And Those That Danced...

[acm28]

This entry is only about a month late. It's the story of The Mob and I in Paris, and how we ended up dancing on a street-corner in the rain, and how we didn't know the Louvre when we saw it, and so on. Three and a half days to explore the city that is supposed to ruin you for all other European cities. It was supposed to be amazing.

First of all, as is traditional, I guess, let's start with the photos proving we were actually there:





Okay. Anyway. So on Saturday we got on a train from London to Paris.



Above: The Mob eating cold baked beans out of the can with chopsticks on the train.

We were of course very class on this fancy train. Of course.
We then did our best to figure out the metro and make it to our hostel. Once again we were reminded that Anna should not be in charge of directions. EVER. At least we weren't shot at this time.



When we got to the hostel they told us we would have to stay in two separate rooms for the first night.
"We were never informed of that!"
"We're informing you now. After tonight I guarantee you can switch into a room together."

We went to our separate rooms. They were 6 person rooms. In The Mob's room some of the beds were still empty. In my room, all of the beds but the one I chose were empty. We went back to the counter.

"Yeah, there's a group of five that's supposed to arrive later tonight."
"Can't you split them up? Two in one room, three in another? It makes more sense than splitting up a group of two."
"You can ask them to do that if you want when they get here."

Oy. A little bit grumpy, we decided to deal with it, we'd get a room together the next night, so whatever. We headed out to go explore the area and see some of Paris, since that was what we were there for anyway.



Check out this amazing view that The Mob got a picture of!



We found a famous church-thing, and got the chance to see inside, although pictures weren't allowed in there. Afterwards we went walking down the hill just to explore.
Suddenly, there was a guy tying something onto The Mob's wrist.

"Where are you from?"
"Uh, America." *tries to extricate wrist*
"Where in America?"
"East coast."
"I know New York. New York." *points to Yankees cap*
"Uh... huh..."

We exchanged looks, and in the span of that time there was another guy tying a similar bracelet onto me.

"What is your name?"
"Uh... Anna."
"Anna, I am Bobo. From Africa."

"Is this your sister?" the first man asked Mob.
"Uh, no, she's my girlfriend," The Mob said, not really sure what to do. The men exchanged looks then pressed our wrists together.
"Peace and love forever!" They said in unison. "There, now you are bound together forever."
"Okay, we need to be going."
"Wait, wait, fifteen euro."
WHAT.
"For the kids, fifteen euro. For you, fifteen euro."

There was a big drop in my stomach. It was a con. Of course it was a con. It was a clever one, and these guys were organized. They knew how to corner tourists and take advantage of a while group. All around us were other men with the same little bracelets, just looking for someone who looked naive enough to fall for it.

"No. We don't want it. We won't pay for it," I said, as the only person with euros.
"Uh, Anna," The Mob mumbled.
"We are giving you a good price," the men kept saying. "You can't take without paying." And there was no way of removing those bracelets quickly and easily.
"Then you can cut this off me," I said, holding out my wrist.
An elderly Frenchman approached. "Problem? Is problem?" He didn't speak very much English, and The Mob tried to talk to him in French, but there were too many voices going on at once.

"Ten euro, is very good price." "We aren't going to pay you, I don't want this." "He tie this on, then ask money, yes?" "It's not a problem." "No, it is a problem." "Leave them alone!"

Finally I pulled out a 2 euro coin, pressed it into Bobo-from-Africa's hand, grabbed The Mob's wrist, and ran.

I was pissed off. Pissed off at myself for not recognizing the con. Pissed off for giving them any money at all. Pissed off that they could make me feel so trapped and so scared when I was in a public space, when there were so many ways I could have just walked away. Pissed off at myself for almost crying because I was pissed off at myself. Pissed off because I hadn't even asked the question that I really wanted to ask. "Bobo-from-Africa, where are you from? Why are you here? Who is forcing you to do this?" I was convinced, at the time, that they were victims of trafficking.
I'm still not sure if that's not the case.



Maybe Pepe made them do it.

We got the bracelets off, and decided to head into a little park that seemed to lead back toward our hostel, trying to just move on.



I liked the park a great deal. It wound straight up this very steep hill, each turn of the path revealing more of the view of Paris below.



Nothing like seeing the vast expanses of human industrialization peaking out from behind the trees.



And the stairs had little footprints!



