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Archive for April 15, 2012

the kindness of strangers

I think they call this kind of thing paying it forward…  My first full day in Paris – a pit stop pre-Istanbul – began very uneventfully.  I made it to Le Bon Marchè without a map and spent the day meandering some of my favourite streets and making notes on things I might buy on my return – as I didn’t know what I might find in Istanbul and didn’t want to carry my purchases all over Europe.

I decided to try a different restaurant this time.  I’d had a little nap to deal with my jet lag so the place was booming by the time I arrived.  It was a big operation, combining a fish market, restaurant and oyster bar so they found me a chair at the bar.

When you are travelling alone, the bar is a more fun place to sit anyway.  Normally in Paris everyone speaks French and I don’t meet anyone.  But not this time 🙂  It all started over a bottle of water.  In Europe you always have to order bottles of water.  There is no free flowing tap water.  I asked if there were any smaller sizes available as I wasn’t sure I wanted to drink 750 litres of water all by myself.  There weren’t.  But the lady sitting beside me said I could have some of theirs.

It was a lovely gesture and she was very chic and lively and I just enjoyed watching her talking with her companion.  But she was also very friendly so before long I was part of their conversation.  According to Hans (her third husband, a keeper apparently :)), Daniele loves independent women.  Hans is from Hamburg and works for an American company so his English is excellent and he could play translator as required.

When dinner was over, they invited me to accompany them to a Cuban bar as long as I didn’t mind smoke.  Anti-smoking laws have come to France but it is very painful to the national culture.  What’s a little lung cancer for a memorable cultural experience? 🙂

 Interestingly there weren’t very many people in the smoking room of the packed bar so we got a seat easily.  Hans had to fly to Moscow the next day so it was supposed to be an early night.  But just as we were finishing our first round of Mojitos, they saw some friends walking by on the street outside.  So they joined us and another round of Mojitos arrived!

I had a 6am wakeup call for my flight to Istanbul so by the time I got back to the hotel, I was ready for bed.  I had met Gino the night before and he is one of the warmest people you will ever meet.  Saying ‘no” to Gino is practically impossible and he seemed rather insistent that I should sit down and have a drink with him and the other guest sitting at the bar.  Sleeping on one’s vacation is really a waste of time, n’est-ce pas? 😉

At first it was just good scotch and friendly conversation and I thought I would get a few hours of sleep.  But as time progressed, it became more evident why Gino had wanted me to sit down. 

Grace was staying in the hotel and had had a big fight with her boyfriend.  And it wasn’t just any situation.  She had met him in Iraq and given birth the day the American forces officially pulled out.  She spoke fluent Arabic and it was clear the experience had been traumatic for her.

I didn’t know much about the boyfriend and or the fight – but I knew what it was like to be in Europe in your mid-twenties with some dude who keeps picking fights with you and acts like a class A jerk a lot of the time.  Scott was definitely the worst boyfriend choice of my life but he was also the reason I first came to Europe.  Hans officially declared me a European rather than a North American so I felt very honoured.  So the jerks in our lives serve their purposes.  But it can take some time and life experience to fit all the puzzle pieces together.

I knew I had to have Grace’s back.  She needed someone to care – at least that night.  She was really lucky to have had the good fortune to have Gino working.  But she didn’t want to go back to her room – and her dude.  And I could see Gino didn’t normally have to stay awake ALL night entertaining guests and he was exhausted.  So I told Grace she could stay in my room.

I think I had booked the best room in the hotel.  When she got there, she was in love with the room.  She seemed really distraught and I was pretty sure she was going to wake up with a killer hangover so I went down to see if the room was free for the next night.   It was.  So I told Gino I would pay for three nights so Grace would have some space to make decisions about her life and not feel pressured by the boyfriend or her anticipated hangover. 

It was a really tranquil room with a view of the rooftops of Paris and a chromotherapy tub that was a highlight of my entire trip.  So I put her to bed, packed for Istanbul and left her a note telling her to enjoy the room.  It was hers until Tuesday afternoon.

I then tried to catnap on planes and arrived in Istanbul a bit exhausted.  But Hans and Daniele had been so kind to me.  Gino had been so friendly and welcoming.  It was an evening where humanity seemed to be firing on all its best cylinders – and Grace just got the benefit of that wonderful joie de vivre.

When I came back to Paris, I checked in with Gino to see if he knew what happened to Grace.  Apparently they checked out separately so I told him I thought my money had been well spent.  He hadn’t been working so neither of us know any details but we hope she is OK.  She seemed the kind of girl who deserved a really great guy. 

She was definitely a catalyst that created a bond between Gino and I that took our relationship to a whole new level.  If you are in Paris and not on a really tight budget, I would highly recommend L’Apostrophe Hotel.  Ask for Gino.  And say “hi”from me 🙂

My Thursday night back in Paris was spent with Hans and Daniele.  They love Istanbul and have been four times so we traded travel stories.  And Hans was impressed I met yet another man from Hamburg!  Based on my sample of two, ladies, men from Hamburg are sympathique!

