I do love Paris in the springtime – but what are all of these sweaty people doing on the streets?
It might have arrived a couple of decades too late, but any time is a good time to visit the City of Light, writes Phil Brown.
I wish I was in Paris. Not competing …but rather just wandering around. Mind you I’d be wandering around with a million other people probably.
But I wouldn’t care because I would be in Paris. Everything seems better in Paris; everything sounds better in French. I love the place and it’s a love I came to rather late.
I was due to visit the City of Light in 1996 but due to a visa stuff up (you needed a visa in those days) we were turned back at Dover. They refused to let us on the boat to Calais because our travel agent had put the wrong dates in our visa.
That was stressful. So stressful I lay on the ground at the ferry terminal and spun around the floor like Curly in The Three Stooges. You had to be there. Good that you weren’t though. My wife certainly wished she was elsewhere.
It then took me two decades before I finally made it. It was my son’s idea. He forsook Schoolies and requested a trip to London and Paris instead. What could we do?
It was December and freezing and it took me a while to get the hang of the place. We walked everywhere and it was freezing and I swore a lot. Just as I was getting acclimatized it was time to go.
Then we went again 18 months ago. Our son was living in Lyon for six months and we visited him there bookending the trip with a few days in Paris upon arrival and almost a week after Lyon.
This time I had the lay of the land. We stayed in Bastille for our first few days and for our final week in the opera district close to the Palais Garnier opera house , Galeries Lafayette Hausmann (my favourite shopping centre in the city) and within spitting distance of Bar Hemingway at the Ritz Paris.
We swanned around Paris soaking it all up but we have still barely scratched the surface. I bought a new copy of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast to replace the tatty old paperback in my bookcase at home and didn’t read it until I got home and when I finished it, I wished I was back in Paris.
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Soon after coming home, we watched our favourite movie about Paris, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris starring Owen Wilson. Brilliant. Didn’t think he could top that but he did with his latest Parisian film Coup de Chance which made us want to go back to Paris more than ever.
Recently we watched another movie about Paris to get us in the mood but I would recommend anyone with plans for going on, or in, The Seine should not watch this one. It’s called Under Paris and it only came out this year on Netflix and it is a ripping French version of Jaws involving killer sharks in the Seine. No, really. If you loved Sharknado you’ll love this film.
One review I read described it as “Seine-sational” and I would have to agree. I’m sure the Olympics committee will have been thrilled with it.
They do say there is no such thing as bad publicity but watching people get chomped by killer sharks in the Seine on the eve of the Olympic Games may not be everyone’s cup of tea. But I enjoyed it and it just made me want to visit Paris again. Sans the sharks of course.
