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Friday, Sep 27, 2002
We'll always have Paris (September 27-29, 2002)
Friday, September 27, 2002 - Tonight, I sit in at the common room table. Four flights up, Kalaine is taking her shower. The rest of us were asked to leave to give her some privacy. Not a problem. I completely understand her request since the shower has no door to it. It's very calm down here. Everyone is writing in his or her journals. I estimate it's around 1:30am.
It's difficult to write anything. My day started at 5:40am so my eyes are tired and my eyelids feel heavy. I'm losing the strength to stay conscious. But I have to write now. Today was such an amazing day...
My journey to France began at 5:40 in the morning. Getting ready wasn't too much of a problem. My panic came as I was about to leave. I thought I had better check to make sure I had my train tickets. So I began looking for them. And looking turned up nothing. I grew quite worried after 10 minutes of searching and no tickets. That was when mild panic set in. Finally, I thought to check in my wallet. Voila. My prayers were answered and my tickets were found. I zoomed out the door and raced down the street in the early morning darkness.
I took the Tube to the Waterloo Station. The trip took longer than expected and I was already running behind. From there I found the train station. It's easy to get to. You just leave the Tube train, walk a few flight of steps, turn a few times and suddenly you're now in a train terminal.
I do enjoy train stations. Don't know why. But somehow the magnitude of the hangers always impresses me. Several trains sat on the tracks patiently waiting their turn to leave. I met up with Kalaine, Gardner, and Raquel in time, and we all boarded our train bound for Paris.
The seats were coach. Yet, that's certainly much nicer than coach on an airplane. I actually had a little legroom on the train. Next thing I knew, we were moving along. Trains are so smooth (well, the Eurostar at least) when they start moving. I wasn't even aware of the movement until someone said "Hey, we're moving." To validate this claim, I looked out the window and sure enough, we were moving. Choo choo! Choo choo! (No, I didn't actually make those sounds on the train.)
I was hoping to stay awake through the grand ride in the Chunnel, but this didn't happen. And I didn't fight sleep once I realized that I would never know exactly when we in the Chunnel. Not to mention the fact that the view would be just a black tunnel wall with the strobing effect of passing lights. Yee haw! Big fun. Yeah, well, time to sleep.
I caught some views of the English countryside. Very green hills. Nice scenery. But I dozed off fast and awoke in France. The French countryside looked similar. Possibly, it had more sheep running around. I don't know. I didn't count them. Thirty minutes later, we arrived at the Paris train station.
Our immersion into the French culture began at the train station. It was time to put my one year of high school French, one quarter of college French and one CD-ROM of "Learn to Speak French" training to work. I asked the lady where the ATM was. She gave me an answer. I knew what she said, but not 100%. She said it was down a ways and "a gauche," but I wasn't certain if that was left or right. I knew the two words for left and right; however, I had forgotten which was which. Yes, you could surely say I literally didn't know my left from my right.
Nevertheless, we finally found the ATM and I got some spending money out. You see, most of Europe all teamed up and went to this thing called the Euro, which is really cool because it's close to the value of the US dollar. England however, didn't want to join their little club, so I had been using pounds up to that point. Now, I had to rethink my spending values once again.
Kalaine and Raquel exchanged their pounds into euros, which turned out to be not a good idea. A lot of money was lost in fees for that transaction. ATM is almost always the best way to go. Still, lesson learned.
The next goal was to buy a metro ticket. This act went smoothly. I went first and attempted to ask for a ticket in French. The rest of the group pretty much just gave that universal sign of "I'll have what he's having." Tickets being bought, we boarded a train and headed to our metro stop. Having spent two prior weeks using the London underground came in handy. I was able to understand the metro system fairly easily and almost always got us to our right station. Leaving the station, we went above ground. Here's where the troubles began.
My first comment got a few groans from the group. I looked around and said "Hmmm....it looks just like London." In my defense, it really did. Not completely, but in a few ways, the view wasn't too different from exiting a London Tube. It's when you look closely that the real differences appear. We began walking towards our hostel. Er, well, I would have thought that. Minor trouble was I didn't know where it was. Major trouble was nobody in the group knew where it was. None of us had the address or the phone number. We just knew the name of the place and the part of town it was in. Enlightening moment: Paris (and even a section of it) is a BIG, BIG city. We spent a ½ hour looking for our place, or for a way to find it. Finally, we tried a police station. Raquel and Kalaine went inside. Gardner and I waited outside to uh, well, keep guard? Alright, we were too wimpy to go inside. But heck, having a French policemen laugh hysterically, call his buddies into the room and say "Okay, once again, tell us all how you managed to come to Paris for the weekend and not even have the address of where you're staying," well, that didn't seem fun.
