An American tour in Paris

Why do tourists humiliate themselves? Here comes an American-run tour, thirty strong, stopping and queuing for ice cream. Against the fashionable Parisian backdrop of women in easy backless summer blouses they've been decked out one and all in reflective yellow vests like a kindergarten class on a roadworks excursion.

The Paris Five

At the foot of the Pont Saint-Louis on the Isle Saint-Louis, across from the red awnings of La Brasserie de l'Isle Saint-Louis and beside the red-awninged cafe Le Flore en l'Ile, overlooking the Seine and overlooked by the Cathédrale de Notre Dame, at perhaps the most charming, most Parisian spot in all of Paris, I was arrested by five young men in their bare twenties—sporting van Dykes and waistbands that fell below underpants elastics—on flute, clarinet, guitar, two-piece drum kit and double bass, jamming in the long summer light on "Memories of my Father" like a seasoned jazz quintet.

Shakespeare and Co.

Books for sale plaster the walls of the most famous bookstore in Paris, Shakespeare and Co., a running maze of ceiling-high bookcases that tower to the ancient rafters in perpetual overflow in a two-storey, one-time monastery.

Upstairs is a reading room where the books are not for sale. Having been acquired as collections, often as estates, many are old and out of print.

In the corners are worn and cracked leather seats with collapsed cushions and shredded arms from the claws of the resident cat, and in one of them is me, reading passages from the out-of-print Selected Prose by Henry Miller amid the sparkling motes of morning light.

The sole window in the reading room is open to the fresh air and overlooks a small cobblestone path below that trickles out through a narrow garden and into the traffic of the Quai de Montebello. Beyond is the Seine, above it Notre Dame.

An old portable typewriter, maybe a Remington or a Royal, sits in front of the window atop a table where a young woman, consumed, captive to her notebook, scratches pencil scribbles into the morning quiet.

And suddenly a swarm of tourists who have heard of Shakespeare and Co. squall up the stairs and into the room, wheeling around us and clicking like chattering birds. They snap photos despite the signs requesting they not and pose in front of books they don't touch, spewing loud, vapid commentary and filling their iPhones with images of what their lives are not so they can be admired by those at home.

I am practically pushed aside by a vulgar American so she can pet the cat—"hey, kirty kirty!"—before she turns to her fat friends and yells "time-check! How are we doing for time? We need to make up ten minutes!" In waves they come, as they are drip-fed into the cramped aisles from their queue of uncouth on the cobblestones outside.

Then they clatter back down the narrow stairs and are gone. As the tempest clears and quiet returns, emerging at the foot of the bookcases across from me is a boy of nine or so sitting in an old wooden folding chair, unperturbed amidst the whirlwind, absorbed in a story.

There is hope for humanity yet.

The city of sorrows and living

Paris. It's one of the few places in the world I return to. This is my fourth time.

I love Paris. People ask me why, but it's for personal reasons that would be meaningless to anyone else. It was here where I had my heart, for the first time, truly broken. I was stood up on the Pont des Arts, the romantic pedestrian bridge which today is literally strained by that recent and tawdry phenomenon of love-locks. I sat in the Place des Vosges, sobbing a spectacle as I wrote a goodbye letter to the girl I loved.

Paris was cold. It was February and there was fog along the Seine. I was 26, I wore a second-hand woollen trench coat that the moths had started on, a narrow pin-stripe suit I found at the Salvation Army, and a new fedora I'd splashed out on.

My room was a crooked and peeling late night desperation at the top of five flights of dark, winding stairs. I was barked out of it in the morning in a language I commanded only in fragments, for using the shower, I think, without paying the extra francs.

I checked into the hostel on Rue des Bernardins under an assumed name instead and met a Dane who gave me ten francs on my last day there because I hadn't eaten in two days. I devoured bread and cheese gratefully, and cured it to something concrete with liquid yoghurt.

I played chess in the Jardins des Luxembourg. I eschewed the Eiffel Tower and wandered the lanes of the Quartier Latin. I shared strawberries with a stranger on a park bench and was invited to her house for coffee, where she practised her English discussing the recent election of a socialist parliament in France.

Today the thing I look forward to the most is tomorrow—breakfast of croissant, baguette, cafe au lait and jus d'orange at a table I shall own for hours.

It is the living here. The French live for now and eternity. They embrace artists, musicians and writers. What is the point of struggling every day like a rat treading water so you can one day enjoy your life? It is already here! And struggles will always come with it.

Parisian Cinemas

One of the things I really like about Paris is the number of little cinemas, mostly in the Latin Quarter, which play classic films.  Just around the corner from our hotel were playing two films by Sergio Leone, one of my favourite directors: the well-known Clint Eastwood flick “For a Few Dollars More,” and the not-so-well-known “A Fistful of Dynamite” (a.k.a. “Duck, You Sucker,” and a few other confusing titles).

It was very cool to immerse myself in a late screening of “Dollars” on the big screen.  Another cinema was playing several Hitchcock films.  In 1998, I came across one filmhouse which had been playing Casablanca continuously for many years, but I wasn’t able to find it this time.

