A roommate, language lessons, fruit flies, and terror in Paris.
2.1 Settling in
I made my first cheese and wine faux pas within the same hour. And while it wasn’t because of my terrible French, that was a factor. You see, I’d figured that after a few months in France I’d have re-learned French fluently. Or at least to a strong level. After all, I’d studied it at high school and even university. Surely, it would all come flooding back to me if I was surrounded by Parisians, ducking into boulangeries, befriending the locals. But as it turned out, I was hardly advancing at all. My colleague was British, my work was mostly translating French into English, and I was spending a lot of my spare time with Lina, a Swede. My priorities were way out of order, I decided. It was time to concentrate on learning French. And since the French classes I’d signed up for were yet to begin, I had to take matters into my own hands.
After a few more encounters with Stephane, my neighbour from Grenoble, I suggested that we try to do a language exchange. The plan was that we’d each grab a bottle of wine, set a stopwatch for half an hour and then only speak French. When the alarm went off, we’d switch to English and we’d continue switching every 30 minutes until we ran out of wine. We organized our first class, and I offered to host it at my place. It’d be the first French guest I’d have at the apartment, and I was determined to make a good impression.
In an attempt to come across as a competent Parisian host, I’d gone to rue Montorgueil to grab some wine and cheese. I’d gotten that bit right; a good Parisian host would absolutely be prepared with cheese and wine for their guests, and they take great pride in doing it well.
But I got the wine bit wrong, to begin with. When I’d asked the shopkeeper for something cheap, he had shuddered, and reluctantly suggested a Bordeaux. It was even worse with the cheese, the buying of which is an art form in France. You’re supposed to go into the shop, have a lengthy discussion with the fromageur about what’s particularly tasty this season, explain what you plan to eat with the cheese, maybe taste a piece or two, pause and consider; then make your purchase and be on your way. I didn’t know all this, of course. Cheese shops aren’t even remotely common where I’m from in Australia. So, I walked in, surveyed the counter of cheeses, and asked for a mix.
“Certainly, monsieur, what would you like a mix of?”
“Well, your best hits, really. A bit of everything,” I responded.
“Could I interest monsieur in our aged hard cheeses? This Comté is 18 months old.”
“Sure. And with it, maybe just a little bit of this and that would be perfect,” I said with a smile. Gosh, what a great customer I was! Not too fussy, happy to accept whatever was on offer.
I didn’t realize it at the time, nor for a good while afterwards, that I was essentially offending the fromageur. He was offering me his best, and I wasn’t even interested in listening. He seemed to give up.
“Perhaps monsieur would like our pre-packaged cheese mix?” he said, pointing to a dusty looking corner in the glass display.
I said that the mix of cheeses sounded perfect. He handed me a plastic box with what looked to me like an exciting variety of cheeses, all in different colours and shapes. Yellow cubes, orange slices, there were even some green bits in there. All pre-cut and ready to eat. Oh what a treat, how Stephane would be impressed with my wine from a wine shop and my cheese from a fromagerie! I took my haul home and set it up on the vintage suitcase that I’d balanced on a box, my dining table for the next two years.
He arrived right on time and broke into a grin immediately.
“Eet’s time to learn Engleesh, wino,” he said.
Again with the wino. What could he mean? I ignored it again.
“Stephane! Welcome! Bienvenue! Shall we start in English?” I said.
“OK, sure,” he said, his eyes taking in the feast I’d laid out on the table. “But first, what the hell is that? Is that cheese? What are the green pieces? It looks like fruit salad,” he said with a laugh. “And let me see that wine. Bordeaux? What is that, cat piss? Let’s start with my bottle, it’s a Côte du Rhône from near my hometown. And remind me to teach you how to buy cheese after I teach you how to speak French.”
Of course, Stephane’s English wasn’t this good, but these were the points he made in a mixture of English, French, and gesticulations. Wild gesticulations when it came to the cat piss bottle of wine. And after the first 30 minutes of French, I can admit that my efforts at speaking his language were as bad as my cheese choosing.
