After a short night of sleep, Michelle Letourneau, Amanda Koziel, and I met in the courtyard below the flats at four on Friday morning. There, we also ran into Amanda’s flat mate Anna O’Meara, who was travelling to Paris alone to explore the city ahead of a weeklong stay during spring break.
Rather than fly, we booked tickets on the Eurostar train through the Chunnel, the cheaper of the two options at the time that we made our reservation. Fortunately, this meant that, rather than venturing out to one of the airports, we only needed to walk up to St. Pancras Station, located directly between Kings Cross Station, which I will be using for a trip up to Edinburgh later in the semester, and The British Library, where I have been researching for my independent study.
The entrance to St. Pancras consists of a giant, Victorian façade with red brick walls and steeple like towers on either end, the grandeur of which embodies the heyday of the railroad system. Inside, the international terminal is a much more recent addition, with clean lines and glass barriers creating the security checkpoint – which reminded me of pre-9/11 airport security – and immigration stations. Officers from the French border agency worked the stations and granted us entry before boarding the train for France (we encountered the same system in reverse in France on our return). We arrived with plenty of time and waited, passports stamped, in the international terminal before they began boarding our train, at which time we followed ramps up to the massive St. Pancras Station, which houses about a dozen tracks of trains, some as long as eighteen large cars, as ours was. Without delay, we found our car and our seats, in which we promptly fell asleep after our 5:25 AM departure.
I slept most of the way through the UK and only awoke when we exited the Chunnel. (For those of you who are curious, it is really nothing more than a standard, dark tunnel, as I learned on the way back. Not that I expected it, but there are no portholes to the sea, and the train does not travel through the water.) At first, all that I could see were some green fields covered by fog. In the hour or so worth of travel between the end of the tunnel and Paris, the sun broke the horizon and began to burn off the fog, revealing idyllic, rolling fields with periodic bunches of trees similar to some of the less flat parts of the Midwest.
We arrived at Gare du Nord station around 9:30 AM local time, where we walked straight from the platform, past the heavily armed military patrol (insert “I didn’t realize that France had an army with guns” joke here), and onto the street in front of the station for our first real glimpse of the city. There were a couple of cafes in the area, and the train station – constructed out of the cities ubiquitous yellow-white brick – towered over most of the rest of the buildings. When I saw the traffic on the street, I found it comforting to realize that the cars drive on the right side of the road in France.
After our early morning, we were all ready for some food, so we found the café closest to the station – just across the street to the west – and tentatively went inside. Unsure what to do, we seated ourselves at a table, picked up a breakfast menu, and waited, hoping that we hadn’t offended anyone. Fortunately, a waiter came to our table after a couple of minutes and greeted us very politely. It was certainly disconcerting to hear his “Bonjour” as he greeted us. This was my first time travelling to a country where I did not speak the language. By pointing to objects on the breakfast menu, though, we did manage to order successfully. Our waiter did not seem too frustrated when we asked him to repeat our options a couple of times, and we eventually figured out what he was trying to communicate to us. I suppose that he probably sees plenty of people who do not speak any French in a café so close to the international terminal.
Satisfied for the time being, we set out in search of our hotel, which we found quite easily. Only a block south and east of Gare du Nord, the Hotel D’Amiens is a small hotel on a street of similar small hotels. Relieved to find it so easily, but unsure of the check in time, we went into the lobby. The woman working at the desk greeted me very politely, and I returned her “Bonjour” before pausing for a moment and then, embarrassingly, adding, “I’m sorry but I don’t…”, and she finished, “…speak French”. She smiled and laughed with a hint of a sigh as she said this, and I was relieved to see that neither my inability to speak French nor my lack of an attempt at doing so had offended her.
Surprisingly, our room was open, so we went upstairs to drop our bags off. Online reviews described the rooms as “outdated”, and that is certainly an appropriate characterization. There was little more in the room than the bathroom and the three twin beds, but the room was cheap and private, so it served its purpose well. The only major negative aspect of the room, as we would learn the next morning, was the bathing apparatus, which consisted of a tub and a water hose with a nozzle. Unfortunately, there was no shower curtain or place on the wall to affix the hose, which contributed to a strange bathing experience in the tub.
