Bienvenue á Paris! / London calling
A year ago this week, it was the highest point of the last five years. I was getting ready to leave New York for Paris. Since my rambling Facebook post the morning after I returned home is the inspiration for this blog, it’s only fair that I take a look back at the week abroad. I know I shouldn’t rehash the past but it’s all I have since I don’t live enough of a life in the present. Happy memories for me don’t come around often and when they do, they don’t last long.
The circumstances that lead to the trip are these: I won the round trip ticket to Paris in a Time Out New York contest that XL Airways France sponsored in the May 3rd, 2012 issue. It wasn’t the first time that I won contests but never a prize this big. My sister just happened to call home ten minutes after TONY called me and I was euphoric in telling her I won, neither she or my parents could believe me. I didn’t believe it until I got the e-mail from the airline congratulating me two days later. Rather than having to pick between parents, I chose my sister as the second passenger as she was planning to go to Paris with her friends the week after our birthday but couldn’t after her trip to Ecuador visiting my mom’s family later in the month.
As the summer went on, it was time to plan the trip. We settled on the dates of October 7-14 as it was as far back as the airline’s schedule could allow us to take the trip and have enough time to save money. Our initial plan was to travel to Paris, then to London before heading to Amsterdam and back but it didn’t happen due to XL only flying out Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in October. The next plan was Paris and then spending the weekend in Frankfurt as one of my dad’s brothers and his family live there but after talking it over with my cousin, plans didn’t materialize fast enough. The final plan would be this: Monday to Friday in Paris, Saturday in London and then returning to Paris on Sunday afternoon to catch our flight home that evening.
The day had finally come. Our flight to Paris was scheduled to leave at 11:55PM Sunday night. Which meant arriving at Terminal 4 by 9PM to check in. With time to kill and a Buffalo Wild Wings nearby, we sit and have a drink and I had a Guinness Extra Stout. At midnight, the flight took off and I spent about the first hour and a half of the flight going back and forth from my window seat to the bathroom before heading off to sleep.
Daybreak on Monday dawned grey and rainy skies, as it would the entirety of our stay in Paris. We landed in Paris just after noon, 6AM Eastern Time. After going through baggage , immigration and a phone call home to say we’d made it, the first order of business was getting ourselves to the apartment we would be staying in.To do so, you have to take the RER Line B out of the airport to Gare du Nord. As the train goes by, you gradually see signs of life with every stop passed. We make it out of the Blanche Metro stop and to the right of the entrance is the Moulin Rouge. After taking the keys to the apartment, we don’t have much time to settle in. The first thing we did was take a walking tour of the neighborhood we stayed in, Montmatre. The walk started where at the bottom of the hill, at the Metro stop we came from and went upward until you see the imposing Basilica Sacre-Coeur at it’s peak. Seeing as we were both jet lagged, we decided to eat in with dinner bought at a rotisserie in the neighborhood before calling our dad to say we made it safely.
The trip began in earnest on Tuesday morning with a visit to Starbucks before heading to the Chateau de Versailles. But to get there, you have go through the labyrinth known as the Metro, with its flights of stairs and tunnels everywhere. The chateau itself is composed of three parts, the palace, the Petit Trianon where Marie Antoinette lived and the Grand Trianon where King Louis lived with his mistress. The lands of the chateau are HUGE, you could easily get lost wandering around the gardens. We stopped to have lunch before we left and I thought eating the chicken salad with dressing would be a safe choice. I found out the hard way the dressing was Caesar, that contains anchovies and I’m allergic to seafood. We were in a gift shop and a look at a mirror showed my face had swelled up and both eyes were bloodshot red. So we immediately made it back to the apartment where thanks to my sister’s antihistamine pills and two hours rest, I was ready to go. We had one problem though: most of the museums are closed on Tuesday. So we head back up to Sacre-Coeur, only to find that the crypt had closed. Plan B had us going to the Arc de Triomphe. It’s a LONG way up a winding staircase to get to the observation deck but it’s life-affirming when you see the view of the Eiffel Tower. The rain makes Paris shimmer under the lights of the Champs Elysee as we looked for somewhere to have dinner.
Wednesday began with a visit to the Musee d’ Orsay. The building that houses the museum was once a railroad station We sat down at a nearby restaurant afterward to have lunch. But the lunch had made us later for a walking tour we wanted to take. But our hustle paid off when we made it to the staring point, the Opera Garnier and the tour guide was at the top of the stairs. From there we walked all the way to the Palais Royal. That evening we had a wine tasting booked and after four days of running nonstop, I could’ve used a breather. I was seated next to a lovely redhead from San Francisco who was spending her last night in town. I didn’t take the meaning of tasting literally as I drank all six glasses of wine offered and didn’t eat anything. I made it through the Louvre enjoying the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo in one piece but we came back to the wine bar to pick a bottle of champagne and I spot the redhead again and take a seat and start talking to her. After we left, the hangover was in full effect. Sweating and stumbling back to the apartment and eventually it all came back up.
