Chapter 7: A week and a bit in Paris

I think I'm living in some sort of sci-fi time dilation dimension something-or-other. It's 32 days since I left Australia, but it feels like three times longer. In those 32 days I've slept in 10 different beds in eight different cities in four different countries. I've been to 12 different zoos (mostly for only 3-4 hours each, they're not taking up *that* much of the trip), four art galleries, 10 World Heritage sites and... I dunno, maybe a dozen or so museums? Dubai feels like it was last year, Lisbon is a hazy memory and even Avignon, which I left barely a week ago, is receding off into the distance. Maybe the secret to a long life isn't living for more years, but simply having novel experiences every day. Hours become days, days become weeks and weeks become months. At this rate I'll be 40 before I get home. Or I will at least feel it.

A month - no, only a week - and a bit in Paris, then. A good start and nice weather are making an enormous difference to how much I enjoy a city, and in Paris I got both.

After checking into what I anticipated would be a four bed dorm, I unlocked the door and found four lockers, but only two beds and a private bathroom. Odd. Perhaps the four lockers indicated that it used to be a four bed dorm. Or perhaps they only have lockers in units of four. Either way, I wasn't going to argue, and the missing beds weren't even the strangest thing about my new home. That would be the elevator, which was about the width of a bookshelf, and was rated to carry a maximum of three people in what would have been uncomfortably close contact. If you haven't felt claustrophobic before, try riding a bookshelf up five floors, when every rattle and creak sounds alarmingly like the bookshelf is about get stuck.

After stepping out for a few minutes I came back and found not one, but two other people in my room. They had booked a private room for the two of them, but there'd been some mix-up. One was in with me, the other somewhere else. I could see a clear path to being shunted back to my rightful dorm, but by the time I came out of the shower, only one guy remained.

Rosie - yes, Rosie - is from New Jersey, is apparently quite open to suggestion, and has a habit of flying to places on a whim. He'd come to Paris because his friend told him he'd like France, and Paris was the only place in France he'd heard of. He's also been to Perth, because somebody had said that the world's most beautiful women were in Perth. I told him I'd never been there myself and asked if he had, in fact, found the world's most beautiful women there. Rosie confirmed there are many beautiful women in Perth, but admitted he would be disappointed if they really are the *most* beautiful in the world. So cop that, Perth.

When I left for my walk Rosie's mate was at reception, trying to sort out the question of their room. I overheard that there had been a mistake and, as much as I wanted to keep my head down and slink out I figured I'd prefer to sort it out then, rather than later. But no, apparently I was in the correct room: the mistake was elsewhere. I bolted from the building before I heard an 'oh, wait,'... and when I came back that evening Rosie was gone, his bed empty.

It went unfilled that night, and I dared to hope that I was, in fact, the dorm-mateless beneficiary of a mix up. I couldn't go and ask, of course, because that would prompt an investigation that could only end badly for me, so I waited it out. Thursday night came and went without a roommate. So did Friday and then Saturday, and with the two busiest nights out of the way I concluded I must be free and clear.

Alas, no. Pinky - yes, Rosie had been replaced by Pinky - showed up on Sunday night, just when I thought I was safe, and was there for the duration. She's a Thai woman working in Germany, and we got on well enough, I suppose, for an uninvited intruder and a first settler whose private room had been cruelly ripped from his grasp. I can't *really* complain though: I've now had a total of seven nights to myself without having paid for them. I could get used to it, except I mustn't: as I head into peak season the rooms are only going to get fuller.

As I did in Lisbon, after dumping my stuff at the hostel on the first day I went for a walk, and I think I'll try to make it my first activity in a new place whenever it's feasible. I can't control the weather, but I can at least influence my start, and walking about - just seeing what one might see - is an excellent way of settling in.

