First international travel AC (After Coronavirus)
I visited Paris for the first time in 2015. As a postgraduate student from London. Paris confirmed my expectations of Parisians: rude, but stylish and charming. It is easier to befriend the French than the Brits. Most French will tell you when they don’t like you. Is it not super? You don’t waste time. The way you make friends and date after 30.
Paris is easy to love. It is drop dead gorgeous and charming. Tourists who said otherwise, the ones who suffer from Paris Syndrome, expect that the City of Light has no shadows. They thought Paris is made only of luxury brands, of Vuitton and Hermès. Instead, they found dirty streets, homeless; rude wait staff; and unhelpful locals.
But Paris is opulence. One of the epicentres of the Global North, a capital of commerce and culture. One of the symbolic metropolises of the Western civilisation, the modern civilisation. Parisians’ affluence was demonstrated by the Yellow Jackets. They highlighted the inequality of the city, and the country, by occupying the Champ de Elysees. They protested about the rising living costs; on how they can only eat out twice a week.
The city celebrates life’s joys and terrors with grace. It endured suffering with hedonism. The blood and death spilled on its streets are equalised by the salons and arts. Paris survived Viking raids, the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, Nazi occupation, Bataclan terrorist attack, and plagues—the Black Death; the Spanish Flu; and Coronavirus.
I bought the flight tickets to Paris in January 2022. The price was so cheap as the airlines were betting on travel restrictions. As the months went by, we were optimistic that our risk taking is going to yield us a win. Quarantine period was reduced, then removed. International borders were opening.
Then on 17 May 2022, my mum had a stroke.
Some of the extended family members tried to give a hint that I should postpone or even cancel the trip. I went anyway. I’d regret missing a travel opportunity more than being absent in case of Ibu’s death, especially after those lockdown years.
Still that thought lingers in my mind. My extended family also made sure to remind me; asked if I could shorten my France trip.
‘You’d regret it when she’s gone.’
‘She misses you,’ said an aunt speaking on behalf of my mum—believing she can read my mum’s mind. She barely recognised me.
I carried with me that filial guilt, Asian upbringing weight heavy.
Thankfully, I have got rid of the expectation that I should always be joyful when I am travelling. You cannot outrace the speed of thoughts, no matter how far you travel. But you can go to places which remind you that life is bigger than your problems.
I deleted the Instagram app on my phone. I decided that June, when I travelled to France, is the no social media month. I used an analogue camera, the Leica M3, to document this trip (backed up with my iPhone 12 mini and my travelling companion’s Fuji X100T). They were intentional constraints I imposed to be present.
On this second trip, we pretended that we were Parisians. We rented Airbnb flats, instead of staying in a hostel or hotel. We dined in bistros, sat at cafes, took the Metro, walked and walked. Did a little shopping too–we’re still consumers. We didn’t ride on the electric scooters though.
I read Paris has the ambition to be a carless city. During the pandemic restrictions, the Parisians decided to close down the roads to make room for restaurant tables, outdoor seating. ‘Restaurants are Parisian institutions. Cars are not.’
The first restaurants were opened in Paris after the revolution. Chefs usually worked for aristocrats’ homes. Then when the aristocrats could no longer provide employment, the chefs decided to render their services to the bourgeois.
Thanks to those Parisian chefs’ entrepreneurial pivot, the world has establishments which are essential to the procreation of our species. Romantic and sexual relationships, political connections and business deals, are made in restaurants.
Paris may be an expensive city. But thanks to socialists’ democracy and capitalist welfare system–financed by colonial inheritance–you can still enjoy the city for free.
We walked along the River Seine. Sat on its bank. Smoking, drinking, talking and people watching. Waved at those river cruises. If you’re feeling belligerent, give the middle finger instead. That’s also an expression of love, in a Parisian rude kind of way.
A group of androgynous models sat beside us. They were taking photos of each other. One of them looks like Benedict Cumberbatch. She (or he) speaks Russian. A group of Indonesian students talked in Indonesian. We didn’t impose an introduction. It is weird that we’re glad to meet fellow countrymen and women abroad, but would not be excited meeting them in our home country.
When we visited Shakespeare & Co, it was the celebration of 100 years of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses. We had to queue to get inside. Once the bouncer lets us in, there is no time limit on how long we can stay inside the bookshop.
We went upstairs. I don’t know if some writers still want to spend a night there; risking flea infection for the sake of sharing the same bed with the great American writers of the post-World War I era.
I didn’t meet Eggy the Cat. We were warned not to feed him, lest he get sick. Bought Camus’ The Rebel, and Sade’s Justine for a friend. I rewatched Before Sunset on the return flight, naturally.
My mum’s best friend and her Parisian husband have returned to live in Paris. Uncle Maurice retired from his corporate job, after being stationed in Singapore for decades. He missed Asian foods, therefore invited us to a lunch meet up in Chinatown.
