Volume 4: Pete in Europe Part 2. A young balding mans journey through 10 countries and back
Day 3 – London to Paris
Up early today for the first day of the tour. I met up with Mojo (her nickname) and Aalok (his real name) in the foyer of The Imperial Hotel at 6:15am to head off together to the Royal National Hotel, our departure point for the tour, a few hundred metres up the road. Mojo is a nurse from the US and Aalok was about to graduate from Medical school on his return home to the US, so I felt confident that if I needed an emergency stomach pumping to prevent my death from alcohol poisoning then I would be in good hands. I had bedazzled Mojo via e-mail before the tour with my sparkling wit and she seemed cool so we clicked pretty much straight away. As for Aalok, we’d met at the pub the night before and he seemed equally cool. What’s also cool is that if he ever invents anything and names it after himself then it will be the first word in the English dictionary.
Before getting on the bus we had to have our luggage weighed to ensure it was under 20kg. Apparently its “an EU requirement”, which I found hard to swallow given no ones’ luggage was every weighed again in Europe and the fact we all purchased about 5 to 10 kgs of souvenirs on tour pushing us over “the EU requirement”. One member of the tour originally weighed her luggage in at 24kg (mine weighed in at 17kg, some as low as 12kg). I could only come to one possible conclusion as to why someone would have so much weight in their luggage; they were looking to dump a human carcass somewhere in Europe.
Once everyone had their luggage weighed in under “the EU requirement” we rode the bus down to Dover. We then caught a ferry from the white cliffs of Dover across to France. One thing that caught my eye was the size of sea gulls at Dover. They were huge. Back home our sea gulls swoop down and steal a chip, at Dover they swoop down and steal a small human infant. Another thing I’d heard about England was that it was filled with unpleasant bastards. I hadn’t really come across this in my short time in London (probably because most of the people I talked to were Aussies), until I got on the ferry. Liz, a very pleasant and friendly Kiwi on our tour (affectionately known as “Loz” because of her accent), when ordering some food nicely asked the person serving her “How are you doing?”. She got a stare from the person that said “Fuck off and order some food!”. It was the first time in my entire existence that I’d ever seen anyone have an adverse reaction to being asked “How are you doing?”. For the remainder of the ferry that woman was referred to as “chuckles”.
Around an hour and half later we were off the ferry and in the bus riding through the French countryside. The French people have also been accused of being rude and unfriendly. I couldn’t see how this could be possible given how easy they let the Nazi’s stroll into Paris in WWII, they’d got to Paris so quickly you’d think they must have been invited. At our first stop everyone was keen to use the ATMs so they could get some Euro cash. But much like the French army in WWII, both ATMs on the premises were not working.
After a long drive we reached our hotel late in the afternoon. Our hotel was located in what people from South Central Los Angeles would call “da hood”. People on the tour were also referring to it as the “Bronx” due to its exceptionally high number of shady looking individuals. The train station located about 20 metres from the Hotel, named Hoche, I believe was listed in one of our tour members guides as a station you didn’t want to be alone at night. My Lonely Planet guide had the Gare du Nord listed, another station on the same train line. We had been warned of a scam where children surround you and then one of them steals your wallet. Such a thing almost happened to tour member Brad H in the local shopping mall. Fortunately for him a security guard was awake to it and prevented it from happening. That pretty much summed up Brad H on tour and the fact that the Gods were looking over him for the entire tour. At one stop he left his backpack in a toilet, but managed to rush back and find nothing had been stolen. In my last night in London, he was standing at the entry to the tube around midnight waving his wallet around as if to say “Rob me! Rob me! I’m an ignorant cashed up tourist! Rob me!”. Another thing I discovered, as with Britain, was that all the security guards were black Africans. There has been a lot of anger in Europe in recent times towards African immigrants giving rise to right wing political parties. But I ask the those right wing bastards this; if you didn’t let African immigrants in then who would you get to do your security? In France, it certainly wouldn’t be their army if WWII were anything to go by.
To couple our great hotel location, was the incredibly slow elevator, a thing that would prove all too common throughout Europe. Some would hate the slow speed of the elevator, but I thought it was great. It gave you enough time to read the entire map of Paris and plan your next 2 days itinerary with time to spare. I only wish I had taken my tax’s on tour because I would have had enough time to complete them on my way up to the 5th floor.
After dinner it was off for a night tour of Paris. We travelled through the Arc de Triomphe round about which apparently has 12 different entry points, is about 5 lanes wide, and contains infinite chaos. Apparently there is not a single insurance company on earth that will cover any damage caused in the round about. Fair enough too. It’s pretty much shut the eyes and hope, which judging by the chaos is exactly how most drivers handle the conditions. Another problem Paris motorists have is that there are around 2 cars to each car park. A fact illustrated by the dinted and scratched bumpers of each car in Paris. The bus was also entertained by some local “touch parking” his car into a parking spot after about 3 attempts.
