European Vacation Part Two: Paris
Landed at Charles deGaulle Airport without incident. It's a quick flight from Heathrow; low altitude, over the English Channel and then the beautiful French countryside. I imagined myself part of the D-Day invasion in a B-24, looking for Nazi tanks to annihilate below, but the quiet empty beaches of Normandy ruined the illusion. At least I THINK it was Normandy...
Descended rapidly to the runway, thus ending my fantasy of being a young, dashing bombardier in 1944 France. And the sexy French whore who was about to hide me in her armoire after I was forced to eject behind enemy lines turned back into, well, the one cute stewardess on the plane. Sigh. The captain turned off the fasten seat belt sign and everyone stood up. A woman right behind the first class curtain stood up and slammed her head into the plastic overhead light assembly. Hard. That had to hurt.
Once again, the International Bureau of Airport Ineptitude was on the job, and we were herded into a passageway that spiraled around and opened into the passport control area. But unlike in London, there were no lines. Just a mob. The signs ordered us to stay behind the yellow line, but there were no lanes to queue up into -- just a single open passport window, with about 400 people crammed together trying to get in front of each other but behind the aforementioned yellow line. I heard obvious profanity being exclaimed in about thirty different languages, including a few I even recognized. I didn't wish to enter France as the stereotypical loud, pushy, Ugly American, but I was quickly getting shoved further backwards in the crowd by people with gigantic bags, dogs, children and beards -- so finally I angled my slender bod in such a way as to form a wedgelike warhead, a human torpedo, and I forced my way through the swearing, sweating, wildly gesticulating masses until I plowed smack into the broad back of a large Arabic gentleman with hands the size of ceiling fans. I knew if I stayed right behind him in his wake, I'd get somewhere -- nobody was pushing HIM around.
After jostling around this way for a good 20 minutes with no sign that the Frenchies were going to open another window, I finally made it to the front and was welcomed to France with a grimace from the obviously unamused Passport Control Gendarme. Wound my way around to the huge waiting crowd where my friend would hopefully be waiting to escort me away from this ghastly place; luckily she spotted me, and we ran off toward baggage claim together. Ah, my vacation begins...
My friend Rachel is originally a New Yorker, but she's lived in Paris for five years, teaching English and translating and such. Her French is perfect, while mine is nonexistent, so besides babysitting my ignorant ass and giving me a place to stay, she was a great resource in oh-so-many ways. She lives right where the Bastille used to be, which is pretty dang cool if you ask me. We went on all kinds of little sightseeing trips, and I took all kinds of crappy pictures with my brand-new digital camera. Yes, I said crappy pictures. Either this camera sucks, or I do -- and since the camera can't defend itself, I'm blaming IT.
OK, so I met a bunch of Rachel's friends, who were all interesting and nice, including the charming British expat Ralph Fiennes type who collects sports cars and Classic Rock Memorabilia and who had just bought his cute blonde American girlfriend a pair of Gene Simmons panties on EBay. Not sure what they thought of me, since I spent my first few days in a complete coma from jetlag; hadn't been able to sleep on the plane and had thus lost an entire night's worth of shuteye and didn't really catch up until Amsterdam (see Part Three). But together we ate a bunch of expensive bar food made even more expensive by the appalling value of my 21st-century American Dollar against the Euro, to my dismay. I could maybe afford to live in Paris for about three months, and that's if I sold my car. And the food's good, but I have to say that in all my travels, Paris included, I haven't found a city that can touch San Francisco for food quality, variety, and (compared to Western Europe) even price. Besides, as good as the food might be in Paris, it might as well be dogshit with all the smokers puffing away at every table in every restaurant. My face was a lovely shade of green the majority of the time, and my food usually ended up tasting like the Marlboro Man's pillowcase.
Ah, but Paris is beautiful. The Seine, the ancient architecture, the magnificent history, the willowy, pouty-lipped girls clicking around everywhere in high heels over ankle-destroying cobblestone streets...
Paris is the only place you could get me to eat a duckling heart. Yeah, a cute little baby duck heart. We had a handful of 'em. Tasted like metallic bridge mix. Here I would be ashamed to eat that, but there I was just glad it was less than a hundred bucks for dinner. Actually my normally somewhat politically-correct dietary leanings became completely violated, obfuscated and nearly obliterated on this trip, as you shall see later in the story -- but that's one of the things traveling does to you. Makes you eat weird shit, and be okay with it. Kinda like being Catholic; I eat something I would normally never consider, but then I say a few 'hail marys' to my inner Buddha and all is forgiven.
