Yesterday my wife and I left Paris for Omaha. That’s not a
sentence most people would enjoy writing, but we’ve been gone a month and look
forward to our home and dullish routines. Twenty-five years ago I was in Paris
nearly every month and my wife often accompanied me. She did the museums,
cathedrals and other large buildings. I worked. I enjoyed interacting with the
French in a non-tourist setting and kidded my wife that she did dead France
while I did live France.
This trip we focused on dead France … and walking. Museums
and walking. Cathedrals and walking. Monuments and walking. Walking to find new
and interesting places to eat. Sometimes just walking to watch the street life.
But if you placed all of our steps end to end, you still wouldn’t reach a Brasserie-free
zone. How cool is that!
We noticed a couple of differences from twenty-five years
ago. For one thing, tourism isn’t nearly as easy or enjoyable. Terrorists and
technologists put a dampener on the fun.
Security is everywhere. And I mean tough, no nonsense
soldiers, not our clock-watching TSA gatekeepers. These decked out fully armed men
and women strode purposefully in urban warfare formation. They never stopped.
They never quit looking around. They never acted friendly.
Every public place included security checkpoints. In most
cases, this meant two lines; one to check your bags and another for tickets.
Standing line could wear you out before you got the first glance at a historic
artifact. Worse, everything was cordoned off. No more grand vistas of the
Eiffel Tower. The base is surrounded by barricades and open space under the
tower is the province of black and white photographs from the pre-digital age.
Notre Dame is still free, but a glacial line to get through security can consume
the entire forecourt. If you’re a millennial, you think this is normal. How
terribly sad.
Technologist have spoiled the party as well. Everybody born
after the breakup of the Beatles has a selfie stick and insists on recording
every moment of their lives. It’s as if they can’t enjoy life in the moment.
They must see a digital representation to believe it’s real. And they can’t
just snap their picture and get on with it. They wield their selfie stick like
a baton, twirl it, shove it in other people’s faces, or just endlessly hold up
traffic as they preen and mug for the perfect shot to share with the world on Instagram.
Everybody is a celebrity in their own mind.
In the olden days, read the distant Twentieth Century,
single-purpose cameras took photographs on expensive film that took more coin
to develop and print. It also cost far too much to make a copy for everyone on
the planet. Tourists stood away from the object of interest, took their
picture, and moved on. That meant Kodak Moments seldom disrupted your enjoyment
of a world wonder. Not today. People crowd forward so they can shoot backwards while
claiming an arc of free space by waving a plastic stick with all of the
authority of a scepter. Digital is free, everyone has a device, and spreading
copies to people you don’t know is de rigueur. Pity the poor soul who just
wants to feast on an exhibit with their eyes and ears.
These inconveniences were restricted to tourist attractions.
Our small hotel in a pleasant neighborhood had all the charm of the Paris we
knew twenty-five years ago. We were nestled on a quiet side street, with tiny grocery
stores, casual cafés, fine dining, with trendy shopping, Metro stations, and bustling
Parisians just steps away.
We had a wonderful time. Actually, our first visit was
thirty-five years ago. At the time, we had never been anyplace more exotic than
Tijuana. On our first night, we walked out of our Left Bank hotel and wandered
down the street to a restaurant. We had no idea how to order. We knew no
French. The waiters knew no English. We were so naïve, we ordered entrées as
our main course. We had accidentally chosen La Coupole, the most famous and
historic restaurant on all of the Left Bank. The whole experience was fun as
hell, and it had a lot to do with our penchant for travel ever since. We were again
in Paris for our fiftieth anniversary, so we decided to celebrate our grand
night at La Coupole. It was fun. The food was great. The waiters charming. And
best of all, the ghosts of all those famous artists and writers joined us in
celebration of our first fifty years together.
Viva la France.
P.S: I write this from New York City, not Omaha. Our flight
was cancelled. My last post (Planes, Trains, and Automobiles) bewailed our
travel mishaps getting to New York. Evidently our travel hobgoblin has returned.