I initially wanted to write the travel blogs as I was travelling, but it just wasn’t feasible given how quickly I was moving. I kept brief diaries, and am now taking my sweet time with making them presentable. So far, it’s been a month since I first left, and with the publication of this blog I have covered two out of twenty-one days. Thanks for bearing with me.
I came off the train around nine in the evening, and walked half an hour to my hostel. I walked as fast as possible, looking straight ahead. I needed to put my bags down before I got a good look of anything: they were heavy, with lots of pockets and points to be grabbed at.
The hostel was unfortunate. It was the cheapest accommodation I could find in Paris. After walking up to the second floor, my key card didn’t work to open the door out of the staircase, so I walked back down to use the elevator. A gaggle of tweenage competitive figure skaters got on after me, and, seeing that I was using the elevator to get to the mere second floor, began to make fun of me in intelligible Dutch.
All of the lights were off in my room. Five of my eleven roommates were already asleep, including my lower bunkmate. I tried to pull out my under-bed locker without waking her, but the thing kept getting stuck out of its tracks. It couldn’t be opened until it had been fully taken out from under the bed, at which point it took up the entirety of the path out of the room. I tried to work as quickly as possible.
The bathroom also required a keycard. The toilets were all plugged and the showers ran on timers which turned the water off after fifteen seconds. Makes you wonder what the conditions of the bathroom would be if there was no keycard required. I dried up the best I could without a towel, using the dress I had been wearing since I left Waterloo.
It was ten by this time, but I only had two days in Paris, so I was out to make the most of it. I put on another dress, walked around the canal, and got a doner. I found someone who grew up nearby to show me around and give me a long list of recommendations, none of which I ended up following. I finally crashed sometime around two.
The next morning, I got up around six and went across the street to rent an e-bike. I had packed no pants for the trip, but I figured France was open minded enough. I fell over trying to mount the e-bike. Falling over on a bike is usually humiliating, but falling over on a heavy e-bike while wearing a dress as nimble Parisians fly close by is a special kind of shame shouldered by both your spiritual and physical self. I would fall over twice more on my thirty-minute ride towards the city centre, bruising both my knees and vastly reducing the efficiency of the bike lanes.
Following a promise I’d made to my mother, my first order of business in daylight hours was to buy a pastry. I got a pain au chocolat, ordered in French. This was my first exposure to the fact that France-French people are much nicer than Quebec-French people when you try to speak to them in french.
Maybe it would be the sophisticated thing to skip the Eiffel Tower entirely and take in the ground floor culture, but I’m crass enough that it was my only real plan for the day. Besides, I’d found out on the train into Paris that tickets to most of the “good stuff” — museums and galleries — were expensive and must be bought weeks in advance.
Walking towards the Eiffel Tower, I came across some kind of public building which seemed to just be opening: the people who had been taking photos on the steps slowly began making a queue. I figured I might as well see if I could sneak in. It turned out that you didn’t need tickets, revealing one special fact about Paris: while it’s true the “good stuff” requires planning and money, the free and spontaneously-available galleries are cut from the same cloth.
After the art gallery, I walked across and down the Seine. I kept losing sight of where the tower was supposed to be. I stopped in a little grocery store to purchase a baguette, a plate of cheese, and a bottle of rosé. My master plan was to eat a little before climbing the Eiffel Tower, and leave the rest for dinner. However, once I got to the base of the Eiffel Tower and read the posted rules, I realized they would not let me bring bread, cheese, and wine onto the tower.
I could’ve just eaten and drunk a reasonable amount and then trashed the rest, but I wasn’t raised to waste food. Besides, I figured I ought to get drunk at some point over my forty-four Paris hours, and it was therefore the safe and rational option to get drunk during the middle of the day in a highly populated area.
So after ingesting a lot of alcohol and dairy, I came out of the shade, wobbling out under the hot sun towards the tower. I waited in three queues before I stood under the tower.
The Eiffel Tower is not silver but brown, and not from rust but from paint. Looking up from underneath the tower, you get the sense of being a mite on the glass of a kaleidoscope.
More than anything else, the process of climbing the Eiffel Tower (left) reminded me of climbing the stairs to the white slides at Red Oaks Waterpark (right), except that because the Eiffel Tower has higher guardrails, it had none of the suspense that I might momentarily go mad and fling myself off.
I was moving up the tower with such a fervour that once a mother pulled her child away from me like I was going to run him over. At this point I realized I ought to slow down, and made an effort to talk to people in order to make sure I was adequately slowing down. I spoke with a couple of Swiss1 who were making a train trip through Europe. They became the first people of many to question why my next stop was Stuttgart, Germany. London, Paris, Budapest, Bucharest, Istanbul all make sense. But why Stuttgart? How did you pick Stuttgart? Is it a Canadian thing?
I also spoke at great length with the young grandmother of a Minnesotan family. She was the only American I met during the trip who didn’t apologize immediately for her being American. It seemed quite nice to travel as a grandmother. When the oldest son (ten or eleven years old) said he found the whole Paris trip “meh”, his mother gave a defeated laugh while his grandmother laughed seriously. “That’s kids!”
When you travel alone, you get to move at exactly the pace you want. I always want to go fast. I have an irrational hate towards meandering, lallygagging, and dawdling in all forms. I can appreciate a slow walk through the park, if “slow walk” is our intention, but if we have a goal in mind, a place we’d like to get to, I will be chomping at the bit. If I always had the luxury of moving through life at the pace I wanted, I would probably wear myself down to the bone. It is good to have duties anchoring you to a reasonable schedule and people telling you to take a break. But being able to let go of a reasonable schedule for a couple weeks, being able to run around and skin my knees and not worry about being well-rested provided a great release of tension.
Yes, of course, the top of the Eiffel Tower was beautiful. The city fans out in front of you and it’s just close enough to the ground you can pull some sense of character out of the people walking below. Nothing else I can say.
Why is there no distinctly plural word for “Swiss”? “Swisses”? “Swissmen”? “Swissians”? “I spoke with a couple Swiss…” doesn’t sound right.
Felt like I was with you! Keep them coming!
so delightful! I wish I could've hosted you here in paris, but I am also glad that you achieved the breakneck speed you sought :)