This wasn't the case though. The guy at the desk was actually very friendly and helpful and gave us directions on how to find the place. More walking and we arrived. It turned out to be very close to the metro station that we first exited.
At the hostel, we checked in. We were quite overdue and lucky to still get a room. I give credit to God for helping us out there. We could have so easily been sleeping on the pavement since they had cancelled our reservation. But they had a room still open on the fourth floor. Leaving our bags there, we headed out to explore Paris.
Following the Seine River, we made our way southeast. Our goal was the Eiffel Tower. We mostly just figured that it would be easy to see and follow. Again, Paris is a big city. And while the Tower may be hundreds of feet up there, even it can be hidden by a city so large. Along the way, we saw the street vendors selling paintings, trinkets, old books, fancy knickknacks, and other assorted items. We didn't buy anything. Some of the items looked neat and possibly one-of-a-kind antiques--until you walked down another 100 feet and saw the same "one of a kind" item. Sorry, no sale.
We did stop at a candy stand though. A little old lady had a large outdoor display of candy setup. The weather was perfect for buying candy (Fine, yeah I'd say that about any weather. I know. Leave me alone). The others bought candy and shared. Yum. I was now in Paris AND eating candy. I could die now. My life was complete. Seriously though, it was nice to have something to eat. My breakfast had consisted of a banana, and it was now 3 pm. We walked another half hour and finally saw the Eiffel Tower in the distance. What a site that was. There are several memorable sites for me, sites that suddenly appear before you and cause you to think, "Wow! I made it." Big Ben is one. The Roman Coliseum is another. And now I was viewing the Eiffel Tower. We didn't rush on over to it though. Nope. Everyone was hungry and worried that without food, we wouldn't have the strength to climb the Tower.
I scoffed at the idea of waiting, but I was outvoted. We found a nice French café to eat at. While, the café people were nice--the food wasn't so friendly. Alas, the food was rather bland. I had a ham sandwich. The bread was good, but between it was my "ham." Or so I would hope. It more resembled ground up ham paste. This ham paste reminded me of the military meals that are packaged up. While they're good when you're reeeeeeally hungry, the taste doesn't hold out for long. Gardner had a steak that he simply hated, plain and simple. The girls had spaghetti that was merely satisfactory. I found that by scraping off my ham paste and putting spaghetti on my French bread, it was pretty decent. So meal number one wasn't tops, but we were no longer famished. It was time to climb the Tower.
The Tower grew bigger as we walked closer. Soon it was standing right above us. Thousands of tons of iron just standing there calling to be ascended. We bought our tickets and walked up the stairs. There was no way we were going to take the elevator. No, sir, we wanted the pride of being able to say, "I climbed that tower by foot and I wasn't even half tired. I deserve a cookie!"
There were a lot of steps. Steps. Steps. Steps. It took a while, but we kept pressing onward--one step at a time (actually, I was taking 2 to 3 steps at a time. That's just how I approach life.) Finally, we arrived at Level one. After snapping a few photos, we ascended to Level 2. At Level 2, again, more pictures. Then we started for Level 3 (the summit). Wait a second. Hold the phone. No more stairs. At this point, we were forced to buy another ticket and take the elevator. Drat! I wanted to hoof the whole tower. Oh well. It was a long wait in line. A lady and her husband began talking to us. Turns out they were from Dallas, Texas. We ended up chatting with them about everything from things to do in London to the sporting activities of their youngest son.
Soon, it was our turn in the elevator. We went inside and a minute or two later, we exited at the summit. Wow. The view was breathtaking. And not just because of the lack of air that high up. It really was amazing.
We took our time up there. There was no rush to climb back down. We even had some snacks. Kalaine ordered some whipped cream coffee which had a nearly divine smell that permeated the area. I had a sip and the taste didn't disappoint. During our time up there, the sky turned from day into night. Awesome. I could now take day pictures AND night pictures in the same outing. After spending two hours on the tower, we began our decent. The summit elevator brought us down to Level 2. From there, we headed to the stairwells. At this point, Gardner challenged me to a race down the stairs. Am I too old to be racing down stairs on national monuments? Of course. Was this a safe thing to do? Probably not. Did I do it? Well, anyone who's known me for a decent amount of time would know that I could never turn down a challenge like that. I gave my bag to Raquel and the countdown began. 3..2..1..zoom! We were now racing down the stairs of the national monument. Who won? First I must explain. Racing upstairs requires speed dexterity and solid leg strength. I may do okay that way, but going downstairs is my cup of tea. Going downstairs only requires one thing--craziness. And I had plenty of that. So by leaping and hopping down the stairs five at a time, I was able to gain a huge lead and won the race with time to spare. It seems quite dangerous, but they have these guard cages around the stairwells. I think the guard rails are to prevent people from jumping off the tower. But maybe they figured crazy kids would also be running down the stairs at full speed. Good thing I don't fit into that category. I'm no kid. I'm a mature-grown adult. Well.