Lightened of our loads, we returned to the train station where, after making our way through all of the people asking for money, we found the correct line to purchase two, day long unlimited subway passes, a very worthwhile investment. The Paris Metro system seems to fit in between the two extremes of the London and Washington, DC subway systems. Like London, the system feels old in the sense that the distances between the lines within the stations suggest that the lines developed over time rather than appearing together as part of a cohesive, city wide plan. At the same time, the method of communicating the direction of the travel on the trains and on the maps feels straightforward, using the terminus point in either direction like the DC metro system.
Our first trip on the Metro consisted of a quest in search of the Loree Oboe Company, the point of origin for Michelle’s oboe. Although our preliminary research gave us the correct neighborhood, none of us had bothered to write down the address and, expecting a store with a showroom at ground level, we felt like we were on the right track when we saw that every other store in the area sold some type of musical instrument. However, only after searching up and down the block and with the help of the clerks in one of the other music shops did we finally find the correct building. Unlike what we expected, though, we found a giant blue door and a buzzer marked “Loree”.
We rang the doorbell and entered through the subsequently unlocked door, where we found another gate, like in an apartment foyer, and a gloomy room with only natural lighting. Once again, we rang the ‘Loree’ bell and ventured in through an unlocked door. At the top of the stairs, we found a closed door marked ‘Loree’. While we paused to decide whether or not to go in, a gentleman came up the stairs and walked into the ‘Loree’ room, so we followed him in. Inside, the darkness gave way to a brightly lit office. A young woman met the man and asked us to wait a moment for her to return. When she returned, she welcomed us to the store, showed us a small room with merchandise, and gave us a short tour. In our short visit, Michelle successfully saw the home of her oboe while the three of us once again experienced warm hospitality from the French family that ran the company, a sentiment that we encountered again and again throughout the weekend.
After completing this personal quest for Michelle, our pursuit of the tourist attractions began in earnest across the city at the Arc de Triomphe. At the center of a large roundabout, we found the massive arch as soon as we walked up the stairs from the subway station. Rather than pay to cross under the traffic to the base of the arch, we decided to just cross the streets around the circle to see it from every possible angle.
At the Arc de Triomphe
At Franklin D. Roosevelt Circle – a name that surprised me much less so than Michelle and Amanda – we turned south to, finally, walk along the river Seine, where we saw Gran Palais before returning to the axis of the Champs-Élysées to walk through the Jardin des Tuileries. Smaller in scale than a modern park, the garden gave us our best reminder yet of the fact that we were visiting a country once governed by the most extreme of absolute monarchs. Filled with fountains and lined by large hedges and bushes, it was not difficult to picture a few nobles strolling quietly in the now public gardens. As in much of the rest of Paris, the sky felt wide open due to the expansive nature of the open space in the garden. We stopped for lunch – I had a chocolate crepe with almonds – in sight of the Louvre at the end of the garden.
Once we figured out how to pay for lunch – we did not expect the waiter to be carrying change – we walked over to the courtyard of the Louvre, with its traditional grand palace and modern glass and steel pyramid. Having seen the many pictures of the pyramid at the old palace already, the presence of the incongruous structure did not surprise me. Thinking about it after the fact, I realize that I have never really known the Louvre without the pyramid, so, although it certainly does not match the palace building, it did not necessarily feel out of place to me.
Between the Old and the New at the Louvre
We soon came across the island in the middle of the Seine, home, on its east side, to the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Before finding the Cathedral, though, we had an experience at a café that many people may have characterized as French arrogance and prejudice against Americans but which, in reality, clearly represented a mistake on our part. It began when Michelle and Amanda stopped to buy ice cream from the street service counter of a café in the corner of a building. Many people – writers, in particular – often romanticize the café culture in Paris, and the concept of a Parisian café – blending indoor with outdoor in an open air establishment with chairs lined up in rows, occasionally broken by tables, facing the street – is unlike any other version of a café that an inexperienced American can imagine.
Excited to finally enjoy on of these cafes, we sat down at a table adjacent to the stand where they bought their ice cream. It was unsettling to, essentially, sit at a table on the sidewalk while pedestrian traffic passed by, but, at the same time, I could also easily imagine the opportunity for social engagement among city residents who know which cafes their friends and acquaintances’ tend to frequent. After we had been sitting for a few minutes, though, a waiter came up with menus for us to consider. When we pointed to the ice cream to imply that we had been served, he immediately and slightly brusquely asked us to leave. As we walked away, we realized that, not only had they purchased the ice cream as a takeaway and, therefore, not paid to use a table but also that we had sat down on the side of the building with a different café than the one that sold them the ice cream.
