Our Weird First Day in Paris

by Lloyd B. Abrams

Some of the weirdness began when we ascended into an other-worldly ultra modern shopping mall after navigating our way up from the Gare de Châtelet-Les Halles – the station for the regional train that we took from Charles de Gaulle airport. After some deep thought and consideration, we concluded that it did make ample sense for all of those upscale stores to be located atop a major transportation hub.

But the apparent incongruity also reminded me of the time we pulled into the garishly-lit South of the Border with the kids asleep in the back of our 1976 Volkswagen van at two in the morning on a 26-hour straight-through to Grandma’s and the geriatric wilds of southern Florida. And “No, Jonathan, we aren’t gonna be buying any fireworks.”

I had studiously Google-earthed and Google-mapped our planned route and I expected an easy walk to our hotel, which was also reflected on my new Borch map of Paris. Our hotel was about half a mile up Boulevard de Sébastopol. Despite predictions of rain for the weekend, that Friday morning in November 2009 turned out to be sunny and mild. I hoped our walk might serve as a pleasant introduction to Paris.

But right then my wife just had to say, “I hope this is not gonna be one of those.”

One of those. I immediately flashed to that humid summer morning in London some years before when I hauled two huge, cumbersome, pseudo-backpacks across Hyde Park to our hotel in Kensington because the jitney driver dropped us off on the wrong side of the park. And I, the stubborn pack animal that I was, refused to hail a cab to traverse such a small distance. After all, how far across could it be? Then, as now, this trek to our hotel followed an uncomfortable transatlantic flight, with too little sleep and too much jet lag.

“Listen, it’s not that far.” I tried to sound confident. And this time we had packed light – two rolling carry-ons, a backpack and a shoulder bag, except that rolling carry-ons did not roll so smoothly on uneven sidewalks, let alone cobblestones. And I hailed no taxi this time, either. I checked the map yet again, trying to get my bearings.

I’m sure that one of the less-than-endearing images Vivien has of me is my asking her to “wait just a minute, hon” while I unfolded a map – yeah, I’m a tourist with a non-functioning flip phone … waddya gonna do about it? – when we’re standing on the sidewalk under a street lamp, or sitting on the bench in the middle of a park, or huddling in a doorway while being pelted by rain. This time, even though it was sunny, and the sun was at our backs, and we were assumedly heading north, it seemed as though we kept getting turned around.

After finding someone who spoke English and gave us directions, we rolled our bags the eight or nine very long blocks north up Boulevard de Sébastopol, which became Boulevard de Strasbourg, and into the neighborhood of our hotel, which was apparently the wig- and cosmetics-store district of Paris, and, perhaps, all of France. It seemed strange.

When we finally rolled our bags into the Comfort Hotel, the receptionist informed us: “Check-in time is at two o’clock.”

“Please. We’re exhausted. It’d been a really long flight ...”

“The rooms are not ready, Monsieur. No, there’s nothing I can do. Two o’clock, earliest. I’m so sorry.” Despite her charming French accent, her curt manner did nothing to comfort us.

And so, we had to wait.

We rested for a while on a faux leather couch in the lobby – jet lag napping turned out to be impossible – then finished the sandwich remnants we had brought with us. We decided to leave our luggage in the vestibule and take a short walk back to bustling Boulevard St Denis, where there was a major stop for three Metro lines. I became excited when I noticed a librairie – a book store. But when we stepped inside I soon saw that most of the books were in French. Slow, exasperated exhalation.

While I waited outside for Vivien, several Asian women dressed in long coats approached me, all friendly-like. When I drove a taxi in New York City years earlier, and even while “sight-seeing” more recently, working women wore hot-pants and micro-mini skirts when they were on the stroll in the Times Square area and points west, so it took me more than a few moments to realize what these women were really up to. Of course I wasn’t interested no matter how chic and alluring their baggy overcoats were.

When we returned to the hotel, we retrieved our baggage and took the tiny elevator up to our minuscule room on the fourth floor. There was no bathtub – my wife’s basic necessity for her mental well-being – but it did have a stall shower I could just about squeeze into. At home, we sleep on two twin beds pushed together to make one king-sized bed, but at this Comfort Hotel, there was only a full-size bed, which my wife immediately stripped to check for bedbugs.

We had a television remote with no markings – they probably wore off – and a phone with multiple buttons but no numbers or symbols. I was waiting for Rod Serling to step out of the shower, cigarette in hand, to introduce us and our story in his own inimitable manner. Maybe it was going to be another one of those.

We showered and dressed and turned on a Law & Order episode dubbed into French – one of the very few I’d never seen. Later we took the Metro (number 4 line to the number 1) to the Beth Habad Loubavitch Champs Elysées – the nearest Chabad house, where we had made a reservation for Shabbat dinner. At the supposedly correct address on Champs Elysées, we eventually had to weave our way along one alley past several small buildings, and then turn left and go up a flight of stairs to find the place. Nothing was going to be easy.

After dinner, we walked over to the Arc de Triomphe and then back along the Champs Élysées, festively-draped with strings of light bulbs, past French-sounding stores like Louis Vuitton, Lacoste and Ladurée and also Levis, Tiffany, and the Disney Store. At Louis V’s, a steamer trunk went for a mere US $17,000. I could spend a whole lot less for a plain pine box.

I realized I had to master this foreign transit system, which labeled Metro lines with colored numbers and terminal stations – the number 4 line (magenta) to Porte de Clingnacourt, for example, so once again it was out with the map. But finding our way through and out of the warrens of tunnels was more frustrating, especially at our stop near the Porte Saint-Denis arch. New York City’s transit system, by comparison, was a breeze.

For the next four days, Paris was going to be a challenge.

* * * * *

We had, indeed, scored an amazing travel deal that November – four nights in a so-called “three-star” Paris hotel, including airfare, for two, for about $1000. But luxurious, it was not.

However, we did visit the Louvre, the Notre-Dame Cathedral, the Clignancourt flea market before heading to Versailles, and Père Lachaise cemetery – cemeteries are always Vivien’s favorite tourist stops – where Oscar Wilde, Frédéric Chopin, Honoré de Balzac, Marcel Proust, Georges Seurat, Jim Morrison and many other notable people are buried, alongside a collection of gut wrenching statues commemorating the Holocaust.

We ate warm baguettes and Swiss cheese in a park one gray afternoon, and had kosher Mediterranean food for dinner twice at L'As du Fallafel in the Marais district. Early one evening, we crossed over the Pont Neuf and strolled hand-in-hand like two not-so-young lovers along the bank of the Riviere Seine.

We took buses and trains and naturally did a lot of walking, as we always do when we’re away. On the last evening, to use up our transportation pass, we hopped on some random bus to the Left Bank and ended up at Le Bon Marché department store where Vivien bought only a pencil sharpener. The exchange rate was daunting and with baggage weight restrictions, why would we want to bring anything back anyway?

As soon as we left Le Bon Marché, we got on another bus that took us to the Eiffel Tower. I was learning the system, and as expected, I made frequent use of my street and transportation maps.

And we got around just fine.

– This story, originally written in 2009, was resurrected from my “Works in Progress” folder

Originally written / December 16, 2009 .. Rev 16 / April 21, 2020

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April 21, 2020 … Copyright © 2020, Lloyd B. Abrams