Bienvenue á Paris

So. Paris. For the longest time, I had no desire to visit France. Don’t know why. But then I read A Moveable Feast and ALL I wanted to do was go to Paris.  I mean, Hemingway and Stein and Eliot and Fitzgerald all lived and wrote here.  HERE!  I desperately wanted to go where they went and get inspired. And then Midnight in Paris came out and it was like my dream visualized on film. Amazing.

So. Paris. Here I am. And the beginning of my adventure is crazy and inspiring enough for its own post.

The flight was fine. I was afraid for a minute we were going to crash and burn, but then it was all okay.  We caught a weird train/shuttle vehicle from the Parisian airport to get into the city. I practiced my French with my friend, Angela, and got to use “merci” when two nice gentlemen helped me with my luggage.

We wandered in the pouring rain for a while, looking for our hotel, and finally found it: literally just a door in the wall smooshed between two restaurants.  At first glance I thought, my God, this place is a dump.  The neighborhood was quite lovely, all lit up with street lights, lined with fancy stores and cute restaurants.  But this place just had that feel: as if it had been around forever, lost in the corner of the city.  We trekked up a flight of rickety stairs and found “Reception”, which was just a small room that branched off the landing.  A spindly, very clearly drunk man greeted us at the door with a boisterous “Attenzione!”  Okay…what were we watching out for and why was he speaking Italian? This appeared to be our lovely receptionist. After various jokes that were a bit lost in translation, and some attempts at flirting/innuendos, he gave us our keys.

I thought the hike up to our room in our Scottish hotel was bad. I had no idea. We carried our heavy suitcases up six flights of long, narrow, winding stairs.  The hotel was itty bitty but extremely tall and we were on the top floor. By the time I got to the room, I was huffing and puffing and building up a sweat. When we opened the door to our room, I was pleasantly surprised. It looked just like the kind of place in which Hemingway would have lived and written.  Small, with the slanting beams of the attic sticking out of the walls.  Two small, old beds. One tiny sink. A little breakfast table and two wicker chairs. But—three windows that opened up wide, revealing the far-reaching Parisian streets, the twinkling city lights, the white rooftops, and (in the distance) the top of Notre Dame.  It was so French, so old, so wonderful.  The receptionist told us the place was built in the 1650s, and I believe it.  I could literally feel the history oozing out of the floorboards.

Starving, we dumped our belongings and went to a grocery store.  Shopping for groceries in a foreign language is…interesting.  Anna and I kept asking, “Ange, what’s this mean? What about this?” We ended up with apples, baguette sandwiches, onion chips, cookies, Orangina, and (of course) a bottle of wine. 

Major problem: no bottle opener.  We asked our receptionist for a bottle opener (he was drunk after all…he was sure to have one), but he couldn’t find it.  So he took us on a hunt. First we went across the street to a little open food shop, but no luck there. Then we crossed back to our hotel and stopped in at an Asian market where the woman behind the counter kindly provided us with a bottle opener. With our wine breathing in the cool night air, we heaved ourselves up the six flights back to our room. There we enjoyed our feast, listening to Edith Piaf and the Amelie soundtrack and the chatter of Paris from outside our windows.

What a lovely welcome from Paris.