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BY MAKI SOMOSOT

In print | Published October 28, 2010

“Paris is overrated!” screamed the T-shirt slogan splayed across the chest of a hip Paris denizen who had just walked past me in the street. My first month in Paris — the honeymoon period — was decidedly over.

Paris is perpetually stereotyped as a picture-perfect study abroad destination. Set against a cinematic backdrop of centuries-old architecture and culture, the stereotype of Paris is no less than that of a paradise, with all its lights, cafés and roaming lovers. In pop culture, the city exists as the ultimate urban symbol of sophistication and cosmopolitanism, a global fashion and gastronomic capital always on the cutting edge. Endless hordes of tourists arrive every year in order to actualize the Paris of their dreams and imagination.

For Francophiles like me, there seemed to be nowhere else better in France than Paris to spend my semester abroad. It was the pinnacle of French culture, wherein the majority of intellectual life and artistic output was concentrated. Committed to my perfect Parisian dream, I was willing to swallow even the deadliest of inconveniences just for the sake of living it up in the City of Lights.

Upon my arrival, I was immediately enchanted by Paris for all the stereotypical reasons. I embraced the café culture, the buzzing nightlife and all the new cultural discoveries that presented themselves for the taking. The fashion and food was impossible not to catch on to: I increasingly wore neutral colors in accordance with the Parisian color palette, on top of consuming croissants and baguettes with real coffee everyday. People-watching while strolling along the banks of the Seine quickly became one of my new favorite activities. Because I considered myself a Francophile, more or less familiar with French culture, I scoffed at the possibility of serious culture shock ever interfering with my experience.

As my first month in Paris ambled on, the steady avalanche of inconveniences and grievances forced me to reconsider my glorified first impression. Case in point: the less-than-ideal living situation. The first hurdle for a student living on a budget in Paris is the sometimes dubious nature of lodging.
Touted as the world’s most expensive city for real estate, 500 Euros per month in Paris pays for a room in a French foyer, a hostel for students and “young professionals.” The description made me anticipate wireless Internet access, a private bathroom and at the very least hangers in the closet.
There was none of the above to be found in the unfurnished room wherein I was supposed to reside for four months in the glamorous French capital. My foyer was apparently at the bottommost echelon of the cheap housing hierarchy in Paris. In other foyers, residents could access the Internet and use the toilet in the comfort and privacy of their own room.

Instead, a sorry little sink in the corner of my room stood for the semblance of a bathroom. The actual public bathroom and shower itself is little more than a single industrial, windowless cell shared by both genders. Once when the shower light had stopped working, maintenance’s homeopathic remedy consisted of wrenching out the bathroom light to replace the one in the shower, judging from the wires hanging from the ceiling.

In our foyer, Internet access is only available in the common room and its functionality is completely unpredictable. Otherwise two PCs of similar Internet capacity are available, which also carry sluggish operating systems derived from a bygone era. There is a single mouse shared between these two technological relics. These days, the mouse has vanished into thin air, just like our last hopes for contact with the rest of the world through the Internet.

Our foyer also has a magnetic tendency to attract the presence of various broken objects outside the entrance every other week. The first time was a broken television set, followed by a dismantled computer hard drive and then a smashed mirror.

An ever-observant friend noted the positive correlation between the passage of time and the degree of destruction incurred by each respective object. “It’s a form of catharsis,” he commented. “I can imagine sexually frustrated Frenchmen passing by and launching themselves at [insert-object-of-the-week-here] every day.”

Apart from the usual housing woes, the dirtiness of Paris never ceases to amaze in its full grimy grandeur. It sends me reeling how much animal excretion, litter and used cigarette butts have flooded all the otherwise pleasant streets in this city. Concessions have inevitably been made for its status as a big city, but having visited my fair share of cities all over the world, the sheer density of dog litter here is so far beyond compare. A rule for survival in Parisian streets is to watch the ground like a hawk, a preventive measure against taking any embarrassing steps in the wrong direction. So far, I have luckily managed to avoid this mishap by developing a strategy of smooth side-stepping and swerving while going about my daily business.

In terms of spatial dimensions, Paris seems to be a relatively miniature city, at least smaller than other global capitals. Natives swear to have walked from the farthest point of the west to the east end of the city in no more than three hours. With a population of over 9 million (and growing), Paris’s land area is approximately 2700 square kilometers, yet has a density of 3550 people per square kilometer. The city feels disproportionately over-populated based on its size, lending it an air of mild claustrophobia that I can never quite shake.

Paris also lures impressionable ingénues looking for le fun with a never-ending and debilitating schedule of concerts, parties, raves, gallery openings, exhibitions and plays. While initially I had been energized by the countless nightlife choices at my disposal, soon I could no longer keep track of all the bons plans for the weekend and couldn’t figure out how I could possibly pencil them all into my planner, much less finance most of them. Overwhelmed by too many possibilities and missed opportunities, going out with friends had become both a chore and an obligation in Paris, which only worsened my cultural impasse further.

Living in Paris is not the same as visiting it. Just like every veteran of culture shock, I have had to reconcile these quotidian disappointments with the city’s more stereotypical enchantments. There are occasional culture shocks that grate on my nerves, but no longer as electrifying as before. Sitting outside a café while grumbling to a friend one day, I arrived at the realization that all the best — and the worst — stereotypes of Paris are true to some extent. There we were, enjoying our espresso shots and croissants while serenely watching passersby, with the sun warming our faces but with endless complaints about Paris clouding our minds. The beauty of Paris could never be more paradoxical than that.

Maki is a junior. You can reach her at msomoso1@swarthmore.edu.

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