particular for most of our produce. As they say in France, it has a great ‘price-quality’ relationship, as well as a large range, all in perfect condition. The shop keepers are friendly too. One jokes with customers and with the woman selling roasted chicken at the stall opposite. Imitating her, he calls out ‘chick chick chick chick chicken!’ in high pitched tones. They both laugh, and the customers, patiently snaking around the corner, do too.
– ‘Two melons’, says a customer.
– ‘When for?’ asks another of the shopkeepers.
– ‘One today, the other next week.’
The shopkeeper will select them accordingly: one ripe, the other a little less so. Before she hands them over though she can’t resist a little joke:
– ‘Yes, but for what time today? Those ripe for midday have already been sold.’
The market also attracts leafleters, raising awareness of political parties and social injustice. Its aisles are dotted with women selling small bunches of lavender or hydrangeas, they look like gypsies. They call out ‘flowers – not expensive.’ I wonder what that means. One day I buy a bunch of hydrangeas from one of them: it is only A$5. There are buskers too: one plays the accordion, a duo play violin. My favourite is the black man, agile, perfectly proportioned and smiling, who juggles tenpin balls to Louis Armstrong’s jazz. A tall clear bottle of goldfish is comfortably balanced on his head.
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There is a school, businesses (including a small textile business where we catch glimpses through its windows of the workers sewing all day) and many shops near us. Around the corner, in rue de Lancry, there are Italian, Greek and Lebanese delicatessens/cafés, as well as a Thai restaurant and an Indian one. Across the canal is a Cambodian restaurant where we buy cheap and fresh takeaway, packed in paper carry bags for us to enjoy on a picnic on the canal. There are three bakeries a few hundred metres from our door, and Steve goes to one of them, ‘Du pain et des idées’ (‘Bread and ideas’), every morning for a baguette.
A sign proclaims it the winner of the ‘Gault & Millau’ prize for the best bakery in Paris 2008, and we agree with this assessment. It provides fresh bread in the morning and again, at the end of a queue, at 6pm. Like all of the bakeries in France that call themselves ‘artisanal’, its bread contains no flavours or preservatives, is not frozen and is regulated by law in terms of the flour it uses and the baking procedure too. Within these restrictions, each bakery has their own secrets, and this bread is golden and crusty outside with the dense, perfect texture of real bread inside. The ingredients are flour, water, salt and some natural yeast. How do they do it? The baker is Christophe Vasseur, who came to bread making only seven years ago, in his forties, looking for work that was more meaningful and connected to the earth. When asked what his secret was in the website Positive eating, positive living, he said:
‘Good bread isn’t produced by a miracle, or from magic powder. It’s time and attention. I almost talk to my dough, it’s alive. I listen to it.’
Including dough rising and cooking time, each baguette takes up to eight hours to produce. The bakery sells croissants too of course, but we do as the locals do and eat them only occasionally. We try the ‘snails’, the bakery’s sweet speciality. They are glazed pastry dotted with currants, this bakery making them in pistachio flavour and chocolate too. Ah, Paris. Paris!
The streets get very dirty – many people smoke, grinding their butts into the dust, and there is rubbish just like anywhere. Every morning, an army of cleaners appears, mostly black men, wearing green outfits with fluorescent yellow jackets. At around 11am the watering system in the gutters is turned on (the water is recycled), and they sweep the rubbish from the streets in to it. How clean the streets are after they have been. But not the canal. Its bottles, cans and bags bob down with the flow, sometimes stopping for a while – an unpalatable sight – until they are swept away by the current. It is particularly polluted on the weekend, after the picnics along its banks are over. I prefer to sit along the canal on weekdays, when the rubbish isn’t quite as bad. Here we are with Rebecca, visiting for a couple of days:
The neighbourhood is organised by the town hall belonging to the arrondissement. Ours produces a newsletter to keep us informed of local issues (like traffic developments or childcare programs), tell us about local festivals, and give us the opportunity to interact with the councillors. In our area there is a festival of choirs one weekend: it is billed as 120 choirs, 3500 voices singing in all different styles (from classical to jazz, French traditional, gospel and rock) along the canal.
The canal was formerly neglected, now increasingly trendy, and people flock in their thousands. We wander from one venue to the next, loving it. Posters also advertise huge BYO picnics for the community throughout the year, tables and chairs provided. If they are aiming to provide everything people need in the area so that they never have to leave, they are doing a good job.
If people do leave the neighbourhood, or travel within Paris, since 2007, many people use the system of bicycle rental for short hops, supplementing the metro. They are tempting: only 2 euros (A$4) for a short hop, with cheap weekly and annual deals, and rides of less than half an hour are free. We try it out and it’s oddly liberating.
Ah, Paris. Paris!
