Paris: Five Years Later

This morning started at a painful time of 4:30 so I could pack and do other things I neglected to do while reading last night. Once the whole family was packed and ready to go we all walked down to the main hotel “lobby”/ porch. Here we nervously waited for our ride to the airport to arrive, hoping he would show up because we didn’t really have a backup plan. While we waited we got to see the sky turning a blissful pink with tints of orange and, eventually, blue. To our relief, the driver arrived to take us up and down the windy road to the airport. On the way I couldn’t help but read, even though I was dying to makeup some of the many hours of sleep I lost with a late bed time and early morning. By the time we got to the airpot I had

70/400 pages left. Getting through the airport went smoothly this time and we were the 2nd group at our gate. On the plane I, of course, read and read until I finished my book and had no idea what to do with my self. Eventually I submitted to sleep, along with the rest of my family, for the rest of the flight.

Like almost every city we visited on this trip, the first thing we did way purchase metro cards. The woman behind the counter was able to save us over €100 by convincing us to buy some weird zone pass instead of the normal tourist one. This put us in high spirits as we headed for the subway, which I was happy to find had considerably more seating than most subways. As we sat there it was weird for me to be surrounded by French words and sounds because after two years of classes I moved to Spanish last year. In that year I forgot a lot of French, but little bits starts to come back to me.

When we arrived at the apartment we dropped off all of our stuff before our stomaches led us it a Lebanese restaurant for lunch. Here we all got falafel, hummus, tabouleh, veggies, and some sort of Lebanese bread. I was slightly surprised to find us in France, where the food is supposed to be world class, eating Lebanese food. However, eating anything other than European food after eating it for weeks was a bit nice. We left stuffed after not realizing how filling falafel is. Deciding to make the most of our day we leisurely started to head to some famous landmarks. We were in Paris just 5 years ago, so we didn’t feel like we had to rush to see all of the landmarks we possibly could. We started our walk by going to Notre Dame, Paris’s most famous cathedral. Last time we went my ten year old self was deeply disturbed by the number of naked people on a church and the creepy gargoyles perched on the roof watching you walk by. Today I found out some things never change.

We continued walking as we tried to find the lock bridge in Paris, which people would attach locks to and then throw the key into the water signifying their bond couldn’t we broken. However, apparently it could be broken, at least the lock could be, because the bridge no longer had any locks. Instead there was glass along the sides of the bridge, preventing any lock from being attached to it. The government supposedly removed the locks because they were getting heavy enough to damage the bridge. A few people over came this obstacle by hanging locks off of the lamp posts, but the bridge looked very bare.

Next, we all walked to the Eiffel Tower, feeling like we at least had to see that again. As we approached it Hannah and I took the lead, walking to a crêpe stand we remember eating at five years ago. We were delighted to find it was still there, at the base of the tower, though the hill we ate them on before has become concrete. We walked into the park surrounding the tower and ate our crêpes on a park bench in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower while watching an occasional vendors pine for people’s money and pigeons clean the crumbs off of the ground. As we sat and people watched my dad looked at the blog he did of our trip five years ago, which had a picture of him, Hannah, and I in front of the Eiffel Tower. We decided to recreate that picture and walked to the area we remember taking it. The exact location was closed for construction, but we got as close as we could. Both the resemblance and change was uncanny.

Feeling our exhaustion kick in we began the end of our adventure by riding the metro back to our apartment, Hannah leading like I did in Singapore and Italy. We emerged from the metro station and immediately recognized where we were, impressive right. As we crossed the street to our apartment my mom walked over a subway grate. I did too, but I was’t wearing a dress. My mom got herself a little attention with a Marylin Monroe moment, but we all laughed it off, deciding it was the funniest part of the entire day.

Finally back at our apartment, my mom and I stayed put for the night. Hannah and my dad went back out for some crêpes, but I was done for the day and behind on my blog, as you probably know. Today was a trip down memory lane, no doubt, but we managed to add some new memories to the old.