Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Down and out in Paris

Blog

So sorry for not keeping the blog updated for the Paris leg of my trip, it is 4 Euros for two hours of internet, so naturally that precious internet time was taken up by communicating with my dear girlfriend and parents.

Anyways… Paris, where to begin?

I arrived via train on the second, a full two days earlier than my original plan. I arrived at St. Lazarre and was promptly utterly confused and dumfounded on the exact function of the Metro system here. It took standing in a line for a full half hour twice to eventually get my five-day pass and proceed on my way to my hostel. I finally got a map of the underground here, and it struck me as rather odd that my hostel, which had advertised itself as being “conveniently located” was not exactly “convenient” and “located” rather poorly in the northwest of town, in what Larkin would call “The Hood.”

So I finally stumbled off of the packed Metro (such timing, I arrived just in time to experience the full force of Parisian rush-hour) at Hoche station and once again became utterly lost. This “conveniently located” hostel had “conveniently” given me incredibly obscure directions and I ended up having to harass a rather aloof kebab salesman to point me in the several directions it would take to find my bunk. Turns out the hostel is rather close to the metro, but as I would find out later, if you have any alcohol in your system, you are guaranteed to find yourself wandering in the opposite direction without ever being aware of it.

My hostel is not what you would call a “Youth Hostel,” rather it appears to be more of a geriatric holding area with space for the grandchildren. I quickly found myself being one of the youngest residents, which was quite a shock and contributed greatly to the alienation I had been feeling since my arrival in Paris.

There are quite a few characters that seem to live here. There is a presumably French male, aged unknown with dental work that would make a grown man cry. His voice is rather high pitched (I mean really high-pitched) and he appears to never leave the confines of the hostel unless he is getting food. I wake up, he is here doing nothing-in-particular. I come back around dinnertime and he is here, continuing the nothing-in-particular. One of his favorite pastimes appears to be the pursuit of unsuspecting young women. His game plan is based around the cheap 2 Euro bottles of wine he buys in bulk and the subsequent consumption by the victim of said wine. At one end of the spectrum it is incredibly amusing to watch, on the other it is rather horrifying. The fact that his voice is quite possibly higher in pitch than any of his targets is amusing to no end. I would write more about the others (such as the old man from the Czech Republic I am sharing a room with, but I doubt anyone reading this would care).

So I dropped my bag off at the hostel and set about getting a feel for the neighborhood. It is a predominantly lower-class area where the Turks are in the majority. There are many kebab houses and Turkish tea-houses and grocers. English, or French for that matter, is seldom spoken here. It is not the type of area you would feel completely comfortable wandering around late at night. I took dinner at a kebab house and returned to the hostel for the night.
The next day I awoke, and made my way downstairs for one of the most sub-par breakfasts I have ever had. The coffee was wretched, the milk for the cornflakes was room temperature, and the bread was rock hard. I sat down, and the girl across from me immediately tagged me as American. Her name was Eliza, and we ended up talking for quite a while about art, American tourists, the French, etc.

So anyways, I left the hostel around eleven and made my way to the center of the city. The object for the day was to see the Palais de Tokyo and the Modern Art Museum. The Modern Art Museum had acquired nearly all of the paintings from Malevich’s installation in the Last Futurist Exhibition. They had arranged the paintings just as they had been nearly a century before. I ended up sitting on the floor staring up at Black Square for nearly an hour.

The weather was pretty iffy that day, but I still managed to walk up and down the Seine a few times, taking the generic tourist picture of the Eiffel Tower. After the museum I think I only really did walk around for several hours. Oh yeah, I went to the Musee de Rodin and lounged about in the gardens. I made it back to the hostel just after dinner and went looking for a cool bar in St. Michel.

The next day… what did I do… Oh yes, this would be Sunday.

I ended up meeting Eliza again at breakfast and we took the Metro to the area just East of the Champ d’Ellyses and wandered around that area. The weather started to run rather sour and the Easter service at Notre Dame I was going to catch wasn’t until 6:00, so we ended up going to see Shutter Island. It was quite a strange movie, and when it was over we had to rush to get over to Notre Dame where, magically as if by an act of God, the weather had become quite nice. The pews were reserved for members of the congregation, so us proles were funneled into the cathedral and, just as quickly, out. Then we walked around the Latin Quarter, ate at a Mexican restaurant, and met Eliza’s Libyan friends from the night before at an Irish Pub.

The next day (Monday) I caught the train to Luxembourg Gardens and sat on the terrace overlooking the pond and read. The bookshelf at the hostel conveniently had 1984 as the only English book, and so instead of lugging my huge D-Day book around, I grabbed the paperback Orwell book. As the day wore on I ended up wandering around the Latin Quarter and then to the garden outside of the Lourve. I ended up sitting in a square watching Frenchmen on rollerskates trying to jump over a plastic chord. It was quite spectacular.

Tuesday… I tried to que for the Lourve, but the line was unbelievably long and it didn’t look like I would be any closer to the famed glass pyramid in a hour. So, as the weather was quite nice again, I made my way back to the Latin Quarter and resumed my wondering. I eventually found William Shakespeare & Co, a British bookstore near Notre Dame and spent a bit of time in there. Then, as with the trend I have been following in regards to the pleasant weather, I made my way to Luxembourg Gardens and enjoyed the sun and my newly purchased book.

Today I tried to get a decent spot in the line for the Lourve, but as with yesterday, it did not seem like it would happen. I made my way across the Seine and visited the Musee d’Orsay instead. At this point it is worth noting that I have gotten into nearly every museum for free or for a reduced fair by putting on my terrible quasi-English accent and claiming to be from the UK. Today was a double-whammy, both Musee d’Orsay and the Musee de Armee. Anyways, so I wandered the galleries of the Musee d’Orsay for a good half day before making my way to the Museum of the Army and Napoleon’s Tomb. It is rather shocking to see the astonishing proportions of Bonaparte’s sarcophagus in person. For such a small guy, he has quite a huge coffin.

So from this report it would appear that I had not really been to too many huge, touristy sites. As with London, I have found that getting incredibly lost is much more satisfying and interesting than hitting all of the big-box tourist sites. Once I got into the older, less visited portions of the city, I found myself enjoying myself infinitely more than if I tried to navigate the masses of humanity at the Eiffel Tower, Arch du Triumph, and so on.

Tomorrow morning I head to Athens! I need to do laundry, I smell rancid.

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