Two months ago, I visited Paris for a weekend with a great friend of mine. I arrived two hours ahead of him and decided to walk down one of the main streets right in front of the train station while I was waiting for him. I just wanted to get a little feel for the city. I wanted to take in some of the sounds and scents Paris has to offer.
To, you know, get an idea of what Paris feels like. What its character is like. You know what I mean? How cities can have a certain feeling to them? Almost like they’re a person.
Some are small and relaxed with lots of open spaces. Others are huge and crowded, buzzing with excitement, so much so that it’s contagious and you get all giddy yourself.
And that’s what I wanted to find out. What’s Paris like? Is it full of life and love? Is it filled with busyness and hurry? Is it calm and serene? I wanted to know. I wanted its spirit to rush through me until I felt part of it. I wanted to feel the connection to this huge breathing thing around me. I wanted to feel its tides and move with them.
So I walked around and looked for the unique little details of Paris. The ones that make it into what it is.
I saw a man riding a bike mounted on another bike. The second bike was mounted on the frame of the first bike, and the guy sat on top of the second bike. It seemed very adventurous.
I also saw a group of teenagers walking a cat. They had a cat on a leash and were walking it. Like it was a dog. It behaved sort of like a dog too. It kept wanting to stay and smell things, but it got dragged with the group. Pretty cute, actually. I didn’t ask if I could pet it.
Those are the things I find fascinating. The little details a city will show you—if you look for them.
Because I don’t think Paris is the Eiffel Tower. I don’t think the Champs-Élysées or the Mona Lisa are what’s at the cities’ core. Those might be the things it’s known for, but I think the core of Paris is the normal people living there. I think they are the heart that is pumping the blood through the body, they are what makes the city come alive.
Yes, I think the Moulin Rouge looks nice, but I don’t think you’ll find the real Paris in it. I think for that, you might have to go someplace else. Perhaps to a little bar on a small street a little further from the noise. A bar where the floor creaks when you walk over it. A bar without flashy signs or fancy offers. Where the chairs won’t be new, and neither is the place. But the people who go there won’t care about that. They don’t want cheap promises. They want something honest and dependable.
They’ll have known the bartender for years. They’ll know what they are going to order, and they know what it’s going to taste like. And when they enter, people’s faces will light up because they are old friends. And they will sit and talk about their lives together.
I think that’s where you’ll find the real Paris.
Another thing I found out when I looked for a store to sell me beer. I went into a little one with alleys so narrow that I could hardly turn without knocking something over with my backpack. After carefully making my way to the beer & alcohol section of the store and picking out two six-packs of Heineken, I walked up to the counter and paid for them. Then the cashier started putting my beers in a plastic bag. I told him that wouldn’t be necessary; I was just going to carry them by hand. He looked at me and told me the bags weren’t for me, they were for him.
“And if someone asks where you bought them…”
I finish his sentence, “Not here.”
He smiles, nods, and hands me my trash bag full of beer.
I didn’t know why he wasn’t supposed to sell me beer, but I thought, “Huh, that must be one of the things specific to here.”
Actually, I’m still not sure what the specific reason for him being all sneaky was. Let me google it.
…
Alright, so apparently there are areas in Paris where from 4 pm to 7 am it is not legal to drink in public (whoops). Consequently supermarkets and convenience stores in those areas are also prohibited from selling alcohol after 9 pm.
Ah, that explains it.
Also—and maybe I’m just imagining this—I felt like I got some weird looks after I plopped down on a bench in front of the store and started making beers appear from my trash bag (and then disappear into my belly). Maybe that was because I was in a no-drinking zone. (Or because of the trash bag trick, who knows?)
After my friend arrived, we checked into our hostel, put our stuff away and went back out. We drank some beers and started catching up about what we’d been up to. We also discussed what we wanted to do in Paris these next two days.
This went on for a bit until we were quite hungry. Now, lucky for us, Paris is known for its exceptional cuisine. Their croissants and pastries are known all over the world, their foie gras is something I haven’t had yet, but it sounds fancy, also their wine and cheese are very good. Oh là là.
