Paris, Day 2: The Eiffel Tower, and barking like a seal

(Here’s Paris: Day 1, if you missed it.)

Moulin Rouge: Not the Slovenian techno-pop band
The second day of the Paris trip started with a countdown and a blast off. Our first stop was the world-famous nightclub, Moulin Rouge (French for red windmill). We didn’t go in, but we did stand by the entrance and take some goofy pictures. This nightclub’s claim to fame is the large model moulin rouge (that’s still French for red windmill, if you forgot already) constructed on its roof, and the fact that this place has inspired at least 7 unrelated movies called Moulin Rouge. One is a pretty popular musical about a writer who falls in love with one of the nightclub’s dancers. Not to be confused with the Moulin Rouge from the 50s about an artist who repeatedly falls down a flight of stairs. And never ever to be confused with Moulin Rouge, the Slovenian techno-pop band from the 80s. Though I’m not sure how you ever could confuse those two, or why you’re even thinking about a Slovenian band from the 80s at all. They passed their prime at least 15 years ago.

According to the posters plastered everywhere outside, the dancers in the Moulin Rouge aren’t really big on wearing shirts. How about that. I don’t think that was in the movie. Either of them, though I’ve never seen the one about the guy falling down the stairs, so I guess I can’t be sure. Either way, let me repeat we didn’t go in. We did do the can-can ouside the entrance. We also made a human pyramid. We got a few strange looks. Probably because of Eric’s orange backpack.

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Le Sacré-Cœur (French for Sacred Heart)
We journeyed past some interesting streets with lots of, um… souvenir shops on our way to our next destination. Most of them were souvenir shops. It was a very cultural experience; we passed a bunch of street venders offering gullible gamblers a chance to lose ridiculous amounts of money on a guess-what-cup-the-ball’s-under-type game. We watched one lady win 50 Euros in about 20 seconds. And then lose 200 Euros 40 seconds later.

We all got separated again, and this time I was already with Eric and his orange backpack, but we got lucky, yet again, and all found each other, yet again. We rounded the corner of one street and were met with this, Le Sacre Cour:

Boom.

Boom-er. (View from the base)

Boom-est. (View from the top)

The building was awe-inspiring, but, as usual, the view from the roof was even more fantastic. Sacre-Cour is built on the summit of butte Montmartre—Montemartre hill, the highest point in Paris. We climbed exactly 700 stairs. (Leeanne counted. I also counted, but lost it at about four hundred and twenty—ohlookagargoyle! So we’ll go with Leeanne’s count.) It was quite a sight to sightsee.

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Lunch and Meanies
We stopped in at a nice little French fast food place, where I was seriously tried in my effort to not develop any negative French stereotypes. I entered France determined to disregard any of the stories I’d heard about Parisians being “grumpy meanies” as nothing more than grim fairy tales. After all, anyone over the age of 2 who still calls people grumpy meanies kind of invalidates their own opinion by default. Unfortunately, the Parisians in this nice little restaurant gave me a run for my money, matching my stubborn optimism with their even more stubborn grumpy meanness. But they will not win. I have decided they’re all just well meaning and hugely misunderstood, so dangnabbit they’re going to be hugely misunderstood nice people.

No one in the building spoke English, so Leeanne, a French minor, translated orders for all 7 of us. Naturally, this took a little while. This gave the cashier a good long while to glare at us. They say looks can’t kill, but after seeing her I’m not entirely sure they can’t at least cause minor physical injury. Of course, this was not because she was angry with us. Because Parisians never get angry people just for being Americans. That would be prejudice. She was glaring at us because she had the huge misfortune to be born with a naturally unpleasant, aggravated-looking face. I feel bad for her. It also sounded like she made a few snide remarks, but the words were in French, so it’s much more likely she was wishing us all days filled with rainbows and kittens. The fact that her tone insinuated that she’d like us all to go dive into a hot vat of stew was obviously due to the fact that she had a cold. I know colds always make me sound like I want people to jump into hot vats of stew when I’m talking about kittens and rainbows. They just do funny things to your voice.

