Bonne Annee

View of the traffic circle from our balcony

Our hotel is situated on a traffic circle. It’s surrounded by tons of little shops, cafes  and restaurants packed into the narrow streets.




We are on the second floor (but in France that’s called the 1^st floor) in a square room cramped with two full-size beds and a small bathroom with THE WORLD’s TINIEST stand-up shower (I’m sure I have bruises from bumping my back against the spigot and door). I expected the room to be small based on the research Scott had done on French Hotels before booking so I think of it as part of the Parisian experience.

The coolest part of the room is our matchbook size balcony off the bathroom. The windows in the bathroom are French doors that open in. There is no screen so you can just step over the bottom window sill onto a metal balcony about 2ft.*3ft. We’re just one floor up so standing on that and watching the street traffic around me is like I’m having some out of body experience and floating just barely out of sight of everyone else.

View from our Saltine-sized balcony

Elle and I immediately crashed on a bed when we got to our hotel room. Scott and Cody went to walk around our quaint section of neighborhood and pick up some food. They brought back some pizza, which I harassed them about a little(we came all the way to Paris and they pick PIZZA to eat). It was so good though and turned out to be just unique enough to make it a French experience too (the sausage pizza had potatoes on it and they used crème fresh rather than pizza sauce).

Our one outing for our first day in Paris was to the Champs-Elysees and Arc de Triumph. We took the Metro subway train (there’s a stop right across the street from our hotel). That experience made me feel so proud and empowered. Scott, having more faith in me than I do in myself, asked me to go to the information booth and ask the guy what subway pass was our best deal and how to buy it using the automated machine. It was like I have some little French elf living secretly in the folds of my brain because the moment I started talking to the info guy (who wasn’t bad to look at by the way), all this French vocab started popping out of my mouth. I’m sure my verb conjugation sounds ridiculous since I really only know how to use the present tense but –mon dieu- that info guy understood exactly what I said and helped us with exactly what we needed.

Elle is a champ traveler!

Throughout our subway labyrinth experience (we spent more time than I should be proud of wandering around in those underground tunnels) I was put to the test with my French and I felt very successful. Two things surprised me. I am surprised by how many people don’t speak English. I had suspected that most would and I wouldn’t really need to know French other than to read signs or show respect  greeting Parisians before asking if they spoke English. But nearly everyone we ask, “Parlez Anglais?” says “No.” Then Scott turns to me and I compose some broken French question and remind them to speak slowly when they answer. The other thing that surprises me is that IT WORKS! They understood me! I am pretty impressed with my broken-French-speaking self...then again. It’s also crossed my mind that most of these people actually do speak English but their first response is always No when asked if they speak English because they, understandably so, don’t feel like serving as tour guide for some ignorant American. Then when they say no and I start “speaking French,” the entertainment value kicks in so they stick around to humor me. Either way, it’s working and we are getting the help we need to navigate.

 

The Arc de Triumph was humungous! From pictures wasn’t surprised by its height (which is a little bit taller than I had expected) but it’s girth, depth, thickness, soul is so much grander than I ever realized.

Same with the Champs Elysees. I expected a busy little street with impressive storefronts and busy passersby. Holy cow, had I underestimated it. We hired a taxi to drive us down the length of it (the driver was on the phone yelling at his brother the whole time HAHA “Mon frère, ecoute moi! Ecoute moi!” It was so long and decked out for Christmas in these gorgeous blue lights. They didn’t blink but they had this feature I’ve never seen that makes the lights fall along the length of the branches randomly. And the street is so long. For the holidays, le marchee de Noel is open, lines and lines of white wooden temporary shops with sundry fares. It looked like the longest midway of some classy carnival and it seemed to go on FOREVER, ending in this giant ferris wheel lighted all the way around in the same blue lights that lined the trees. What’s funny about it is that when I went to California this spring and saw the sights that we see on a regular basis on TV, I was disappointed by their size. Everything had looked much bigger in pictures and TV. Here, it’s just the opposite. Kind of like the Grand Canyon or some huge natural phenomenon that you can’t capture the whole of it in a photo, the Arc de Triumph and the Champs Elysee are so much bigger and brighter and deeper and thicker and longer and wider and taller than I ever saw represented in a picture.