paris diaries, vol. vii

You know the times in life where you think, wow, God really wants to humble me right now? That was kind of what happened to me Friday. I think that there is no true way to tell this outrageously strange story, where we were faced with inconvenience after inconvenience after inconvenience. (Did I mention that we had a few inconveniences?) In the grand scheme of things—aka writing this a day later—we were humbled. We were on highs, some higher than others, and I’ll get to that part. But first, I have to tell you the story of our Friday trip out of Paris. (Not great for the “Paris Diaries,” but you will soon understand why it is a trip that I have to share. With the contribution and permissions of Kelcie and Gaby of course.)

The story of our Friday from Paris, to Giverny, and back.

Gaby woke up late, I woke up anxiously (bad dreams), Kelcie—fine. “Good, in fact.” Breakfast at the dorm—mediocre. Bad coffee, too bitter. Take two different metros to St. Lazare. We get there, and we’ve missed the first train by two minutes. Time to wait an hour and a half until the next. A cat in a bag meowed loudly.

Kelcie’s bank account gets charged 50 euros for an app her grandmother told her to get. The app was downloaded on an unsecured network, and so, of course, a fraudulent charge appears. We sat in Starbucks. Overpriced, no purchases for us. I nap, Gaby reads, Kelcie freaks out. Her card is cancelled. Gaby buys beignet from kiosk in station. “The worst beignet I ever…” (trails off).

We get on our train. Gaby and Kelcie read (feet up on seats). I put in headphones and fall asleep (feet up). I wake up to RATP offers yelling at the three of us. Feet up, confused. I (still with feet up) pays 180 euro fine for all three having feet up. Gaby Venmo’d me 60. Kelcie did not (cancelled card).

Side note: Kelcie paid later.

Our train arrived at Vernon two minutes after the fine. Kelcie expresses anger, Gaby laughs, I feel nauseous. We find our bus stop to get to Giverny. Realizes bus isn’t for another hour and a half. A common number? I am still nauseous at this point. We all three searched for new transportation. “Bikes are our only option!”—Me (I always say this. I am always wrong.) Further pushing the bike narrative, Gaby’s card gets declined by Uber (unexpectedly (says Gaby…)).

We all go in search of a bathroom. Can’t find one. Turning to our last—and “only”—option, we go into a café and rent three bikes. Customers are allowed to use the restroom. We are now customers. I entered the bathroom (men’s, as the women’s is closed), and immediately sent a picture to the group chat. Terrible.

Plans are revised. One bike returned, soon to be rented back. Man (owner?) at café seems disappointed as I stood in the doorway, 10 euros in hand, asking for the bike back. Low point. Now, though, we are three people on three bikes. Gaby redeemed for Uber thing as she changed map from car to bike route. Things were looking up.

We rolled on towards Monet. My bike breaks, so I have to stop and fix it. By fix, I mean put a screw back into the brake and hope like heck that it doesn’t stop randomly anymore. We faced traffic and crossed a scary bridge. Then we get laughed at by children out of a car window as they yelled at us in pipsqueak French. Going across the bridge, we chanted “Pont Pont Bridge Bridge” crazily. The police wait on other side. We roll on past, moving onward.

Side note: we almost asked for refund from the RATP officers. We would rather go to jail than pay the 180 euro fine. Too late.

Okay, so now we’re feeling refreshed, just biking along the river. Which river? No clue. We ask a woman to take pictures of us—she is kind but speaks no English. We soon see cows (highlight). A man walking past said “You got this!” (Gaby assumes this was his message; he spoke entirely in French.) as we biked past. We make it out onto main road. Too many roundabouts. Go back onto a bike path. Feel like we are in a realism painting—something uninteresting in content like Gleaners or Harvest.

See a house with kangaroos in the backyard. Gaby entranced. “We should go pet them!” Kelcie and I refused, moving on, and leave Gaby to her daydreams. As Gaby took pictures (@cultureflor on Instagram), a woman walked out of the house and we three biked away quickly, meeting a tractor head on. We survived, narrowly.

On a new bike path. Kelcie thriving, Gaby teetering, me witnessing.

Make it into a parking lot. Kelcie picks the one furthest from the gardens. Gaby tells a stranger, “we’re lost. “He laughed but gives good directions. The rental bikes are left behind, chained to a precarious post in a ditch. We march on. Cyclist gets mad at Kelcie and me because we are apparently walking on the wrong public pedestrian path, gesturing rudely. He is a recurring character.

