Well, good morning, Paris! It’s a great sight in the morning to see, through the drizzle and light fog, a one-star hotel across the street from our hostel. I fear we may have the better accommodations. We also have a French-style continental breakfast downstairs in the foyer, which is to say, toast, butter, jam, coffee, hot chocolate, and various tables to eat on with stools to perch on during your breakfast. Before breakfast, though, we needed an itinerary! No, of course we didn’t have any idea what we wanted to visit, just to be a bunch of tourists in gay Paris. Good thing there’s the internet – and tourist information spots!
Speaking of tourist information centers, I might have to say that the goofiest encounter we had in Paris was Karen talking in Spanish to the French guy at the one by the metro. He actually spoke pretty fair Spanish while he pointed out sites to visit on the map, but it was rather weird to hear it with a French accent. The guy did peg us pretty easily as English speakers, but I think we might have tipped our hand when we talked amongst ourselves in English and American Spanish. At least he thought we were England English, not American.
Another person who did speak a little English was the apothecary. Analecia had a bad cold, so her brain is a little clouded. Since she was incapaz, not in condition to wander around the streets of Paris in order to get herself some Robitussin, I asked at the front counter of our hostel for where I might find a pharmacy, ever-so-prevalent across Europe. Apparently one was right around the corner, so I walked over and hailed the man working, asking if he spoke enough English to get the concept across. A little, he says. So I tell him my friend as a cough (illustrated by a little hacking) and her chest is stuffy – ah, yes, an expectorant would be great. Also, her nose is stuffy, not runny, just lots of phlegm – oh, right, a decongestant, yes, exactly. Finally, a headache, so some OTC French-style Advil. Grand total: 14€ and a smile for accommodating the poor tourists. Now, back to our initial timeline, already in progress.
After a time at the tourist info booth, we went up the hill to the closest site: the Cathedral of Sacre-Cœurs. (Really, I’m just telling you about that so I can use the “œ” character. It really was a cool place, though.) Besides being a typical fancy cathedral, though, we ran into a few shenanigans there.. more than a few, to tell you the truth. I’ll start at the bottom of the hill and work my way up.
The cathedral is placed atop a mighty hill, with stairs and greenery leading up to it. At the plaza at the base, where are various tourist shops and a carousel, stand lots of African guys (mostly from Senegal and Trinidad) ready to intercept tourists. Analecia had sat down on the bench there to rest, because she had a cold which had rendered her lungs useless; so, when I came down the hill to fetch her, one of the black guys caught my attention and I let him spout his spiel. He had a length of string, various colors, with a loop on the end which he hooked over my naïvely outstretched finger, then proceeded to make into a finely wrapped bracelet while he talked an awful lot of nonsense at me in heavily accented Spanish and English. I must admit that I heard the phrases “gulag gulag” (”good luck” in his language, so he said) and – this is no lie – “hakuna matata” while he wrapped up the bracelet and gave me a little finger massage for, as he mentioned, more gulag gulag. When he finished chatting me up, he tied the bracelet around my wrist with an ingenious knot which, as of the time I write this (a month later) still hasn’t come undone – then he asked me for a tip. I dug in my change purse and came up with a 20-cent piece. No, no, too little, he said! He wanted 5€ which I didn’t want to pay; maybe 2€, but I didn’t have that coin. After a moment of haggling over the matter, I realized what I had in my back pocket: a collection of friendship bracelets I’d made in Spain, fit to rival any five-minute creation at the foot of Sacre-Cœurs. Moreover, one was in the French colors of red, white (well, cream), and blue! That set of macramé came out of my pocket and to my aid: his friends all came over to admire them while he pondered my offer of barter. After a moment, he said to me, “Alright. I change you this one for that.” Parfait – especially since I couldn’t take off the darned bracelet without cutting it! Meanwhilst, Ana was just finishing with her attendant Senegalese, who had a slightly more sour look to him than my genial host; the man had convinced her to take one by pointing to me and saying, “Look, your husband is getting a bracelet, you should too!” Cute line. Thus adorned, we went back up the hill.
What was up the hill (but slightly earlier in today’s timeline) but more people selling tourist goodies! Laura saw a great deal at the top of the stairs: a youth with a blanket covered in Eiffel Tower sculptures of various sizes and a sign listing “3 = 1€.” Not one to pass up a bargain, she handed him a one-euro piece and took her three, one in each color of bronze, silver, and gold. Pretty typical, right? Only until a woman standing there took the euro back from the boy, put it in Laura’s hand, and closed her fingers over it. Laura looked at the woman in confusion, who started taking in French and took out her wallet to flash a badge at us. Karen’s reaction? “Time to go, Laura!” I hung back a little and spied on them from above. It unfolded that the boy didn’t have a license to be an ambulant vendor – that is to say, a street seller – and the woman was a police officer who made him pack up and ship out, much to his chagrin and Laura’s joy, for she had both three miniature Eiffel Towers and a euro still in hand!
Here’s the last story of the Sacred Heart: Karen made friends with a juggler! On the steps just below the cathedral was a guy, twenty-something, with a pair of Chinese yo-yos: two sticks with a long cord in between the tips, with which he juggled the yo-yos, two rubber figure-eight objects. When we first came up, he wasn’t doing anything particularly impressive; but then Karen did the most amazing and magical of things: she threw some change in his hat and watched appreciatively. The yo-yos started flying higher and higher, going around and about his sticks in such a manner that you couldn’t tell whether his strings would be knotted in a moment or completely free! Looks like I neglected to get a video, though – sorry!
