April in Paris: Monday

Some times I get lost in my life; days merge and blend and I am carried along on the current of the moments; sometimes I catch myself fretting over what one of my friends calls "white girl problems" (I just had to spend four hours in the library studying my incredibly interesting Irish poetry for the Celtic Lit class I am taking in Scotland, my life is so hard; oh NO I had to spend a few hours in banks to fund my trip to Spain; oh darn how annoying that the flight landed in Beauvais instead of Paris and I have to take a bus; Gosh the line for the Musée d'Orsay is so long!; the sunburn that I got in the gorgeous, 73 degree weather stings when I carry around my new, indie tote bag. ... Whitegirlproblems. Hahaha). When that happens, I tend to forget, momentarily, just how wonderful my life is, and how incredibly lucky I am. Having the amazing opportunity to spend five days in Paris reminded me of that, and (puts on tearfully grateful Academy-award-winner voice) I would like to thank my parents, for giving me the opportunity to come here...

But really.

Mom and Dad, I do not know how to express how grateful I am to have had these amazing experiences, and to have been lucky enough to spend time in some of the most beautiful places it has ever been my good fortune to visit. Paris was amazing. Thank you, so, so much. I will try to share a little bit of it with you, despite my clear inadequacy of expression. But first, a bit of music. April in Paris: Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. It was a feeling.

[I have too many words: I am going to break this up by day, since it is a massive post anyway. Words words words words... Love to you all.]

Monday, April 4th:

The Trials of Traveling Solo

• Madrid subway angst, duffle bag slamming against my side and pulling on my shoulder as I ran from one Ryanair desk to the next. But really, who puts a check-in-desk in the cafeteria?!
• Short flight, skimming the clouds over the Atlantic. The lemon-yellow backs of the chairs blazoned with inescapably large diagrams of all the disasters that could possibly occur in an airplane, and what one ought to do about them (because when the plane crashes a flimsy plastic bag of air, in either oxygen-mask or life-vest form, will totally make everything better...). Flight attendants trying to sell smokeless cigarets, perfume, jewelry, in addition to the usual food/soda/alcohol, with all the persuasiveness of born salesmen, hawking wares on a Barcelona street corner. French mixes with the English and Spanish announcements, and I start to realize that I am going to a country where I speak NONE of the language. The rest of the flight is spent flipping through the guide/phrase books, thumbing pages in excitement tinged with worry.
• Hurried walk through the Beauvais airport, and I worry a little bit when I leave the building and they have not yet stamped my passport, but decide there is nothing I can do. 15 euro later I am on a bus to Paris, seated next to a bright, though cynical New Yorker who I found interesting (he spent a year teaching English in Spain!) but depressingly negative. I resisted the urge to stereotype, with little success: well dressed, hip, slightly effeminate, intelligent and aware of it, pessimistic and confident, he seemed to fit the mold of the ivy-graduate New York resident pretty darn well. 
• Metro. Oh my. The Paris metro isn't really that complicated: the lines are color coded, there are maps pretty frequently, and the trains come with startling regularity. But to get onto the metro, one needs a ticket. And to purchase a ticket, one needs to operate the ticket machine. And to operate the ticket machine, one needs to understand French, OR to have absurdly good luck. Apparently I have the latter, because I get a ticket out of the machine eventually, but it took far too long, and involved a lot of me pushing random buttons, and struggling with the lack of direction-key buttons (instead there was a  cylindrical metal bar which one could roll to move the selection up or down. This took me several minutes to discover). I spend the whole ride double and tripple checking my map, angsting about whether I was on the right line, the right direction, etc. etc. I needed somewhere there to slap me upside the head and tell me to take a chill pill - I did know where I was going, I got off at the right stop, I found my way to an information booth, then wandered about until I found my hostel, checked in functionally, and all was well. Really, I should have more faith in my traveling abilities, apparently, since I haven't gotten really lost yet.
• Le Village Hostel was bright, clean, and quirky, with squeaking wood floors and colorful curtains, with cheerful student-age employees and a manager who was so incredibly French: mid-40s, tanned, with a bit of a paunch over which his skin-tight shirts stretched comfortably, a peach- or nude-colored scarf tossed carelessly around his neck and a hat perched jauntily on his balding head, which was perpetually threatening to slip off, due to his slightly nose-in-the-air saunter. I caught him singing in poorly accented English along with awful euro-techno-remixes of every bad American pop song you have ever heard, most of which should never, ever be synthed and put to a driving beat. It was hilarious. The only thing was, I was supposed to meet my friend Katherine and another Mac girl, Amy, in Paris, and we were staying in the same hostel, but due to my temporarily deceased phone and her lack of computer, we had not been in contact in days and I had no way of getting ahold of her. I left a note at the desk, crossed my fingers, drew a deep breath, and set off to explore Paris all by my lonesome.

