Up and out in Paris

The arrival at Charles de Gaulle was smoother than I expected—not merely the actual landing of the plane, but the overall getting-into-Paris experience. It helped that I was happy to be approaching home, a place where I feel much better and more comfortable than I think I ever have in my native country. But my past chipped code on the stone tablets that control my primitive computer in the present. I had been ready for a shake down, an unpleasantness I was willing to suffer to get back from where I should have come from.

In the old days, I had to pass through deeply personal interrogations at passport control and customs. At each of these, the officers/agents scrutinized the subjects that passed before them, trying to read the body language and facial expressions that gave away a terrorist, criminal, or a person who wears even venal, to say nothing of mortal sin on their face like me.

Generally, foreign authorities did surprisingly little in this realm of border security, though I have suffered at rough hands on occasion. A German with greasy hair and the look of an apprentice once took apart my bags once, looking for drugs, vegetables or fruits, and bundles of cash. He aped the airs of his superiors, grunting and harrumphing at each piece of underwear he examined, promising from time to time that anything I might be hiding would end up “bad for you.” Such experience readies a guilt-ridden neurotic like me for the worst-case scenario, which always has me in a foreign prison bargaining away my last dignity for toilet paper, matches, and a few squares.

This time, however, the automated systems for seeing the American visitor (and I imagine most others too) into the EU/Schengen Agreement area functioned surprisingly well, though I was disturbed to have my identity verified via facial recognition, which the agents seemed to think infallible. For all of this, the officers were pleasant. Most were in moods far more amenable to welcoming guests than I had ever noticed before, likely for having been relieved of the pressure to make their quota of harassed guests.

We walked, literally, through passport control and customs without a hitch. As a matter of fact, agents were singularly uninterested in underclothes and plant matter. Waltzing, which it was, through to the open air was easy as the proverbial pie.

My wife packs and repacks for days preceding any trip farther than 50 miles from home, the amount of fussing and overthinking increasing exponentially with the miles traveled over that number. Paris is at least 4,500 miles from Kansas City. The amount of packing-pressure on her must have been enormous. For a guy like me, a pair-of-undershorts-and-extra-shirt person, my readying for the trip took 11 minutes (I timed it).

Her carry-on weighed something like 40 pounds and included a couple changes of clothes and all the everyday items one might need for a couple of weeks. I muffed and grumbled under the load—having checked my nearly empty carry-on at the gate when the flight agent asked for volunteers to give up their carry-ons for the sake of opening space in the cabin.

Ultimately, she practiced a kind of wisdom in her overpacking in this sense: AirFrance lost our bags. We loitered around the baggage carousels for nearly an hour, waiting for our bags to trundle through. The baggage claim where our bags were supposed to be was completely empty and I never did find out where the bags for our connecting flight from Atlanta wound up. I gazed at what I thought was a miracle—nobody on the Atlanta flight seemed to have checked bags. After wandering from carousel to carousel in the immense baggage-claim hall at Charles de Gaulle, I finally went to AirFrance Baggage Services to discover from a kind and smiling agent, that our bags had been delayed a flight and would arrive in “about an hour or two hours.” Instead of waiting, she said, we could go and our bags would be taxied to where we were staying.

We almost merrily made our way to the bus that would take us into Paris. The fee was far less than a taxi or Uber from MCI to our house in Kansas City. I was thrilled. Not at the savings but at the ease of getting into town. All we had to do was take 30 seconds to buy tickets and wait twenty minutes at a bus stop directly outside the baggage-claim hall.

Meanwhile, my American friends in Paris texted to determine our arrival time. The “where are you?” messages came at regular intervals, with me having to report our position in something akin to Morse Code. “At the baggage claim.” “Waiting for the lost baggage agent.” “Our bags are lost.” “At the bus stop.” “On our way.” “Accident on the highway.” And so on.

We arrived at the Opera, finally. Eddy Harris, the ex-patriot writer of great American memoirs, met us with his lovely girlfriend Cecile. From there, we bused it through the snarl of Paris traffic to the Arc D’Triomphe and walked then to my friends’ Elizabeth and Phil Glynn’s apartment in a very quiet neighborhood—as opposed to the cacophony of urban Paris traffic. Finally, we were home for the holiday, at least, the Paris part of our holiday.

Phil had us out on his beautiful courtyard, which falls from the walls of adjacent two- and three-story apartment buildings into a pleasantly shaded rectangle of potted plants and functional outdoor furniture. He is a tall, very American-looking man whose bevy of children chattily arrived and talked to us in ways most American children don’t. They treated us as equals in intellect, maturity, and conversation, likely suffering the freedom French children have to express themselves over American children, who are constantly hushed and made to know their places.

Eddy, Celine, Virginia, and I headed out after a very short conversation with Elizabeth, who had arrived with more plants to pot and soil to pot them in. Eddy has lived in France for the last 40 years, the first ten or so in Paris. He knows this confusing knot of a city like I know the more ordered streets of my own. Before long, after a bus ride and short walk, we arrived at a plaza overlooking the valley where the Eifel Tower stands. We wound our way between blankets set on the ground of people peddling every sort of tourist kitsch, which, of course, included mini-towers in multitudes of metallic finishes.

More than the view, we wanted nothing to do with the tower. We saw it, marveled at it, talked about it. That was enough.

A cafe coffee later, we made our way to another café where the case of baked goods made the smallish plexiglass cabinets of American coffee houses look like leftover and day-old pastries. We bought a baker’s dozen of macarons for the Glynn’s and made our leisurely way through the Victor Hugo circle and back to the Glynns’, marveling the entire time at the wonderful architecture and solid, block-square apartment buildings that line these spindly alleys and broad boulevards.

A late-evening dinner at the corner restaurant gave me the feel, a magic, perhaps, of the Paris I remember from George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. The place was full windows and no seat without a view. Phil knew the owner, who also knew enough to bring English menus for the guests. The food, of course, was outstanding.

After some 20 hours underway, a five-mile walk through the atmosphere of this fantastic and iconic city, we slept 10 hours and woke to another day with Eddy and Celine as guides for an adventure that continues today.

In all, less than 48 hours in Paris, we came, we saw, we were overawed. Surrounded by friends, conversed by strangers—who weren’t nearly as snooty as we had expected—and fed and refed in cafes and the dining rooms of the Glynns and the restauranteur, we find ourselves ready for the worn and less-worn old tourist haunts.

What will happen next?

Between all the tourist and foreign-interested people who come to this great city, Parisians are, above all, people with things to do, money to earn, and families to tend to. Next time, before I get to customs, I’m donning Groucho glasses just to spice things up. I might just wear them around the city to see if anyone really notices.