Police/Racial Profiling/no sleep

This was NOT the entry I was expecting to write about on the day that I move from my host family's place to my apartment. But since I have to do that soon, I'll make this entry quick.

Last night was my friend Miranda's bday and we picnicked at a popular spot for young people, the tip of the Ile de la Cite. The recently-acquired boy in my life, Yann, came too, and he happened to be the only French person in the large group of Miranda's friends. Most of Miranda's friends left around 12:30 to catch the last metro, but some of us stuck around. Yann and I were just thinking of taking a nice romantic stroll along the Seine when chaos ensued.

In French there's a word, racaille, which the dictionary defines as "riff-raff" but the French explain as "those sketchy guys who are immigrants who wear sports clothes/ gangster clothes and are annoying and never leave girls alone and just hang around doing nothing on the Champs Elysees or Chatelet or other popular areas." Note that they are almost always immigrants--they are French Africans or 'Maghreb', aka French North Africans.

Last night, a group of guys that the French would definitely call racaille invaded our picnic briefly. One of them took the bottle of wine that I had bought for Miranda. It was 2/3 done, we didn't care too much about the wine, just about the fact that they thought they could annoy us by taking it which bothered us. So we kept saying "come on Monsieur, it's her birthday, let her have the wine" while simultaneously telling them to get lost. Next thing you know, the leader of the pack, an African wearing all black and a red baseball cap and a shiny silver decorated buckle on his belt (how many times did I have to describe this to the police? Oh hold on, we're getting there) puts down the wine, and takes this girl Victoria's camera, which is sitting right next to the wine bottle. Why she didn't put her camera back in her bag, I don't know, but that's when it got messy. Our friend Ryan (also from LA) was drunk enough to get aggressive with one of the guys... and we got scared. Nothing physical happened, but we knew at this point we weren't getting the camera back. They kept passing it between them, and running off. Other people in the area tried to talk to them as well, but no luck. Yann, the only Frenchy in our group, tried to talk to them, but also no luck. Finally Yann, Ryan, Victoria, and this guy Jonathan (also from LA) started chasing them down the banks of the Seine, while Jonathan is calling the cops. The guys get away, and Ryan leaves, because he isn't legally allowed to be living and working in France, and doesn't want to deal with the cops.

Once the police come, we give them a description of the leader of the pack, the one who took the camera, and within minutes they find someone who matches that exact description. We walk over to Chatelet and we see it's him, it's definitely him. However, they also have about 6 other Africans and two Maghreb guys with them, none of which match our description. That's when I started to get upset. Here were some completely innocent guys, just chillin' in a spot that happened to be where this jackass was apprehended, and because they were black/middle eastern males, the police started interrogating them. Miranda and I kept going up to the police saying "it's not them it's not them we're sure it's not them." All of the guys in that group that took the camera were wearing sporty/gangster shiny black jackets. These guys weren't. We felt horrible.

Then we had to go to the police station, where we stayed for 2 hours as they got down every detail of our story. The guy they apprehended put up a huge fight. He was screaming and banging and I almost started feeling sorry for him. I really did. This whole situation was so messed up. First the racial profiling, then the way they treated this guy (Miranda saw them perform some sort of neck-twisting move on him... not what I wanted to hear), and plus, poor Yann has a final today, and he was NOT supposed to stay out until 4 am being the "translator," despite the fact that we could all speak French pretty well. I felt SO SO SO bad that he was involved in this. I'm moving today, I wasn't supposed to stay out till 4 am either! And Miranda... well, now she's got a crazy story to tell about her 21st.

In the end, they never found the camera, and they never probably will. And now Victoria has to go to court against this guy.

8 months in Paris, and this is the first time something like this has happened...

well, bonjour there

Long time no post, blog-readers.

It's been over a month since my last post, and life has been crazy. Fantastic, yes, but crazy. And strangely enough, now, during finals, is the calmest I've felt in a while. I know you're going WHAAAT? But it's true. Bizarre how that happened. But let's backtrack, shall we? Let's go back in time...

• April 3rd, Mommy arrived in Paris and spent two weeks with me. It was really fantastic, actually, and kept me very busy, of course. Since my family had spent 3 weeks in Paris during the summer of 04, she didn't really find the need to go to the Eiffel Tower or Arc de Triomph or Louvre again. She basically wanted to see what I enjoyd doing and wanted to mimic my life. So, that we did. We all celebrated Passover, took a day trip to a French chateau (castle) in the town where French whipped cream (Chantilly) gets it's name (wow, I've been to Champagne, Dijon, and Chantilly. What other French towns can I go to who have food/drink named after them?), sat in parks, hit up museums, just had a lot of busy fun. (I also hit up two other chateaux-- Fontainebleau and Vaux-le-Vicomte-- with SBC).
• Spring break week two (because week one, Mommy was here)-- traveled to Dublin and Stockholm. Honestly, two fascinating cities. Dublin had a lot of charm and character and THE NICEST PEOPLE EVER. Stockholm was beautiful in a very unique way. It's situated on 14 islands, and there is so much to do in Stockholm it's ridiculous. It felt like San Francisco mixed with Amsterdam (which happen to be two of my favorite cities).
• All this while, I was very busy trying to prepare to be a tour guide for this summer, and more importantly, searching for an APARTMENT! Here is what I discovered-- apartment searching in Paris is a pain. A giant pain in the neck. A friend of mine from Wellesley, Stephanie Buhle, and I decided we wanted to split a place together this summer. Not only do I not like living alone, but I also have no idea how to live in an apartment alone. Stephanie, on the contrary, has had an apartment all year in Aix-en-Provence, provided to her by the Wellesley-in-Aix program. So she knows how to cook, clean, do laundry at a laundromat, deal with apartment issues, etc. Plus, I figured it would be easier to find an apartment for two people than for one, because Paris is FULL of students looking to live in "chambres de bonnes," which are tiny student rooms that can be found on the top floor of many apartment buildings, and so I figured, while everyone was looking for small chambres de bonnes, we'll look for something sliiiightly bigger. Well, apparently, it's harder to find something affordable for two people during the summer than we thought. No one wanted to rent for two months, there were less places to choose from, etc. FINALLY, through the help of SBC, we got a two-bedroom place for a ridiculously cheap price. SBC rents this place out during the year to students on our program who prefer independent living. The old couple who have the place are crazy nice, and they wanted to continue to rent it out to students during the summer, and since they trust SBC and they love students, they just handed it to me!! No contract, cheap price (considering it's in the 8th, normally a VERY expensive neighborhood. The Champs Elysees/Arc de Triomph is in the 8th. So you can imagine...), WE'RE SO LUCKY!
  
• went to the Idan Raichel Project concert here on Thursday night!! Marion came up from Aix for the concert, which was great. Always fun to spend time with far-away friends :). The concert was, as always, moving, incredible, beautiful, profound, fantastic. We bought shirts too. They've never had shirts before...God I LOOOOOVE their music. And they played a LOT of songs from their new album, which made me really happy.
• Went to Giverny, where Money lived, with SBC. Had been there before with my parents, but it was beautiful to be there again. SBC gave us the most incredible meal we'd had in a while. Felt spoiled. And full. We did some biking too. All in all, lovely day.
  
• And finally, now, finals... because things felt so crazy before, I feel actually much calmer now, and so finals don't bother me so much. Instead, I'm focusing on having fun with all of my friends before most of them leave. I can't believe they're leaving. But I'll leave that reflection for another post. In the meantime, well, I SHOULD be studying... but that's just an update. If you read all of that, I applaud you...