I wrote this in 2006, and just found it in an inbox I’m about to lose because I’ve graduated.
Now I want to share it, despite its imperfections, because I have not the succinctness of James Oppenheim, who wrote:
O Gazing, how the heart is lost/ In the Deepest City in the World.
Enjoy.
The Middle-Aged Colossus: A Tour From the Inside In
The fifty-fourth floor. Past the massive elevator column are white-tiled corridors lit by glaring fluorescent ceiling bulbs and leading to dozens of blank, locked doors. A large placard near the elevator bank lists numbers and names: A bevy of self-named law offices and private consultants and the intriguingly named World Youth Peace Summit. From the side of the doors exposed to the labyrinthine hallways, though, they all look identical, with no visible décor or distinguishing technicalities. These could be the innards of any industrial office complex in any urban high-rise. But it is a floor of the Empire State Building, the tower that marks the center of the cultural capital of the world.
Each morning in my adopted New York City, I join the hundreds of commuters-on-foot who spend their weekdays in one of these tiny offices, suspended on a floor somewhere between heaven and earth. Though I am just a college student fortunate enough to have a school housed in one of America’s most conspicuous landmarks, I enjoy the business-as-usual crush of professionals in the Lobby over lunch and during the 9 am rush hour. But once they leave the street level, where do these people go? They dissolve like pebbles tossed into a pond, lost in the largeness of the structure.
When the steel behemoth of a building was technically opened in 1931, critics of the 102 stories of post-Depression audacity claimed that it would never fill. True to prediction for a while, the owners of the building were compelled to illuminate floors of the building at random to simulate the tenants who failed to materialize. “The Empty State Building” became the structure’s snide but appropriate epithet.
Today nobody worries about how much space the Empire State Building will lease each year. Once largely deserted, now every public place in the building is flush with tourists, courtesy of the teeming epicenter of commercialism and culture that has bubbled up around it. Yet the core of the core, the raison d‘etre of this gargantuan structure, its technical office space remains surprisingly nondescript and full of vacancies on nearly every floor.
There are exceptions, of course—a quick elevator ride to floor 12 will transport you into a series of well-lit and attractive showrooms, including Scent-Sations, which touts “Lingerie for Your Bed.” Next, find the visual smorgasbord that is Ellie Fine Hats and Accessories, where the clerks must insist that people do actually purchase pieces that are, in a word, the Empire State Buildings of headwear. But these vivid and well-dressed office spaces are showpieces only, and rarities among the dozens of floors. Austere, relative emptiness is the norm.
What, besides its massive and mirifical exterior, sets the Empire State Building apart from any of the other office high-rises in Manhattan that vie with each other to block out the most sunlight? It is the self-styled Eighth Wonder of the World and certainly markets more socks, sporting goods and “bed lingerie” than the other seven Wonders combined. But is that alone right enough to declare itself king of the towers with little inside, a 102-story hollowed-out straw? A cavernous colossus of a bygone era? A space-consuming and misshapen Art Deco Faberge egg, composed entirely of exterior, with nothing worth seeing inside?
Or maybe the building succeeds as the symbol of a city in more than superficial, stamp-it-on-a-postcard ways. New York’s infrastructure is composed of a chance conglomeration of small businesses and tenacious entrepreneurs. The inner workings of the colossus, whether speaking of the building or the city it stands for, are never as aesthetically pleasing or exclusive or hi-tech as we imagine. The structure is composed of people—lawyers and consultants and hosiery retailers—working alongside one another and sharing corridors.
Simple as the idea seems, it has helped me to adjust to a city that, from the outside, seems as imposing as the skyscraper that has become its icon. While sometimes the building can look blank and vacant even amid the crowds, further inspection reveals the Jewish women who close Ellie Fine Hats early for the Sabbath, and the aging storeowner next door who holds an ongoing sample sale of items that must have been found in someone’s garage. There is no dense and meaningful center of the city, only the seemingly isolated and spare fragments of personality.