I didn’t sleep that night and still felt queasy and exhausted the next morning. But the trip rolled on as we started Thursday at the Eiffel Tower. We were at the top level and I decide to go one down to get myself a bottle of water and go to the bathroom. She couldn’t find me and was worried until she saw me again. This isn’t the first time we got separated from each other, it happened to me when I got lost in a crowd with my mom and sister when I was a kid. We sat down to lunch outside at a restaurant where the walking tour ended the previous day. After heading to the Angelina tea room to track down a box of macaroons for a co-worker of my sister’s, we ended up at the Cathedral Notre-Dame as the starting point of a walking tour of the Left Bank that ended at the Sorbonne. At the end of the tour, something unexpected happened, the sun shone for the first time all week. It would’ve been nice if it stayed that way through the Seine River cruise that evening. Alas, it went back to cloudy and raining at the end of the cruise. But we ducked into the port side restaurant where a nice three course dinner and glass of champagne awaited us, back where the day began near the Eiffel Tower. A nice ending to a chaotic four days.
Friday morning we were leaving Paris for London. But not before we took a wrong turn on the Metro that made us miss our 7AM train. We had to buy new tickets at 183 Euro a pop. And before we got on the 9:30AM train, one of our tickets went missing but we were able to get a new one. So we arrive at St.Pancras in London and are greeted by sunlight shining through the station’s roof. After a ride on the Underground and a cab ride, we arrive at our hotel and put our carry on bags away. There was no time to settle down as we had afternoon tea at the Athenian Hotel. It was a beautiful and serene setting for us to enjoy our tea and sandwiches in peace. Since I’d been a petulant asshole to my sister the entire trip through my bumbling, I offered to pick up the tab. We spent the rest of Friday riding around London on a double decker tourist bus before ending the day at a tapas restaurant and then going to see the musical Blood Brothers. We head back to our rooms and find that our bags still weren’t delivered so the front desk was called and around midnight, we had our bags.
Just because we were in London, didn’t mean I didn’t stop bumbling. I was in the shower Saturday morning trying to fix the shower curtain and I used too much force to the point the entire curtain came down. Thankfully, we were able to switch rooms without losing the security deposit. But at breakfast that morning, I felt like a complete fuck up of a person after the events of this week. The over protectiveness of my parents had come home to roost in every action toward my sister. We headed off the the British Museum and then headed off to a pub for lunch before riding around the sightseeing bus the rest of the day. Since there was a free Thames River cruise with the price of the bus ticket, we took it late in the evening with a beautiful sunset after a brief rain shower. We ended up outside the Houses of Parliament when another quandary came up. We were supposed to go to the Tate Modern and have dinner but since most of the Underground was suspended, we decided to just have dinner instead and head back to the hotel.
Sunday morning gave me a new appreciation for The Ramones “I Wanna Be Sedated”. We started with a cab ride from our hotel to St.Pancras, with a obligatory stop at Platform 9 3/4 at the Kings Cross underground stop nearby as my sister’s a big Harry Potter fan. We made absolutely sure there would be no repeat of Friday arriving early enough, we caught the Eurostar back to Paris. After taking the RER back to Aeroport Charles de Gaulle, we were one of the last groups to board the flight. After an eight hour flight, we arrived back home at JFK about 10:30PM as our dad was waiting for us in the parking lot. About an hour later, we make it home and I plopped in my bed.
The next morning I woke up in my own bed and was crushed to be back home. I then put my pictures up and wrote about my experiences as a status update. I’m way too much of a coward to openly tell my parents about the bad portions of the trip. But my mom’s sister in Ecuador saw the post and told my mother about it. The following Saturday, I was confronted about the drinking binge and used the excuse that I couldn’t function in social settings without drinking. It’s true: When sober, I’m meek, reserved and quiet and uncomfortable with social interactions. A few drinks in me, I can chat up a storm with confidence. I also got yelled at by my dad for not telling him about this as I was too exhausted that night to talk and not wanting to receive a double dose of sanctimony about drinking. That whole week I was depressed that the trip, five months in the making had come to an end. And all I kept seeing from that trip were all the bad moments that served as a reminder that I’m incapable of doing anything independently. If it wasn’t for my family looking out for me, I wouldn’t have survived this trip. This trip was panacea in a time where there was nothing going on in my life. My last volunteering stint had ended weeks earlier, the progress from the vocational evaluation that summer in trying to figure out what to do with my life was glacially slow. There was a void left unfilled.
This trip gave me the perspective I needed. My life has gone absolutely nowhere to this point. If this trip was a sign of things to come, I’m completely fucked the rest of my adult life. Because of these reactions, I needed to get myself together and sought out a therapist’s help. I only live life moment to moment, the rest of the time it’s through everyone else. I didn’t want this week to end and every day since, I wish I could have it back as it went by way too quickly. A year has gone by since this trip and my perspective on it has changed. There were moments on this trip I wish I could do over, one thing is certain: for better and worse, this trip was the greatest week I’ve had in my life so far!
