The Eurostar train from London to Paris was sold out by the time my trip started. Months ago, I’d written in my (very extensive) planning journal “BUY EUROSTAR ASAP” because I knew 2nd-class Eurail reservations could sell out, but by the time I knew my departure date (which is to say, by the time I got on the plane to Europe), it was already too late. I didn’t want to fly or pay $300 for one of the first-class seats, so the 9-hour bus (which ended up really being 11 hours) was the only option.
In normal life, I’m a highly anxious person. I like to know what to expect in every moment. When I travel, some of that need dissipates. There are so many things that are out of your hands whether you want them to be or not when you’re traveling, and not having a choice in the matter can be very freeing. When I realized I had no choice but to buy the ticket for the 9-hour bus instead of the 2 and ½ train that I’d planned and researched, I didn’t even look up how we were crossing the English Channel. When our bus arrived at these giant white cliffs and I saw ferries the size of small cruise ships, I realized then, oh right, of course we’ll take a ferry.
The ferry crossing from Dover to Calais brought me an abnormal amount of joy. As a person who has never been on a cruise ship, everything about this ferry felt like a novelty. It held dozens and dozens of buses and vehicles and had 8 floors containing a dog park, restaurants, shopping, and a magic show. The ferry ride lasted less than two hours, but I liked that time and space to transition from the UK to mainland Europe. If I travel between the UK and France again, I might choose to take the bus again because of it. I’d been in Europe for a week by then, but it was a Europe that felt easy and comfortable because the language and culture were familiar. Arriving in France meant a new culture, a new language, a new currency, and new social rules that I didn’t even know I didn’t know. The bus and ferry ride gave me time to adjust slowly so that when I arrived in Paris and had no clue what any sign or service interruption announcement in the metro said, I didn’t feel all that bothered about it.
Paris was the place where my expectations felt heaviest. The Paris I wish I could experience (still) is one that I recognized long before visiting doesn’t exist in the summer of 2022. I wished I could see the version of Paris where writers come to live as tumbleweeds in Shakespeare and Co. Bookstore, which in my mind must be like a magical and free artist collective that somehow includes clean and private showers, no crowds, and is devoid of all germs. The reality of Paris in July 2022 is that I had to wait in line to even get inside Shakespeare and Co. Bookstore, and it was so overpriced that all I purchased were two postcards. In spite of the crowds and the miserable heat (it must not be airconditioned), it DID still feel like a magical place. They do actually still take in tumbleweeds—writers who can stay at the bookstore for free as sort of volunteers/writers-in-residence—but they’ve temporarily suspended the program since Covid started. (Though there is no reality in which my clean and private bathroom and germ-free fantasy ever existed here.)
We consume so much media about Paris that tells us what to think of it, and it’s hard to separate the reality of the city from what we expect to experience. I stayed in a small hostel in Montmartre and paid extra for a 3-person dorm room so I could have slightly more privacy than the larger dorms offer. The “3 person” dorm actually contained 2 single beds and a bunk bed, and they crammed 4 of us into it. I was on the bottom of the bunk bed, and I very sincerely worried that the top bunk was going to collapse on me because it shook so badly. There was roughly 8 inches of space between each of the beds so that you couldn’t comfortably sit on the bed without your knees jamming into the bed in front of you, and the bottom of the only window slide across the bed sheets of the bed closest to it so that it was impossible for anyone to sleep in that bed with the window open. It smelled mysteriously of old cheese and had no air conditioning. Another hard lesson I’ve learned on this trip is that it’s unfortunately easy to let your accommodations in a city have an unfair impact on your opinion of the city itself. In an attempt to not let this happen, I avoided the room during all daylight hours.
Paris is too large for me to consume as much of it as I wanted. I wandered from neighborhood to neighborhood trying to see as much as I could fit in while also trying to strategically squeeze in the equally desirable thing of relaxing with a notebook in cafes. This is a hard combination to balance. My hostel was in a quiet corner of Montmartre behind the Sacrée Coeur Basilica. Montmartre, or at least this quiet section of it, really was a beautiful as I imagined it would be. It was the most idyllic Paris, and a perfect place to stay (that is, if you stay anywhere other than a shared dorm room of my particular hostel). I did an excellent city tour to learn some of the history of the city and wandered Saint Germain and the hectic Latin Quarter. I picked a different bakery every day and got mid-day snacks in Marais. In an effort not to cram in more than I could enjoy, I picked The Musée d’Orsay over the Louvre. In Canal Saint-Martin, I found my favorite place in Paris– Le Comptoir Général. I’d read about it online and knew it was a bit hard to find, and I still ended up searching for 15 minmutes before figuring out how to get in the place. It involves entering a nondescript storefront (which does have the name of the restaurant listed inside in tiny letters, but you can’t see it from the outside) where a person working at the register points you in the right direction down a hall. The hallway is full of taxidermied animals and mounted insects, and you wonder where on Earth you’ve accidentally found until you finally reach a host who leads you the rest of the way to the restaurant. The restaurant itself is this oasis of strange beauty that I wish I could live in. The food was all fixed-price menus that I wasn’t hungry enough for nor willing to pay for, but I sat there for 2 hours with just a drink in their courtyard feeling like I’d finally found a glimpse of whatever intangible thing people find in Paris that makes them fall in love with it.
During my senior year of college, we read Proust in one of my literature classes. One of my favorite professors taught the class, and she gave us madeleines (I hadn’t known what these were before) while we were reading the memory scene in In Search of Lost Time. And I remember her saying to the class, “Next time you’re in Paris…” and I can’t even remember specifically what we were supposed to do “next time” we were in Paris because I got stuck on that phrase and have been stuck on it now for 10 years. “Next time you’re in Paris,” she said to this room of probably 50 students. It was a totally harmless statement without any forethought I’m sure, but embedded was the assumption that these students had all been to Paris and would undoubtedly be back. Of course, I’d never been to Paris, and I didn’t know anyone from back home who had been either.
I’d been to Europe for the first time a few months before that, but it was still hard for me to conceive of a world where people casually went to Paris like this was an inevitability. Ten years later, I finally made it to Paris, and ate a madeleine. And not for one second does this feel like a thing I’ll ever take for granted.
Things not to miss in Paris:
- Le Comptoir Général – restaurant and bar in Canal Saint-Martin
- The Musée d’Orsay if you like Impressionism art
- Watch the sunset from the steps of Sacre-Coeur Basilica
- Try the buckwheat crepes at Breizh cafe
- Sainte-Chapelle – most beautiful cathedral in Paris
- Shakespeare and Co. Bookstore
- And also all the other bookstores in the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain
- A free walking tour with Sandemans New Europe tours (really you should do this in every city that offers them)
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