France: La Première Semaine
Day 1, August 31
At 1:20 PM, I arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport carrying twice my weight in luggage. I made my way to the train station where after about 30 minutes of confusion, I was able to figure out how to buy a ticket to go to the centre of Paris. I eventually got there. I got off at Chatelet because it looked really close to Notre Dame which seemed to be a few blocks away from Bastille where my youth hostel was. How wrong I was.
When I got to Notre Dame, my camera started cursing at me for the non-stop clicking. The architecture in Paris had so far been amazing but Notre Dame topped all of them. It was perfect down to the very last detail.
After Notre Dame, I decided to go to the Eiffel Tower. I thought “Hey, I can see it from here so I can probably just walk it.” Wrong again. It took about an hour or so. Mostly because I didn’t know what to do, and I was just following the Seine and whatever may distract me. I got there after a while. I passed some really awesome places . The Eiffel Tower was frickin’ huge. I thought it was smaller (which was why I thought it would be a shorter walk). At the time, it had gotten dark and the Eiffel tower was flashing lights like a pointy gay bar. I’m sure M. Eiffel never planned that.
Something really weird that I found was that there were guards patrolling the streets of Paris...carrying AK47s. That kinda freaked me out. Policemen are scarcely allowed to carry handguns in Canada, let alone assault weapons. There were so many tourists, some of whom were more annoying than others. It was really awesome to hear people switching back and forth from Italian, German, Spanish and French...but then I felt less special, coz that was my thing and I got depressed. Haha.
For some reason, I was getting the hang of it and was passing off as a French guy. It’s the curly hair, right Crish? Haha. But honestly, I thought I’d have trouble with French because I had lots of trouble speaking French during my stay in Quebec in ’04, but it was no problem at all. It was just coming naturally out of my mouth as if I’d been learning it for the past 10 years...oh no wait, I have. Haha. FINALLY, something I learned in school that’s actually applicable. Anyway, I displayed my cab-catching skills once more and got back to the hostel in less than 10 minutes. And thus ends my first day in Paris.
Day 2, September 1
I didn’t have much jet-lag. I was so tired from Day 1 that I just passed out immediately after I got back and woke up around 6. The first thing I needed to do was make sure I got a ticket to Avignon for , got out of there and found an electronics store where I bought a converter for my North American electronics. I went backto the hostel and found out that it was closed everyday from 10am till 3pm.
So I decided to catch a train and go to some place random...and by random I mean the Louvre. It was pretty easy to get there by metro.I didn’t really know where it was from the Metro though. The train dropped me off inside some mall. I looked around this place for a while until I bumped into something large and made of glass. It turned out to be a large inverted glass pyramid. And then I realized I was already in the Louvre. I got a ticket, got into the museum and had gratin and iced tea...and then I went to see the exhibits.
Holy God, it was amazing. The sheer scale of everything. I started off at the Near Eastern exhibits and saw a lot of the monuments from Mesopotamia...my first thought was “Wow, I hate every single one of you statues. I’ve written some pretty exhausting essays because of you.” And then I got out of there and went to the Egyptian exhibits and totally pissed my pants. Then I got to the Greek and Roman exhibits...The statues that I’ve known since I was 8 were standing there bold as brass...in this case, marble and bronze.
I got to this one room with an enormous amount of people and then I saw why. Surrounded by a throng of flashing cameras was the Venus de Milo. It was taller than I expected. I got a couple of shots before I left the increasingly crowded room and then I made my way to another famous resident of the Louvre: the Mona Lisa. There was a long line up but I eventually got to it. I thought, “Hmmm, over-rated. Moving on.” I saw Da Vinci's many paintings and thought that Dan Brown is a crackpot after every I saw every single one of them. Fun fact: the first time I ever did #2 in France was in a bathroom adjacent to the Venus de Milo and a floor below the Mona Lisa.
After the Louvre, I decided to walk through the Champs Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe. I thought it was gonna be another quick walk...but wrong again, it was as long as Broadway to UBC. The Arc was bloody humongous. I got acosted by about a hundred gypsies on my way away. They’re really annoying thieves.
Then I got a ticket to the Cars Rouges which are like red tourist buses that take you around the sites of Paris. It was kinda cool. I got off in front of the Paris opera, around which time my camera passed out on me. I walked to Montmarte and saw the Moulin Rouge which looked kinda ‘meh’. Montmarte as very Bohemian. I found a small restaurant and I had a nice poulet niçoise with red wine in a walled garden. You could hear a man singing Italian opera from the other side of the wall. It was really pleasant. There was also a large cathedral called the Sacré Cœur in Montmarte and that was quite beautiful because it was high on a hill and it had a very good view of Paris. It also glowed at night.
