Paris 2010

My beloved and I have recently been to Europe for a three and a half week glimpse of France, northern Spain and central Italy.

Our first stop was Paris. Now I have heard a lot of positive and negatives about this supposedly magic city and its people. I admit I wasn’t that thrilled about visiting a big city with a reputation for its arrogant and unfriendly citizens, regardless of its other qualities.

Let me say right from the outset that I loved Paris!

That’s right, for a non-city living, non-city loving country boy I thought it was a wonderful city to visit. We had way too little time to explore areas such as Montmartre and the East Bank or any of its galleries. But we did walk a lot, saw a lot and experienced even more. That’s what it’s all about isn’t it, the experience?

Two days, with jetlag, is not time enough to explore many of the places we wanted to visit and the afternoon sleep became imperative. But it did prohibit the evening visit to many places.

Oh well another time with more time is what’s called for.

We got to places early before the tourist coaches arrive, as we did with Notre-Dame Cathedral. Mornings were easy as our internal time clocks were out of kilter! The series of flights from Australia totalling twenty-three hours in all wasn’t fun.

A friend suggested that we use the double-decker tourist buses that seem to abound in European cities and hop on and off as often as we like. As our time was restricted we found that it worked for us. It helped us to get our bearings and at least see all the major tourist spots before we continued our journey south.

Strangling the language and laughing our way out of any really embarrassing situations added to the fun of our time there. Remembering the basics of schoolboy French lessons from only a million years ago was a wee bit hard at times. But we had to make do and we did find that if we attempted to speak some of the language it was accepted and the Parisians generally responded generously. Communication and the willingness to try is always acceptable no matter how pulled apart a language is.

My beloved did over hear one funny interaction between two American women in a department store complaining to each other, “you’d think that they [the French] would speak the language.” Hello we are talking about the French, in their country and they do speak the language! Their own, not the American one!!!!

Finding out that we weren’t English or American and were actually Australian seemed to break the ice and be acceptable to a lot of the French we came across.

Was our acceptance because we are older travellers or because we live on the other side of the world that most of them may never visit in a place called Australia or that they don’t have any old animosities with Aussies that they do have especially with the Brits? I don’t know and really it didn’t matter.

We had such a good time and the people were generally very friendly and helpful.

More next time