Two Star Hotel Where the Stars Don't Mean Anything

Reflections on a trip to France

I’ve never experienced eye contact that I enjoy less than eye contact with a clarinet player. 

Complete with cartoonish ponytail, he swayed around the street next to where we were eating dinner outside in Paris. It was on St. Germaine, so right in a touristy part of town, so I can’t entirely blame the guy for trying. I think he made a few bucks (they call them “Euros” over there) from people who felt that he elevated the environment.

But I did not, and when I made the mistake of turning my head toward the sound, his enthusiastic eye contact and head movement while blowing into his clarinet made my skin crawl. It was like he was trying to be whimsical. To add emphasis to his breathing into the instrument. It made me feel oogy. Back up, Squidward.

Art is everywhere in Paris. In my opinion, it’s one of the most important artistic cities in the world, and has been home to some of the greatest creative minds in history, like Lionel Messi, who is currently in his “moved from Spain to live in Paris for a couple of years” phase.

The Louvre smells like shit. Now, I’m not sure if this was because you’re largely underground in a building that abuts the Seine in a city known for throwing its dead into overstuffed holes for centuries, or if it was the crowd of tourists feeling that they could fart freely knowing the chances of anyone zeroing in on them and making a scene were slim. I didn’t notice many video cameras in the Louvre (it’s good to know how easy a heist would be at any moment), let alone any sort of tech that would maybe set off a siren or shine a spotlight on someone who farted a little too close to “Liberty Leading the People.”

Being that the Louvre is home to arguably the most famous painting of all time, most of the tourists are there to see that. When you go into the Louvre, you should 100% get a map, because the layout is a little confusing. That is, however, if you want to actually see art besides the Mona Lisa. If you want to see the Mona Lisa, it’s easy as hell to get around. Just follow the people. They will probably be holding selfie sticks.

After puttering around the Egyptian antiquities and Greek/Roman sculptures for a while, we decided it was time to see the hits.

The first was the Venus de Milo, sculpted some time during the second century BCE (which they abbreviate in France as “Avant J-C”). While looking at the armless beauty, Michele and I discussed why exactly this sculpture was so well known. It is, of course, beautiful. Pretty much every sculpture is wildly impressive. This was just a rock at one point, and someone painstakingly made it look almost exactly like a person/lion/fish/combination of things.

We, of course, knew what the Venus de Milo was and looked like, but neither of us really know why it was worthy of any more attention than the other incredible sculptures there. After a quick Google search of “Why is the Venus di Milo so famous?” we learned that essentially it is famous for being famous. It is the Kardashian of paintings.

The Venus di Milo is mostly famous for its own legacy, having influenced consequential art of the future like that of Salvador Dali and, of course, The Simpsons.

We sort of speed-ran our way through the European paintings section, being that we live right next to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, home to plenty of paintings of Jesus’ grizzly demise, and found ourselves in the flow of people heading toward You Know Who.

I have seen pictures of the crowd around the Mona Lisa, and even with that in mind it still struck me. Not in the way that art strikes you, mind you. This was a different sort of striking. There wasn’t much beauty to behold. In the middle of the room, still surrounded by plenty of other paintings, the hoard of people is corralled into a line to take a photo up close. Not wanting to do that, I just went around them and took a picture from the side.

The magical thing about the Mona Lisa is that her eyes still meet your camera lens, even if you take it from an angle and don’t wait in line. Wow.

While I took the picture of the painting, and then turned around to take a picture of the crowd, I heard a little girl behind me take a picture and excitedly announce to her father, “OK, we can leave now!”

I do love art museums. I’m not big on them when they’re crowded (or stinky), but it’s the Louvre so I couldn’t really get too picky. I’d like to think that as I continue to age I’ll have a better understanding of art. It seems like something someone who wants to be perceived as intellectual and sophisticated should know about, especially if you live in a city and work in the creative arts.

At the Louvre, many of the painting descriptions are in French. And my French is, as they say over there, merde. 

The alternative is to pay for a Nintendo 3DS that you carry around with you and it explains the art you are looking at. I’m not sure what I thought the future would be, but a 3DS explaining “The Winged Victory of Samothrace” didn’t cross my mind.

I don’t speak French mostly because I never took French in school. That’s not entirely true. I don’t speak French mostly because I live in the U.S.

The first time my French was put to the test was when I went to Montreal in college to see my friend’s band play at Pouzza fest. My friend and I drove up and stayed in a university dorm, being that they were empty for the summer. Our suite-mates were a group of very nice Quebecois punks working at the festival. Over drinks, when I explained I don’t know any French aside from a few phrases my mom taught me before I left (but did not remember) they asked what we learn in school.

“They teach us languages, mostly Spanish, but we don’t really pay attention,” I said.