The next hour so was not as eventful. We meandered around Montmarte and saw some sights, but didn’t visit anything in particular. The Salvador Dalí museum looked interesting, but we didn’t have enough time for it! The guy playing a string bass outside the museum was interesting, too, and we only needed a few minutes for him. Some cool graffiti adorned the area, including a doe walking out from behind a tree – the tree was real, the doe was painted on the wall – and a flying cat up high on an apartment building wall. Le Chat Noir, the same one of the famous bohemians and poster with the aforementioned cat, is indeed a real café over in Montmarte and we almost ate lunch there! The Moulin Rouge was a little shorter than I thought it would be, but it was still cool to see; however, the big air vent in front of it was more fun – we did Marilyn Munroe-style poses for schlitz and giggles (mostly giggles). Since the street down the way from the Moulin Rouge is lined with sex shops, we dropped in one for giggles as well. It turned out that the proprietor, a black guy from one of the French territories, had previously been an economist but had retired from the market to open his shop and, what’s more, had studied in the U.S. at University of Maryland, College Park, so he was familiar with Delaware. Nice guy, he gave us a little discount too.
For lunch, we ended up at a café on the corner just across the street from the Moulin Rouge. At least, half of us did, since we couldn’t find the other three people until we were sat down, when I spotted them on the street, leaped up, and tore out of the café to hail our friends for lunch. Lunch was served by a very genial old waiter who lacked a few teeth and any knowledge of English, so we weren’t exactly sure what we were getting or how much it cost. We ended up with some tostadas (toasted baguettes as open-faced sandwiches), mineral water, and of course a beer for me. Pretty tasty, although when the check came, we were a bit sticker-shocked by Parisian prices – I think my entire meal came to 18€, as opposed to 7€ or 10€ around Spain. Ah well, gotta eat to live, gotta pay to eat, gotta go to a patisserie and get bread for tomorrow.
Next stop after lunch: the National Opera House. This place – specifically, the National Academy of Music – is a fantastic opera house and also the setting for Phantom of the Opera, so of course Karen especially wanted to make the 3pm tour. We finished lunch a little late, which gave us … not enough time to find the opera house. We were further delayed by a fire in the top floor of a hotel along the way, which didn’t really get in our way, but was interesting to watch anyway. The firemen brought out their fancy fire truck, extended the ladder up to the top floor, rolled out the water house, and in short did all the typical things that firemen do in this kind of situation. They had cool helmets, though. Well, in between this fire, general cluelessness about where the Opera House was in the city or how to get there, and misinformation from the tourist booth (since the tours were at 2:30, not 3pm as he told us), we didn’t make the tour. We did eventually find the place that we might go back tomorrow and get some nice tourist photos today.
Our eventual goal for the rest of the day was to make it to the Louvre for the evening, since it was free to under-25’s every Friday evening, in an attempt to culture the youth of France. Ana’s mind was getting clouded, though, as her dose of cough medicine from the morning was wearing off. Unfortunately, Ana’s drugs hadn’t kicked in early enough in the morning to grant her the presence of mind to put the medicine in her Mary Poppins bag before we left the hostel, so I elected to take her home that she might take another dose, and to meet up at the Louvre. Several metro rides and a bit of a walk later, Ana found herself a rejuvenated woman and we found ourselves outside the Louvre, waiting for the free entrance time and to gather everyone up. Outside the Louvre proper was a skate-park of sorts: a large plaza in between two hotels served as recreation area for a bunch of teenagers on rollerblades chasing each other around and doing stunts; also, a priest. Cool guy. Anyway, we all came together after a time and two of Ana’s friends found us waiting in line, per their plan, so we all split up into mini-groups and wandered around the museum for a bit.
What’s in the Louvre? Plenty, man, plenty! Statues, paintings, the Mona Lisa, boys playing with Rubik’s Cubes, etc. and so forth! I wasn’t particularly impressed by the Mona Lisa, I will say, though I was entertained by their presentation of it. It’s mounted in a huge, empty brown wall in the middle of a room, the walls of which are covered by equally huge paintings, while the Mona Lisa itself is only about 2 feet tall. She’s certainly pretty, but I must be a Philistine, for I don’t get all the hype. The crowd was pretty cool, though, and I was amused by the singular security guard posted by the painting to make sure nobody rushed the barrier to try and break the lady out of her glass cage. As for the boys with Rubik’s Cubes, it was a pair of them sitting on a soft bench near the Gregorian art. They were something, alright, with timers and bags full of different cubes: 3-by-3-by-3, 4-by, 8-by, even a little 2-by-2 keychain one. One guy showed off for us when we started talking to them about it: he solved the cube in 21 seconds, one-handed, on his left hand. Cool hangouts, man.
Before the entire facility closed, we took a break around 8 or 9pm for dinner at a food court underground, in the complex but outside the Louvre proper. Instead of proper food stands with brand names, each one was a different regional menu: Moroccan, French, Italian, Asian, and the best of all, Spanish tapas. Not too expensive for the meal, either.
Shortly afterwards, the Louvre closed, so we went out to street level to see the pyramids all lit, spy on the Eiffel Tower from afar, and take goofy photos. Some teenagers were taking GQ-style photos, so we got a few with them and even made friends on Facebook with one. Good times at the Louvre. After a bit, we took the metro home, got some freshly made crêpes on the street (mine with Nutella and almonds!), and headed back to the hostel for the night.
Good night, Paris, we’ll be back tomorrow for more!
Facebook albums for today:
Then we met up with Karen and got to see it at 8pm from afar.