Palais d’asie is listed as ‘Pan Asian restaurant’. But they only serve Chinese and Vietnamese. The audacity! How about us Indonesian? Yet we do not trust any ‘Asian’ restaurant that specialises in all Asian food. Eating Chinese and Japanese may require you to use chopsticks, but their foods are not to be mixed.
Located in a typical baroque Parisian building, juxtaposed with neon signs of Chinese characters. A Space Invaders’ tile mural of ‘Noodle’ on its building’s wall testify the authenticity, I suppose.
The proprietor served us. A middle aged man in short sleeved shirts, a bit oversized, and brown pleated pantalon. Pens in his shirt pocket. The 90s Hong Kong movies’ Chinese uncle looks. He took our orders in French.
We strolled around Chinatown. The concrete tenement blocks make the area feels like Hong Kong. Peddlers, unlicensed, were selling traditional snacks. Asian sex workers loitering around the neighbourhood. We entered a high rise building, the lower floors are a commercial zone. Shops selling bubble tea, mango sticky rice; bars serving Asian cocktails.
Tante Yanti told us about her student life in Paris. The Chinatown was a mustering point for Indonesian students, mingling with the other Asians. Her father was a sympathiser to the Indonesian Communist Party. After the 1965 Jakarta Method purge, she did not have much opportunity in Indonesia as a daughter of a sympathiser. She got a scholarship to study at Sorbonne.
Compared to my mum’s life, hers is a tumultuous one. Ibu had a sheltered life, at least from Ibu’s stories. She played it safe, or rather passive. Worked for the same company since she graduated. Stay married to Bapak.
She endured. ‘Because life could have been worse,’ she always said.
Tante Yanti left her first husband to be with Oom Maurice. She took his son with her. Oom Maurice raised him as if he is his own son. They have a daughter.
She lives a bourgeois life. Tante Yanti is a stay at home wife. Making sure the nest is well kept, children fed and educated. While her husband worked a C-level executive job.
They are doing well. Family vacations to exotic or fancy destinations every year. Their son and daughter were sent to Canadian and UK universities. Careers in London and Stockholm.
When Oom Maurice retired, their children moved out to live and work in London, the old married couple renegotiated their roles. Tante Yanti demanded Oom Maurice to be more involved in domestic chores. In Paris, they don’t drive anymore, they walk and take the public transport.
Oom Maurice, being old school, prefers the Metro’s paper tickets to the electronic card. The one you pay per trip or buy in bulk of 10 tickets. I tend to lose those papers (and it’s greener to use reusable cards).
With Oom Maurice, I talked about big things. How Paris is prohibiting prostitution again by criminalising the demand side (soliciting sex services are allowed, but procuring them is a crime). Public private partnerships in the construction of Jakarta’s MRT, and how Jakarta tries to imitate Singaporean business model: to profit from renting the spaces in the stations to retailers. The Ukraine-Russia War; the upcoming recessions.
Tante Yanti likes to talk about small things. How to register for PeduliLindungi, Indonesia’s Covid-19 tracing app. How sad she is that her children have grown and left home; how glad that they are not struggling and living their own lives in other European cities.
Tante Yanti and Oom Maurice treated us ice cream at Berthillon in Ile de Saint-Louis. Told us about Louis IX, the sainted King of France. I asked what his miracle was. He didn’t know. He’s a well read free-thinking Jew, but sainthood canonisation is not one of his interests. (I researched later, Louis IX sainthood is attributed to cure tuberculosis and blindness by touch, and extinguishing raging fire in Paris)
Took us around Marais. We went inside Cathedrale Sainte Croix, near the gay clubs. A White Pantecost Mass was ongoing. Marais was the Jewish quarter, gentrified into a hipster area full of designers’ shops. Oom Maurice told me that an Islamist terrorist attacked HyperCacher (super kosher) in 2015. One of the victims was a Muslim, Lassana Bathily, the heroic employee who saved several Jewish customers.
Our last stop with them was Place des Vosges. I did what I have always loved to do in cities with decent public parks: laid down on the grass. In sub-tropical temperate summer, the earth is warm and dry enough. Unlike on humid tropical soils, it is still hard and dry enough to be comfortable on it.
We dined, most of the time without reservations. Even at Huitrerie Régis which usually requires advance reservations. A Vietnamese family said they had to reserve 4 months earlier; we just came in and the wait staff said there was one table left beside the toilet.
We sat outside whenever we could. Curbside dining, drinking, and smoking are quintessentially Parisian pleasures.
Unlike our previous visit, Parisians waiters and waitresses were polite and welcoming. I thought it was because of our charm, which matured as we age. A Parisian who sat beside us at one of the bistros shrugged, ‘We finally realised how much we need you, tourists, after the pandemic.’
Fair enough. Hemingway warned how simple it is to be liked in Paris: just be generous in tipping.
My first visit in Paris was spent on the great sights: the Notre Dame, Louvre, Orsay, Canal St. Martin, and, of course, the Eiffel. This time, we visited just one museum: Musee Rodin.
