Wanderings

Last night we had a highly entertaining night out in St. Germain des Pres, which ultimately succeeded in making us more enemies than friends. Our first faux-pas was when, in our tipsy post-dinner circle-making around the block, we sighted four dashing young lads smoking outside a bar across the street. I had been holding an unlit cigarette for the past half an hour in preparation for this very sort of opportunity, and immediately went scrambling between parked motor-bikes and over cobblestones as Leah, who doesn’t smoke, tottered behind yelling “Give me a cigarette! GIVE ME A CIGARETTE!”

The boys were more eager to engage us in conversation than they were to give us a light, and I was in the middle of telling them all about the landscape of Zimbabwe, my "home country," when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a herd of possessive girlfriends came swarming out of the bar, and within seconds had their hands all over their men in an attempt to stake their claims.

“I’m afraid he doesn’t have a light; he doesn’t smoke,” one said from beneath her hubby’s curling smoke rings.

“Is this why you come out for cigarette breaks? So you can talk to pompettes?” Another asked her man.

Pompette is the French translation for “tipsy”. Which we, no doubt, were. But at 11 pm in St. Germain, everyone is pretty pompette, and so we took no offense, only a certain satisfaction in seeing how desperate the girls were to shield their men from us.

“Bonne courage, les filles!” The rival women yelled as we took off down the street in search of new opportunities.

It only got worse from there. At “The Princess and the Frog” my Zimbabwe joke failed to resonate with a group of French lads who were clearly used to a much simpler routine of, “Where are you from, can I buy you a drink, let’s go back to my place.”

“You don’t look Zimbabwean,” the pack’s leader puzzled.

“Well, what are you?” I asked.

He held out his hands. “We’re French!”

Leah, who was feeling similarly irreverent, and I exchanged looks.

“My God, more French people!” We lamented. “Why is it that every person we meet seems to be French?”

Now the guy was really confused.

“Because we’re IN FRANCE!” He cried. “What else do you EXPECT?!”

He huffed a little, and turned on me again.

“Where are you REALLY from?” He insisted, as if all life and death hung in the balance. I forced myself not to smile, and paused for just the right amount of time. Then I told him.

“Antarctica,” I said. To which he stuck his middle finger out at me, turned his back, and told the rest of his pack very heatedly why they should not talk to Leah or I ever again.

Undeterred, I tried out the Zimbabwe schpiel a few minutes later, farther on down the bar. It received a very different reaction; this time, the guy was so thrilled that I had indulged him in conversation for more than three seconds, that when I tried to escape by turning back to Leah, he quite ungracefully managed to insert his face between the two of us. “Kiss??” He queried. That’s about when we decided to leave “The Frog and the Princess” for good.

The end of our traipsing found us in “The Cavern Club,” where signs advised us to go "get funky" in the basement. The 70's cover band and a few enthusiastic groupies were decidedly in the groove, but the rest of the crowd consisted largely of brooding French people. One particularly unpleasant young man, with bad hair and even worse tweed pants, was in heated debate with a friend when we walked in- the only space to sit was down the bench from them. The friend left after a while (we didn't blame him) and the young French man sat and sulked. Then a girlfriend figure arrived on the scene, and made the mistake of asking why he wasn't with the group, having a good time, and so they proceeded to undergo a long and bitter argument.

Leah, Molly, and I were enthralled. We don't think we've ever seen so tortured a character-- although, at a brief intermission to the fight, he sat back and bopped his head contentedly to the music, as if all the animosity had served to lift his spirits a little. We finally decided to call it quits and headed back to the comfort of our hotel- tonight, Leah and I vetoed a trip to the Irish pub in favor of drinking wine, reading Hemingway, and listening to Carmen in our suite, and I don't think a better decision was ever made.