[A brief rant.] Ordinarily, I like being alone. It's an empowering feeling, walking through a city on the other side of the world by oneself, knowing that you can go anywhere you please, on the slightest whim. Sometimes, however, being a young woman walking alone can be unpleasant, or even unsafe, and that is a feeling which I am at once unused to, and angered by. Saint Paul is, overall, a pretty safe city, especially in the Macalester area, and Edinburgh is pretty darn safe as well (too full of college students for anything much worse than drunken debauchery to go on), and to be honest I am just not accustomed to feeling as though a solitary walk in the late afternoon is something that I should think twice about. Probably I was never anything but safe, but as I wandered away from Le Village Hostel, I did not feel as though I was. I walked the half-block up to the steps that lead to the Sacre Coeur church (cathedral?), which shone white and pristine atop the Montmartre crest, looking for all the world like a misplaced bit of the white city of Gondor, Ecthelion transported out of middle earth and into France, brilliant and tall. All I wanted to do was enjoy the views of the city and the sight of this incredible building and breathe deep the Parisian air, but I found my wrist caught by a vendor trying to sell me string bracelets, who then wanted to talk about my life, and was just a little too interested for my taste. Moments after I extricated myself and hurried away, I was approached by two different men who wanted to practice their English and talk to me, despite the fact that I told them I was in a hurry, and was meeting friends, and did not make eye contact any more than I could help. It made me profoundly uncomfortable when the second of them would not take the hint and leave, and especially so when, after I barely acknowledged his comment that I had beautiful eyes (How could he know? I was doing everything I could not to look at him so that he would leave me alone; perhaps rude, but clear, I thought) he followed me down four flights of stairs to the street where the hostel was. Perhaps farther, but I stopped looking behind me and tried to go swiftly without appearing to run. My mother used to call me fearless when I was a child, and it wasn't incorrect~ I probably would have worried her less if I had been a little more afraid of the usual things - fast-moving vehicles, deep water, etc. I am still not used, truly, to feeling afraid. I hated it.

People talk about the cultural differences between America and Europe, or even between the UK and continental Europe, and they aren't kidding. There were no repressed, reserved, adorably shy Scottish boys on my travels, which was just fine, but the different sorts of attention my friends and I received in our wanderings was... interesting. Spanish men catcall and look more than any other people I have ever encountered, but unlike the guys in the states who stare and whistle there is, generally, no intention behind it, no aggression really, mostly just ... appreciation? I mean, when a fellow thrice my age with a fully white beard is making comments about my behind, it's hard to take it seriously. Generally, in Barcelona, I could just roll my eyes and keep walking, and was more on the flattered than the offended side of indifferent. In Paris though, perhaps because I speak no French and therefore felt just a bit more insecure and unsure of myself, and perhaps too because of the rather sketchy area where the hostel was, the comments and the looks were a little harder to shrug off, and felt just a little more persistent, a little more aggressive. It was only really a problem when I was walking by myself that afternoon, and only in that bit of the city, but it was just enough to make me think about all the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies classes offered at Mac, and about all the talk of feminism and female empowerment. I appreciate them, in a general sense, but because I have lived a privileged life I have always felt like for myself, feminism was a bit moot since I have always been treated as an individual and not noticeably different from anyone else based on gender alone. In retrospect, feeling my femininity imposed on me, as it were, by the people around me was an interesting experience, though in the moment, wishing only to exist in my happy little world-traveler-bubble, I would cheerfully have forgone the cultural experience in favor of feeling more at ease. Anyway. Things to think about.

• Left the hostel, walking this time in the opposite direction. I realized rather swiftly that the Moulin Rouge is still the Moulin Rouge in function as well, and the area around it, while interesting, was full of signs and shop windows advertising products and services that I was slightly uncomfortable contemplating, so I turned and began to walk south toward the city center, the Seine, the Louvre, and the Paris of so many books and movies. I walked past churches and shaded buildings, a cathedral or two, and the shining façade of the Opera House, gleaming with golden statues and a hundred grinning or grimacing masks. Broad grey streets and tall white buildings bedecked with fragile, fanciful swirls and curls of plaster wound their way down to the river, and quite suddenly I found myself staring Lady Louvre in the face, shining pyramid and russet stone brilliant in the evening light. Every figure on the sides of the building was outlined stark against the twilight sky, grey clouds underlit with blinding light, and the realization that so many of the most beautiful paintings and sculptures in HUMAN HISTORY are inside this building! shook me to my core, and I could not stop smiling, even knowing I wouldn’t go in for another day or so. The poplars lining the Seine shivered in the breeze, and the darkly shining sky overhead gave the whole scene a surreal, magical feeling.
• I walked back through the darkening streets, feeling my elevated heartrate from the overwhelming loveliness and the realization that this was PARIS; I kept to busy streets, despite the temptation of narrow cobbled allies and sidestreets, residually cautious from my earlier scare, and found with pleasure that I could navigate the city with relative ease and a map. I love maps, and getting myself around with them is one of the finer pleasures in life, and despite the fact that mine was not a particularly GOOD map (it was one of those tourist ones, where the cartographer got all excited about pretty buildings and cool monuments  and decided it would be really cool to put in pictures of said buildings, etc. However, nice as the pictures are, they mean that you cannot see the streets. Unfortunately, streets are kiiiiiinda necessary on maps…) it was functional enough to get me the 7.5 miles from Montmartre to the Seine and back. Huzzah!
• Ate tons of carrots, apples, and apricots (purchased at a local grocery store) for dinner. ...You did notice all the baguette consumption that happened in Spain, no? Fresh produce tasted soooo good. Afterwards, 11:30 pm ish, went to bed, hoping to run into Katherine and Amy in the morning.
• 12:15 am, awoken to "JANE!!!" and an unidentified dark head bobbing excitedly at my bedside. Turns out, Katherine and Amy were staying in the same room as me. Either the hostel worker was being sneaky and REALLY nice and put us together on purpose, or else it was a brilliant, ridiculous coincidence. Chatted cheerfully and groggily for a while, then crashed back to sleep.