Paris Through the Night, Part 1

My most surreal / memorable travel experiences: #5 See full map

I was studying abroad for a summer in Compiègne, France. It was an idyllic time, with days devoted solely to French lessons at the local university and evenings spent back at the international residence abutting the Abbey and a lush park. We would have baguettes with Nutella or fried merguez and then play soccer into the late evenings with all the exchange students from Latin America, and speak hardly a word of French outside of the classroom. Tom from England had an unimaginably cool toy called a MiniDisc player, which could hold something incredible like 80 songs on a single tape! Today people probably have microwave ovens with greater storage capacity and audio fidelity, but it was 2001.

At those latitudes it could stay light until 10 o'clock in the summer, which at first made me think my watch was off, having been used to much earlier sunsets back in the U.S.

I had heard that the Sacré Cœur church atop Montmartre had a lovely vantage point over Paris for watching the sunrise. I decided to take a train there one weekend, with a plan to wander the city overnight and eventually see it for myself. No hostel or arrangements to stay somewhere, just a backpack and a spirit of adventure. So off I went, from Compiègne to Paris Gare du Nord.

I remember distinctly walking through a random part of the city and marveling at the blessing of being 20 years old and able to explore a place I had only heard about. Paris! How fortunate I was. It was special, and I knew it, in the moment.

Towards evening I wandered over to the Champs-Élysées. Despite my best attempts at blending in, my American-ness must have been obvious. A man bounded over, picking me out from all the throng, and asked me in his American English to take a picture for him. My image of myself as a slick traveler, smoothly blending in while the tourists broadcast their cluelessness was duly deflated.

Now I was starting to tire from all the walking, and the full import of a plan that involved wandering a strange city for something approaching 24 hours without anywhere to rest started to hit me. I needed to sit somewhere for a while, and a movie theater seemed like the perfect place to do it. Of all the random films that were showing with appropriate subtitles the best I could do was Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, at the time groundbreaking for its expensive fully computer-generated scenes. It had middling reviews and ended up losing a ton of money for its studio, but it was quiet place to sit for a few hours.

My student discount wasn't valid for the showing, but at least I overcame my hesitancy in French to ask for it. The movie was subtitled in French, which provided an unexpected lesson in how to render idioms in different ways that don't really capture the meaning of the original English. Two hours later I was back on the streets, with a long way to go before the sun came up.

In the light of day and in the comfort of a house one has all sorts of wonderful ideas. In the cold of night, in a strange place, reality sets in. Around 2 AM I was really flagging. I wandered over to the Eiffel Tower, with the idea of laying on a park bench underneath it and attempting to nap. 

Do not do this.

Most people would figure it out well in advance of trying something like this, but the area around the Eiffel Tower at night is not a good place to be. I believe someone tried to push some kind of drugs on me, but being familiar neither with the vagaries of illicit substances nor the related French vernacular I'm not entirely sure what our interaction was about.  

While I lay down and attempted to doze (clutching my bag firmly to my chest, for fear of a snatch-and-grab robber) I was aware of the general random activity around me. Most upstanding citizens are not up at 2 AM, nor do they make their way for no apparent purpose to internationally-famous landmarks, which are of course closed for the night.

For some reason Usher’s song U Remind Me was being played on a stereo nearby (this was 2001, after all). To this day, Usher now reminds me of the Eiffel Tower.

Next: climbing Montmartre and seeing it for myself