Paris 2017

Paris, France

November 16, 2017

Latitude 28˚ 2’

Thirty-one years had elapsed since the last time I visited Paris.  Forty-one if one considers the distance from the first time to this one.  A tremendous flow of water had crossed under the Pont Neuf on the Seine in all those years.

At the age of 68, memory is a slippery slope.  I think I remembered this I think I remembered that about Paris, but the truth is that Paris was like a new city for me.  It had been a long time.  Perhaps it was because I was there in the crispness of November and not during the hot steam of summer.  Whatever it was my two and half day visit to this city was like being some place new.  That’s a good thing.

On the day I arrived, a gray drizzle cast a gloom of the City of Light.  That day is a fog, as all first days are when multiple time zones are crossed.  But the next day, when I left the apartment I’d rented I walked out into a day of seamless blue skies, a day of clean cold air and autumn yellows still lingering on trees.  It was a wonderful day to explore the Seine.

I took the metro to the Eiffel Tower, thought of Steve and looked for a Skoda.  There were long lines to go to the top but that wasn’t on my agenda.  Just being able to see it set against the clean blue sky was enough.  I would be content just exploring and loking.

From there I hopped a Bateux Mouche and spent a pleasantly cold hour on top deck sailing past Paris’ monuments to Notre Dame and back.   That gave me the orientation I needed to head back to Notre Dame—a distance of about four miles.  I zigzagged my way from the Right Bank to the Left Bank, walked through gardens and along the Seine.  Once at Notre Dame, after a solid four hour walk, it was the usual tourist nightmare of dealing with hordes of tourists, the Japanese who all shoot photos and never really look at something and the Chinese who are rude and loud and think nothing of pushing people out of their way.  Silence was not respected, although it was plastered everywhere. And, like my last trip to Europe, people were climbing into small chapels to have someone take their picture sitting in front of some icon.  It was to be meditative.

After dinner of Turkish food, it was another two-hour walk back to the Eiffel Tower, this time through neighborhoods and restaurant sectors.  The city took on a very different atmosphere at night.

On Tuesday I spent the late morning/early afternoon at the Catacombs and then wandered over to the Monrparnasse Cemetery to find the tomb of Jean Paul Sartre and, more importantly, Porfirio Diaz.  It was a golden afternoon and the sun was in just the right angle.  The cemetery glowed in the late afternoon light.

It was a wonderful visit, made even nicer by the neighborhood I stayed in.  Before Airbnb it would have never been a neighborhood to go into.  Arabic was the predominant language and the few women I saw were dressed in birkas.  I bought my food from an Algerian grocery store and my baguettes from two Indians who’d learned the baking trade. 

I could not help but think how different a person I was now than the young man who arrived in 1976.  Age and decades of international travel had permitted me to the city in a far broader way.  In 1976, I had no other reference points but Montreal and the two cross country trips I’d taken two and four years earlier.  Now, I have a life-time of travel behind me and thousand reference points I could not have imagined in those younger, earlier days.  I now see why Hanoi is called the Paris of the East, and why the baguette flourished in Vietnam.  Line 6 on the Paris Metro has cars that are almost identical the Subte’s cars in Buenos Aires.  I now know why there is so much French architecture in Mexico City and am thrilled to see so many comparisons.

The city is still a gem, and perhaps more so today than 40 years ago.  UNESCO has poured millions of dollars into the city to spiff it up. Paris, like so many other places in the world, knows what it has and is maintaining its treasures for future generations.  The air was clean and cold with nary a hint of acid in it.  The streets were clean and not once did I smell urine or dog poo.  Good improvements!

I’m not in a hurry, but it will be nice to back in Paris in the weeks before Christmas.  Then it will take on a very different aura.

But that’s still weeks away and there a lot more left to this trip.