But the language exchange was a handy way to learn, at least for me. Our rule was if you didn’t know a word, you couldn’t say it in your native language. I had to try to explain it in French (and Stephane had to explain it in English). Because when it comes to language learning, it’s too easy to resort to just dropping in English words when you’re lost. Or to say “Oh, how do you say this?” and so on. So we ruled that out from the beginning. And as excruciating as it was for both of us, we struggled through and got to know each other the hard way.
Stephane told me that he wanted to learn English so he could watch the new Game of Thrones episodes without having to wait for the local TV channels to dub them into French. He explained that he was studying finance and had dreams of moving to New York or London. He added that he didn’t have a girlfriend but was on the lookout. I told him that I was a journalist who played basketball. He thought I was crazy to move to Paris when I was from Australia, a sentiment I’d hear countless times from other young French people over the years.
It was a pleasant treat to get to know my neighbour, even if he didn’t have an appetite for my green cheese. By the time we reached the bottom of the second bottle, the cat-piss red wine I’d bought, it felt like we were both somehow fluent in each others’ languages. And I suppose we were pretty drunk. He took his leave and staggered across the top floor corridor to his own chambre de bonne apartment.
“Zairs a new episode of Game of Thrones, I think I’m ready to understand eet, wino,” he said.
As he shut the door, I figured it out. Wino had nothing to do with my taste (or bad taste) for wine, not at all. He was saying “right now”, but instead of doing the unrolled English R, which can be tricky for French speakers, he was switching the R for a W. So right now became wight now, or wino in a Grenoble accent. I never understood why he said “right now” to punctuate so many of his English sentences. Maybe it was a “lost in translation” thing; maybe they say “juste maintenant” all the time in eastern France. Who knew? I certainly didn’t, but I took it to be one of Stephane’s charms. And anyway, I had other things to focus on, wino.
2.2 The admin
If you’re thinking of moving to Paris, or anywhere in France, you must be prepared for administrative difficulties. Specifically, you must be ready for rejection. That’s just how it is, you’ll apply for something and you won’t get it. And the reason will be ridiculous. There’ll be a missing signature. Something won’t be stamped. Your dog’s dental records will be out of date. Who knows. But there will be something. And the number one, ultimate secret for beating the system is to expect failure and smile when it happens. It’s the only way to go.
And you know what? It really works. When you expect that things will fail, then you don’t mind when it all goes pear-shaped. It’s like a Jedi mind trick. You almost end up leaving happier when you leave whatever office it is without having gotten what you needed. Because you will suffer failure: it’s part of the process. I’m convinced French admin workers are relieved when there’s a document missing and they get to send papers to another desk. I can sense their satisfaction.
And I learned all this pretty quickly.
One of the cruel ironies for a newcomer in France is that you have to do all the hardest admin at the beginning. You can’t wait around to improve your French if you want to open a bank account or get a social security number. Nope, you have to do it immediately: and though it hurts, you’ve gotta rip it right off the wound, like a bandaid. A lot of expats move to France with their French loved one, making the journey infinitely smoother: but that wasn’t my situation. I was single, clueless, and desperately unprepared for the pain that came with peeling that bandaid off gently.
When I opened my bank account, for example, I was once again reminded of how impressive Sweden was, compared to France. In Sweden, I waltzed into a bank, asked to open a new account, and had one in minutes. In France, I had to book a meeting, endure that meeting for over an hour, and then leave the bank with a pile of documents as thick as a short novel.
When I arrived, the banker took me into a little office and made me sign ten lengthy documents, once for him and once for myself. Yes, that’s right, 20 signatures.
“This, monsieur, is for online banking. You want online banking, yes?” he said.
“Well, yes, please,” I responded.
He printed off another few pages twice, one set for each of us.
“And monsieur would like a bank card, yes?”
“Yes, please. But do we really need all this paper?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“This is just how we do it in France,” he said.
But if I thought the bank was bad, I was in for a real treat trying to set up my social security account. The fact that I can be quite unorganized with these matters didn’t help. The first time I went into the social security offices, I went simply with the goal of finding out exactly what I needed, right from the horse’s mouth. I took the afternoon off work for the occasion. When I arrived at 2 pm on a Thursday, a sign out the front informed me that the offices were closed Thursday afternoons. Of course.
