Il sesto. Parigi. (11/11/07)

Oh, Paris.

Here's one for the Christmas card. Considering this is the only time in my life when a weekend in Paris is actually feasible, I'm pretty glad I decided to buy that plane ticket. Even if I was there less than 48 hours. Seeing Molly was excellent. We ate pastry really sneakily in a cafe. She drank apple juice. And then spent a fittingly gray and drippy Saturday wandering around the Luxembourg Gardens and Père-Lachaise with some French girl named Callie. Said hi to Oscar Wilde, Proust, Chopin, and Jim for everyone. The hours I spent in the Pompidou are, well. Let's just say I'll be back. Maybe if I study my French hard enough I'll be able to work there someday. Or live there, secretly. Like the Boxcar Children.

Sometimes I wonder how I ever ended up in Italy after having seen Paris when I was younger. I rode the metro enough this weekend to give me a rather insuppressable flashback. To some other metro. There are so many cities. So many places to live someday. Soon.

I also may or may not have carried on a baguette when I boarded the plane home. And ate it the following morning with butter and jam. A little nutella. Can anyone tell my why I end paragraphs with fragments like this? So annoying.

I rode the bus back through Bologna in time to see them hanging giant snowflakes and lights across Via dell'indipendenza. And this morning, a huge platform appeared beside the cathedral while I was in class. It literally takes up two thirds of the widest street in town, and they're hanging the whole thing with white tents. I think it's going to be a Christmas market.

I might take a ballet class here in the spring. I just have to get my shoes from home. God, I can't believe I'm going to be home so soon. I'm excited for the things I really miss here. That is, the ridiculous things like driving my car, coffee in giant to-go cups, Fritos, tv. But I'm not sure how I'm going to handle being back. And so soon. I don't remember what life in one language feels like. I still can't turn off the constant bilinguality here; writing this feels a little bit like translation to me. My life here is in a language that no one back home can understand. How can I actually translate if for everyone? That's you, oh blog void. I just don't know how much of this experience I will ever be able to communicate. In my head, that came out fino a che punto mi saro' riuscita mai d'esprimere. Do you see the problem?

And then I wonder how I'm going to listen to all of my friends who've been abroad tell me about the really sweet discothèques they found, their big semi-offtrack trip to Prague, and most of all how glad they are to be back in America. 'Merica, my roommate says. I'm being horribly unfair. But I'll nod my head for a while, hear everyone's stories, and then after three weeks at home, I come back here. Back to my apartment, back to my drafty little city in the northern pianure. The rest of my friends head home to their respective college lives, possibily unaware that anything has changed. But I don't know that I'll ever be able to walk into a store again, anywhere, without waiting for the person behind the counter to look me straight in the eyes and say, "Dimmi tutto." Tell me everything. Not how may I help you, not usually even a hello. Dimmi.

I don't know. I have so many small daily frustrations and smaller triumphs here. I'm constantly working to convince every person who sees me or speaks to me that I belong here. Ignore the hair. I can speak this language. I can communicate with you as well as anyone else on this street. It is impossible for me to not be treated differently here, and it's based entirely on my complexion. It doesn't seem to matter how much black I wear, the best assumption I get from people I meet is French. Occasionally German. Never Dutch. I'm not tall enough. I may not always be that American girl, but the constant application of some stereotype which does not represent me is maddening.

I walk up to an il Fe' newsstand and ask for La Repubblica. The man watches me, guardedly. Asks me to repeat it while he reaches for the paper. Just to let me know he knows I'm not Italian. I walk up to Il Fe' and ask for Le monde. He hands it to me and replies amicably, "merci." No matter what image I can fit here, or with what culture I am able to identify, I will never, not for this entire year, not with complete fluency in the language, be accepted, will never fail to be scrutinized everywhere from the grocery store to the coffeebar to my classes. Maybe I just should have dyed my hair. Maybe I'll do it soon.

I've never known a place, or more a tendency among people, to be so incredibly protective of their own. Their own race, their own language, their own culture. Not as much in the self-aware, "we must preserve a cultural identity that we recognize is fading out" sense. It's more like, "I'm Italian. I was born in Italy. I live in Italy. Why are you here, in my country? Why are you reading my newspaper? You're not like me." Frequento l'Universita qui'. Faccio lo studio all'estero quest'anno. Ma perche'? E' davvero migliore qui, in Italia, che negli Stati Uniti? Is studying here really better, they ask without blinking. I have no idea what to say. I shrug, I walk outside, I hear them talking about me through the door while I unchain my bike.

I've made it sound more dramatic than it is. These are just the tiny things in my day-to-day life that, after three months, have started to get to me. It's incredible how easily one little gesture can change my whole outlook on the culture I'm living in. It's terrifying, actually. It's like everything. I love it. I can't stand it. The line between the two is hardly distinguishable. Time to apologize for the longest blog entry of all time. Ann would call this "un piccolo rant." Forse un grande rant. Maybe I should have just stuck to the photos. Ma dai, who reads these things anyway?

Allora. E voi? Come state? Come va a casa, nel resto del mondo? Ognuno mi manca.

Dimmi tutto.