Days 2-8

Home: Jessica’s AirBNB

We reserved a week to experience the Parisian lifestyle. Our AirBNB, at ~US$180/night, was the most-expensive place we’ve stayed since Charleston, South Carolina (another historic city-center tourist draw), nearly two years ago. And the price is not because the unit itself was at all luxurious; Paris is just an expensive place to stay, much more so than the rest of France. For most vacationers, that would mean maximizing your activities to make the cost “worth it”, but we’ve learned long ago that without routine-filled months at home to prepare for a “vacation sprint” (and then months afterwards to recover before even beginning to think of the next one), such “sprints” are impossible for us. So we only “went out” on four of our seven days. But that means we got more value out of the apartment than we would have otherwise, and one of our goals was to just feel like we were “living in Paris” anyway.

Our apartment was at the base of the steep hill of Montmartre, so that’s where we did our first evening walk. The heat waves are apparently not quite done with France, though this one was moderated by enough evening cooling that a couple days peaking in the mid-90s wasn’t a big deal. Even though we’re broadly past the European holiday season, it seems Paris is enough of a worldwide draw that the tourist hump gets rolled out into a nearly-year-round layer enrobing the city; on the one hand, it keeps the energy-level high (at least in Montmartre), but it also meant that we would have needed to climb up to Sacre-Coeur Basilica at least an hour earlier if we wanted to get a spot on the stairs to watch the sunset from.

We kept our evening schedule going the next night with a much longer walk, ticking off some of the even-more-obvious icons of Paris: the Arc de Triomphe at sunset, and the lit-up Eiffel Tower to see a couple of its “on the hour” sparkle shows. The walking route randomly-generated by connecting our Montmartre apartment to the Arc took us through neighborhoods absent of tourists, though they were frequently absent of any other signs of life as well. The classic Parisian 5-to-6 level apartment buildings were unfailingly elegant, but compared to Buenos Aires (which has a similar urban structure and architecture), the lack-of-pulse made it a bit boring after a while.

Paris is brand-new for me, but Rett was here in the early 2000s with her mom and sister, and the Tower triggered her surprising and emotional realization that Rett is now close to the age her mom was when on that trip. I”m certainly not as good of a thrift-shop companion as they were, but I did my best. That European trip (which was mostly in Italy), along with the general view of “Europe” from an American perspective, has instilled in Rett the belief that she has needed to augment her natural elegance above a “bike tourer” aesthetic (even though she’s already in the 99th percentile within that group). That exacerbates our long-running conflict, where she is continually adding weight and bulk to our limited carrying capacity, and I’m trying to make her understand that the suffering she feels while biking is a direct consequence of that accumulation. I’ve been proven right that even Paris is not actually a fairy-tail world with a strict dress code, and even a grubby “bike tourer” aesthetic wouldn’t be noticed in the crowd. However, I am forced to admit that the number of attractive and effortlessly-stylish people walking the streets of this city is in fact at a level higher than most other places in the world.

To return from the Eiffel Tower, we walked along the Seine for much of the way. Here, the tourists were largely confined to the river itself, packed onto the large sightseeing boats (some of them were delivered directly to the boats in tour buses). The bank itself was mostly quiet, with at least as many locals out for a night run as tourists willing to burn some of their limited time on a mode as inefficient as walking.

Rett loves Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!”, and had attended the cabaret show of the modern-day Moulin Rouge during her previous visit to Paris. Our AirBNB location (not entirely coincidentally!) put us a mere a block away from the spinning red windmill, so of course that is where we would spend one of our evenings. In something that was entirely a coincidence, Japanese black/avant-metal band Sigh was performing a theatrical concert at the club literally right next to the Moulin Rouge, with their show scheduled to end 20 minutes before our 11pm cabaret tickets. I had been listening to their new album just a few days before I decided to look for Paris concerts, so it felt a bit like fate, but in the end I figured it would have thrown too much chaos into our plans.

I enjoyed the show a bit more than I thought I would, and not just because the quite-good-looking women spent most of the show dancing topless. It was really high-energy, and they had three excellent “America’s Got Talent”-type circus-y performer couples as interludes (roller skaters, Chinese yo-yo/dance, and acrobatic strongmen). Finally, I appreciated how entirely “French” they kept the whole performance, despite most of the audience being foreign (in contrast to the time we saw the house band at BB King’s play two blues songs and then jump to recognizable pop/rock covers because they know tourists don’t like The Blues as much as they think the do).

On our final day out, we headed to Notre-Dame Cathedral. To save a bit of time/energy, and make sure we experienced the Paris subway system, we took the Metro on the way there, but walked back in order to explore streets we hadn’t yet seen.

I never found Notre-Dame particularly attractive, but I thought seeing it in person had a good chance of changing my impression. Nope. I mean, it’s a grand cathedral, so it still inspires awe and wonder, but the exterior is just kind of boring. When the spire famously toppled during the 2019 fire, they should have just left it off rather than re-creating it, since it looks super tacked-on (because it is! The original appeared 600 years after the rest of the building!) Or, they could have instead added new spires to the squared-off twin towers that have been yearning for them for 800 years! The restoration was amazing though, you’d have no idea the whole place had nearly burned down just seven years ago. Though that also feeds my doubts about how “old” these places really are; they’re constantly being rebuilt/restored, which makes it harder for me to imagine walking in the footsteps of medieval people (at least placards admitted that the vast majority of the interior decoration was from the 1800s).

On the walk back, after getting more of those flower ice cream cones, we made our one (intentional) movie-location stop in Paris, this one for me, at the bookstore where Jesse (re-)met Celine in the beginning of “Before Sunset”. “Shakespeare and Company” is now as much a tourist attraction as it is a bookstore, with a line at the door managed like it’s a popular nightclub, though “Before Sunset” is only a tiny contributor to that. In “Before Sunrise” (the first movie in the unintentional series), Jesse talks about how if reincarnation is to be believed, all of the 5.6 billion people living that year (1994) must only have a fraction of a soul. In the 32 ensuing years, the global population has increased by nearly 50%, which means that our souls are even more divided, but also that a store like “Shakespeare and Company” now has a line.

It makes sense, because we certainly haven’t added 50% more Parises to the world since 1994. And Paris is a completely-understandable draw for that ever-growing worldwide population. It must be strange though, for a family-run small-business to now be so flooded with visitors and potential customers that it’s a challenge to maintain the store’s original vibe and purpose. But kudos to them for putting in the effort to manage that tension, just as the city as a whole seems to be doing. It has certainly not turned into Venice, which is effectively a city-sized museum; part of Paris’s attractiveness comes from Parisians living their lives in their city, as we tried to emulate for a week.