Gimme Shelter

A little over one full week in Paris, and so much has happened. If this pace keeps up, it will be a jam-packed five months for me in France. It all began last Saturday after a draining flight from Boston and a layover in London. For the first half of the week, I (along with the other visiting students to the American University of Paris) had been staying at the FIAP. I was desperate to get out of there and the American student bubble that surrounded it and finally find my own place. Of course that was easier said than done.

I opted to live in a “chambre de bonne,” or a former maid’s quarters converted into a tiny single studio apartment at the top floor of most Parisian buildings. Since I had turned in all my housing forms early (for once), my AUP housing meeting was scheduled at a prime time and I was sure I was going to get an excellent place. Monday morning I went to talk with the advisors, and, after telling her my reasonable budget and expressing my easy-going nature, she sent me to what I lovingly refer to as the apartment from Le Hell. In retrospect, I think my easy-going nature was my first mistake. I like to think I’m a fairly low-maintenance person, comparably, and while I may be fussy about somethings, that’s only to the people that I’m close with--not a housing advisor. And while bitchy, demanding girls from New Jersey (I’m assuming) got placed in amazing apartments, I think my advisor thought I was on a tighter budget than I really was and sent me off to a chambre de bonne off a side street off a side street near an elementary school.

It was horrific. First, this room, including a shower and kitchenette, not including a shared toilet down the hall, measured to be nine square meters. That’s roughly 27 square feet. I’ve lived in a smallish apartment before in New York with a tiny bathroom—my NY bathroom was literally the size of one you’d find on a train—but this shower was a plastic tube smack dab in the middle of the room. To the left of it was a dingy kitchenette and the right a bed with two shelves above it and nothing else.

Everyone was telling me to be realistic about my living situation, which I thought I was, and that my room would no doubt be small, but THIS small? This was the first apartment I’d seen in Paris, so I had nothing to compare it to, and we were encouraged to take the first apartment on the spot or risk moving to the end of the waiting list and getting the reject apartments if there were any. This made me think, would rejecting this place subject me to apartments even worse than this? Could that even be possible? I didn’t want to be difficult, but I could not happily live there. So to the bottom of the list I went.

I waited around the housing office for the rest of the day but my next meeting would be the next day. Apartments were on the tips of everyone at AUP’s tongues, and the constant questions about the apartment I had seen was stressing me out. At the end of Tuesday, the main housing coordinator came out to inform me that there were very little housing options left, and that my best bet may be to stay with a host family.

Chills went down my spine. The last family I lived with was my own, and even that didn’t go so well. I love my family and all, but our relationship on both ends is infinitely better since I moved away for college. But I felt desperate for somewhere to live, to make Paris my own and to finally escape the FIAP, so I gave the home stay a chance. A student advisor and I went to the fifth arrondisment and entered a beautiful old building with a classic looking elevator. As we got out on the fifth floor, a tiny old woman, at least into her 70s, with white hair greeted us at the door. Immediately entering the apartment, the place smelled like old woman. We checked out my potential room, which was roomy with a connecting bathroom, but the apartment felt like a museum of Parisian collectables. It was beautiful but I would be afraid to touch anything. The woman spoke no English, which was fine because it would help me enhance my elementary French skills, but she presumptuously kept calling me Robert (“Rah-berrh”). Name is a huge part of your identity, and just because I was in a different country did not mean I was going to change who I was. The whole living situation seemed so intrusive to me—if I saw this little old lady sitting alone in her parlor, am I supposed to ignore her? What about if I get home late at night, do I have to tiptoe around like I’m in trouble with my parents? Again, I could not happily live here for five months, so I had to turn it down.

I had no internet access, no cell phone, and no apartment. I felt ungrounded in a foreign city with seemingly no housing options left. What was I to do? I was one of the last ones still not housed. I considered myself to be an agreeable person, what was wrong with me? After a frantic, and expensive, phone call to my parents, in which my mom blatantly told me to get a grip, I decided to keep up the housing search. It was now day three, and I had talked to all the housing advisors available. Finally, though, one had an idea. A student visiting from George Washington University had been unfairly holding on to more than one housing option, against the rules, and it could FINALLY be the right apartment for me. I took a look at it, and it was. At 15 square meters, or about 45 square feet, it was in the 5th arrondisment right below the Jardin du Luxembourg, like Paris’s answer to Union Square, or so my friend Swati tells me. It’s in the Latin Quarter, home to some of history’s most notable intellectuals, and it’s near a lot of nightlife on Boulevard Saint-Germain. I have a TV with 6 French channels, which I am loving watching French commercials, and a park outside my door. I don’t have Internet, as France is pretty slow on the technology bandwagon, and when I need to use the bathroom, I try to hold it because I dread going to the shared bathroom and potentially running into someone down the hall, but other than that I love it.


Agrandir le plan

It’s a bit of a trek from school, but with everyone else living close to campus, I’m excited to explore a part of the city that will be my own and separate from AUP. And while everything here is so expensive, I ‘ve taken to eating street food, the effects of which are starting to catch up with me, but the best panini’s I’ve found are down the street from my house. Got a French phone. Got a French apartment. Now I just need to find some French friends.