It really is a beautiful city and, with the possible exception of my lady cop and the barmaid near my hostel who treated me like a leper, the people are not quite as rude as you think.
Most Parisians are, if not exactly gushingly outgoing, at least friendly-ish.
There were even a bunch of cops around the Eiffel Tower dishing out cheerful smiles and helpful directions. Though, it must be said, they didn't look completely natural about it. It looked like part of some sort of tourist-department-working-in-partnership-with-Paris-city-council "let's stop everyone thinking we're rude" communications initiative. I could almost smell the PowerPoint.
Still, the tourists seemed to appreciate it and, I suspect, the uniformed members of the Combined Operations Tactical Smiles and Map Reading Unit probably found a day telling fat Americans that the Eiffel Tower was the big pointy thing mere steps away to be a lot easier way to earn a crust than running around busting crims.
I really do go on about police, don't I?
Truth is, I think you can tell an awful lot about a society by looking at its police.
Canadian police are as near to incorruptible as coppers get, superficially friendly and ever so slightly dull.
American cops are armed to the teeth and paranoid to a degree that would get normal people institutionalised.
British coppers are slightly sloppy, well-meaning, but bogged down in nanny-state paperwork and not entirely sure what their role in life is.
Mexican police are the finest officers your money can buy.
And so on.
So far, the French police were conforming to my theory -- arrogant and overbearing by nature, yet quite willing to do a little smiling and grovelling if it seems to be in their self interest (Ooops. Sorry to mention the war).
I was looking forward, on this journey, to seeing how well my theory held up, how closely my impression of each country's police matched the national character. Hardly the sort of tourist agenda you'll find in guide books and Sunday newspaper travel sections, but you've gotta admit it beats the shit out of endless churches and museums, now doesn't it?
The Eiffel Tower is, surprisingly, not easy to find. From movies and TV you naturally assume that it must rise prominently over the city and therefore be a breeze to locate. Not so.
As well, in a city absolutely festooned with helpful directional signs, there are none in the immediate vicinity of the tower. I did eventually find it thanks to a kindly South African family who had come to Paris armed with a better guide book than my hopeless Lonely Planet Europe on a Shoestring.
Once you find it, the tower is exactly what you think it's going to be. It is neither bigger, nor smaller than you expect and is therefore, in my view, all the better for that. It is absolutely the perfect size, tall enough to be impressive yet not so big that, like Toronto's CN Tower, for example, it doesn't dwarf the city in a "fuck you" kind of way.
I would have loved to climb it and, despite being told that the estimated wait was two hours and despite the electronic signs over the ticket office reading "saturation possible" I did join the queue. But after half an hour in the line and extrapolating my wait over the length of the line-up, I calculated the wait at more like three or four hours so, after a last admiring walk around, I headed home.
My walk back along the left bank (or Rive Gauche as they say on the YSL bags) of the Seine took me past at least 5,000 significant attractions. The thing about Paris is that you pass something historic and wonderful every half-block. Even the stuff that isn't special, looks like it ought to be.
I was wandering along the Quai d'Orsay when I sited a magnificently ancient and grandiose edifice that, I thought, must be a royal palace, a national museum, an imperial residence, or some such important thing. It turned out to be nothing more than the Paris office of Air France.
I passed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It's so grand and magnificent that you immediately understand how and why the French have such an overblown view of their stature and importance in the world. If I worked in an office like that, I'd think I was King Shit of Turd Island, too.
By the time I got back to the hostel, I'd been walking for nearly seven hours. I didn't mind; I love walking. Just as well as I didn't have much choice. The Blue Planet hostel has a strict 10am to 4pm lockout policy. The Blue Planet was not, to put it mildly, the best hostel I've ever stayed at.
I've never met a backpacker anywhere who's found a decent hostel in Paris. They are all, it is generally agreed, overpriced crap. But arriving at the Blue Planet near the Gare de Lyon, I thought I'd managed to buck the trend. The dorm room was clean and reasonably spacious. The en-suite facilities were fine. There was a common area and free internet. Seemed pretty good.
I was wrong.
There was a strict no-alcohol policy which, while not uncommon in hostels, is generally just seen as a legal technicality. At the Blue Planet it was strictly enforced. Signs all over the place warned that violators would be expelled without warning after their first tipple. There were CCTV cameras everywhere which, even as someone coming from Britain's surveillance culture, freaked me out a little bit. The staff were surly. The breakfast consisted of three tokens that could be dropped into vending machines dispensing a selection of stale bread rolls and the sort of coffee that gives Tesco Value instant a bad name. You even had to share a single room key between four people in the dorm.
It was utter rubbish. And yet it led to one of the most magical evenings of my entire journey.
There were seven of us, a nice mix of girls and boys from a variety of countries, sitting out on the hostel patio enjoying a few drinks, some snacks, the warm pleasant evening and, most of all, each other's company when an officious member of the hostel staff came out to enforce the no-alcohol rule.
"No drinking here. No alcohol! The police will come," he said. This may or may not have been true, but he could have been nicer about it. We weren't exactly partying it up or waking the neighbours.
"Can we bring it inside?"
"No! No! Take it in the street," was his cheery response.
The prospect of drinking standing up out in the street with the local winos didn't sound terribly enticing. Fortunately, one of the German girls in our group had a better idea.
She led us away from the hostel, across the Austerlitz bridge and onto the left bank of the Seine where, it seems, a group of Parisians gather nightly along the Quai Saint-Bernard to dance.
It's not a performance or some sort of tourist thing, just a collection of ordinary people who like to get out under the stars and tango. They've organised themselves into an association (they're French, after all) called, I later learned, Paris Danses en Seine, and for more than ten years they've been coming out in their finery, setting up a boom-box and enjoying a night of mostly tango plus a bit of salsa, swing and even, from time-to-time, a little hip-hop.
We sat around the raised and curved steps that encircle the dance floor, seven new friends, glasses in hand, under a full moon, with the world's most romantic river lapping at its banks mere steps away. Brilliantly lit tour boats slipped by. Music filled the air. Elegant couples swooped and swirled and twirled and did a hundred other things that clearly brought them great pleasure and captivated and charmed us all.
It was glorious.
One of the dancers caught my eye. She was statuesque and graceful and poised and stylishly but not overly dressed and perfectly but not excessively made up, and she danced like a dream. She was, quite frankly, dead sexy. She was also, quite clearly, a lot further past her fiftieth birthday than I am in front of mine.
I kept these thoughts to myself. The rest of our little group were all younger than me and, I thought, probably wouldn't understand, might be a little creeped out, and may never have even heard of Katherine Hepburn.
"Nice," said Jeff, a twenty-something fella from the US sitting next to me.
"Hmmm," I said. "Beautiful dancing."
"I meant ...," he said.
I looked around. "What?"
"The tall lady there," he said with a nod of his head. "For an older woman ..."
"Mmm," I said, noncommittally.
"I mean, she's probably about 40," he said.
I laughed. "Mate," I said. "I'm probably about 40. She's past fifty."
"Oh," he said, a little sheepishly.
Then, after a short thoughtful pause, a slight cocking of the head and raising of the eyebrows, he added, "Still ... ...."
It's the story of what happens when I set out in my 40s to do the backpacking trip I never quite managed in my 20s.
Click here to find out more, purchase the book or download a free sample from Amazon.
