May 29th

Paris, France

  

(I tried to write this blog a couple times with no success. Too many ideas.)

Bonjour.

The City of Lights.

Je t’aime.

Paris holds the key to my heart.

Au revior.

After a little over six hours sitting in the same bus, ten minutes in the car riding home, five minutes pulling out the second bed, and seconds of laying in my bed again, I went to turn off the alarm clock, because it was 6:00 AM on a Sunday morning: “Ugh, my alarm clock is about to go off again. Honestly, can you believe everything that’s happened since then?”

Around 23 hours and 36 minutes earlier, we were getting up slowly, excited for a day that I knew I would remember for a while. It would just be a day, but it was a day in Paris. I was on the bus at 8:00AM with Christel and Martin (my host parents), Jana (my host sister), the other Jana (my host sister’s friend), and Anne by my side.

Back in November, I remember visiting Anne in Jülich for the afternoon, and we plotted how to get to Paris. Anne was determined to go to Paris, and I was, truthfully, just determined to travel. So when my parents discussed planning a trip to Paris, I worked up the courage to ask if Anne could come too.

Driving there was as unpleasant as a six hour bus ride could be, but I kept looking over to Anne with tired eyes and pulling out the scary-excited smile: Paris! The bus ride was a killer, but seeing every highway sign with the word “PARIS” written above got my nerves jumping and me pinching myself to validate everything going on around me.

We drove more and more into the heart of the city. The older buildings all just looked so… Parisian. As our bus pulled in next to the Arc d’Triomphe, I could not believe anything that was going on. We were looking at the Arc d’Triomphe. It was right in front of us. There. Like, really there. I read the dates and took in all of the detailed statues, which commemorated the Revolution that I was used to studying in my German classroom *** miles away. The view behind us was just as beautiful: Avenue des Champs-Élysées, one of the most famous shopping streets in the world.

… The rest of the day, we saw some of the most beautiful things in Paris. I, literally, stared at the Eifel tour every three minutes just to see that it was really there. That was something that I had seen over and over again in movies and history books, and now it was there. We walked up the steps of a large, beautiful church and looked at Paris as the sun set on the city. We fought our way through the Paris subway system, keeping a hand on our purses the entire time. We peered through gates to see “The Thinker” statue at a museum. We laughed as we saw the real Moulin Rouge: yes ladies and gentlemen, it does exist. We gasped at the beauty of Notre Dame and laughed at our childhood memories of the hunchbacked bell ringer. At the end of the day, through the tired eyes, we were still running around singing, “Paris holds the key to your heart. Ooh la la.”

When it comes to French: A language that I don’t understand. I couldn’t discern words so there was a need, a desire to learn and interpret, to say the words back to people with the same elegance. It was another language to conquer, and I tried to use the words I knew, saying “merci” and “excuse moi” with the best accents I could muster. Paris was beautiful.