A group of French folks accumulated behind us and waited for us to finish our order. They looked extremely impatient, but really this was just a combination of incredible fidgetyness (too much sugar for breakfast), and a huge case of The Glare Face. The cashier wasn’t the only one with this unfortunate condition. Apparently it’s rampant across the city. Tragic, really. I had to reach across a few people to get my tray and tried a respectful “pardon” (pronounced “par-done” in French), but I guess my “par” had a little too much Spanish in it or my “done” wasn’t nasal enough. Anyway, the result was snickering from the sweet French folks behind me. The thought crossed my mind that next time I’ll just do a caveman grunt, or maybe bark like a seal, since it apparently gets the same result. But then I realized that they weren’t laughing at me, because that would be rude. They just all happened to remember a funny joke all at the same time. Most likely a Garfield comic. It was possibly the largest spontaneous simultaneous joke remembrance in history. Someone tell Guinness world records.

If I were to assume for a moment though that that restaurant had treated us all like dirt, you have to keep in mind that’s only one experience, and you shouldn’t judge a whole city on it, never mind a whole country. However, we had about 3 similar experiences in three day’s time. (That Glare Face thing is an absolute pandemic. Someone call the CDC.) That’s 4 more incidents than we had in Austria, and 4 more than I’ve had anywhere in Spain after three whole months. I’ve been told that Paris used to be the number one choice place to study abroad. Now that’s dropping fast, and it’s not because the Eiffel tower’s not pretty anymore. If the Parisians overall really are frequently that unfriendly to foreigners, as people living in the biggest tourist attraction in the world, with an economy dependent on that tourism, they’re only hurting themselves.

Champs Elysees: Mikeyheaven
When Mikey found Champs Elysees, the world’s most expensive shopping district, he thought he’d died and gone to heaven. And I was kind of concerned he might, either due to infarction or asphyxiation, considering how he kept forgetting to breath and was running the risk of a pure-joy heart attack. While he shopped in the most luxurious Ralph Lauren in existence, Eric and I played everybody’s favorite gameshow game that doesn’t actually exist, “Guess That Price!” We went around the whole store guesstimating the prices of everything before digging out the price tag. After the first price tag we went around gingerly extracting the price tag. There was a leather jacket in there for 1,500 Euros. That’s way over 2,000 bucks. I could fill my entire house with gumballs for that money. Which would be a terrible idea, since nobody in my family really likes gumballs that much and, assuming for some reason we didn’t vacate the house before the dump trucks unloaded the gumballs, there’s a very good chance we could all be buried alive. …This is making the jacket seem like a rational purchase. That wasn’t the point. The point was it’s worth potentially deadly amounts of gumballs. There was also an ugly checkered shirt worth slightly less than my entire summer’s income. After that one Eric and I decided to play the sit-very-still-and-touch-nothing-breakable game upstairs.

Arc de Triomphe
The Arch of Triumph. It was built by Napoleon after a triumph. Who’da thunk. It was big and important. There were people with swords and flags there, doing something big and important. Never did figure out quite what. The Arc takes a very long time to walk to and makes your feet stage a painful civil war against your shoes. But I’m not bitter. Next.

The Triumphy Arch of Triumphness

Doing something important with drums, guns and uniforms.

All these huge monuments are starting to make me feel really short.

The Eiffel Tower: This is why people love this place
This was the highlight of the trip for me. (Oh hey look, there was a pun there! See, because the tower’s tall. Like, high up. And it’s all lit up. Light a light. Like a high light. …Alright, I’ll stop.) After being teased with glimpses of the Eiffel tower from our hostel window, we were finally going to see it in the flesh. Or in the iron, I guess. And FYI, If you’re an epileptic in Paris you should probably go everywhere with a bag you’re your head from dusk until 1 am. Not because you’d look better that way, but because the Eiffel tower sparkles five minutes every hour after dusk, and it’s mesmerizing and seizure-inducing all in one. Exactly 20,000 light bulbs flash on and off in random patterns, making the tower look like it’s been dunked in fairy dust. Or like it’s caught the world’s worst lightning bug infestation ever. Or like 20,000 light bulbs flash on and off in random patterns. Hah. You just had déjà vu. That’s French. The lights are very purdy, but I’m guessing the mere sight of all that electric expenditure would probably give my Spanish host mom a heart attack.

I have this theory, I call it the awesome-stupidity-proximity theory. I believe there’s a direct correlation between the proximity of awesome things and the size of your vocabulary; the closer you are to something superamazing, the dumber you sound. I’m also afraid that this theory might just be specific to me. Looking at the tower’s lights glittering from halfway across the city, I was able to utter such intellectual sentences as, “I dare say, this structure is likely much more immense than I was expecting it to be if it is so visible from such a considerable distance.” When we’re 1,000 feet away I can still manage, “Wow. That’s really pretty big,” but suddenly we’re right under it and I’m reduced to, “WOAH. BIG. VERY.”