Another highlight of the night was the Eiffel Tower. It’s almost impossible to now think that one of the world’s most famous landmarks faced massive opposition when it was first built in 1889 for the Exposition Universelle (World Fair to you and me). It was almost knocked down in 1909 until someone from the Murdoch family figured it would be a good place to put an antenna, and alas, pay-tv was born. Okay, I made the Murdoch stuff up, but the French seriously thought about knocking it down in 1909. We rode to the top and viewed the many lights of Paris that come to light at night. Once on the ground 10 hawkers surround you at a time all looking to sell you the same crappy merchandise. You don’t dare purchase from 1 one of them otherwise the others will surround you like sea gulls after a chip (or in Dover, a small infant). That night I flipped through my French dictionary to find out how to say “Suck my balls” in French so as to eliminate any unwanted attention from street hawkers for the rest of my time in Paris.
Back at the hotel there was a small gathering in Aalok and Brad H’s room for some cards and Bundy and coke. The fun and games probably finished around midnight.
Another thing I should point out was that I had booked a triple room for the tour, giving me a 5% discount on the cost of the tour. As it turned out, no one else booked a triple so I was given a single room. If that wasn’t enough to make my day, I was also given a double bed, which apparently wasn’t a luxury afforded the martial couples that were stuck with two single beds and some improvisation. My single room luxury was to continue for the next 2 weeks until there was some covert political unrest towards the tour manager and I was overthrown from the single room. For the last week the single room was than rotated between Aalok, Brad H, and myself.
Day 4 – Paris
The day started with confirmation we were in “da hood”. Apparently two old ladies on a Trafalgar tour had had their luggage stolen after some fine, upstanding Frenchmen in a suit walked into the hotel lobby, dropped his coat over the two bags (the luggage, not the old ladies), and then proceeded to walk out with them.
Our first stop today was the Notre Dame. Work on the Notre Dame began in 1163 and was completed around 1345, proving god not only moves in mysterious ways, but slow ways as well. The Notre Dame is famous for its gargoyles crafted on the outside of the building, or a more adapt description I believe is the “constipated looking gargoyles”. I stood on a circle thing out the front of the church, which apparently if you touch it you will be destined to return to Paris (myself I need to return to find out what the rest of the writing on the circle says. In the picture I took of it I only got “point zero des routes” into the frame). Judging by the piss weak attempts at humour and attempts to impress the women on tour by some street hawker, I figured the French didn’t want anyone to return to Paris and this guy was paid as a last attempt to make sure no one touched the circle. I touched the circle anyway and put my hopes in the SARS virus reaching the street hawkers of Paris. We all ventured into the church where I would see my first of many pictures in Europe of Jesus giving the peace symbol.
From Notre Dame, a few of us decided to walk to the Louvre. It was there that I met a more advanced street hawker, read scam, where a bunch of African guys were allegedly trying to raise money for some anti-landmine campaign. It seemed shady from the start, and when I signed the petition they threw in my face and saw a column indicating the size of donations people were making (all in excess of 20 euro) the alarm bell for my bullshit detector was about to be set off. When the guy holding the petition was pissed off with my 2 euro donation and kept trying to harass me into ‘a paper donation’ the alarm bells for my bullshit detector were set off and the mental guards were released in my brain to remove me from this group of charitable men. In all my years I’ve always been greeted with a big smile and a ‘Thank you very much’ no matter how small the amount of money I’ve chucked into someone’s charity’s tin can. Only great restraint on my behalf withheld me from using the newly learnt French phrase of “Suck my balls”.
The Louvre is of course famous for the glass pyramid at its’ entrance. It was designed by American architect IM Pei, apparently not as an artistic statement, he just wanted to prove to his mates you could still grow tomatoes in the city provided you had a suitable glass house. Once in the Louvre, we were told we’d have to check our backpacks into the baggage hold. Initially I wasn’t exactly ecstatic about that as I figured it was another way to charge the hapless tourist more money, but I was happy to discover the baggage hold was free. We all agreed we had little time to view all the great works inside the Louvre so we decided on making sure we at least saw the most famous works, namely the Mona Lisa (as overrated as anything from Van Gogh) and the most famous chick on earth without arms, the Venus de Milo. As we made our way to these famous works I noticed the curator at the Louvre had an obsession with putting up paintings of women breast-feeding. One such painting also included a grown man getting his fair share of breast. Don’t know whether he was breast-feeding or just “trying to get some”. To go with that, the curator also was a big fan of paintings that included naked blokes wrestling and heads on plates. Jesus, his mum, and his dad also had a huge number of paintings in their honour. To think that the guy who only lived such a short time found time to pose for so many paintings and still perform so many miracles is quite remarkable.
