Zurich and Paris: Part II

Read Part I here.

We thought we might have to walk around the city a bit to find someplace available and affordable, but we were lucky once again. We asked the woman at the information desk in the train station for recommendations for hostels. She not only recommended one to us, but even called ahead to reserve a room! The hostel was centrally located in the city and fairly clean. However, it only had a room available for the 30th, so we still needed to find somewhere to stay for the nights of the 31st and 1st. We were lucky once again and found a second hotel for the final two nights fairly quickly. This hotel was tucked away in one of the side streets and looked perfectly fine, so we booked it right away for two nights.

Back in the original hostel, we met one girl from Thailand and two girls from Greece. The girl from Thailand was extremely friendly, but unfortunately she was leaving on the same day that we arrived, so we didn’t get to spend much time with her. We also talked for a while with the two girls from Greece. They were studying architecture at a French university. They had traveled to Paris together and when it was time for them to return, only one of them wanted to go back and the other wanted to stay a few more days in the city. So, after the first Greek girl left for home, the three of us remaining—a Greek, a German, and an American--ended up spending the next two days in Paris together.

Conversation between the three of us was hilarious at times. We all spoke English, so that was our main language of communication, but Lilli and Catherine (the girl from Greece) both spoke French and Lilli and I both spoke German. In addition, Catherine obviously speaks Greek and Lilli speaks Spanish, so between the three of us we covered five languages. Most of the tourists in Paris spoke one of these five languages, so it was fun to guess exactly where each person was from. Interestingly, the largest percentage of tourists aside from Americans, seem to come from South America, Mexico, or Germany. I had expected to hear a lot of German, since France borders Germany and many Germans speak French, making France a logical tourist destination, but I did not expect to see so many people from Mexico and South America, and particularly from Colombia and Venezuela.

In Paris, we saw all of the sights--and with the exception of the massive Louvre art museum--I do mean all of the sights. On our first full day, December 31st, Lilli and I walked for 10-12 hours all over the city. Some of the areas we visited include: Place de la Bastille (site of the famous French prison and the beginning of the French Revolution), the Notre Dame Cathedral, the Concorde (site of the Egyptian obelisk monument, marking the former site of the guillotine), the Arc de Triomphe (an arch in honor of French soldiers killed in the Napoleonic Wars), and the Champs-Élysées (today a major shopping avenue that connects the Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe). My favorite landmark by far was the Eiffel Tower, but more about that later.

After Lilli and I went sightseeing together during the day and Catherine took her friend to the train station, the three of us met up for the evening—actually New Year’s Eve. We knew we wanted to watch the fireworks at midnight, but we had a few hours to spare before then. Catherine wanted to see a play, so we decided to see Woody Allen’s “Puzzle”, a story about complicated family secrets, at the Theatre du Palais-Royal. By sheer coincidence, I vaguely remembered hearing about this play, which is titled “A Second Hand Memory” in English, when it debuted in New York in 2004. I was lucky in this regard because the entire play was in French and required some serious filling-in-the-gap storytelling on my part. Still, it was interesting to watch a play in another language and I found out later that even Catherine and Lilli, both of whom speak French fairly fluently, only understood about 80 percent of the story.

We left the theater around 10:00 pm and headed to the subway to go see the midnight fireworks. Of course, on New Year’s Eve, everything takes longer than planned …