Get to the house. Realize we need tickets… tickets we didn’t buy. Tickets are bought, Gaby’s card goes through (!). Walk through gardens and house. Pretty, but could be prettier on a different day. Go into gift shop. Sit on couch and watch documentary. (What do you guys think about the friendship between Monet and Clemenceau???) Ride back to the café bikes are rented from. Five minutes into ride, it starts to pour rain. Of course.

So there we are, biking back in the pouring rain and the temperature is dropping. All of our phones were dropping in battery—mine was already turned off—and so I had to direct us back to the café by memory. We made it, though.

At the café, we walk in, hysterical, mascara running. We are wringing the water out of our dresses and coats. The man (owner?) gives us paper towels and we order coffee. Probably the best cappuccino I’ve had in a while (since the night before?). I may have just been on the verge of pneumonia though, I don’t know.

With warm coffee mugs in our hands, we sit in disbelief of the day. Tears are finding their way down my face, Gaby stares into space, and Kelcie is telling the man, “c’est un jour difficile.” (It is a difficult day.) I am still feeling the terrible feeling in my stomach from the 180 euros from my card.

The man kindly brought us a small plate of dates to be eaten with our coffee. He explained that he had three daughters, so we knew he sympathized. Said dates had worms in them. Yeah. Worms. Gaby had eaten three, Kelcie one. I had eaten enough to see the worm. Laughter and tears erupted at our table. I miss GMOs.

We paid for our coffee and went off in search of our train. When we got on, we were soaked and freezing. We simply sat there, cold, wet, and traumatized. Our spirits were higher than ever (this is completely lacking in sarcasm; we were simply so in shock nothing could bring us down). I wrote out our day in Gaby’s sketchbook, while wiping my nose on my dress (tears still present, mixing with the cold I thought I had gotten rid of). Kelcie and Gaby contribute, to the story, not my dress. The three of us think of RATP and Pizza di Gio.

Once we got back to the dorm, we changed into warm, dry clothes and marched to Pizza di Gio in the cold. There, I ate an obscene amount of pasta that led to some serious contemplation of life. The pizza and pasta healed us, except for my stomach’s reaction. Reminder, this was the only real food we had eaten that day, aside from a couple bites of bread and cereal and a cup of orange juice that morning. What can you do?

Okay, but now I have to tell you just why I needed to be humbled, which does in fact take place in Paris.

Thursday afternoon, I spent four hours at my internship, enjoying the full four hours for the first time in a couple of weeks. Not that my internship is ever bad—it’s the opposite. I enjoy my time there every Tuesday and Thursday, doing projects for my boss and running books all around the library. The fact that we all speak English “in the office” is just a bonus. But this Thursday, we were speaking English and I had about three separate projects assigned to me. We had gotten a new shipment of books in, so I unboxed them all and cross referenced the books in front of me with those on the packing slips and invoice. It may not sound the most invigorating, but it’s better than you may think. Once I finished with that, I moved onto a project in our travel section to free up space for more books and the books we already have. Not the most fun, again, but something I enjoy. And to finish my projects for the day, I went through a “historical” collection of books that has been set aside and added to for I’m not sure how long.

Basically, this has been a project that I’ve been helping with for a few weeks now, even though it’s been a thing for a while. I sit down at a computer, and add to an Excel sheet a list of things about the books: author, title, year published, call number (think Dewey Decimal), barcode number, notes, etc. And this is for hundreds of books. But on this particular day, I was opening and closing books left and right, typing all of this information into my document, when I found this really cool bookplate in the front of the book aside from the one from the library I intern at. I ask one of my bosses about it, then she goes into this long-winded story about a woman named Sylvia Beach.

Of course, I’d heard little bits about this story strung together, and I’m sure that at least some people reading this will know exactly who this woman is. But if you don’t, Sylvia Beach was the founder of the original Shakespeare & Co. book company, opening the shop in 1919. Writers like Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald shopped and hung out here. For over 20 years, this bookstore kept going. The German Occupation during WWII tipped this. According to my boss, and other sources, one day a German soldier came into the store and asked for a book on display, which Sylvia Beach refused because it was her own copy. The soldier was of course unhappy with that response, so said he would come back the next day, either implicitly or explicitly saying he wouldn’t be unaccompanied. Overnight, she emptied the store. Apparently, she worked with the owner of the empty apartment over the store to move every book upstairs so that when the soldier came back, there would be no bookstore for him to get a book from.

