At this point in the trip, I’d finally realized that the end was in sight. I was back in Frankfurt for a weekend that included a road trip through the Rhine Valley, and on Monday morning I hopped on the train for what amounted to my last border-crossing of the trip. I began to start noticing the particulars of all that was going on around me. The alien conversations, the miniaturized landscape, the modernity of the transportation; all of it was filtered through a fresh pair of eyes. I was, I’ll have to admit, more than a bit depressed. It’s quite difficult to imagine yourself droning through the tedium of life at home when you’re zipping across the French countryside on your way to Paris. Yet there was another part of me that was thrilled; after all, two months away from friends, family, and milkshakes tends to take an unregistered toll on your psyche. So it was with a mixed bag of emotions that I stepped off the train in Paris en route to my final hostel of the trip.
Mind you, the 14th was Bastille Day, so every shop I saw was shuttered tight. Yet Paris still felt like Paris. As long as you’re not standing next to the Seine, the canals, or an open sewer drain, there’s always some kind of delicious food smell wafting from some open window somewhere. There’s always some crotchety old lady screaming at the equally crotchety taxi driver who almost ran her down in the crosswalk. There’s always some impossibly decorated building that turns out to be a painter’s studio or a fire station upon further inspection. I dropped my bags at the hostel (which was rather unfortunately located as far away from downtown as is physically possible) and sprinted off to the Champs Elysees to catch what was left of the military parade. Contrary to popular opinion here in the States, the tanks were not driving in reverse, nor were the soldiers parading in full retreat. It was a pretty awesome spectacle; I wonder how long it would take for the U.S. army to do the same parade down Pennsylvania Avenue… In any case, I spent the rest of the day wandering around from sight to sight, basking in the sun near the Palais du Senat, and poking my head into all the little alleyways on the Ile de la Cite. The fireworks show that night was great, but the Europeans have a much more artistic approach to fireworks than the Americans do. Theirs framed the Eiffel Tower and were relatively low to the ground; I was lucky if they shot off two rockets in a given minute. Here, well… It’s a bit different. The next morning I was off to the border of Bretagne and Normandie to check out Mont Saint Michel. The place was featured on the cover of just about every French textbook I’ve ever owned, so I figured I had to check it out if I had the time, and boy am I glad I did. The place is utterly over-run, but thanks to my patented tourist avoidance techniques I was able to escape the crowd and actually wander around for about two hours completely unmolested by anyone but the occasional friar headed off to afternoon prayer. I had to have taken about 400 pictures of the place. It’s still one of the most photogenic spots in the world, and I’ll be darned if they don’t make the best cider money can buy. The day after that, I was off to Cap D’Agde on the southern coast; my high school debate coach and long-time friend John Cardoza was swinging through for two days and I figured I’d join him while I still had the chance. It was the perfect cap (no pun intended) to the trip. I got to debrief him on all that I’ve laboriously debriefed y’all on over the course of the past two months. I got to hang out with actual French people (as they’d all headed out of Paris and down to the beaches for their summer vacation). And, on the last night of the trip, after we’d taken the train back up to Paris so that I could catch my flight out the next morning, Cardoza surprised me with tickets to Le Lapin Agile- one of the only authentic French cabarets still in operation. The night was simply amazing; the place, buried deep in the Montmartre quarter of the city, looked like a relic straight out of the 1820s. The players drank and sang at a communal table about five feet in front of us. And if you didn’t join in their drinking and singing, they mocked you. Shamelessly. Especially if you happened to be the poor Japanese couple sitting in the corner that didn’t speak a word of French. Poor kids…
