Wonderful weekend

On Saturday, I went to Paris with the three other English assistants that live at my school.  We left – don’t ask me why, it wasn’t my idea – on the 7:59 a.m. train, which means that we had to leave our school at 7:15 in order to make it to the train, which means that I got up at 6:30.  Ugh.  And, as it turned out, both of the automatic ticket machines were down, there was a line (at 7:45 a.m. on a Saturday?) at the single ticket window, and the 7:59 train was actually a 7:53 train, so we only managed to make the train by dint of much begging in broken French to the conductors to hold the train just one more minute…

Anyway, we made it, and upon arriving in Paris and being joined by another English assistant who is stationed in Amiens, we made our way to the youth hostel.  It was very nice – a three-minute walk from the Louvre, and only 23 euros per night.  We dropped our stuff off and headed out, splitting into two groups.  Lauren, Andrea and I went to the Louvre.  I didn’t spend much time in the museum itself, although I made a perfunctory dash through one wing to celebrate being able to get in free.  In my dash, I discovered a number of rooms that I had not seen before, including the room containing Hammurabi’s Code and the Impressionist room.  I spent most of the hour and a half that we had allotted to the museum wandering around the underground shops in the Carousel; there is a perfume (Angel,  by Thierry Muegler) that I’m thinking about dropping a small fortune on, and I wanted to test a little bit of it on myself before breaking the bank.  It is nice.  Very very nice.  And very very spendy.  I shall have to weigh my options.

After we met up again, we decided to go to see the Eiffel Tower, and then Notre Dame.  It would have made a whole lot more sense to see them in the opposite order, especially since the stadium where we were supposed to meet the other two to go to the football match was beyond the Eiffel Tower, but we weren’t thinking straight.  So we saw those two highlights of any tourist trip to Paris in that order, and then Lauren and I bid farewell to Andrea (who didn’t go to the match) and went to catch the metro to the stadium.

When Camus said, in Huis Clos (“Closed Door”), that “Hell is other people,” he must have just gotten off the Paris metro on route to a football match.  It was ghastly.  There were quite a few people when we first got on, about fifteen stops from our goal, and at each stop a further ten or twenty people tried to crowd on.  No one got off, it seems.  Finally, for the last few stops, no one else, save a midget, could physically get on.  We were packed back-to-back-or-front-or-shoulder, there wasn’t enough air, most of the people who were headed to the game had already had a large quantity of alcohol and/or hadn’t showered in a few days… I started crying at one point – I just couldn’t deal.  I had had a migraine before I got on the train in the first place, and that, combined with nausea from the fumes and the motion and dizziness from the lack of air and space.  Never, ever, ever, ever will I ride the metro to a football game less than three hours before a game.  Never.

Finally, after I started to think that I actually had died and gone to hell, to ride forever on this train, we arrived and the train lost hundreds of thousands of pounds weight as everyone disembarked, save a few extremely-relieved-looking people.  Hannah and Maggie, the other English assistant, were waiting at the two exits from the stop, watching for us.  They practically had to catch me – I have rarely felt as awful as I did then – and Lauren wasn’t in much better shape.  Imagine my joy, then, when after we had battled our way through those same crowds to our seats, to discover glaring lights and a soundsystem set about 300 decibels too loud.  Not fun, again, not fun.  And the person smoking pot two rows in front of us didn’t help.

Then the game began… and it was awesome.  I can’t say that my migraine really went away, although the adrenaline rush of being among these spectators did help some.  But I could mostly ignore the pain, lose it in the feeling of the game.  The word “feeling” isn’t really strong enough – it was more like an out-of-body experience.

Tens of thousands of spectators.  Flags.  Flares.  Confetti.  Rain.  Light.  Rivalries, both friendly and not.  Fights.  Cheers.  Songs and motions performed in unison by thousands of people. 

Incredible.  The game itself was really good.  Paris-St.-Germain against Bordeaux.  They carted three players off the field on stretchers, five yellow cards – two for Paris, three for Bordeaux, two missed penalty shots – one for each side, a handful of offsides, and a final score of 2-1, Paris victory.  Go PSG!

But while the game was good, the most impressive aspect of the game was the feeling.  It was… primal.  When I said that it seemed like an out-of-body experience, I wasn’t stretching the truth.  You get swept up in the emotions of everyone around you.  The chants pealing from thousands of throats is physically palpable and the choreographed motions of their arms and bodies as they pound on the chairs and gesture towards the field is completely hypnotic.  Before you know it, you are cheering the goals, loudly lamenting the misses and injuries of a team whose name you had never heard until a few days before.  You start to feel, if not animosity towards the opposing team’s supporters, then at least a playfully-malicious joy when they are disappointed.  I don’t understand why that blockhead in front of us needed the pot – the experience was intoxicating enough in itself.  I came away feeling slightly drunk.