It is pretty cool to know a city so well that it feels like home when you come from other, more foreign cities.  It’s only when I can’t speak French that I remember… oh yes, I don’t LIVE here.  It’s so familiar and now I am even accumulating some Paris friends. 

Here people say  “enchantée” when they meet you.  It’s impossible to not be seduced by a city with a culture like that.  And Daniele says “oo la la”.  She says it with such enthusiasm in this great French accent of course and you are just swept away… enchanted indeed…

 

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midnight in paris

I love the cinema but often find I don’t have the time to sit in the inky dark of a movie theatre watching the trailers in anticipation of the main event.  As a result, I have become a big fan of Air Canada and the personalized entertainment on almost every flight.  I always climb aboard with a list of films I am hoping to see someday…

One of the films this trip was “Midnight in Paris”.  I think I have seen every Woody Allen film – even the bad ones!  This was supposed to be him returning to his glory days.

The film starts with panoramic shots of famous Paris iconography.  Few cities have so many instantly recognizable famous sites.  It took only seconds for me to realize it was the absolutely PERFECT film to watch on the plane to Paris!

The messages of the film resonated over my first two days in Paris.  I have been to Paris so many times I have lost count – and have explored a lot of the city.  But all the visits have been far too fleeting and there are still many corners left to discover so now my strategy is to choose hotels in new neighborhoods to expand my knowledge of the city.

Paris v1.0 this trip I spent two days in Montparnasse.  Montparnasse is close to St Germain des Près, my usual stomping ground, but just far enough away to be something new.

Sometimes I use my guidebook and sometimes I just use my instincts.  In Paris, I just used my instincts.  And ended up at La Closerie des Lilas, where the paper menu had been signed by Buzz Aldrin along with many others.  I chose it because it looked busy, the menu looked appealing and the maitre d’ seemed OK with a table for one.  The server was exemplary, teasing me that since I had a French menu, I had to order in French (no problem :)) and bringing me a half bottle of bordeaux he deemed worthy of me.

The server, the bordeaux and the entrecôte on a balmy March night in Paris would have been enough but at the end of the meal some ladies invited me to join them.  This is how I learned the restaurant had been frequented by Hemingway but was apparently not all it had been back then.

Nostalgia – not one of the deadly sins – but dangerous all the same.  For those who haven’t seen “Midnight in Paris” the big theme is how we always think an earlier era was the “golden age” and sit restless and unsatisfied in our “real-time” world.

I think it’s an important message for the educated traveller.  I have been teased by a French server at Les Deux Magots trying to imagine Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir arguing over a coffee.   I have drunk an outrageously expensive Bellini in the original Harry’s Bar in Venice (where it was invented).  I have sipped the most expensive glass of champagne of my entire life on the veranda of the Victoria Falls Hotel pretending to be a pampered colonist.  Like the guy in the film, I have run all over Paris trying to be Hemingway.

The experiences have been OK.  But none have been special.  And mostly I just felt ripped off.  So I finally had that eureka moment and quit drinking overpriced beverages chasing the glamorous past I had read about in books with ghosts and embraced the future.

I was travelling to the past to find the zeitgeist.  It made no sense.  The Paris of 2012 will never the Paris of the 1920’s.  But the Shanghai of 2012 might well be.  If you want to be like Hemingway, you need to think, “where would Hemingway hang out in 2012?”

Certainly not in Paris.  Maybe Shanghai?  Maybe Mumbai?  Istanbul?  These are the exciting cities of the 21st century.  I haven’t been to Mumbai yet but in the other two I felt like I was discovering the future.

I started finding history in the making and participating.  Making up my own narratives in places that would – in the future – be someone’s golden age.  My life became exciting and my stories started to rival Hemingway’s.

And if the film is accurate, lots of these famous guys were douche bags so WHY did I want to follow in Hemingway’s footsteps anyway?  Or Picasso’s?  My sense is these guys were assholes.  So who cares what they drank – or where – or with whom?  I need to create my own personal narrative.  So far I think I am giving them both a run for their money – and my ex’s LIKE me 🙂

One of them – with whom I am still friends over a decade since the breakup – described me as “a woman who is hard to forget.”  Hemingway would likely have been intrigued.  But I would have told him I don’t do bad boys.  Nice guys are so much more fun!  Without all the nice guys taking pity on me and bringing me out of my shell, I would never have become the kind of woman who would tell Pablo Picasso, “honey, you’re talented for sure, but you’re a little too Kim Kardasian for me.  I think Otto Dix is far more interesting…”

I send people to Paris to pretend they are living in the 18th century.  Paris is one of the only places I’ve been that preserves its history with such diligence.   It is a wonderful city.   But it is only the exciting center of the universe it was in the early twentieth century in the movies.  God bless Woody Allen – Paris has never looked better.  You should see the film.  And you should come to Paris.  But also go to Berlin and to Istanbul.  They are cities where the zeitgeist is in the present.

Revel in the zeitgeist.  Be part of your own era.  Embrace it and create the stories of the present that the people of the future will romanticise and try to re-create on their own voyages into the dangerous land of nostalgia.

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