We made it. But not, of course, without the little touches that often make travel a bit like a surrealist experiment. First there was the confirmation from the airlines that we could each check two bags, and each bag could weigh up to 70 pounds. Thus encouraged, we stuffed each suitcase until it was bursting at the seams with innumerable heavy guidebooks. Using the bathroom scales to make sure they weren’t overweight, I discovered that the heaviest bag was nonetheless only 40 pounds. What on earth, I wondered, did people pack that weighed 70 pounds? What could possibly weigh more than books? Needless to say, as soon as we arrived we found that we somehow forgot to pack half our clothes, so (as one wag put it to me), perhaps that’s why our bags were “underweight.”
Since I, for one, was not going to haul all those books through the Paris metro, we had arranged for an airport shuttle to take us to our apartment. All went smoothly until I noticed that our rather young shuttle driver was playing a video game on his cell phone as he drove along the very congested and very fast Peripherique (the ring-road around Paris). Shortly afterward, the American woman next to me decided to practice her school-girl French by engaging the driver in quasi-conversation. In response, the driver put away his phone and launched into an extended monologue. Now and then she would interject five words that even I could understand, whereupon, as far as I could tell, the driver would pick right up where he left off. Round and round they would go, with the driver getting so enamored of his own words that he rather forgot about the gas pedal. Cars were soon whizzing by on both the left and the right (passing on the right is illegal in France, technically speaking) as our van moved more and more slowly. Finally, to both my relief and that of the cars behind us, we reached our exit; the driver bravely inserted himself in what was now the high-speed lane on the right, and suddenly we were on the banks of the Seine with Notre Dame straight ahead.
We’re not in Kansas anymore
Since we were not headed for a third world country, we didn’t pack super-carefully (except for the guidebooks), thinking that we could buy whatever we forgot when we got there. This, it has turned out, was not as smart as we had imagined. Although it has given us yet another (expensive and time-consuming) lesson in cultural differences.
For one thing, spring break, a time when everyone (we are told) heads for the ski resorts, is fast upon us. Thus, unlike at home, where stores are already stocked with spring clothes, Paris shops are still stuffed with heavy winter wear. Trees are bursting into leaf, the cherry trees are in blossom, daytime temperatures are sometimes in the 60s, and nowhere can we find the light weight jackets we forgot to pack; just ski parkas and heavy fleece pullovers. We need rain pants and some light-weight capilene-type tee-shirts for hiking, but all we can find is thermal underwear and insulated ski pants. It’s early April and the clothes capital of the world is still selling winter apparel; who would have guessed?
And then there was our search for Afrin nasal spray. Robert had picked up a nasty cold (not pneumonia) on first exposure to Paris, and he desperately needed something like Afrin to allow him to breathe through his nose. Enter the French pharmacy, which is not at all like the American drug store; like most things French, they are either small or miniscule. And they tend to display only a small selection of the most innocuous items on the few shelves accessible to the customer. So, for almost everything useful, one must ask (as best one can). Which we did, at the tiny pharmacy around the corner. Where we learned that Afrin, which takes yards of shelf space back home, is unknown in France.
After a brief search in the back, the pharmacist offered us a little bottle containing l’eau de mer (a saline solution, we presume) instead. A bit doubtful about the efficacy of shooting seawater up my nose, we asked for something stronger, and soon we were shown another antiseptic-looking squeeze-bottle; the fine print on this one said it contained a weak camphor solution. Still not close enough for comfort to Afrin, we retreated to the apartment, where John researched Afrin on the Internet and determined its active ingredient. Thus armed, we ventured forth again, this time to a larger pharmacy on Boulevard Saint-Germain, where the pharmacist looked up the chemical name in a tome bigger than the Manhattan phone book. After different spelling conventions were taken into account, she did indeed find it buried within the columns of absurdly tiny type. Digging deeply in one of the several dozen large drawers that line the walls behind the counter, she seemed almost surprised to find a small box of Aturgyl. Same ingredients as Afrin, works just the same, just obscure (in France) in the extreme.
Sticker shock
Something else tells us we’re not in Kansas any more — the prices. With the falling (fallen?) dollar and the conversion to the euro, Paris is a lot more expensive than it was just a year and a half ago. Some examples: $60 to clean and press eight shirts. Two tiny tubes of sunscreen for $33. A package of toothpicks for $8. Two rather peculiar grilled cheese sandwiches at a café in the Luxembourg Gardens for $38 (that’s the last time I’ll order something with “surprise” in the description). Still unaccustomed to scrutinizing the prices of everything we buy, every few days we are hauled up short by the realization that we just paid an extraordinary price for something rather ordinary.
In the end, and despite the time we have spent here in the past, second-guessing French culture based on our own culture and our assumptions about France has proved to be more of a challenge than we expected. We brought some small-press guidebooks that I was sure would be hard to find here, and they’re in all the English-language bookstores, while the books we purposefully left behind — general guides by UK publishers — are nowhere to be seen. Clearly, we have much yet to learn, most of which is not in any guide book.