After just under twenty hours of flying, driving, waiting in airport terminals, and bus hoping through French traffic, it’s safe to say most people would be disoriented. Moreover, when all of this travelling has landed a person in a foreign country, the first foreign country he has ever been to nonetheless, this disorientation process is all the much greater. Furthermore, when seeing any brand new place for the very first time in one’s life, enormous disorientation is inevitable. Ultimately, when all of these blurs of what amounted to two days of confusion leads you on some random street in Paris, France, somewhere you know nothing about nor where to go, and most significantly, nor what to do, its needless to say a person may feel far more disoriented than at any other point in his life.
On May 22nd at one o’clock such was my disposition just a few hours after landing at my dream destination of this aforementioned Paris. The cliché goes ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’ In many ways, this is all too true. (As I was to find out just a few days later, a Claude Monet painting provoked more emotion out of me than, probably, the past three girlfriends that fell by the romantic wayside.) In many other ways, however, these thousand words are simply not enough. No picture, no painting, no book by Gertrude Stein, rather, nothing would have been sufficient to paint the picture of what Paris, or any place to which I have never physically experienced, is truly like. Those thousands words are not enough to prepare a person for the shock of what is sincerely foreign to him. Thus, the scenes, memories, and images that were unfolding me in the waking moments of my first trip abroad can be described in many ways; at first, overwhelmingly disorienting is the one way in which these experiences can be encapsulated.
So, with a few hours to spare before meeting for dinner, a meal which I needed desperately by me after a fit of self-proclaimed starvation, I embarked upon my adventure to try figure out make something, however so little, out of my surroundings. First destination? Well, my guess was as good as the next person’s; meaning, ‘let’s head down the street and see where we end up’ was the most logical, perhaps only, move to make. One fact in my mind was certain as we headed what was probably North towards what I later learned is called a Brasserie—what Ms. Stein, what Google, what travel books on this fabled city showed and told me about Paris was certainly not was what was unfolding before my very eyes. In no way were my expectations being met. At the time, this certainly seemed like a bad notion. The thought process being somewhere along the lines of ‘well I spent somewhere around $2,000 to make it here. All $2,000 being in the form of a loan which will invariably be paid back for with some ludicrously high interest rate, putting it at more like $2,500. In either case, $2,000 or $200, I’m not quite sure what I’m looking at but I can be fairly certain it is a couple of apartments and a few decent…at best… looking restaurants that are called..what was it? Brassieres…?’ Trumped up pictures to not warn you ‘Gary. When you arrive in Paris, you are going to be stationed in a NEIGHBORHOOD. You will not walk off of the plane and be looking at the beautiful river with some perfect view of the enormously elegant Eiffel Tower. No, travelling to a country in which you are realizing at torrent speeds you know very little about is not that cut, dry, simple, and, well, beautiful.
Still, we moved on. We went forward, attempting to make sense of the giant cloud of confusion we soon understood travelling to be. Yet, like a newborn child who is foreign to, let’s be frank, living in general and is trying her mightiest to walk, we fatefully stumbled with each baby step we made toward a sensibility of the country to which we quite obviously did not belong for more than a few moments. Stumbling into what looked like a nice place for the smokers of the crew to buy their cigarettes, we figured we were in for a simple nice, quick and easy trip to the store. Low and behold, we were wrong. Mistake number one—the clerk did not speak English. The client did not speak French. Mistake number two—the American credit card was not accepted at this location. Mistake number three—where is all of our Euro!? Mistake number four—being totally unprepared to handle any of these series of minor calamities in our tragic world of tourism. Still, cooler heads prevailed, and we marched on to our next destination, fully loaded with cigarette and lighter.
Indeed, it is perhaps in all of these Oddysean experiences early in the afternoon that provided the perfect set-up in what would soon unfold as one of the most pristine, serene, heart-warning, and, in the truest sense of the word, unforgettable moments of my short life. As our procession through the random Parisian neighborhood continued and we were still praying for some amazing, wonderful, cliché, picture-esque place to appear, it never happened. Instead, we were in store for an experience far better. We were about to bear witness to a place in no travel guide, in no great literature, in no painting stashed away in the Hogwarts disguised as an art museum called Le Louvre. We were about to bear witness, instead, to a place of infinite more power, majesty, and wonder.
Appearing seemingly out of no where, a park no bigger than a Manhattan Upper-East Side apartment materialized, as they say, out of the wood work. Naturally, with no clue what else to do, a few of us embarked into this park of absolute intangible and tangible wondrous beauty. In a time of war and epic gas prices, in a time of social unrest and the AIDS epidemic, in the time of an unsung Rwandan genocide and international terrorism, we found a place inexplicably so close in distance but so immeasurably far in emotion from all of these disheartening pressures. What we saw was dozens and dozens of French boys and girls. These boys and girls were not just any boys and girls. These boys and girls were a different breed. There was a sense of community that, in twenty years of living with adults and college students and college graduates and parents and grandparents and war veterans, I have never come this close to seeing. This, it must be repeated, was a group of children, mere children only five, six years old. These children were not eating McDonald’s hamburgers which have a mind-blowingly high rate of being tainted with E. Coli. These children were eaten fruits, natural fruits of the natural world. It’s no wonder these childrens’ dispositions, demeanor, and love for each other came so naturally. It’s no wonder why as a pigeon indefinitely named Wally landed right next to me and I looked at him, he did not fly away. There must have been a time, a place where birds were not scared of us human beings. Indeed, that time and that place are but a distant memory, but on this day, on this park known by far too few, that time and place was for once here and now. Thus, it is also no wonder why the roses in this park were a pinker, bigger, and healthier than any rose that has been in the nicest of flower shops. Those roses were natural. They grew out of love, the same love the children grew out of, the same love that brought all the pigeons named Wally to share this moment of unmatched bliss. There was no other choice for us to sit there and bask. Bask in the knowledge that we found what we were looking for.
A lesson learned indeed. There is a right way and a wrong way to be a tourist. Of course the Arc De Triumphe is beautiful. It is certainly worth seeing. Yet, the opening of one’s mind, the drive to go out and find amazing parks where chubby little French boys come up to you and say “LA VIE DE TOUT,” is a far more enriching aspect of being in a foreign place. My entire disorientation was a matter of realizing I was looking in all the wrong places, looking for the wrong sort of satisfaction, and that all along, everything I could have ever hoped to see was right around the corner. For not a second more did I doubt the notion that, for the next week, I was going to get every single cent out of the $2,000 I thankfully spent to end up in more parks just like the one that will forever be known as La Vie De Tout.
1 Comment
June 11, 2008 at 1:49 pm