chapter 7 : paris.

Image by daniel-weber via Flickr

hey guys! how long has it been since my last post? i don’t even dare to count. you know how much i love you all, i just have been so busy with everything, literally everything.  i don’t really wanna dwell on it right now, cos those stories are worth its own post. i will try, really hard this time to finish up this series on the trip i did in june.

and then we were in paris. we arrived in the late afternoon, and we decided to actually book our seats for the next part of our journey, which turned to be a really smart idea, cos we actually spent hours queuing and negotiating until we got the rest of our journey fixed. then we took the paris sub to our hostel, the st. christopher’s inn paris, which is a commercialised chain of hostels in europe. you can find it in almost all of the big cities. it has, of course, advantages and  disadvantages. these hostels might not be the cheapest, and are crowded. but the atmosphere might be suited to young travelers/backpackers, and there is a bar in each of the hostels, where you can get your alcohol fix every  time you get lazy to walk out, or even get a dinner.

early next morning we went on the paris free walking tour by the new europe tours, like the one we did in berlin. will always definitely my suggestions to go on their tours, and  as you might later read in this post, i went on 3 of their programs, and all were great. back to the walking tour, tyler, a really smart guy with a posh sense of humour  who eventually would be our guide, picked us up at 9 at the hostel to bring us to the main meeting point. at the meeting point, we got to meet some new people while waiting for the tour to start. there was this canadian guy (if you read this, you know who you are ) that joined us for the most part of our paris stay. per usual, we learned a lot about the parisian and french culture during the tour, like how the french authorities try really hard to keep the english words from seeping into their language, they went quite far to do just that, they even banned the use of the word ‘e-mail’ in the publications and replaced it with a made up french substitute ‘mél’, and they even require a french translation for every english word used in advertisements. then we crossed one of the many love bridges in paris, where people write their name and that of their loved ones on a lock, lock  it on the side of the bridge and then throw the key down to the river. sounds really romantic doesn’t it? but it became hilarious, we suspect that some of these people are players, cos they used a combination lock, meaning they can come back, open the lock and use it to flirt with some other girls/guys. the interesting part, there are people who go around a few times in each year to take off all of these locks, but nobody seems to know who these people are, not even the authorities. but then again, you can surely get a handsome sum of money collecting all these scrap metals. the tour ended around the arc de triomphe, which when you think that it dates back to the napoleon era is quite magnificent. it is much bigger than you think it is, and is a central point of roads heading out, forming a kind of star if you take a bird’s eye view picture at night. it is said that all the roads in france can lead to the arc de triomphe, wonder if anyone had tried.

after the tour we went into the louvre, which is again, bigger than you would imagine it is. it’s gonna take days if you actually wan to properly observe all the art on display. but just like every other tourists in the museum, we head first to see the monalisa. it was f-ing crowded in front of that miniature of a painting. full of people trying to take picture in front of it just to tell people ‘i’ve been in paris and i’ve seen the monalisa!!’, show-offs. so i just battled among the crowd, to get to the front row, and just stood there like an asshole, preventing people from taking pictures with my tall figure. i did not do that for long though, it got boring quite quickly. but you will only realise how small monalisa is once you turn your back around. there it stands, a monster of a painting, it was just as large as the whole wall. it is the painting of the wedding in cana, you know, the one where jesus turned water into wine just so that people could party into the night. and apparently it is the biggest painting in louvre. if i am forced to estimate, i would say it is at least 100 times bigger than monalisa. but there are really so many other interesting art and cultural pieces, but after 30 minutes, i wasn’t paying any attention any more. then we went to the bottom of the facing down glass pyramid, just to see if we were the lucky ones to find the holy grail. but the da vinci code is a novel after all, well i guess it is a matter of interpretation. considering that there is an apple store and a starbucks around the pyramid, the holy grail might actually be there.

