Written Sun Nov 4th

I’m sitting in a TGV on my way to Nantes. It’s a bit before 9am and I’m tired, hot, and a bit sore after having dragged my bags through the station (I’m in car 17). I’ve had two incredible days in Paris with Aude, Sebastien, and Claire.

The first day (Friday Nov 2nd) I arrived early in the morning on the night train from Hanover. I managed to sleep ok, since the compartment had seats for 6, but there were only three of us. Aude met me at Paris Nord, in the early morning rush, and I tried to speak in French. The words wouldn’t come. I mean wouldn’t wouldn’t… I kept finding German words instead, which felt really odd, since my German is better than it was, but still crap, and my French is pretty good… It took all day for me to get comfortable speaking French again, but by the time we’d walked across half of Paris and met up with some friends for a drink, I was mostly fluent again.

The first time I visited Paris was when I came to France for my exchange. We flew in with the red eye from Montreal, and I was too excited to sleep much. When we left Ottawa, there was freezing rain, but we landed in Paris to flowers and warm weather. My body, still on Ontario time, felt like it was 1am, but it was bright outside. We hopped into a bus from the airport and went to the hostel where we would stay for a couple days of orientation before heading out to our families.

Instead of going to sleep, we dropped off our bags, and got back into the bus.

We drove to the Eiffel tower, piled out of the bus, took photos for 15 minutes, and piled back in the bus. We drove to Notre Dame, l’Arche de Triomphe, and several other famous Paris landmarks and followed the same routine. It was the most surreal bus trip of my life.

It was really nice to see Paris on a more human scale.

Mostly we walked around without going into museums since it was vacation time for school aged kids in France, so the crowds were enormous. We did get a chance to visit Notre Dame though. It must be difficult to be the priest there. Even though the crowds generally respect the no talking rule, when there are hundreds of people walking through the church and taking pictures, it doesn’t make for a very peaceful sanctuary.

After an attempt to visit the Opera (which had a very long line up) we visited the Galleries Lafayette, a huge department store in the middle of Paris. We entered to see throngs of people searching through the expensive brand name merchandise. We made our way to the gallery the store is presumably named after. It goes up 5 stories to a beautiful glass dome. They already had their Christmas display up - a 4 story tall christmas tree reaching up to the top of the gallery to get everyone in the buying mood. It was really quite amazing. We went up the escalator to see the view of the tree from an upper gallery. We browsed a bit - Seb fell in love with a pair of fake fur mittens. Then we made our way to the roof from which there was a great view of the city and crowds below.

Later that evening, we made our way to ‘Theatre des Deux Reves’. It’s a tiny theatre with about 40 seats, that’s tucked away on a street that’s little more than an alley in a run down part of the city. We thought we were going to see 2052, a sci-fi play about climate change and world problems. The play we actually saw was ‘3 nuits, pas plus’ a story of the return of a runaway sister after 7 years of silence. It was a surprise, but really good. I felt bad only paying 3 euros to get in.

It was awesome to see Aude and Claire again and meet Sebastien. We had a great time catching up and sharing photos from the past 6 years (it’s been that long?!). Now it’s their turn to come visit Canada!

Posted in just one more eurotrip blog |

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