After being conned out of 5€ by a man from Guinea, I got back to the Metro which I took back
to the Bastille and then my hostel. I took a shower and passed out.
Day 3, September 2
I woke up on Sunday morning, and didn’t know where I was gonna go that day. At this point I’d already seen the most famous sites of Paris, but now I wanted to go deeper. As it was Sunday, I thought it would be really appropriate to go to church...so I went to mass in Notre Dame. It was quite awesome inside as it was on the outside. It was very dark though. There was a solemn, silent atmosphere even though there were hundreds of tourists there with me. It was quite the experience.
And wanting to save on metro fare, I walked to the Eiffel Tower again. This time I went up the Eiffel Tower. I paid less than 3€ and that got up to some of the best views of all of Paris.
I eventually found my way to the metro, looking at the pictures on my map, trying to decide what I should see next. I was trying to go to Château de Vincennes but went the wrong way. I ended up outside of Paris, near the Palace of Versailes where the French royalty lived. After a few hours of maneuvering my way around metro, I found my way out to Versailles (la ville propre). I got lost for an hour or so AGAIN but I eventually got to the palace. The palace itself was already closed because it was getting late but the gardens were still open so I decided to take a walk around.
I thought it was gonna be a nice brisk walk around a royal garden but holy crap, I swear the gardens were bigger than UBC campus, and I’ve taken wayyyy too many walks around UBC compared to the average UBC student. But it was surreal. It was like walking into a fairy tale. There were statues made of bronze, gold and marble…there were fountains and tall hedges that formed sorts of mazes…and canals where people could ride with little white rowboats. It got even more surreal when I got to the domain of Marie Antoinette. There were little gardens, and fountains and some really amazing architecture. There was a building called the Grand Trianon which was a sort of pillared building made of pink marble and it was just wonderful. This must have cost the French people a lot of money. No wonder they cut off Marie Antoinette’s head.
And back again to the hostel where I collapsed on my bed.
Day 4, September 3
After packing all my things and eating breakfast, I went back to Gare de Lyon to go to Avignon. I took the the TGV (high-speed train; Train à Grande Vitesse) which was more comfortable than the regular metro. We passed by some lovely countryside but the train literally passed through several towns in the blink of an eye so it was a bit hard to enjoy. I took some videos along the way but I still preferred to read Harry Potter...third time reading the 7th book. It only took 2.5 hours to get to Avignon...I actually wished it was longer. I’m used to long journeys. 2.5 hours won’t get you to UBC and back from Surrey.
I caught a cab to my hostel (which was infinitely nicer than the hostel in Paris; nicer facilities, great food, good location, nicer staff and just as cheap). I dropped off my luggage and took a walk to the historic centre of Avignon (to Filipinos, that’s like our Intramuros in Manila, except nicer). It was really amazing. There were palaces and cathedrals cut from the limestone. There were narrow streets with really old stone houses. From the high places of the city, you could see castles in the distance. There were towers and secret passageways...it’s like I died and went to Hogwarts.
After the accidental sight-seeing ( I was supposed to go straight to my university to get my registration going but I got lost AGAIN), I got to the little campus on the east wall of town. I found my way to the the the International Services office, talked to my coordinator and got information on finding housing in Avignon. I was really daunted by the fact that I had to go around this city looking for a place to live. I was also given a computer password so that I could use the computers on campus...
As fate would have it, the password didn’t work so I went back and asked what was wrong with it. I was sent to a different computer lab with a girl named Amélie and she helped me fix it. As we were talking, I told her that I was looking for a place to stay in Avignon...and she just happened to be leasing her apartment because she was moving with her boyfriend Sergio to Mexico. I went with her and Sergio to the apartment after and the place was quite amazing. It was an attic room, 40m², fully furnished with a shower a bathroom and it was somewhat prism-shaped. It costs 370€ a month plus charges. That’s like finding an apartment in Downtown Vancouver for less than $400. I told them I’d take it.
