Dear Godson,
If there was one place I didn’t want to go, it was Paris. The entire city, I thought, was a cliche. An American in Paris…tch. I didn’t want to go.
I wanted, instead, to spend my limited weekends in lesser known places. I could always plan a trip to Paris later, and fill weeks with all there is to see. To cram one of the world’s most popular and beautiful cities into two days seemed like a sin. To go to the city of romance alone also seemed sinful. No! I would not go to Paris.
And yet, I went to Paris.
I went to Paris because I was tired of traveling with new people. I like it, but I wanted familiarity–much like my trip to Barcelona. So I went with three of my closest friends at the castle, and despite the cliche we had an absolute blast. I’m glad I went to Paris with them, and I am truly glad I went to Paris. We didn’t try to do ALL of Paris, just what we could. In our two days we squeezed in the Eiffel Tower, the Arc du Triomphe, Notre Dame, the Catacombs, and Shakespeare and Company bookstore.
The sights were beautiful, looming, tall. Much like with Big Ben I found myself smiling like an idiot at the Eiffel Tower. I get more star struck with these towers than I do with actual celebrities. Ah, well. You may notice that we skipped on a huge star-struck moment: The Mona Lisa at the Louvre. Frankly, we ran out of time (and patience for museums). Besides, I can draw old Mona from memory. No need to see her in person.
The Catacombs were eerie, morbid, awesome. Six million skeletons, ranging from the French Revolution(s) to back to the Black Plague, lay under the city. Some sick weirdo arranged the skulls and femurs and all the other bones into walls with aesthetically pleasing shapes and designs.
These things go on forever. It’s sickening. It’s so cool. And I may have caught a ghost on camera?:
The scariest part wasn’t the bones, though that did make me shiver and breathe lightly. It was the hallway getting there. Damp, dark, made of dirt. A mile underground, claustrophobic, and nowhere to hide.
Shakespeare and Company, on the other hand, enveloped the other side of Paris: the bourgeois, starving-artist side. The English-Language bookstore allows struggling writers to live there for free, as long as they work in the store/cafe, read a book a day, and work on their novels. I bought one book from the lost generation (Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, written right in Paris) and one from the beat generation (Charles Bukowski’s Pulp). Perfect!
Food? Of course. Baguettes, croissants, cheese platters, wine, croque du monsieur, even escargot (tastes good, like clams).
To and from Paris we took a train straight through Belgium. I felt bad, as I had passed up a Brussels/Luxembourg weekend to go to Paris. As I said, I would plan a trip to Paris–but would I plan a trip to Brussels or Luxembourg? I may have missed my chance to go to these places. I wrote about it for my travel writing class, Miller infecting my prose. We’ll see how that goes. (“So it goes…” ha! And I didn’t even buy a Vonnegut this weekend.)
Overall, Paris was just as beautiful and just as trashy as it needed to be. For every glittering Eiffel Tower there was a gutter clogged with garbage. It’s a city of elegance and desperation, a city of juxtaposition. Above all, it’s a CITY, no doubt about it, and it deserves its grungy, inspirational reputation. Never have I felt so disgustingly artsy in my life.
I left Paris–the city of so many artstic, political, and social revolutions–with my hunger for writing renewed. So for that, I thank it.
Much Love,
Christina
Dear Godson... 