NOT parody of Emily in Paris
So I hope whoever may read this blog accepts my apologies for neglecting to add a post to the website last week. My brother was home on his limited free time from his education and we were invited to spend the week at a family friend’s vacation home in New Hampshire, so my scheduling skills might need some work. Originally, I had intended to post on a different subject, but after a brief call from the same brother, now studying in a different country, I thought I might revisit my time at the same location. My brief visit to the City of Lights.
I should preface this by saying at the time, I was in London on a study abroad program, during which the professors either had us going to some performance or on a weekend trip to a historical location around England, but they did give us two free weekends and a week off with the intention that we use it to travel. Perhaps the week off shall be another blog post (the first free weekend snuck up on me as I was busy with schoolwork, so I just explored London a little more), but the final bit of free time I had in Europe I decided to go on a nice relaxing weekend to Paris with my favorite people; me, myself, and I.
That was my intention, anyway. Having traveled alone to Edinburgh a few weeks earlier, I thought it would be relatively simple. My mistake.
I had taken three years of French class in high school, but never really used it afterwards. My second mistake was assuming all of it would come back to me after I was in Paris. Not exactly.
I knew barely enough French to get by, at least if I were in a more remote, less tourist-y part of France, yet I still had difficulty getting to my hotel. Eventually, however, I was successful, and tired as I was, I had the energy left in my to walk to a nearby café and get something to eat for dinner. On my walk to find this evening meal, I noticed how close my hotel was to the Eiffel Tower; so I thought that could be something I would want to see at night, more than likely after I had slept through the first one.
After I had finished at the café, (my first time having escargot), I went back to my hotel room where I figured I should just check in with my parents and let them know I had gotten to my hotel room alright and would venture out into the city in the morning. As my dad was still at work, my mother was the only one to take my Facetime call, and she commented how tired I looked, to which I relayed the long journey from the train station to my hotel, as well as the fact that my phone was slower than normal. At her suggestion, I got off the phone and started the update, which she estimated would take all night. As I had missed a few updates, however, it ended up taking all weekend. I decided after a five-minute scroll session through Facebook I would go to bed. Fun fact: five minutes can turn into an hour very quickly. Then the fun began…
I started to notice numerous sirens going off in the city, and I thought that was odd, though I reasoned that Paris was a big city, and so would be bound to have more sirens going off every few minutes as opposed to somewhere like Providence Rhode Island, so I brushed it off. Then I got a message from my uncle, who was in upstate New York at the time.
“Steven, are you ok?”
Not knowing what was going on, I sent back: “I’m fine, why?” Part of me wanted to send back “uh, how are you?” but somehow, I could tell it was serious.
He told me there was a suspected terrorist bombing in Paris, and as soon as I googled it to find out what had happened, everyone I ever knew started trying to get in touch with me via Facebook. At some points it felt as if the conversation (at least in my head) went. “Steven, are you alright?” “Yes, I’m fi— Didn’t we hate each other in high school?”
Eventually, I used Skype to get in touch with my parents, my dad was home from work at that point, and my mother commented on how I looked more alert than when we had spoke earlier. Later I learned that a cousin, who went to the same university in the same year as I was, called her father nearly in tears at the thought that it wasn’t really me who posted online that I was safe (longer story, I won’t go into it here), but eventually it got back to my parents who were able to relay that they had heard from me and that I was safe.
For some odd reason (sense the sarcasm here?), the sleep I got that weekend, never mind that night, was not the best in the world. The people at the help desk assured me that I could still walk around the city, despite all major tourist sites being shut down, and they encouraged guests to do so, thus that was the rest of my weekend in Paris. I saw the glass pyramid outside the Louvre. I stilled walked past the Eiffel Tower, and imagined if that had been a target for the attack, how much worse would my experience have been? While I did not go near it, because of its location it was nearly impossible for me not to have seen the cathedral of Notre Dame…well before the fire that burned it. I got to walk down the streets that Napoleon paraded his army down by the Arc de Triomphe. I also saw French authorities armed with machine guns nearly everywhere I turned that day. As I would later hear my father say, “Ironically, there is no where safer now than Paris.”
That weekend people I knew caught flack for posting about how tragic the events of Paris were while saying nothing of other terrorist attacks elsewhere the same day. No one had ever given me anything like that, yet if they had, my response would have been that I was in Paris when those events unfolded, and how that was a little more concerning to me at the time. Perhaps the reason I write this now is because of the fact that at least one of the people responsible just received the harshest sentence possible the French justice system is capable of giving. Perhaps I just needed somewhere to let my real feelings about that night out.
One day, I hope to return to France under happier circumstances. I want to go to Napoleon’s tomb and see all the generals he allowed to be buried with him. I wish to go to Champagne, drink the beverage while learning the history of champagne sabering (more on that topic in a later post). I wish to visit the beaches of Normandy, or the ruins of Oradour Sur Glane. One day, I will return to France, but I certainly won’t be the same kid who thought he was just going for a fun weekend in 2015.