la nouvelle vague

"what typifies paris is its endless variety. you can easily slip from one milieu to another. it's a city that's truly open, where you end up learning more about yourself than you learn about the city. i don't intend to stay, of course. but i hope i never lose touch with paris. my stay here will leave its mark on me. that's not surprising, because this just might be the most important period in one's life, when one shakes off past influences and one's true personality is formed."


i'm not really familiar with french nouvelle vague directors. somehow i always failed my attempts to watch any of godard's movies although deep down i've always wanted to. just maybe my reality doesn't really allow me to get in the mood to watch old noir movies and i tend to avoid to go deeper on sad melancholic mood. i mean, sad or serious movies i don't mind, but i tend to choose visually nice ones with more "modern" cinematography, or with actors or actresses or directors i'm familiar with.

now i like to roam around instagram for entertainment and i have a habit to screenshot books or movies i'm interested in to read and watch later. even though the fact is that 90% of the screenshots were buried on the camera roll on my phone or in a folder on my laptop. so there were two french nouvelle vague movies i attempted to watch. the first one was godard's. it seems appealing and i thought it was a lighthearted one until i read about it and it's about some war soldiers torturing a woman to death. needless to say, plan cancelled. the second one was éric rohmer's nadja à paris, which turn out to be a 13 minutes short i could find on youtube and watch in one sitting.

it's about a serbian american girl living in paris in the 60s, which somehow doesn't feel that much different with paris today. as i've written before, paris is the kind of city where each name of the places carries its own familiarity. nadja lived in citè universitaire which is in walking distance from a place i used to live in paris. then there's saint-germain-des-prés, which is of course one of the grand boulevards of the city. then there's belleville, montparnasse, etc etc. places i used to be. and i miss the kind of normal urban interaction a normal city should provide, since i now live in a not normal city where interaction is limited and mostly unpleasing.

anyhow, despite my reminiscence, i think the film is a simple existential narration that people could relate to. about how you perceive yourself, the people around you, and the places where you are. and how certain places or periods of time in life make more memorable marks in life. the narration is somehow the content of what i usually would write on my journal. i also enjoy reading the essay written by nadja 30 years later after filming. there's always something soothing about reading personal nostalgia from different time and different places.

a movable feast

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for paris is a moveable feast.” - ernest hemingway
 
upon reading the quote a friend of mine posted on instagram, i grabbed myself the book online and finished it in no time. it doesn't really describe paris the way i expected, but hemingway does mention specifically names of streets and places which almost all of them still ring to my ear bringing me that familiar feeling.

after a short visit four years ago, during my last two years of nomadic life in europe, i went and stayed in paris for like five or six times. the longest for about two months. stayed in at least three different studio apartments. for about two years i associated the city with a person. someone i knew from my first visit. practically the only person i knew in the city almost the whole time i was in paris. (i got to know more people from the period where i stayed in a town outside paris, but it's another story).

as we now have become good friends, i no longer associated paris with this person. although he was a part of most of my memories about paris, i have moved pass through associating the city with a particular person. what's left was a set of memory about a city i once get the privilege to live in. what was left were the memories of routines i used to do. of waking up to breakfast with quatre-quarts. of choosing whether i should go to metró saint-jacques or to denfert-rochereau. of having the best and freshest croissant at the boulangerie. of walking rue d'alésia. of the kids getting out of school in the evening from l'école maternelle across the street. of evening walk on rue de la rouqette. of opting out to walk all the way home across le marais instead of taking the much faster metró ride. of queing for the longest time for the crêpe at the greek place at rue mouffetard. of having the delightful 3 euro student meal at the cité universitaire. of going to some asian diner along rue de tolbiac. or the wonderful japanese along rue saint-anne. of just walking along canal saint-martin and entering cute design shops. of rolling cigarettes at parc de la villette. of walking from the tour eiffel all the way to 14arr the night of bastille day. of having beers on the street around belleville. of the always exhausting hustle on châtelet. of the retro cinemas around pantheon. of that moment when i cried in front of a monoprix after a fight. of sitting on a deck around the bibliothèque nationale. i could go on and on. somehow paris has this something which makes me remember all these names and senses. something that doesn't really happen with other cities i lived in, at least they aren't as strong.

paris will always be a cliché to talk about. some people love it. over-romanticise it. others loathe it. i still think the way as i first visited, people can say whatever but it all ends up being very personal. to me what hemingway said rings true, i'll always carry through with me the tiny little pieces of memories of the city.

milano, lombardia (iii)

about six months after my departure, i found myself back in milan. a big part of it i won't mention here as it was and still is perplexing to me, the why and what and how. but anyway, back when i was about to leave the city almost a year ago, i knew i wanted to be back very soon. i even told a friend that i would come back on winter, which was like three months after my departure. but there i was six months after, having what i thought was enough reasons to pack my bag and go back to the place i once called home.

the whole process of getting myself there was a real hustle and looking back i must admit that i was such an ass for creating unnecessary troubles mostly for myself because of my own thoughts and also for someone else who had to deal with my behaviors back then.

