Chapter 11 – Paris

Day 24 – Sunday 18^th September 2011

 

The trip to Paris was, in comparison to the other journeys, a short one. Only 12 hours and as it was from 8pm to 8am I planned on sleeping for the majority of it. My compartment was a horrible 6-bed compartment, which as a 6ft2in guy was far too cramped. I noticed that as people were getting on they were reaching straight for their laptops or iPods and were quite happy in their own little world. On the trains I’d been on further east people had all taken the time to talk to the people they were sharing such a confined space with, however I had seen very few iPods while I was on those trains.

I myself joined them and put my iPod on and caught up on my journal, which had suffered due to all the fun I was having in Berlin. It wasn’t long though before I was calling it a night ready for a quick 36-hour stop in Paris.

 

Day 25 Monday 19^th September 2011

 

Over the trip I had normally stopped in places for 2 nights or longer but as I’d been to Paris before I decided I’d arrive early on the Monday morning and leave Tuesday evening, effectively giving myself 2 days but still being in London by Tuesday night. This had the added benefit of only paying for one night in Paris, where even the hostels are ridiculously priced.

The plan was similar to Berlin, I had arrived very early in the morning, so I was going to go to the hostel, dump my bags and go out exploring before coming back later to check in. the hostel I had booked in was brand new and very close to both the east station (where I arrived) and the north station (my departure) however my issue was they seemed to have designed a system to squeeze every single Euro out of the people who stayed there. Every other hostel along the way had allowed travellers to leave their bags in a locker room if they needed to while they went out to see the sights. This one did have a locker room but it required payment, this was not such a big deal as I figured they needed to run a business not a charity. What really annoyed me was I needed to charge my phone up and it was then that I noticed that when they had renovated the place they had blocked up all the plug sockets to stop anybody using their electricity. There was a little phone charging up place but again that cost money to use. To me this sort of attitude was against the ethos of why youth hostels had been invented and why they were so popular, they were a cheap place for somebody to stop for a couple of nights and allow people without an extravagant budget to go places they may not otherwise be able to. As I said I can understand from their point of view that they need to be able to make money from their business but it just felt very much against the spirit of all the other hostels I had stayed in along the way and if anybody wanted recommendations I know which one I would tell people not to stay at.

Anyway, I left as soon as I was sorted, the plan was to walk around Paris and get a feel for it. Every time I’d been before on a school trip we were on a coach and it was “ok this is the Eiffel tower, get off and take a picture and get back on the coach”. So I had seen the main sights but I felt like I didn’t really know Paris. First up I wanted some lunch and had decided to go to the Gare De Nord to see how long it would take me from my hostel and also because I had a sneaky suspicion they would have a British newspaper I could read while eating. My hunch was correct, so I bought The Times and found a little café with tables outside quite close to the station. I ordered a salad that came with a fresh baguette and a coffee and sat there on my little table in the September Parisian sun and had never felt so sophisticated in my life.

sophisticated lifestyle

After I had refueled I set off for the nearby Sacre Coeur, the Sacre Coeur sits on top of a hill and has a great view of the rest of Paris. Just as I started to climb the stairs 3 African guys at the top appeared, I knew that it wasn’t a coincidence and they would be trying to sell me something, sure enough they wouldn’t let me pass them on the stairs. I used my normal tactic of just saying no and trying to move on, they asked me what was the hurry. I couldn’t really get passed without shoving them aside so I stopped to see what it was they wanted. They started with the typical “where are you from?” “Where are you going?” etc. so I told them I was English and had made my way all the way from Korea and I was almost home. They told me they were from Ghana and we started talking about football, turned out the main guy really liked Manchester united and Wayne Rooney (seems to be a recurring theme on this trip) and he couldn’t believe it when I told him my home was so close to Manchester.