How completely badass (pardon my French) of a woman. She was later arrested by the Nazis and stayed in prison for six months, but never reopened the store. The Shakespeare & Co. we know today is a completely different guy.

After I left my internship, I took the bus back to my dorm and waited until dinner, where I ate half of a plate of fries, nervously awaiting something to come that evening. At about 7:00, I went up to my room and began to get ready, going through multiple variations of the same outfit, switching between a skirt and dresses, until I finally decided on an outfit. At 8:00, I went downstairs and out into the rain, meeting a date waiting with an Uber. I got into the car, still unaware of where we were going, and we talked about each of our days as we anxiously looked out of the windshield, nervous about our driver as he kept switching between 4-5 map apps. In the rain. Eventually, with GoogleMaps pulled up, he asked “Eiffel Tower?” and I thought, there is absolutely no way.

Our driver finally pulls over, and we are right next to the Eiffel Tower. Again, I was like, no way. “Oh, so we’re going to a crêpe stand, right?” I asked. He nodded along and laughed, saying “sure.” I think I knew what we were doing though, and I think you can tell the direction we were heading. We make our way into Entrance 1, getting in line for tickets to go up for our 9:00 reservation.

Side note: At this point, I had known this guy for literally two and a half weeks. This was the first date. Okay, keep that in mind.

Okay, so at this point we’re in the elevator, going up. Still in disbelief, I have come to the conclusion that is the craziest thing anyone has done for me. The tower is sparkling now, and of course I’ve pushed our way to the window so we can see the sparkling light in the rain. We get to the first level, and a waiter led us to our table, a table that had a view of the Seine and Trocadéro. For the first course, I had a salad with mandarin oranges and smoked duck; I can’t say that I’ve ever had that. He had something with crab, I’m not sure. The second course was some kind of meat pie with sauce. I’m sure it’s a French staple, but I’ll be honest, the texture turned me off to it. The sauce tasted good, but it was oddly chewy and just kind of cool in temperature. Weird. After we had finished our slices of meat pie, the waiter brought out the main course. He had sea bass, I had beef bourguignon. Mine tasted like my mom’s pot roast, so of course I loved it. Plus, it had my second favorite vegetable, carrots, cooked perfectly. I love a good carrot.

During this course, as I was trying to hold back from scarfing down my food, he points to my right and says something along the lines of, “holy crap, look at that!” Me being me, I looked straight past the man proposing to his girlfriend and looked out at the rain, thinking he was pointing at the downpour outside. But alas, there we were, at table 49 (47?), and three tables away two people were beginning the journey to spending the rest of their lives together. Very cool.

After we had the first three courses, and witnessed a proposal, we both had chocolate profiterole, which had melted chocolate poured over it. It was one of the best desserts I have had in Paris so far. (I went to the bathroom after eating it and realized I had chocolate on my nose. Only slightly embarrassing.) After dessert, and the trip to the bathroom, we had our last course of coffee and “chef’s treats.” Not to sound stupidly pretentious, but there’s just something about drinking a cappuccino in the Eiffel Tower. It’s only slightly better than drinking one soaking wet in a café in a nameless town.

Around 11:15, the dimmed lights brightened, and we were ushered out by our extremely kind and cleverly funny waiter, and we went outside. He pulled up a map and led us to this darkened path on the other side of the tower. Knowing him for such a short time, I joked about him leading me there to kill him, which he soon refuted by leaving me and stepping over the little fence, going to look for something in the bushes. I sent an “alive” text to my friends, and then heard voices as I was standing in the dark, so I thought we were about to get mugged. It ended up being a group of teenagers, 1 girl and 3 boys, which didn’t really help my worry of being mugged. But it ended up fine—I was talking to the girl and having fun as I heard him say “found it!” from a few bushes away. I was then met with a bouquet of pink roses.

We soon departed from our new friends after exchanging Instagram usernames and WhatsApps. The two of us then walked along the Seine, making our way back to the dorm. It was definitely the most memorable date of my life, and one of the most memorable nights. Not a bad Thursday. But then I went to bed, and, well, you’ve read what happened when I woke up.

I hope you enjoyed reading about this crazy 36 hours of my life. I can’t say that I will try to relive that any time soon. But hey, it’s for the plot, right?

Thank you for reading, as always. This week is a double feature of sorts… so if you would like to read about the few days following the Eiffel Tower and a fever dream trip to Giverny, read the second part of this blog post in my next Paris Diaries, talking about a peaceful trip to Normandy.