Volume 2, Days 38-40
French is not on the list of languages I am trying to learn in this year long experiment of linguistic immersion, and given my general indifference to the country I would just as soon have left it off the itinerary. But, I happen to have some friends who live there and this middle section of the European travels is primarily oriented about visiting friends.
The bus from Luxembourg to Paris was nearly an hour late arriving to the bus station. Of course, I had arrived nearly thirty minutes early, timing out the local bus and discovering on the way that public transportation within Luxembourg city is actually free. If I had known that, I would have done a lot less walking.
I napped a lot on the bus to Paris and about midway through the journey, as I was getting in touch with my Paris-based friend we discovered a miscommunication, wherein I was under the impression that I would have somewhere to sleep provided and that it was in fact not the case. Scrambling to find accommodation heading into Bastille Day weekend in Paris wasn’t much fun, but I ended up getting a studio apartment through Airbnb. When the cleaning fees and services fees were factored in, it still pains me to think of the price, but I guess one can take refuge in the romantic notions of having a little flat in Paris for the weekend.
When the bus was still 30 minutes from Paris, a small passenger sedan thought the highway was a game of bumper cars, and bounced off the bus after trying to change lanes. How the driver did not notice the double decker bus is beyond me. I witnessed the whole incident as I just happened to be looking out the window at the moment and it struck below me. We sat on the side of the highway for thirty minutes while whatever reporting was being conducted.
The exhausting journey wasn’t over yet. I had to navigate the Paris metro to get over to my Airbnb, which fortunately was located very close to a station, if not exactly in the center of town. The Paris Metro is quite convenient and affordable, with standard tickets costing 1.9 euros a piece. I briefly debated buying a pack of ten tickets for 14.9 euros, but in the end, I didn’t take so may trips. There are tons of metro lines crisscrossing the city and the intervals between trains are quite short. Unfortunately, as several buses dropped off load after load of travelers near this one metro station, the queue to buy a ticket at the two functioning ticketing machines reached all the way out into the street. A third machine was “out of tickets,” but to the best of my knowledge could still be used to reload the reusable metro pass. After waiting 45 minutes and I was at the head of the queue, a pregnant woman cut in front of me.
My Airbnb was to the south of the city, just outside Paris city limits in the town of Malakoff. It was a quiet sleepy town, that pretty much just looked like whatever the Parisian version of suburbs would be. After dropping my stuff in the apartment and having a quick coffee, I headed back out to find my friend in the 15th. Emerging from the metro station, it was like being smacked in the face — ah, this is Paris!
We took Blue, a 10-month old husky, over to the Champ de Mars, and had a small picnic in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, though it was mostly an evening of keeping Blue from eating our food or — worse yet — running over and stealing other people’s food. This captures how I spent most of the weekend — dogs and picnics. I think owning a dog might be a shortcut for language learning, you get to stop and chat with everyone else who is out walking their dog. There was a bit of a concert under the Eiffel Tower, though the main show would be on Sunday night.
After one insanely priced beer at a streetside cafe, I bid adieu to my friend and headed back to my suburb apartment. I decided to try it by foot and I covered the 4 km distance in a cool 45 minutes. The intervening neighborhoods were definitely on the safer side of Paris, long sections were bustling with life while others were completely quiet. The entire walk was lit by a nearly full moon and the sparkle of fireworks shooting into the sky from the south and the west. As I reached the flat and headed up the stairs, it was Midnight in Paris.