The next four days before I moved into my apartment passed like a blur. The plot centres around the people I met at the youth hostel across the river from Avignon. You will never meet more interesting characters anywhere other than at a youth hostel. Many faces flash past my mind...some more clearly than the others. I made many important contacts from all over the world. It’s weird how close you can get with people in such a short period of time. There were many long conversations at the café about every topic you can possibly imagine. They ranged from pleasant reminiscences of our own countries to passionate outbursts on politics to drunken ramblings about the inadequacies of the French. There were many adventures into the city, private (and sometimes excessive) wine-tastings and impromptu tae-kwondo lessons in our balconies, and noise-making waaaaaay after midnight (much to the annoyance of the one guest out of one hundred who was actually asleep).
Much to my enjoyment, our conversations never seemed to be able to stay in one language. In one conversation we would often switch back and forth from French and English, which was often re-explained by someone in German and Dutch. I even had a lot of opportuniy to get my Greek on. This made me feel special because I met foreigners that have lived and worked in Greece for years and still can’t speak Greek. I’m getting job offers in Mykonos (which means that I might be leaving again not long after I come back). But anyway, it was always memorable whenever we clinked our wine glasses and toasted in half a dozen languages.
On the day I left, things started to quiet down. It was time for many of the people I met to get going and it was also for me. That afternoon I lugged my 200lbs worth of luggage across the river Rhone, through the city walls, navigate around the winding streets of the city, survive the ceaseless winds of the Mistral, and make my way up a narrow, dilapidated staircase which led to my apartment.
Sergio hadn’t completely moved out yet but he was letting me stay for the night so I wouldn’t have to keep paying for the hostel. He even took me to a party for the international and exchange students of the university at a nice little resto-bar where I met two other Canadians.
The following night, the apartment was completely and solely mine. Sprawled out on my bed that night, I had begun the process of making this place my home.
______________________
[1] Gringotts is the Wizarding bank in Harry Potter. It’s deep underground and it’s extensive. I’m using it here as a comparison to the Paris Metro.
At 1:20 PM, I arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport carrying twice my weight in luggage. I made my way to the train station where after about 30 minutes of confusion, I was able to figure out how to buy a ticket to go to the centre of Paris. I eventually got there. I got off at Chatelet because it looked really close to Notre Dame which seemed to be a few blocks away from Bastille where my youth hostel was. How wrong I was.
Looing like an overburdened camel, I walked through the loooooonnnnnnnngg, narrow streets of Paris (after I found my out of Gringotts[1], i.e., the Metro). It honestly didn’t look that large in the map. It’s like they zoomed way out to fit the city into the map. I didn’t realize how big it was. But anyway, I got tired and sat down on a bench. I got into a conversation with an old French man about wine and then I asked him if he could show me how to catch a taxi and he did. I caught one, and it took me to the hostel I was supposed to go to. I got a bed, put down my luggage and hit the town.
Oh my, Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore. The city was so much easier to appreciate when I wasn’t carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. Indescribable. I eventually found my way back to Chatelet where I walked towards Notre Dame, eating a ham and cheese baguette on my way (it sounds really simple but that was one of the best sandwiches I’ve ever tasted). I got to the Seine where I caught my first glimpse of Notre Dame on my left and the Eiffel Tower to my right. I had to stop. It was way too much for me at one time.
When I got to Notre Dame, my camera started cursing at me for the non-stop clicking. The architecture in Paris had so far been amazing but Notre Dame topped all of them. It was perfect down to the very last detail.
After Notre Dame, I decided to go to the Eiffel Tower. I thought “Hey, I can see it from here so I can probably just walk it.” Wrong again. It took about an hour or so. Mostly because I didn’t know what to do, and I was just following the Seine and whatever may distract me. I got there after a while. I passed some really awesome places . The Eiffel Tower was frickin’ huge. I thought it was smaller (which was why I thought it would be a shorter walk). At the time, it had gotten dark and the Eiffel tower was flashing lights like a pointy gay bar. I’m sure M. Eiffel never planned that.
Something really weird that I found was that there were guards patrolling the streets of Paris...carrying AK47s. That kinda freaked me out. Policemen are scarcely allowed to carry handguns in Canada, let alone assault weapons. There were so many tourists, some of whom were more annoying than others. It was really awesome to hear people switching back and forth from Italian, German, Spanish and French...but then I felt less special, coz that was my thing and I got depressed. Haha.
For some reason, I was getting the hang of it and was passing off as a French guy. It’s the curly hair, right Crish? Haha. But honestly, I thought I’d have trouble with French because I had lots of trouble speaking French during my stay in Quebec in ’04, but it was no problem at all. It was just coming naturally out of my mouth as if I’d been learning it for the past 10 years...oh no wait, I have. Haha. FINALLY, something I learned in school that’s actually applicable. Anyway, I displayed my cab-catching skills once more and got back to the hostel in less than 10 minutes. And thus ends my first day in Paris.