After the game, Lauren and I stopped in the team shop and picked up a couple of PSG scarves – not that I will ever wear mine, but it is one of the better souvenirs that I’ve ever bought, simply for the memories that it will evoke.  While in the store, I dropped my hat, which I had taken off upon entering the crush inside the store.  A man picked it up and handed it to me, and when I thanked him, said, “Of course, I only did it because you’re a PSG supporter.”  ::chuckle::  Then the four of us walked half an hour in the rain to the next-nearest (supposedly – I wasn’t leading, nor had I consulted a map) metro stop.  We had taken a few steps into the metro stop from which Lauren and I had come a few hours earlier, seen the thousands of people being herded by the gendarmes onto the train in “small” batches, and decided that it would be better to get wet.  We returned to the hostel, changed out of our now-soaked clothes, and went as a quintet to a little pizza/pasta place four steps from the door of the hostel.  Originally we had thought that we would go to a nice dinner in Montmartre, but none of us who had been to the match at all felt like dealing with the metro or people in general again, and the pizza place was charmingly, echoingly empty.  We nearly fell asleep in our food (which was quite good, and very cheap: a three-course menu with a pizza as the main plate was only 9.50), and we went straight back to the hostel afterwards and fell asleep.  It was about 11 o’clock.
Sunday morning we awoke at 8 a.m., went down to the breakfast room and had our included-in-the-price breakfast (quite good as well), then went back to our room and prepared to leave.  We had a bit of trouble at this point – four of us (the four who had gone to the game) wanted to leave on the 12:46 p.m. train, but Andrea was really disappointed not to see more of Paris and wanted to leave on the 4:15 p.m. train.  She would have gone on the earlier train if we had all gone, but this was her first real trip to Paris and she made us (or me, at least) feel really guilty for wanting to leave.  We all remained resolute, and she had accepted semi-graciously the defeat when I suddenly decided to stay.  What decided me was the blue, blue sky shining through the skylight in the lobby and the remembrance that I came to France to explore, stretch my limits, spend time doing things.  So Andrea and I stayed until 4.

We all went to Montmartre and Sacré Coeur together at about 10:30.  Lauren, Andrea and I went inside the basilica briefly – they were just starting mass and the organ was playing.  We went back outside, and there agreed that the others would go wander around Montmartre for half an hour while I went back inside and listened to some of the mass.  Once again, I was swallowed by sound and visuals, but this time the effect was sublime rather than primal.  The organ’s notes reverberated through the space, especially the bass notes, which gave my stomach lining a massage.  The nuns who sat near the altar with the priests frequently sang and led the congregation in Gregorian-style chanting, unlike any sort of music I’ve ever heard in a Protestant ceremony.  The mosaics – which have all the people dressed in Victorian-era garb, since the basilica was completed in 1886 or thereabouts – glinted in the lights from the windows and the candles.  In general, the interior of the basilica was a place of light, unlike the interiors of many of the great Gothic cathedrals, full of shadows and candle-whispers.  At one point, the sun fell through a red portion of the glass onto the auburn hair of a woman in front of me and suddenly it seemed as though her head were alight with flames.  The effect was not as gruesome as it sounds.  Rather, given the holiness of the surroundings, it seemed that she was being chosen to work some great miracle, a halo of fire signifying the selection.  It was only with great reluctance that I left the basilica after a half-hour.

We split up, the others leaving to catch the train and Andrea and I walking down the Montmartre hill to the metro.  We took the metro to the Champs-Elysées, which Andrea had wanted to see, and walked from there across the beautiful Pont Alexandre III to Les Invalides.  The weather was spectacular – blue sky, a few artistically-strewn white clouds that would occasionally hide the sun and instead create the sunfalls so beloved in inspirational pictures, and a warm-cold temperature that was pleasant in a sweater, coat and some gloves, but no hat or scarf.  We walked into Les Invalides, decided not to pay 7 euros to see Napoleon’s tomb or the military museum, and instead availed ourselves of the free bathrooms near the gift shop.  Afterwards, we walked (and walked and walked – it was further than I had remembered) to the Saint-Germain-des-Près district, got some food at a kebab place, then walked back to the hostel via the Pont des Arts and the courtyard of the Louvre.  We gathered our things, which we had left at the hostel while we wandered, took the metro to the Gare du Nord, and after a brief struggle involving our tickets and changing their departure time, went and boarded our train. 

That was the final, crowning joy (for me) of our trip – the train that we took for the first leg of our trip back to Laon was a double-decker, and we got to sit on the top floor of the non-smoking car.  I felt like I was a kid again, going with my preschool classes on train-riding field trips.  We would take the train from San Antonio to New Braunfels (I think), a distance of maybe 30 miles.  I have only a few memories from preschool, but one very distinct memory is of boarding an enormous train with my mom holding my left hand – she often chaperoned these trips.  I think that this might have been in early spring, because it was very sunny, but for some reason I also remember the other kids wearing long sleeves, hats, etc.  The trains were almost always the double-decker, luggage-on-the-bottom-level, humans-on-the-top sort, and it was amazing for me as a short preschooler to be able to see the tops of cars and houses and things like that.  So, since I first discovered that there were double-decker trains here in France, I have been hankering to ride one, to rediscover the old thrill.  And may I say that it hasn’t lessened at all with age and increased stature.  ::grin::

P.S.  Random side note to all you single girls out there – if you ever want to pick up a good-looking guy, go to a Paris football game.  The girl to boy ratio was about 1:100, if that.  We four girls were getting lots of looks!