That night, after drinking far too much with them, I remembered one phrase and announced it proudly as I swayed to my feet to stumble to my bed. I motioned for quiet and said, “Je suis fatigué” and the crowd went wild.

Since then, I’ve gone to France a few time, and have mostly relied on Duolingo to get me through things like ordering at restaurants, buying train tickets, asking for directions, and generally separating myself from the people who ask for a menu with a big British flag on it.

This has, largely, failed me. Not because of Duolingo, though. My own brand of anxiety manifests itself in a way that when the pressure is on, meaning a real person is standing in front of me waiting for me to say something, I blank. I forget how to order something. I say bon soir instead of bonjour at 1 PM (13:00 over there). 

Throughout the week or so that I spent in France, the words I could most reliably conjure were the ones that came from neither my mom recounting her high school French from 1978 or Duolingo. It was a song by Flight of the Conchords called “Foux du Fafa.”

“Foux du Fafa” is practically a Duolingo conversation before there was Duolingo. In no situation are you going to say “The boy eats the apple” while on vacation in France. In the song, Bret and Jemaine essentially just rattle off French 101 subject-verb-object sentences and French-sounding gibberish.

While I walked through a grocery store, I remembered ananas, and you bet your ass every time I looked at a menu I heard Bret McKenzie’s voice say bœf. When I ate seafood, which was often as I spent part of the trip in the South of France (you can’t just say Southern France), I looked at the menu and thought, Jacques Cousteau. 

With “Foux du Fafa” in my head nearly on a loop, there was one moment where I got to almost verbatim channel the lyrics. 

While we stood outside of a bar in the 11th Arrondissement in Paris drinking wine, we heard a thud and looked over to find that someone had rammed their car into a parking barrier.

The guy working inside came out, saw the guy drive off, looked at us and said “Ça va?”

“Ça va,” I replied.

Voilà – le conversation dans le parc.

I wanted to do better with French. I’d love to have full conversations with people. Every time I visit another city, I can’t help but insert myself into it and picture what it would be like to live there. Being 31 in Paris, I had trouble deciding exactly what kind of Parisien I would be: That is, am I a baggy pants young person or an older person committed to tight fitting pants? I’ve gone over how commitment to a certain pants cut aligns with a person’s age and whether or not they have stopped trying in terms of fashion.

The man who owned the Airbnb we stayed in was a sophisticated Parisian man. Xavier was his name, and his studio apartment was full of photography books signed by his friends who made them. His one wall lined floor to ceiling with books of all kinds – philosophy, art, fiction, the Kama Sutra. His furniture, while minimal, was vintage and beautiful. He was a man of taste who no doubt could explain the intricacies of the wine you were enjoying beyond ça va and maybe he would even stop to help someone after their car runs into a barrier.

We left the windows open to sleep there, letting the Parisian air and the sounds of their goofy police sirens in. The next morning, looking at his small couch in the sunlight, I noticed cat footprints on the cushions.

Xavier had said he would be staying at his girlfriend’s apartment while we were there. He does not live with her, as he says that “is not the Parisian way,” and I wondered whether that meant he took his cat there, too.

One night, after having a few too many bieres on the banks of the Seine, I decided that it would be a good idea to partake in foreign McDonald’s. Michele agreed, but on the condition that I would remove all of the evidence so our esteemed host would not have a reason to think of us as anything other than American travelers who have transcended our stereotypes and are worthy of respect on the global scale. We joked that McDonald’s was not the Parisian way, but having seen the line of teenagers waiting for Domino’s, I wasn’t sure that was true.

On the final night, as I cleaned Xavier’s apartment before his return the next morning, I saw something move in the window. It was a cat.

It turns out, while we were sleeping, a cat had walked down the gutter from possibly a few windows down, possibly from across the city, and hung out on the couch for a while. I almost wish that Xavier was some Airbnb creep who hides a camera in his home so I could watch the cat let himself in.

Paris seems like a good place for animals to live. In addition to mentally inserting myself into the city, I also sort of anthropomorphize foreign animals on a Disney-like level. I imagine horses on a farm talking to each other in the native language. I imagined the crow carrying a whole ass croissant through the Jardin des Plants going and telling his friends about his haul en Francais.

Paris, of course, is home to one of the most famous anthropomorphized animals, the rat from Ratatouille. 

The first night we were there, I swear to god I saw a mouse scurry across a restaurant floor. And instead of thinking, “Oh, gross.” I thought, “Oh, wow. It’s real.”

I looked back into the exposed kitchen and noticed the chefs were wearing tall-ish hats, with enough poof for a rat (or at least a mouse) to fit. And in that moment, despite having just turned 31 and having never been to Disney World, I believed in the magic.

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Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Title Fight.