The Quaintness of the French

Paris is .... quaint.  Isn't that what people love about it?  Everyone has a tiny, swirly wrought iron balcony you can't stand on.  People bring their tiny dogs into tiny shops. The cappuccino you order in a streetside cafe at a quaint little table is served in a tiny cup with a tiny spoon. When you buy lettuce at the grocery, you can't get a big head of lettuce but you can get a package of three tiny heads of lettuce, packaged together.  What gives, Paris? Every French person I used to have as a restaurant boss and that I've played soccer with over the years has a massive French ego, so something is amiss.

The other day at the Musee D'Orsay we saw the lovely Van Gogh painting of his room in Arles.  Our room is almost exactly like this.  We literally have these same chairs and table thingy. (The router and washing machine in our room are marginally newer though.  And if Vincent had to deal with the hundred tiny steps it takes to get up here and the spotty wifi we get with that router, I guarantee you he would have cut off the other ear too, plus other stuff.  And he probably would have painted the router yellow, with swirls for the flashing lights.)

The problem with all this quaintness is that Sophie is nearly six feet tall and we have to live here.  The poor girl has to duck in doorways and stairwells and kneel in the shower here, which was not mentioned in the airbnb rental listing, which should read 'petite, seulement, sil-vous-plait.'  The stove is bloody adorable and the fridge is the quaintest, tiniest thing ever, so it's a good thing models don't get to eat much food (although our hosts left all their condiments and a dozen beer in the fridge using up more than half its space which I might quaintly drink and not replace before we go.  Adorable, right?)

Plus I feel I have to mention the size of the elevators in the city, which are-- you guessed it-- quaint.  I mean, don't get me wrong, I love it that they exist but they're all so very old and coffin-like.  Many are less than six feet in height and narrow across too-- today the two of us went in one and we had to slide sideways and quaintly suck in our guts just to get in there and get the door shut (ok, yes, I had to do that.  Sophie... no).  Our purses were almost a deal breaker. So quaint!  How, when you're in an elevator that size, do you not immediately wonder what would happen if there was a problem and you were stuck in there for hours?  I realize now of course that it wouldn't matter anyway since we would run out of air in less than a minute.

Perhaps this is why Vincent Van Gogh saw everything in swirls. He got stuck in a French elevator and was oxygen deprived from all the quaintness. I like to imagine that in the storage room of the Musee D'Orsay there's an odd old Van Gogh painting of a tiny elevator propped up against a wall and the curator just looks at it and shakes his head thinking "Why did you paint this, Vincent?  I can never display it, no one will understand it.  Why did you go crazy and do all these weird ones?!" But we know the real story.