I see London, I see France

Two weeks ago I ventured across the Channel to explore a bit of Paris with two of my friends and our trip was filled with the wonder that is French McDonalds, tears, and a fixation with the Eiffel Tower. We saw so many different things and Paris has changed my stomach, my mind, and my outlook on life for the better. I’m not trying to make out like I’m a whole new person after one week in France, I’m just trying to say that it was a fucking great holiday.

Firstly, I should mention that we took the notorious Megabus from London to Paris and I can confirm that all the VICE articles and all the horror stories are true, but I can also say that they have been exaggerated for journalistic affect. Of course the coach was late to arrive in London, and we arrived about an hour late in Paris on top of that. Of course there was a middle-aged Australian man, who seemed to be travelling alone, at the back shouting “champignons!!!!” (which is French for mushrooms) at least once an hour. Of course it was hot, the engine was making weird noises, and people were making extremely loud phone calls – but all in all it honestly wasn’t so bad. However, even I found myself leaning my head against the chair infront of me after eight hours, but all that stress on my body only cost me £15 each way – a deal so good you couldn’t say no even if you had the money to fly (which student does?).

The hostel was nice enough. There were lime green walls, a broken shower head that couldn’t stand up on its own, and moody French kitchen staff; but there was also a decent mattress, an inclusive breakfast, and good Wi-Fi so what more do you need really. At our first breakfast an American girl came up to us and was asking about good bars in the city for her and her brother who she’d come with, but obviously we didn’t know of any so we just made small talk instead – I felt like I was properly embracing the hostel experience. I noted she wasn’t wearing tights but she mentioned that they came from California so she was about to get a nice shock from our distinctly colder European spring weather.

We stayed in Montmartre, an area which is allegedly more trendy but also has a huge number of hills and steps which never seemed to shock my lungs, even on the last morning. The first place on our itinerary was naturally the Musée d’Orsay where we were dragged around a bit and questioned on impressionism by American tourists before we got to see Van Gogh, and it didn’t disappoint. We saw Dr Gachet, his 1889 portrait, L'Église d'Auvers-sur-Oise (that church one from Doctor Who), and of course Starry Night Over the Rhone. We also saw some of Gauguin’s paintings which were significantly less crowded, but were sadly overlooked by many in favour of the more famous works across the room. I chose a new favourite Van Gogh and Gauguin.

After the most incredible white hot chocolate you’ll ever taste from Angelina in the 1^st Arrondissement, we walked past six hundred tourist shops selling Eiffel Tower key chains, a Sephora, and a couple of MANGOs to this narrow building in the middle of the French Oxford Street. It’s a building with loads of art studios inside across six floors where you're able to go in and have a look around. It’s a former squat which has been reserved as a space for artists which I’m glad hasn't become just another building consumed by the shopping metropolis.

We wandered through more streets just chatting to each other and mumbling “pardon” every time we walked into someone. Eventually our stomachs started to pipe up and we went for some huge falafels from the friendliest man ever in a quiet area in the backstreets. Every cent of the six euros we spent on them was worth it, it was even rated highly on tripadvisor.com or somewhere, and I have to agree with the reviews despite the four huge chunks of aubergine right in the middle of my pitta, which I'm convinced I would’ve been able to construct a sentence to ask not to have from my B in GCSE French.

Parisian metros are several thousand times better than the underground in London or the buses in Manchester because you have to open the doors yourself with a little handle that you flick up, and their lines are numbered instead of some stupid name like ‘Hammersmith and City’ which is so much harder to remember when you get on and have to make three changes. After getting off the metro that evening, we visited the Eiffel Tower (of course) and we sat on the opposite side of the Seine with a baguette and some jam for our tea as the sun set, and it was hands down one of my Paris highlights.

The next day we visited the Sacré-Cœur and had an incredible view of Paris from the site which was near to our hostel. There was someone playing ‘Hallelujah’ on the harp which is obviously my jam so I threw some money in his hat. I bought a beret (naturally) from a nearby tourist shop and we went off on our quest to find some ice cream. It took us so long that we found the Moulin Rouge, The Wall of Love, walked down all the back streets in Montmartre, and I walked in on a man wiping his bum in the Starbucks toilets. Eventually we found an overpriced ice cream shop just off the Place Du Tertre which was also a really cool spot with a crowd of artists trying to draw you in for a portrait. We went back to eat at the Sacré-Cœur and we saw a couple get engaged! We then followed Google Maps to find the Amélie Café (which has a proper name (?!) - Café des Deux Moulins) and got overcharged for two glasses of pineapple and mango juice. After that adventure, we decided to go back to the Musée d’Orsay because, with the sensible one at work, we really were a clueless pair who had no guidance.

