France 1

Blog post 2

10/4/2022

45O26’26”N 12O19’52”E

Suffice it to say, traveling has been a whirlwind. I have enjoyed every second of it, but I have been from one thing to the next so it has been very difficult to write. Finally, the fervor has died down and I am going to be in a slightly more calm rhythm, so I will take this opportunity to catch you all up on how thing have gone. Today I will cover my first impressions on travel and France, tomorrow will be Florence, Italy, and the next day will be Venice. In other news, before I get to France, I just uploaded a paper I wrote to the website under the Projects category named ‘A Treatise on Spiritualism.’ I recommend giving it a read. Now for Paris:

We started by waking up at 5:00 to drive to a small airport, where we were greeted by the nearly full moon and Orion waving us off from the sky. The first flight was a short one on a 6-person plane and took us to Denver. I was dead tired because I had gotten very little sleep the previous night, and once I was finally able to fade off, my friend called me and we had a deep philosophical conversation at 2:00 AM for an hour. This travel day was not going to be fun.

Before I knew it I was walking down the departure ramp into the plane and was hit with my first bit of culture shock: the flight attendant greeted us in French. After I was comfortably settled in my seatled I was ready to dive into the next nine hours of homework, books on tape, movies, and if I was brave, sleep. The only thing of note about the flight is that when the flight attendants brought out the dinner, I was surprisingly not repulsed but the meal, unlike its American counterparts. I was still in shock from the fact that I was actually leaving the country all year to travel the world and learn all I could, but I still understood that to some degree as I stepped off the plane, I would be entering a whole new world.

That is why when I stepped off the plane, I was surprised when there was no fanfare of trumpets or chorus of angels, there was only a small exit lane and a lot of signs in French. The mundane nature of everything was in the people working on their phones returning from just one more business trip, or the casual demeanor of the tourists waiting to return to the great US of A and lovingly reunite with their jobs, school, etc. This is not to say that traveling is not what I thought it would be—it is and more. But there was still a confusing feeling that I could not place; I struggled with it then and still feel now in a small amount, and I think it is predominantly caused by social media. It is weird to live in a world where with the push of a button you can see every corner of the planet, and you can go to a movie theater and watch your favorite celebrities go on adventures from country to country, but at the same time see generalizations of people from different countries because of their political views. The dynamic becomes them and us. So whether consciously or not, as you step off the plane, you are surprised not to be greeted by aliens.

After getting some of the philosophy out of the way, I can tell you a little about Paris itself. We first made a quick stop at the hotel which was directly in front of the Louvre. Then we went out to eat. Luck was on our side because right outside our hotel along the Seine was a small corner cafe with small wicker tables and ash trays in abundance. Maybe, though, we were not too lucky, because there was another corner cafe one block down, and another, and so on. I guess all stereotypes are not foolish, after all. We only spent two days in Paris, but in two days, I enjoyed some delicious Parisian food. (It is always weird for me to see food, even nice food, at prices under $15 because I have lived in Telluride, an overpriced ski town, and New York City, one of the most expensive cities in the world. So to me, even the jacked-up tourist prices are a breath of fresh air.)

Besides the prices and profusion of corner cafes, there was one other thing that was very different from any previous experience I had had, and that was the roads and buildings. America is a young country that did not have a chance to build its infrastructure before the advent of cars, and Britain was severely blitzed by the Germans in World War II, so their roads and building are very modern. But in France, most of the building and streets can date back to the Renaissance and even earlier. This means that the streets are very narrow and winding as they were built for pedestrians and carriages. It chills my blood to see cars zip down these streets as bikes view along sing while people are making illegal traffic maneuver outages u turns and bikes make mischief through it all. If you can survive the deadly traffic I would highly recommend Paris.