I went to the Sorbonne in Paris to study French. I hated it. I only went to a couple of classes before I dropped out.
Then I wandered around Paris getting into trouble, eventually hooking up with some Parisians who liked me because I knew about rock 'n roll. About the only two French phrases I knew are Do you have a light? and Where's the bathroom?
Paris was pretty, but you have to know the circumstances of my life before I wound up in a tiny dorm room in the building for students from India. I'd been living in a tent in the New Mexican north-central highland near Santa Fe. In the Santa Fe National Forest. I had a beat-up white '68 Dodge Coronet that I drove into town. I had a couple of friends with benefits to visit. I was surrounded by a cloudless horizon that stretched to infinity.
Suddenly I was transported thousands of miles to Paris, France where I knew no one. I was thrown in with clueless American tourists from New York. The classroom was medieval, complete with worn wooden benches. All I did was read War and Peace. Eventually I bought camel dung from some Arab and was so disgusted and a teensy bit paranoid that I got on the next flight back to the US.
But things were never the same. That trip to Paris, France marked the end of my youth.
I went to Paris with my family when I was in eighth grade. I didn't read War and Peace, but I did read Hunchback of Notre Dame while lying on some chairs in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, looking up at the bell and imagining him lurking up there. When I came back home and told my ninth grade English teacher's twentysomething student teacher this anecdote she was impressed, and I thought I had a shot with her. I did not.
Also, if you like bildungsromans set in Paris check out Geoff Dyer's "Paris Trance." Good stuff.
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