27 Luni

The Intro

This January I was fortunate enough to join a few Peace Corps Volunteer friends on a trip to Paris, France.  Even though we decided on the excursion late in the fall of 2011, I honestly hadn’t given the vacation much thought until the night before departure.  As such, I hadn’t planned anything in particular to do or see, aside from the obvious inescapable landmarks.  I hadn’t read through a Lonely Planet, or even gone so far as to google “Paris.”  I had, however, emailed a sister who is no stranger to the city, but didn’t even read her response until after takeoff.  The only French I knew was “Merci” and that’s only because of the word’s regular use in Romania.  And I wasn’t even sure where I would be staying for the week.  So, in short, I was about as ill prepared as a person could be for such a vacation.  After all, Paris is just another European city right?  It’s full of the same history, churches, and metropolitan snobbery as any other major city, isn’t it?  Oh, how wrong I was.  This adventure of ours turned out to be one of the most amazing in all of my life, thanks to the best travelling companions ever and an incredible setting for us to explore.

The Harsh Truth

Paris is one of those places that we are all familiar with from our exposure through movies, television, news, etc.  It’s a city that is so tightly engrained into the world’s psyche that simple images of berets and baguettes conjure up romantic and whimsical thoughts of bistros and French accents.  For those of you who have never been to Paris, take a moment now to imagine that you are there.  Pull up a small wicker chair to a little round table on the sidewalk patio of a bistro that is tucked around the corner on cobblestone side street.  Order your coffee or glass of red wine, and take it all in.  Feel the warm Parisian air caress your skin as it swirls around you.  Smell the fresh French bread baking.  Watch the smartly dressed, brilliantly beautiful Parisian men and women motor by on their Vespas.  Eavesdrop on the delightfully alluring French conversation that is taking place over your left shoulder as the young couple next to you incomprehensibly plans their afternoon jaunt to a secluded park.   Okay, 3, 2, 1, back to the blog.  Now take everything you just imagined and file it under pure fantasy in your mind, because it is total rubbish.  There isn’t a human being on this planet that can accurately imagine the wonderment that is Paris.  Nothing that you have ever read or ever will read will do this city justice.  No romantic film, or steamy love novel can even come close to what it really means to stand on one of the many Parisian bridges and to stare blankly at the Eiffel Tour.   Of course this is coming from a man who almost cried over his first bite of Jambon-Beurre….at the Beauvais airport no less.  Oh, yes my friends, that is real butter.

The Disclaimer

Now having said that, I’ve made my job of conveying how truly great my experience was infinitely more difficult, impossible in fact.  So you may be better off closing your web browser right now, calling your travel agent and embarking on your own Paris trip.  However, for those of you who have already planned your vacation for 2012, I will wholeheartedly attempt this venture with the limited resources at my disposal: the English language and two-dimensional photographs.

The Preparation

As you may recall from my New Years Eve blog post, there is a fantastic hostel in Bucharest, The Green Frog; this is where our story begins.  Since my flight left the next day, rather than go home after the hockey game in Miercurea Ciuc, I bypassed Valea Călugărească and went straight on to Bucharest.  Moments after walking through the front door, checking-in and throwing my pack on the bed, I was greeted with a complimentary tall boy of Ciucaș beer.  As a brief side note, I feel that it’s interesting to point out that “normal” small, American sized beer cans don’t exist here; only their big brothers.  Step it up America!  Anyway, it was over this refreshing 24 oz., that I first started to wrap my head around the trip.  I booked my hostel for the first night, as I would be arriving a day ahead of my compatriots, and I downloaded the necessary iPhone apps to ease my navigation around the city: Paris Metro and Paris2Go.  The former being completely pointless, as the latter has the metro map built into it.  Also, being a big fan of the Lonely Planet series, I downloaded their electronic book to my iPad and considered myself to be all set.  The last bit of business was to research where we’d be staying for the week.  My friend Matt has acquaintances that live “just outside of Paris” that offered to put us up.  Aside from the awesomeness of the city, a big draw to visit Paris was that we’d be able to stay for free with some local college students that knew their way around.  As it turns out, “just outside of Paris” means the city of Amiens, which is actually 150 kilometers one way from Paris.  This is not exactly the kind of distance that lends itself to daily site-seeing commutes.  Thus, it quickly became clear that our “cheap” trip would suddenly incur the costs for lodging.  Not to be deterred, I gulped down the last swig of Ciucaș and tabled this minor inconvenience for another night.