Day 2, September 1
I didn’t have much jet-lag. I was so tired from Day 1 that I just passed out immediately after I got back and woke up around 6. The first thing I needed to do was make sure I got a ticket to Avignon for , got out of there and found an electronics store where I bought a converter for my North American electronics. I went backto the hostel and found out that it was closed everyday from 10am till 3pm.
So I decided to catch a train and go to some place random...and by random I mean the Louvre. It was pretty easy to get there by metro.I didn’t really know where it was from the Metro though. The train dropped me off inside some mall. I looked around this place for a while until I bumped into something large and made of glass. It turned out to be a large inverted glass pyramid. And then I realized I was already in the Louvre. I got a ticket, got into the museum and had gratin and iced tea...and then I went to see the exhibits.
Holy God, it was amazing. The sheer scale of everything. I started off at the Near Eastern exhibits and saw a lot of the monuments from Mesopotamia...my first thought was “Wow, I hate every single one of you statues. I’ve written some pretty exhausting essays because of you.” And then I got out of there and went to the Egyptian exhibits and totally pissed my pants. Then I got to the Greek and Roman exhibits...The statues that I’ve known since I was 8 were standing there bold as brass...in this case, marble and bronze.I got to this one room with an enormous amount of people and then I saw why. Surrounded by a throng of flashing cameras was the Venus de Milo. It was taller than I expected. I got a couple of shots before I left the increasingly crowded room and then I made my way to another famous resident of the Louvre: the Mona Lisa. There was a long line up but I eventually got to it. I thought, “Hmmm, over-rated. Moving on.” I saw Da Vinci's many paintings and thought that Dan Brown is a crackpot after every I saw every single one of them. Fun fact: the first time I ever did #2 in France was in a bathroom adjacent to the Venus de Milo and a floor below the Mona Lisa.
After the Louvre, I decided to walk through the Champs Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe. I thought it was gonna be another quick walk...but wrong again, it was as long as Broadway to UBC. The Arc was bloody humongous. I got acosted by about a hundred gypsies on my way away. They’re really annoying thieves.
Then I got a ticket to the Cars Rouges which are like red tourist buses that take you around the sites of Paris. It was kinda cool. I got off in front of the Paris opera, around which time my camera passed out on me. I walked to Montmarte and saw the Moulin Rouge which looked kinda ‘meh’. Montmarte as very Bohemian. I found a small restaurant and I had a nice poulet niçoise with red wine in a walled garden. You could hear a man singing Italian opera from the other side of the wall. It was really pleasant. There was also a large cathedral called the Sacré Cœur in Montmarte and that was quite beautiful because it was high on a hill and it had a very good view of Paris. It also glowed at night.
After being conned out of 5€ by a man from Guinea, I got back to the Metro which I took back
to the Bastille and then my hostel. I took a shower and passed out.
Day 3, September 2
I woke up on Sunday morning, and didn’t know where I was gonna go that day. At this point I’d already seen the most famous sites of Paris, but now I wanted to go deeper. As it was Sunday, I thought it would be really appropriate to go to church...so I went to mass in Notre Dame. It was quite awesome inside as it was on the outside. It was very dark though. There was a solemn, silent atmosphere even though there were hundreds of tourists there with me. It was quite the experience.
And wanting to save on metro fare, I walked to the Eiffel Tower again. This time I went up the Eiffel Tower. I paid less than 3€ and that got up to some of the best views of all of Paris.
I eventually found my way to the metro, looking at the pictures on my map, trying to decide what I should see next. I was trying to go to Château de Vincennes but went the wrong way. I ended up outside of Paris, near the Palace of Versailes where the French royalty lived. After a few hours of maneuvering my way around metro, I found my way out to Versailles (la ville propre). I got lost for an hour or so AGAIN but I eventually got to the palace. The palace itself was already closed because it was getting late but the gardens were still open so I decided to take a walk around.
