PARIS/ILE-DE-FRANCE, France: August 11-18, 20001

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This counts separately from my main stay in France that summer because it was the week my mom came to visit Paris with me, and we both played tourists all week long. It was her first time in France, so it was a kind of magic thing. We had decided to save money by staying in my tiny little apartment, which worked out ok really, because how much time do you spend in your hotel room when you're tourist-ing? Unfortunately that week was the hottest I'd yet experienced in France, and my apartment was a sweltering humid sauna compared to the cool night breezes I had been getting (and got again during my last few weeks). Anyway what follows is a day-by-day play-by-play, accompanied by illustrative photos :)

Saturday: We arrived in Paris's Charles-de-Gaulle airport to find that one of my mom's suitcases was missing... Apparently it had not made the quick connection in the O'Hare airport along with the rest of the luggage. We left my address with them, as the airline claimed it would be arriving later that night on the next plane. I was kind of worried, as my apartment is quite far from the airport (about an hour by train) and not very easy to find, but we left to go home, hoping for the best. When we arrived, it was mid-afternoon. I showed Mom around where I lived, and took her to "downtown" Palaiseau to get some groceries to eat while she was in town. We had dinner at the Chinese-Vietnamese restaurant before heading home to collapse in sleep. The jet-lag flying east through like 8 time zones is nuts, and we had a super-early day the next day. I was afraid that the luggage delivery would not wake us, but sleep was our only option given needing to wake up at 5am the next day.

Sunday: Today was our trip to le Mont St Michel, a beautiful old abbey on an island in a bay on the north coast of France. The tides in that region rise up high enough to isolate the abbey from land, but other times they are receded enough to leave miles of tideflats, and a small landbridge for visitors. My Mom and I woke up at 5am, still exhausted, and went into Paris via train to catch the tour bus. We were on the bus for several hours (4 or 5) but could not sleep well as the sun was shining brightly despite all our attempts to ignore it. Also, my mother did not have any clean clothes, nor did I have my camera, as these were all in her missing luggage. This, combined with our collective exhaustion, did not put me in a great mood to be playing the tourist. Plus, the island was extremely crowded. I had not realized how many other people we would be contending with. The narrow streets up to the abbey through the small village surrounding it were jam-packed with other tired tourists. Because of the long trip from Paris to le Mont, we had to return at 3:45pm, meaning we had less than 4 hours at the abbey---too short a time to really see everything in a leisurely enough fashion. Once my mom and I got to the top of the abbey, all I could do was sit and watch the people moving about and taking pictures. I was too tired to even read any of the historial plaques.

Anyway, on the bus ride home, the airline called me about the luggage and tried to make sure we'd be home to receive it that evening. My phone French is really very poor because it's very hard for me to hear what the person is saying, and it's also hard to get across that you are misunderstanding, or taking time to think of a reply over the phone. Plus, I was trying to calculate how long it would take us to get back to the apartment. Ultimately, they delivered it a few hours after we had returned to my apartment and we could finally fall asleep again, which was much-needed.

Monday: The next day we woke up finally rested and mostly not jet-lagged. Today I took my Mom down to the St-Michel area of Paris. We first got a pair of Carte Musees, which are special passes to help you bypass museum lines and get in for free. This helps you avoid all the insane lines which Paris sees in the summertime, when it's so hot out that all the natives have escaped to the mountains or the seaside, but all the tourists from other countries keep the city in business. It's not a joke that Parisiens all leave the city in the summer. They really do.

We went to the Louvre, the biggest museum in the world (a former house of the kings of France); le Cathedrale de Notre Dame; Sainte Chapelle, a beautiful little chapel near Notre Dame; Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris but whose name ironically means "New Bridge" because it was new at the time and the first built of stone. Then we went to the Picasso museum. This was funny because I found out later my mom does not even like Picasso. When I asked her why we'd trekked all over Paris trying to find it (and getting a little lost in the process), she said "So we could say we've been there!" Picasso was a truly strange man...his sculptures are a lot more insanity-inspired than his paintings, too. Afterward, we had dinner at a cafe near St-Michel overlooking the Seine. As I recall, the waiter was very good looking. That night, my mom and I took a cruise on the river Seine to see everything all lit up. It was her first view of the Eiffel Tower, and what a view it was: all lit up and beautiful in the night sky.

