MY BOGGY BLOG: find your way through the murk
Notes from the Homefront -- Theresa Jarosz Alberti, writer and mother... http://sapphire.albatross.org
Paris is not somewhere I usually think of DRIVING to, but that's what we ended up doing (trains and planes were too expensive for 5 of us). It's odd, coming from the US, where we've driven 16 hours just to go to Tennessee, but from Newmarkt, driving to Paris was more like driving to Chicago from Minneapolis. Not bad!
Our drive was unremarkable, except that I actually did some driving this time. I've been skittish about driving in Germany, where the signs and driving rules are all different, and the speed on the autobahn makes me too nervous. Besides, the van is a stick shift, which I haven't driven with in over a year, so I've felt uneasy about that. But once we crossed the border to France (and there is no stop at the border-- it's just like driving from state to state now) and the driving was tame, with drivers sticking to the 130 km driving limit and using the left lane only for passing, I knew it was time for me to give B a break. Happily, driving with the stick came back to me like riding a bicycle and every thing went smoothly.
As we entered Paris, we could get a real sense of the size of the city, how long it took to get to the center of it. I had been looking forward to this jaunt to Paris, a chance to revisit the city where B and I had our honeymoon 17 years ago. I was also looking forward to getting to see how much of my French I remembered. I took French from 8th grade through my first year of college, and while I was never fluent, I had a pretty good vocabulary and could construct sentences and get an idea across. For weeks now we have been struggling here without knowing more than a handful of German words, pointing and nodding a lot, and I've found French words coming to me as I try to find a German word that might express what I want.
The first trick was to find our hotel, one I'd reserved online near the Bastille. We had a map, we had mapquest directions but all the streets are curvy and as hard to follow as untangling a knotted fine gold chain. It's not easy to follow a single street as arrowed signs point two different ways at once, or the fact that some streets don't seem to have street signs, just small blue signs on the corner walls of buildings that are hard to see. We decided B should pull over somewhere to look at the map, but just finding a place to stop seemed impossible. All the streets are narrow, all the parking spaces filled, no parking lots, even the gas station ended up being a drive through with no place to stop. He did find a spot on the street, illegal we think, but it gave a chance for him to stop and me to jump out and see what street we were on.
We eventually made it to the Garden Hotel, after B was so stressed from the very aggressive drivers, an attempt to go up a one way street the wrong way, and streets so narrow it seemed like the van wouldn't fit. I was nervous about the hotels I'd booked, sight unseen, these budget hotels listed on the hostels website with some good reviews and some bad ones. I had to find places that would work for 5 people, and at this hotel, we had 2 rooms, one for the boys with 3 beds, one for G and me with 2. The rooms were small and plain but clean, and I loved the floor-to-ceiling window with the wrought-iron railing which I could open and look out onto the quiet street below.
After getting settled briefly, we were off to find a parking garage for the car. We'd been warned by the G's that if we traveled to Paris or to the Eastern European countries, we should find a guarded garage for the car because they'd heard about theft and window-breaking happening in those places to German cars. So after the car was safe in its spot, we headed towards the Bastille area, our first Paris sight.
The Place de La Bastille is actually only a monument, a tall pillar with a gold spirit of Liberty statue at the top. It marks the spot where the Bastille prison stood for about 400 years, until the French Revolution. The monument stands in the center of a large traffic round-about, very busy. After admiring the monument, we sat down at a sidewalk cafe and had our first meal in Paris. The kids and I all had croque-monsieurs (a toasted ham sandwich with a layer of cheese grilled onto the top) and B had quiche lorraine. Here we discovered how expensive Paris restaurants can be-- the sandwiches had nothing served along with them, the kids all had Cokes (small bottle for 4 euros each), B and I had coffee, and the meal was 42 eruros. Tasty, but not all that filling. Drinks are very expensive in Paris (we thought drinks were expensive in Germany, but much worse in Paris), and yet asking for tap water is frowned upon, unless you've already ordered drinks. And ice is unheard of!
We found a metro station and gave B some time to figure out how it works. Then we ventured on to the Eiffel Tower... what can I say, it is just suck a striking sight! It is so famous and everyone has seen it in pictures, that just to be standing there in front of it is amazing and unreal. We spent time looking at it from afar, taking pictures, and then wandering the park area that is in front of it. The lines to go up the tower were very long and the kids didn't seem to care if we did or not, so we went on to see the Arc de Triomphe. We went several stops on the metro, walked a long ways and got to it about sunset. B and the boys decided to climb to the top and G and I were tired already and rested below. The Arc de Triomphe was the first Parisien sight I saw on our honeymoon trip, the first thing I saw that said "Paris" to me after having studied French for 6 years. It is so much bigger than you imagine, so classically engraved with carvings, so solid. I love it.
After this, it was the metro back to our hotel. Even though we'd only been in Paris for a half day, we were already discovering how exhausting the metro was... every station has labyrinthine hallways that unfortunately smell of stale urine, many levels that trains can possibly be on, stairs or broken escalators. Often you are taking 2 or 3 trains to try and get to your location, and at every stop you must get out and figure out where you need to go to connect to the correct train (or let your DH figure it out, if you're directionally challenged like me!), climb or descend a few levels, walk through more smelly dank hallways. I'm sure if you live in cities with metros you get used to it all and it just becomes second nature, but it feels a bit like the underworld to me.
By now it was 10 pm and we were very tired and hungry, and 2 blocks from our hotel we were happy to find a Chinese fast food restaurant open, with food for us to point to and buy and take back to our hotel. Egg rolls for 50 cents each! We were so used to everything closing up early in Germany that it was a blessing to find late night food.