Paris. Ah Paris. It was my first time in alone in a non-English speaking country, what I had been preparing for in school for years and years. I still remember shaking with anticipation and nerves as I stood in line to board the plane from London to Paris. Goodbye English! I arrived only to discover, to my dismay, that it is extremely difficult to speak French in Paris. My first morning I went in search of the Eiffel Tower; finally gazing breathlessly with tear-filled eyes when I saw it peak above the tall buildings that line the streets of Paris.
I soon befriended fellow tourists and together we discovered much more of Paris both day and night. I fell in love with Paris, falling as so many before me have; the famous monuments sticking out in the skyline, the small churches, beauty and Parisness around every corner. Oh the cheese, the pastries, the CREPES! I enticed others to come along and fall with me. One after another I was able to show some of my best friends the city with which I was enamored. Every visit symbolized something new. Visit 1: Freedom. Visit 2: Bonding with a good friend. Visit 3: A brief glimpse back into the developed world after over a year in Africa. Visit 3 consisting mainly of eating anything I could get my hands on. American food, French food, Japanese food, chocolate, fresh fruit, ice cream you name it. Forever the city to visit never a place I could live. Then Visit 4 happened this past New Years. If I had to give Visit 4 a label it would be “disappointment”.
I arrived with Marina ready to ring in this New Year, and what could be better than Paris at New Years? Alot apparently aside of course being with Marina. With the utter entrapment it seems to have over everyone, Paris decided to keep New Years low-key, meaning nothing as mind-blowingly spectacular as one would expect. Metros broke down on us and tourists filled the charming alleys and famous landmarks. It seemed at some points that for every truly French person you saw 3 tourists. Then there was the day we went nowhere. If you are going to have a flight delayed or canceled hope that it is not at Charles de Gaulle.
First we paced back and forth looking for our gate. It was written quite clearly that our gate was number 13. And the signs up to this point had said “to 10-18”. Yet there we stood between gate 12 and 14 and could not find the invisible gate. Taking a clue from Harry Potter I recommended that Marina try running at the wall between the two gates but I just couldn’t talk her into it. The invisible gate turned out to be the least of our problems when our flight was cancelled due to snow in Dublin. We had to go back to check in and get new tickets. To do this we had to go out of security thus getting stamped BACK into Paris. When we giggled at the fact that we'd have a page of stamps from Paris for the same day the security guard accused us of making fun of him. It didn’t help that he must be the only person in Paris hat speaks no English, and they put him at the non-EU citizens line?? We were the first to show up and he looked bewildered as our entire flight lined up behind us. I had to talk our way out of that. Then we had to go up two floors to get our checked bags, bring them down, wait 4 hours and then check them back in. So we paid the ridiculous prices to eat at the two restaurants we could find. We went back through security and waited for our flight. And waited and waited and waited. They are tricky in Paris. No one from the airline was around to question unless we wanted go out of security and customs again. And we didn't. Finally four hours later our flight arrives to pick us up! Making it a total of 12 hours, 2 meals and 5 stamps in and out of Paris. So this year did not start off so well. Then Marina and I stared in horror at the layer of snow in Dublin that did not even cover the grass. That was really why we were stuck in Paris all day???
Dublin did make up for the heartache it caused us. It is by far the most American European city I have visited. I found that I understood how everything worked in Dublin without much thought. Dublin made up for everything that had gone wrong in our trip. We not only found items we had been shopping for across Europe, we found them on SALE! Our hostel was great. I even had a chance to speak French since I couldn’t in Paris. We stuck to the basic tourist track, not having much time to stray from it. The benefit of spending a mind-numbing 12 hours in CDG with extremely limited entertainment and not a single affordable activity was the bonding we did with fellow stranded travelers including some people from Dublin who gave us great tips.
We learned how Guinness turns water into gold, poured the perfect pint of Guinness and ran into a girl we had seen not once but twice on our trip. Once in ever country we had been to, small world sometimes. I learned where my family name came from, Dusseldorf, and learned why the doors are all different colors.
Yet it was with a light heart that we arrived back in Madrid. For the first time I realized just how much I had come to love Spain. But more on that next time…
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