Triumph Over Laundry and Loneliness: My Year in Paris, France

            In the fall of 1998, my husband received a grant to do research for his doctoral dissertation in Paris, France.  For him, it was the next step in the journey to a PhD in medieval history.  For me, it was yearlong vacation to a beautiful city in a country whose language I had been studying for ten years.  The months leading up to our departure were exciting.  We visited the consulate in Los Angeles and got beautiful long-stay visas stamped into our passports.  We scoured the bookstores for unusual books on Paris - insider guides that would make us feel less like tourists and more like locals.  I had the distinct pleasure of quitting my mind-numbingly dull job in human resources: “Sorry to leave, but I’m moving to Paris,” I told my boss.  I could not wait for my year abroad to begin.

            When we arrived, my husband got right to work.  He spent mornings at the national library with his manuscripts and afternoons in seminars at the Sorbonne.  He was very busy and I was very, well, bored.  After answering the initial dilemmas of where we were going to live, and do our grocery shopping, and so on, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself.  I didn’t have a job; I didn’t have friends; I didn’t even have cable.  After a few days sitting around doing basically nothing, I started to feel an overwhelming need to be productive.  I wasn’t sure where to direct this energy, so I spent a lot of time cleaning.  This was entirely silly.  By an astonishing stroke of good fortune, we had been able to rent a beautiful apartment three blocks from the Eiffel Tower, on a lovely residential street without a lot of tourist foot traffic.  This apartment was also two hundred square feet.  I could dust, sweep the floors, do the dishes, and clean the toilet in about half an hour.  Keeping our apartment clean was simply not going to be enough to occupy me for the next year.

            Doing laundry, on the other hand, was the kind of ordeal that could really suck up a lot time.  Apparently, Parisians don’t really do laundry themselves.  I gradually came to understand that, for one thing, the French don’t feel the need to wash something after it’s been worn only once or twice – four or five times is more like it.  When it is time for something to be washed, they take to it to be dry cleaned or laundered professionally.  This is true for everything but undergarments, which they generally hand wash in their sinks at home and then hang to dry in their bathrooms.  This explained why there were so many clothes-pin-and-drying-rack options in our neighborhood market, and also why Paris was a city where there were practically no Laundromats. 

            As it turned out, there was a coin laundry not too far from our apartment.  It was unbelievably expensive and time consuming, but it was not really possible to comparison shop, since the next nearest Laundromat was about a mile away.  When I finally broke down and did laundry for the first time, it cost me 250 francs (about $50) and an entire day.  Like most French things, it didn’t open until 10:30 am, so it was impossible to get an early start.  Really, doing laundry in Paris is like a synthesis of every negative French stereotype – it costs too much, it takes too long, it is wildly inefficient, it smells bad and, if there is any service at all, it is terrible.  To do laundry, I would pack our dirty clothes in our rolling suitcase and carry it down the four flights of stairs in our apartment building (there was no elevator), roll it the several blocks to the “Lave-Linge,” and begin filling the machines as fast as I could in the hopes that I could get my clothes in before anyone else arrived.  Although the market for coin-laundry is clearly not large enough for there to be a lot of them, it is large enough to make every Lave-Linge packed with irritable French people in need of clean t-shirts.  The problem, however, was not getting the clothes washed as much as it was getting them dried.  Apparently owning a washing machine is more common than owning a dryer.  This makes sense; if you only have room for one of the two machines in your tiny Parisian apartment, go with the washer. Anyway, I frequently encountered the problem where someone brought their wet clothes from home and put them in the Lave-Linge dryer just as my clothes finished washing.  The owners of the facility had anticipated this problem – there were twice as many dryers as washers.  Nevertheless, a lot of the time I wasted at my local French Laundromat was sitting around with my wet clothes waiting for an available dryer.  Clearly, a year spent doing laundry would be both expensive and frustrating.  It couldn’t be entirely avoided, but letting laundry absorb my existence was turning me into an irritable and bored human being.  I was going to have to move out of the domestic sphere if I wanted to find a more fulfilling way to spend my year of free time.