I decided to get the cliche out of the way first, so I walked to the Eiffel Tower. This is going to sound egocentric (in a travel blog? Really?) but there are some places that you understand, intellectually, are out there but that don't quite fully become real until you've been and verified their existence for yourself. It's a sense that I first had when I went to see the White House in Washington: the Eiffel Tower has never quite lived in my imagination in the same way that that benighted, besmirched building does, but it's a mythical thing anyway. Or at least it was. Now it's real. And also quite rusty.
From there I headed out to the Arc de Triomphe, where I couldn't approach too close because there was a wreath-laying ceremony involving unidentified but no doubt very important Very Important People. So I followed the Champs Elysee down to the Tuileries Garden, past the Louvre and on to Notre Dame. I'm surprised my knees let me get away with what I later calculated to be an 11km walk, but I'm glad they did. If they hadn't I might not have discovered a surprising, but admittedly logical souvenir gift from the City of Love:

Nor might I have found a candidate in the upcoming French election that I could truly get behind. I am hoping, without much enthusiasm, that Emmanuel Macron will win, largely because both major left candidates are much less likely of being able to hold out the fascists in a second round contest. But that's before I learned Jean Gentilhomme is running:

Je suis Charlie Gentilhomme.

My first full day had two agenda items. The first was the Menagerie in the Jardin des Plantes: the world's second oldest zoo in continuous operation, having opened in 1793. Its first animals came from the royal menagerie at Versailles, where their keeper saved them from being eaten by the mob by warning that they were more dangerous than they were tasty. As a child of the French Revolution the Jardin was the first explicitly 'public' zoo: it's not a particularly good one now, but with its history it was always going to make the cut.

Later that day I headed to the Musee d'Orsay. As much as I'm not the most artistically-minded of people I've always liked Impressionist painting, but it wasn't until I came to Europe that I could ever 'see' them properly. It's the light that makes the difference: it's not the same in Europe as in Australia. I don't know if it's one of the benefits of having an ozone layer but the light here is softer, gentler on the eyes. The vibrancy of the colour in Manet and Renoir paintings makes sense for the first time.

Day two was spent watching the Swans play Collingwood. Moving right along.

After another predominantly zoo day on the Saturday, Sunday was spent in and around the Latin Quarter. I started at the Pantheon; I gather it was a church at some point in its history, though it seems now to be very much a secular monument. To be buried in the Pantheon's crypt is just about the highest honour the French Republic will bestow upon its citizens. Voltaire is in there, as are Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Louis Braille, Marie Curie and Jean Moulin. The pantheon, indeed.

From there I returned to the Jardin des Plantes, which in addition to the Menagerie hosts a variety of museums, including not one but two devoted to dead animals. I made brief stops at both the Evolution Gallery, which hosts a variety of stuffed animals in somewhat psychedelic surroundings, including a giraffe that found its way to the top floor and couldn't get back down:

As well as the Paleontology Museum, which has a somewhat macabre way of displaying its specimens:

Later that day I went into Notre Dame, but my heart wasn't quite in it, having already gone to see churches in Lisbon, Madrid, Granada and Barcelona. It's a very nice cathedral, I'm sure, I'm just a little churched out. I only stayed for about 20 minutes.

Monday was a more gruelling Zoo day than most. Beauval Zoo has a reputation for being one of the best in Europe so I was always going to make an effort to see it. Unfortunately this effort involved waking up before 6AM to catch a bus to catch a train to catch a bus. The train went to the town of Blois, which is apparently pronounced 'Blow-ah'. French names and words have silent letters interspersed within them at seemingly random intervals, though I've learned to always drop the 's' from the end of a place name. 'Blow-ah', not Blois. 'Neeem', not Nimes. 'Aaarrlll', not Arles. 'Paris', not Paris. Ok. So the theory doesn't quite work.

Tuesday was one of the most eagerly anticipated and soul-crushingly disappointing days of the trip. I went out to the Palace of Versailles, having bought my tickets online in advance to avoid the queue. Except that I didn't avoid 'the' queue, only 'a' queue. I avoided the hour long wait to buy tickets, which snaked in and out of a building with a single corridor in and out that screamed 'death trap in a fire'. What I got instead was an enormous line to get into the Palace itself, that snaked up and down the courtyard outside the main entrance.

Three hours. Three. Hours. In full sun. Nowhere to sit. It's true that I could have been there a lot earlier - I had naively anticipated that my online ticket would negate the need to be there early in the morning, and I hadn't gotten home from Beauval until nearly midnight the night before. But whilst doing that would have left me not quite so thoroughly fed up with the whole thing by the time I got inside, I don't think I would have enjoyed the Palace more in any case. There were so many people inside that it felt like leaving the MCG along with an 80,000-strong crowd. The crush was overwhelming. Unbearable.

