Arriving in the 17th Arrondissement

One day slides into another when we travel through time zones and across wide gleaming oceans, and today we found ourselves in a new country and a new day.  Although technically Britain is part of Europe, flying across the English Channel seems to cross a border of a different kind entirely, onto the continent, and a country that speaks a different language and has an entirely different culture than we experienced in the United Kingdom and Ireland three years ago.  We were in the EU!  We carried with our passports a new form which we had obediently printed out, the EU Digital Passenger Locator Form (dPLF), which bore a QR code and identified our temporary address as Paris, Rue de Tocqueville 118 75017, and which we were never asked to show any authority during the entire time we were in France.

While waiting in Heathrow Airport for our flight to Paris, I had been surprised as I had been three years ago at the many races, ethnicities, and cultures all around us.  It makes one feel provincial!  I was sitting on a bench waiting for our flight to Paris and noticed a young woman near me wearing a head covering who was carrying on a series of conversations on her phone in what seemed to be at least four different languages, one after another.  She finished her calls and struck up a conversation with us in excellent English, and we learned that she was a doctoral student pursuing cancer research; originally from Turkey, she had traveled widely in the US for her education.  What a bright and personable young woman!  Surely she is the hope of the future in finding a “cure” for this disease, although in our conversation we agreed that it was unlikely that there would be a magic bullet, that cancer was likely caused by many factors including lifestyle and environment. 

One of the things this woman told us was that her baggage had been delayed for two weeks recently, and we tried to imagine how such a calamity would affect us.  Two weeks from now we planned to be on the last leg of our voyage, on the way to Mont-Saint-Michel and the Normandy Beaches.  But a very sharp young man at Charlotte Douglas had taken a look at our itinerary and said he could get our bags transferred to Paris so we would not need to claim and then re-check them in Paris.  “I’ve tried three different ways,” he had said with some frustration as he wrestled with his computer, before telling us confidently that he had worked it out.  Could we trust him?  We made our way immediately to Baggage Claim.  There are few sights more welcome to a traveler than the appearance of one’s humble piece of baggage on the conveyor belt, safe and intact, making its way slowly around the carousel.

Charles de Gaulle Airport was a beautiful, modern airport, and passing through security was much easier than Heathrow.  The concourse was filled with the luxury shops which we would become accustomed to seeing in Paris:  Prada, Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Hermes, Gucci, Chanel.  And of course, everybody was talking French.  We had been advised by Trafalgar Tours,  “Make your own way to the hotel at your own expense.  If using a taxi, ensure that it is an official taxi from the rank outside the Terminal Building.  By law these must have a ‘Taxi’ sign on the roof and a taxi meter.”  We found a taxi meeting those requirements immediately, driven by a friendly and talkative Asian driver named, I think, Hai.

When I say “talkative,” I mean that he spoke about as much English as I spoke French.  This was my first attempt to carry on a conversation with a French-speaking native and I was proud of myself and grateful for Miss Satterlee grounding me in the basics of the language.  Over the next few weeks, I would find that my vocabulary seemed to bloom and expand; long-forgotten words came to me easily, rising to the surface and surprising me.  It was a good time to visit, Hai told us, because all the Parisians were on vacation, or vacance.  This was la grande vacance, he said proudly, which could be as long as deux mois.  “Two months!” I said.  “We are lucky to get two weeks in our country – deux semaines.”  He laughed.  “Oh, we have that, too, la petite vacance, deux semaines.  We don’t like to work as much as you do.”  Paris was consequently filled with tourists, which made business good and driving a taxi profitable.  

It was rush hour in Paris – heure de pointe – and traffic was heavy.  I was struck by the beautiful modern architecture all along the way, the modern well-designs roadways, and by the complete absence of pickup trucks and large SUVs.  Everybody seemed to be driving compact or subcompact cars, which is understandable when gasoline (sold in liters) is the equivalent of $7.50 per gallon.  (Yet for some reason, French residents do not feel inclined to post stickers of Emmanuel Macron on fuel pumps blaming him for the high prices.  Instead they buy smaller cars.)  We arrived at our hotel somewhere close to six or seven o’clock, the Hotel Mercure, located in a relatively quiet part of Paris, the 17th Arrondissement.

We were relieved to be checking into a hotel after many, many hours without sleep.  The room was small, as we had expected in Paris, but since we were arriving five days before the Trafalgar Tour was scheduled to begin, Martha had booked a room on the eighth floor (“Etager huit!”the elevator announced) with a narrow balcony overlooking the Rue de Tocqueville below us.  Across us were eight- and ten-story buildings with metal mansard roofs from which picturesque chimney pots protruded, and off to the south a portion of a long, green park called Parc Promenade Pereire, where an abandoned railway had been converted into a pedestrian greenway.

We had gone out onto the balcony immediately when we arrived, and we shortly discovered that the air conditioning was not working in the room.  But Guillame, a tall friendly young man on the front desk, came upstairs and quickly solved the problem.  When the balcony door is opened, he said, and not shut entirely, with the handle turned down, the air conditioning does not work.  Which after all was entirely sensible.  As most things in France, we would discover over the next few days, seemed to be.