The second time around, I came armed with the necessary documents. Some of the online forums I visited suggested that a translated birth certificate might not be necessary, so I chanced it that an English one was fine. But I was wrong, of course. I had to get an “international apostille” sticker on the back of my birth certificate - which meant that it was now an internationally-recognized document. Then I paid a ridiculous amount of money for an official translation of my birth certificate, which I still consider to be the easiest translation job in history. “Born here, named this”. It was high school French at best. When I finally submitted it, they still didn’t accept it because there was no official signature or translation on the back of my birth certificate, the side that had nothing besides the apostille sticker. The word apostille was French, for God’s sake, but it wasn’t translated, signed, or stamped, so I had to start all over again and head back to the official translator.
Sometimes it’s almost enough to break your spirit, but that’s why you have to laugh.
Despite my struggles, I did have a few early victories. One was when I limped into the town hall on crutches after a cycling accident. I exaggerated that limp and let my voice falter when I handed over my papers. I winced at the mere effort of signing something. And the woman took pity on me, and helped me.
But nothing compared to the magic of occasionally saying I was Australian. Once I went to the Town Hall of the second arrondissement to set myself up as a tax-paying journalist, rather than a tax-paying citizen, after I heard rumours that there would be added benefits. It was a complicated procedure that called for French language mastery far beyond my own talents.
There was a young man behind the desk, whose thick glasses made his eyes seem twice as big as he sized me up. I asked him if he spoke English.
“You know,” he said in fluent, but heavily accented, English. “We’re told we don’t have to speak English with people - even if we can.”
He looked across the room as if he were about to sell me drugs. As if he could get in trouble if he was caught speaking English with me.
“Where are you from? America? England?” he said.
When I said Australia his eyes went almost frighteningly wide behind those glasses. His dream was to visit Australia. He’d been looking into the one-year work visa that was popular among many young French people. He was going through all my papers as he talked, chattering away about kangaroos, Sydney, and famous Australians.
“Tell me,” he said. “What do you think of us French people? People say we are arrogant and rude, and there is a bit of truth to that, I think.”
With my mind clearly on the importance of his help, I answered that I didn’t think the French were rude at all, which was actually true. I honestly think it’s all one big misunderstanding that comes from language criss-crossing, cultural differences, and too many tourists. But I didn’t get into it then.
We kept chatting, he seemingly oblivious to the fact that there was a long queue piling up outside his small office. He asked what kind of vegetables we grew in Australia, except he pronounced it veg-er-ter-bles - four syllables, which I realized I actually preferred. All the while, he was flipping through my documents, ticking boxes, and explaining how I could get journalistic tax deductions in the years to come. Finally, he said I was set up as a tax-paying reporter in France and that I’d be getting generous returns if all his work was approved.
“I’ll come back with good news,” he said, leaving the room with my papers.
And he did. All I had to do was go out of his office and ask the woman at the front to co-sign a few documents. I was amazed; I’d tackled the dreaded French taxman and it was actually a rather lovely experience. When I got to the lady at the front, I offered a friendly “Do you speak English?” with a strong hint of an Australian accent to see if my luck would continue.
“Non,” she grunted. “On est en France, on parle français.” We are in France, we speak French here.
Ah. Well, you can’t win them all, I suppose.
2.3 The neighbours
“It’s part of your job contract to date a French woman,” my editor repeated.
I made sure to peruse my contract, just to be sure, before I introduced him to Lina, who I’d been seeing a lot more. The editor was dismayed. He was convinced that the only way I’d ever understand France was with a Frenchwoman on my arm. He was probably right. There’s no quicker way to learn a language than to be immersed in it. Weekend visits to the French in-laws. Whispering sweet French nothings in the bedroom. Watching as they manoeuver the ridiculous French admin for you (if only!). Oh, the benefits were surely endless. But I had a Swedish woman instead, meaning I was doomed to improve my Swedish and forever languish in French language purgatory.