Tuesday: Mom's third full day in France dawned. We went to the Rodin Museum in the morning, which I loved. I think Rodin's sculptures are just beautiful, romantic and sensual and perfect. I know in his later years his fame sort of went to his head and he passed on most of the actual sculpting to his assistants, himself only casting the initial scale models or his conceptions. However, the concepts themselves have an elegance and a depth of feeling which I have not felt looking at other statues before (except the Venus de Samothrace in the Louvre). It had been raining in the morning but finally got sunny as noon broke, and the sun broke through the clouds.

In the afternoon, Mom and I took a trip to Giverny (Monet's home) just outside of Paris. It was swelteringly hot that afternoon...over 95 I believe. The house was kind of crowded but the gardens were completely beautiful. Monet had two: one traditional French garden with neat rows full of tall flowering plants, and a Japanese water garden with waterlilies and bridges over quaint, picturesque ponds and beautiful tall willow trees. When our tour was over---a bittersweet moment because it felt good to be in the air-conditioned bus again but it was also sad to leave such a beautiful place---and we had returned to Paris, we made our way to the Eiffel Tower, which we stood under and took pictures. But it was a bit late when we got there and they had stopped allowing people to go to the top. A big disappointing but my mom was a good sport about it. We had dinner at a nice cafe again, before returning home to the apartment in Palaiseau.

Wednesday: Another sweltering summer day in Paris. Temperatures in the mid-90s again... Mom and I wandered the Montmartre area, the tallest natural point in Paris. In other words: closest to the sun! Anyway, the Montmartre area is very quaint and extremely old. It's a part of Paris which really has not changed much in a very long time. Mom and I climbed the stairs to the top of the tower in Sacre Coeur, a gorgeous old cathedral which they still use for services (and for which reason we could not enter the sanctuary, if I recall correctly). It took us 2 hours of huffing and puffing up a tiny spiral staircase to get to the top. I don't think my mother was very happy about it :)

After that we stayed for a while on the lawn of the Sacre Coeur, from which you can see the whole of Paris stretched out before you. It was a gorgeous view. Then we decided to visit the Impressionist museum of Paris, le Musee d'Orsay, housed in a former train station. The building architecture itself is breathtaking, as are its 4 floors of Impressionist works. My mother loves impressionism and so this was the best museum to take her to in Paris. Unfortunately we were a little too rushed at the end because we arrived only 2 hours before closing time. But we got to see most of the actual art. Many of the upstairs rooms are full of Art Deco furniture displays, which I think my mom was less impressed with, so it was not so bad to have to skip them.

Thursday: This was the day I was most looking forward to of my mom's visit. Ever since I'd taken French classes in high school and heard about the chateaux (castles) in the Loire River Valley of France, I had longed to see them in person. Photographs capture the picturesque-ness of them, the architectural grace and opulence, but their grandeur and imposing size is only really clear once you are standing in front of one. Someo f them have as many as 440 rooms (Chambord). All of them once housed French nobility who had so much money they could actually furnish each room of their magnificent chateaux. Most of them are owned by the state now, but some of them are still owned by the original families, and are still occupied.

That morning Mom and I had to rise again at 5am to make it to Paris for our bus ride. This one was a little shorter than the ride to Mont St Michel, but we were doing 3 castles in only 8 hours, or something like that. We only got to spend about an hour and a half at each chateau, enough to take the tour, take some pictures, and get back on the bus to the next one. There are dozens of chateaux along the river valley in central France but they are not exactly right next door to each other...Acres and acres of lush forest and green land separate them. The three that my mom and I visited are Chambord, Cheverny, and Chenonceau. All three were amazing.

Chambord is the one with over 440 rooms. It is stately and grand, and now owned by the state. It is completely unfurnished, so tourists wander through empty rooms imagining what they were like at the height of the French opulent monarchy. The most famous aspect of Chambord is a double spiral staircase that twines around itself. Fascinating. Cheverny is a former hunting lodge. Use of the term lodge does not do the grandeur of this chateau justice. One wing of the castle is still used as a home by the family who owns it. Chenonceau was by far my favorite. It is smaller than the others, but it has a wing which extends out over the river like a bridge halfway to the other side. It's completely beautiful. The chateaux were somewhat crowded, especially on the tours through furnished rooms, which inspire a lot of picture-taking and stalling. But overall the tour was excellent.

When we returned to Paris, I took Mom down the Champs-Elysees toward the Arc de Triomphe. When she found out that there are no elevators to the top of the Arc, she decided she wanted to just take photos from the base :) The Champs-Elysees is always crowded, especially in the summer, full of tourists trying to recreate the romance of this famous Parisien street while ignoring the myriads of other people hustling and bustling around them. We ended the night with some glaces, French ice cream dessert treats, watching the passersby.

