As a mother, one of the advantages of your daughter living
in Paris is that you just won’t be able to resist going to visit her, so it’s
practically considered a need to book your plane ticket. As a daughter, some of
the advantages of having your mother come to visit—especially when you’re a
poor graduate student—are that, for a little while, you’ll be able to abandon
your days of living in former servants’ quarters, eat dinner in restaurants
that include such rarities as dessert and wine that costs more than €3 a bottle
and maybe even possibly be spoiled by The Air-Conditioning in a hotel.
Such a glorious event took place in July, when my mom hopped
the Atlantic and became my temporary roommate for two weeks. Besides living
like a modest Kim Kardashian for two weeks, I was really just spoiled by
having so many laughs with my favorite woman in the world. It being her third
time in Paris (the first in
2006 and the second in
2012), I felt an enormous
relief in not needing to herd her from one tourist line to the next and instead
got to show her the places where, to me, Paris actually feels like Paris and
not some really convincing extension of Disney World’s Epcot.
On her first day, I pleaded with her to go with me to Hôtel
de Ville (which is City Hall, not a hotel as people usually assume) to watch
the World Cup match between France and Germany on a huge screen among thousands
of Parisians. Though France ended up losing, it was still great fun to tip back
a few pints, get overly invested in the game and show Mom something that the
tourists in line under the Arc de Triomphe probably had no idea was even going
on.
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| Watching France lose to Germany |
Another day, I took her out to Versailles, which she hadn’t
seen since her first visit to France. I’ve been to Versailles five or so times just
in the last year alone, so in order to make it a little more special to the
both of us, I bought us tickets to Les Grandes Eaux Nocturnes, the fountain and
lights show that happens every Saturday night in the gardens during the summer.
After a few glasses of wine—something you really can’t ever drink in the palace
gardens—with the sun beginning to set, Classical music and bubbles in the air,
the fountains flowing and fire torches shooting up out of the lawns, Mom turned
to me and, misty-eyed, said it was one of the best days of her life. A glass of
Bordeaux can make you start saying all sorts of things, but it was proof enough
to me that I was giving her the vacation she so deserved.
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| Wining at Versailles |
NICE IS NICE
For the next week, we headed down to the French Riviera, or
the
Côte d’Azur. This was a region,
like so much of France, that I’d never seen; the closest having been
Marseille and Arles when I studied abroad two years ago. We started with four days in
Nice (pronounced like ‘niece’). Despite being a veritable city with a metro
area of more than a million people and cultural and historical sites to offer
tourists, I loved ignoring all of that and spending all of our time just
strolling along the waterfront on the Promenade des Anglais, small-scale
gambling in the Palais de la Mediterranée, eating copious amounts of Italian
food in Vieux Nice and drinking
mojitos-fraises
while reading Bret Easton Ellis’s horrifying
American Psycho in between intervals of swimming on the rocky
beaches and sunburning the absolute shit out of myself (Whenever I get sunburnt,
I always say it’s the ‘worst sunburn I’ve ever had,’ but this one probably was.
I couldn’t walk without wincing). No schedule, no museums and no maps. Did I
really learn a damn thing about Nice? No—and it was awesome. This is not the
way I usually travel and I should really do it more. But maybe I should read
something a little less nauseating while I do so.
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| Vieux Nice |
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| My little gambler |
MONEY, MONEY, MONEY
One day we took a regional train over to Monaco, which only
took about a half hour. Maybe it’s my general disgust for people who flaunt
their wealth, but I didn’t like Monaco at all. Like most people, I thought of
Monaco—which was almost never—as a place with beautiful beaches, historic
buildings and gorgeous vistas. It’s true—but it’s a tiny, incredibly
artificial, sterile and bland version of Nice. The beaches—of which I don’t
recall seeing any for swimming—were ports for enormous yachts, the buildings
were all freshly painted and looked like plastic and the views were the exact same
as in Nice. It is also outrageously expensive (we ended up just buying
sandwiches and eating on a retaining wall next to the palace), since it’s home
to the highest number of millionaires and billionaires per capita and the
lowest poverty rate on the planet. The attitude here is strictly
look-at-all-the-money-I-should-be-donating-to-charity-but-am-instead-blowing-on-myself
and after passing so many people wearing Chanel and Prada, I thought, “these
people really do think they’re their f*ing khakis.”
