The City of Lights

So Paris was awesome. The rest of my trip was filled with long walks to and from major attractions that took us throughout the city. We saw all the big ones. The famous Cathedral of Notre Dame, the other huge church, the Sacre Coeur, the Pantheon where famous Frenchmen are buried, the Louvre and its surrounding gardens, the Garden of Luxembourg, the Sorbonne and a ton more. I went on a great free walking tour that gave me plenty of information about these places as well as the history and culture of the city. I didn’t actually go into many of these places though because that required time and money, two things I was very short on. Besides, it would have been a crime to rush through it all. I will do these things on a different visit in a different life.

The Sacre Coeur.

What I was more interested in was experiencing the streets and watching the people. I have always found that the best way to learn about a city is to get lost in it, (unless of course you are wasted at three in the morning trying to get home by yourself.) This is easily done in Paris because no street is straight for very long and none run in direct north-south or east-west directions. There were two distinct areas of concentration that we found wherever we went. All over the place are markets and cafes. These markets were a great way to get a cheap meal. Tiny shops are lined up and down streets selling a particular, always fresh commodity that Parisians rely on every day. Bakeries supply people with an assortment of different breads baked fresh daily, the butchers have meat hanging everywhere, the seafood specialists’ line huge ice bins with crabs, oysters, fish and shrimp, and cheese shops cut your cheese order directly from the wheel although picking the correct cheese is a daunting task because the variety seems endless. Other stores specialize in fruits and vegetables, flowers, and wine and all these stores are always buzzing with customers because Parisians only want the freshest food.
Wherever I went I was sure to be within a stones throw of a café. The importance of cafes in Paris is hard to understand unless you have been there. Cafes are where people go to socialize, eat, drink, write, read and enjoy life. When you go to a café, you stay for hours, not minutes. Loitering in cafes is considered a virtue instead of a crime. Whether it is a tiny espresso, a hearty meal, or large quantities of alcohol a person is looking for, they can find it in a café at any time of the day.

Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb with their €8 beers.

Our nights were fun too. The nightlife is different than in most places and the idea of clubs and pubs are foreign to the French but they are catching on. Drinking out is very expensive though so we mainly stuck to getting a bunch of beer and wine and wandering the streets or hanging out at an attraction. Probably the coolest sight we saw was sitting at the Sacre Coeur which sits at the top of a hill that overlooks the whole city. At night the Eifel Tower is lit up and every hour on the hour, thousands of lights sparkle and our view of it was perfect. I would like to take this moment to just say how incredibly stupid I was to go to Paris with two dudes instead of some smoking hot chick. Incredibly dumb! Even the most pathetic of players could get a girl to take her clothes off in Paris because the place is that romantic. I will never make this same mistake again.

The Arc de Triomph.

My favourite day of the trip was the final one. My two friends had an earlier flight and I was left to do whatever I wanted all day. After reading a book and enjoying an espresso at a café, I went to the park in front of the Eifel Tower. There I watched finely dressed couples stroll linked together, children shriek in French as they kicked a soccer ball around and people of all ages gasp at seeing the tower for the first time. It was a cold brisk day without a cloud in the sky and the Eifel Tower was so brightly displayed, I could see every detail of the massive beautiful structure. The moment was so surreal. I sat on a bench and wrote in my journal for hours taking everything in and documenting my past few days. As I sat there, I couldn’t help but chuckle thinking how a fellow Oak Parker could have been writing in the exact same spot as I was years before. I’m talking about my main man Earnest Hemingway of course and although his writing is just a little more monumental than my own, I think we now share the unique kind of joy that can only come from scribbling in a notebook in Paris.