So, yes, we absolutely… went straight into the next KFC and Burger King and stuffed our faces. What can I say? I guess we’re just rascals. Drunk, impatient rascals. We wanted food and meat in our stomachs, and we wanted it fast.
After giving our money to big fast-food conglomerates who don’t need it, we started exploring Paris. After a while, we were approached by a guy. The guy had been standing by the entrance of a strip club and apparently had an opinion of his own of where we should go next. He kindly invited us to visit his strip club. We were unsure. He said upon entry you get a free beer. We were less unsure.
We paid him 10 euros each (to get in and for our “free” beer) and walked into a sort of long, narrow, dark room with cheap-looking tables standing around. This was not a fancy place. There was no sweet buffet, no cool stage with poles on it, no pretty women spinning around. There were also no guys in suits with big grins and even bigger cigars throwing money at strippers.
Just other tourists who were also stupid enough to enter this hallway with tables. Although they did seem more excited about getting to see some naked women.
After we sat down with our “free” beers, one of the women started talking to us. It was a peculiar conversation style. It reminded me of the dialogue in porn movies. The kind of porn movies where they want to make it seem realistic, so they pretend to give it a real plot. You know the one: A secretary in a tight outfit seduces the boss in 90 seconds, and then they have adventurous sex in different positions all over the office.
But before they do that, they actually have a line or two of “real” conversation. And that’s the way the stripper started talking to us. Not totally unlike human conversation, but quite different from it to anyone not drunk and very horny.
So, after she basically asked us whether she should bounce her butt on us for a couple of minutes or not, we politely declined.
My buddy had a girlfriend, and I didn’t find the idea appealing. Maybe I’m weird, but the thought of a woman rubbing her more or less naked body on everyone with a few bucks to spare—doing the same to me—is not my idea of a good time.
Us politely saying no also turned her into a normal person again. She stopped pretending to be flirty, and the conversation became more relaxed as well. This was a pleasant turn of events, as I wasn’t a fan of her fake persona. I don’t like staged porn that much either. I guess I don’t like people pretending.
We talked a bit about how it is to be a stripper. She said she enjoys it, in part because her boss doesn’t make her do things she doesn’t want to do. And that, generally, it’s fun.
After drinking our beers, we then went back outside and back to the hostel.
The next day we finally got some quality French food for breakfast in a cute little restaurant with tables on the sidewalk.
We then started discovering what else Paris has to offer. We visited a thrift shop where we tried on ridiculous clothing. I put on a trench coat, which immediately managed to make me look like a creepy flasher (I decided not to buy it).
We also saw this house with plenty of tubes:
We saw this fountain with lots of spinning things:
We saw this building, which apparently is some sort of big deal in Paris:
We went up the thing, jumped on the glass to freak ourselves out:
We enjoyed the view:
We got back down, walked around some more and went for dinner.
After which we decided we just wanted a relaxing evening. We found a video game bar called “Player One” that was awesome. It was beautifully designed and has tons of different video games you can play. It had different versions of Mario Kart, you could play real-life pong, and they even managed to project Pac-Man onto a wall, which you could control with a joystick.
Once we figured out how to get an old Street Fighter arcade game to work, we had a lot of fun making our characters do all kinds of cool moves. Although they happened mostly by accident since we couldn’t remember what all the buttons did. This meant we mainly tried to back the other one into a corner and punish him with the one or two basic moves we knew how to do. However, tensions began to rise after a while. I guess getting the crap beat out of you with no amount of frantic movement able to save you from the massacre is quite frustrating. So, in order to avoid having to move from street fighter to actually fighting each other on the street, we decided to go play something else.
The other game we really enjoyed was a life-sized version of Tetris. They remodeled a Nintendo Game Boy Classic and mounted it on a wall. Only that it was huge. The buttons were so big, you didn’t push them with your fingers, you pushed them with your hand. We took turns steering the blocks left, right or down while the other one was tasked with turning them. This meant that communicating was more of a challenge than actually playing the game.
This is roughly what it sounded like:
“Dude turn… no, turn… no, no the other way. Now you’ve gone too far… Oh come on!”