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| Smiling in Monte Carlo, but really just wanting to fight a Monacan. |
IN THE EAGLE’S NEST
For the remainder of our week on the Riviera, we stayed in Èze
(rhymes with ‘fez’), a nearby village I probably first came across while curating
my Pinterest travel boards (Oh God, did I really just admit to that?). The town
is perched like an eagle’s nest around 1,000 feet above the sea, about the
height of the Eiffel Tower, and is an idyllic—though meticulously manicured—medieval
village maintaining a certain level of charm that is clearly sustained through
the influx of tourist money and not by any real industry. Towns like these have
clearly lost the ability to be self-sufficient ages ago. Èze, like many of
Europe’s beautiful and historic towns, is a place sadly devoid of any obvious
locals, evidenced by the abundance of spoken English alone. You sort of just
have to go with it and ignore the fact that the village is only still thriving
because it’s part of the tourists’ playground. Despite all of this, the town
still has many quiet spots like the semi-neglected cemetery behind the yellow
church where you can smell lavender and olive trees and hear cicadas and
nothing else—a far cry from the ambulances of Paris.
Ever since I studied art for a month in Italy during
college, I’ve always traveled with a sketchbook at the ready. One afternoon, we
found a quiet restaurant called La Taverne that was closed until dinner, but
they reluctantly allowed us to have a glass of red wine on their terrace. I
began to draw and the owners, who were taking a break and enjoying each
other’s company and that of their neighbors, came over to have a look at what I
was doing. They were so impressed and asked if I did it
comme métier, as a job. I said no, and they were shocked. The owner
asked if I’d make her a painting of the front of her restaurant and she’d pay
me for it. No one has ever offered to buy my art before (I even feel weird
calling it that) and I feel wildly uncomfortable when I get the slightest of compliments, but I couldn't say no. While I sketched, she kept coming over and
bringing Mom and I wine, bread and appetizers. She was so passionate about art
and asked me if I knew the artist Archimboldo, and I said no. A few minutes
later, she came running back to our table with a coffee table book under one
arm, and told me all about his art. “For me, he is like Dalì,” she said,
glowing. When I finished, she asked if she could kiss me on the cheek and told
me with such sincerity, “To me, you are a discovery.” She gave us aprons with
the restaurant’s name on them and promised to put my painting on her business
card. I’ll never forget that.
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| La Taverne's owner and her daughter with my painting |
LAST TRAIN TO PARIS
No trip is ever complete without a clusterfuck mishap, and ours
came in a very expensive way. Èze has an hourly bus that circulates between the
village and down to the seaside, taking about twenty minutes one way. On the
day we left, we got to the bus stop three scheduled buses ahead of time. And
just my luck with timing, no bus arrived for the next hour and a half. By the
time we made it to the seaside train station to catch our train to Nice, it had
already left. In full-out crisis mode, Mom sat in the baking sun on the side
of the train platform and I paced, knowing we were screwed. We hopped the next
train and once we were at the Nice station, we realized he had missed our train
to Paris…by five minutes. FIVE MINUTES. It was the last 5-hour TGV (high-speed
train) of the day, so we had to pay an additional $300 to take a 12-hour night
bus and share a six-person cabin hardly bigger than the WC. Thank goodness Mom had the sense to get us a six-pack of Grolsch.
Finally back in Paris, we were able to laugh it off and
forget about the whole thing. We walked around the Parc des Buttes Chaumont,
explored the far-flung corners of Mom’s favorite neighborhood, Montmartre,
relaxed on a Bateaux Parisiens tour on the Seine and drank
panachés (beer with lemonade) at Café de Flore. Most importantly, we
got to witness the Bastille Day fireworks over the Eiffel Tower. During
La Marseillaise, France’s national
anthem, I looked around at the thousands, seemingly millions, of singing Parisians
looking up at their nation’s symbol, the Eiffel Tower. I got a little misty
realizing how finite my time left in France is and how good this country has
been to me over the past few years. This is my first home chosen as an adult
and I know, even when I'm back across that ocean, that I’ll always have Paris.
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| Parc des Buttes Chaumont |
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| Before the fireworks on Bastille Day |
YOU ARE YOUR MOTHER’S CHILD
Not long after Mom arrived back in Minnesota, her father
died. It wasn’t a surprise; he’d been declining for months. I’m glad she was
able to come and make memories with me and put aside the tough realities of
life and be the hilarious and warm lady whose hugs I miss the most during the
hard times in Paris. I can’t believe I missed both of her parents’ funerals
because I was living in France two separate times, but I’m content in knowing
that I got to spend the majority of my life knowing the two of them, visiting
them when they needed it, and admiring their love for each other and the rest
of us. If I could sum up Grandpa in three words, they’d be happiness,
generosity and golf. He had an exceptional heart and was one of the least
selfish people I’ve ever known. He was an extraordinary man and I miss him.
Love,
Rachel
