Go Back to Your Country

So it's been a crazy ten days, and that is my excuse for the radio silence. In those ten days, I have been in 4 different countries (I'm including Germany in that). It was the longest consecutive amount of time that I have been out of Tübingen since getting here, and it was wonderful. For the ease of both writing and reading, I'm going to split it into three blog posts. Otherwise, it might start looking like a novel. So I shall start from the very beginning (a very good place to start): Paris.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from Paris. Of course, it's supposed to be wonderful, with macaroons, baguettes, the Eiffel Tower, and all that, but after five years of very frustrating and not-particularly productive Frenchg classes, I had quit with not particularly nice (and completely irrational) feelings towards France or the people in it. I also didn't have anyone to go with. So that was also a little intimidating. For those reasons, I wasn't particularly excited when I got on a train with Paris as the destination on Monday, March 3rd. But I got on nonetheless. 

I ended up at Gare de l'Est (the east train station), when I thought I would end up at Gare du Nord (the northern one). So my adventure started off interesting. With my gigantic, blue turtle-looking backpack, I wandered from the east train station to the north one, where the screenshot of directions to my hostel started. Luckily, the two train stations weren't very far apart, and I found my hostel in a little over a half an hour. The Woodstock Hostel is located in the 9th arrondissement, near Sacré Coeur and the Moulin Rouge (and therefore the redlight district), but it's not actually in the redlight part, and it's quite wonderful. As expected, the entire thing was very hippy-ish with brightly-painted walls and a Volkswagen Beetle (like a big one) sticking out of the wall with a skeleton inside and bumper stickers all over it. 

So anyways, I checked in and brought my stuff up to the room, and after a bit of fiddling with my phone, decided to head down and get a map and see what was close that might be worth exploring. I sat down with it in the lobby, and just as I was about to start wandering a girl came in with her bags and started speaking to the receptionist. I overheard that she was in my room, so after she went up, I decided to go up too and say hi, just for the hell of it. And that was how I met Giulia. She is from Brazil and was with her boyfriend in Spain for his job, but decided to come to Paris for a few days by herself for the hell of it. After she unpacked, we decided to got up the hill a little ways to Sacré Coeur and check it out. Most simply put, it's a huge and beautiful basilica. Beyond that I know very little about it. According to Wikipedia, it is a double monument, political and cultural, both a national penance for the excesses of the Second Empire and socialist Paris Commune of 1871 crowning its most rebellious neighborhood, and an embodiment of conservative moral order, publicly dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which was an increasingly popular vision of a loving and sympathetic Christ. So yeah, that's about what I got for you on that. Despite it being a Monday night, it was still crowded with tourists and people trying to scam those tourists. We stopped in for a little bit, but there was a service going on, and both of us (being not-real Catholics) felt the whole Catholic guilt, God-will-smite-you-down thing setting in and decided to leave. 

Praise Jesus 

After some wandering around Montmarte, we went back to the hostel, where we met a guy who claimed to be from California but was really from Wisconsin (like arguably more from Wisconsin than me), a girl from Australia studying art in Italy (Jessie), an English girl studying in München, and Stefano. But more on Stefano later. We ended up getting pizza at a nearby restaurant with the English girl, and returning to the hostel. We had promised Jessie that we would meet up at 10:30 and go for drinks or something. When we got back, it was the three of us, Stefano, and the receptionist, Nate. The English girl went to bed early, and Giulia and I sat, drank a beer, pet the cat, (named Jesus) and chatted with Stefano. Now Stefano is an interesting creature. Upon meeting him, we thought he was French, as from our non-native-in-fact-barely-speaking-any-French ears, he sounded like a native French speaker. He also refused to tell us his name instructing us to call him Jesus. (after he realized that would get him confused with the cat, he revised it to God.) After we got back from dinner, he continued to tell us to "go back to your country" with a shit-eating grin. When Giulia had had enough of his shit, she turned her attention to a boy who was quietly typing away at the computers. "Hey, what's your name? Where are you from?" That's how we met Cornelius. He was from Berlin and also traveling alone. Shortly thereafter, Jessie came back, and the four of us sat, drank, tried to ignore Stefano telling us to go back to our countries, and chilled. At some point, Stefano threw his Italian ID out on the table and that's how we learned that he was, in fact, not French nor was his name God. So that was my first night in Paris.

