The Great European Adventure: Christmas of Ought Nine and New Year's 2010 (Part 3)

On the 30th, Rachel and I took complicated, multi-change train ride to Paris. We couldn't get a direct train, so we had to go from Zurich to Basel, Switzerland and from Basel to Mulhouse, France. We went from Mulhouse to Belfort and then changed trains for the last time in Belfort to get to Paris. We ended up either on trains or in train stations all day. I do like riding trains a lot, but the lugging of luggage and the cold were a little unpleasant. And we rolled through northern France after sunset, which caused us to miss out on what the countryside looked like. I was curious, since I had considered studying abroad this year in Strasbourg instead of Bordeaux. That would have been a different experience entirely, I'm sure.

Arrival in Paris was a trial. We took the metro from Gare de l'Est to the southwest part of town, where we were staying at the Aloha Hostel for one night. The hostel was cramped ad ecclectic...all decorated in bright colors and with lots of cheery New Years and Christmas decorations. Rachel wasn't feeling well, since we'd both been sick and cold and fatigued from traveling and hardly sleeping in Switzerland, so she chilled out while I tried to check in. An easy process, right?

The guy at the counter told me to wait five minutes while he "did something" and then proceeded to help a long line of other people, while I waited. Ten minutes later when I inquired he told me to wait five more minutes. Ten minutes after that, he repeated it in Spanish. I don't speak Spanish, but I understand enough to get "I need five minutes", so I just nodded.

Unfortunately for me, the other guy who had just come in was also a Spanish-speaker, and heard the first man speak to me in Spanish, so when the first guy told the second guy that he should check me in, the second guy told me HE needed ten minutes. I was fine up to this point, but exhausted and thirsty.

Rachel and I bought a beer from the vending machine and sat, sharing it, dejectedly, among all of our suit cases and a crowd of internet-seeking foreigners.

Some time later, the second guy starts speaking at me in rapid Spanish, but I assumed he wasn't talking to me, since I, you know, don't speak Spanish. There was confusion, and then we finally got checked in and climbed a few flights of twisty, deathtrap stairs (Rachel pointed out that if anyone put any weight on the handrail at all, it would probably come crashing down) to our room. All of our roommates were unconscious already, so we quietly put our stuff down and went out in search of some cider.

The search for cider was entirely useless, but we did find a brasserie to sit and talk at for a while. We met a Belgian named Pierre who insisted that Brussels was the best city in Europe (why he was living in Paris, then, is beyond me) and kept telling me how boring Bordeaux was.

We went back to the hostel, where I slept on a railless top bunk with a mattress that sloped toward the side without the wall.

I woke up at godawful early and wandered out into the cold, looking for the RER. By some miracle I got to Charles de Gaulle even though I'd bought the wrong ticket...so when I arrived I couldn't exit into the airport and had a moment of panic while I looked for a place to buy an appropriate ticket. I was walking in anxious circles when, with no input from anyone standing near it, the turnstyle suddenly lit up with the word "Passez" and I launched myself at it in disbelief.

Hunter's flight was a bit late, which is good, 'cause so was I. He and I bought the right tickets to go back to the hostel and navigated the RER and the metro, stopping at Gare du Nord to switch to line number 4 and to get something to drink. Hunter wanted a hot chocolate, but the option on the menu was "boisson saveur cacao"...so I ordered the "cocoa flavored drink", only to have the barista look at me like I was an idiot, and repeat the order back as a hot chocolate. Awesome.

We got back to the hostel to collect Rachel, and we undertook the laborious task of crossing the city via metro with all of our luggage, and finally checked into the next hostel. When we booked our trip to Paris, all of the hostels were almost full to bursting, and none of the ones we tried could accomodate three people for three nights, so we kept having to move.


The first item on our agenda was to get food, so we stopped at a brasserie where Hunter ordered something that may or may not have been horse, and Rachel and I had some kind of beef with a dish of very interestingly-cut carrots. I can't remember much more about it than that, now.

On the way back to the hostel for our pre-party nap, I ran into Dan, who is my favorite bartender from the pub downstairs. Crazy weird coincidence, I guess -- given the small number of people I know in France and our geographical distance from Bordeaux, I really wasn't expecting to see anyone I knew. We talked for a minute and then went our separate ways.

I remember the nap being particularly delicious, after my early, early departure to CDG the night before. I'm sure Hunter in his jetlag felt the same way.

We woke up in time to head to the 8 p.m. light show at the Eiffel Tower. I called my brother for his birthday while Rachel and Hunter were eating something that vaguely resembled a hot dog. There was a brief moment of staggering homesickness, when I really just wanted to be bowling with my family for Jonathan's birthday, but then the football game was about to start and people started screaming under the tower and we hung up.

