Bisous Ciao: La fête de la musique

Apparently, the reason I was disappointed by the fête de la musique last summer in Avignon was not because I was in Avignon and not Paris, but rather because the fête de la musique is just disappointing in general. In fact, it was a lot better in Avignon, mostly because the weather was nicer and there were actually musicians playing on the street. Here in Paris, it was dark, cloudy, and ominously looked as though it were about to rain even though it never did. I walked from the BnF (not the fancy castle one) all the way to the Marais, and only saw one concert. That was at the Institut du monde arabe, and it wasn't anything amateur. It was incredible—a bunch of instruments I had never seen before, and the interplay between those traditional instruments and the guitars was really something special. But in the end, I didn't see much. I started to think that in Paris, the fête de la musique just meant that Parisians put giant speakers in their windows and played music for the street. I spent about 20 minutes standing across the street from a gelateria in the Marais listening to Italian music before finally deciding to head home.

On my way, I heard someone say: "Natalie?" It took a second, but I finally realized it was addressed at me! It was Alix's middle brother, Jimmy, who also lives and studies in Paris, at Paris 7—Denis Diderot. That university is one of the better public French ones, located right down the street from the BnF. I'm surprised I ran into him there and not in the 13th! Anyway, he informed me that their friend Ali (who has been studying in England all year, but who was in Paris for a few years, where I had met her two summers ago) was visiting for the weekend and that I should come with him to their party in a friend's apartment. Well, the party was apparently a "power hour" with beer, which I don't like at all. But, I at least got to catch up with Alix's brother. Their family has a pretty epic story: they are the children of a navy veteran and a Japanese woman, all have Italian passports (because of their father's Italian roots), and live in Paris studying in French universities since with EU citizenship you don't need a visa. Alix came here in high school, and through such an intense immersion experience now speaks French with absolutely no accent at all. After finishing her lycée and baccalauréat, she just decided to stay in France and go to La Sorbonne instead of returning to the US. Given the incredible price difference between French universities and American ones, her parents probably didn't mind much paying for a Parisian apartment and airfare. In all honesty, it probably all cancels out.

Anyway, so the rest of my fête de la musique was spent with this group of American ex-pats in Paris. Honestly, the majority of them are pretty disappointing. None of them seem to be writing the next great American novel, most don't speak French very well despite spending a lot more time in Paris than I ever have, and they sit around telling stories of the parties they've been to. When some of them asked what I was doing here and I gave my spiel about reading Victor Hugo's love letters, they were a bit confused what I was doing there with all of them. Good thing Alix's friend Yasmine was there—she's in her fifth year of med school, speaks four languages fluently, and generally makes me feel like an underachiever. The rest, the drunker they got, made fools of themselves, but it's okay, because I doubt anyone remembered exactly what happened this morning. Thankfully, otherwise they might have been embarrassed by all the German jokes they made to the German girl, the Irish jokes they made to the Irish guy, and other strange and insulting conversations they had throughout the night.

The quai de la Seine by Notre-Dame was crowded beyond belief, the métro ran all night, and there were a few concerts around, but no one seemed to be paying any attention. Macs had a similar experience, though he was all the way across the city in Montmartre. Wanting to go to an actual indoor concert, his American friend and her other ex-pat friends who were with them had other plans. He ended up spending the night talking to a girl who said the three sentences that most efficiently make him want to kill someone: 1) Why would you want to live in Paris? 2) Honestly, if someone handed me a free plane ticket back to Paris after I was back in the US, I'd turn it down. and finally 3) It must suck that you have to starve yourself to study French literature (which is just not true—Princeton pays us quite well!).