How It Started: Paris

How it ended: 3 world travelers with eyes wide open

Paris, our first non-American city. Photo mine.

Ever since my recent jaunt to New York and Vermont with my sons, I’ve had travel on my mind. I’m back in Italy now, and one son is back in NYC, the other in Iceland, en route to Prague and Spain or Portugal. Inevitably, when the three of us are together, the conversation turns to our travel exploits, past or planned, and, equally inevitably, I think about our first trip abroad, to Paris, way back in March 2003. Nineteen and a half years later, my sons have collectively visited 43 countries, 11 of them at least twice, and of those 11, five (Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Iceland, and Italy) at least three times. And that’s great. I love that they get their kicks crossing international borders, that they’re curious about other places and peoples and cultures. And maybe they’d be that way today even if The Paris Trip (capped because that’s how we talk about it, in honorific and reverent tones) hadn’t happened the way it did.

And maybe not. Let me explain.

The Paris Trip was the first time we’d traveled abroad—due to a lack of cash, not interest or desire, plus some complicating factors of the marital kind. Thus the trips I’d dreamed of for my sons never happened during my marriage. Instead, six months after the ink had dried on my divorce decree, I booked three tickets to Paris, money be damned. My goal was to introduce my boys, then 15 and 13, to the countries of their heritage (Italy on my side, France on their father’s), and we started with France, and specifically Paris, because we had a place to stay for free. By the time our free digs fell through, our tickets had been purchased, plans made. Money be damned, again. We were going.

Then shit happened. Good shit. Okay, bad shit too—on the day we departed, then-President G.W. Bush was to decide whether to invade Iraq. We all know how that turned out, but at the time we knew nothing, including the kind of reception Americans could expect in France. France did not endorse Bush’s plan for military action. But part of the good shit that happened, from my parental perspective, was very much due to that bad shit. Because, as you know, the U.S. did indeed invade Iraq, the day after we set foot on French soil.

I feel compelled to add that this was in the Before Times—before we had smartphones, before everything was google-able. I mean, we actually had to watch the news or read a paper to know what was happening. Trust me, this is important. Why? Because my kids watched the news in our hotel room, and that was when Eye-Opening Thing No. 1 happened.

I probably had my head in a guidebook (see Before Times, above, though I must say I still love guidebooks and have a ton of them), but the kids were flipping back and forth between BBC and CNN, the latter of which, even 19 years ago, was making lousy decisions. They called my attention to the BBC broadcast, where a grim-faced reporter was talking about the war in grave tones. They then switched to CNN, whose news anchor was also talking about the war—while smiling radiantly, accompanied by graphics of cute little bombs and colorful, animated explosions. (Hey CNN, guess whose reporting my teenagers thought was more appropriate for reporting on war, yours or BBC’s? You got it. Kinda like a 13-year-old has better judgment than you, huh?)

Actually, I’m grateful to CNN for their cutesy approach, because the contrast with staid and somber BBC taught my sons that people outside of the U.S. don’t necessarily (and usually don’t) view America the way Americans do. There it was, a prime-time lesson in the need for some Americans—the ones who spout, as if brainwashed, that tired old “America is perfect, the greatest country ever, superior in every way” bullshit variety of rhetoric—to learn some humility.

The next day, our spirits somewhat dampened, we began the first of our adventures—a tour, led by a glib Texan named Brian, via broad-saddled, zebra-striped bikes built for comfort, not speed. I’d booked us on two tours, one by day and one by night, and though the day tour was fun, it was our nighttime cruise around Paris that produced Eye-Opening Thing No. 2.

Not that the day tour isn’t worth mentioning. After Brian explained the rules (“Own the road!” and “Stay together!”), we were off, zipping through parks and alleys and fending off Paris’ infamous drivers by fanning out across avenues and boulevards like a swarm of leisurely bees.

At our first stop, I was delighted to learn that history was part of the tour. Brian, you see, was cool in ways a mom just can’t be, making history lessons equally cool. Did you know that Les Invalides, now a military museum and monument, was a hospital during the time of the French Revolution? Okay, so its name gave it away. But did you know it was also a secret arsenal where rebel citizens seized their hidden weapons before running off to storm the Bastille? And have you heard about the shopkeeper who decided that jumping off the Eiffel Tower draped in billowing silk (which he believed would to allow him to swoop gently to the ground) would be excellent advertising for his fabric shop? Wrong on both counts, poor guy.

The next morning, the day of our evening bike tour, we woke to frightening news: the bombing of Iraq had begun. Almost instantly we noticed a subtle shift in attitude toward us oh-so-obvious Americans—or did we expect it and thus look for it, possibly imagine it? I don’t know. Until that morning, all the waiters we’d encountered had taken our orders attentively, memorizing them on the spot, and they’d always gotten everything right; now, suddenly, our breakfast waiter was markedly inattentive and got just about everything wrong—not the case, we noticed, for anyone who spoke perfect French. Coincidence? Perhaps. It never happened again, so maybe our waiter that day was, understandably, distraught and distracted.

That evening we set out on our bikes, but this time Brian was subdued, clearly worried. Our route would take us past Place de la Concorde, site of the U.S. Embassy, and the entire area had been shut down. Anti-war demonstrators already mobbed the Boulevard Saint-Germain, our planned route to land us on the banks of the Seine for a riverboat cruise. Brian made no promises.

We arrived at Place de la Concorde as planned—and that was where Eye-Opening Thing No. 2 happened. The U.S. Embassy was barricaded and hordes of policemen lined the streets, some trying to manage the crowd, some diverting traffic—and, as it turned out, us. We were ordered off our bikes. As we wheeled them past double rows of policemen and thousands of protestors (more than 10,000, Google tells me now) shouting, chanting, and hoisting signs and Iraqi flags, my stomach did a few half-twists. A little fear, a lot of thrill, and, thrumming along beneath those two, absolute exhilaration that my kids were getting a never-to-be-forgotten lesson in international relations.

We didn’t make it to the riverboat that night, but no one cared. Later, in our hotel room, I asked the boys what they were thinking as we walked past protestors who were angry with our government. How much did they understand? The potential for violence was obvious; were they afraid? My 15-year-old said he wasn’t scared because we weren’t too close to the demonstrators, but he could feel the resentment around us and the police staring at us. He said it was weird to be in another country, seeing people protesting about ours. My 13-year-old said it was exciting, and his heart was pounding as we passed the policemen.

As for me, I was relieved my children were safe, worried about the months ahead, saddened by the destruction and inevitable loss of life to come. And grateful that The Paris Trip had given us much more than sightseeing fun. It changed us, all of us, boosted our awareness of the world outside our country’s borders, tilted our perspectives. How fortunate we were to have had our reality shaken, how fortunate to have seen, even briefly, America through European eyes.

---

Books of the week: Let’s celebrate Paris, not war!

• The Piano Shop on the Left Bank by Thad Carhart

• Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik

Poem of the week:

• “Paris” by Charles Bukowski (This one makes me laugh. It’s short enough that I’ll leave it here.)

never
even in calmer times
have I ever
dreamed of
bicycling through that
city
wearing a
beret

and
Camus
always
pissed
me
off.

Film of the week:

• Farewell, My Queen (Les Adieux à la reine), 2012. The early days of the French Revolution as seen through the eyes of a servant at Versailles.