April in Paris

April in Paris. Just the very words evoke beauty, romance, and love. It seemed only right that Chip and I should experience it ourselves, so on April 4, after classes were over, we set off to the City of Lights.

Of course, if you must know, our real reason for traveling to Paris in April had nothing to do with amour. No, instead, we were going to Paris to meet our son Jake, who was on a school trip conducted by ACIS, the high school equivalent of AIFS, the company running our program here in Florence. Their last day in Paris was Friday, April 6, at which time the students would all board a plane to head back to California. But not Jake. No, we had arranged for Jake to stay an extra week to tour Germany (more on that later).

Because we would both be flying back out of Germany, we had to find one-way tickets to Paris, which turned out to be quite difficult. Ever since 9-11, the major carriers don’t like to issue one-way tickets, so they price them outrageously high to make their purchase difficult. Let’s just say that the ticket prices we found in our research were simply not doable, so we turned to the one-way European king—Ryan Air. We were thrilled to find one-way tickets from Rome to Paris for about 90 euro each, so we snatched them up. It was only later that we learned how Ryan Air really operates.

You see, Ryan Air is able to offer such low fares because it operates out of smaller, lesser-used airports. So, even though we thought we were flying out of Rome, we were really flying out of an airport named Ciampino, which is about a 30- to 40-minute cab ride from Rome’s main train station. And we weren’t flying to Charles de Gaulle or Orly. No, we were flying into Beauvais, which is about an hour and a half by bus (which, of course, isn’t free and is operated by Ryan Air) from Paris.

So here’s what we did to reach Paris, a trip that ended up taking us almost 10 hours, including waiting times:

1. Cab to the Florence train station (10 minutes)
2. Train to Rome (1 ½ hours)
3. Cab to Ciampino Airport (40 minutes)
4. Shuttle bus to where our plane was sitting (5 minutes)
5. Flight to Paris (2 hours)
6. Bus to the only drop-off point in Paris, Porte Maillot (1 ½ hours)
7. Cab to hotel (20 minutes)

Once you add up all of these costs and consider the time involved, we might as well have purchased those really expensive one-way tickets! And to make matters worse, we didn’t book our train tickets to Rome ahead of time and arrived that afternoon to find that the train was full. The guy at the ticket counter kept saying to me, “No seats.” I tried to explain that we needed to get to Rome to catch a flight, and the response each time was, “No seats.” I asked him what we could do to get to Rome on time, showing him the time that our flight was leaving. He then pointed to trains that would get us there after our flight left. When I explained that this wouldn’t work, he pointed at the train we wanted and said, guess what, “No seats.” Eventually, though, I figured something out. Even though there were “no seats,” he was willing to sell me two tickets on this train anyway; we would just have to stand. Why didn’t he just say this in the first place?

I immediately bought two tickets, and we boarded the train hoping that we’d luck out and find two empty seats. No such luck! So he we are: I’m sitting on my suitcase and Chip is standing. He doesn’t look too pleased, does he? Oh, did I mention that he tried to get us to buy our tickets in advance, but I kept telling him that it would be “okay”? Whoops!

Well, at least we could sit comfortably on the plane to Paris, right? Wrong! Here’s another way Ryan Air must make money—by cramming as many seats onto the plane as possible. Even I, with my 5'0"stature, was longing for more leg room!

Well, the important thing is that we made it to Paris, eventually. And we found the most beautiful room at the Hotel Pantheon waiting for us! This boutique hotel, perfectly situated on the Left Bank right on Place du Pantheon, was a dream. Our room was decorated in relaxing white and rose colors, it was sparkling clean, and our window looked right out onto the dome of the Pantheon, a mausoleum originally built as a church for Louis X, beautifully lit in the dark. Amazing! And even though it was after midnight, we decided we simply had to take a stroll around the neighborhood!

The next morning we awoke and found that breakfast was served on the ground floor of the building in a cavelike room lined with thick stones. A bountiful buffet was laid out, with breads, cereals, fruit salad, and other treats. We could have even ordered cooked eggs (a luxury after being in Italy!) if we had wanted, but we surprisingly declined.

