Un week-end incroyable

Finally: Paris.

From about the minute we got to the castle, this weekend was circled. Easter in Paris. Where better? Nowhere. My travel guide (thank you, Aunt Louise!) told me to avoid Paris on Easter, as it would be crowded, but it didn’t say when Paris isn’t crowded, because it never isn’t. We went, we saw and we conquered Paris.

But not from the start.

Friday / Vencredi

Right away, upon our arrival, I had to find an internet café for a phone interview I had arranged with the Boston Globe for a summer internship. (Because a late train and a subsequently missed connection, we arrived 90 minutes later than expected. My original plan was to use WiFi at the hostel.)

After my interview, we went to our hostel, but they didn’t have any open beds.

I have a reservation, though.
Booking ends at 6 p.m.
I booked it in February.
There are no open beds.
What about my reservation?
We stop booking at 6 p.m.
What do you expect me to do, leave? We came from the Netherlands. We can’t just go back home. It’s
Easter in Paris. It’s crowded. Where will we sleep?
Not here. We’re full.
Damnit. Fine. Refund my deposit.
You’ll have to talk to my boss tomorrow. I can’t refund your deposit.
But you can overbook when I have a reservation?
You’ll have to come back tomorrow.
Is this a real business, or is this just a way for you to sit here and scam everyone?

It was actually much more heated than that, but the essence remains: we’d made a reservation, they wouldn’t accept it, and I‘m out on my $35 deposit (I’m going to fight that, but I don’t think it’ll work). Some charitable Canadians gave us the phone number of a hostel/budget dormitory hotel that isn’t listed on the major hostel booking websites. We went back to the same internet café once more, and found a hostel that had empty beds. By then, it was freezing rain outside, and we could barely see. We finally got to the place around 11, and then passed out. Sometimes, things just don’t go your way. But we moved on, and by the next day it was nearly forgotten.

Saturday / Samedi

The good thing about the hostel thing is that I saved some money over the per night cost, and they had a good free breakfast, featuring cheese, Frosted Flakes and croissants. After breakfast, Ben (whom I was traveling with) went out to really introduce ourselves to Paris.

We started at the Ile de la Cite and Notre Dame. It was like 40F with fairly heavy rain and wind, and the line was terribly long, so we decided to do a lap around the cathedral and check that off the list. We were in no mood to stand in an outside line and catch pneumonia (though I don‘t know if I‘m ever in that mood).

We walked along and crossed la Seine. It was time to go to the Louvre. Before we saw any art, we purchased 2-day Paris museum passes, which ended up being a very wise investment. We looked at French sculpture for about an hour and French medieval painting for about another hour (this was a lot of time to spend on such small divisions of art, but the place is just as huge and impossible-to-take-on-in-one-trip as you hear about) before heading to the Italian Renaissance wing. La Jaconde—the Mona Lisa—looks just like it looks everywhere else, and it was a circus getting to a point where I could see and enjoy it (of course everyone had to have their photo of the thing). I’ll remember the pushing and shoving and desperation displayed by museum-goers more than the painting itself, but it was worth it. Not just from a “I’ve seen it” perspective, but as a piece of art, it shouldn’t be missed.

We walked down the mall to the obelisk at Concorde and then across to L’Hotel Des Invalides, the military museum. Our decision to go there was pretty much all you need to know about why Ben and I travel so well together…

Ben: What’s that?
Chris: Umm, let me find it here.
B: Let’s go to it.
C: Yah, it looks cool.
B: What is it?
C: Let’s go! Oh, yah. What is it. Let me look again

It was cool. They had really big cannons. Like, cannons that launched 600 pound balls-big cannons. And a lot of guns and swords. It was a very masculine museum, and that was welcome. After the museum, we went to Napoleon’s tomb, which is in the gold dome of L’Hotel Des Invalides. This was my favorite church (there were no pews, but it was sort of a church) I’d yet seen on the trip. There were stained glass windows of all-yellow and all-blue glass, which had such a cool effect. Napoleon also had (I’m sure he oversaw it all) different hues of marble and granite used to build it. Dude had good taste.

After that, it started to pour, so we retreated underground to the metro. We had seen a KFC the night before and hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so we decided it was a wonderful time to gorge ourselves on fried chicken. Bon appetite!

We went back to the hostel to call Alex and Marita, our friends who were also in Paris for the weekend, and met up with our them at Le Centre Pompidou—Paris’ main modern art museum. As can be expected with modern art, a lot of it was artistically inaccessible or just plain wacky, but it was all fun to look at, and, sometimes, make fun of.

We bid goodbye to the girls and proceeded to L’Arc De Triomphe. The arch stands in the middle of a massive, 8-land rotary, and it was fun to watch the traffic from the top of the arch. The view of Paris by night from the top was spectacular. We even saw the L’Tour Eiffel light show while we were up there! One thing we didn’t know that there’s an underground footbridge going to the arch, so we ran across the rotary to get there. Whoops. It’d been a full day, so we returned to the hostel and passed out.

Sunday / Diamanche

Easter morning, we got up early and went to Montmartre to see Sacre-Coeur, which unseated Napoleon’s tomb as my favorite basilica of the trip. The white granite is so beautiful. To get to the Sacre Coeur we had to climb a big hill (the highest point in Paris) and dodge the gauntlet of African bracelet harassers scattered around the hill. I’ll explain. At Paris’ biggest attractions—Le Tour Eiffel, Le Louvre, Sacre-Coeur—bands of men would try to tie a bracelet around your wrist and demand a donation to their cause (which I’m pretty sure was them).