The Departure

The next morning, one of the hostel owners gave me a free ride to the Băneasa airport, which is just beyond the Bucharest city limits.  This is the area’s answer to low-cost airlines and features such gems as Wizz Air and Blue Air.  My Icarus of choice for this adventure would be Wizz Air because of their great rates to Paris; my roundtrip ticket was only $300 including one checked bag.  There is no doubt that the age-old adage “You get what you pay for” certainly applies here.  The Băneasa airport is no sight to behold inside or out and is about as efficient as it is aesthetically pleasing.  The loud speakers were so garbled that I wouldn’t have been able to understand them had the announcements been in English.  When it was finally time for my delayed flight to board, a small sheet of 8 ½ by 11-inch paper was taped to the gate’s window that said “Beauvais.”  With no zones and no seat numbers, all passengers were inadvertently encouraged to press up against the gate desk to be the first on the bus.  Yes, that’s right BUS.  Rather than the modern convenience of walking through a jet-way to your plane, at Băneasa you’re piled onto a standing room only bus and wildly carted off to the runway.  As the two buses came to a stop alongside the plane, all six doors opened, at which point passengers began to bum rush the plane as if their lives depended on it.  Though the seats were astonishingly comfortable, the flight smooth and the flight attendants attentive, when I think of “Wizz Air” I now think more along the lines of golden shower than I do whizzing effortlessly through the air.  The fact that my Oakley sunglasses vanished from their hard shell case, apparently while airborne, admittedly sours the experience further.  Though like a mouse to cheese in an electric shock experiment, I will likely use the low-cost Hungarian airline again some day, if only for the low rates.

The Arrival

Unfortunately, arriving at Beauvais airport did little to lift my spirits, aside for the aforementioned Jambon-Beurre.  The airport is some fifty kilometers outside of Paris, so it’s not as easy as hailing a cab to get to your hotel.  The airport does however offer a bus service that promises to accommodate all passengers with transportation to Paris for only twenty Euro roundtrip.  So with my Jambon-Beurre in hand I decided to leisurely make my way to the bus’s ticket booth, this time doing my best to avoid the hordes jockeying for a ticket.  Once the ticket line died down I made my approach only to be cut in front of by a local.  Being that I wasn’t up to speed on my French expletives and that I didn’t want to start an international incident on day one of my visit, I shrugged my shoulders and let the offense slide.  Little did I know that I would be the very first person after the last person to get a seat on the bus and that I would have to wait another hour for the next one.  To make matters more nettlesome, the ominous Parisian sky was spitting cold rain and blustering wind down on me; not the pleasant French welcome I was shooting for.  As I waited in line, shivering, the next bus pulled up, but the driver wouldn’t let anyone on board until it was ready for departure, thirty minutes later.  The disgruntled bus driver exchanged a clearly unpleasant barrage of French dialog with many locals standing in line.  Fortunately for me, this was without a doubt the low point of my trip; it was all rainbows and gum drops from here forward.

It was dusk when we loaded the bus and latched our seatbelts, which is apparently mandatory in France, and began the hour-long journey to Paris in total silence.  The giant coach bus was largely empty so I managed to score the front row seat, right by the front door, which gave me an unencumbered view of the lush, green countryside as we drove south on the perfectly paved highway.  I mention this, because I hadn’t been on such a nicely paved road in over eight months and was bemused at the smooth ride.  Being lolled to sleep like a toddler in the car after a long day at the playground, I fought to stay awake not wanting to miss anything; that is when the city lights of Paris first hit the horizon.  By now the sun had set and Paris had taken over the job of lighting the sky.  A few minutes later we arrived at Port Maillot where there is a metro stop, and disembarked, slightly disoriented from the days travelling.  Not having a clue how to get to the actual entrance for the metro and not seeing any obvious signs, I just followed the flow of travelers.  To my surprise, they led me right into a huge shopping mall, another spectacle that I had rarely caught a glimpse of in the prior eight months.  As I wearily roamed past the designer stores I caught the trail of signs leading to the metro, bought an unlimited five-day metro card, consulted my Paris Metro iPhone app, and figured out my route to Anvers, the closest stop to my hostel.

Being that rush hour had now descended upon Paris, the metro was in full swing with business people making their way home and to happy hours, so understandably, the masses didn’t react kindly to my giant hiking backpack.  Nonetheless, I managed to navigate the mass transit system, narrated by the loveliest of mass transit automated announcers.  When I ascended from the Anvers station, I was pleasantly surrounded by more hustle-n-bustle, bright lights and a welcoming positive vibe of city energy; we had definitely picked a great hostel location.  In the minutes that followed, I walked by a proverbial treasure trove of ethnic restaurants, from Thai to Indian to, of course, French.  By the time I had made my way to the hostel I was famished and as giddy about my dinner options as a school kid on the last day of the spring semester.  After getting checked in and finding my room I headed out solo for a culinary delicacy.  Thai would be my first choice, as the polar opposite to Romanian food and just the jolt my system needed to get my palette readjusted to the culinary wonders of the modern world.  After a thoroughly satisfying dinner, I headed back to the hostel to relax in the lobby.  My goal: to hash out a plan for a bit of sightseeing.  What would I do tomorrow?

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