A Parisian Prelude

Sorry it’s been over a week since my last post. I’ve been caught up in other projects, but now I’ve come to the realization that I’m leaving not too soon from now—in less than two weeks, and I’d need to finish of my pre-departure blog posts. So here it goes.

A Parisian Prelude

Here, I feel like we idealize Europe as a cultural center. It’s filled with excitement and emotion, romance and adventure. This was my first time going to Europe, and I was expecting all of the vibrancy that people talk about in Europe, only to find out that the only thing that I found to be how I imagined was that in France they spoke French and in Italy, they spoke Italian.

As something of a prelude to the much longer trip that I’ll be departing on in two weeks, I want to show how I handled this experience abroad and reflect upon how I see my home state now.

I departed on June 18 and left France for Italy on June 24. In that short week, I found that Paris (the only place we went in France) was not what I expected; however, I grew to like it.

We arrived at the Charles de Gaulle Airport and had to take the Metro to my cousin’s house in Neuilly-sur-Seine. It was one of the RER trains which are supposed to be faster than the regular Metro trains, but was just more creaky and old feeling in my opinion. What struck me first was that everywhere I looked there was graffiti. On the trains; some inside the trains; at the stations; on the buildings lining the corridors—Europe was not how I pictured it at all.

Not that there’s no graffiti in the United States or Los Angeles; however, in my humble suburb and the surrounding bedroom communities we have very little graffiti. Most of it is out of sight and the city maintains the graffiti patrol, which makes sure graffiti is quickly eliminated by water pressure or paint. And it works. Thousand Oaks is a very clean looking city.

The subway was very crowded. We must have been waiting at least 45 minutes at the airport subway station before the train came. By that time, the platform was packed and the coming train followed suit. The subway made its way down to the central station named Châtelet—Les Halles. It was kind of dingy at best and filthy at worst. We then took another line to get to my cousin’s place. The entire journey took almost two hours including waiting time. We were tired and jetlagged and from the Pont Neuilly station we had a 10-minute walk to her house.

She said she lived on the first floor, but forgetting how Europe labels the ground floor “0,” making our second floor their first floor, we found our way onto their rez-de-chausée and knocked on to their downstairs neighbor’s door (who we were told later was a crank). Only after we found the intercom and messaged them did we find that they lived on the floor above the ground floor. My cousin came down with a “didn’t you know?!” face and brought us up to her floor on an elevator fit for two-and-a-half moderately sized people.

Such was my first day.

Over the next five days, we moseyed our way around Paris and I grew to like it. The tourist areas had less graffiti and I got used to the big-city feel (crowdedness) of the subway. As soon as I got used to Paris, though, we were off to Italy—and a whole different experience.