It was getting late-ish, and I was tired, so we headed back to the hostel to make ourselves dinner, maybe meet some other people staying there, and retreat to our separate rooms.
I remember we met a pair of Australians there. The ATM had eaten their bank card, and they couldn't call Australia to get another one until Tuesday, because it was the weekend and Monday was a holiday because Sunday was Easter. Until then, they didn't have very much money left.
They were trying to get to Barcelona.
That first night, the Australians seemed like people living what I could have been if I hadn't gone to Mount Holyoke. They were seeing the world, working where they could and mostly just exploring. Had I not gotten into my top choice college, I dreamed of taking a gap year, of going to Europe and just... living. It seemed so natural, so free of worry. They never knew where the next adventure would take them.



Probably not to boring old Amurka.

The Mob and I parted for bedtime. I went to my big empty room, lay down on my bed, and was hit by a new wave of anxiety.
Separate rooms, a group of five coming in at an unknown time, the cold wind coming in from the window next to my bunk, smelling of cigarettes as the Australians smoked outside in the courtyard.

"Hey, I'm going to be up for a little while more, if you want to come over," I texted The Mob. It was three minutes or less before I heard a knock on the door.

We lay on my bunk, barely enough space for the two of us, and I could fallen asleep like that. Maybe I did. I was dosing in and out, not really as awake as I had pretended to be in my text message. The Mob was tired, it was bed time, we both needed sleep and unlike me, Mob can't sleep when in contact with other people.

"We should go to bed."
"Yeah," I sighed, and eventually I moved so that we could get up again and The Mob could go back to the room next-door.

I locked the door of the room. I put all my belongings in my suitcase and locked it. I arranged myself under the covers so that it was clear there was a person there, but I was completely featureless.
I went to sleep.
I woke up. Five people were in the room, discussing where they were going to go out that night.
"There's no one in here!"
I groaned.
"Yes there is," one of the female voices said. "Be quiet!"
Eventually some of the voices left the room, and some of the bunks creaked and groaned as two members of the group went to sleep.
It was 1 am, Easter morning.

In the proper morning, I met The Mob at dinner, and we commiserated.
"Three of the beds in my room haven't been slept in."
"There's a couple that took two bunks, but they're both sleeping in one, you totally could have used one of those bunks last night."

And then it was our goal to head out to find an organic market and go see certain sights. Nothing went according to plan, and we ended up doing most of our plans for Tuesday on Sunday. Not a bad thing, just kind of funny.



The market was closed, because of Easter, but somehow we ended up at Notre Dame instead.



Too crowded to go in, but really lovely. We walked around that for a while and found the Seine.



That was pretty gorgeous, so we decided to walk along the water and sort of look at the street vendors and sort of just enjoy the fact we were in Paris. That's a thing, right?



When we got hungry we found a cheese shop, and got our selves some ethical cheese.



The Mob was very excited about this turn of events.



We sat in a little park and ate our goat cheese, baguette, and grapes. It was fantastic.



Back along the Seine again, we turned away from the river and came across this building that looked strangely familiar.



"Does this look like...? No, it couldn't actually be..."



Yup. The Louvre. Which we failed to recognize for an embarrassing large amount of time.



I took over the camera to take pictures of all the fiddly bits, but mostly I ended up creeping on people taking touristy pictures of each other.



I'm a creeper, what can I say.
Beyond the Louvre is the Jardin de Tulieries, so we started walking through that.



Classily, of course.



The thing that bothered me about French gardens was mostly how square the trees were. English gardens, I'm sure, are planned, but they look natural and beautiful, like, "oh, what a lovely piece of wilderness in the middle of London." French gardens look like, "hey, there are a bunch of evenly spaced flowers in alternating colors along this stretch of sand."



Something about it was so unnatural that I couldn't find beauty in it at all. I was unnerved. The square trees didn't look cultured, they looked eerie.



Look at that face, I was so unnerved!



I believe that it was in this square where we were accosted again. There were young girls with clipboards with a list of names on them, and they held them up to us.
"Sign? Please, it's for the disabled."
I hesitated, but then I stepped forward and picked up the pen. Why not? What could signing my name on a piece of paper hurt?
She moved her thumb to reveal the donation column.
"How much will you be donating?"
Dawning realization.
Except it didn't so much dawn on me as soak me to the bone.
Another con. For sure, none of this money was ever going to go to where we expected it to go. I glanced around. Other girls, of similar age and ethnicity, carrying the same clipboards, collecting money from the tourists for whoever it was that controlled them.
"No."

We left as fast as we could, and I was pissed off again. How had I not seen it coming? How had I missed it twice, two days in a row. Don't talk to strangers. Had I forgotten that rule so easily?



Fortunately, The Mob is always willing to be completely ridiculous, and our run-in with the girls with clipboards was forgotten.



If you walk through the Jarden de Tulieries long enough you get to that famous street, the Champs-Elysees, and everyone says you have to walk along it, so we decided to.