“I told you to go into that space! Why did you go into the left one?! Are you crazy?”
“Alright, this isn’t working. Let’s switch, you get the arrows and I do the turning.”
A little later:
Both: “AAARRGGHH!”
It was great fun.
After the bar finally closed, we went to a neighborhood with bars next to bars next to bars. There were drunk people, there were loud people, there were people smoking. It was lively and exciting, so we decided to explore some more of the area.
A little further on our sidewalk, we saw a girl sitting in the doorway of a building. At first, I thought she was crying. Two of her friends were there with her. We got closer, and it turned out she wasn’t crying, she was having trouble breathing. She was sitting on the step, audibly gasping for air.
I have some first aid training, so we stopped and asked whether everything was alright and if there was anything we could do to help. They told us she was having an asthma attack and that she didn’t have her inhaler with her. While I tried to remember what I know about asthma, one of her friends went to look for an inhaler. Unfortunately, he didn’t find one.
Then, her condition worsened. She fainted, fell to her side and started convulsing. Now, everyone really started freaking out. Three people rushed to her side and started doing whatever.
I wasn’t really worried about what they were doing, but I did want to make sure she was in the recovery position so that her airway would be secure. So, I calmly made my way to the girl’s head and told her friend (who was holding her head and trying to talk to her) that it was important to put her on her side so she could keep breathing. I’m not sure how much she understood, but she let me put her onto her side (into somewhat of a recovery position).
There, I made sure her head was the lowest point so that if she were to throw up, it would leak out of her mouth instead of going back into her airway and lungs. I also tilted her head back so she wouldn’t choke on her own tongue. The last thing I did was put one hand under her head to prevent her from hurting herself because she had been rubbing her head on the concrete.
There was still chaos around me, I didn’t pay much attention to it. My focus remained on watching her head position and seeing whether her condition changed. (Technically, I should have also checked to see whether there was something blocking her airway, but to be honest, I forgot.)
I still got glimpses of the emerging chaos around me. People from across the street came over to see what was going on. A drunk guy wanted to know what was happening. When no one answered him, he became frustrated and started demanding an explanation of what was going on with the girl lying in the street. Finally, someone answered him. Her one friend kept talking to her. My buddy and her other friend got a jacket to put over her. People everywhere kept talking in stressed French, which is even harder to understand than regular French. It is safe to say I had no idea what they were all saying.
I just reassured myself that an ambulance had been called.
When the ambulance did arrive, they put on quite a performance.
The ambulance arrived with sirens blaring. It stopped, and three “pompiers” (firefighters) got out. (In Paris, the fire department apparently also handles medical emergencies). They were not worried, actually, they hardly even seemed concerned. They got out and, at a very relaxed pace, opened the back doors to retrieve the stretcher. None of them even came over to engage with the patient. The three of them proceeded to unload the stretcher, and then they worked on covering it with a sheet. All three of them.
For some reason, they hadn’t even prepared their stretcher before arriving.
Then, after talking some more among themselves, finally one of them came over. He walked up to the girl, grabbed one of her wrists and shook it a little while telling her, “Eh madame les pompiers sont ici… madame?” (Miss, the firefighters are here) After not getting a reaction from her (because, you know, she’s barely conscious) he stood up, shrugged and walked off again.
After another minute or so, one of the pompiers talked briefly to the friend of the girl (I assume to ask what had happened). Then, another minute later, they put the stretcher on the ground next to the girl, got everybody out of the way, and lifted her onto it. They rolled the stretcher back into the ambulance and closed the doors.
And that was that.
I wished her friend all the best, and my buddy and I made our way back to the hostel.
Here’s why I was disappointed with the performance of the pompiers.
First, not having your shit (in this case the stretcher) prepared is just negligent. Second, after having arrived, the first thing you ought to do is assess the patient’s situation by checking her vitals. And even if that’s for some reason not the first thing you do, you should definitely not implement any measures (like lifting someone off the ground) before you do. It’s dangerous and stupid, and you don’t know if it will cause more damage.
I hope she’s okay now and won’t have to suffer too much from the stress of having to go through such an experience.