anyhow i was there on the dates coincided on purpose with the salone. it was my third salone, and although i missed most of it because of some immigration problem, i have to say this was the least favorite salone i've been to in terms of what were being exhibited, the installations and furnitures, etc. but still i took with me some notes and inspirations. and also because of this event i got to meet my friends who was also there and getting to know friends of friends. and because i know more people now than my previous salone, i'd bumped into friends here and there and sometimes got lucky to be able to cut some long ques.

one thing that i noted when i was there was the difference of how the city of milan (in particular, and being abroad in general) and the city of jakarta affecting me. roaming the streets of milan i felt like there are more chances, more possibilities and varieties of how life can be, places you can be. while in jakarta it's like you're stuck, doing the one thing you can do, and that's it. and then you have to follow what the society tells you to do because everyone is basically doing just that one thing. being abroad you're one free soul, free to do whatever you want. the city with all its content send you the ability for your thoughts to run wild. while in jakarta everything you see is uninspiring and you need to hustle day by day with all the problems it gives you, you barely have time and ability to think about other good things. your day just go by one after another, hopefully someday something will take you somewhere. but then again of course it's not as simple, i could write pages long about this matter. and it's not that i hate this city i live in nor that i have particular emotion towards milan either. it's just a thought i had when i was there and a lifelong question i have about the city i live in. and hopefully one day i would find myself some other clues leading to the answers i've been needing.

lecco, lombardia.

i knew moving from como to lecco was gonna be a right decision, and it was. i don't think i need to write about it more than what the photos here are already showing of what kind of place it was and what kind of feeling it could evoke you while being here. lecco was my last place i travelled to before my period living in milan officially ended. and somehow i'm glad that it was here. the only thing i wished i could have done differently is that i wished i could stay longer instead of having to rush back to the train station to catch the last train going back to milan. though we did keep saying to each other, let's stay for five minutes more.

como, lombardia.

i don't know why i never made it to any of the lake surrounding milan other than lugano (which is in switzerland) while it was just couple of minutes train away. i finally visited lago di como on my last month living in milan when my friend who lived in perugia came to visit and stayed at my place. we decided to visit the city of como, instead of bellagio, the one that is famously luxurious and expensive.

and while being close to water always brings that calming and reflective feeling, i don't remember much other impressions about como. it was nice and beautiful, but that's about it. so we decided while we still have time to move to lecco, another town on the other side of the lake.

orvieto, umbria.

from spoleto all the tragedy began on our way to orvieto. there was a misinformation so we hopped off the wrong platform for our train and it messed up the whole thing. because it was a sunday, there weren't much choices of transportation. this was the part where i felt i could be proud of myself cause in this kind of situation i would try to find options and make a way however it takes to get to where the initial plan was. i'm never a quitter and i hate it when things don't go as planned. so we finally found the most effective route of trains, changing lines, so we could still get to orvieto on time.

and then as always, the universe never seemed to back me up. about one minute away from terontola, where we supposed to change train, we heard the magic words, "è rotto il treno." the train is broken. there and then the train stopped. for 3,5 goddamn hours. with the power on the train turned on and off, mostly off. as it was getting dark and darker, funny things started to happen when you're stuck in the middle of nowhere with bunch of strangers and a cat. things got funny and people did stupid things like humming christmas song to the cat.

when we finally got to terontola, we decided to return back to perugia, hopping off the train heading to rome. this time we made sure and asked a passenger whether we're on the right train heading to rome. little did we know that there were actually two routes to go to rome. and guess what, we took the wrong route. and instead of arriving at perugia, we arrived at.. orvieto. we were too tired to even notice that we're heading to the wrong direction until we've arrived. lucky enough that we didn't reach rome instead.

we arrived very late at orvieto, and to get to the city center we need to take a bus because it was far uphill. fortunately we could still catch the last bus. and we were magically welcomed by a parade of fireworks we could see on our journey on the bus. we had no clue what occasion it was for, but hey it wasn't bad at all.

it was kinda romantic actually exploring orvieto in the middle of the night, if and only if you're with someone you can be romantic with, haha. but we did enjoy orvieto, despite one incident and the fact that we were damn tired and at some point we just laid down on some bench staring at the open sky. we took the earliest bus downhill, around 4-6am i don't remember, thinking that we would be back someday.

spoleto, umbria.

should there be any chance to visit umbria, i would never miss it. this time i was there to visit a friend who was staying in perugia. although i've been living in milan sporadically for like around 12 months in total, i would still say with a cliché that umbria still is my favorite region. i really didn't get why i didn't visit more of umbrian towns last time when i lived here four years ago. maybe because i was already living there everyday so it didn't urge me much to explore more of similar experience. but coming from lombardia, i feel like i need to explore as much as i can this kind of relaxing feeling and toning down given by the intimate scale of the medieval old towns of umbria.

first town we visited from perugia was spoleto. it wasn't my first preference but we adjusted the cities we could visit according to train schedule because of our limited time. while it isn't our favorite city, still we very much enjoyed the umbrian atmosphere of walking he narrow alleys, up hill, down hill, discovering pretty hidden corners here and there.

we confused ponte sanguinario (the bloody bridge) with ponte delle torri (bridge of towers, fourth picture), ended up not visiting much places. but we stopped a lot to just sit and enjoyed what were there, just as how it supposed to be being in umbria.