Paris

Mai Li and I spent the final week of my trip in Paris, where it was averaging 8° or 9° Celsius.  It seems such a short time since I was being scorched by the 40°C Andalusian sun.

We kept warm with plenty of walking.  Paris is made for it.  The famed city planner Baron Haussman laid out broad boulevardes in the 19th century, though not for the enjoyment by the pedestrian masses but rather to suppress them; the narrow medieval bottlenecks they replaced prevented soldiers from effectively responding to the riots which led to the French Revolution.

The Promenade Plantée, a garden footpath slicing through the Bastille elevated on arches, was originally a railway after Napoleon III approved a right of way through the city.  Today it is a favourite spot for locals to jog or stroll.  We walked half of its four-kilometre length.

Another transformed right of way is the Canal Saint-Martin, controlled by a series of locks and once a highway for transporting food and other goods on barges.  It is now used for tourist boats.  A long stretch of it has been enclosed and covered with gardens, and a film on the history of the canal is projected onto the brick walls of the tunnel from the boat.  This and one or two locks are the most interesting; the rest of the two-and-a-half hour trip is frankly a little boring.

Switzerland: Lucerne, Interlaken; Italy: Tuscany, Rome; Paris

Okay, just a quick catch-up on Switzerland: we spent three days in Lucerne, which they say is everything Switzerland has to offer rolled up into one little easily navigated city. The old cobbled streets are pedestrian only. The price of, well, everything is expensive, except for accommodation, which was one of our cheapest hotels yet. Perhaps it was because it was not yet tourist season, though the weather was beautiful, albeit extraordinary for that time of year. It was as if it was summer.

Next stop was Interlaken, where we spent two days and which we used as a jumping off point for Jungfraujoch, an alpine peak to which a 19th century train line climbs. The view was impressive.

From there we went to Florence, as noted below, at which we didn't realise we were arriving on Liberation Day in Italy, 25th of April, a Thursday before the Tuesday May Day holiday, meaning that all of Italy took the Friday and Monday off work and went to Florence. And Rome, but more on that later. The crowds drove us to spend the following day out of town in San Gimignano, a hilltop town about an hour away. It once featured 75 towers, like medieval skyscrapers, but battles with Florence, the plague and time have whittled them down to about 15. Nevertheless, the city is unique among the Tuscan hilltowns for the towers.

Then, Orvieto, and the most spectacular cathedral I've ever seen. And I've seen a lot on this trip. The detail and craftsmanship to the tiniest detail is exquisite, and the variety of materials includes gold leaf and inlaid stone. We had no idea there was even a cathedral here, and when I first came across it, I just gawped and said, "Wow."

We then went to a little Etruscan-medieval hilltop town called Civita di Bagnoregio, known as the dying city because the clay hill on which it is built is slowly crumbling into the valley below, taking the buildings with it. Population: 14. Fourteen. Oh, and one dog, named Barillo.

And then there was Rome. Arriving the night before May Day and still having been too dense to figure out we should book a hotel before we get there, we were greeted with wide eyes by the tourist bureau when we asked if they could find us a room for the night. They said that people had been booking hotels in Naples—two hours away—to stay in Rome. The bloke did a bit of searching and ringing and amazingly as our luck would have it he found a hotel room just ten minutes away from the centre of Rome by train. Or fifteen euros to return by taxi after the train line shuts down at 9pm. He said we were very lucky, and I take his word for it. Still, it was a rigamarole to get there (it was still a 650 metre hike with the backpacks from the station) and we had already lost a day because of our adjusted itinerary, but we managed to squeeze in the Roman Forum and the Palatine. On any other day, the ticket for the Palatine, for which the queue is about one hundred times shorter, includes entrance to the Colosseum, but because it was May Day they decided not to make this the case, so we would have had to spend one of the three hours we had spare just standing in the Colosseum queue. Alas, I had to (angrily) skip it.

All in all, Rome was dusty and bustling and too busy and big, and always being under time pressure we really didn't have the luxury to enjoy it, and so we left with a kind of relief when we pulled out on the night train to Paris. We slept in our own private cabin on the 15-hour journey and as I write this from Paris we have spent four days here. We now will be spending five and a mere afternoon in Amsterdam because we didn't reserve a seat on the train and all of them are booked up tomorrow. All of them! Lesson: book ahead of time and be wary of weekends and public holidays.

Paris has been relaxing and it's perhaps my favourite city in Europe. It's a very liveable city. The other day we zipped around on Segways on a tour of the city (run by Americans) and had so much fun on the Segways we barely looked at the city at all. Three hours was gone in half the time, and we now want to own one. Or rather, two. But at US$5000 apiece, and no service outlet in Sydney (that I'm aware of, anyway) that's perhaps a silly idea. But when you ride one, you want one.

Well, that's going to have to be it for now, and perhaps for the trip. After Amsterdam we will spend three days in London with Mai Li's sister and her husband before heading home, and I likely won't get any time to update the blog until after we reach Sydney on the 12th of May. Check in later and I'll get some more photos up.