I only spent about 25 minutes inside - less than one for every euro I had wasted on this schemozzle - and retreated to the gardens. I just don't know how anybody enjoys that experience. The gardens are okay, but nothing to get excited about. The main feature are 'musical dancing fountains', though whilst there's about five of these on the map only one appears to operate at any one time. And when you boil it down it's just a speaker system and some sprinklers.

Avoid Versailles and go to a less famous, less trafficked palace instead. There will be less name recognition when you tell your friends, but you'll have a better time of it. I'd call it a victim of its own success, but that is letting the perpetrators off the hook. The Alhambra, in Granada, has timed tickets and sells out in advance. It means fewer people can visit, but those people have a rewarding time.
Versailles is clearly all about maximising revenue, quality experience be damned.

The next day was the last full one I had available. Versailles had made me question whether Paris' best known attractions were worth the hassle, but I was hardly going to come here and not go to the Louvre, so I put my courage to the sticking place and went. The earliest time available, however was 3:30 (this wasn't a problem because it's open late on Wednesdays) so before that I went to Les Invalides, which has a museum of French military history and Napoleon's tomb. The museum is decent without being spectacular: being a French war museum I expected to find lots of runners-up trophies, but they must keep them all out the back.

Napoleon's tomb is rather large for a rather small man:

Maybe he had Napoleon Syndrome.

At first I feared the Louvre would prove to be the same sort of more-hassle-than-it's worth experience as Versailles. My timed ticket required me to enter within a half-hour window, but getting in at all was a challenge. At the first entrance I tried I was told that I had to enter through the glass pyramid out the front, but when I went there I was told to go somewhere else and turn right. After going somewhere else and turning right I found another entrance, but this one was only supposed to be for groups. I tried and failed to find a staff member to confirm I had turned right at the correct somewhere else, so I just stayed there and hoped for the best.

I found myself in the midst of an Italian school group, and two of the teachers were having a running argument as we waited in line. One of the teenagers was able to translate for me that one wanted to let me in with them, whilst the other wanted to kick me out of the line and make me go somewhere else and turn left. I just stood there, unwilling to budge throughout the increasingly theatrical debate, until eventually my patron won and I was allowed to enter the Louvre as an honorary Italian school child.

I'm more of a Musee d'Orsay person, I think, than a Louvre person. Its painting collection had been fairly described to me as 'too many pictures of Jesus and fat babies', and I'd had my fill of this particular genre at the Prado. I enjoyed the classical sculptures immensely, though, and of course I had to do the obligatory thing and look at the Mona Lisa. Or, more accurately, look at the people looking at the Mona Lisa:

This is going to sound weird but I've always been quite creeped out by the Mona Lisa, with her smile that seems to know too much and eyes that always seem to be looking at me no matter from what angle I look at her. But I have done her a disservice. The eyes aren't following me: they're taking in the full, ridiculous spectacle before her. And the smile isn't from knowing my secrets: it shows that she's in on the joke. That this is all just a touch silly. I suspect many people who come to the Louvre really only come to take a photo of the Mona Lisa and go: there are signs directing people to her right from the entrance, and the room she's in has a direct exit through a Mona Lisa-themed gift shop.

I was joined for a last dinner in Paris by an elderly French man, who had been taught English by an Australian ex-girlfriend. He suggested that a French girlfriend might improve my own language skills, but only if I shaved off my beard first. From there the conversation segued to how the CIA will kill Donald Trump, because they had, after all, killed JFK, RFK *and* JFK Jr. I pointed out that Jr was only a magazine editor - not a politician - and the conversation unfortunately ended before we had firmly identified the CIA's motive for his death.

My final day was another footy day. Moving right along.

I'm now finishing writing this in bed number 11, in city number nine, in country number five. The (rail)road stretches out ahead, and Paris will recede into background memories - good, bad and Versailles - like all the rest. In a week it will be a month since I left. In a month, it will be a year.