ak35

I was disappointed, expecting some version of Plato’s ancient Greece.
But Athen’s a city which you learn to like.
You eventually see beyond the tourists,
the smog (very polluted), and truly
appreciate it when you adopt a Greek lifestyle
and schedule: slow, siesta, good food, stroll,
take time to enjoy life.

I grew up in Paris, well from age 9 to 26 at least.
At the time I didn’t fully appreciate my good fortune.
Paris is not very kids-friendly (although that is slowly changing with the ``new” mayor). Look but don’t touch !!!
As a teenager, my friends and I kept getting into trouble for: splashing in public fountains, visiting and getting lost in the forbidden underground catacombs and sewers, walking on the lawn in public parks, playing hide-and-seek in private parkings or large building complexs (a scary one, because it usually ended-up with security dogs running after us), roller-skating (rollerblades were yet to be invented) which fell into a legal loophole: not being a pedestrian forbids you to use the sidewalks, and not being a vehicle fordibs you to use the street … catch 22…Fearless old ladies who would use their walking stick to make you trip on purpose (one friend ended up with a serious concussion), avoiding dog s** (almost impossible at the time, but I hear it is improving).
Well, we did it all anyway, and since we’d get in trouble no matter what, we pushed our luck by `catching a ride’ holding to the back of buses, vans or trucks. More often than not, the driver didn’t notice us.
I hope my kids never do that kind of things !
So when it comes to outdoor activities, places like New York are much better !!!
Fortunately, a teenager in Paris has a variety of other options, most of which require some amount of money.
This would include: smoking in school during recess (anything smokable really), hanging out in bars (legal drinking age is 16, but not enforced. Plus a beer is MUCH cheaper than a coke!), the cheaper option of buying alcohol at the supermarket and drinking it in a park (drinking in public places is perfectly ok, as long as you’re not walking on the lawn), ditching school to hang out at the Pere-Lachaise cemetery on Jim Morrison’s grave, being obliged to ditch school to catch the mailman before your parents receive a note from your principal informing them of your absence (a vicious circle really…), getting out of the city by jumping on subways and trains without a valid ticket (too expensive, and there are just SO MANY places to visit), restaurants, concerts and all the goodies the city has to offer, and which you slowly discover in your transition from teenagehood to adulthood. And by the time you’re in college, you attain total freedom: fees and tuiton are less than 300$ per year (I repeat: *300, oh and by the way, `La Sorbonne’ is a very nice building, but apart from that, it is not academically better than the other 12 or so public universities in Paris.) In college, as long as you show up and pass final exams, all is well: attending the courses is optional, even discouraged for first year students because of over-crowded amphitheaters which don’t have enough seats for all the students enrolled. That problem is solved automatically though: 50% drop out every year until graduation !
So graduating from college is more than an academic achievement: it is a testimony of your survival skills in an adverse environment where you should not expect any help from the university professors, infrastructure or administration (or - more precisely - any interaction at all really until you reach a Masters). Not only have you passed all your exams, but you’ve sucessfully managed to enroll (for me, because enrollment was firt-come first-served, it involved staying in line all night in front of the building, before finding out the next morning whether you actually passed the national high-school exam without which you can’t enroll for college. Needless to say that those who stood in line all night only to find out they had flunked were … a tad irritated), find the date and location for those exams (yes, I know, it sounds simple enough, but trust me, it isn’t !), to navigate the student `Resto-U’ for food, insurance system for accessing high-quality quasi-free healthcare, to find and understand the countless administrative forms that need to be filled with hard-enforced deadlines (yet another efficient way to make the student crowd shrink). Those forms typically require you to submit additional documents to prove your citizenship, your home address, your parents’name and DOB or any similar arbitrary information which typically requires navigating through a Kafkaesque maze in different administrative offices… (Yes, you can obtain a certified proof of citizenship from city hall with a national ID, but no, can’t get one with a passport…go figure…).
Well, it’s all worth it though because you obtain at minimal cost an education on par with the best US colleges for a fraction of the cost !
The diploma ? No fancy ceremony: you receive it in the mail for your own very private enjoyment.

I was speechless when I first heard that US undergrads not only had an ADVISOR, but actually met with that person !!!
Not to mention career-counselors, sports facilities etc.
Well, I suppose that’s a minimum to expect when you’re paying 30.000$ a year after all (...)
But for the majority who can’t afford it, the French minimalist system works by sticking to a single goal: if you’re motivated and self-reliant, you can get a free high-quality education without owing a single penny in debt!

These days I try to visit Paris once a year. Over time, when you move abroad, you slowly lose touch with your social group…
But only now do I fully appreciate Paris’ architecture and beauty.
Especially in May, when the scent of the cherry trees blooming fills the air.
When I visit, I simply enjoy walking aimlessly, sometimes stopping on a public bench in the sun to read. I just wish there were more outdoor spots to hang-out: like the west side promenade, central park and the many public plazas in Manhattan !

We got married on top of the ESB, in November 2001.
Why ? Because when my husband and I first moved to NY, we were filled with hope, and somehow that building became a symbol of those hopes. The first year, we developped kind of a ritual looking at night to see what color it was and why.
We knew we wanted a non-religious ceremony, but when we went to city hall to obtain our wedding license (compulsory before getting married in NY state), we were treated like `cattle’ by the civil-servants there: rude would be a gross understatement of their attitude !
That, plus the residual stench from ground zero, which was still unbearable downtown more than 2 months after 9/11, convinced us to rule out a city-hall ceremony.
Fortunately, unlike many countries, you can get married in any location as long as the ceremony is performed by a qualified authority (in our case, a retired Judge).
On our big day, we were incredibly lucky with the weather: a perfect indian-summer cloudless sunny blue sky !
The ``wedding chapel”- a small room located several floors above the public observatory - has a breathtaking view over the city, but it is quite small, so you can have 35-40 guests max.
Of course safety measures had been implemented, so like everyone else visiting the ESB these days we had to go thru a metal detector, no big deal really.
The size of the chapel wasn’t a problem either, because in November 2001 many potential guests had cold feet, whereas neither the bride or the groom did. Ironical role reversal.
So much talking about `life as usual’ that middle-(red)-America likes to repeat so often since 9/11: in addition to my father who flew in from Kansas, the guests who actually got their acts together and attended our wedding all came from New York, from Sweden, or were non-US-citizen residents (from India, Poland, Haiti, Brazil etc.). The melting pot in action !
Middle-America guests had qualms about flying to NY, being in a skyscraper, catching Anthrax and what not…
Some of our other guests had some concerns about their safety, yet they overcame their fear. I am grateful to them.
Esp. my maid of honor forgot/didn’t want to tell me she was scared of heights, but I’m very proud of her because she performed wonderfully and helped make this important day perfect!!!