As I suggested, where many people many have interpreted the brusque waiter as throwing the Americans out of the café, we immediately recognized that we were in the wrong and that, therefore, the waiter acted reasonably in asking us to leave. Slightly confused but thoughtful, rather than indignant, we walked east along the island in search of the Cathedral of Notre Dame while they finished their ice cream. Clearly visible on the south side of the island, we only spent a brief time at the cathedral – once again planning on returning later, in this case, the Saturday night mass – before finding a train station to take us to Luxembourg Gardens directly south of the cathedral. Following a minor mix up in a confusing station that saw us get on the wrong train, initially, we eventually reached the garden.
Like the other royal garden that we walked through earlier in the day, the now public Luxembourg Garden sits on a former private estate. Similar to the cafes, chairs and benches line the paths and central areas of the park. By the time that we walked through in the late afternoon, all of these seats were full of silent people watching the foot traffic in the garden, making the sound of feet crunching on the pervasive gravel, rather than grass, seem loud in the reflective park.
We wandered the park for a while before catching a subway train back to the Louvre, where we met up with Anna once again and, at her suggestion, departed for dinner in Montmartre. After exploring the area for a short time, we eventually found a restaurant offering a well-priced, set menu along a side street a few blocks from the Sacré-Coeur, near the top of the hill. Compared to our interactions with the wait staff in the morning and at lunch, it was a relief to have Anna along, since, unlike the rest of us, she speaks French.
Following a leisurely meal, we caught a train back to the Louvre, where our student ID cards were good for free admission. Visitors access the museum through passageways branching off from the central entrance beneath the pyramid, and it is inside this atrium that the pyramid makes more logical sense than it does on the exterior. Rather than feeling cramped and like the underground room that it is, the pyramid creates the feeling of a large, open space, artificial as it may be. I can imagine that, on a crowded afternoon, this makes the entrance feel much less claustrophobic than it would if they had simply added an underground chamber.
We went into the museum with the intention of seeing the Mona Lisa since, as we expected, there were very few people in the museum late at night. After initially heading to the wrong wing of the building, where we saw the state apartments of Napoleon III, we rushed back through the atrium beneath the pyramid and into the wing with most of the paintings. It was odd to know that many of the works that we were rushing past were beautiful productions by equally famous artists, but we had our goal in mind and hurried, afraid that they may close of access, as the museum was closing down for the evening.
Finally, we came to a room about the size of a small gymnasium. A large wall stood in the center of the room and, through the throng of fellow tourists, we could see the Mona Lisa, the only painting on that particular wall. Two guards, a rope, and a thick pane of glass protected the painting. I have heard it said that the small size of the portrait surprises many people and that the crowds waiting to see it can be unbearable, at times, so I had expected a small, cramped room with heavy security requiring visitors to file by almost single file. In reality, it not feel particularly small for a portrait – although it did feel small relative to the massive wall space allotted to it – and it surprised me just how accessible it was for viewing. We guessed correctly that the crowd would be relatively small late at night, and we quickly made our way to the front of the pack for a closer look and a chance to take pictures. Our main goal accomplished, we continued through the galleries of paintings until the museum closed. Although our stay was far too short for such a massive collection, we were glad to see the biggest attraction.
To finish the first day of our whirlwind tour of the city, we took the metro to the Eiffel Tower, which we had heard we absolutely needed to see at night. There are no stations directly adjacent to the tower, so we chose to get off at a stop just across the river to the north of the tower, and, as we turned the first corner after exiting the station, we came upon the lit tower down the hill in the distance. Rather than go any closer, we decided to just enjoy the view with the other tourists and the souvenir vendors from a plaza overlooking the tower. We concluded the day on a high note, taking pictures, including one from the beginning of this post, and enjoying the view of the golden tower in the distance.
At this point, I will split the post and share part of the weekend while I finish writing about Saturday in the city. I am sorry that I did not get this up sooner (the trip was two weeks ago, now), but I was only in London for four days after the trip before leaving again for a ten-day spring break. Over the course of the next two weeks, I will finish the Paris post and then include posts on Northern Italy, Germany, and Ireland.
Until then,
Joel
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