Carey on wandering: Paris Edition
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There’s this great Walt Whitman quote I found when I decided to write this:
‘Not I, not anyone else can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself.’
I doubt that Whitman was exclusively referring to my two week interrailing trip around Europe in 2018 but it certainly spoke to me.
A couple of weeks ago, when tidying out an old box of momentos, I came across the journal I had taken to record my trip. It was a gift from my Granny to “record my European adventure”, the way my uncle had done some years before.
Flicking through the already worn pages, odd postcards and faded train tickets, I thought I would be overwhelmed with nostalgia for a person that is no longer in my life but in these pages, I cared about so deeply.
But I didn’t. But I wasn’t.
I felt like I was reading the diary of a stranger. Romantic strolls along the Seine, wine in Piazza Navona, live music on the Danube. These were all things I had done but I barely recognise myself in any of the memories.
Instead, I felt this all-consuming angst to travel again which is difficult to swallow when the world is as still as it feels right now…unless you’re a Love island influencer in Dubai.
Call it nostalgia or anticipation for the world to move again but I’m going to share some of that trip with you: post by post, destination by destination. And why I’m determined, after Lockdown, to do some solo travelling of my own.
Paris
In Paris, I wrote:
Pardon my french but what a load of rubbish.
Paris is a dynamic city, I grant you. I’ve been a couple of times now but I make it sound like I’m the first person in the world to brand Paris as the city of love. What I don’t tell you is that our flight was delayed meaning our Air BnB host was furious with us. We had to excruciatingly drag our amateur backpacks from Charles de Gaulle airport to the other side of the city, desperate to find any space on the metro that wasn’t already crammed full of drunk french football fans celebrating their world cup win. All before we got locked out of our cute little apartment at midnight in the 18th arrondissement.
They say a bad day in Paris is still better than a good day anywhere else. Quel mensonges! Trust me, I know from experience that is far from the truth.
Paris was far from the romantic dreamscape I imagined. The Paris of Mary Wollstonecraft writing about feminism amidst the cries for revolution. Nor was it the Paris of Audrey Hepburn elegantly walking along the Seine. Netflix’s Emily in Paris was almost closer to the fantasy that I had created in my head.
Yet, we did get into the apartment…eventually and truthfully, I have rarely found a city with as much to offer as Paris.
On the 19th of July I wrote:
“It is fairly similar to how I remember- still smells of pee and everyone (except from the tourists) are always in such a hurry. But I’m definitely a fan now- the beautiful weather, the electric post-World Cup atmosphere.”
I crammed so much culture and chocolate tasting into my few days there, I often think what it would be like as a place to live. When you are not part of one big cattle farm, being herded from one overpriced attraction to another, but you are actually part of the mean Parisian scene, fighting against that very stream of starry eyed tourists that have bought into the thinking that Paris is the most romantic place in the world, just as I once did.
But living there would ruin the dream. It would no longer be the Paris where:
”I walked along the Seine in the sunshine and drank cheap wine in overpriced restaurants as the sun went down.”
As a city, I would to visit again. I had planned to do so much during my short time there. I wanted to see the Catacombs or go out of the city and see Versailles. Both things that are firmly on my bucket list to do. Yet, despite learning french for four years at university, I am cautious not shatter the Paris I had so carefully crafted in my head. It’s a dream, I’m afraid, that I am not quite ready to give up on.
