An American in Paris

Sometimes I feel like a real idiot here. This morning, I couldn’t open the door to my apartment.  No, not from the outside, from the inside. I couldn’t leave. I was already running a bit late, having stayed up past my bedtime to finish correcting a composition, so my family had already left. Little did I know that they would bolt the door before they left, meaning I had to unlock the door to leave the apartment. I stood in front of that thing for several minutes, pushing on the knob and twisting the latch this way and that, before my host mom called me back. I had sent her a text, asking how to “salir a travers la porte,” but she didn’t understand what I was trying to say. Salir is the Spanish word for “to leave,” and, while it is a verb in French, it means “to soil/get dirty.” Cool. “Dear host mom, how do I get dirty through the door?” Very intelligent.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had trouble exiting through doors. The first time I tried to go out of a Metro station with a specific “in” and “out” – at the Louvre, no less, which has a lot of traffic – I for the life of me could not figure out how to make the door open. I pushed with all my might, but to no avail. Finally, a kind, Asian tourist took pity on me, came around from the other side and pushed on the green “POUSSEZ” button. "Push." Et voilà, it worked. This being at the beginning of my trip, I wasn’t sure which French expression to use to express my ineptitude, so I just slapped my forehead in exasperation. The universal sign for “I cannot believe that just happened.”

The cool, but also intimidating, thing about blogging is that my words reach people from all over the world. I can check the statistics of where the traffic is coming from, and during this week alone I’ve had readers from the US, Sweden, France, Germany, Canada, Russia, Great Britain, Chili, Italy and Brazil. How they found me, I will never know. Anyways, I hope all of you international people don’t assume all Americans are this incompetent… I promise, it’s just me.

To further underline my American-ness, I might add that I am writing this post from a McDonald’s (called affectionately, “MacDo,” by the French). To be fair, it’s the only place with WiFi in this area where I’m supposed to meet up with a friend, but still, I’m feeling less-than-exotic right about now. Ah, well. Off to the Musée Picasso to make up for it.