Staff writer Kirah Brouillette continues her series about bringing three dozen Waterville High school juniors and seniors on a tour through Europe with her mother, boyfriend, and a professional tour guide from Explorica. She discovers Paris has both a dark and light side.
Paris isn’t as graceful as you might think. Yes many of the world’s most magnificent building, bridges, and guilt fountains line its streets. And yes, the Parisians are the most beautiful and fashionable people on the face of the earth. But Paris does not introduce itself to you with gold-filigree and Chanel when you’re stuck either walking the streets or taking the Metro to find your way around the city . . . as you will be required to do when taking a tour with Explorica. That Paris greets you with street gutters full of rotting garbage and stealthy child-pickpockets. That Paris gets on your nerves pretty quickly and that Paris; that smelly, grimy, mildly rude Paris is what makes the other, prettier Paris seem like a fairytale.
Exhibit A: Springtime in Paris?
After little sleep in Amsterdam and a five hour bus ride to Paris, including 40 minutes clutched in the grip of fierce Parisian five o’clock traffic, we were allotted 20 glorious minutes of time in our hotel rooms to freshen up before boarding the metro to make our way to dinner.
Our local residence in Paris was the hotel Campanile, located in the Northwest part of the city directly across from the number two Metro stop, Hoche. While Hotel Campanile itself was exceptionally clean and seemingly safe, the neighborhood surrounding it was not. It was sketchy.
Sketchy because it was a just a little bit dirtier than a neighborhood ought to be, a bit more run down than a neighborhood ought to be and it smelled a just a little bit more like pee than a neighborhood ought to smell. The streets were lined with dank, grey office buildings and second-class fast-food Chinese joints, each coming equipped with its very own mumbling bum functioning as an unofficial doorman.
There were various groups of instigators posted on each street corner, kindly alerting you to the shape, size and functionality of your derriere or your d?colletage, depending of course, on whether you were entering or leaving their general direction.
Paris hasn’t forgotten you though, gentleman. You don’t need to have an ample bosom to receive the official Parisian welcome. As we were gathered in front of Campanile waiting for everyone to filter down from their rooms so we could march off to dinner, one of the junior boys on the trip was lovingly tapped on the behind by, as he later described with a laugh, “A short man in a leather bowler cap and red spandex pants who then turned around and blew me a kiss. Talk about springtime in Paris!” In Paris, lust is an equal-opportunity offender.
However, Paris is no worse than New York City. This seasoned traveler happens to love New York and its addictive combination of sass and skankiness. Paris was shaping up to be just as alluring. As we walked down the Hoche Metro steps, I explained this similarity in detail to the few students who were walking with me, trying to quell their initial (and distasteful) perceptions of the place.
It seemed the students appreciated my efforts and digested my words, until one student raised her hand, pointed to previously unseen brown smears on the white wall beside us and asked, “Um, Does New York have like, poop on the walls too?”
We squirmed collectively and jogged down the stairs as germ-fear swept through the group, causing a break-out of the immediately-coined “Paris Poop Paranoia” disease, which afflicted all of us for the rest of the trip.
The delicious introduction to Paris continued as we waited for our train and took notice of the piles, literally piles, of rotting garbage and food in the train tracks and in the corners of the station.
A toothless man with open sores on his face cornered three female students and verbally assaulted them with unidentifiable wine-enhanced words and gestures. Pulling them aside, I comforted them and reminded them that Paris is like any other metropolis with its dirty streets and dirtier street-people. I confided that I too walked around Rome (my first major European excursion) wide eyed and clutching my purse to my chest until I got used to it and learned to see the beauty of the city beyond all the crime and grime.
Calmer, we all squished our way into the train and moved the four stops to our destination where we were told, as we surfaced, that a pick-pocketing had occurred among our ranks. We huddled together, students asking students what happened, who did it happen to, and when will it happen again?
In an announcement, Tour Guide Lynn explained to us that, in fact, it was a parent who had his money stolen right out of his front pants pocket, he assumed, by a group of “tiny little school children in red caps.” As we walked to dinner the parent who was assaulted by an army of first-graders described the encounter: “I thought they were holding on so as not to fall over on the train. I was worried about their safety.”
