Ah, la belle Paris!

Everybody says that beautiful Paris is the City of Lights, Art and Love. However, nobody thought to mention that it’s also the city of copious metro stops that immediately disappear when the sun goes down and your feet hurt. Despite sleep deprivation, blisters, dehydration and a lack of arch support, Paris was still a dream. I’ve suffered through two years of French classes during college, hoping that someday I’d be able to use the beautiful language. That’s still a goal because I speak French with the clearness and precision of a 90s-model McDonald’s drive-thru speaker. My communication subsisted of phrases and present-tense verbiage supplemented by heavy gesticulation. However, we got around.

We headed out last weekend on a 7:05 a.m. flight from Newcastle to London, on a comfortless flight from EasyJet. That’s not to say that it was uncomfortable. The airline just went to a great effort to spare EVERY expense to make the flight cheap. This includes the trolley cart selection and even their orange branding and uniforms, as I assume the material was picked from the overstock offerings from a fabric factory.  Next we rode Eurostar’s Chunnel into the Paris city limits. The train was nice, but different than I expected. I guess I’m still in the mindset that passenger trains are for pleasure, not transportation, so I was waiting for some sort of notification that we were passing under the English Channel. There was nothing to set that particular long, ear-popping tunnel apart from every other long, ear-popping tunnel. In about two hours we stepped onto the Parisian concrete of Gare du Nord. We deposited our stuff in the room the six of us shared at St. Christopher’s Hostel, which is a great option for English-speaking students because guess what, everybody there speaks English. Next we headed south to explore the city, and in typical touristy fashion, we made a beeline to step on a train heading the wrong direction.  We righted ourselves and then found our first stop, the Eiffel Tower. We saw it from a distance first, and it was great in an industrial kind of way. I also struggled to contain my hypocritical eye rolls when people taking cliché pictures jumped in front of my line of sight, interrupting my own highly original (meaning greater or equal levels of cliché) photo ops. Tourists these days.

Afterward we headed to the Louvre. We waited through a long line before we found out we had a free pass – student perks. We excitedly headed off, unsure of the direction but trusting we’d see great things no matter the route. It worked. We took a spin through their Medieval England room, trying to earn some brownie points with our professor. However, the exhibit was much less impressive than the ruins we’d seen previously; visiting historical buildings where they were actually built just seems more wholesome than looking at transplanted fragments in artistic recreations. Go figure, huh. Next we followed the Greece and Roman route, because we found ourselves in a carved marble paradise. We passed The Winged Victory of Samothrace, Venus De Milo and Diana of Versailles before taking a crooked path through the paintings, leading to the Mona Lisa. I selfied with Mona and retreated.

She’s a little too popular for me, and I was eager to escape the semicircle of outstretched cameras and jabbing elbows. Eventually we came to grips with the fact that we simply could not finish the Louvre in our limited time there, so we wandered our way out, stopping to take pictures with a Razorback statue. I realize the original was created much before Woo Pig Sooie was even a thought, but it doesn’t matter. It served as a little reminder of home all the same.

We roamed around the city for a bit and I was amazed at the sheer density of landmarks. It seemed like there was some postcard-worthy statue, monument, building or plaque around every corner. Around 10 that night, we found a park bench to watch the Eiffel Tower light up. Every hour on the hour throughout the night, the tower lights blink and flash for about five minutes, making this pointed, industrial monument positively twinkle. It’s gorgeous. We wanted to see it up close, so we headed toward it on foot, believing that the glowing beacon would be impossible to miss. Soon afterward we lost sight of the tower among the buildings for a while, but we got there through meandering determination. We timed it perfectly, arriving just as another light show took place. After a lengthy hike to a known metro stop, we found our way back to our room. I wasn’t the only one excited to find the hostel, and the six of us crawled into bed that night footsore and exhausted.

The next day we felt much better thanks to getting more than three hours of sleep. We ate the hostel’s breakfast and I was overjoyed to see Nutella and baguettes. We headed to Notre Dame Cathedral before grabbing lunch. Work on Notre Dame Cathedral started in 1163, but wasn’t completed until 1345, nearly 200 years later. It’s one of the first cathedrals built in the French Gothic style and it was also one of the first to use flying buttresses, which were added as a necessary afterthought when the walls

developed stress fractures during the building process. Everything about the building was stately and ornate, and I loved walking around it. This was the first Catholic cathedral I’d visited so far, so that was also neat. It was an extremely popular destination and we visited on a Saturday, so there was quite the line (queue!) to get inside the cathedral. It was worth the wait. Next we got lunch at a nearby café, where I ordered my meal using French with made-up pronunciations. Somehow the waiter understood and brought everyone the right food, so I called it a success. Later we found the famous Shakespeare and Company, which is a cozy bookstore just off the River Seine. Apparently it’s universally considered perfect because it was so crowded that we had to wait a while before getting inside. The popularity of the place made me sad, because it looked like one of those places where the original proprietor really cared about the business and getting to know customers. There’s the ghost of friendly familiarity in the building and workers, but it seems like the place is too busy for much more than a welcoming smile. I prefer bookstores that make it easy to forget where you are, which is impossible to do when you’re shoulder to shoulder with other customers. Anyway, it was still a great

bookstore and I happily left the place with an additional book weighing down my backpack. After that, my group decided to just explore the city so we meandered through a few side streets and stores. Before heading to catch our train back we made sure to stop at a bakery. I got a cappuccino and a twisted pastry with a cutesy name that made me blush to say it aloud. However I spotted bits of chocolate folded into the pastry puff, so the struggle was worth it.

I headed back to London on a coach at the opposite end of the train from the rest of my group, and then I was treated to schoolchildren playing a heated game of cards. From there I met up with the group and we took London’s Underground train to Heathrow, which took about four times as long as we expected thanks to a mistaken destination and an unexplained train delay. It was a stressful ride through London and it just got worse at the airport. The majority of us were stopped and patted down by TSA but we made it to the gate about five minutes before it was supposed to close, so I guess everything was okay. I finally relaxed after making the flight, and when I stepped foot on the grounds of Collingwood College in Durham, it was with a sense of accomplishment. We all survived the weekend.