One spring morning, Lina had stayed at my apartment after I’d gone to work. She texted me with what she called good news and bad news. The good news was that she’d washed the sheets. The bad news was that she’d thrown my pillowcases out the seventh-floor window.
“I didn’t mean to do it, I was shaking the sheets out the window and I didn’t know the pillowcases were in there.”
“So what happened to the pillowcases?” I asked.
“I can see them. They’re on someone’s sunroof seven floors down. But it’s not our apartment block, it’s next door, and I don’t know whose door to knock on. I have an idea to get them back, but you’ll have to help me.”
Lina was waiting for me when I got home, armed with a big ball of string and a few pieces of metal.
“We’ll fish them back up!” she said, with a half-crazed look in her eyes.
“That’s the plan?” I said with a laugh. “You’re going to try and hook them from the seventh floor?”
We spent the next two hours dangling 15 metres of string, weighed down with a few nuts and bolts, and trying to hook pillowcases with bent pieces of wire. The feeling of pure elation to eventually hook each of them was surely greater than any fisherman at the Seine River had ever felt. If only we could have seen the faces of the Parisians below when they saw the white pillowcases being reeled upwards past their kitchen windows.
As it turned out, we’d hear from my neighbours quicker than we thought. My phone rang a few days later and a man introduced himself in English as “Andrew from downstairs”.
“I got the note you left, so here I am, calling you back,” he said.
I’d slipped a note under his door after noticing his doormat was in the design of the Union Jack, the British flag. On the note, I told him that I was on the top floor if he ever fancied meeting a neighbour.
“Great! If you’re home now, come up for a drink,” I said.
He knocked on my door ten minutes later and came inside, impressed by the view from the apartment, but not by the size of it. In Paris apartments the ceilings tend to get progressively lower the higher you get up the building. In other words, those on the first few floors typically have the highest ceilings, while the apartments at the top are cramped and tiny. You can see it for yourself if you look carefully at the outside of Paris buildings, there’ll be a noticeable difference between the first and fifth floor, for example. You can often see it even more tangibly from the stairwell inside, where it takes fewer and fewer steps to get between floors. When these buildings were made, the wealthiest residents lived near the ground and left their servants and maids up the top.
Anyway, my no doubt wealthier neighbour asked how I liked the building, and I told him that it was all good, besides my lack of internet connection. Weeks after my initial complaints, the internet team had finally visited and decided it was the fault of the telephone company, which had apparently cut the wrong wire. After more weeks of nothing happening, the phone team came out to repair that wire, and now I was waiting for the internet team again.
“The French won’t do anything unless you get angry,” Andrew said, adding he’d lived in Paris for decades now and had seen it all before. “I can call them if you like.”
“Be my guest,” I said.
With that, he phoned the internet provider and when they started to make excuses he proceeded to let loose on them.
“What’s the point of having this piece of shit internet box if there’s no bloody internet on it? I may as well throw it out the window! What kind of company are you running that you give internet boxes but don’t make sure they’re connected? This is bullshit.”
Yikes.
While he may have been firm - even aggressive, perhaps - on the telephone, he was a pleasant chap to be around, and the tough guy act seemed to work. After he hung up, he told me that the internet team would be around on Friday. Amazing. It was a valuable lesson: don’t let yourself be walked over or you’ll never get anything done.
As the evening wore on, my guest took one more look out the window and tried to pinpoint his apartment below.
“Ah, it’s lovely to have a kitchen window that looks over Paris,” he said. “And you know, sometimes you can see the most unusual things. Last week I could swear I saw someone’s washing fall down past my window. Then hours later, I saw it fly back up again.”
2.4 The fruit flies
It was summer in Paris, the air was crisp, the fruit was fresh, and I was about to annoy the architects again. I’d found that spending full days in front of the computer screen wasn’t doing anything for my health. My editor had no taste for long lunches or exercise breaks, so I decided to start bringing fresh fruit into the office. No harm in that, I figured. I’d bring in bananas, apples, peaches, and I’d place them in a fruit bowl in the middle of the room for the team - which was growing to include the occasional intern or two. It was a good plan, but it didn’t always go smoothly. One week I bought too much fruit for us all to manage.