I found out in Paris that a 'suzette' is a lollipop, BUT it is also, appropriately enough, slang for 'blow job' -- a fact I relayed excitedly to my friend Suzette just yesterday. But for some reason, she wasn't as amused as I was by this delightful bit of trivia. Go figure.
You hear a lot about how rude French people supposedly are, especially to Americans, but I didn't experience this. Either they weren't rude to me at all, or else they were rude in French and I didn't understand them. They could be saying the French equivalent of 'Your face looks like an orangutan's ass with smallpox' and I would respond with something like 'Oui madame, the croissants smell excellent.' I guess one could say that the beauty of not understanding a language is being immune to its insults. Makes me wish that sometimes I couldn't understand English.
In fact, one such time was when some American tourist with an East Coast-ish accent stopped us and asked if we par-layed eeng-less, and if we knew where the 'Emily' cafe was. I was baffled for a moment until I remembered we were in Montmartre, where the film 'Amelie' was shot. The girl in the film works at a little cafe; apparently it and many other of the locations in the movie have become tourist attractions simply by virtue of being featured in it. Hey, it's a great little film and I like it a lot -- but come on, people. Jesus.
Wandered aimlessly around Paris for awhile, taking in all the sights, navigating the Metro, eating out too much and resisting the temptation to buy a tiny metal replica of the Eiffel Tower. Checked out the cemetery where my heroes Proust, Wilde, Jim Morrison and Leopold Fucker are buried, which is one huge cool crazy spooky place, let me tell ya. Repeatedly passed incarnations of the Tex-Mex restaurant chain known as 'Indiana.' Why anyplace ostensibly serving 'Tex-Mex' food would call itself 'Indiana' remains quite beyond my comprehension. Maybe 'El Paso' was taken?
I'm thinking of opening up a French restaurant here in town and calling it 'Scotland.'
OK, so I could talk all day about Paris and how great it was -- except for the weather, which tended to be rather chilly for June, even by San Francisco standards -- but anybody who's been to Paris knows how fab it is, and anybody who hasn't ought to get their ignorant lazy American asses out of the barc-o-lounger and do some traveling, for Christ's sake! The world's bigger than Michigan, Bucko!
To be continued...
* * *
Descended rapidly to the runway, thus ending my fantasy of being a young, dashing bombardier in 1944 France. And the sexy French whore who was about to hide me in her armoire after I was forced to eject behind enemy lines turned back into, well, the one cute stewardess on the plane. Sigh. The captain turned off the fasten seat belt sign and everyone stood up. A woman right behind the first class curtain stood up and slammed her head into the plastic overhead light assembly. Hard. That had to hurt.
Once again, the International Bureau of Airport Ineptitude was on the job, and we were herded into a passageway that spiraled around and opened into the passport control area. But unlike in London, there were no lines. Just a mob. The signs ordered us to stay behind the yellow line, but there were no lanes to queue up into -- just a single open passport window, with about 400 people crammed together trying to get in front of each other but behind the aforementioned yellow line. I heard obvious profanity being exclaimed in about thirty different languages, including a few I even recognized. I didn't wish to enter France as the stereotypical loud, pushy, Ugly American, but I was quickly getting shoved further backwards in the crowd by people with gigantic bags, dogs, children and beards -- so finally I angled my slender bod in such a way as to form a wedgelike warhead, a human torpedo, and I forced my way through the swearing, sweating, wildly gesticulating masses until I plowed smack into the broad back of a large Arabic gentleman with hands the size of ceiling fans. I knew if I stayed right behind him in his wake, I'd get somewhere -- nobody was pushing HIM around.
After jostling around this way for a good 20 minutes with no sign that the Frenchies were going to open another window, I finally made it to the front and was welcomed to France with a grimace from the obviously unamused Passport Control Gendarme. Wound my way around to the huge waiting crowd where my friend would hopefully be waiting to escort me away from this ghastly place; luckily she spotted me, and we ran off toward baggage claim together. Ah, my vacation begins...
