An Exceptional Trip to Paris

Myself, Phillip, and Jenny in front of the infamous Notre Dame.


Jenny and I, still glowing from the musical, especially Rafiki. SHE was phenomenal!


Looking up the Champs Elysées, toward the Arc de Triomphe.


Looking down the Champs Elysées, toward Place de la Concorde.


Pictures just cannot do Christmas lights justice, can they?



The weekend of December 1st I headed to Paris to meet one of Eric's best friends. Jenny Thumann comes from Cincinatti but has called many places home. She went to school in Saint Louis where she met Eric, last year she lived in Japan to teach 3 and 4 year old kiddies, and this year she is living in Sion, Switzerland, working as an au pair for 2-year-old Zach! But that doesn't start to explain the complexity of this wondeful new friend of mine.

Meeting up with Jenny was like meeting up with an old camp friend - someone that you once knew really well and shared all of your secrets with, but who you haven't spoken to for years. The friendship is still just as strong, but the time that has passed between then and now allows you to talk incessently for hours on end. You can walk and talk for hours, sometimes noticing the intricately carved, decade-old canes in the shop windows and the very french women walking past, hurriedly trying to get inside and out of the rain, and other times you have to read the map at a random bus stop to see where the heck you are since you haven't looked at a single street sign for an hour.

We enjoyed Paris, but only as an aside. We were both there to meet someone who is loved by our dear Eric. And to see The Lion King!! Friday night we visited Fountainebleau where Jenny's friend Phillip is working as an au pair. The three of us, thirsty for conversation with people from our own culture stayed up until the wee hours of the night telling embarassing stories of French language mistakes, comparing the quality of our boarding, and of course re-living the gems of the 80's. Saturday we took a train into Paris and wandered through neighborhoods and around monuments, searching for nothing in particular. Saturday night Jenny and I abandoned Phillip to get ourselves gussied up for a night out on the town. We were going to see Rafiki!! And the rest of the characters in The Lion King. After the most beautiful musical I have ever seen (with one of the most beautiful voices in the world portraying Rafiki), we headed to the Champs Elysées. With dinner and Christmas lights on our minds, we meandered across town. Then, as was the theme of the weekend we RAN to the metro and got the last metro of the night, a long ride (which would have been a much longer walk) back to our hostel. Not ready to retire for the night, we found a table at an "Irish Pub" and ordered two Irish coffees. Coffee in hand, we enjoyed a Justin Timberlake concert playing on the tv until we were approached by two Scots. One was too drunk to remember which glass was his and the other was the funniest man in Scotland! We stayed, laughing, at the bar until 5am when we knew we had to go to bed so that we could see more than our pillows the next day.

Sunday we made the requisite trip to the Eiffel Tower. Despite the hurricane. I know you don't think that Paris has hurricanes. But you're wrong. If this wasn't officially a hurricane, then it was just as strong. In this type of a situation one can either choose to be furious or one can laugh. We obviously chose to laugh - it's what 'old camp friends' do together - and we were happy to see that most of the people around us felt the same. Despite our good attitudes, we decided to leave the tower and head back to the hostel for our things. We wanted to sneak in a coffee and a dessert before we parted ways mid-afternoon. Unfortunately, our easy-going attitudes got us in trouble in the end. Just as we sat down for our goodbye treat, we noticed that we didn't have enough time to actually indulge without missing our trains home. I ran inside with the money, asked to pay immediately and have our desserts to go. No problem, he said. Until he came out with our deserts on plates. Then we had a problem. I asked for them to go, again, and he hustled inside, arriving minutes later with our deserts at the bottom of bulk fruit containers, covered in tinfoil and connected with plastic wrap - an enormous package for two deserts, each of which were about the size of my fist! We had to laugh. And then we had to run! We ran to the metro, tore at the plastic wrap to disconnect our pleasures, and blew kisses as we each ran toward a different metro. Minutes later I had already connected to my second metro line when I received a text from Jenny. We were to meet at Chatelet because she had missed her train. About a half hour later we were reconnected and so were our desserts. Not wanting to risk missing the next and only train home for the two of us, we stayed close to the metro station. In a bar, or course. I explained to the bar tender that we had missed our trains and that we would really like a drink to accompany our desserts, and would she mind if we ate them in her bar. She made us a stiff Irish coffee and invited us to stay as long as we wanted. And we did.

This time we walked tranquilly to the metro station, had a proper goodbye with hugs and near tears. But by the time I arrived at Montparnasse train station I was running again! I ran across the passage between the metro line and the train lines, arriving at my platform with one minute to spare before the last train left the station towards Nogent-le-Rotrou. Whew! Another successful weekend in Paris!