By the time Monday came around I got to work before anyone else in the office only to realize I’d left the bloody fruit on the desk over the weekend. The peaches had turned into rotten corpses and they were swarming with fruit flies. And I don’t mean just a regular swarm. I mean a swarm of biblical proportions. I had only minutes before the architects started to arrive, and I panicked. I threw the peaches into my little bin, tied the plastic bag tight, then ran it into the kitchen and launched it into the main kitchen bin. Then I came back to our glass-walled office for damage control. Shit, there were still hundreds of fruit flies - what to do? I opened the windows and shooed them out. Some left, but most of them stayed. I wasn’t getting anywhere. I waved my arms around, tried to swat them. Anything to hide the evidence that I’d been eating food in the office again. And I’m ashamed to admit it, but I murdered some of them too. Innocent fruit flies! But that’s how frightened I was of the architects, frightened enough to kill defenseless insects in cold blood.
It wasn’t long until the architects started to arrive. Still very wary of me at this point, some said hello. Others ignored me, as usual. At this point there were only a dozen fruit flies remaining, so I left them alone, realizing it was better than attracting attention trying to get rid of them. I felt I’d escaped, gotten away with the perfect crime.
I cracked on with the day’s work, irritated that I was having a slow start on one of the rare occasions that the editor wasn’t in the office. An hour or so into the morning I had well and truly forgotten about the fruit flies and was starting to feel the urge for a mid-morning cup of tea. I stood up from my desk and stretched, then turned to head for the kitchen. But before I’d taken one step, I saw them. The horror. The fruit flies, which had obviously been frightened away by my mad efforts to kill them, had by now figured it was safe to come out again. They had congregated in scores on the ceiling and all over the glass walls that separated me from the architects. Shit shit shit. But… what’s this? None of the architects had noticed. I could fix this. It could be worse. Yes, it could be much worse, I thought.
I was right. And it was going to be.
I headed for the kitchen, playing cool, acting like there weren’t around 200 flying insects in my office. The same office I’d allegedly let mice into, which is another story, and which also explains why the architects didn’t like me. And then I saw it.
In the kitchen was a second swarm of fruit flies. Some idiot had taken rotten fruit and dumped it in the kitchen bin an hour ago. That idiot was me. But at least no one knew that. I felt like a child again, facing imminent trouble from the adults. In a blind panic I grabbed the kitchen bin bag and smuggled it out of the office and into the elevator, then out onto the streets where I dumped it in a city bin. I ran to a nearby shop and bought fly spray, then raced back to the kitchen. Then, as much as I hate to say it, I sprayed the fruit flies to death until they were dropping all over the kitchen table and floor. I did this all without the architects knowing. I couldn’t let them couldn’t know. I was already a terrible guest. I swept away the corpses of the fruit flies from the kitchen table and opened the windows to get rid of the smell of the fly spray. And miraculously, no architects came in during the entire slaughter.
Sure, there were a few left in the kitchen, but not enough to notice, I thought. So I moved back to my cubicle and spent the rest of the morning trying to get rid of the evidence. Like a lizard catching flies in a terrarium, I sneakily disposed of the remaining fruit flies in my little glass office one by one until there were none.
But fruit flies are apparently stubborn little buggers. The survivors in the kitchen turned out to be a mini swarm. The architects found the invasion at around lunch time, and were baffled as to where it came from. Where was the fruit, they wondered. No one could figure it out and I wasn’t about to turn myself in. I’m ashamed to say it, but they were still killing the flies when I left the office that evening. And I never said a word. It marked the last time I brought fruit into the office, and our diet returned to English biscuits and the occasional French croissant.