Unfortunately, the races ended because the Leven 1 stairwell was closed for the night. Perhaps they saw us coming. We then took the elevator to the ground floor.
It was now dark outside. All around us, vendors peddled their trinkets of Eiffel Tower souvenirs. Nothing even looked remotely worth buying. We traveled down a grassy lawn near the tower and I snapped even more pictures. Suddenly, running by us were dozens of men. A closer look revealed that these men were the street peddlers. Apparently they were on the run from something. Raquel asked one of them why they were running. He responded with one word, "Police!" Hmmm...these peddlers didn't appear to be licensed by the city.
We headed north after the Tower experience. About a half mile from the tower, something stopped us. Unfortunately, there was no escape. The smell was just too strong. I wasn't sure what it was, but I had to find out. So we walked up a little hill and there it was--a food stand. And the sweet aroma of freshly made crêpes was spreading throughout the cool evening air. It beckoned to me. I could no longer resist. Raquel and I decided to split a chocolat (‘e' omitted on purpose, just to be French) crepe. It was divine. No, wait, words can't express how good it was. No. Wait again. Divine expresses it just fine. It was divine. Yes, it was overpriced, but like I said, the smell was too strong, and besides, it was worth every "scent." Ha ha!
After heading northwest, we came upon a busy intersection. On the corner lay a cozy little café. I don't recall the name and that's a shame, because it was outstanding. Sure, we were hesitant because of our earlier dining experience, but we had to eat. And this placed served food. We decided to try it out. It was slightly cold outside, but we wanted the outdoor atmosphere so we ate on the sidewalk. Well, not directly on the sidewalk, we did have chairs and tables. The service was good. I did my best to order everything in French. We also had the assistance of a little guidebook. The book had some handy translations regarding food. This wasn't as important as what to order, but more importantly was--what NOT to order. Certain words translated to cow brains, frog legs, and even...liver! Yeah, I'll just stick with the poulet (chicken). At this café, our food was excellent. Raquel and I split a cheese platter. I don't normally eat cheese. Never been a big fan of it. But wine and cheese had a nice sound to it, and we had already decided to have some red wine. I also ordered some chicken. It was after I had ordered the wine, so don't think that I am so clueless to not know that white wine goes best with chicken. Or maybe that's white wine with fish? Oh, I dunno. I'm not a wine connoisseur. The word is just too difficult to spell.
Kalaine ordered pork. Gardner had the lamb. For dessert, I had the strawberries and cream. That was well worth the $9 we paid for it. And I'm not just trying to convince myself of that. It really was worth it! Honestly! Alright, fine. But it was worth $8. Our bill ended up being 80 euros. And that was a great price for four people eating at a nice place. Tipping is a weird thing. Sometimes they add in a service charge. Sometimes they leave it out. Half the time, I haven't the foggiest idea of what to do. I would imagine some people would assume that the tip was already in there and just pay the exact price on the bill. The café people would just assume that the people were unaware of the proper customs. I'm sure some people would do that. Yeah. Some people...okay, moving along now.
Dinner being complete, we caught the metro back to our hostel. It was now time to see our room. Four flights of stairs needed ascending to reach the room. We opened the door and looked around. It looked nice. The room had two single beds and a bunk bed. So far, so good. We then looked at the bathroom. It has a sink and a shower, but no toilet. The bathrooms were evidently in a separate area. What sort of shocked us is that there was no door to the shower area. This was a bit of a problem. Sure, we were all friends for the lifelong span of two weeks. Call us prudes, but a little privacy whilst showering was still an important thing. The bathroom was more complicated. Watchers of Ally McBeal will recall the unisex bathrooms on the show. I always guessed that this was just a Hollywood TV thing. It's a Paris Hostel thing too. You get your own stall, but that's about it. Uncomfortable sums it all up. Shared bathrooms or not, the hostel price was still excellent. We only paid $24 a person per night. Before bed, we adjourned downstairs in the common room area to chat and write in our journals. Afterwards, it was back upstairs to get ready for bed. My last minute thing to do was alarm the door. My invention was low tech but very creative. I would put a chair up next to the door tilting in towards the room. Books were stacked to keep the chair close to tipping. If someone entered the room in the middle of the night, the door would push the chair, the chair would crash against the ground, and we would wake up and pounce on the intruder. My plan was so cool. I thought everyone would love it. Well, then someone pointed out that the chair would have to be moved whenever someone used the toilets. And Kalaine suggested that maybe just having a soda can over the door handle would work just as well. Ugh. These people were ruining my genius invention. But alas, I couldn't argue with progress. A can was a better idea. So I took down my tilting chair alarm, and setup the soda-can-on-handle alarm. Finally, at about 3am in the morning, we rested from our first day in Paris.
