In a city where one can lock eyes for three seconds with a passerby and easily mistake it for love at first sight, my journey was amazingly anti-romantic. After the passionate Riviera and the serene Alps, I was hoping to get my own version of Paris, Je T’aime by returning to the city of lights for eight more, hopefully lovely, days. I was staying in the Latin Quarter (it’s in the movie in the “Quartier Latin” part with Gerard Depardieu and the old couple who were getting a divorce) in a youth hostel called BVJ. Unfortunately, the closest I’ve had to a Parisian encounter was when I was dared by F, my Mexican roommate, to scream “voulez vous-couchez avec moi ce soir” in Italian outside the balcony of the youth hostel. I thought, what the heck, I would be saying it in Italian therefore no one would understand me anyway, and I wanted that Crepes au Nutella she promised me. So I screamed out the balcony, and two seconds later a window across the street opened and a guy came out the balcony and said something in rapid Italian and started blowing kisses. I couldn’t understand what he was saying but my other roommate, N, who was from Naples, was in a fit of laughter. She told me then that the guy said he wouldn’t mind and it would be his pleasure. The next morning we went for breakfast and the same Italian guy was there, said his name was E from Torino and I fortunately had the chance to explain myself.
The lengths I would go for a Nutella crepe.
I don’t know how others do it. Like F, she didn’t come back to the room until 4 am one night because she got lost around Les Halles and met a guy, S, who helped her find her way, after she let him buy her dinner. Apparently he worked just around the corner of the hostel in a bar. She took me to meet him the next day and he turned out to be the owner of the joint and looked like Olivier Martinez. I mean, of all the guys in Paris, she has to get one who guaranteed her free liquors and looked like a model? The injustice.
Another night I went to the bustling night scene at Place St. Michel with two Irish girls from Belfast (they said it was no longer like in Angela’s Ashes but it’s still the most boring place on earth) where they have all these restaurants, bars, gelato vendors, street performers, artists and an entire row of Greek bistros where you can pay to break plates. It was their last night in Paris so we went to get Sangrias in a place where they hang money all over the ceiling. We met two other Irish girls there (one was wearing a T-shirt that said “I wish I spoke French”) and decided that the five of us should go some place to dance. So we went to “Ze Bar” (we thought the name was funny) to dance and ordered the package (2 shots per person) and after getting our tongues burnt by a drink called “license to kill” (the waiter told us later that the mysterious “???” in the content menu was actually Tabasco) we went to the Haagen-Dazs near Notre-Dame and one of the girls, E, was apparently drunk and started asking homeless people on the streets whether or not they have some weeds to spare for her. I told her to stop because these people were cold and they needed the weed for themselves. She shrugged me off and started belting out Spice Girls songs and A Whole New World. We sat by the Notre-Dame side entrance and watched the fire-eaters, the Spanish guitarist, the skaters and the bateaux-mouches sliding along the river Seine. It was one of those moments when you feel like you have to congratulate yourself for being alive.
I went to Versailles with F the next day. It was raining cats and dogs and I swear to whoever’s listening that it was colder than the summits of the Alps. It was not that pretty because they were doing a lot of restoration work here and there. We went back to the hostel and there were two other girls in our room from South Korea. I spent the afternoon showing them around the area, to Notre-Dame, Hotel du Ville (the Mairie), Paris Plages, Centre George Pompidou, Les Halles, Rivoli, Place St. Michel, Sorbonne, Pantheon, and had pasta for dinner in a place where they serve pasta in Chinese take-out containers. They told me to call them Unni because they’re older than me, and we talked about everything from Won Bin movies to the potential for reunification with North Korea.
The morning after I went with F and N to the Church of the Sacred Heart (Sacre-Coeur) and Montmartre to look at the artist district and check out Pigalle where the Moulin Rouge is (and countless other shops they will never allow in Indonesia). Pretty Parisian girls in skimpy costumes were standing along the sidewalks, fawningly inviting male passersby in and glaring condescendingly to female passersby, giving us a what-do-you-think-you’re-doing-here look. I felt like a free cat going to a cat circus watching other members of my species in cages, forced to wear and do silly things. Then we passed the Sexodrome (I cringed at the lack of subtlety in the name) and the Museum of Erotica where in the display they put up this wooden chair that had a hole with a rotating giant tongue in the middle of the seat. And to think that this scene was juxtaposed right next to the Sacred Heart church. Oh well.
1 comment:
Well written article.
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