2.5 The lessons
Speaking French on the phone makes me nervous. Especially having to do it in front of other French speakers. And this was an unavoidable part of my job as a journalist in Paris. Even though the editor was aware of my terrible French, he insisted that I make phone calls to interview French people. So, often when I was covering a tough story, I would dread having to pick up the phone for an interview, especially if it was about something difficult or sensitive. I didn’t even know the word for raw bacon, for God’s sake - how did I get to be interviewing French people on the phone? And let’s not forget, the phone is harder than face-to-face conversations because you miss all the visual cues.
In those early days, by insane luck, a lot of the people I rang spoke English, or at least good enough English to fill in the gaps for me. But often they didn’t, and I massacred their language just as I had massacred the fruit flies. Shamefully, regretfully, and with a great deal of embarrassment I butchered the French language, so badly sometimes that the person on the other end just went silent. Yes, my French was atrocious, and I felt guilty about it. This wasn’t just going into a bakery and ordering a croissant. Who cares if you get that wrong, especially if you’re just a tourist and you’re never going to see the baker again. Get your croissant and run, I say. But when you’re in a little office where everyone can hear everything you say, speaking French on the phone felt like being naked.
So it was a relief when the new semester of language classes began. And there I was, studying again and realizing that there’s nothing more boring than learning French at a school in France - at least if you do it at a traditional school with traditional teaching methods. I’d hunted down a cheap course not far from my office in the 19th arrondissement. Twice a week after work I’d go to the class, but twice a week I’d dread that too. The teacher I had was as fastidious with his verb conjugations as he was with his facial grooming. And he was horrible. I don’t think he meant to be horrible, he was probably perfectly friendly outside the class, but I think he taught us the same way he’d been taught at school himself - and as I understand it, learning in France is not a process that’s meant to be enjoyed. The teacher would throw grammar rules at us and hoped they’d stick. He’d go through example sentences on the board, then whip around the room asking students in turn if they could conjugate the verbs. I never knew the answers, and would plan ahead to try and find the correct response to the teacher’s question. When it got to me, I’d often have no idea and would just guess. But if someone got it wrong, he wouldn’t explain it. He wouldn’t teach it. He’d just wait until the student eventually got the right answer.
The irritating part for me was that at this point, I wasn’t skilled enough to discuss the topic, the problem, or even why I couldn’t answer it. I could only sit silently, like many of the other students. When you’re learning a language, one of the biggest achievements is reaching the level where you can explain what you don’t understand. It’s a huge moment. Sure, you might be way off fluency, but a new world opens up when you can say: “Hang on, what does that particular word mean? I’ve never heard that one before.”
I still hadn’t reached that crucial turning point, and my teacher with his overplucked eyebrows wasn’t making life easier for me. I remember one time he was going around the room asking students to conjugate verbs into the subjunctive. It’s one of the hardest tenses in the French language, irregular and basically impossible to guess. I decided that instead of guessing, I would just tell him that I didn’t know.
“Oliver, c’est quoi le subjonctif ici?” he said.
“Je ne sais pas,” I responded. I don’t know.
The rest of the class waited expectantly.
Then, the teacher did the weirdest thing. He mocked me.
“Oh, Oliver, you don’t know?” he said in a high-pitched baby voice. “Well maybe you could try and figure it out.”
I wasn’t expecting that. But there was no way I could figure it out. So I went for a lighter touch and said that I had no idea at all: J’ai aucune idée. And as unbelievable as it was to me, he mocked me again in the same child-like voice.
“Oh, Oliver, you have no idea at all, do you?”
I was so shocked. So embarrassed. I was lost for words. I sat there gaping like a stunned mullet while the teacher waited. I knew what he was trying to do. Like some kind of French python toying with an Australian mouse, he was trying to squeeze an answer out of me. But he was doing it all wrong. He was actually squeezing the confidence out of me. Finally, in shame, I broke eye contact with him, and he triumphantly moved on to his next victim.
I eventually gave up on the French classes. I stayed long enough to finish the semester (and pass the final tests, thankfully), but I never went back after that. The teaching wasn’t for me and I figured there were better ways to learn. Eventually, through sheer time, effort, and language exchanges, I managed to build up my French to an acceptable level. Fluent by some people’s standards, sure. But even years after moving to Paris I wouldn’t feel comfortable during a fast-paced conversation at a French dinner party. I suppose it didn’t matter at the time, because I wasn’t being invited to any.