I thought it was gonna be a nice brisk walk around a royal garden but holy crap, I swear the gardens were bigger than UBC campus, and I’ve taken wayyyy too many walks around UBC compared to the average UBC student. But it was surreal. It was like walking into a fairy tale. There were statues made of bronze, gold and marble…there were fountains and tall hedges that formed sorts of mazes…and canals where people could ride with little white rowboats. It got even more surreal when I got to the domain of Marie Antoinette. There were little gardens, and fountains and some really amazing architecture. There was a building called the Grand Trianon which was a sort of pillared building made of pink marble and it was just wonderful. This must have cost the French people a lot of money. No wonder they cut off Marie Antoinette’s head.
And back again to the hostel where I collapsed on my bed.
After packing all my things and eating breakfast, I went back to Gare de Lyon to go to Avignon. I took the the TGV (high-speed train; Train à Grande Vitesse) which was more comfortable than the regular metro. We passed by some lovely countryside but the train literally passed through several towns in the blink of an eye so it was a bit hard to enjoy. I took some videos along the way but I still preferred to read Harry Potter...third time reading the 7th book. It only took 2.5 hours to get to Avignon...I actually wished it was longer. I’m used to long journeys. 2.5 hours won’t get you to UBC and back from Surrey.
I caught a cab to my hostel (which was infinitely nicer than the hostel in Paris; nicer facilities, great food, good location, nicer staff and just as cheap). I dropped off my luggage and took a walk to the historic centre of Avignon (to Filipinos, that’s like our Intramuros in Manila, except nicer). It was really amazing. There were palaces and cathedrals cut from the limestone. There were narrow streets with really old stone houses. From the high places of the city, you could see castles in the distance. There were towers and secret passageways...it’s like I died and went to Hogwarts.
After the accidental sight-seeing ( I was supposed to go straight to my university to get my registration going but I got lost AGAIN), I got to the little campus on the east wall of town. I found my way to the the the International Services office, talked to my coordinator and got information on finding housing in Avignon. I was really daunted by the fact that I had to go around this city looking for a place to live. I was also given a computer password so that I could use the computers on campus...
As fate would have it, the password didn’t work so I went back and asked what was wrong with it. I was sent to a different computer lab with a girl named Amélie and she helped me fix it. As we were talking, I told her that I was looking for a place to stay in Avignon...and she just happened to be leasing her apartment because she was moving with her boyfriend Sergio to Mexico. I went with her and Sergio to the apartment after and the place was quite amazing. It was an attic room, 40m², fully furnished with a shower a bathroom and it was somewhat prism-shaped. It costs 370€ a month plus charges. That’s like finding an apartment in Downtown Vancouver for less than $400. I told them I’d take it.
The next four days before I moved into my apartment passed like a blur. The plot centres around the people I met at the youth hostel across the river from Avignon. You will never meet more interesting characters anywhere other than at a youth hostel. Many faces flash past my mind...some more clearly than the others. I made many important contacts from all over the world. It’s weird how close you can get with people in such a short period of time. There were many long conversations at the café about every topic you can possibly imagine. They ranged from pleasant reminiscences of our own countries to passionate outbursts on politics to drunken ramblings about the inadequacies of the French. There were many adventures into the city, private (and sometimes excessive) wine-tastings and impromptu tae-kwondo lessons in our balconies, and noise-making waaaaaay after midnight (much to the annoyance of the one guest out of one hundred who was actually asleep).
Much to my enjoyment, our conversations never seemed to be able to stay in one language. In one conversation we would often switch back and forth from French and English, which was often re-explained by someone in German and Dutch. I even had a lot of opportuniy to get my Greek on. This made me feel special because I met foreigners that have lived and worked in Greece for years and still can’t speak Greek. I’m getting job offers in Mykonos (which means that I might be leaving again not long after I come back). But anyway, it was always memorable whenever we clinked our wine glasses and toasted in half a dozen languages.
On the day I left, things started to quiet down. It was time for many of the people I met to get going and it was also for me. That afternoon I lugged my 200lbs worth of luggage across the river Rhone, through the city walls, navigate around the winding streets of the city, survive the ceaseless winds of the Mistral, and make my way up a narrow, dilapidated staircase which led to my apartment.
Sergio hadn’t completely moved out yet but he was letting me stay for the night so I wouldn’t have to keep paying for the hostel. He even took me to a party for the international and exchange students of the university at a nice little resto-bar where I met two other Canadians.
The following night, the apartment was completely and solely mine. Sprawled out on my bed that night, I had begun the process of making this place my home.
______________________
[1] Gringotts is the Wizarding bank in Harry Potter. It’s deep underground and it’s extensive. I’m using it here as a comparison to the Paris Metro.
posted by Gino at
8:54 a.m.
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