At dinner it was apparent that the kids were worried about their own safety. Another girl chimed in. “I put [my money] in my bra, cause if anyone grabs either one of these, I’m gonna start kickin’.” Jess, a senior, commented as we stood in line for the bathroom. “Yeah, mine’s in my sock, inside my shoe. No one will ever get it there.” Another girl chimed in. Over a dinner of traditional French-style roasted half-chickens with mushrooms and disappointing, soggy (pre-made) frites, I again reminded everyone not be discouraged. “We’re off to Monmatre next,” I said. “And it will be that much better in comparison to all the nastiness of today.” At that a few smiles broke out and Jess raised her hand and asked “Is it pretty? Cause we really, really thought Paris was going to be, well, pretty.”
Exhibit B: Pretty Paris?
In fact, there is a Pretty Paris, and she is dressed for the prom every single day. All of her statues have been recently cleaned and/or re-covered in gold foil (“22 carat from Italy, only, for our Paris,” our Parisian tour guide, Catherine said). The park greens are velvety and vast (due to a wet and early spring there) and the trees are pruned in precise (though unnatural) shapes. Everything, it seems, it made of marble, and the Parisians are as comfortable with their museum-quality buildings as Americans are with frat houses. Pretty Paris loves to show off and we (as in, the entire world) can’t seem to get enough of it.
One of the city’s finest beauty marks is Monmatre. It is an artist village situated at the crest of one of the tallest hills in Paris, capped by the looming presence of Sacre Coeur, a giant of a church built in 1870 by two businessmen who wanted a place they felt was “suitable for their families to pray.”
To get there you can take a funiculaire (a hill-side tram) or walk the many, many steps to the top. My boyfriend and I chose to walk up with the kids while most of the parents took the tram. We had to stop for five minutes to catch our breath when we ascended. Waiting for Lynn to arrive and give us our meeting time and place, we were treated to a hazy sunset over a dusty and crooked Paris skyline-quite pretty indeed.
“Two-and-a-half-hours are all the time we have here, people.” Lynn shouted. “We have to get up early tomorrow. Time travels quickly here, you’ll see.” By the satisfied and sleepy-eyed folks draped across benches and stairs and the lovers coiled about one another dotting the main square, we found it hard to believe that time could get away from us. Time, it seemed, had left Monmatre long ago. After all, wasn’t the famous painter Degas buried in the public cemetery there, a few rows away from Alexander Dumas?
It is impossible for a place as romantic as Monmatre to function along the parameters of something as uniquely American as a schedule. Lynn must have been able to see the misty romance-lust in our eyes because she reminded us, as we walked off in intimate groups of two or three, “I mean it. You’ll lose yourself here. Watch the time.”
Though I only looked at my watch once, just before we were supposed to meet, I did lose myself there. My boyfriend and I spent and hour examining the cobbled streets and twisted alleyways that ended suddenly at a bit of fence overlooking the impressive luminosity of Paris at night.
We bought over-priced and ironic tourist gifts at shops tucked into the folds of the buildings surrounding the square. We watched some of our students get their portraits painted by local artists who were dressed to impress American tourists in striped shirts, berets and suspenders. We laughed at the funny little dogs many artists owned who wore matching mini-berets and barked amiably at you as you walked by as though they might convince you to sit for their master.
Our last hour in Monmatre consisted of a chilly seat outside a creperie in the main square, holding hands and sharing a blackberry-filled crepe so light and tender I was moved to declare, then and there, that I would never eat another crepe until I returned to Paris. A grand gesture considering my boyfriend, a chef, makes a spectacular crepe himself.
As we joined everyone in pausing to enjoy the Paris skyline once more, we heard a terrible screech from a few girls followed by many audible gasps. Concerned that there had been another tush-touching-scary-street-man occurrence, we turned around to make our way toward the outburst when we realized what had actually happened. The Eiffel Tower had suddenly come to life with moving lights, slipping on its newest prom finery and parading its undulating, sparkly dress for all of us to be in awe of.
Paris certainly is the prettiest girl at the prom. But she’s the kind of prom queen who chain-smokes Marlboro reds and lies to her parents about where she’s going after the dance is over. It is the juxtaposition of good and bad, the elegance of marble against a thousand years of built-up smoke and dirt and garbage that make Paris intriguing. And if you haven’t seen Paris’ bad-girl side, then you really haven’t seen Paris.