‘The Thinker’ may be the Master Sculptor’s masterpiece. But it was ‘The Helmet Maker’s Wife’ that arrested me. A meditation on the fleetingness of youthful beauty; a sorrowful acceptance to ageing and impending death. A figure of a naked crone with sagging breasts; wrinkled skins of the decay of time.
‘The Wife’ triggered my memories when I washed Ibu at the hospital bed. Her skinny arms with paperlike fair skin. Her face, I noticed, has become a masculine one. Tante Yanti said she used to be the cute one among them. She endured an awful marriage. She is still.
‘The Kiss’ also fascinates me. It is a strange mating gesture, kissing. Before my very first kiss, I imagined a kiss would be a grand mind blowing feeling to meet each other’s lips and tongues. But I found it simply a gateway to the intercourse. My partners like it when I kiss, so I do it.
Maybe it is the emptiness inside me which made me unable to truly appreciate kissing. Or I’m simply not a good kisser.
Maybe kissing is an affectionate gesture, rather than sexual. It is difficult for me to be at ease when hugging and cuddling too. Not that I am against emotional connections. I yearn for it.
I read the plaque. The couple kissing are Paolo and Francesca, from Dante’s Divine Comedy. They were forbidden lovers. Francesca was the wife of Paolo’s brother. When Paolo’s brother found out about their affairs, they were stabbed.
Rielke said that Paris is like a city in Biblical stories. A city that invokes the wrath of God. No wonder Paris is so appealing. An unapologetically immoral city. Luciferian, the City of Light is.
Paris is a walking city. Our iPhone tells us that we walked 15,000-20,000 steps on average. Like hunters-gatherers. It was the peak of the summer. Heatwaves of 31 centigrade. Enough to make us, tropical people, sweat.
We met up with Rich and Em. They took a train from Geneva for a Parisian weekend. They brought their son James, Si Anak Bule (the white kid).
It was surprising James is given such a white name. Em and Rich work at the UN and have lived in Asia for a long time. They met in Indonesia; Iowan Em even speaks Arabic (she was stationed in Egypt before Indonesia). I was expecting a more exotic name, but ‘James’ is Rich’s granddad’s name.
Paris is not wheelchair friendly, which means it is not buggy friendly. It was difficult to navigate Parisian streets with a baby and a buggy. We collaborated, the four of us. But Em as the mother carried the heaviest burden. She had to breastfed hungry little James.
Even in Paris, when you’re with a baby, people are more receptive. The Resistance smuggled and transported contrabands under the cover of babies. Mothers hid the guns and classified intels past through Nazi sentries with their buggies. The same trick the Indonesian revolutionaries employed to pass through occupying Allied Dutch checkpoints. Well, as long as the kid does not throw tantrums. James did not, two madames on Metro kept James entertained.
We visited the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation. I baptised my M3 at the Grand Master’s temple. Bought a copy of Images a la sauvette, the French edition.
France may not be known for its camera brands, but the first photograph was taken here. It has a long tradition of photography. I wanted to buy another Leica M, but I realised money spent on a camera would deduct my budget for experience. Also my time shopping would take my time photographing. When you are in a stimulating environment such as Paris, you’d lose your consumerist impulses. Such a paradox, Paris is one of the consumers’ paradise.
One of the earned wisdom I gained from travelling is to become a minimalist. I converted to the Leica M-system because it is a minimalist system. Dissonantly, I became obsessed with the idea of collecting Leica Ms.
Good thing that Paris, France, and travel in general, allow me to focus on what really matters. I have all that I need: a Leica M3 with a Elmarit 28mm f2.8 lens. HCB used one camera and one lens for the rest of his life. (He shot only in black and white though, Ilford HP film stocks)
We went to Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. It feels like London’s Hampstead Heath, but the people are more stylish. No trainers and dirty sneakers. We met up with Momo and Thibault and Em and Rich. Momo brought me the handmade leather documents/macbook pouch I ordered from Corman Mariquiners in Noyers, Burgundy. We had a proper summer Parisian picnic. Red and sparkling wines; pickles, cheese, and ham in a wicker basket. Sat on a red and white chequered mat. We chose a spot under the shade of a cliff and right outside a cave mouth, where the air circulation kept us cool.
The summer light was perfect. I love how Kodak Colorplus 200 captures it.
Couples, friends, parents, and children were playing. The kids noisily gathered around the water fountain–drinking and refilling their water guns or plastic bottles. They didn’t respect the queue, until a madame yelled at them in French with the authority of a Mother Superior.
This is Affluence: a beautiful public park where people can walk for the sake of walking. Just bring a bottle (or two) of wine and some charcuterie (or any food you like). Smoke some pot, play some music instruments; talk about nothing and everything with your friends and lovers.
Again, Lonely Planet is right. ‘These Europeans. They know how to live.’