That evening we went to see Notre Dame in the glow of its floodlights and we stopped by Shakespeare and Co. which honestly is a must-do for anyone who likes bookshops. We sat in the shop just looking around at the places where they’d stuffed as many poetry books as possible onto the shelves in the underside of the staircase and the notes that people had pinned onto a board with plasters and post-it notes. We browsed the philosophy, history, and music books and there was a book full of Ian Curtis’ handwritten notes from when he wrote all the lyrics to Joy Division’s songs and I swear to God if I didn’t have to carry it back to England/wasn’t broke I would’ve bought it right there and then. After we went to this café/restaurant and I stressed out over the mayonnaise being squeezed all over the chips rather than to the side, we witnessed a robbery (!!) where a passerby had attempted to steal the money left out for the bill on an outside table but was caught. Exciting stuff.

After helping my long lost French twin pick up her dropped metro card the next morning, we headed to the Arc De Triomphe and wandered around trying to find a way to cross the eight-car-wide road before realizing there was an underpass. We struggled through the hike up to the top and it was worth it for the view of the Champs-Élysées and all fourteen roads coming from the center. That evening we bought a couple of pizzas from Pizza Hut (they have that in France!!) and headed to my favourite spot in the whole of Paris; the bank of the Seine. We were severely disappointed that one of the pizzas had tuna on because two of us are vegetarian, but made up for it by doing a quiz where some questions were deep (what quality do you tolerate the most), some questions were hard (what’s your favourite military event, your favourite fictional hero/heroine), and some questions were just a bit of fun (your favourite food, drink, colour, flower). We trailed back to the metro station when it started to get unbearably cold and our fussiness to get onto an empty carriage and a broken carriage door meant that the metro pulled away before we could even get on. The metro only stops for about twelve seconds at a station – Paris hasn’t got time for your shit. We were left re-enacting Mr. Bean’s Holiday on the platform in absolute stitches before another metro arrived and we finally got back to the hostel.

The next day we took three extra trains which we didn’t need to get and shared many a joke on the way to Versailles, and then queued for over two hours to get inside. The place is literally huge and the wealth is incredible. The chandeliers, the fabrics, the details, and the ceilings were all so impressive, and it was interesting to see how the estate had grown and expanded over time. It had that old smell which you sometimes get in museums which I wasn’t really expecting but I was distracted by someone walking all over my toes as we filed through the rooms. We got to the gardens, but our aforementioned tardiness meant that it was closed to the public as it could take up to A WHOLE HOUR to walk across the estate – imagine that being your back garden. When we got back into Paris, we went for another McDonalds which I’m surprised hasn’t come up yet because it feels like a good 85% of our meals were two portions of large fries and Speculoos McFlurries. If you don’t know what Speculoos is, you might know what Lotus biscuits are (you know those little fancy ones you sometimes get with teas), and its basically them but in a spread and then put in a McFlurry with caramel sauce and, for me, it was the hardest thing I had to leave in Paris – closely followed by the garlic mayonnaise French McDonalds gives you with your wedges, and then my best friend.

We had the Catacombs planned for the day after and I honestly wasn’t looking forward to it because its a fucking creepy concept in the first place. It’s just a casual underground walkway underneath the whole damn city with six million skeletons placed inside, with illegal entrances where people get lost and die and, to top it all off, all the skeletons are arranged in love heart formations or in the shape of a skull and crossbones and they're all looking at you. I think you can tell I wasn’t best pleased to pay ten euros to wander round the death pit and, not only that, but I was left to walk at the back because I’m the shortest of us three and the other two were keen to see the dead bodies. I just had this very weird feeling that we shouldn’t be down there because we were invading six million people’s graves and, despite the lights along the walkways, it was eerie. If you like death and walking about the perfect setting for a horror film (of which there have been a few) then you would probably enjoy the Catacombs, but I needed a McFlurry and fries to recover even an hour after we left.

Ironically, we went to a religious site afterwards. The mosque was unbelievably pretty and even the brief rain couldn’t ruin it. If anything it made the mosaics glisten and it was nice to be able to reach out and touch them after almost a week of seeing the prettiest, most interesting things in museums and art galleries and not being able to do so. We went to the adjoining café and had hot, sweet teas forced into our hands and I drooled over the pastries being served from platters. There was a busy atmosphere, people were chatting in many languages, and the interior was covered in rich browns, terracotta oranges, and bright emeralds. I think that we did quite well to visit the more obscure sights in Paris rather than sticking to the main streets and all the typical sights which made our trip that much more enjoyable.

On that note, it turns out that there's more than just the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. There are a pyramids worth of sarcophaguses, room after room of statues, loads of miniature artefacts, mummies, Roman masks, huge tiled surfaces that have been saved, art, and we didn’t even see half of it. I could’ve easily spent three or four more hours there. On top of all that, the view from the inside was a photographers dream; the sky was blue and the glass contrasted beautifully against the marble interior and the older buildings outside. We went for lunch at McDonalds afterwards (where else) and we had every intention to go to another museum nearby, but we found out you had to pay for entry rather than sponge off your passport which had gotten us in many places for free, so we voted against it and just went back to the hostel to recharge our phones and grab a jumper. After I watched the Geordie Shore episode that I had missed (essential, even when in France), we headed over to the Eiffel Tower for our last night in Paris.

