Tuesday, August 23, 2005

travel log part I: Paris

All right. As an introduction, for those of you who don't know, I spent the last two weeks traveling with eight adolescent types (some students of mine, some former students of the school I teach at) on a pilgrimage through France and Germany, winding up in a small village near Cologne for World Youth Day. We travelled with another, much larger youth group from the East Coast, some forty-odd kids and chaperones, which turned out to be somewhat unfortunate, but more on this later. I packed everything I needed for two weeks in a carry on school sized backpack. As it turns out, I should have left a little space for souveneirs. Hohum.

The teenagers: as it turns out, with teenagers, emotional baggage has NO WEIGHT LIMIT. Half the teenaged group just wasn't on good speaking terms with the other half of the group. Every time I tried to ask "Why can't we all just get along?" or "How come we can't have a nice meal as a family together any more?" they just called me a damn hippie.

The France: The French really aren't into creature comforts. Nothing is air conditioned, bathrooms are few and far between (and you have to pay for them), the toilets lack toilet seats, and water fountains are non existent. Also, everything is hella expensive. They make some fine coffee, though. And I loved the fact that every apartment window had red geraniums growing outside...

We arrived at our youth hostel, after our eighteen hour plane ride, to find that our rooms weren't ready yet. Also, there were a number of strange people hanging around in the hostel lobby; strange as in rocking back and forth and muttering to themselves. I didn't think anything of this at the time.

Grubby as we were from the plane ride, we set off immediately to see Notre Dame. Trying to fit fifty people onto a crowded Paris metro was not easy, but we soon learned that shoving perfect strangers and not having any personal space whatever was how things were done here. Notre Dame was neat looking, although a bit too crowded to stop and ruminate on any particular feature. Five minutes into the tour, half of my group disappears. I find them later outside; as it turns out, they are bored by cathedrals. This does not bode well for the rest of the trip; as it turns out, they also find museums, scenic views, and in fact all manner of sight seeing boring.

Time for lunch! Our tour guide provided us with bread and cheese, which we ate by the Seine. Oh, hey, guess what else some of the teens aren't fond of...bread and cheese. We saw more of Paris, then headed home for the hostel. After a shower (in a communal unisex bathroom), and a nap, I went with five or six people to see the Eiffel tower. Very pretty.

The strange muttering folks were at the hostel's breakfast, too. Apparently, the other wing of the youth hostel was an assisted care facility for the mentally disturbed. Mostly they seemed harmless. They just wanted to shake your hand, hug you, babble at you in French, and follow you into the bathroom. How sweet!

We spent three days in Paris, basically walking from scenic thing to scenic thing at an insane speed. The group we were travelling with wanted to see EVERYTHING, and so we did. Five minutes of the Louvre here, eight minutes of the Arc d' Triumph there.

There are military dudes walking around with machine guns in most public areas. They will not cooperate when you want a picture of them pointing a machine gun at you.

The Eiffel tower is surrounded by swarms of young men selling light up miniature Eiffel towers. This is apparently illegal, as occasionally the police will sweep through, and the young men will scatter. One of the boys in my group bought a light up tower for five Euro (bargained down from fifteen Euro), and spent the rest of the time trying to sell it back to various tower vendors for six Euro. This, we discovered, was the best way to get the light up tower vendors to leave you alone. I guess they thought we were part of some light up tower selling sting operation, so they started avoiding our group like the plague.

The river Seine had some really gorgeous barges moored to the side. Apparently, some people live on these barges seasonally, spending their time cultivating container gardens on deck, and slowly touring the waterways of France. Damn that is the life.

At first, I was afraid that my teenaged charges were going to get lost. Eventually, I ended up hoping they would get lost. As it turns out, some of them expected the trip to include more in the way of shopping, eating at fancy restaurants, and staying in luxury hotels than it actually did. This is odd, since the trip was billed as a pilgrimage with simple food and lodging. Anyway, the complaints about how France (quelle surpise) was different from America, and different was bad, got a bit grating.

stay tuned for part II: Lourdes.

1 Comments:

Blogger ridley said...

Have you ever read a book called "Eloise in Paris"? 'Cause if you haven't, you totally should.

4:49 AM  

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