Paris, My Sweet Read Online Free PDF Page A

otherworldly? I stopped on the sidewalk, my eyes rolling in the back of my head as I chewed very, very slowly, savoring the baguette’s flavor.
    I opened my eyes and a girl smoking outside a bar was staring at me. I had become infatuated with French women, more so than the slim-hipped, effeminate men, developing girl-crushes daily. Their lips were always painted perfectly in magenta or tomato red. Their eyeliner was at once retro and modern, like Brigitte Bardot’s. And their hair was always disheveled but perfectly so, as if they’d just had a romp in bed. They were sexy, stylish, and gorgeous. I felt horribly dull with my brown hair and au naturel makeup—both pretty much unchanged since the day I graduated from college. Whenever I was around a particularly jolie femme , I could hear Edith Wharton whispering in my ear, “Compared with the women of France, the average American woman is still in kindergarten.” Touché, Edith .
    The girl outside the bar was in Parisian uniform: slim jeans tucked into short cowboy booties, a leather coat hanging off her thin frame, and an oversized scarf, which, like her hair, was effortlessly yet studiously haphazard. I smiled. I felt a bonding moment between us, her looking at me, me looking at her, just two girls of the world. But she just pulled an impossibly long drag from her cigarette, tossed it in the gutter, and subtly rolled her eyes before disappearing back inside the bar. Paris was cool; apparently, I was not.
    In fact, I knew I wasn’t. Edith Wharton wasn’t the only thing I had been reading. I had been dipping into all the tomes about living in and adjusting to France and I suddenly recalled a small but important gem. That in America, everyone smiles at strangers—your neighbors, the checkout girl, the cop giving you a ticket for doing 45 in a 35-mile-per-hour zone—as a friendly, pacifying gesture. In France, the only people who smile at strangers are mentally retarded.
    I found the insight so ridiculous and funny and, if I were any example, apparently true. I laughed out loud and continued down the street with my baguette, looking “touched” for sure.

    As American as I appeared with my big, dorky grin on the outside, I was beginning to understand—a deep, in-my-bones understanding—the French appreciation for food.
    Nobody at the office deigned to eat lunch at their desks as we had habitually done in New York. Little pockets of colleagues broke off and ceremoniously ate together. A small group of twenty-something-year-old women would have their meals, packed from home, in the office kitchen, while most of the guys went out to local cafés. I tried not to mind not having anyone to lunch with yet, and quickly learned not to “eeeet in zeee streeeeet,” as one of my colleagues caught me doing one day—a true faux pas to the always-proper Parisians. Instead, I took advantage of the break to explore the neighborhood.
    Offices cleared out and boutiques were closed from noon until 2:00 p.m., while the sidewalks, boulangeries , and bistros came alive. The French got so much pleasure out of shopping for and eating food every day. Mealtime was sacred. Food was celebrated. It wasn’t forbidden or an enemy for which the French needed gym memberships, cabbage soup diets, or magic powders and pills (though I did have my suspicions about French women and laxatives).
    What’s more, there were entire shops devoted to singular foods: stocky, pot-bellied men in wader boots and white lab coats stood outside poissonneries , even in the coldest weather, showcasing filets of the catch of the day, while other boutiques offered scores of colorful and alluring tins of foie gras. On Sunday afternoons, so many people stood in line at the fromageries , boulangeries , and boucheries that I made a game out of counting them. How wonderful that families were stocking up for their big Sunday repas , doing all their food shopping