Follow the adventures of Liesha Stone –a sister trying to make a new life in the city of love, Paris. This week Liesha’s escapades take on a decisively more political theme…
Springtime in Paris is a wonderful thing. The city is made for strolling around, and unlike in London there are no long empty corridors of main roads. The whole of Paris is a network of shops and attractions, with something of interest on nearly every street. It’s been six months since I moved here, and I must admit I am now getting into the swing of things, and equally importantly, the French seem to be growing more accepting of me. I have learned my lessons: out have gone the tracksuit bottoms and baseball caps. The key here is to fit in, and the French do judge you on appearances. While in London a multimillionaire may be in baggy jeans and an ill-fitting jacket, this does not happen in France. If you look like a bag lady – which for the French means tracksuits and baseball caps – they will believe you are one.
The sunshine has allowed me to get out and away from French television, which seems to operate on extremes: you either have primetime shows with people sitting around and talking about existentialism and the like, or some inane “comic” quiz show that would be too juvenile for CBeebies in the UK – and there seems to be very little else in between. The rest of the airwaves are populated with American dramas and soaps, but they are unwatchable because they are all dubbed. When you know how sexy Blair Underwood really sounds, listening to some guy with a French Caribbean accent and a lisp just kills the show. Come to think of it, every brother on television in an American show ends up with some French Caribbean/African accent!
However, this lack of quality television helps explains why the French have such a flourishing film industry. While the BBC and ITV make great drama for the television, all the best French creatives in this field are working in the cinema, creating one of the most successful national film industries outside of the USA.
What is great is that the French love films so much that there are always old films showing, as well as the latest releases, so if you want to see Charlie Chaplin followed by Slumdog Millionaire, you can do that here. Another great thing to note about the movies is that even the French realize that dubbing spoils celluloid, so if you look for movies with the letters “VO” after the film title, it means it’s the original version, so you actually hear the actor’s real voice. Hallelujah!
However, the biggest change for me has not been the sunshine but the arrival of a new man in my life – and a French one to boot. Well, African-French to be precise: Kumi from the Ivory Coast.
Now, off the record, and keep this just among us, I don’t think this is a lifetime pairing. He’s hot – looks a bit like Djimon Hounsou – but to honest, apart from the intense physical attraction, I fear that we do not have that much in common. He is a hard worker, working as a delivery man for a big electrical chain called Darty (kind of like Currys), but he’s not really the aspirational man I am looking for. And although we have been seeing each other for nearly a month, we do not know that much about each other.
One thing that perplexes me is that he keeps insisting that we converse in English, even though his English vocabulary does not seem to extend much beyond the names of the teams in the Premier League. To be fair, this may be a blessing in disguise, since it means it often takes us an hour to get across the most simple things, and so we never progress past the most basic of conversations. This means we never really have to face the fact that we have nothing in common to talk about, so quite often we just give up and go to bed. And bed is the one place where we seem to communicate fluently. Well, this is the city of love, isn’t it?
