I made an nice acquaintance this Saturday. It’s a guy from Algeria. He looks completely like a French, at least not like a Muslim. His slight accent, though, betrays his foreign origin. He’s a painter but he cannot make money as an artist so he, mathematician, works at the same time at a famous French gas company. He loves blue colors and all the time makes jokes about his ‘manias’ and about everything around reacting vividly to any comment or phrase of mine. His and our manias concern everything in our everyday life; I think the way we organize space we inhabit is marked to a great extant by our phobias and manias.
I came to his perfectly clean flat in a close South Parisian suburb, and my mission was to clean it even better. “Don’t you regret of coming here?” he asked. “Of course not. I’ll always find what to do even when there’s nothing to do”. He explained meanwhile his philosophy of the “fainéant”, of a lazy man: “I hate doing a lot of job, so I prefer to do it gradually, in small portions. For example, it’s better to wash a cup of coffee right away, as soon as I finish my coffee. I never leave an unwashed dish for the next day, I can’t sleep if I know there’s something not done. I wash it, only then I go to bed and my mind is zen. I iron all of my chemises in advance because in the morning I only have 30 seconds to put one on.”
When I came he first made me coffee, natural, strong, tasty, not in a capsule coffee machine, offered some chocolate fait maison. As it took some time I wondered, “Am I going to work today at all?”
His womanish manners (is he gay?), his laughter, his jokes… I had an impression to have met a very educated person, generous, attentive, with his mind open… So this visit was not really cleaning someone’s apartment but like a good friends’ meeting.
I also learnt something important: amour, love in French, is in singular a masculine noun, but mes amours (plural) becomes feminine…
Tag: friends
Post 3
Before being trapped in such an ordinary situation, I worked quietly and comfortably in one little, comfortable library which makes part of a scientific center for the Greek and other ancient worlds. This comfortable job lasted for about two years. How did I manage to find such a dream-work?
I arrived in Paris in December 2015. I wanted to conduct a serious, deep research on skin in Hippocrates. But I needed a job. And at that moment, I had no idea of how it is difficult to do these two things simultaneously: to study seriously and to earn enough money to survive in Paris, where the cheapest apartment is a studio 9 m2, on the last floor without elevator, with no WC inside, no shower cabin and no kitchen costs 350 euros per month. No problem! says the householder, you’ve got a swimming pool not far from here. There, you may take your shower. By the way, the door of this “studio” was rather symbolic: old, one half of transparent glass, another one wooden. “There have been no robberies here as yet”, says the householder. Oh, thanks for these words, I feel safe and comfortable now…
Fortunately, around the mid-January 2016, I found a studio (rented, by chance, by a Ukrainian) for 5oo euros + 70 (electricity and internet) in the 9 arr., Cité Napoléon. Cold, humid, tiny, but ok till the neighbour listening music every night arrived.
I also found a babysitting agency and became a babysitter, my first job in Paris. But I suffered from the boys, then I suffered even more from the girls I had to take care of. Finally, a friend of mine and a doctorant from Greece, Vasso who knows well how it is for the outsiders to study and to work in Paris, insisted: ask, do not hesitate an ask our direction for a job at the Gernet-Glotz! So, I did it. And closer to summer 2016 I signed the contract with CNRS (library). Since then, my life in Paris had become more “bourgeois” – more or less quiet and stable…
How to survive in Paris 