The light show started eerily and over-dramatic, and turned into a veritable rave, with the music bouncing between techno and accordions intermittently, and the tower making blinding combinations of colors fast enough that it probably should have come with a seizure warning. I found myself wondering who was sitting around designing the light show and saying "You know what the Eiffel Tower should do? Flash the colors of the French flag and then run trippy rainbow patterns for the next three and a half minutes." Who knows what Computer Science major ended up programming that business. Hunter got it all on video, and Rachel was going to great lengths to get good photos with her DSLR, but all I got were these few sort of blurry snapshots from my iPhone.

The clouds were low, partially obscuring the top of the tower and preventing us from seeing the blue moon that was purportedly visible. After the light show we wandered through Paris to the Arc de Triomphe, since in all of our memories, when they flashed the tv to all the major cities of the world ringing in the New Year, there was the Arc de Triomphe.

We walked past a LOT of riot police wearing body armor and driving trucks equipped with giant grills on the front, presumably for pushing crowds around. We began to wonder if we'd even survive the night, if that many police were necessary. It seemed like they might have had to recruit police from out of town to have this many.

We went into a restaurant on the Champs Élysées to spend some time before midnight, and I ordered some farfalle with grilled samon which turned out to be fettucine with smoked salmon. I ordered a mouresque (Ricard, which tastes like anise, and almond-something-or-other) so that Rachel and Hunter could taste it, but I think they were both non-fans, which was unsurprising. The table next to us was soon filled with four fabulously gay men from Portland, Oregon who were really nice and who we talked to some about their experiences living and traveling abroad, and about Portland.

We headed back outside to see what would happen. There were a LOT of people, so we thought we might be in the right place.

There was no clock, however, so no way to get a uniform count down to midnight. There were no riots, unless you count a few people standing on street lights and crosswalk signals as riotous. There was one guy who climbed a really small tree, and every time he climbed a branch higher I was waiting for him to fall on his head. He didn't, but he deserved to.

Midnight was actually really anti-climactic. Everyone cheered in a staggered sort of way as various watches and phones decreed midnight at different times. There were a few fireworks brought by people in the crowd, and I was sort of alarmed that anyone could set off fireworks in a crowd packed so tightly. No one caught on fire that I could see.

The best thing about where we were standing at midnight is that we met a Danish couple who had been standing behind us. We shared some champagne with them and talked for a while before we realized it was entirely too cold to stay out in the cold, and went in search of a bar. It was surprisingly hard to do, but we ended up in a place called Indiana, where the walls were covered in paintings and photographs of Native Americans. It was kind of trippy to see on the other side of the ocean, but Hunter said it kind of reminded him of my parents' house.

We left our new friends Signe and Daniel and tried to hail a cab...it proved a lot more difficult than you might imagine. I guess on New Year's all the public transportation is free, but it was so cold at this point that we thought we'd skip all the hassle of trying to find a metro station and navigate by just calling a cab. It took considerably longer than I expected, but we did eventually get back to the hostel.

We woke up entirely too soon, since we had to change hostels yet again. We ended up somewhere called Hotel St. Sebastien, where we were given a key to a room with people in it, and awkwardly walked in on them going about their getting-ready-in-the-morning routines and then had to explain that there were already people in our room, and wait almost an hour for them to prepare another one for us. We did get free breakfast while we were waiting, and I remember the coffee being the most worthwhile part of that.

That afternoon we tried to do a little bit of sightseeing, but our primary goal of going to the Louvre was thwarted by it being New Year's Day, so we went over toward Notre Dame. The line was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever seen -- blocks long in the freezing cold. We didn't go in because we couldn't bear the thought of waiting that long, but we walked all around the cathedral really slowly and admired the gargoyles.

Aside from admiring the city in general, I don't think we did much that afternoon or evening. We watched the first half of Waitress in our hotel room, which was shockingly luxurious after living for more than a week in hostel after hostel. For one, sheets were provided and the beds were already made. The pillows seemed huge. We were sleeping only three to a room, without any bunkbeds, and we had a bathroom within our room. With a bathtub, and a heater we could control (though it refused to get hot much in the same way as the shower failed to get hot). I kept commenting on how awesome it was, and I think Hunter thought I was insane.

That was about the time I realized that it was going to feel good to get home after a long trip. For once in my life. Usually, when I come home after traveling, most of what I feel is regret to be back to the familiar things. I guess that's a good sign.

The next morning we left for Berlin, and that post will have to come later. Amy and I have to get to the Monoprix, since tomorrow is Sunday, or Day Where Nothing Is Open Except Restaurants and Bars.