The Empire State building likely will never fill up; like the entire city, it was built too large for practical use, a testament to itself more than to the individuals who surround and sustain it. But within, hidden in the 102 levels of doors and corridors, there is space that they can take and transform, to style a pastel gallery of hats or just to assimilate to the surroundings behind another unmarked door. The city is not as young as it used to be, and does not sparkle on the inside like it does from without. But there is potential for transformation still, and there is always room for lease.
June 5th, 2009 in
Albania,
Travel Journal |
Enter your password to view comments
I’m happy to report that Italy too exists, and that the sun does rise there, even at ungodly hours of the morning. After a breakfast featuring many cups of strong espresso and the now ubiquitous bread and cheese, the hotel shuttle tool us back from whence we came, past ancient ruins of a Roman town jutting nonchalantly out of the turf.
The sweet lady who checked us in had less faith even than we did that our bags would make a quick appearance in Tirana. None of us were disappointed. After Eri’s father Skender, an airport fireman, proudly greeted us at the airport with a private shuttle bus from plane to baggage claim, we were weklcomed to Albania with an empty conveyor belt. Worse, the 1-20 documents that Eri needed for her visa interview on Tuesday were in Matt’s suitcase. So Eri was off to make phone calls to the Embassy in Tirana, her father returned to the airport to finish his 24-hour shift, and the rest of us had the misfortune of being left alone at the family beach house in the coast town of Durres.
A few of us decided to adopt new aliases for our stay in Albania out of whim and necessity. I became Shpresa, the direct translation of Hope, and Kari, whose name apparently means in Albanian what schmok means in Yiddish, bound us by a thousand oaths to call her Karine. And so with new names and fresh faces, we began the second leg of our trip: our stay in Albania.
***
The above stars represent a delicious homemade lunch and a long, long nap. Eri’s grandma rebuked us in stern Albanian every time we left her sight to explore the wilds of sleepy, beachfront Durres. But we managed to sneak out nonetheless and visit a nearby cafe to eat a sumptuous dinner served by a waiter who muttered something like “bofne,” every time he left us with a new plate of food. “That either means ‘you’re welcome,’ or ’screw you,’” Matt decided. (It turned out to be an abbreviation of te bofte mire, or bon appetit.)
Later that night, after a few small errands, we sat on a back balcony overlooking the crumbling wilderness of Albania, with our chairs in a row like five old men. We made casual observations and watched the world’s only cute slug reaching his antennas out into the air and exploring the evening. No more traveling for a few days, and the past worries of papers and deadlines already a seeming distant memory. This is living.
There is no good way to be an American foreigner as far as language is concerned.
I try assiduously to greet customs officials, shopkeepers, and airline workers in their native language and waste valuable time and precious goodwill when they respond in the same tongue, then must translate their remarks in English as I stand in inane silence. Kari makes wild and descriptive hand gestures that draw veritable pictures in the air while speaking an oddly accented form of English.
Matt, on the other hand, speaks his native tongue unapologetically, with a broader American accent than usual, pointing when necessary, and condescening only to learn the names of food in their proper dialect. And Rachel attempts foreign words in gentle tones that only bats and rodents can hear, accompanied by a winsome smile that goes much further.
Of all of us, I think Matt is best understood.
We aren’t by any means the most obnoxious Americans we have comes across, but we seldom get mistaken for natives. I have resolved to become multiligual; until then, I remain undecided on the question of language.
The minute we saw that this particular Alitalia flight had a 69 percent chance of being on time, we should have gotten worried. But care doesn’t really have a place on this trip; as Mark Twain said, “we are beyond its jurisdiction.”
Sure enough, the first delay on our flight from Munich pushed departure back an hour and twenty minutes, obliterating any hope of making our 50-minute connection in Rome. Nothing for it but to wait…and wait…and wait.
