Arriving in Paris
We left for Paris mid-day on the 14th of March, Davids birthday and we’ve been up since 5am as part of the timezone adjustment scheme that was implemented in the attempt to thwart jet lag. However it does mean I keep falling asleep in the car on the way to the airport which is decidedly not when I’m supposed to be sleeping.
Getting to GSP is easy, if a bit of a drive. I’m grateful to never have lived more than an hour from an airport. Living an hour from a fairly small regional airport is something I was admittedly nervous about however I’ve quickly come to fall in love with it and all 13 of it’s gates as it makes security so much easier. Due to a delay in the incoming flight our connection in DC was going to be a tad tighter but easily managed. Unlike the people in the rows in front of us who had their ski gear offloaded to different flights due to the weight constraints of our plane. It’s times like these where I wish I could just follow their story a little bit longer to know if their ski bags did in fact arrive in Zermatt before they left on their train.
The connection in DC while a little tighter left time to a walk about if not a book shop stop I was hopping for. However I did pack a book, Jane Austen’s Persuasion so I would be well entertained with this reread. We take the mobile lounge between terminals - a large type of space bus that looks like its from a knock off Star Wars or some form of military containment unit. They could probably hold about 80-100 people where ours held about 12 with many travels being duped into taking the out of the way trains.
On the way to Europe we’re in a 3-3-3 configured plane, which for the larger planes might be my favorite so far as economy goes. There’s lots of movies and even though I’m in the middle of the middle it’s not so bad with David at my side.
Things took a bit of a negative turn when during the meal serve it became clear that they didn’t have my gluten free meal. I had packed snacks but it’s always a bit disconcerting when the flight attendants ask you “what are you going to do about dinner” as if I was the one who failed to plan appropriately for the occasion. Thankfully the main meal didn’t contain any gluten ingredients in the main dish so I was able to eat a mostly cold chicken and rice dish along with my snack mix. It wouldn’t be making a top-10 plane meal list anytime soon.
Maybe it’s the wine, the late “meal”, or the fact I like talking to my boyfriend but this is the first international flight I had a hard time sleeping. I was just too hot and cramped, couldn’t get comfortable. The flight coming from the east coast is much shorter than flying from Denver so even if I was able to get straight to sleep it was never going to be the desired 8 hours in a bed. This is the plight of every traveler however so one can’t dwell on it too much and just allow the excitement of being on vacation carry you through the first day until bedtime.
Arriving in Europe early in the morning is the best option one can hope for. Security & customs moves very quickly as there isn’t as many people arriving and nothing has gone wrong in the airport yet. So making our way zombie-like we enter the series of tunnels that CDG has to offer. The tunnels make the expansive space of an airport feel much more human in scale. They are comforting because they prevent you from getting lost without being claustrophobic. It’s these small touches that continue to pop-up in the architecture of the city that make it feel special.
These special liminal spaces can help a place feel much more interesting even if it’s simply a metro station at the airport. The French at good at designing spaces, they are however terrible at designing functional ticket kiosks and thus employ a full fleet of people to ‘help’ you navigate the menus while telling you that you want the wrong thing but letting you buy it anyways when you insist that it in indeed what you want. Then the machine freezes and you have to start all over again on a different machine for the 3rd time.
Taking the train into the city allows for David to get some quiet contemplation in as I promptly fall asleep for the first time. I typically have a super power for sleeping on public transit and this time is no different. As we arrive in the city proper we are greeted by a blasting cold wind that makes me grateful I packed my scarf in my backpack and in a block or two the Eiffel Tower. Spotting this landmark boosts our mood as we’re now “officially in Paris!”
We drop our luggage at the hotel and make our way to breakfast while avoiding the outdoors as much as possible at NoGlu - a 100% gluten free bakery. I enjoy a breakfast sandwich, and a chocolate croissant with an Americano with milk, David having been able to eat the airplane breakfast had a scone and tea. With the weather being much colder feeling than expected (I guess living in the south has made us wimps after all) we decide to pivot our plans to an indoor activity.
Instead of walking around outside we visit the Musée d’Orsay. Working our way from the top down we kick-off with the impressionist galleries which are perhaps the most well known and popular galleries the museum has. They are crowded with tour groups and tourists like us. It makes me wonder what about this art style has held the attention and affection of current audiences that other eras fail to capture. I’m by no means above the fray as I too capture snapshots of my favorite works in the galleries and make potentially unfounded claims about the artists. Mainly I’m fairly certain that Degas hated women despite the fact that he painted many of them he seems to refuse to give any of them the dignity of having a proper face, here they are just bodies with the roughest suggestion of facial features.
After the congestion of the upper galleries we take a coffee break in one of the nicest museum cafes I have ever visited with the strangest “environmental” scam I’ve ever experienced. Due to the construction one of the restaurants was relocated due into one of the more stately rooms on the second floor. We ordered bottled beverages plus a coffee for me and a raisins escargot (Pain aux raisins) for David. Strangely enough they had us pay a 2euro cup deposit for these plastic cups that could be, if someone wanted such a thing, a souvenir. However if you went back to the counter to return the cups you got your money back. It was a strange little touch for this lovely little cafe, made even more over the top as we watched an employee chase down a family to insist that he take his cups 5 with them instead of explaining the strange scheme.
We spent much of the afternoon in the other galleries. There’s a lot of interesting and weird artwork to look at that most people seem to overlook in their desires to see all the highlights and only the highlights. There are beautiful rooms of art nouveau furnishings, funny little sculptures, and paintings that imply that Jesus was definitely gay or at least cool with all his friends being gay all mixed in with some of the more notable works of art in the world. It’s always nice to be reminded that “proper art” doesn’t really exist and people should just continue to make the beautiful, cool, and odd things they enjoy.
We walk back to the hotel now things are warmer to properly checkin, unpack, and shower before dinner. We’re staying at the Hotel du Champ de Mars, a smaller hotel that David found in a Rick Steves book and previously stayed at when visiting Paris with his family years earlier. Our room is charming and clean, not large by American standards but roomy enough to have a little table with chairs and a luggage rack without feeling cramped by any means. The neighborhood is cute with lots of restraints but still quiet that it doesn’t feel like you’re in a city of over 2 million and around 50 million visitors a year.
We take dinner at Bistro Richelieu - a place well known for their gluten free options. We order stereotypical French food, escargot to share, duck confit for me and beef bourguignon for David, splitting a carafe of wine. The tables are filled with other Americans, and towards the end of the meal our dining neighbors were replaced with another American couple who found the restaurant “on the app” (FindMeGlutenFree). We shared a strange number of parallels with them, we’re both celiacs, they had recently been living “in a town just west of Boulder, CO” which is what perked my ears up enough to say something, and both of the men were named David. They were in the process of trying to move to Switzerland to be with her sister and were stopping in Paris on their way to the UK due to visa regulations.
They asked what we were planning to do tomorrow and we told them about the antique fair we intended to visit, which seemed to surprise them. They in return said they were visiting a “little known art museum in an airy former train station called the Musée d’Orsay” and seemed disappointed when we informed them we had visited their little known secret of a museum earlier that day. In fact there were a number of galleries on the first floor we hadn’t seen on previous visits that brought us much joy. Perhaps we’ll be the cause of a running joke for them as they have been a bit for us. We said our goodbyes and wished them luck on their travels and their move.
For now we’re in Paris, excited to see the city but also for sleep.