On the morning of my first full day, we woke up early and met in the lobby for breakfast, as the four of us had agreed the night before. We had decided to go to Versailles. Something I hadn't intended upon seeing due to my limited time in Paris, but I decided why not? Better to hang out with people than not. So after a little bit of confusion and searching, we boarded a train from around Notre Dame to Versailles. Two things surprised me about my journey there. I was under the impression that Versailles was very far out of Paris, but in fact, it's only a 30 minute train ride, which is the amount of time it takes to go from one end of the #2 Metro line to the other (more on that adventure later). Also, I expected to be thrown out of the train in front of Versailles, which also was not the case. So the four of us wandered for a little while, got some cheap food (a half baguette size sandwich for 3€? Madness!), and eventually made it to the palace, on the not-usual-entrance side. We first stopped by a lovely little manmade pond on the east? side of the palace and then walked to the gardens. After spending way an embarrassing amount of time trying to get a good jumping picture, we wandered to the area with the boats. 

We rented out a boat at 11€ for a half an hour, and struggled to paddle our way through the rather large Versailles pool thing. Despite the struggles, it was very fun and cool seeing the gardens from the water. 

The Hall of Mirrors

Afterwards, we went back up to the palace and commenced with the whole tour thing. And despite that all four of us were from different hemisphere, we all managed to get in for free because we all had EU citizenship or residency. How cool is that? Anyways, we commenced with the tour. Versailles is huge and golden and fancy with high and sometimes painted ceilings. You can see the Louis the XIV really had a huge ego or was compensating for something or both. But in any case, it's a neat thing to see and kind of transports you to another time. It's weird to think there were once fancy balls and king and queens living there seeing it has been a museum since shortly after the Napoleonic Wars. 

After the tour, we wandered around and struggled a little bit with finding the train station, but we eventually found it, got on a train, and headed back to Paris. We got back to the hostel probably a little bit after 6:30, and shortly thereafter went back out again to buy wine, cheese, and olives, and then go to find real dinner. Unfortunately, most things around where we were (except for the shitty kebabs) were quite expensive, as it was a tourist-y area. So we stopped in an empty Chinese with reasonable prices. 

We walked around for a little while after that, and then made camp outside the Moulin Rouge and had a lovely little picnic, the first of three. Then we went to a bar next to the Moulin Rouge that Jessie had been to called O'Sullivans. She had described it as a total dive, but it was definitely wayyyy to nice to be a dive bar. We ended up leaving early, though, because we wanted to get up kind of early the next day to do more tourist things. 

The next day, after breakfast, the four of us split up. Giulia and I decided to do a whirlwind, see-all-of-Paris-in-one-day tour, while Jessie went to draw Notre Dame, and Cornelius went to explore a cemetery and catacombs. Giulia and my adventure started at the Metro, took us to the wrong side of Paris–hence how I know how long it takes to get across the city by Metro–and then brought us eventually to the L'Arc de Triomphe, which is pretty cool albeit in the middle of the craziest traffic circle this world has ever seen. We got back on the Metro, started our walk at the Eiffel Tower, then continued along the Seine, seeing the Palace, the Musée d'Orsay, the Louvre, and finally ending at Notre Dame. Seeing as we didn't exactly have time to go into any of these places, I don't think there's much to say about them. But we did meet Jessie at Notre Dame with cheese, crackers, and olives. We chilled there for probably 3 some odd hours. While Jessie sketched and fed the birds, Giulia slept and I read Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down. 

Heaven on Earth

Then the time finally came. The time to go to Shakespeare & Co. Shakespeare & Co. is an English language bookstore maybe 5 minutes from Notre Dame. Hemingway used to chill/live there during his starving-artist/ex-pat times in Paris. The store still has space for starving writers to rent out for cheap and just write. It's super cool, and I restrained myself and only bought five books. Everyone should be proud. The three of us then went back to the hostel to meet Cornelius. 

We had decided earlier that we would do a picnic by the Eiffel Tower that night. So we got back to the hostel, hung out, ate some very, very mediocre kebabs, and bought more wine, cheese, and olives, acquired a new French friend that resembled Tom Welling from Smallville, and then made our way to the Eiffel Tower. We sat there, drinking and talking for quite a few hours, so long in fact, that we didn't make the last train by l'Arc de Triomphe and ended up having to walk an hour back to the hostel. But that wasn't so bad. It wasn't terribly cold out, and hey, exploring Paris at night, amirite? 

So that was my time in Paris. The next day I had to leave on an early train for Brussels, so it really only consisted of breakfast and saying goodbye, which was sad. But I was still excited about heading to Brussels to see Louise for her birthday. And that, my friends, is the next installment in this three-part series. Stay tuned.