Paris Day II -- Saturday
Saturday morning was slow to begin. At around 9:30, bodies began moving and coming to life. The girls took showers while the rest of us continued sleeping, each one complaining of the continued loss of the heat in the water. Gardner took his shower next. Yelps and screams came out of the shower area as he suffered through the now cold water. Afterwards, it was my turn. I mentally prepared myself for the onslaught of icy cold shower water. I got undressed, stepped inside the shower and turned on the water. Next, I tested the water with my hand. Yup. It was cold. It was VERY cold. But nothing could be done, so I stepped completely into the freezing water. YIKES!!! I too yelped and screamed under the stinging streams of chilling water. My brief escape was when I stepped out of the water to shampoo my hair. While doing this, I wondered to myself, if this bone chilling water was supposed to be hot, how cold was "cold"? I turned the handle all the way to the other side. The water was now...HOT! Wow! That was it. Gardner must have had the handle going the wrong way. There was hot water left--and lots of it. Yes! I now enjoyed the rest of my shower. Part of me wanted to keep this little secret to myself, but nope, I had to tell my story. Mainly, I just wanted to see the reaction from the others when I told of how Gardner's ice shower was needless torture.
Back on the street, we found a little bakeshop to buy our morning pastries. I ordered a tasty little sandwich on a French roll. Good stuff. The metro took us to our first stop--the Louvre. It's something every visitor in Paris has to see--though I'm not entirely sure why. It's a very nice place, and has many great works of art. But unless you have a healthy interest in paintings, sculptures, and art history, it can get rather dull after a while. I appreciated it to a point, but I gotta be honest--I was there for the pictures.
Gardner suggested saving the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo for last. I wasn't fond of that idea. I didn't want my camera batteries dying before I had a chance to take photos of those two exhibits. My fear would be someone saying, "Did you get a picture of the Venus De Milo?" and me saying, "Uh, no. But I did get a great shot of the serpent angel guy holding up a coke."
The Mona Lisa was interesting. It's much smaller than many people expect. She's behind a glass case, which of course ruins pictures using flashes. Most people will discover this fact when they get their pictures back days later and exclaim "AUGH! My Mona Lisa picture is just a big white glare!" Venus de Milo was nice. She posed quietly as crowds gathered around to take her picture. I haven't studied much about that piece. I assume that there's a lot of history to make her more fascinating because the work itself was far less stunning than other sculptures in the museum.
Once we had our fill of art for the day, we exited the museum and headed up the path west of the Louvre. An outdoor café was where we had lunch. One lesson: if a café is located far away from any serious cooking kitchen, order cheaply. If there's no place to cook good food, you're not gonna get good food. The food wasn't awful. It was just bland. I had an ice cream coffee. Raquel ordered the same. This was odd considering she didn't drink coffee. To sum it up, I ended up drinking TWO ice cream coffees. I also ordered a coffee (living in Europe has deprived me from my using pot-a-day fix. They served me a tiny cup of coffee. My fear is that people overseas just don't understand the concept of coffee. The quantities are just too small, and they don't do refills. Don't they understand that coffee should be gulped cup after cup; gallon after gallon? I'm starting to think that people over here are actually looking to TASTE the coffee. Weird, I know.
After lunch, we headed down the Champs De Elysees to the Arc De Triumph. I'd tell you why the Arc was built, except I never bothered to find out. And the fact that everything there is written in French doesn't help. It's probably just another anti-England thing. I mean come on France and England; play nice!
You had to pay to climb it. We passed on that one. The view wasn't going to top the view from the Eiffel Tower, so what would be the point? I hated the idea of wasting seven euros on an overpriced monument when I could be wasting seven euros on overpriced food. Back along the Champs, we stopped at many shops to look around. At a candy store, Kalaine and Gardner bought bags of candy. I must say, I simply LOVE traveling with these people.