It was the most dull, most commercial street I've ever seen.



There was really no benefit in walking all the way along the street. By the time we got to the end, we were just ready to go back to the hostel. Our legs were tired, and Paris was looking more and more fake by the second.



Sure, we had arrived at the Arc d'Triumph or however you spell it in French, but it was just another fancy monument covered in fiddly bits.



In fact, Paris seemed to entirely be one big monument made of fiddly bits, covering up what it was really made of. On the outside you had these famous landmarks and museums, the insistence in the supremacy of French culture, the overly-organized gardens. But inside, it seemed incredibly false. The whole city was trying to sell something. Maybe it was little string bracelets, or fake donations to a fake charity, or identical Eiffel-tower figurines sold on every street corner, or maybe it was "I hear Paris" condoms, or "French Fashion." Whatever it was, I felt like I was in the Capitol, a land of strange accents where artificial colors mask any sort of... humanity.
Fed up with the plastic city, we headed back toward our hostel in the drizzling rain.

When we got back to the hostel we checked the two rooms and saw that nothing had really changed. There were five people plus me in my room, and there were things on all the beds in The Mob's room.
However, we noticed that the couple that had been sharing a bunk was probably going to share it again, so there was no reason why I couldn't technically switch rooms with all of them, but we all slept in that room, and I could have the bunk they weren't using. Then the group of five could have the room to themselves, The Mob and I could be in the same room, and so on.

So we approached the front desk feeling pretty confident. They had promised we'd be in the same room for the rest of our stay. There was a way people could be moved around to make it work.

"I'm sorry, I don't know anything about that," the woman at the desk said. We explained, but she just shrugged. "Sorry. When the person that just checked in to that room comes back, you can try asking them to switch with you."
No! You promised us that you would take care of this! You gave a verbal guarantee that this would be taken care of!
"Yeah, okay, we'll do that."

We backed away from the counter.
"We could just put your stuff on the bunk they're not using," The Mob suggested. "And if they've got a problem with that, we'll deal with it then."
"Yeah, okay."
I got my belongings and I hoisted them onto the top bunk of the bed The Mob had slept in the night before. I was uneasy, but mostly just grumpy that the hostel hadn't done what they said they would.

We made ourselves a simple dinner, and sat in the dinning room.
"That all you're eating?" the Australians asked. "We found some Euro on the ground and we're going to eat like kings tonight!"
"We're trying to save money," The Mob said. "And it tastes fine like this."
I listened to the Australians, wondering if maybe their lifestyle weren't all it was cracked up to be. Maybe their dinner would be more exciting than ours, but our boring dinner meant we knew what would happen tomorrow, that there would be another boring dinner waiting for us at the end of the next day. They had no idea if that was true. I wasn't sure which was better, uncertainty with peaks of excitement and dips of not being able to get to Barcelona, or the reassuring monotony of spaghetti with garlic powder.

At some point I went into the room to get my computer at something, and the Brits making out on the bottom bunk across from me separated.
"Hey, are you the person whose stuff that is?" they asked.
"Yeah."
"Well, uh, that's his bunk."
"Oh, right, well, we were promised a room together, and we knew you weren't actually using this bunk..."
"Are you traveling with someone?"
"Yeah."
"Well then I feel bad splitting you up... but we did pay for that bed."
"But you're not using it."
"But we paid for it. Don't worry, we'll go to the front desk and get this all figured out."

I held my computer to my chest and returned to the dining room to tell The Mob what was going on.
"This is ridiculous."
"Yeah, well..."
The woman at the front counter came to find us and called us up to deal with the problem, like naughty children being sent to the principal's office.

"Now, I told you I would talk to someone for you and get it sorted out," she said.
"Uh, no you didn't. You told us that we had to talk to someone. And we saw that bunk was empty, so we figured-"
"But it's his bed," the Brits whined. "We paid for two beds!"
"So did we!" The Mob pointed out.
After my first initial frustration, I decided that my arguments weren't going to help this. We didn't need more arguments. And so I folded up my arms, took half a step back, and watched. My teeth were clenched, and I'm sure I didn't look at all accommodating, but internally I had gone from "participant" to "observer" in a vain attempt to keep from getting emotionally caught up in the argument.

Eventually I was going to get somewhere to sleep. I don't even know what the agreement finally was. The Brits were angry with us, and the hostel as an entity didn't like us, and I wanted to curl up and go to bed, but even going to bed felt like it would be a hostile act.

"We should go look for the Moulin Rouge."
"What? Uh, okay."



And so we did.