And just for the record, I still can’t use the subjunctive tense.
2.6 Making friends
Nine months had passed since I had moved to Paris, and I was finally settling in. The worst of the admin was over, my grasp of the French language was improving, and I had made a solid group of friends, a mix of expats and French people. Most of us were fish out of water, strangers in a strange land, or strangers in a strange city. Even the French guys, all of whom were originally from elsewhere in France.
A lot of my friends were also Australians, which surprised even me. During four years in Sweden, I’d typically walked in the other direction when I heard an Australian accent. I think it was a mix of wanting to fit in with the Swedes and wanting to feel unique. In Sweden there aren’t many Australians at all, and meeting another one ruined my illusion that I was doing something special. Imagine if you were exploring a remote village in Mongolia, then found your neighbour from back home at the village pub. It was like that.
But when I moved to Paris it was different. I knew from the outset that I wasn’t unique. There’s nothing special about an Australian in Paris, so why try to avoid them? Rather, I found myself embracing them and wanting to spend time with them. What’s more, they’d been through the same challenges I was facing with opening bank accounts, getting social security, paying taxes. Some of them even had the benefit of a French partner, which made the journey easier for them, and sometimes for me too (indirectly).
In any case, my group of friends in Paris all lived in a big triangle, with the Canal Saint-Martin at the centre. Naturally, the canal proved to be the magnet that would draw us all in, a watering hole where we could grab a beer or a wine. Oftentimes, when the weather was good, we would sit by the canal with a picnic dinner and chat away into the night, like the Parisians did. It wasn’t strictly a summer activity either. As the autumn came and went, we continued to congregate at the canal, savouring the last moments of sunshine and preparing for another winter.
In mid-November, in what seemed like the last of the warm weather for the year, I headed back to Sweden for a weekend to tie up loose ends and hang out with Lina. And, as it happened, almost my entire group of friends had decided to take a weekend away as well, all separately. That’s the thing with international crowds - they all have a second home to visit, or in-laws to see, or will jump to explore nearby European cities. Even my editor had decided to head back to England for the weekend. We were all taking one last little holiday before the Christmas break at a typically quiet time of the year. And it was during that weekend that Paris as the world knew it was to forever change.
2.7 Terror in Paris
I was in Stockholm on the night Paris was attacked. In fact, I was in a theatre watching a musical. And I had an uncomfortable feeling throughout it. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something felt wrong. It may have just been the all-too-familiar feeling for journalists of going too long without checking their cell phone. When the show finished, I took my phone out of my pocket and saw there were way, way too many notifications. Dozens of missed calls, loads of texts and emails, and the first of the many news flashes from the French news sites.
“Shots fired in Paris.”
“Dozens injured in Paris.”
“Several killed in Paris attack.”
And that was just the beginning.
It was the night that would change Paris and I wasn’t there. At the time I learned of the attacks, I had a journalist’s response and my first thought was that we had no one to cover what seemed like an enormous story. The editor was in the remote countryside of the UK with no internet. I was in Sweden. That was our entire team at that point. I raced for my laptop and saw the news flashes as they started streaming in. More and more victims. More and more and more. 30, 40, 50. The updates came all night. 60, 70, 80.
For those first hours I was in an almost robotic journalist mode, filtering out the emotions to concentrate on writing the tragic news. I was seeing the horrific footage on social media, scanning frantically through the French press, translating whatever the officials were saying, and telling the news to the enormous number of people around the world who were reading about it.
As the night wore on, and the scale of the attacks became clear, the strangest whirlwind of emotions was going through my mind. The first was the shock. The second was wondering if everyone was OK. My phone, like everyone else’s in Paris, was flooded with messages from friends and family around the world. “We just heard what happened, are you alright?” I got the same form of messages from people I hadn’t talked to in years. Facebook rolled out a “mark as safe” feature, in which people in Paris could tick a box to show they were alive. It was an unheard of move for Facebook to make, and the company would later face criticism for it, but it certainly seemed at the time the quickest way to let people know if you were safe.