We got off at Trocadéro, turned the corner, and saw the Eiffel Tower. Its honestly something you don’t get used to seeing, well maybe if you lived in Paris you might, but I saw it everyday for a week and it still stunned me. My attention was drawn to the Trocadéro (which I think is actually called the Palais de Chaillot and it may or may not be a museum, but you’d need to ask a better person than me) where my friend translated the lines written on the side of the building. It reads “Tout homme créer sans le savoir comme il respire mais l'artiste se sent créer son acte engage tout son être sa peine bien-aimée le fortifie”, which translates to “Every man creates without knowing it, as he breathes. But the artist feels himself creating. His act engages all his being, his pain, well loved, strengthens him” or words to that effect. After reveling in the artsy feeling that washed over me as I stood there and consciously thought of the fact that I was in Paris for the seven hundredth time, I turned and took a dozen photos of the Eiffel Tower including, of course, the fake holding up from my palm.

Being underneath the Eiffel Tower is a weird feeling. You don’t realise how big it actually is until you’re right next to it, looking up at three hundred metres of 129 year old iron. We queued for a while through the light rain, and eventually clambered into the cable-car-shuttle-thing that takes you up to the second floor. I was quietly glad to be squished in the middle of the carriage hiding behind my friends with a mouthful of fur hood because I always thought I disliked heights, but this trip may have proved otherwise because by the end I was chomping at the bit to go to the top, but it was unfortunately closed because it just happened to be really windy that night. Initially I didn’t enjoy the height and vowed I’d never go out to the second platform with its poor railings, but I later found myself unable to move from that spot. Maybe if I was feeling more radical, I would’ve walked on the glass panel on the first floor, but it just wasn’t that kind of night. Eventually I got used to the height and started to appreciate the whole place and the fact I was about a hundred and twenty metres above the ground. I felt so weirdly content as I stood on my own and looked down at the spot on the bank of the Seine where we had sat twice that week, and if going a hundred and twenty metres off the ground is what it takes to be happy, then I no longer disagree with skyscrapers and I think Manchester should suck it up a bit and get some more. I haven’t felt peace like that in so long and in all honesty, I cried. Eventually, after a pretzel and a muffin (there's a café, a gift shop, a bar, and a cinema room all in the Eiffel Tower – crazy, I know), we walked down some stairs which really didn’t feel safe for how windy it was and how unsecure they looked, down to the first floor where I washed my hands with a view fifty odd metres above Paris – how often can you say you took a wee fifty seven metres up in the air? I found my friends in the cinema room with projections on three walls of videos from the Tower’s history. There were clips of Paris in the nineteenth century before its construction, and clips where workers were dangling off the half built tower with no harness where we all cringed in unison. There was one clip in particular where they showed the Eiffel Tower setting off fireworks which read “VIVE LA PAIX” and it had just been an emotional night, and it was our last night, and I was just so touched by everything happening around me and I haven’t felt that content in so long. To be in Paris with two of my best friends was just such an experience and I felt like I’d had all the emotion from the whole week crammed into one moment as I sat next to them watching these videos on the walls and I may or may not have cried again.

We had to come down eventually, but not after watching the video one more time, we dodged the eight men trying to sell us Eiffel Tower keychains on our way out and battled through the wind and rain back towards the metro station. The weather then improved so we turned back to see the Tower all lit up - it had been lit in the colours of the Belgian flag for the rest of our trip after the horrendous events there, so this was our first time seeing it in its normal colours and it was such a sight. We grabbed some crêpes from a nearby stall, and sat and watched it glimmer for those five minutes on the hour. Some people asked us to take their picture and it stopped glittering mid-picture which made me laugh because they genuinely looked really disappointed. Unfortunately, our night out had to end at some point and I was really sad about it because it was also the end of our trip as we were due to travel back the next day.

I refused to start walking to the platform after we passed the barriers in the metro station because I was leaving one of my friends in Paris (she’s living there she’s not like just wandering around for another week) and it totally broke my heart. We travelled home early the next morning after hiking up over a hundred steps in Montmartre to the local Carrefour at 8am, and I ploughed through sore ears whilst we were in the Channel Tunnel. The night after that, I went out in Chelmsford for another friend’s birthday and got hit over the head with a bottle, so it was really nice to be welcomed back to England.

Travelling and seeing new places with your friends is something else entirely and, even though I've only done it the once so far, I can’t wait to see more of this planet we are so lucky to live on with them. I had the best time in Paris and I relished every second I spent in their company which made it so much harder to leave that incredible city behind. I desperately want to go again because I know that there’s a million things I haven’t done, and I can imagine that Parisian summers are an absolute dream.

You can check out more of my photos here: http://grlafraid.tumblr.com/tagged/paris