Routine is important in Paris.
Establishing regular appearances in certain places can result in a pain au chocolat from the warm stack, freshly out of the oven at the boulangerie, a good quality cut of meat from the man at the boucherie, a discount on the freshly caught sole from the poissonier, or even having your regular order brought to you without demand at a certain café.
It’s observing these relationships and creating them that dissolve any mundane assumption out of the word ‘routine’. Though it would be much easier to grab everything at one central grocery store, the presence of these characters becomes a comforting element while running errands. My life here is routinely picking out the stereotypes, and confirming them. However the stereotypical details are there; the flour all over the boulanger’s hair and apron, the crisp white outfit the boucher wears and his smiling expression, a contradiction to his profession, the poissonier always humorously wearing striped marine shirts and rubber galoshes, and that one waitor who charmingly brings over your regular order and passing by with quick, slurred one-liners that get lost in translation, but I laugh in hopes that he is trying to be funny.
I may be forever stuck in my American-living-in-Paris mind-set, but I honestly think this is the routine life in France. It was verified when I came across these postcards by Michel Cordi right outside the newsstand I pass regularly, I stacked up. They are postcards from Paris, of Paris. What could be more fitting to fit into one’s routine.
Establishing regular appearances in certain places can result in a pain au chocolat from the warm stack, freshly out of the oven at the boulangerie, a good quality cut of meat from the man at the boucherie, a discount on the freshly caught sole from the poissonier, or even having your regular order brought to you without demand at a certain café.
It’s observing these relationships and creating them that dissolve any mundane assumption out of the word ‘routine’. Though it would be much easier to grab everything at one central grocery store, the presence of these characters becomes a comforting element while running errands. My life here is routinely picking out the stereotypes, and confirming them. However the stereotypical details are there; the flour all over the boulanger’s hair and apron, the crisp white outfit the boucher wears and his smiling expression, a contradiction to his profession, the poissonier always humorously wearing striped marine shirts and rubber galoshes, and that one waitor who charmingly brings over your regular order and passing by with quick, slurred one-liners that get lost in translation, but I laugh in hopes that he is trying to be funny.
I may be forever stuck in my American-living-in-Paris mind-set, but I honestly think this is the routine life in France. It was verified when I came across these postcards by Michel Cordi right outside the newsstand I pass regularly, I stacked up. They are postcards from Paris, of Paris. What could be more fitting to fit into one’s routine.
Bisous,
Reba
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