The third strongest emotion for me was disbelief that the series of attacks were not only so indiscriminate, but in the exact areas where I spent my social time in Paris. Four of the bars that were hit were in the canal area where we always hung out. My mind wandered. I’d have been out if I were in Paris on that Friday night. Where would I have been?
But I was so swept up in covering the story that my mind mostly stayed in news mode. 90, 100, 110 dead. My phone was ringing off the hook, news stations from around the world calling for updates. The international journalists couldn’t speak French, so they were calling our paper to hear it in English. I stopped answering the phone.
One call I did answer was from my neighbour Stephane. He rang, worried for me, asking where I was, but there was a real trouble in his voice.
“I’m fine, I’m in Stockholm,” I said. “But what about you, are you OK?”
“Yes, I’m OK. But I was at the stadium tonight,” he said.
Shit. I remembered him talking about going to the soccer match at the Stade de France. It, too, was a target that night.
“It was horrible,” he said. “We heard an explosion. No one knew what was happening. No one told us anything. We got back to Paris and ran all the way home. There are police everywhere, everywhere.”
A suicide bomber had blown himself up outside the Stade de France stadium, where 80,000 people were watching the game. The bomber managed to kill a security guard and himself. He never made it inside the stadium.
But by far the worst was at the Bataclan, a concert hall in the 11th arrondissement, where gunmen and suicide bombers killed 89 concert goers. I felt sick writing about it and even to this day I still struggle to comprehend it.
I stayed up through the night, reporting on the terror. And that was just the “What” part of the story. The “How”, the “Who”, and especially the “Why” would take months, even years to cover.
I was on a flight back to Paris the next day. To my home. Which on the one hand felt extremely foreign to me, yet more “home” than it ever had. It was a strange time to be a new resident in Paris. I’d lived there for almost a year, but I had never considered myself Parisian, even though I lived in the centre of the city, had a job there, and had no plans of leaving. But I felt a kind of belonging and a closeness with my friends and with the locals. The Parisians had been strong and resilient in the face of the Charlie Hebdo attacks earlier that year, but would it be the same now that the attack had been so huge and so indiscriminate? 130 people were killed. How can you respond to that?
And whether Paris was home to me or not (and how do you define home anyway?), one thing was for sure. When I arrived in Paris to cover the Charlie Hebdo attacks, I had no context of the city. I didn’t know what Charlie Hebdo was. I didn’t know what anything really meant. But I did know exactly what it meant that a huge number of young people in the 10th and 11th arrondissements were massacred at bars, restaurants, and in a concert hall, all in my neighbourhood. But I was far, far from understanding why it happened. And to this day, I still can’t.
2.8 Paris after the terror
The months following the terror attacks were unusual. There were so many questions about it all. How could anyone do that to other people? And why would they?
It was a testing time for all Parisians, and a difficult time to be a journalist in Paris. We spent every hour at work covering some aspect of the attack. Who were the victims? What were the ramifications for us all in Paris? What was to happen next? France declared a state of emergency - what did that mean? Who was the terrorist that survived, and how the hell did he get away like that? How did they get their weapons? How was France’s Muslim community reacting to the increase in hate crimes against them?
That was our life as reporters. All other news took a break for months. And as much as the city was trying to get back to normal, everyone knew it would take a long time. Some people looked for distractions. Others dwelled on the attacks. Some left the city for good. Tens of thousands of tourists, probably more, were scared away from the City of Light, and Paris suffered from that too. But what I noticed most was that many, many people got on with it. They flocked to the bar terraces for drinks, despite the November cold. Once again, Paris was resilient. The big difference between the response to this attack and the one at Charlie Hebdo was that there was no massive march afterwards: the president had banned public gatherings as part of the state of emergency that was to last two years. Yes, Paris had changed, and soon it would become common to see heavily armed soldiers patrolling the streets. For months, we’d have our bags searched as we went into shopping centres and cinemas. And everyone got used to it. There was no other choice, really.
And gradually, very gradually, life got back to normal.