While this was going on he had taken my wrist and using three bits of thread was tying them together to make a bracelet, I told him I didn’t have any money to buy anything like this from him. He said “nobody said anything about money”. We continued to talk, he told me his wife was back home and I told him I’d left my girlfriend back in Korea. This made us brothers in his opinion and he once he finished making me this bracelet he told me it was free and shook my hand and let me go on my way. I left having had a lesson on trust and misconception.

I didn’t go inside the Sacre Coeur I just had a wander around outside and the small streets that surround it at the top of the hill, they were full of small cafes and art shops so I bought a couple of small paintings for my mum and my sister and made my way down the hill to the Moulin Rouge.

The Moulin Rouge is in Paris’ more risqué area of town so as I was approaching it I kept getting invited into all sorts of establishments promising all kinds of shows and dances, I politely declined the invite but I wonder what made people think me, a single guy on my own wearing a hoody and with my travelling beard was their target clientele. The Moulin Rouge had shows going on and people were queuing to go inside to watch but I had no time to take in a show, I had my walking tour to continue. I next aimed for the Arc De’Triomphe, it was built under Napoleons orders as a tribute to all the glorious victories France had under his command and those victories are still listed on the walls. As a young boy / teenager I was a big fan of Bernard Cornwell’s series of books “Sharpe” and the subsequent TV series staring Sean Bean about a British officer fighting in Spain against the French in the Napoleonic wars so I felt that I knew a fair bit about these battles. It was also the place where France had placed their tribute to the dead of the two World Wars. On this trip I had now seen three different countries tributes to the senseless killings of these wars.

another tribute to the "glorious dead"

From this tribute of war I made my way to the Seine and Frances most iconic landmark, the Eiffel tower. Time was short so again I didn’t go up the tower, I left that to the couples from all over the world to do that and I moved on again to the next place on my trip. That place was the ecole de militaire and the Hôtel des Invalides, which that man, Napoleon again, built as a place for the soldiers wounded in his wars to be able to go to and receive good care.

I had no idea how far I had walked but by this point I was quite tired, so I headed back to the hostel for a shower before dinner. I decided that as the hostel was in the Asian area of Paris I would try and find some good food close by, I settled on a Pho place and was not disappointed. While walking back to the hostel a strange thing happened to me, a car waved me to cross a small side street before they turned in. now in England to show my appreciation I would wave my hand but in Korea that had been replaced with a little bow and for some reason even though id left Korea almost a month ago I bowed instead of waved. However given the area of Paris we were in I think I got away with it.

My opinion of the hostel was somewhat redeemed that night as they were playing football on the TV from England so I happily sat down and watched that before calling it a night.

 

Day 26 Tuesday 20^th September 2011

 

The plan today was to actually go inside a museum or gallery as I had spent all of yesterday getting my bearings of Paris and staying outside all day. The place I decided on was not really surprising given my love of history, I chose the Hôtel des Invalides as it housed the French military history museum. It also housed the coffin of Napoleon himself; coffin is perhaps the wrong term to use, as the thing he is buried inside is massive. It looked to me as though it had loosely been designed to look like a grand piano and it was certainly a similar size and the man himself didn’t really need all that space, as everybody knows he was “the little corporal”.

Napoleons understated coffin

The museum was very interesting but in my opinion slightly too long, there’s only so many times you can look at the same type of swords before you just want to leave. The section on the first and second world wars was very interesting though. The museum in total took me 4 hours to get around from start to finish and as I had a train to catch later on it rather ruined my plans to go around the louvre.

So from the museum I made my way, instead, back to the Seine, as I was keen to see Notre Dame. Along the way I also saw the “Grand Palais” and the “Petit Palais”, the Cenotaph and its great view down the road back to the Arc De Triomphe. Finally I arrived at the “ile de la citie” and Notre Dame, it was far too crowded here for me to enjoy it and anyway by that time I needed to be making my way back to the hostel to pick up my bags as I had a train taking me back o England.

The station had something I had never seen before, the area where you go through British customs is actually still in Paris before you get on the train, so around 7pm I had technically done it, I had gone from Korea all the way home to England. Although to make it official I just had a little bit of water to go under first.