Paris – the City of Love.
Paris the City of Arrogance.
Sophistication, fashion, cuisine … so many clichés and stereotypes.
From my experience it is all of those things and none of
those things. We had only three days
there but I had visited in winter 1989 just as the Berlin wall had fallen in Germany. The European winter is something special and
Paris was cold but sunny then and bedecked with tasteful Christmas
decorations. Then I did the Arc du
Triomphe, Versailles, Pompidou arts centre, Museé Rodin, and The
Orangerie. I stayed in a rickety old
left bank hotel and ate Chinese on my first night.
This time around I had the chance to see the Eiffel Tower up
close (couldn’t be buggered queuing for the lift to the top). It is huge.
Also we did a day trip to Versailles, and the Montparnasse street
markets and cemetery. We stayed in a
Marist Brothers’ hostel for just 46 euro a night, including the standard French
petit déjeuner
of crusty baguette with jam, cheese and coffee.
I didn’t quite get it
last time in France, but I realise that bread is the staple carbohydrate of the
nation. Bread is eaten with every meal;
and as a snack between meals. There are
stacks of baguettes behind the counter in gas stations where you would normally
expect chewing gum. Baskets of bread
immediately appear on your table at any bistro or restaurant. A friend told us that the government tried to
convert the masses to potato consumption hundreds of years ago by planting
fields of spuds, loosely guarded by gendarmes to give the impression that they
were valuable and worth stealing. It was
a total failure.
Now, to Parisian arrogance and rudeness. Nope. All
but one person we met in three days of dozens of interactions, were helpful,
charming and indulgent of our tourist French language skills. The only time
we struck anyone rude was at the oxymoronic ‘Information’ booth at the
St. Jacques Metro station. I think they
have retained just one rude bitch from hell information lady as a relic for
posterity. This one was a doozy. She spat her apparent incomprehension of my
stumbling French pronunciation mockingly back at
me, with an icy stare in rapid fire French, and by way of help shrugged and
jerked her thumb at the automated ticket machine.
(To be continued ...)
When he's not away overseas being an international man of mediocrity, Phil runs Wine Tours in Auckland
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