Paris weekend arrives

My first experience in Paris was not a good one. I avoided France entirely on my first Europe trip in 1989, because at that point Americans needed visas to come, and I didn’t feel like hassling with it. The visa requirement was ended while I was still in Germany, but I didn’t feel like reversing my decision, and went to Amsterdam instead (not too far from Bremen, where I was staying that summer).

In January 1991 I decided to come to Paris at last, but the circumstances were terrible. I took an overnight train ride from Prague to Berlin. There were plenty of eerie beauties on that trip. The Czech train station announcers, invariably female, have a haunting way of incanting the names in Czech of all the places the train will stop. They often sing the names more than saying them; it’s sort of in between. (Perhaps Peter Erdélyi will know what I’m talking about.) If you awaken from a dream at 2 AM and hear such a human songbird, it’s something to remember. I would give anything for tape recordings of that train trip.

In any case, I arrived in Berlin to discover that someone had pickpocketed me as I slept on the train. Having come from Prague, I had arrived at Berlin’s Lichtenberg station in the former East Berlin. The first person I saw on the street was a nice middle-aged German woman, and for some reason an inner voice told me she was the right person to approach with my story (I didn’t have a cent, and needed to get to some U.S. diplomatic facility to decide what to do next). She was indeed the right choice: she gave me a few public transportation tickets, a lot of verbal sympathy about what had happened, and I believe 20 Deutschmarks as well. What a sweetheart. That was enough to get me to the Embassy, and then to the Consulate when the Embassy told me to get there.

As experienced travellers know (but I wasn’t very experienced then) your Consulate isn’t going to be able to do very much for you in most cases. I had to wait something like 2-3 days to have some money wired to me from the USA. In the meantime, the Consulate did lend me enough to get a room in an incredibly dumpy hotel in Wedding, near where the Berlin Wall used to run. (That hotel is another story for another time.) I did get to meet an interesting character in the Consulate… A former U.S. soldier who had defected from West Berlin to the DDR rather than get transferred to Vietnam. He was now white-haired, married to an East German, and the owner of a successful business. But with the Reunification he was now in serious trouble. He had been summoned to the Consulate, and told me frankly there was a chance he might be arrested then and there. When I left he was still there, and I have no idea what happened to him. He was from Pittsburgh, I remember.

The train ride from Berlin to Paris was interesting as well. I was in a compartment with two fascinating people. The first was the Mauritanian Consul to France. He showed me his passport, which said he was allowed to travel to any countries except Israel or South Africa. He had a lot of interesting thoughts about the world. The second person, also interesting, was a theatrical and paranoid 60-year-old Frenchman. This was right before the start of the Gulf War, and he practically started screaming about how there was going to be global bacteriological war as a result. It was like a movie scene, and the Mauritanian Consul was nodding and agreeing with him.

In any case, rather than the 4 glorious days in Paris with which I had planned to end the trip, I had a half-day in Paris, and was very cranky. Also, purely by chance, I ended up making all the wrong turns and seeing the absolute most boring neighborhoods, all in a bad mood of course.

As a result of all this, I spent several years telling people that Paris was the most overrated city in the world, which was of course unadulterated nonsense without my knowing it.

A few years later, my youngest brother (who was living in Prague at the time, ironically) took a long-delayed honeymoon to Paris with his wife and their infant son. My brother came back raving about how Paris is the best city in the world. That settled it for me, because in 98% of cases my brother and I have the same tastes in everything. And, he was right. I’ve been a regular Paris visitor ever since.

Overcast in Paris this morning. Is it worth going down to Chartres, just for a change of pace? (I haven’t been since 1999, but am quite fond of it.)