The poor gate representative from AirFrance (which, we learned, had recently purchased Alitalia after the airline declared bankruptcy, for reasons that will become increasingly apparent) did his best to fend off a horde of perturbed Italians with food vouchers and water, but had no real information for people, say, who had to make a connection in Rome to Milan, change airports in Milan (!!!) connect to Tirana, and who hoped to be greeted by their luggage on arrival. Rachel said it and I agree: the man deserved a significant raise.
Vouchers at least bought Bavarian veal sausages and soft pretzels, the best German food I’ve had so far.
Plenty of time for people watching, as rain and lightning began to pour and dart from the heavens. All of it made me an even greater believer in the American custom of supportive undergarments and more dubious about the Italian reputation for taste and high fashion than I already was.
Don’t think for a minute, though, that they don’t give their appearance serious thought, though: I’ve never seen so many tanned and highlighted men all in one place. I told Eri that I found some of the ensembles a bit tacky, and she retorted that Italians were at least very good-looking. To that I say…touché.
To those of you attempting to follow along, we were still stuck in Munich at this point, as the poor man at the counter looked more and more worried each time he announced further delays in German, Italian, and English. His native language was French, and whatever they paid him, it wasn’t enough.
But after our plane apparently made several wide circles above the earth and parked in a hangar apparently in Frankfurt, tey sent a shuttle for us and we were on our way to Rome. The short flight taught us two valuable lessons: we are not the only ones butchering other languages, and pregaming plane rides is a bad idea.
We thought the plane might get turned back or hastily landed when a rowdy bunch of drunkards a row or two ahead of us would not surrender to the copilot the bottle of vodka they had brought on board. But our surprsed laughter drowned out their rowdy racket when heard a voice over the speaker calmly announce in English that we were now at an altitude where it was safe to use electric razors and non-digital recorders. How nice.
Not enough has been written, for whatever reason, about the view from airplane windows. Our course took us past what I think were the Alps, craggy and knuckled, rising up seemingly to almost tought the plane. A powder of snow formed the faces of ghosts in their sides. They passed out of sight in 20 minuted, but it was an awesome view.
Now we were descending. Imagine our plight then, surrounded by anxious people all yearning for sympathy, a flight out of Milan, and a free hotel stay in the meantime. And all we wanted to do was get taken care of first. In spite of the unChristian way we gave that plane the bum’s rush, positioned ourselves strategically at the door of our shuttle bus, and surrounded the service counter strategically at five points so as to find an early in, God saw fit to grant us as many demands as it occurred to us to make.
A hotel room in Rome (!) Free dinner, and free breakfast in the morning (!!) A direct flight to Tirana (!!!) Bags forwarded on, to meet us at the airport (!!!!) I feel certain that the man who helped us had never seen so many beaming faces at his desk.
Then were were on a bus into Rome and to the Airport Palace Hotel. Consider for a moment: that morning in Munich at the Easy Palace Hotel, where we were delighted to find that the sheets looked clean, and now being served wine and dinner by Italian waiters at the Airport Palace, where the swinging sign out front carried four stars.
Well. The difference was not quite as great as I first imagines. The pasta was a little al dente, as were the beds; the towels were a good size, but of a consistency between that of a coffee filter and a dishcloth. Italians as a people must not get very wet.
But forgive me. To complain would be like shooting this gift horse in the mouth, considering our evening plans previously had been contingent on whether the seats at our gate in Milan had armrests.
And seeing Eri’s excitement when she flipped on the TV and started watching American B movies dubbed in Italian was alone worth the price of my plane ticket. Buona sera!
I never quite believe in the existence of a place or a thing until I’ve seen it myself and personally verified its existence. This makes my actual world very small compared with the universe I have in theory. But like Descartes, I’m pleased enough to start with the fact that I exist, and move slowly on from there.