it was only the next day that we went to the notre dame i guess, and i was really sorry for not being amazed by it. it was dark for once, and that made the tinted glass amazingly eery, and the long queue going in didn’t help, and you even need to pay to get up to the upper areas. it all might have actually changed if i saw quasimodo though, but that also did not happen. but the kilometre zero of france sits right in front of the notre dame de paris, translated to ‘our lady of paris’. people say that if you stand on this point, you will come back to paris in the next 10 years. well, i am not a particularly superstitious guy, let’s just see if that really happens.

this is the second activity we did with the new europe tour guys, especially tyler. this time round, we wandered around the montmartre area, which is also the red light district of paris, but if you were ever in amsterdam or brussels, montmartre will seem more pink than red to your eyes. the famous moulin rouge is there, which actually looks more ragged and run down, than you might actually think. but then again, this place used to be famous for the artist living in the area, most notably pablo picasso, sadly the area has become too expensive for most artists. there stands the apartment in which picasso used to live in. and then there’s an interesting story. it is said that picasso used to frequent a restaurant for his meals, and one his first day, he was impressed by the beauty of the waitress that served his dinner, and he painted her face on a piece of napkin, she was so flustered that she let picasso eat for free. picasso, still living under poverty, used this opportunity to get free meals almost everyday. of course until the owner of the restaurant found out about this. he had a really serious talk with picasso about it, and picasso made him an offer, that he would give the owner a piece of painting for every meal that he eats there. out of pity, the owner accepted his offer. years after, picasso became famous, his paintings became highly sought after, and this restaurant owner, of course had  a basement full of picasso’s paintings. the best investment story i’ve heard to date. and also in montmartre, there’s the basilica s

acré-cœur, now that’s what you call a beautiful church. it was build out of a special kind of stone that cleans itself when it rains, but then you see areas that can’t be reached by the rain water, and those areas are kinda black and dark, but it only enhances the beauty of this basilica, the view from the front of its doors is also something to behold. a must for romantics.

what else did i learn in paris? oh yeah, definitely the numerous gypsy cons. actually i could only remember two, but you’ll get the idea. the first one, be careful when you see people going around shoving a kind of petition letter, they say that it is for a good cause and need your support by signing the paper, but if you read closely, there is a point right at the end where you agree to donate a sum of money, and they’ll aggressively ask for the money once you’ve signed the paper. definitely not the thing for travellers on low budget. there’s another one, in this scheme, a person will come up to you, claiming that you’ve dropped a golden ring. he will then force you to take the ring in question, once you’ve taken the ring, thinking that you might profit from it, then this person will again ask for some compensation for his ‘efforts’ and ‘honesty’. it gets worse, it is not so easy to run away, cos a whole big group of gypsy will then come and surround you, a really scary intimidation strategy. it will definitely not be a nice experience, so my advice is to avoid eye contacts with suspicious looking persons and wear a comfortable running shoes, just in case.

oh and i also went on the pub crawl  i paris. we basically went around the bars around the montmartre area. learning to order a beer in french ‘un biere sil vous plait’. and also meeting other fellow travellers, exchanging interesting stories, you can never guess who you would meet on your travels, which is a humbling experience, cos you know that the world doesn’t revolve around you and that you are only a small fish in the ocean. i basically walked the whole way from montmartre back to the hostel after the whole thing ended. the river was so still and dark, and level with the street that i almost walked on it. luckily i could still find my way home no matter how drunk i am, kind of a special talent if you ask me.

that should do it for the first post in a long while. my life is reaching another mileston, i’ve just finished my german course, like the whole thing that i planned on attending, of course i have still got loads to learn prior to my exam in january, but it felt like time really flies. and 7 weeks ago, i started working at a starbucks store in zurich, it’s my first job ever and am quite lucky to get it. i didn’t believe when people say how happy they are when they get their first pay, until i got mine. it really felt like i did something useful. it has been a really interesting experience, although the job is quite demanding physically and mentally, i won’t be working there for a long time though. but all these, besides basketball and other activities i did here, made me really busy the last few weeks. but i hope i can still contribute to this blog. cheers!

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