My friend Rachel is originally a New Yorker, but she's lived in Paris for five years, teaching English and translating and such. Her French is perfect, while mine is nonexistent, so besides babysitting my ignorant ass and giving me a place to stay, she was a great resource in oh-so-many ways. She lives right where the Bastille used to be, which is pretty dang cool if you ask me. We went on all kinds of little sightseeing trips, and I took all kinds of crappy pictures with my brand-new digital camera. Yes, I said crappy pictures. Either this camera sucks, or I do -- and since the camera can't defend itself, I'm blaming IT.
OK, so I met a bunch of Rachel's friends, who were all interesting and nice, including the charming British expat Ralph Fiennes type who collects sports cars and Classic Rock Memorabilia and who had just bought his cute blonde American girlfriend a pair of Gene Simmons panties on EBay. Not sure what they thought of me, since I spent my first few days in a complete coma from jetlag; hadn't been able to sleep on the plane and had thus lost an entire night's worth of shuteye and didn't really catch up until Amsterdam (see Part Three). But together we ate a bunch of expensive bar food made even more expensive by the appalling value of my 21st-century American Dollar against the Euro, to my dismay. I could maybe afford to live in Paris for about three months, and that's if I sold my car. And the food's good, but I have to say that in all my travels, Paris included, I haven't found a city that can touch San Francisco for food quality, variety, and (compared to Western Europe) even price. Besides, as good as the food might be in Paris, it might as well be dogshit with all the smokers puffing away at every table in every restaurant. My face was a lovely shade of green the majority of the time, and my food usually ended up tasting like the Marlboro Man's pillowcase.
Ah, but Paris is beautiful. The Seine, the ancient architecture, the magnificent history, the willowy, pouty-lipped girls clicking around everywhere in high heels over ankle-destroying cobblestone streets...
Paris is the only place you could get me to eat a duckling heart. Yeah, a cute little baby duck heart. We had a handful of 'em. Tasted like metallic bridge mix. Here I would be ashamed to eat that, but there I was just glad it was less than a hundred bucks for dinner. Actually my normally somewhat politically-correct dietary leanings became completely violated, obfuscated and nearly obliterated on this trip, as you shall see later in the story -- but that's one of the things traveling does to you. Makes you eat weird shit, and be okay with it. Kinda like being Catholic; I eat something I would normally never consider, but then I say a few 'hail marys' to my inner Buddha and all is forgiven.
I found out in Paris that a 'suzette' is a lollipop, BUT it is also, appropriately enough, slang for 'blow job' -- a fact I relayed excitedly to my friend Suzette just yesterday. But for some reason, she wasn't as amused as I was by this delightful bit of trivia. Go figure.
You hear a lot about how rude French people supposedly are, especially to Americans, but I didn't experience this. Either they weren't rude to me at all, or else they were rude in French and I didn't understand them. They could be saying the French equivalent of 'Your face looks like an orangutan's ass with smallpox' and I would respond with something like 'Oui madame, the croissants smell excellent.' I guess one could say that the beauty of not understanding a language is being immune to its insults. Makes me wish that sometimes I couldn't understand English.
In fact, one such time was when some American tourist with an East Coast-ish accent stopped us and asked if we par-layed eeng-less, and if we knew where the 'Emily' cafe was. I was baffled for a moment until I remembered we were in Montmartre, where the film 'Amelie' was shot. The girl in the film works at a little cafe; apparently it and many other of the locations in the movie have become tourist attractions simply by virtue of being featured in it. Hey, it's a great little film and I like it a lot -- but come on, people. Jesus.
Wandered aimlessly around Paris for awhile, taking in all the sights, navigating the Metro, eating out too much and resisting the temptation to buy a tiny metal replica of the Eiffel Tower. Checked out the cemetery where my heroes Proust, Wilde, Jim Morrison and Leopold Fucker are buried, which is one huge cool crazy spooky place, let me tell ya. Repeatedly passed incarnations of the Tex-Mex restaurant chain known as 'Indiana.' Why anyplace ostensibly serving 'Tex-Mex' food would call itself 'Indiana' remains quite beyond my comprehension. Maybe 'El Paso' was taken?
I'm thinking of opening up a French restaurant here in town and calling it 'Scotland.'
OK, so I could talk all day about Paris and how great it was -- except for the weather, which tended to be rather chilly for June, even by San Francisco standards -- but anybody who's been to Paris knows how fab it is, and anybody who hasn't ought to get their ignorant lazy American asses out of the barc-o-lounger and do some traveling, for Christ's sake! The world's bigger than Michigan, Bucko!
To be continued...
* * *
posted by brioSphere at 10:39 AM
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