My five-month European journey ends here in Paris. I expected to have just a day or two here, but because of the train fiasco in Lyon I suddenly found myself with five nights and four days in Paris. Of all the cities in the world in which to suddenly find yourself with several extra days, Paris is one of the best.I mostly spent my time wandering the city by foot rather than taking the metro (which costs 1.50 euro per trip) to save money and to see more of the city. In fact, I walked so much in Paris (ten to fifteen miles per day) that by day three my feet hurt and I noticed while climbing Montemarte that I was starting to get shin splints.
I took two free tours by the tour organization New Europe. If you have not heard of it, Google it; I highly recommend it. The tour guides make money by tips only, which forces them to be fun, interesting and energetic tour guides. I did the New Berlin tour two years ago, and since then they have expanded to several other cities, including Paris.
The first tour was a 3.5-hour walking tour of the city, covering the 2,500 years of history in Paris, all the way from the Celtic “Parisii” tribe that settled on the island in the Seine River, through dozens of wars and revolutions until today. My guide, a Bostonian studying theatre and mime in Paris, pointed out some amazing things about where we were standing: this is where Knights of the Templar were burned alive, for example, and this is where Marie Antoinette was beheaded, this is where the Nazis flew their flag, on and on.
The second tour, which starts at 6 p.m. (18:00 for any European readers) at the Moulin Rouge, located in the heart of Paris’ red light district, is a two-hour walk through Montemarte, the former Bohemian quarter located on a hill where famous artists lived. We learned about the Prussian occupation, how they sieged the city from the hill and destroyed all of its windmills (except one; they killed its stubborn defender, cut his body in four pieces and spun them around on the four tips of his windmill, the only one still standing today).
Montemarte is where Van Gogh, Picasso and scores of other famous artists lived, painted, drank Absinthe and formed new artistic movements. We passed Van Gogh’s former house, which presumably still contains the blue bedroom that he painted, along with Picasso’s favorite restaurant, house and studio. On a few occasions, the guide pointed out streets that Van Gogh famously painted (the painting of the street lined with cafés at night, for example), which prompted the guide to remark with a smile, “We are now about to walk through a Van Gogh painting.”
The tour concluded at the Sacré Ceur, a white church built ontop of Montemarte’s hill in order to celebrate the reunion of Paris with the rest of the country at the end of the 19th century. Inside the church, an interesting combination Judaic, Muslim and Christian architecture, is a plaque that says something decidedly French: “God commanded the people of Paris to build a church. The congress took a vote and the measure won by 247 to 116.” (Or whatever the numbers were.) In France, even God’s orders must be debated and ratified by the government.
I devoted an entire day to the Louvre, which is utterly massive both in its physical size and the scope of its treasures. Over the course of six highly-caffeinated hours, I sampled a bit of every exhibit. My favorite parts were the ancient Egyptian, Greek and Mesopotamian artifacts, which were anywhere from two to seven thousand years old. I also saw hundreds of French, Italian and Flemish paintings, so many that by the end of my Louvre marathon, I was so sick of paintings I was actually repulsed by the sight of them. As I finally left the museum, I had to shield my eyes from the paintings I passed.
Fortunately I went to the Musée d’Orsay, the Impressionist museum, a couple days before getting “painting-ed out” in the Louvre. The impressionist works of Van Gogh, Monet and others were a nice change to the onslaught of religious and royal paintings from the Medieval to Baroque periods that I see most everywhere else. I especially love how the Impressionists depict reflections on water.On Monday, my fourth day in Paris, I had another day on my Eurail pass to burn (again because of the Lyon train incident, since I was planning on using it to go from Grenoble to Paris). I asked my couchsurf host, Freddy, a guy who lives in the city center and who has hosted hundreds of travelers, where I should go, and he recommended Lille or Strasbourg. I chose Lille because it’s only an hour away, located on the Belgian border.
Like Siena to Florence, Lille was a good antidote to its larger, more tourist-y neighbor, Paris. The prices in Lille are also down on earth, a good change from Paris, where prices are in the stratosphere. After chatting about football with an NFL-crazed worker at the tourist office, I wandered around the charming, quiet little city’s medieval center.
After returning to Paris on a train that zoomed through the countryside at 200 mph, I walked to the Père Lachaise cemetery on the east side of town, where Frédéric Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison and other famous people are buried. While studying the cemetery’s map, I met two American girls who are just beginning their semester abroad in Paris and talked with them for a while. I could hardly contain my jealousy of their upcoming adventures (except for the prices they will have to pay in Paris, which I noticed were often three to four times the prices in Granada). Oscar Wilde’s grave is a huge, narrow angel that people kiss with lipstick; it is covered with hundreds of kiss marks, and a couple of people even spread the love and kissed the relief of a face on the neighboring grave. At Jim Morrison’s grave, a veritable tourist attraction in Paris, people in the past have smoked, done drugs, even had sex on his grave, but now a metal fence surrounds it. A British girl looking at Jim’s grave poignantly remarked that the cigarette lying on his grave is “the only thing rock-and-roll about his grave right now.”
For food in Paris, I ate exclusively from grocery stores (usually a baguette, a little block of cheese and, if I felt like splurging, an apple), which still cost a lot, and occasionally street food. I ate some croissants so flaky and delicious they were almost life-changing. Sampling different types of crêpes was fun, too. Part of the fun was just watching the person make it: they use a roller to evenly spread the batter, then after it’s done cooking they fold the crêpe in half, paint the semicircle with nutella/egg/whatever, sprinkle on other ingredients, and fold it in half twice more to make a pie-shaped mass of goodness that you can easily eat while walking.
On my last night in Europe, I accompanied my couchsurf host to a weekly couchsurfing party held at a pub in the Latin Quarter, where they have a pub quiz every Monday. I talked about the American primaries with a Parisian, about traveling in eastern Asia with a Japanese, and about traveling in Australia with a soldier in the Australian army. When I used the last of my euros, Guillermo, a Spaniard living in Paris with whom I reminisced about Spain, bought me another beer. “Ah, my last beer in Europe” I exclaimed. “In my culture,” he explained, “we never say, ‘This is my last beer,’ but rather my penultimate. It’s always the penultimate.”
May this not be my last adventure around this great world, but instead merely one in a series of penultimate adventures.
Pictures from Paris
Pictures from Lille
