Parisian Misadventures

Now I’ve been to Paris before, several times. (It’s worth visiting a hundred times and more, of course.) But seldom have I met with a series of misadventures as this journey had at its start.

It’s basically a birthday and cheer up present for my aunt, from my mother & self, as my aunt has the year of hell behind her, health wise, and has had some family trouble to boot. She’s a sweet, kind woman, and always wanted to travel more than she did. Hence, Paris.

We were all set to go when arriving at the Nuremberg airport on Monday afternoon, only to be told that Lufthansa Paris was on strike. This where your solidarity with the surpressed workers goes right out of the window, and your inner Ferengi awakens. Don’t be surprised if it results in a Quark-on-holidays vignette. Anyway, our replacement flight was via Frankfurt and didn’t leave until much later, so we weren’t in Paris until twenty past eleven pm or so, and didn’t reach our hotel until midnight.

There, our stroke of luck continued. We had booked the rooms many weeks ago, explicitly requesting something quiet and non-smoking. Had the confirmation in writing. Had even told the hotel we’d be late because of the strike. Did that mean they actually had quiet non-smoking rooms for us? Nah. The first combination we were offered were non-smoking, but one was next to an elevator, and the other hadn’t even a clean bed – the sheets were still dirty and not made up, at midnight. Yours truly arose to true Teutonic furor and trampled down from the fifth floor to the groundfloor, while leaving mother & aunt exhausted and nearly weeping at the fifth floor, which was the only non-smoking one. The second combination of rooms were a nice but rather small one for mother & aunt, and an also nice but smoking one for yours truly, which happens to be just next to the noisy, loud, air conditioning apparatus. As I really, really wanted to sleep and believed the late night receptionist that they didn’t have other rooms, while still being mad as hell with the hotel itself for not keeping those they had promised and we had paid for on hold, I settled for that.

Today, things started out better. We collected our metro tickets for the rest of the week at the Gare de Lyon and went off sightseeing. Since it didn’t rain and went from cloudy to sunny, I did the most important out of door stuff with mother & aunt – I started out at the arc de triomphe, walked down with them, the entire Champs Elysees to the Louvre, which is the one magnificent street all the others in capitals, no matter whether Berlin or Washington, try to imitate in style and splendour. (Mussolini also created a rather horrid imitation in Rome which manages to cut between the ancient Forums and is the reason they’ll never be completely dug up.) It was rather cold, but even freezing, we enjoyed the imposing view. Thus being in the mood for the imperial side of France we went next to the Invalides; the golden cupola had caught my aunt’s attention from afar, and she was interested in seeing Napoleon’s tomb. On the one hand, the whole thing is an exercise in hubris, sure, but on the other, we did see various rather opulent tombs in the past, the inhabitants of which had done nothing but inherit the status and/or wealth of their ancestors. Napoleon was a self-made man. (And his nephew who financed the whole tomb extravaganza was good with propaganda, but that’s another issue.) Wandering by the tombs of various maréchals I thought of artaxastra who is rather fond of Michel Ney. The saddest part, though, was the plaque for “Napoleon II”, aka the King of Rome, aka the Duke of Reichstadt, aka Napoleon’s son by the Austrian princes Marie Louise who was raised in Vienna in a kind of privileged captivity and died young. It’s hard to feel sorry for the conquerors of the world when their luck runs out, but it’s easy to feel pity for innocents like that boy.

From Les Invalides, we went to the Eiffel Tower, as the clouds really had dissappeared by then, and the predictions for the rest of the week weren’t that good. Since my first visit to Paris all those years go I had never been up the Eiffel Tower again, because really, queueing for a view which isn’t that unmatched in the city in question isn’t something you feel the need to repeat. The queue waiting for the elevator was quite long (well, for November – you can’t imagine what it would have been like in summer), so, being determined to show tourist vigour, we climbed the stairs until the first level.

Yes, our knees all said thank you. But we didn’t have to queue, much, except at the elevator which went to the top. Enjoying the view once we were finally there, I noticed that the boats didn’t seem to move much in the Seine, but then, who makes a boat trip in Winter (except for the Japanese)? We also spotted the small model of the statue of Liberty. Lady Liberty being French in origin, an immigrant like so many New Yorkers, and said smaller version is left at the Seine.

(Insert appropriate topical quote from Madame Roland here. Blake’s 7 fans, it’s the one which shows up in Orbit.)

At that point, my aunt & mother were starting to feel really exhausted. So we took the metro to Monmartre (Anvers, to be precise about the station) and visited that strange exampe of kitsch-gone-art, Sacre Coeur. Meaning: it should feel like it’s too much of a sugar model of a church, yet somehow it never does. The view from Sacre Coeur over the roofs of Paris is the reverse from the Eiffel Tower one and as the sun was starting to set at half past three or so, very beautiful. There is a painter at the place du teitres we used to visit each time one of us was in Paris before, an Yugoslavian (or Serb, though he emigrated decades before Yugoslavia stopped existing) named Stephan, who rather uniquely in that particular assembly of tourist catchers draws in Cubist style and amazingly did a portrait of my mother when she was 30 which captured how she turned out to look when she was 45. He did something similar with me at age 18, too. This time, he wasn’t there, alas – probably too cold, he has to be over 65 by now. Montmartre was as it always is, the once-upon-a-time small cafés and houses captured for tourism. There is a school at the foot of the hill, though, and the cries of the children were real and unartificial in the afternoon sun.

Tonight, it’s going to be the Lido, after giving my two companions some hours to recover. Fear me, I’m the tourist task master. Also, annoyed again because some benighted fool had opened all the windows in my room which means it was icy cold when I arrived here and started typing on my trusty laptop, which I have managed to take along. Ah well. I remember learning in my one and only Highlander convention that Adrian Paul and Elizabeth Gracen did not, as I had assumed previously, film the dancing-on-the-Eiffel-tower scene from Finale in a studio but on the genuine article, and poor E.G. had to wear a miniskirt for continuity reasons. In November. That’s inspiring.

In other news, the Londo 'n Cartagia story is up. Since I took a B5 term like "Faith Manages" for a DS9 story, I figured it was only fair to give this B5 story a DS9 title and called it "In the Pale Moonlight".