After our brush with some of the greatest paintings of all time, we decided to head for the Arc de Triomphe. Along the way some guy purporting to be a street artist offered to draw a picture of me. Initially I was flattered that someone finally agreed that I was a deceptively pretty man, but when he said “I can draw you with more hair” I had to storm off. It was the only way I could prevent myself from using my newly learnt French phrase. That guy was just one of many annoying street hawkers. There’s just so many of them that you almost think they’re hired by the French government in an attempt to keep foreign tourists out of the country by ruining the whole Paris experience for you.
As we walked up the avenue des Champ Elysee towards the Arc de Triomphe we were pleasantly surprised to stumble across a parade of troops to commemorate victory day. Apparently there were more troops marching that day than actually attempted to defend France from the Nazis when they strolled across the border and into Paris. We ordered lunch while we watched the parade, which is always an experience when the customer and the person serving them don’t speak the same language. It usually involves a lot of pointing at the picture on the menu and everyone behind that person pointing at the food that was just ordered and saying “I’ll have the same”. The young French woman serving us found the whole thing as amusing as us and tried her best to help us out, thus killing the stereotype of the rude French person for me.
After lunch we made our way to the Arc de Triomphe for the regulation photos. The great Arc was commissioned in 1806 by Napoleon to commemorate his imperial victories, and was finally finished in the 1830’s. I believe it took so long because of constant union strikes about smoko times, union workers trying to get double time for working on each day that ends in a “y”, and union workers trying to get a danger allowance for having to walk through the round about. I was amused that they had to have a sign explicitly saying no dogs allowed up the stairs to the top of the Arc. The French just love walking their dogs, namely poodles. A love affair that must also include walking their dogs up national monuments.
After visiting the Arc de Triomphe a number of us figured we had enough time to catch the metro out to see Jim Morrisons grave in Cimetière du Père Lachaise. That assumption soon wavered when it took us around half an hour to just figure out which station we were at. I had helped the confusion when I said we were at the “Charles de Gaulle North Sortie” station. It was a sign I saw and it didn’t make sense to me given the French word for “exit” is “sortie”. We had lost confidence in our ability to use the metro so decided to just try and figure out how to get to Hoche. Knowing I just had to be wrong, I eventually figured out which station we were at and took control of the situation for the small group. I then steered us onto the correct trains, avoiding a potential situation when one of our small group almost had us going on the wrong way on the correct line. After we got to Hoche we were quite proud of ourselves, a feeling very similar to that which I’m sure a rat gets when it finds the cheese in the maze.
Back at the hotel, and on the elevator, I had plenty of time to think about Paris. The one thing that really stood out was that Louis XIV must have had an incredibly small penis. It was the only way to justify why a man would build such huge, monumental buildings; he was compensating for having a small penis.
Dinner turned out to be a lot of fun that night. There was some French Keith Richards guy and a freaky looking old transvestite guy singing tunes all through dinner. I enjoyed many glasses of wine and my first experience of eating snails. Thankfully, they were dead by the time they were served as I hear they are hard to catch once they get the fear of death in them as they can show a real turn of speed.
After dinner it was off to see a cabaret show. That was also great experience. I sat at a table with Brad P and Andy and we worked our way through two bottles of complimentary champagne. Free alcohol and half naked chicks; it doesn’t get much better than that.
After the show a group of us decided to head off to a club called the “Lokomotion”. It had an “interesting” crowd wanting to get in, including a number of punks with mow hawks. Aalok teamed up with Vicky, Vicky spoke French and Aalok was good at negotiating deals, and they succeeded in getting us into the club with a group discount of 2 euros per person. A beer cost 10 euro inside the club, so it was little surprise to see no one in the club drinking. The place started to get jumping around 1am. At which time a local tried to work his magic on Liz using the great line “You are so beautiful”. I’m sure given that English was his second language he was quite proud of it, but when English is your first language it just doesn’t cut it. Liz wasn’t impressed and Frenchie was sent off with his tail between his legs.
Sometime after 2am it was decided we’d had our fair share of French dance culture and decided to head back to the hotel. As it was after 2am, the only way to get home was by Taxi. When the cab driver pulled out a map to find the location of the hotel it reminded me so much of home and the blank stare you get so many times when you tell the driver where you want to go. The fact that the driver didn’t speak English also reminded me of cab drivers back home. After about 5 minutes the driver finally figured out where he needed to go, and promptly started heading in the opposite direction to which we were travelling. We got home safely, and all for the cost of 15 euros. Others were not so fortunate, being slugged 35 euro. Rip off cab drivers; again I felt at home.
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