So, Paris has finally become a reality to me on this trip, and so has Germany. I have a faceto put with the name, so to speak. Except for the small, historic villafe of Bamberg, Germany, where Manuel took us after another leisurely German breakfast. I walked the cobblestones and snapped pictures of the sloping red-tiled roofs, all right, but the whole outfit was so darn cute that I’m not fully convinced the villagers didn’t pack the whole thing up, fold it down, and shut it off for the night after we left.
Prior to our stop in Bamberg, Manuel took us to a grocery store, where we quickly emptied the inventory of chocolate, enough to fill several very heavy insulated bags and nearly exasperate poor Manuel. These bags will be our constant companions, along with our other luggage, until we return to the states. Hmmm.
In Bamberg, we saw the brewery where they make the hamlike Schwenkerla, a castlesque church on a hillside that treated us to a riot of bells a la the Sound of Music, and an Apotheke with a brightly illustrated sign warning against the Schweinegrippe (swine flu.) (I follow the development of the swine flu very closely from country to country, for personal entertainment reasons of my own. More about this hence.)
Anyway, our time in Bamberg was far too short, then off we were to Munich, via Nuremberg, by train. As hours of green countryside rolled by, interspersed with clustered villages, each with an ancient steeple at the center, I believed in Germany.
We arrived in Munich in the early evening. Our hotel went by the name of the Easy Palace, and offered bunkbeds in a private room and little else. Our room had no separte bathroom, and the WC down the hall was sans a shower stall.
(Things were not as unfortunate as they seemed, though: we sent Eri on shower reconaissance to the floors above us, and she reported that all the showers were out of order. Matt, playing the part of two spies to Eri’s ten, did his own looking and returned a much better report: two roomsful of showers on the third floor alone. We pressed Eri further on her account and she persisted: all the shower doors, she said, were labeled “Bad.” Our German was even worse than our French but we tried to keep straight faces as we conveyed to poor Eri that bad was the German word for bath.)
Enough of the hostel; Munich stretched before us, and we were starving. We were under strict orders from my former professor and boss, Dr. Puffert, to visit a biergarten (I preface with this for fear a reader miught accuse our group of dissipation.)
This proved to much easier ordered than accomplished. I gather that Germans are very serious about their food and their beer, and observe separate institutions for each. Thus, we walked for close on two hours, through the beautiful Marienplatz and past a good number of what looked like cathedrals-turned-shopping malls before finding a cute place with outdoor seating that condescended to serve us both solids and liquids.
Jagerbraten, my dish, reminded me of Thanksgiving on a plate. The bread dumplings tasted like turkey stuffing, and roast pork slices were savory and filling with mushroom gravy. Kari said it reminded her of the fare at a Norwegian nursing home. This was accompanied by a dark local beer which hit my empty stomach and rushed straight straight to my head. I found no further fault with the food, with Munich, or with anything else that night.
Rachel offered to take a picture of us toasting (”Prost!”) and digging into our gravy-soaked food. We told her to count to three in German before snapping the shot. She counted off obligingly: “Eine, Schweine, Drei…”
Rachel is incredible sweet and wonderful. Amid our helpless laughter, we scarcely had the heart to tell her that she had said, roughly,
One, pig, three.”
And with this Zen koan-like pronouncement, I will leave you.
Those dreary and unexpectedly tedious vacation days merely build appreciation for the rich and good ones. Rachel and I were gently awoken at noon to a delightful repast of cappuino, rolls, sliced cheese, and salami. Take note: in Paris, delicate pastries, pain au chocolat, and cafe creme; in Germany, bread and cheese and meat. Men are from Mars…
Daylight presnted the outside delights of Manuel’s family home-a fountain in a pond of gleaming goldfish, a wilderness of leafy plants, and a sunny swimming pool where Matt took the first chilly dip of the year. Then the travails of the day began.
