Donde Esta La Biblioteca? Otra Vez

Rest assured, I won’t attempt one of my verbose abstractions for the jaw-dropping city of Paris. I wouldn’t know where to start; plus I think the name alone carries enough imagery to validate our excitement towards immersing ourselves in this mecca of culture. We spent a week trying to experience as much as we could but of course we didn’t even scratch the surface. There’s enough art, architecture, food, history, design, and ambiance drenching the streets to keep Parisians (and jobless nomad travelers) busy purging themselves with sophistication their whole lives.

In the interest of time I’ll simply state that the major sites (Louvre, Orsay, Pompidou, Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, and Versailles) all exceded my expectations and provided massive amounts of entertainment. Lauren has been to Paris before so she knew what to expect, but was nevertheless further delighted. Besides those standard Paris experiences there were also a few other memorable events worth recounting.

We started our first night right with none other than Andrew Melodramatic Vickers. We all enjoyed some €4 wine, talked about how much we had missed each other, and then embarked on a search for cheap (<$10) drinks and cool Parisian bars. We came upon a club under a bridge but the cover was too steep and it was under a bridge, so we opted for the sixth street-esque bar district of Paris. There we found the cool bars with cheap drinks and Andrew's French skills facilitated the mingling with some locals. The next day Andrew lead us to a falafel place his Aunt had recommended that turned out to have the best falafels in Europe. From then on L'Aus du Falafel was the source of at least 40% of our food consumption. It was conveniently located in our favorite part of town – the Jewish neighborhood. Our Paris Servas hosts were the Akakpos; wife Ann-Cecile, husband Olivier, and baby David. Ann-Cecile hails from Brittany in western France and Olivier grew up in Togo in West Africa (hence the name Akakpo.) It’s not every day you meet someone from Togo, so we had a lot of questions for him. When Ann-Cecile isn’t mothering her incessantly happy child David, she is teaching at the local elementary school. She invited us to drop in on the English lesson of a couple classes one day and we eagerly agreed. We showed up a little early and were unexpectedly mobbed by 50 chattering little French people. Ann-Cecile told us it would be good if we could think of a simple song to teach the kids because they had recently learned “Hello Goodbye” by the Beatles. All we could think to teach them was good ‘ol “Eyes of Texas.” The words might have been a little too difficult for them, but they definitely caught on to the corresponding hand gesture. Before all the singing there was a lengthy Q&A session where Lauren and I fielded questions like “Are there airplanes in your city?” from the 7 yr. olds and “Have you been on reality TV?” from the much wiser 9 yr. olds. Ann-Cecile and Olivier were awesome hosts who patiently answered all of our questions. Baby David is only 5 months old, so we interrogated Ann-Cecile about the details of her pregnancy healthcare and maternity leave to compare with Michael Moore’s depiction of the French healthcare system in his film Sicko. She hadn’t seen the movie and probably thought we had some weird neonatal preoccupation.

Unfortunately, a lot of the facts didn’t match up and it sounds like having a baby/receiving medical care in France isn’t quite as dreamy as Michael would have us believe. Still, Ann-Cecile didn’t have any complaints and her healthcare experience sounded pretty impressive. Let’s just say I would recommend delivering a baby in France over the US, but there was no sign of any magical nannies running around doing people’s laundry for free.

Other memorable moments include being stopped in our tracks by the 6 o’clock Eiffel tower light show while marching around the top floor of the transparent Pompidou, touring the infamous architectural promenade scheme of Villa LaRoche by French architect Le Corbusier, and entering the Italian Renaissance wing of the Louvre in search of the Mona Lisa to find what might as well have been the little Italy of Paris with endless Italians huddled around their handiwork.

We barely made it out of Paris on the 14th when all hell broke loose thanks to the French ninnies of the rail workers union that can’t handle a few extra years of work. With a stroke of luck, and a death-defying leap into oncoming traffic by me and all my baggage, we managed to flag down the only available cab in Paris and were able to catch our train to Belgium.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 6:55 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.