Salut tout le monde! I arrived safely in Paris two weeks ago for my one-year Gardner Traveling Fellowship. “Les petites goûts” means “the little tastes” of Paris and, in this post, I’m writing about all the little tastes I have had in the past two weeks. Read ahead for my adventures with French paperwork, café crème, and Belgian political structure.

La paperasserie

This French word looks like a cross between papier (paper) and pâtisserie (pastry shop/bakery). But don’t be fooled because it’s nothing as pleasant as the latter. It means paperwork and the French are really, really into it. Before arriving, I had read about this from various blogs but did not truly understand until I went into the bank to make a bank account and came away (two appointments later…) with about 50 pages of paper about my account, 20 pages on two types of insurance I had to buy from the bank, and a (verbal) note that more paper was coming in the mail. That’s to say nothing of the paperwork I had to bring to make the account in the first place. Let’s just say I’ve heard of people having had to get their birth certificate officially translated because their American passport didn’t specify the city of their birth. Quel horreur!

Café crème

Despite–or perhaps because?–the large amounts of proof needed to start anything in France, the actual time it takes to process everything from a bank account to a visa verification is still very long. I attribute this to the laid-back French life style. One of the other reasons getting a bank account took a while was because the bank had a two-hour break in the afternoon for lunch and only had appointments for certain tasks either only in the morning or afternoon. And perhaps most emblematic of this style–and most visible to visitors to Paris–are the cafes with many rows of tiny tables lining the outside and, at all times of the day, crammed with people. People, Parisians and visitors, sit for hours at a time just chatting, drinking coffee, or imbibing wine. Waiters never rush you the check and, in fact, you usually have to ask for it more than once before it comes. And despite what my seventh grade French textbook said, the order is not cafe au lait but rather café crème. In the evenings, many restaurants will be filled until past 11:30pm, when everyone filters out to catch the last metro. The amount of second hand smoke aside, this low-paced approach to meals is one of my favorite parts of the French lifestyle. I personally prefer small and deep conversations over large, superficial gatherings and Parisian cafe culture offers the perfect outlet for me.

Le Petit Pont café is pretty touristy as it is very close to Shakespeare and Co and Île de la Cité, which is the island with the Notre-Dame cathedral and many other notable sites.

Belgian political structure

I am living on a campus with lots of international students from all over the world. But it just somehow happened that I sat down–freshman year Annenberg-style for my Harvard friends–and started chatting with a very nice Belgian on my second day there, and now almost all the new friends that I have made are Belgian. This led to some interesting learnings on my part, including a debriefing session on how Belgian government works, based off of this following video that they showed me.

I really appreciated getting more depth in my understanding of the country besides the one paragraph I had read about in my high school French textbook. While I don’t know the full extent of the structure, the Belgian system reminded me of the political solutions proposed for the Israel-Palestine situation. In the context of the short lectures and videos I had had before going on the Harvard Israel Trek this past March, it seemed like modern day Belgium presented some similarities to the some of the one-state solutions that have been proposed. Of course, many differences also exist in the polarity of religions, cultures, and attitudes, but it did help me realize that I wanted to learn more about countries that contain multiple different groups.

That’s it for my first–and rather random–set of petites goûtes. I will be uploading some more pictures soon! A tout à l’heure!