Breaking me into Europe

Me in front of THE Moulin Rouge

Come to think of it, the first article I ever wrote for a newspaper – my campus newspaper – was a travel article. (I found a copy of it amid the stuff I recently retrieved from my ex-boyfriend’s apartment, and decided to resurrect it here.) I was 21 and had just returned from my first ever trip to Europe. My years-long obsession with the film Moulin Rouge may have played a small role in my choice of destination out of all the countries in the continent. I stayed in a village outside of Paris, with a Brazilian journalist friend of my mother and the lady's French husband. With them, I had my first glimpse of the instant, generous European hospitality and openness I would come to love, and which sometimes still leaves me speechless when it manifests itself. On that early trip I would spend my days in Paris, mostly on my own and making pitiful attempts at French of American high school caliber, and return to their house in the early evening to homemade meals and pleasant chats (in Portuguese). I also visited Mont Saint-Michel with the lady, but that's another story. Anyway. I could feel myself getting intoxicated, especially when out in Paris on my own (so liberating), and was hopelessly hooked. So it’s not surprising that when a fellow student suggested that I write something for the campus newspaper, this is what I came up with. (Needless to say, don’t expect a masterpiece of travel-writing. I reproduced it exactly as I wrote it, errors and all.)

The Beacon, January 2005

The City of Lights

Paris looks like a huge open-air museum to me. It seems that on every corner you turn, there’s an ancient castle or monument staring you in the face. It’s an imposing and breath-taking city, indeed, but one that’s also uncannily easy to “conquer.”

TRANSPORTATION

Getting around Paris is no mystery. The transportation system is well-integrated. Train stations like Montparnasse lead down to metros (subway stations), which are practically on every corner. There’s also the RER, a breed between a subway and a train, which gives you a high and low view of the city so you don’t need to pay for those red sightseeing cars. One of the RER drop-offs is at the nearby city of Versailles, where the beautiful Louis XIV palace is located.

For 30 euros, you get the best deal in town – a single pass that lets you use any kind of transportation in and around Paris for a whole week.

Almost every morning, I took the train alone from the town of La Falaise (with a floating population of 621 and no commerce), to Paris’s Montparnasse station, an hour away. I was staying with acquaintances I had only met over the phone – a Brazilian lady and her French husband.

DELICACIES

We carried whole conversations in Portuguese, and I inserted half a sentence in French. They fixed me exotic dishes every night when I came home for dinner, such as escargot, couscous, foie gras (goose liver) and duck legs.

Sometimes I ate chocolate crepes in Paris throughout the day and chocolate crepes again for dessert at the house back in the village. Good stuff.

But the husband was somewhat of a hermit and didn’t like the big city, and the lady often wanted to keep him company. So she only accompanied me to Paris a couple of times to get me used to it. After that, I was on my own.

There are tourists and lines everywhere in Paris, even when it’s as cold. I visited the Eiffel Tower and waited a couple of hours to get to the tower in a shaky, little elevator. I felt uneasy, but the panorama was worth any shivers from fear or cold, and any crowds.

MONTMATRE

Another highlight of Paris was the neighborhood of Montmatre. After climbing a hill with the ancient Catholic chapel of Sacre-Cour on top, there was an overlook of a “village of sin.”

After climbing down the other side of the hill, there were artists everywhere painting portraits of tourists in the middle of the street, which is no sin except a sin of the pocket. But when you get to the bottom, you are taken aback by the number of sex shops and cabarets.

The mildest one seemed to be the Moulin Rouge, now more like a circus.

In fact, in Paris, the duality of Catholicism and sex is quite an interesting theme. I reencountered this sensuousness in a more artistic way at the Museum d’Orsee.

Walking in, there was a sculpture of a woman writhing after having been attacked by a “snake.” On the right side of the hall, there was a huge painting of a Roman orgy, titled something like “The Decadents of Rome.”

Near the world-famous impressionist works by Monet and Van Gogh, there was a painting by Courbet that showed a vagina titled, “The Origin of the World.”

The Louvre Museum has more classical art, although its Greco-Roman aisle presents sculptures of men in questionable actions.

But I redeemed myself. I went to Sacre-Cour, Notre Dame and about 10 other churches or basilicas in Paris. I unintentionally witnessed Mass in French in a little chapel among the expensive shops of the Galeries Lafayette and understood none of it.

PRICES

Paris is not cheap, and prices are disproportionate. The price of tickets for attractions like the Eiffel Tower is on average 10 euros. Meanwhile, the price of a cup of coffee is a little under half of that, at four euros.

The coffee was only worth it for me because I sat in a Paris café and imagined that Ernest Hemingway must have done the same thing when he lived there. So I felt like a Bohemian novelist for half an hour. But in Hemingway’s time, there was no such thing as the euro, which is worth about 33 percent more than the dollar.

ENTERTAINMENT

At some point during the two weeks I spent in France, I was invited to sing at an Irish Pub named Corcoran’s, in the trendy Paris neighborhood of St. Germain-des-Pres. My payment was free food at the pub and free board for one night at one of the cheapest Paris hotels; the nightly rate was 80 euros.

LOST AND FOUND

After spending the whole day worshipping the Eiffel Tower, I got to the Montparnasse station and, not looking at any signs and assuming I knew where to go, I took the wrong train.

I ended up in a town in the middle of nowhere, in the complete dark, and thought I’d spend the midnight hour alone in a desolate train station.

To me, French rudeness is a false myth. It was French Samaritans who saved me and directed me to another train that took me to another station where I took yet another train back to La Falaise that night.

The trip back lasted three hours instead of one.

I arrived at 7:15 p.m. and the lady with whom I was staying drove me to a new train station and deposited me inside my fifth train of the day, so I could meet up with a couple of French girls I barely knew and proceed to the soiree (party) somewhere near Paris.

PARTY TIME

It was a house party spiced up with lots of toast with caviar, sangria and champagne, American hip-hop, me trying to speak French to people and people trying to speak English to me. Well, at least I made some new acquaintances. I took about 200 pictures and, in spite of the transportation system, walked about 200 miles. But I wanted to walk.

I had an exhilarating sense of freedom strolling by myself along the Seine River and the Place de la Concorde, through the Arc de Triomphe and across bridges held up by sculptures of golden angels. I also felt safe.

You do run a serious risk, however, of wanting to stay there indefinitely.