Eri’s father in Albania wanted us to purchase a used car in Germany, which we could drive at our leisure the 24 or so hours to tirana, Albania. What with the Albanian reputation for thievery, vandalism, and swindle (justly deserved, says Eri) we thought to embroider the truth a bit and tell dealers we were destined for Croatia or Montenegro. All well and good, but for a new government policy acting as a stimulus to German automakers that offers car owners 2500 Euro to bring their old cars to junkyards and have them crushed. Our upper price range was 2400 Euro, so dealers were better off throwing their junkiest cars away than they were selling them to us.
So commenced a day of weary searching the Web in search of the holy grail: a big car, manufactuired after 1997, with low mileage and basic good looks (specifications all from Eri’s dad). After two dozen phone calls, turning up the useful point of interest that most used car sellers were on vacation until Friday, we set off to Nuremberg to view one promising car in person.
An interesting proposition: among us, only Manuel (graciously spending his day assisting us instead of planning his own wedding in early June) spoke any German, and only Eri knew precisely what her father wanted in his cheap-as-free dream car.
By a stroke of miraculous luck, both Eri and the dealer spoke fluent Italisn. And so commenced the most spirited haggling for the ugliest, most beat-up car I have ever seen. She called him “little thief” (l’adrino), which she convinced us is an Italian term of endearment; he offered new hubcaps that didn’t fit, cautioned us to drive fast so the battery wouldn’t stall, and expressed great surprise when the car alarm barked uncontrollably everytime someone started the engine. The onlz actual words I understood were his exasperated “mein Gott” when Eri asked him to knowck off another 200 Euro and throw in a new battery.
For most of this shoptalk, I waited in Manuel’s car with Kari and Rachel, hidden for dear we would look too earger, I guess, or betray by our countenances that we were indeed planning to travel to the rightly maligned nation of Albania.
This car time was not all wasted: were were able, unseen, to express our enthusiasm for the pedestrian, who though tanned and looking good for middle age, pushed his luck a bit far with a checked shirt that he wore open to the bas of his rib cage, where he tied the ends together in front. You know, the way my mom wouldn’t let me wear my shirt in the early 1990s. This left a good six inches of bronzed stomach visible to the world above his low-rider jeans. We nicknamed him “Abs of Steel.”
As you might have guessed, we didn’t take the car. This left us with a plurality of bad options for our trip down the coast to Albania. Rental cars were too expensive and would make the trip too shortö trains would set us back about 100 Euro per countrz, or about 140 US Dollars, and airplanes wouldn’t allow us to experience the Balkan coast. And any of these choices would sadden Eri’s dad, who was waiting for us to drive up in a shiny newminivan.
Sacrifices must be made. We booked the cheapest flight from Munich to Tirana, which ran 17 hours including an hour layover in Rome and an 11 hour overnight stop in Milan.
As a consolation prize, we booked a night in Munich, the historical town known for a number of things including its status as birthplac of the Nazi party and appearance in the Eric Bana movie Munich.
Dinner made everything all betterÖ a sumptuous feast of the best barbecue I’ve ever had, Spargel (white asparagus) Salat, and a very German mixed concoction: wheat beer mixed with banana juice. We also tried beer mixed with Coke, and Schwenlerla, a local brew that our hosts told us tasted like ham.
We prayed that this we simply a terrible German-to-English translation, but sure enough, the drink did have a similar dark smoky flavor. We capped off the night with a stroll through the incredibly cute village of Eggolsheim, and as we walked giggling down the street, I had to concur with Kari: I don’t know what they put in that banana juice, but it sure was strong.
We are breaking all the rules of proper acclimation, and we’re beginning to feel it. We capped off last night–after waking up from a luxuriant early evening nap–with espresso and cigars a Harmonie Cafe on Magenta Boulevard. When we later tried to bed down for the night (cozily, 3 girls in a queen bed, one in a twin, and Matt in another twin) none of us could really drift off, and we woke up the next morning just a little sore and out of sorts.
