It was a cool decision to do a Eurotrip rather than take a cheap, little-to-no satisfaction Turkey trip on an isolated holiday complex. My boyfriend and I decided to visit my cousin in Liege and expand and explore for 10 days for as long as our legs could work and our heads could stay at least at the tip of the clouds.
The flight to Brussels was my first flight ever. The fact that I’m a well-known, self-proclaimed hypochondriac has nothing to do with the (deathly) expectations I had over the flight. Sure, I thought everything and anything that could go wrong would go wrong, of course I was silently, mentally praying that our pilot was sane and had no recent relationship issues or that a bird wouldn’t suicidally fly into our engines – basically all the things that bring a plane down were on my mind – but I was chill. I was trying to be zen.
I decided I wanted the window seat so that my first flight experience ever was as rich as possible. My kind boyfriend agreed, yet somehow karma got the best of me and gave it all to him. The take-off was rather gentle for what I had heard of take-off's, my ears were hardly that clogged from the high pressure and the view was extraordinary – to put it lightly. And that was the absolute perfect moment my motion sickness decided to kick in and I established it was the best idea to give my window seat to my boyfriend. Karma.
What do you expect when you fly with a plane for the first time? Moreso when it’s the first time you are leaving the country. Quite frankly, I felt rich, I felt luxurious and I felt like I couldn’t wait to eat the famously delicious airplane food and drink a glass of wine while watching which country we were currently flying over. Well, our flight was low-cost so there were no monitors. The food was great, and expensive. And so was my water.
The minute I got the sense we were starting to lose altitude, I felt relieved and worried over how the typical Brussels fog could somehow take down the plane all by itself. That was not the case, even considering that most of our flight we had to keep our safety seatbelts on and turbulances were present 90% of the time. My stomach was not happy. The landing was smooth and just as I thought we were safe, the airstrip was nearly over so the pilot had to hit the breaks pretty hard. Then that was it. We got off, my cousin picked us up and we got some rest for what was about to be the greatest travel holiday ever.
Out of all our must-see destinations, Paris was, of course, our first. The road was long, the driver had to pee a lot and the passengers were silent, even seeing as a period of at least half a year had passed since the last live conversation. Yet excitement was predominant in the little environment that was our car. Excitement and the GPS.
So what exactly did I learn from Paris?
I learned that gipsies got to it before I did, and they apparently loved it, because they are everywhere – starting with the hotel's neighborhood we stayed at in the North, all the way to under the bridges over Seine. Moreso, I learned they beg in Romanian. Right in front of the Notre Dame.
I inevitably learned that Paris has more McDonald's than Amsterdam has H&M’s, and that’s not even a compliment. Coming from my boyfriend or any other McDonald's lover, well, maybe that would be, but it’s not.
I learned that Marks&Spencer set out not to limit itself to clothes and opened up a food chain. Presumably Romania is way under-developed to have even heard of Marks&Spencer alone ( okay, we do have a couple of those stores).
I learned that snobbish people can rent cool cars on Champs-Elysees for 90 euro for a 20 minute drive and that they won’t even mind that 20 minutes are insignificant in the Paris traffic.
I learned, of course, rather too late, that you can get the same touristic crap for extremely various sums of money in numerous places in Paris. Even from the infinite amount of street sellers.
Sadly, I learned that 10 P.M. is late for Paris and most of the restaurants and pubs close, so there is hardly anything to do if you want to have a beer by the Seine with your cousin and boyfriend. Furthermore, walking for two hours trying to find a pub or a shop to buy beer will prove useless. Useless and cold. And that was only a reminder of how poorly Paris stands regarding to little markets, especially in the center. This is how I learned that you should plan in advance the amount of water you are going to need because you are not going to find a store when you need it. Or in the next 3 hours of searching one. And don’t even get me started on those people selling water bottles being kept in blue buckets. They are reused, the seal is broken.
All of us – and our hurting legs – learned that if something looks really close in Paris and seems like a good idea to walk to it, it’s probably not. NOTHING in Paris is close and nothing is what it seems and you will find yourself walking from one end of the Seine to the other just because the spinning wheel looked close or wandering for 3.5 km because the Eiffel Tower „was so close to us the entire time” and there was no point in taking the subway. There is ALWAYS a point in taking the subway in Paris and most of the times it’s cool, fast and even gives you a nice view over some of the neighborhoods.
Last but not least, I learned that the Eiffel Tower, but Paris in general, are – with the risk of sounding corny – breathtaking and amazing and like nothing I have ever experienced before, especially if you decide it to visit it for the first time at nighttime.
Regarding food, I enjoyed the most amazing and delicious meal I ever came across in my entire life at the L'assiette aux fromages restaurant on Mouffetard street. If you have the time, be sure to check it out.
- Sophie Pugh
Disclaimer: Please understand that this was my personal experience in Paris. I chose to recount what my perception of this city was and not to review every attraction.
Although I chose to narrate my experience in Paris in a rather critical tone, as say my last paragraphs, Paris is unbelievably surreal (pardon my redundancy) and I absolutely cannot wait to visit it again and sometimes call myself its faithful inhabitant.
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