            In the evenings when my husband came home, we would walk around in the city and explore a little.  It was an interesting and inexpensive way to pass the time.  Mostly we were fascinated by what we saw and enjoyed ourselves.  Sometimes, though, especially as the holidays grew nearer, we would feel homesick.  We would reminisce about ice in a soda, recognizable menu items, doing all of your grocery shopping at one store, smiling at strangers without being thought a lunatic.  It was during one such walk, in the middle of a particularly acute bout of homesickness that we came across our most cherished Parisian indulgence: a real Chili’s restaurant, right off the Champs-Elysées.  When we went inside, we discovered you could easily pretend to be in the United States.  The menus were the same chili-pepper shape as in the U.S.; even the menu items had the same names (if you blurred your eyes slightly, you could not notice that the descriptions of these items were in French).  They even had USA Today papers in the bathrooms.  We ordered and ate the “Fajitas for Two” like ravenous people who hadn’t had a decent meal in weeks.  We savored the cheddar cheese (it is not used in French cuisine) and reveled in our free refills of soda and bottomless chips and salsa.  This little slice of American heaven was just the thing to ease our homesickness. 

            Despite the discovery of Chili’s and a stoic acceptance of the laundry situation, I still had not found a satisfying way to fill my days.  But in early October, I had a breakthrough.  There was an exhibit at the Louvre my husband wanted to see (it was a traveling collection from Egypt - “with a real mummy!” he told me, like an excited child.)  While we were there, my husband noticed the price for a year-long pass to the Louvre was really reasonable.  “You should get one,” he told me.  “You could always come here if you ran out of things to do.”  I bought the pass and after that, everything changed.  The Louvre was my job.  When my husband left in the morning to go transcribe twelfth century bookhand, I went to the Louvre.  At first, I went everyday.  I went systematically through the different wings of the museum.  I lingered in the book store.  I sat in the Grand Gallery and watched tourists and groups of children on school field trips.  I tried different routes to get to the Louvre.  Sometimes I walked.  Sometimes I rode the metro.  I tried different metro lines to arrive at the Louvre in different ways.  I never had to wait in line because I was a pass holder, but I tried all the different entrances, anyway, to figure out which one I liked best. 

            My Louvre experience elevated my confidence.  I learned how to navigate the museum, the metro, and the crowds.  I decided to apply my new skills to different places in Paris.  I started going to other museums.  I went to Musée Picasso, Musée Marmottan, Musée d’Orsay, Musée de la Mode et du costume.  Every week, I bought a magazine called l’Officiel des spectacles and it said what special exhibits were showing at different museums.  I saw a Van Gogh and Cézanne exhibit at the Grand Palais; I even went and saw an American Folk Art exhibit that was visiting from a museum in Chicago.  I started making a schedule for myself each week.  Wednesday became my favorite day because that was when the new l’Officiel des spectacles came out and I could plan what I wanted to do.  Each week, I planned three art exhibits I would go see, one movie to go watch (if you went at nine in the morning, an hour when most Parisians are apparently still sleeping, you can get a discounted ticket), and a trip to the English bookstore, W. H. Smith.

            W.H. Smith is on rue de Rivoli and just across the street from the Tuileries gardens that lead up to the Louvre.  I knew I ought to be reading French books, but when you are in a strange land you really crave anything that is familiar.  (This was also my explanation for why I really enjoyed drinking Coca Cola in France.)  So I indulged in visits to the bookstore where they only sold books in English.  W.H. Smith is a British chain, so their offerings were mostly tabloid magazines and mystery fiction, but they also stocked bits and pieces from Oprah’s Book Club and a few contemporary authors of quality, like Margaret Atwood.  I would spend a long time making my selections – two books a week – because it was an expensive habit for a couple living on a little research grant, and I needed these books to last me all week.  After I made my purchases, I would walk across the street to the Louvre.  If it wasn’t freezing cold and rainy, I would sit in the Tuileries and read.  Usually it was freezing cold and rainy, though, so I would go to the Louvre and find a nice bench or chair to read in.  If I felt like a real splurge, I might go to the museum café and get a tiny cup of coffee to drink while I read my book. 

            As the year went on, I started to feel a real sense of accomplishment.  I could navigate the metro system like a pro, but also knew the city above ground from all my walking around.  In the spring, when we had several groups of guests arrive and I got to play the tour guide, I realized how comfortable I was in Paris and how much I had learned about the city.  The other surprising discovery was how happy I was to wander the city on my own after our guests had left.  I no longer dreaded being alone; I no longer saw each day as a stretch of empty hours I would have to fill before my husband came home.  My year in Paris had taught me to cope with the unexpected, to figure things out for myself, and, most of all, to be alone without being lonely.