Our last day in Paris! Before getting down to the brass tacks of traveling, most of us rode the Metro out to Pont Neuf, where we ate overpriced croissants and coffee with a view of the tower where Marie Antoinette was once imprisoned before she made the acquaintance of Madame la Guillotine.
Trop court! And then back to find and load the rental car that would carry us for the 12-hour drive from Paris to a village near Nuremberg, Germany.
***************************************************************
“Welcome to the land of bad haircuts,” Eri said with a mournful look as we piled out of the car at a Burger King (!!!) just over the German border. Thanks to the European Union and the Shengin Agreement, border crossing in Western Europe is less stringent than your average US tollbooth.
Eri did have a point: although Germans are masters of efficiency, precision, and design, they have not yet retired the mullet. Apparently, the French knack with hair gel and mousse is all you need to really impress this group of tourists.
It was sad leaving behind the now-familiar French language for mysterious, gutteral German. We quickly learned that “Ausfahrt” meant exit, and that “bitte” mean pardon or please, and that we’d happily keep to sign language for the rest of our communication needs.
But our firs experience with Germans left a good taste in our mouths (more than I can say for the German Burger King menu, which featured “hot muffins” that were apparently chocolate with bits of chili peppers baked in). When Matt when up to the BK register to ask for directions to Nuremberg, he was soon surrounded like Jesus during the Sermon on the Mount as patrons, employees, and children crowded around to listen and offer their assistance. One family seemed delighted to learn that we’d both be traveling in the same direction, so they led us to the highway and set us on our way.
All five of us have spacious bladders and high tolerance for the discomfort of travel, so the next seven hours was a blur as the Autobahn whizzed past us at 180 km an hour (best not to convert to miles if you are a parent of mine). It was 1am when we finally pulled in to the home of another grad, Manuel, in the small town of Eggolsheim.
He and his family welcomed us into their incredible modern home with graciousness and style, letting us sleep late and leaving German chocolate bars on our ready-made beds. We may never want to leave…which is good, because to use a reality show metaphor, we just hit our first roadblock.
So apparently the conventional wisdom about jet lag has a germ or two of truth about it. In spite of a bed that creaked in misery every time I exhaled too forcefully, everyone slept like the dead until mid-morning. We awoke to a dilemma: should we remain in our lodging for a costly (to us) 25 Euro each, or try to find a cheaper place? Kari, who is skilled in the art of blandishment, descnded to negotiate with the manager and got him to knock 5 Euro each off the price, unauthorized.
But Matt, who is skilled in the art of everything, found a hotel down the road with cheaper rates and a private room, so we rolled on out anyhow. Our new lodging, the Hotel de Nevers, has massive double windows, a friendlzy concierge, and a free-roaming black cat who answers improbably to “Mike.”
Matt screwed up his courage to ask the question in all of our minds: was the town of Nevers particularly known for its cats? The answer is immaterial; in my heart, I think yes.
We have now been in France long enough to start boldly making the kind of cultural faux pas that are expected of Americans. Nothing too embarrassing has happened yet, but later in the day when we returned to the hotel with yet more bread, cheese, and wine, Kari bravely asked the concierge where to find “la cousine.” After a few perplexed looks and some sign language, he led her off to find knives and a corkscrew. Meanwhile, the man in front of us at the counter turned around, and, smiling broadly, told me in French that we had asked to see the man´s female cousin, not his kitchen. Cést la vie; anyhow, I think we made that guy’s day.
I’m getting bolder with my French by inches; I had two years from an exceptional teacher in high school (and retain a good deal, Mrs. Hill!) and can read most anything and understand perhaps a third of all I hear. But I have a crippling fear of speaking it in front of the sophisticated French, who observe me stumbling along red-faced and switch condescendingly to English. Peut-etre demain je serai plus confident. Peut-etre.