And I felt better. Just leaving the hostel, getting fresh air, made me feel better about life. Sure, I didn't know where I was sleeping that night, but I knew I had a bed. Sure, I didn't know whether it was in a room with five people I didn't know or approximately six people, one of whom was The Mob and two of whom were the grumpy British couple.

(Eventually I ended up sleeping in the bunk above The Mob, and the couple continued to share a bunk, and I don't really know what officially happened in regards to that. I do know that every time I came into the room I felt like I was intruding on the Brits, not least of all because they were always making out and/or mostly naked when I came in.
Guys. This is not a private hotel room. This is public space. Be considerate of your fellow guests and do not awkwardly snog all the fucking time.)

Anyway, the next pictures I have are of the Eiffel Tower. I think we saw it that night? It was getting late, and we heard it was pretty at night, so...



That's how we discovered that the Eiffel Tower is huger than you think it is.



It is a legitimately amazing feat of engineering, and none of the photos or the little models do it justice. It is so big and it looks so delicate and spindly. You can see every part of the way this thing is put together. It was lovely, and it made it even more painful to see how commercialized it was. Like Paris had been given this incredibly beautiful gift, and had used that gift to make cheap toys and put it on t-shirts, just to make a quick buck (uh, euro).



Anyway, the next day we went out to have early lunch/snack in a particular park, which ended up not being as cool as we expected and all the museums were expensive.



But don't worry, dubious looking Mob!



IKKS believes in you!



We had planned on going to Las Du Falafel for "the best falafel in Paris" but we forgot about one tiny little problem... it was Passover.



Fortunately, there was a place still open nearby. Unfortunately, while the falafel itself was good, the packing of the sandwich left much to be desired. Also, they did a terrible job of remembering that "no tomatoes" means "no tomatoes" and their hot sauce was too hot.



Next stop? The Musee d'Oracy.



Where we found this really long line in the rain.



It was really cold, and really wet, so I think we decided to call it a day.



I mean, no one wanted to stand in that line.

If I recall correctly, Mob, this was when we encountered a street band playing swing music. We hesitated.
"You could swing to this."
"Do you want to?"
We looked around. The sidewalk was crowded, but there was space. The music was good. I adjusted my bag so that it wouldn't fall off or hit anyone when I spun.

And we swing-danced in the rain on a Parisian street corner. A few people watched us, another couple joined in, but mostly people were either listening to the band or just hurrying on their way.

There's a quote by Nietzsche that goes, "and those that danced were thought insane by those who couldn't hear the music."

When the band packed up I gave them a big tip, and we headed to the hostel. I felt giddy. It's funny how one little thing can make your day so much better, or so much worse. Swing dancing in the rain made things so much brighter.



P.S. here is some really cute graffiti from Paris!

Anyway, we got back to the hostel, made spaghetti, and ended up engaged in conversation with the Australians again. I wondered if their big meal had been worth it. And anyway, they would be able to call Australia tomorrow and get themselves back on track. Soon, they'd be on a train or a bus or a plane to Barcelona, and who knew what adventures would they have there. I was jealous.
Um, until one of them started telling us conspiracy theories about how "The Jews control all the money, right?" and "Every Jewish person took September 11, 2001 off work if they worked in the World Trade Center, so they must have known what was going to happen."
When countered with arguments like, "that doesn't make any sense" they were adamant, "I read it in a book somewhere, bro."

The argument fizzled away eventually. They went outside to smoke. We laughed about how silly they were. I wondered why I'd ever found their lifestyle attractive.

Looking back on it, I find the characters "The Australians" to be more pitiful, than anything. Yes, they were being anti-Semitic, but I think it came from a place of "I read it so it must be true" a place where they really didn't understand critical reading in the same way that a college student does.
A place where what they did today was the most important thing of all, and what happened tomorrow didn't matter.
I find myself wondering if they ever even made it to Barcelona.



You know what's more attractive than the wandering young male stereotype? Whatever whovian wrote this on the wall.

Anyway, our last big event planned was a fancy dinner. We had picked out a vegetarian restaurant, "Saveurs Veget'Halles", and we headed there on Tuesday evening to have ourselves some properly fancy food. The meal wasn't even that expensive, it was just more than we normally spent on eating.



And we dressed up in classy dorm clothing for this event, because we are college students and seriously, what did you expect?



The food was really good, too. I mean, look at that vegan chocolate-banana cake! So good!

There is more to the story of what we did in Paris, like how we left Paris, but I think The Mob will agree with me when I say that it's more related to our day in Venice than our last day in Paris.

So I'll write you another entry soon. I'm going to Poland for the weekend, but when I get back, I promise I'll tell you about Venice.



Until then... thanks for reading!