Hi all!

I know it’s been a little while since I’ve posted. Last spring ended up being a little much, and then I got out of the the habit of posting and, well, you know how it goes.

When I arrived here a year and a half ago, I found myself being very self-conscious about my French. The mind-warp between being pretty freaking good at speaking French for an American and being pretty sh*tty at speaking French compared to actual French people was a bit difficult for a long time. I really struggled.

But then somehow magically, a few months ago it seemed to get better. I was reading a lot of books in French, my vocabulary was definitely growing, I was talking more with French people, like actual conversations and not just « Bonjour, madame ! I’d like a croissant. » And I think somehow some of the anxiety I’d had seemed to lessen, so I could just dive into the slightly chilly water of speaking French and start swimming.

So that’s been very nice. It used to be that after I’d been speaking French for a few hours, I’d get a headache, partly because it just requires more mental effort to speak and to understand, but also because my cheeks and jaw muscles would ache because speaking French simply requires more muscular strength to pronounce.

So I’m feeling like I’m a bit over the hump. I can have a fairly normal conversation in French without having to think about it too much, without having to formulate a sentence three times before figuring out something I know how to say in French, though that still happens once in a while.

I mean, don’t get me wrong — when a bunch of French people start jabbering to each other, I’m still pretty lost. But not quite as much as I used to be.

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On another note, I try to go to an art exhibition about once a week. Which, believe me, does not come anywhere close to exhausting the options. Recent outings have ranged from the Surrealists and impressionist painter Suzanne Valadon (no, I’d never heard of her either, but after seeing her work, I was like, why haven’t I?!?)…

… to PopArt painter Tom Wesselmann to Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, whose signature works involve room-sized webs of yarn…

… to the street art of Paris…

I’ve also been reading about mid-century photographers like George Platt Lynes and the PaJaMa trio (Paul Cadmus, Jared French and Margaret French). One thing that has struck me — particularly with the Surrealists and the mid-century photographers, but also with other groups of artists like the cubists — is how much collaboration and interplay you see among them. I guess I’d had the idea that the great artists spent their time holed up in their studios creating ART. But at least for a lot of them, they were actually spending a good deal of time hanging out with their other artist friends, whether that was discussing avant-garde concepts or just the latest gossip at a cafe over coffee or wine, going out to soirées, engaging in torrid romances or else pining for one or another, or actually collaborating on one work of art or another. It seems like there’s a spark that can happen in circles of artists, even if we often tend to focus on the individuals.

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In the last couples months I’ve also started going on hikes outside of Paris on the weekends. I may have mentioned that I have a book of hiking trails that you can get to from the metro or (more likely) the RER, the light rail train system that serves the Paris region. I’ll pack the fixings for a classic ham and cheese on baguette sandwich, some nuts and lemonade in my knapsack, and off I go.

It’s been wonderful to get outside the city for a few hours, breath in some fresh air, wander through a forest, and often pass by a chateau or some other very French building, listen to some birdsongs, maybe see a random pony or two.

Okay, these are real hikes, some of them up to 10 miles, but sometimes it doesn’t always feel like a « hike » when there are chateaux to be seen and you can grab a glass of wine or a pain au chocolat along the way.

A few photos…

And yes, one of those hikes did take me from the edge of Paris to Versailles. It would take the king and queen two days by carriage to travel from the Palais du Louvre to the Palais de Versailles back in the day because they’d stop off at the Chateau de Saint-Cloud (since burned down). It was fun to in a way retrace their steps (or carriage wheels) over the course of an afternoon.

Hoping your spring is getting off to a good start! A bientôt!