Our big stop today was the Louvre, which defies hyperbole to describe. We walked there at a French pace, first meeting Chris and James again for expensive but exquisite espresso,then meandering the rustic streets, stopping to photograph every door and fountain.
It was 4pm when we finally arrived, which was no doubt a blessing, because the museum closed at 6 and was roughly the size of the state of Rhode Island, with far more points of interest. Matt, Kari, and Eri bore the childlike excitement of Rachel and I as we trawled the Italian gallery, expressing sympathy for the other fine paintings that had the misfortune to get stuck in the same room as that Prima Donna, the Mona Lisa. We posed victoriously with that famous Delacroix painting of the French Revolution, and drank in the painted ceilings so deeply that we nigh fell over.
Did you know they have window seats at the Louvre, which look over the palatial courtyard, vineyard, and gardens? I’m fairly certain they will have a version of the Louvre in heaven–and I’ll be interested to note if the statues in it are wearing fewer clothes, or more.
Dear Amis et Famille:
As I write this, we are in a hostel making a little midnight snack of wine, bread, cheese, and chocolate, the combination of which represents a French tradition we’ve been all too pleased to adopt. We haven’t adopted all French customs, however (notably omitting the longstanding tradition of speaking French), but I think that by now none of us would object to getting our French citizenship and living here forever.
Our flight landed early in the morning, and knowing that our hotel would not open until noon, we decided to take the French metro into what Eri called “midtown Paris.” 45 minutes later, having successfully purchased tickets and boarded a train, we felt like world conquerors. On the downside, any street cred we thought we had ( Eri, at a cafe: “Dollars? Do you take dollars?) was officially destroyed.
Breakfast was two crusty baguettes and a massive block of Emmental Swiss cheese. As we stopped for cafe creme at a sidewalk cafe, we learnd that while business owners rarely could assist us in English, they were invariably helpful for correcting our bad grammar and pronunciation as we stumbled along in French. For the record, “l’addition, s’il vous plait” means “check, please!”
After some serious walking, we reached our hotel, by this time approaching our 36th hour without sleep. 20 seconds into the best nap of our lives, old friends showed up at our door: another fellow grad and francophile, Chris, a King’s junior, James, and one of our favorite professors, Dr. Bleattler. They obligingly led us on a tour of the city as we stumbled, bleary-eyed, past spectacular monuments and through ancient neighborhoods.
I would ask, “when was that built?” at every stop, just for the mind-blowing effect of speaking of history not in terms of centuries, but in Millenia. Highlights were a monument to the Bastille, a lovely old Paris neighborhood called the Maie, and of course Notre Dame. Apparently a few Euro can take you as far as the second turret, but you need an in with the bent old bellringer to get any further.
But the gem of the afternoon, at least for me, was Place des Vosges, with a small French flag hanging from a windoaw to indicate the location of Victor Hugo’s lifetime home. As Eri would say, Oh my heart!
Overwhelmed by emotion at the sight, and perhaps experiencing a skosch of jetlag, we passed out on the grass in a nearby park, surrounded by picknickers, lanscape painters, and people on benches reading actual books. So very French!
Mercifully, we decided to relent and commit the unpardonable sin–napping during the day while trying to adjust to a time change. Squeaky top bunks and questionable bedding have never felt so good. But it doesn’t get dark until 10pm in France–quelle schwete!–so at 9 we ventured out once more.
When you exit the Trocadero metro stop, you see the massive Museum of the City, itself an impressive sight. But round the corner and…! I think the collective gasp we let out created a small local breeze. There in all its glory against the dusky sky was the Eiffel Tower, huger and morze lovely than movies and photographs can show. A gentle fall of night rain only perfected the experience.
And every hour, a brilliant light show made the tower sparkle wildly against the night. I think we all envied Matt and Kari, our couple in residence. The romance of it all was simply too good to waste.
I could go on about our adventures returning to the metro through a haunted forest, but I’ll take pity and end here. Bon Soir!