-“Yes, David, we all know it’s big.”
-Me: “BIIIIIIIIG. BIGBIGBIG. Bigbig.”
-“Shhh… It’ll be ok.”
-Me: “…Big.”

It really was big though. Somehow that doesn’t come through in the 1-inch tall keychain models. It’s like modern day Tower of Babel. Then we’re actually inside the thing. We’re all packed into this awesome elevator that goes up through the Eiffel Tower diagonally at first, and then straight up. Through the glass walls of the elevator you can see the lights of Paris. The streets slice through the city, glowing off into the distance, every car visible like a shiny tin bug. The speckled jigsaw the streets leave behind shimmers like a lake of candles, and the horizon beyond glitters with a minefield of fallen stars.

-Me: “GWAHHH.”
-Concerned tourist: “Is he okay?”
-“It’s doubtful.”

The Eiffel tower was the second time I got the surreal “no way am I really here seeing this for real” feeling. I can’t imagine that it’d be that interesting in the day, but at night it was amazing. Everyone else in the group was loving it too. The tower sparkled 3 times while we were on it, so we were there at least 3 hours.

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The How
Waiting in line for the elevator back down, I said some profound sentence ending with “how,” something like, “I just don’t understand how!” and had another “we don’t appreciate your language in our country” experience. The guy in front of me decided “how” was a pretty funny word and started imitating it with a strong accent and a bit of a sneer: “How! Ho-ow!” I followed his lead. And started making seal noises:

“HOUW! HOUW!”

The guy looked a little confused, but he tried it once. “HOUW?” Then he made a “Wait, I think that guy just made me make seal noises” face. I commenced singing “How how! How-how-how-how, how how!” to the tune of “Can You Do the Can-Can.” Perhaps not the best time or place, but I couldn’t help it. It’d been stuck in my head ever since we did the can-can that morning and sometimes you just gotta let it out. He laughed, I grinned and we went our merry ways. I guess I really can’t blame the French for thinking Americans are kind of strange.

The Phantom of the Opera was here
My mind was blown one more time before we left. Day three we got up and toured the Palais Garnier, Paris’ opera house. You know it from Phantom of the Opera. I see why that place inspired a book that inspired a film that inspired a play that inspired a movie that inspired another movie and a lot of weird knock-off books. Like The Angel of the Opera: Sherlock Holmes Meets the Phantom of the Opera (I saw it in the gift shop). The opera house is one of the most ornate, luxurious buildings I have ever been in. The Grand Staircase is aptly named, with ornate carvings and imposing statues in all the right places. The Grand Foyer shines with two neat rows of golden chandlers dangling low and crowned with clusters of candlesticks. And the auditorium itself is all luxury with red velvet seats, floors and walls, gold everything else and a mural of brilliant colors spanning the ceiling.

I can safely say that the auditorium’s centerpiece, the infamous chandelier, is the single most impressive light-giving thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Excluding the Eiffel tower, if that counts, and the sun, because the sun is awesome. And stars in general. Anyway, I can definitely see how that chandelier worked itself into the story. It’s imposing up there. It weighs 7 tons. One of its counterbalances really did kill an audience member way back in 1890-something-almost-1900, which inspired the falling chandelier in the Phantom story.

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We never figured out how to get down to the main floor of the auditorium—I believe you had to take a tour—but that was probably for the best, since down there is where the chandelier can fall on your head. There really is an underground lake hidden under the opera house too. There isn’t supposed to be any real phantom under there, but, in Leeanne’s words, “They don’t let anybody down there unless you’re the Pope, and then only maybe,” so no one would really know, would they? I got lost from the group once more for good measure, found Eric’s orange backpack, and we were off again.

After some falafel (Falafel is delicious!), a short metro ride, another metro ride that connected to another metro ride, one last trip to the hostal, two more metro rides, a bus to the airport, a monorail because that was the wrong part of the airport, one more bus and a quick and painless plane ride… we were back in Sevilla. I loved Paris, and I’m going to hold on to every detail of the trip as long as my brain will allow me. But I have to say I’ve never been so happy to hear Spanish. “Finally! Someone who speaks my language! …I mean, kind of.” After French, Spanish doesn’t feel like a foreign language. It feels like my other language. That’s progress, I think. It was a wonderful trip.

And next time I’m bringing a working credit card.