Auditory Beauty of Paris – Wednesday, 17 June

Some days I walk down the street or sit in a café with a beatific smile on my face and a tear in my eye (or maybe it just comes across as a goofy grin – you’d have to tell me) because I’m just overwhelmed by the visual or olfactory or gustatory or tactile or auditory beauty of this place.

(I have to say that, in this respect at least, it helps to travel alone – you spend more time looking around and listening around and focusing on tastes and smells and sensations than you do if you’re sharing the experience with someone else. Sharing the experience is great, no question, but it’s also a little distracting, in my humble (but outspoken) opinion.)

Anyhoo, the last couple days I’ve been reminded of the auditory delights of this place:
• Sitting in a café and hearing the delightful faint bell-ring of tiny spoons being placed on saucers - it tells me that I’ve arrived here and pretty much nowhere else.
• Quiet conversations in the beautiful almost “singing” quality of the French language – the room can be full of people, but it’s not loud. I can’t understand what they’re saying, but it really appears that they’re enjoying each other and the art of conversation.
• The Doppler effect modulating the pitch of an ambulance’s singsongy eee-ooo-eee-ooo siren as it’s going past you.
• The city buses have a horn, of course, but when they’re approaching a bicyclist or a pedestrian that might not see them the driver uses a bell sound – ding ding ding ding ding – to signal his presence in a way that won’t make the bicyclist or the pedestrian jump out of their skin. (Of course, motorists aren’t always that kind to each other!)
• The beautiful soft chime of two wine glasses clinking - whether intentionally as people are toasting each other or unintentionally as a waiter places them on a tray.
• Walking past an elementary school (it’s behind closed doors of a building that looks like so many others, so you don’t even know it’s there) when the kids are out in its playground, laughing and calling to each other. Today I walked past “Crèche Municipale” (a public kindergarten in the neighborhood) and a very young child was singing the ABC song, the English version, with a French accent – you know, a-b-c-d-e-f-g; h-i-j-k; lmnop … – even more cute than when a tiny American does it!
• Most motorcycles and scooters are fairly well muffled – not too many Harleys around here! There are a lot of motorbikes, but there are also a lot of bicycles sporting cute little brrrring-brrring bells (roll your r’s when you say brrring-brrring and you’ll get what I mean!).
•The trickle trickle drip drip swoosh swoosh of the plastic lime green feathered brooms of the street washer guys (wearing lime green jumpsuits, naturally) as they dip those brooms in water that has been sent running down the curb from a spigot opened up the street, to wash doggie souvenirs (and other miscellaneous stuff) from the sidewalks. I know that they wash streets and sidewalks in other cities, but here they do it with style!
• Generally, if you hear a loud voice here, it’s an American's (sad to say, it’s as if we think it’s all wide open prairie!). Although, I gotta admit, I went to a very large outdoor pizza joint tonight and it got just too loud for me – people of all nationalities were stretching their vocal cords!

OK, so maybe I got a different kind of tear in my eye tonight!