Wow. It’s raining really hard. I’m on a train from Paris to a city in Northern Belgium, and I’m lucky I’m on it. My reservation (which are required for high speed trains) was for 6:55 p.m., but after trying 3 different ticket agents at customer service, I was able to alter my reservation to the 4:25 train. I had seen all I wanted to see and wanted to get home before midnight.

Anyway, Sacre-Coeur was amazing. We met up with Alex there and after going to the top, Alex and Ben departed to go back to the castle. I really wanted to stay in the city, so I did. I was at Sacre-Coeur on Easter morning, so I thought it was pretty perfect and pretty obvious: I should go to mass! Even though I could only pick up every few words (the mass was in French), I was able to sing along with the Latin and some of the chants were the same and the order of the mass was the same. I read the readings somewhat proficiently (although I had read the Gospel reading in English a short time ago). I had to stand in the back, but that was fine. I hadn’t been to a service since I left America, and I really wanted to go to one on Easter. I miss everyone back home, and it was a wonderful blessing to be able to go.

After the service, I walked around Montmartre and bought a baguette and some cheese from a store there. I walked around and took the Metro to L’Ile de la Cite again, to try my luck at Notre Dame once more. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it, but there was an Easter mass going on, so instead, I bought a meringue puff from a patisserie and visited Sainte-Chappelle, a beautiful, 12-century church with unbelievable stained glass artisanry. All of the walls were covered with stained glass which depict Biblical scenes. The church was built to house the supposed relics of Christ, which prompted some to call Paris “New Jerusalem.” It was amazing.

I then walked along the Seine to the Musee D’Orsay, Paris’ impressionism hub. It’s my favorite artistic era, and I really enjoyed the museum. It closed at six, so I could only spend two hours there. I could’ve spent more.

I got on the Metro once again (I bought day passes for a paltry 3E20 on Sunday and Monday) to visit La Bastille. Once I got there, a monument gently reminded me that the Bastille no longer exists. The “storming of the Bastille” did a pretty thorough job making sure of that. The neighborhood, though, was my favorite in Paris. I bought a slice of strawberry cake from a patisserie (it sounded better than dinner at the time and I don’t regret the decision) and found a copy of A Farewell to Arms written in French. It was only 1E50 and I had finished that same book (and loved it) exactly seven days prior, so I figured it was a sign. A Hemingway is a ma souvenir Parisienne.

It was approaching nightfall, and I jumped on the metro to go to La Defense, a high-rise district outside Paris’ city limits. The futuristic architecture was the most impressive I’ve ever seen. It looked like a movie set. There’s a huge arch there that looks like L’Arc de Triomphe, except it’s bigger, plainer and contains an office building. I was really glad I made the trip out, and I took the RER (faster and more sprawling than the metro) back in to save myself some time. At this point, I was exhausted, so I did some Interneting back at the hostel, showered and went to sleep.

Monday / Lundi

Because I went to bed pretty early, I woke up at 7:30 a.m., almost like a real person. I ate breakfast, stashed my backpack in the luggage room and set off for the Eiffel Tower. I walked up the first two levels, but I didn’t go up to the top. I had seen the views from atop L’Arc and Sacre-Coeur, so I don’t feel remiss. The tower is really, really big. Really big. Not like tall, but big. Wide. The legs are horrifying. It was like the Death Star or something.

After the Eiffel Tower, I felt like anything that followed would be a letdown. I went to the Bois De Boulogne, Paris’ largest park, but after a few minutes of being completely exposed in the bitter wind I decided to scurry back into the neighborhood, where I had the protection of the buildings around me, at least. I happened upon an outdoor market, where I bought veggies and hummus, which I had been wanting for a while. I browsed the area a little bit and then went to the Latin Quarter.

The Latin Quarter was sometimes loud and touristy, but it had personality nonetheless. The streets were so tight and the shops so small, it reminded me of Prague. I ate un Croque-Monsieur, which I wanted to do while I was in Paris.

And that’s pretty much it. I went back to the hostel, registered for my classes online, found the times for trains earlier than my reservation and hi-tailed it on the Metro and RER to Station Du Nord. Because I had to rush to make the train, I didn’t get to buy a French food product (I was thinking some sort of cookies and/or wine, which is very cheap) to bring home. Oh well. Sometimes, things just don’t go your way. But this is petty compared to almost having to sleep in the metro on Friday night. I’ll just buy wine in Italy.

I did just buy a (made in) Belgium chocolate bar when I switched trains. Actually, I bought two so I could eat one.

On Friday, we leave for our second required travel break: Croatia! We were going to go to Prague, but they joined the Schengen immigration zone, so we had to travel outside of it (the London trips serve the same purpose). I’m very excited to go. Dubrovnik is a resort town, and hopefully it’ll be warm. The excursion includes a day to Bosnia, which I'm really excited about! On the second half of the trip, we’re going to Barcelona, where we’ll be able to relax on the beach and spend a lot of time not spending money. It may be two weeks or so until I write again, but it could be less! Au revoir, for now!

(I really did write this last night on the train. I just didn't get around to posting it till now.)