Nous sommes arrivés!

Nous sommes à Paris! Nous avons arrivés hier après-midi et puis quand je…oh, sorry! I’m getting carried away! Let me back up a bit: when we found out more than two years ago that we would be in Scotland for a semester, my very first thought was that we were definitely going to take the kids to Paris at the end. I have been to Paris only once---when I was 17 years old and in high school, and spent a summer living with a host family and going to le lycée technique in Brittany through a program at Indiana University. The first part of the experience was difficult…living with a French family was not easy, and though my French was greatly improved at the end, it was certainly a challenging experience. At the end of the trip, though, our group of about 20 American high school students was driven to Paris, put up in a hostel, and let loose. As you can imagine, I have wonderful memories of that part of the trip, and ever since then have desperately wanted to come back!

So, twenty years later, here I am! Over the past five months, I have been planning an itinerary for us, and searching for apartments in Paris. I knew from the beginning that we wanted to stay in an apartment in one of the neighborhoods (arrondissements) that would allow us to experience a bit of daily Parisian life and would give the kids a bit of space to spread out in between our visits to the parks and the markets. I eventually chose a one-bedroom flat in the Marais district (the 4e arrondissement) one block away from the Place des Vosges, which is the oldest planned square in Paris. I rented the flat through an American company that rents about 200 different flats all around the city to American tourists, and they sent me the keys to the place a few weeks ago with a map of the area and a note that simply said Merci beaucoup! Easy enough! And once the keys arrived, I was obsessed with fine-tuning our itinerary—staying up late into the night researching and rearranging, adding and nixing, second and third guessing. Was a visit to Napoleon’s tomb worth it? Would the kids be able to take the massiveness of the Louvre, or should we stick to the Musée de l’Orangerie? If we arrived at the Cathédrale Notre Dame right at 10am, would the line to climb the tower already be oppressively long? Could we make it 20 minutes out of our way from the Musée Rodin for a gâteau opéra at Lenôtre? I was checking the tripadvisor sites about taking kids to Paris and reading the David Lebovitz blog daily. In the last week, I have even begun my day with a “walk” through our neighborhood in the Marais through Google Earth! So much fun!

I have also spent the last five months working on my French. It was my minor in college, but I was able to finish all the requirements by the end of my sophomore year (I told you the trip to Brittany helped with my command of the language!), and then I switched to Italian. I haven’t spoken French since (in fact, I was mortified during my senior week in college when I was inducted in the French honor society, and learned during the ceremony that I was expected to say a few words of gratitude…en francais! If memory serves, I believe I stammered out a quick “uh, merci, uh, oui, uh merci beaucoup!”). So, in the last five months, I have been listening to a daily podcast in French on my morning run called Coffee Break French. It’s produced by a Glaswegian guy, and while I have been able to successfully restore much of my ability to speak the language with the program, I now do so with a bit of a Scottish accent, which is a little strange. I have also been working with Emma and John a bit on a few key phrases that they might need to use while in Paris, and coaching them on French etiquette: always say bonjour when walking into a shop, and au revoir when leaving, and use s’il vous plaît and merci (please and thank you) as much as possible; never touch anything in a market unless you are in the process of buying it; don’t walk around with gum in your mouth or your hands in your pocket.

The only downside to all the planning was that I came across a lot of advice about avoiding pickpockets in Paris, and became just a tad bit worried about it. I read about the crowding scam in the Metro where someone watches you put away your money after you buy a ticket, then bumps into you on the train and slyly helps himself to some of it. I read about the string scheme, apparently common in the Montmartre area, where someone quickly ties a piece of string around your wrist then demands money for it, and the ring scheme, used near the Eiffel Tower, where someone gives you a gold ring that they found, claiming you must have lost it, then demands money from you. I got so carried away with worrying about it that I began to chant French phrases in my head at night as I fell asleep: “No, please, that ring is not mine! Go away! Thank you!”

My biggest concern about pickpockets was that, after our arrival, we would need to make the trip from the airport to our apartment, where we would need to take the RER into the city and switch to a Métro line at a very large Métro station with both kids and two suitcases in tow. The RER is notorious for pickpockets, especially when it comes to tourists fresh out of the airport laden with suitcases, laptop bags, purses and kids (i.e. us!). I also know from experience that the Métro is not easy to navigate with large suitcases, and though I don’t know from experience, I am guessing that it might be tricky with kids too. So, to avoid the risk and to alleviate my worry about the RER (much more the latter than the former…and I’m sure David would not use the word “worry” there, but would go with something like “torment” or “anguish”) I arranged for a private transfer service to take us to the apartment right from the airport. I felt a little silly, and a little extravagant, making such a decision (though I might add that in the end, it was actually only a wee bit more expensive than tickets for four people on a return-trip shared van shuttle), but I must say that it certainly paid off when we emerged at baggage claim at Charles de Gaulle airport to find a very polite, English-speaking Ghanaian waiting for us with our name on a big white sign! (I only know he was from Ghana because I saw the screensaver on his iPhone which said “I HEART GHANA!” so am assuming…) He drove us right to our flat, which took about 40 minutes in a bit of traffic (John promptly fell asleep, of course, the instant the van started to move…) and dropped us off at our front door. Again, easy enough! We arrived at our flat without incident…no stolen laptop or passports, and now I feel like I can much more easily tackle the Métro in the days to come without being a pickpocket target.

So, we made our way up the four flights of stairs to our flat and went in. It was actually larger than I had thought from the pictures on the website (and from my general idea that any flat in Paris would be tout petit), but just as cute: huge windows overlooking the Place du marché Sainte Catherine, a bright kitchen that looks over a courtyard overflowing with red geranium-filled window boxes, a bedroom wall made of exposed wooden beams and thick red drapes, and a big bottle of wine on a tiny table waiting for us. We unpacked quickly, and headed out for some dinner. In my constant quest for the perfect itinerary, I read about a falafel place called L’As du Fallafel on the Rue de Rosiers just a few blocks away from us that was a must-see, so we ventured in that direction and found it with no problem. I was able to piece together enough French to order our meal (the result of the podcast is actually that I can understand quite a bit of French, but can’t speak it back nearly as well…), though we are somehow so easily identifiable as English speaking that it wasn’t necessary. Our meals of schwarma, falafel and humus were delicious, and not too frightfully expensive. We treated the kids to their first taste of Orangina (still one of my best memories of France…twenty years later and after “globalization” has brought Orangina to every Wegman’s store in New York State…), and I was treated to my first taste of sitting amongst the French. After twenty years, it’s refreshing to see that not much about the French has changed—it’s still apparently not acceptable to sit with your hands in your lap, but perfectly OK to have a go at the contents of the inside of your nose in public.

After dinner, we walked a bit, and stopped at a small grocery store for some breakfast supplies. My French came in handy again as we read the labels (though I inadvertently bought lactose-free milk which the kids won’t touch…) and as we paid for our purchases. We did a fair amount of window shopping on the way home too, as most of the stores were closed. The phrase “window-shopping” in French, by the way, is faire du lèche-vitrine which translates into “window-licking” and gives a nice visual…After a stroll, we went back to the apartment, where the kids watched the Hunchback of Notre Dame and I put some last-last-last minute touches on our itinerary for tomorrow!