After enjoying breakfast, and the daytime views from our room, we headed out to explore Paris. Now, both of us have been here before; we came one together and I came once with a friend, Annette. And the beauty of having already been to a city, and of having a very limited amount of time (just this one day), is that you don’t feel compelled to do all of the tourist-type things. Instead, we just walked…

We first walked through our immediate neighborhood, in fact our favorite neighborhood in Paris, the Latin Quarter. This neighborhood earned its name from the scholars who lived and studied here during Medieval times; they, of course, spoke Latin. And today this is still an academic center of Paris, filled with various institutions of higher learning, including the Sorbonne, Collège de France, and Lycée Louis le Grand. We strolled along Rue Mouffetard, one of Paris’s most important market streets, taking in the sights and sounds of the fruit and vegetable, meat, bread, cheese, and wine shops. We walked down Rue du Cardinal Lemoine, where Ernest Hemingway once lived from 1922 to 1923. We eventually made it down to the Seine, and decided to walk its length down to the Eiffel Tower, where Jake’s hotel was located.

At some point, we had decided that it would be fun to put together a “care package” to leave for Jake at his hotel. And, believe me, we had a great time putting it together. All along the Seine, we stopped, in souvenir shops and book stores, to find just the perfect items to put in the package. Here’s what was included:

1. A deck of cards with a vintage Paris travel poster on them
2. A bookmark with a black-and-white photo of the Eiffel tower on it
3. A French version of Fahrenheit 451, one of Jake’s favorite books
4. A book about the history of jazz, in French of course
5. A French version of Sudoku
6. A moleskin blank journal, the type once used by Hemingway
7. A 2007 Tour de France t-shirt
8. A 2006 Germany World Cup cap
9. Some French candy and gum

We put it all in a bag and added a postcard telling him how much we looked forward to seeing him the next day.

It took us quite a while to walk along the Seine from the Latin Quarter to the Eiffel Tower, and we couldn’t have had more perfect strolling weather. One thing that struck us was how clean Paris is compared to Florence. Not only are the streets spotless, but the buildings are thankfully free of grafitti, which is a real problem in Florence.

When we reached the Eiffel Tower, we found the parks surrounding it filled with bright, cheerful spring flowers. We also found some of the longest lines we had ever seen, whether one had a reservation or not. There went our plans to possibly climb the Eiffel Tower, something that we’d never done.


But that was okay with both of us as we went off in search of Jake’s hotel, the Mercure. We found it with no problem and left the bag with the man at the front desk, who wrote Jake’s name on the message board. We knew Jake would love that!

After leaving Jake’s hotel, we walked back through the Montparnasse neighborhood, another area with a rich artistic and literary history. During the 1920s especially, a slew of artists sought out this neighborhood, hanging out for hours in its famous cafés. They included people like Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Man Ray, and Chagall. (Many loved it here so much that they never left, arranging to be buried in the Montparnasse Cemetary.) And anyone who knows café culture can’t help but recognize these names: Le Select, La Coupole, La Rotonde, to name just a few. Unfortunately, their popularity has also resulted in large crowds and high prices, so we decided to continue on.

We ended up on the idyllic Îl St-Louis, a true oasis in the middle of bustling Paris. There are no monuments here; instead, you’ll find lovely homes, small cafes, interesting shops, and, of course, ice cream, for this is the home of what some consider to be the world’s best ice cream, and certainly the best in Paris, Berthillon. We had lunch at Café Med, followed, naturally, by ice cream at a Berthillon shop across the street. Delightful!

We then continued our river walk until we reached my favorite place in Paris—Shakespeare and Company, the famous American-run bookshop. I mean, I feel almost obligated to come here. You see, this bookshop, which was originally opened by Sylvia Beach, is now the sister bookshop to City Lights in San Francisco. We even found a bumper sticker inside that read “HOWL if you love City Lights Books,” a play on City Lights’ most famous publication, Howl by Allen Ginsberg. What is Shakespeare and Company’s most famous publication? No doubt it was Ulysses by James Joyce. Sylvia Beach had faith in his work when no one else did, and the rest is literary history.


Alas, our time in Paris was almost over. We found a little café right around the corner from our hotel with a beautiful view of the Eiffel Tower in the distance. And as the sun went down our last night in Paris, we were rewarded with a spectacular sunset, bathing the sky in bright pinks, the perfect backdrop for this magical City of Lights.