Friday: My mom's last day in Paris we decided to take it easy. We'd been running up and down the city all week. My knowledge of the city and where things were kept us from having to do too much cross-trekking on one day but each day we filled to the brim with sights to see. One the last day, we decided to relax and just absorb the Parisien atmosphere. I took Mom down to the site where the Bastille once was, but which is now just a traffic circle opposite the new Opera building. We visited the Monet museu at the opposite end of Paris, which is in a very quaint section of town. My mom's favorite Impressionist is definitely Monet, so this was a very good museum for her. I did not really ever like Impressionism all that much, but I have gotten to like it a lot more since living in Paris. I even have several prints hanging on my walls now!

Afterward, we went to Rue Cler for lunch, a wonderful open market with an excellent crepe truck, some say the best in Paris. Then we went to Les Deux Magots for dessert, a cafe which was often frequented by the artistic elite in Paris, like Hemingway and Sartre. We had strawberries and sugar and cafes, like good little tourists trying to recreate a French atmosphere. Mom wanted to get some chocolate to take home with her so we went on a hunt for an open chocolatier but we did not have any luck, as I was unsure where to find one, and the guidebook was less than helpful on this subject. (Of course, I later found an excellent one on my own, from which I brought back much chocolate for everyone back home.) We left Paris early that day so that my mom could pack up her stuff, as her plane was early the next morning.

Saturday: We woke at 4:15am on Mom's last day, lugged her suitcases up the insanely steep hill to the train station from my apartment, and caught the train to the airport at 5:17am. When I dropped Mom off at the airport, we said our good-byes, and I returned home to sleep. This was before September 11, but even then, non-ticketed passengers were not allowed to go to the gate with their traveling family members, so I had to leave her to wait alone. That's the most depressing part of traveling these days: waiting for the plane all by yourself.

Other interesting notes...I saw a cute guy on the train one day while riding into the city with my mom. Normally I ignored anyone I saw on trains because the language barrier always made it too difficult to tell if they were nice, normal people or predators. But there he was, a cute guy who seemed normal enough, and I was too embarrassed to talk to him because my mom was there :) Speaking of guys, on one of my mom's last days in Paris, we went to some touristy shops so she could get some souvenirs to take back. In one, she was picking out a zip-up sweatshirt and the guy working there was quite a salesman. He was even hitting on me and suggesting I should come back sometime when my mom was not in town. Hah! French men are impossible. Another day, some random person decided to start cussing me out in the subway (Metro) within Paris, in French. I had no clue what he was upset about or what he was even saying. I tried my best to ignore him but it was kind of upsetting that my mom had to see that side of Paris, too, on her vacation.

Speaking of the trains, I rode trains at least twice a day every day I was in France. They have an honor system, where you purchase your tickets and get them punched by a machine when you enter the train. Many people have passes that are good for a month or a week, and so these do not have to be punched. However, the way they enforce this system is to randomly have RATP (Paris transportation authority) officers roam the trains checking tickets. I rode trains every day and never once was asked for my ticket; I never once saw an officer. Then, the week my mom was there, we were asked to show our passes on the train. I had gotten my mom a weekly pass but forgot to get her picture taken, which is supposed to go with it (la Carte Orange). The officer gave me a little trouble---I guess because it could be a ticket which we stole from someone or something---but let us go because I guess my French was halting enough that he felt bad for me. Boy was I relieved. There s a very hefty fine for not having your ticket...

Finally, the most noticeable part of our vacation that week was the heat. We must have been drinking at least 4-5 bottles of water a day. Luckily, the eager-to-capitalize street vendors were all selling ice cold bottles all over Paris, so they were never hard to find. But be forewarned if you ever go to Paris in the summertime: it's hot!

All in all it was a great vacation. After it was over I had exactly 4 weeks remaining until I left France for Philadelphia, my home. I guess it sounds ungrateful, but I couldn't wait for those 4 weeks to pass. I had so much more fun just having my mom around (even though it was tough to share my bed after being used to living alone for so long) that when she left I had to fight off depression all the rest of the weekend due to loneliness. I never did manage to make any real friends here and as many times as I say I am content and finally able to live with myself without needing companionship, every once in a while, it's just too much to be so isolated. Anyway, by the time this gets posted I will be home in Philly and I'm sure, much happier to see everyone than they will be to see me; at any rate, much happier than they could possibly realize. Anyway all in all, it was a really great week and I'm glad I got to take my mom to Paris and show her all the stuff that she's heard about all her life. Till next time!