So I arrived in Paris. “J'ai arrivé”... which apparently is wrong; it's “Je suis arrivé”. It didn't take long for the memories to start flooding back: being alone, in a foreign country, where you do not speak the language, is not only terrifying, and a source of constant embarrassment, but also potentially very fucking boring.
The journey was from the plane, to airport, to regional train, to metro train, to street in the centre of the 10th district of Paris. First there were bi- and tri-lingual signs, and announcements in French, English, and Spanish – it's as if this country could tell that whenever I hear a language other than English, my monkey brain reaches for the only other thing I know, and starts spouting spectacularly adequate Español. This includes while ordering at a French restaurant, and while talking to Parisian police officers. Dickhead. Slowly the industry and dirty train-yards give way to dense residential flats, French graffiti, French people, French signs. The announcements were in French, and French only. I began to rue the last few weeks when I had continuously put off making a start at learning this god damn language. Je ne parle pas français... and feeling like a piece of shit.
The hostel was named 'Friends Hostel' – I'm still trying to figure out which linguistic category this name occupies. Is it irony? Is it a joke? Is it just completely irrelevant? The best analogy I can think of right now would be if you started working for a lawn-mowing company called 'Friends Lawnmowers'. Sounds descriptive sure, but then on your first day no one speaks to you about lawnmowers, or at all, and after telling you that you'll be sharing the keys for your lawnmower with five other people (lawnmowers have keys), you walk into the Lawnmower Room (LR) to find that actually all of the lawnmowers start on their own and the key has disappeared anyway. And then you go on break, even though you haven't done any work yet, and there are a bunch of other people in the break room who look like they have also just started today, and no one knows where the boss is, or who he is, his name, or what he even looks like, and for some reason everyone is speaking Spanish. When you finally get back to the LR (picking up the industry slang ('Jargon' – OOOOH!!) quickly) you find that the lawnmower you were supposed to be using is being used by someone else, but not to cut grass, they're just riding it backwards like a dumb, stupid horsey-horsey, and you're like, “what even is this fucking company? I don't hate it, in fact I'm having quite a good time... but I feel like this is not the way things are supposed to work, and I'm sure someone, somewhere, is mucho is disappointed.”
Well that's what 'Friends Hostel' in Paris was like. That, and they have a lot of stairs.
It was a in a pretty shitty area of town, and it wasn't until my second day that I actually realized this wasn't all that one of the most famous cities in the world had to offer. Honestly, for about a day and a half until I ventured into the tourist district with all the museums and statues and junk, I thought the whole city was full of criminals (or at least dudes whose eyes move quickly) splashing themselves with water from the road because it was a little hot out. The whole city. It's not just that though, there's also a river... ha. ha. ha. Okay I promise I won't do that again...
It's strange going from the clearly demarcated and meticulously planned cities of Australia to somewhere that has evolved over several thousand years. There are no neat, parallel roads and parklands dividing the CBD from the suburbs... I got lost on Magenta and Stalingrad streets for seriously about an hour. Walking around in circles. I went into some huge church – Eglise Saint-Laurent – and listened to some French priest deliver his sermon for about twenty minutes. HA! I'm sitting here right now laughing at myself sitting there trying to attain some sort of peace from sitting in this huge building while a French man droned monotonously about Jesus Christ. To be honest, it was just nice to sit down... maybe that's what church is about? I'm not as anti-religion as I used to be. I found myself appreciating it on SOME sort of weird level and the whole experience is still a little obscure to think about.
I'm getting off track.
Highlight of day two was drinking two bottles of wine with Katie from Wollongong who I met on the walking tour I did in the morning. We sat on the banks of the Seine with all the other French hipsters and talking about life, comedy, writing, boys and girls, and the cheese that I had left in my bag since our first leisurely drinking session that afternoon: she refused to eat any as I had no knife, and was cutting it with my South Australian driver's license (FULL Drivers License, thankyou). Then I got lost on my way back to the hostel, and thighs chafing red as the rose we had drunk in the sun that afternoon, I wandered the Northern parts of the 10th district of Paris, France, past the homeless sleeping under the train line, and finally made it home in time to pack by 2:30am and set my alarm for 5:30. Trains to catch in the morning.
Also I walked down the Champs-Élysées, climbed the Arc de Triomphe, saw Napoleon's tomb, the Eiffel Tower, and the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. Getting swindled by Parisian grifters was better though, but that's a story for another time. I'm going to lie down now, I'm feeling a little tired.
Peace, Taco.
