An American in Europe

19 September

Paris in heels

What a Sunday!

Click “read more” to hear about my adventures today by myself in Paris! Photos included.


I woke up this morning to attend mass at Notre Dame, possibly the world’s most famous church outside of the Vatican.

Notre Dame

I’ve never attended church at a tourist attraction before, so I now star as an extra in countless home videos. While the faithful gathered in the center , roped off from the “tourist” entrance, the non-worshippers photographed and video taped the service.

I arrived at 10:45 a.m. and saw the end of the French service. Then at 11 a.m., I scooted up to the second row to get a good view for the “Messe International.” or International Mass. Not the first row though. I didn’t want to be presumptuous.

After all, this is the same church where Napoleon was commissioned.

Window

Well, it turns out that the International Mass is held in Latin, with a smidgeon of French, English and Spanish sprinkled in. In other words: I had no idea what was going on. But I felt right at home anyway. Some Latin I could understand, such as this awesome song,

“Laudate Dominus. Laudate Dominus. Omnes. Gentes. Alleluia.”

Something about praising God, all knowing and kind maybe? Anyway, I felt God’s presence, and that’s what I needed.

Isn’t it amazing how God understands all languages? Praise the Lord!

Notre Dame

Ok so my day gets even better.

When church let out, the bells were ringing in the two huge towers and throngs of people were videotaping the worshippers leaving the church. (Notre Dame is about 500 years older than the United States!! Imagine that!)

AJ!

After that I walked over to the Prefecture of Police – the site where the Resistance first defiantly flew the tricolor French flag during Nazi occupation of Germany in 1944.

Prefecture of Police

Next, I stopped at the Sorbonne (Paris University) to have a two-hour lunch. In addition to the food, I gobbled up a copy International Herald Tribune, because I’ve felt quite cut off from the rest of the world lately without Internet or television.

AJ eats lunch

For lunch, I ordered a cheese and tomato sandwich on a baguette. Then I wanted to order coffee-flavored ice cream, but inadvertently ended up ordering coffee ice cream and an espresso. How’s that for my French?

Since I’m not used to drinking coffee, the espresso had me bouncing all over the place.

My view of my table

Next it was time to find American University of Paris. I had this desire to go there since I attended AU in D.C., and many AU students go to AU Paris.

Well I couldn’t find it. I had the address, but you know me with directions. So I ended up asking lots of people how to get there.

I approached one jolly-looking group of folks and asked them, in French, where Avenue de Bosquet is. One man said, “No parla francais. Hablo Espanol.”

Even better, I thought!

So I asked him in Spanish where the street is. Haha. He didn’t know, and a woman in the group said, “Estamos perdidos.” (We’re lost.)

I told them that I was lost too, and we all bonded over the map. At one point, the woman started talking to me in perfect English. I complimented her English and soon found out she was born in Cuba, but had lived in Miami for 40 years. Everyone in the group was of Cuban descent and an American citizen!

One of the men asked me, “So you speak French, Spanish and English?” He was quite impressed until I explained that I spoke only a handful of French phrases and my Spanish is remedial.

Eventually, I helped them find Rue de Cler (a cool street with lots of shopping) and they guided me toward American University, and we parted ways.

Turns out, American University was closed, and I couldn’t get into any of the buildings without an ID card. Gotta love Sundays.

So I decided to try to find my way back to the Metro.

By this point, I was quite good at asking for directions in French. So I stopped another person to ask them, “Ou est le Metro?” (Where is the Metro?)

While the person was responding, I heard a big group of people at a nearby sidewalk café yelling for me. “American! American!”

I looked over, and saw a whole bunch of people waving and smiling at me. I thought, “Who the heck in Paris knows me?”

It was the group of Miami Cubans!!

They insisted I have a drink with them.

Cubanos locos!

So we all bonded over a glass of Kir, and it turns out they all have children my age. They told me what it was like to come to the United States in the 1950’s, when people didn’t speak Spanish at all, and their school teachers told them, “go back to your country.”

Now they say that they have lived in the United States and have assimilated so much that they understand how the Americans felt! I was very surprised.

This is exactly what I love about traveling. Meeting new, fun people, swapping stories and laughing!

I have plans to meet them all again on Tuesday.
posted at 07:16:00 on 09/19/04 by ajluvsu - Category: General

Comments

mySQL error with query SELECT c.citem as itemid, c.cnumber as commentid, c.cbody as body, c.cuser as user, c.cmail as userid, c.cemail as email, c.cmember as memberid, c.ctime, c.chost as host, c.cip as ip, c.cblog as blogid FROM nucleus_comment as c WHERE c.citem=27 ORDER BY c.ctime: Unknown column 'c.cemail' in 'field list'

No comments yet

Add Comments

You must be logged in as a member to add comment to this blog