Finally, it was dinnertime. We found an interesting place called the Hippopotamus, or something close to that name. I used French to order my food as the waitress spoke little English. I again used French to ask the waitress to have Gardner and Raquel's food cooked some more as they weren't too fond of having pink steak and ostrich. I became extra excited when the waitress understood my request of getting another spoon. (It's the simple pleasures in life.) Though, I'm not sure people will quite understand my answer when I tell them that the highlight of that evening was asking a waitress for a spoon. I guess it's a "tourist in France" thing. Dinner was around 80 euros and not near as good as the place the previous evening. It's funny how different one place can be from the next. Dinner being done, we returned to the hostel, but not before stopping at a little store and buying some champagne. Hey, one can't come to France without having some champagne. It's practically the law. Though, the law doesn't specify quality. Cheap champagne would do just fine. At the hostel, we ate candy, drank our champagne (it wasn't too bad for $20 a bottle), and I told the Penguin Story. The story took over an hour to tell. I can't even describe it here. It's just way too long of an event. Around 3am, our second day in Paris ended.
Paris Day III -- Sunday
Sunday morning followed Saturday's pattern and came in slowly. I showered first this time and it was even nicer than the previous day. Hot water is so much cooler than cold. That sentence doesn't sound quite right, but nevertheless, it's true. Soon, we were packed up and checked out of our room.
Blue skies spanned overhead. The weather in Paris had been unbelievably nice. It was perfect for photographs. Our first trip was to Notre Dame. Admission was free so we went inside. As an extra treat, mass was in session. People were seated inside the inner area, and visitors circled around them. The church had beautiful stained glass windows all around. This gave the place an ethereal type of lighting. Hundreds of candles were also burning in trays scattered throughout the place. They gave off a pleasing scent and also warmed passerby's who passed close. Plus, it was a fabulous church for pictures.
Exiting the church, we headed over to the crypt, which was located nearby. Kalaine's interest was in seeing the bones of the buried. Sounded like a good idea to the rest of us. The cost was 1.60 euro per person, which made us all smile. Not many things in Paris had been that cheap. But our smiles soon faded as we discovered that this was not a place for the buried dead (or the buried living for that matter). This was merely a basement or cellar area near Notre Dame. Archeologists for whatever reason were uncovering it. Maybe they're curious what sort of wine their ancestors kept on hand. Our interest wasn't held for long. We looked at our guidebook and it said that the place we wanted was the Catacombs. Ah, that sounded better. Now, we'd have our dead bodies. We took the metro to the south part of Paris to find these catacombs. The entrance was hard to locate. We were used to huge monuments like the Eiffel Tower. That was easy to find. The Catacombs entrance was a small building like any other on the street. Each of us bought a ticket and began our descent. Right away, the light grew dim as we descended a long circling stairwell. The steps went on for a long time and we sank deeper down into the earth. The air became dank and cooler. Finally the steps ended. We had reached the bottom. The ground was just gravel now. All that lay in front of us was a tunnel stretching out into the distance. We followed this tunnel for a long ways. At times, the ceiling was only inches over our heads. Eventually, we came to an area where the tunnel widened out. We were now in a small room. To the left side of the room was a door. It had a sign over it that had some French writing. I translated it to say, "Welcome to the empire of the dead." Empire eh? I wondered how many bodies were down here. We entered through the doorway.
Inside were bones. Not just a few bones, but piles and piles of bones. They were stacked from floor to ceiling. Mostly, they were what I would guess to be femurs. But many skulls were there as well. They had about two feet of femur bones, and a row of skulls in-between. This went on for many tunnels. Hundreds of thousands of people's bones must have been down there. Sometimes the skulls were arranged to form crosses. Some skulls were intact while others had holes in them suggested the past owner had crushing blow to end his life. After many tunnels of bones, the catacombs came to an end. We climbed another stairwell for a long time to reach the street above. It was an eerie, but cool experience.
Once we were back on the street, we took the metro back to our hostel area. Lunch was eaten at a local café. The food wasn't bad or great, but merely good. It's just so nice to eat outside on the sidewalk and soak up the Paris atmosphere.
When lunch was complete, we picked up our luggage, found the metro, and headed to the train station. The train ride home was a calm one. Gardner's candy was now gone, but Kalaine shared hers. We were quite pleased with this kind act. My dentist may disagree, but he's not here--and I am.
I've now been to Paris. No, I don't want a cookie. But a candy bar might be nice.