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.
life on planetm 
a marriage proposal before noon
You may be thinking by now that you will be spared the stories 🙂 But I have just been too busy with marriage proposals, men who want to be my “free guide”(payment in kisses 😉 and all the new friends I am making hanging out in bars…
This post has been started a number of times now so will have to revise some of the earlier notes to get up to date. We’ll see if I can actually get this posted today! It’s now Friday morning and I am waiting for my flight to Berlin. Managed to actually make it to the House Cafe’, as recommended in my guidebook. And it is as good as promised! My Eggs Benedict not quite standard issue – ciabatta, regular bacon, salad and a brown butter hollandaise – but it worked 🙂
It is obvious this is a Mediterranean country. Food has been delicious and you can taste the sunshine, especially in the vegetables. I have become addicted to Turkish olive oil but thanks to my carpet (it’s a good story ;), I don’t have any room in my suitcase sadly.
So much has happened since the last post, I have decided I will just have to go chronologically. On Monday I just got my feet wet. I love travelling on my own but I make sure I know my way around a place before I get too lost. I put a lot of energy into deciding where to stay in Istanbul – and, as anticipated, it was a great launching pad to get to know the city.
I am staying in Beyoğlu. This is the hip and happening section of Istanbul and the main shopping street was just one tiny lane over from the hotel. Taksim Square is pretty ugly but a great reference point so I headed there first.
Monday was an absolutely glorious day and my guidebook said the view from Leb-i Derya on the top of the Richmond Hotel was possibly the best view in Istanbul. So I had a long leisurely lunch, got to know my server and planned my assault on Constantinople over the next three days. I also took the first set of what would become a crazy number of photos of this highly photogenic city.
Tuesday morning I got up early and it was time to leave my comfort zone and take a taxi to historical Istanbul. The hotel staff are wonderful and there are countless taxis lingering about at any hour so getting into a taxi was a piece of cake. Getting out of taxi proved to be a little more challenging…
The driver did not appear to speak English so I just had to hope I would arrive at the Blue Mosque. The Blue Mosque and Haghia Sophia are opposite each other so it’s easy to know you are in the right place!
What is not so clear are the dangers lurking when you step out of the taxi. Especially as a newbie who has been spoiled by the laid-back ways of your now native Pera.
In Sultanahmet, life is a lot more stressful. This is where all the big tourist attractions are – and where you are part of the game, whether you realize it or not. I was busy focusing on whether the taxi had dropped me in the right spot instead of noticing the guy opening the taxi door for me.
Nïzam seemed like a pretty decent guy and he would be my guide for free – and I was not obligated to visit his family’s rug shop at the end of our tour. It seemed easier to just say “yes” than to figure out how to get rid of him. And the start was very promising…
He was charming and very knowledgeable about the buildings.
Apparently he was trained as an architect although his current profession seemed unclear. He was a master at the protocols; that was certain. He did not like queues so he just told me to put my scarf on (I had come prepared!) and we went through the local entrance leaving the hordes of tourists waiting on their own.
I was very appreciative of his efforts and have been accused of being an incorrigible flirt so we were getting on famously until the kissing started to get a little out of hand… but not everyone can claim to have been groped in a mosque 😉
I think being agreeable is always the best strategy in complicated situations so I kept tagging along with him, trying not to get caught in too much kissing crossfire. It was a wonderful tour and I am really glad that I did it. It was so much easier than navigating on my own and I learned a lot.
But then the marriage proposal came. At least he allowed me to wait until after lunch to make a decision. It was all getting a lot more complicated than I had planned on so I agreed to go and look at carpets so that I could kill some time and figure out how to graciously get out of the mess I had gotten into. And he had insisted I didn’t HAVE to BUY a carpet, just drink some tea and look at some…
But then he introduced his cousin 🙂 I have no idea how much I was ripped off but the carpet is gorgeous and I would spend that much on dinner for two so it was well worth the money. The show was spectacular! The cousin was very smooth, with much better English. They brought me Turkish coffee – which was a bit much but I thought I had to try it! The rug whisperer started tossing rugs on the floor, flipping them around so you could see how they changed colour depending on how the light hit them.
I hadn’t planned on buying a Turkish rug so had no idea about them – except that they didn’t go so well with my purple and leopard print decor 🙂 But they come from different regions, there are traditional symbols, some are prayer rugs, some are prayer rugs but you can’t pray on them cause they have been jazzed up too much. The spiel was well done and I think I learned a little bit.
I finally decided a rug would be cheaper than bringing home a live souvenir from Turkey and that would be my concession. I also wasn’t quite sure how to get out of the room. I decided I was also paying for the world’s best sales training 🙂 At least I didn’t end up spending over $2,000 I hadn’t planned on. That was where we started!
It was all quite a show. Both the carpet salesman and I were trying to be gracious and I left myself open to be sold to so finally just caved. It IS really beautiful! Not sure if he was trying to improve his deal at the end or if it was a genuine mistake but I know my exchange rates so the price didn’t get inflated over 50% when suddenly at the end, it got converted from US dollars into Turkish lira…
At that point I was still open to going for lunch with Nïzam and then he was supposed to take me to Süleymaniye Mosque but the courtship seemed to be progressing rather rapidly and his English was pretty good but when he seemed annoyed that I had already said “yes” to a question I was now answering with a “no”, I decided it was time to cut my losses and try to get a taxi to take me from Old Istanbul back to the Istanbul of the Republic where life seemed a lot easier!
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eating & drinking - well, social commentary, travel stories
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