Paris, Part II

Ok, still catching up with the present here. If the lack of extemporaneity bothers you, you can pretend this is an exciting postmodern experiment and feel intellectual when you tells your friends that you follow a travel blog that brashly kicks to the curb traditional narrative structure.

Back to Paris (hey, it was only two months ago. Memory like an elephant). After traipsing around the city trying to find the Rice School of Architecture, I finally succeeded and the irritation of schlepping around what felt like nine thousand pounds of crap subsided (kind of) on seeing my friend MJ. She had even saved me a half-baguette! She kindly gave me the key to her apartment (which seriously looked like a medieval torture device) and a Paris map book (which was to stay with me longer than I ever suspected…[FORESHADOWING]) so that I could go get settled in while she was in class. In short, MJ is the best. That night she and her room-mate Tim, who graduated from Hanszen but is cool anyway, came back and we all went to Picard, a store which only sells frozen foods. Seems kind of un-French, right? I sampled the classic Gallic delicacy, frozen lasagna.

The next day was great. I was generously invited to go with MJ’s whole architecture class on a walk through Paris focusing on urbanism, which was exciting because urbanism is basically what I want to do. In life. Although teaching French high schoolers about peanut butter comes in at a distant second, I guess. At least de facto. It was fun to see the architecture class because I recognized all of the undergrads (or, uh, recent-graduate-post-preceptor-sixth-year-students? Whatever) from Rice. Anyway, the guide for the walk was a very funny and knowledgeable professor named Françoise who apparently has her own Wikipedia article (that’s about all it takes to impress me). One of the first things we did was walk along the Promenade Plantière (or something like that—I don’t have Internet access as I write this so I can’t fact-check). It’s basically a way, way cooler version of New York City’s new High Line Park—an elevated, linear park full of greenery. The New York one is pretty neat, but Paris’ strikes me as a much more pleasant place to actually be. Maybe in time as the High Line becomes less of a novelty and the crowds subside, it will settle into itself.

This was also the point at which I was informed of the concept of the sanisette, a type of French public toilet that CLEANS ITSELF with a WHOLE LOT OF WATER between each use. I was so entranced and horrified by the concept of a magic robot toilet that I kept a wary eye on each one I passed in Paris, though never got the chance to test them.

Later in the walk, we visited a fascinating public housing project in one of the inner suburbs of Paris. It was designed by an architect named something like Renaudet (again, can’t check at the moment) and I found it to be a really inspiring example of forging livable space. Basically the project is a reaction against uniformity in institutional housing, and it is designed so that each unit is different. Despite the fact that it’s molded from concrete, the development has an intricacy and randomness that makes it (to me, anyway) instantly pleasing both aesthetically and ambiently. It’s built around a triangle pattern, and balconies and roofs and windows jut in all different directions from any given point. It’s hard to explain, and if I can find pictures of it online I’ll eventually put them up here. Over all I was very moved by the project.

I’ll describe the rest of the walk and my Paris visit next time.