To begin with, my student visa application was bungled. I’ll spare you the details, but this essentially meant doing everything short of bribery to make my case to remain in France.
It also meant I was unable to apply for a rental as I had planned, and ended up rooming with a chain-smoking, short-tempered retiree who rarely left the house and his wife. Located in the 13th arrondissement – a newer area of Paris mainly populated with high-rise concrete buildings – the apartment didn’t exactly fit the fairytale picture of the city I had envisioned for myself.
But living in the 13th opened my eyes to a different side of Paris, one that over time I grew to love. Home to the largest concentration of Asian immigrants in the city, I was grateful for the smells, sounds and sights that reminded me of my childhood. When I grew sick of eating Ham butter or chocolate bread (which was often), a wealth of Asian supermarkets were at my doorstep, enabling me to make the food I loved most. And, as May Ngo writes in The Lifted Browthe fantastical image of Paris most of us hold is at odds with the reality of a city still heavily stratified by race and class – one I may never have otherwise encountered.
“The archetypal Parisian is still imagined to be a white person,” Ngo says. “Even when the reality of Paris includes high levels of immigration, diverse ethnic quarters and a working class you can see immediately once in certain areas of the city.”
The French, famously, love to protest. It’s not uncommon to encounter train delays or cordoned-off streets due to protests, but my time in Paris happened to coincide with two of the city’s biggest demonstrations: a city-wide train strike – at the time, Paris’ longest in three decades – and the end of the first phase of the Yellow Vest protests. This was pre-COVID, and there was no such thing as online learning, so my classes simply stopped. Yet I was still expected to turn in assignments, making the 45-minute trek on foot several times to hand in printed copies of my work (if there are two things the French love, it’s paperwork and making things harder than they need to be).
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[ad_1] She continued: “Roll on a few years and my eldest daughter Hannah is 20 and diagnosed with malignant melanoma stage 4. Hannah died within 12 months of diagnosis. Something that has never left me is to this day now 15 years since Hannah left earth, is when I see a random hair, I stop […]
[ad_1] Eid-ul-Fitr which is also called Meethi Eid is an auspicious festival of Muslims which is celebrated across the world. It is observed with great enthusiasm by the followers of Islam. The Eid-ul-Fitr festival falls immediately after Ramadan month after the crescent moon of Shawwal is sighted. All the Muslim festivals are based on the […]