Some Firsts In France

I had a dream weeks before leaving to visit my friend from UW-Madison, Nisha, in Paris that I, well, was in Paris, visiting Nisha. Topically, this sounds like a nice dream, a little mental warm-up before the actual trip, but what happened was maybe a couple step closer to a nightmare. I was dropped in the middle of the city and presented with the daunting task of finding Nisha's family's apartment without even having her address. Anticlimactically enough, the dream didn't go much further than that, but the reality of finding her place was just as stressful.

I arrived in the airport, Charles de Gaulle, on Monday. The airport was a frightening place, one of the biggest and busiest in the world and nowhere near Paris. I had saved an online correspondence I had with Nisha before the trip detailing where she lived and how to take the Air France buses to her neighborhood. I managed to get onto a bus that luckily was going in the right direction. The trouble started when I got off. 

Saved on my lap top was an image of an online map showing exactly where Nisha lived. The only trouble with the brilliant plan was that my battery was dead from watching a movie in the terminal while waiting for my flight in Copenhagen, and the map I got from the airport didn't even show the street she lived on. I ended up having to rush into the first building I saw that looked like it would have wall sockets for me to charge my computer. What I thought was a hotel lobby initially turned out to be the reception area at what the woman at the desk told me was a "really big company" as she urged me to make my loitering as brief as possible. I suppose a sweaty traveler sitting on a couch in a lobby doesn't communicate the most professional image for a company...

After getting some vague directions from a man who sat at the desk translated by the anxious woman, I set out again. After half an hour more of panicked panting, I found number building number 10 and figured out that "Rue" means street in French and is not, in fact, a street name. 

Petit Palais, one of the many art museums I didn't have
time to wander

Nisha's spread was incredible; a few blocks away from the Arch de Triumphe, and several more from the Eiffel fucking Tower! We took a walk after I stammered up the five flights of stairs to Nisha's apartment with her and her high-school friend Janthe (Yonn-tuh) around the neighborhood. You couldn't turn your head without seeing an astounding specimen of renaissance architecture. 

That night ended early enough, but the days only got longer, and even more fulfilling. I'll get to those later, God willing.