Last Month’s Vacation
Hello again internet! As promised, here I am, back once again with a report on my vacation last month. To recap, we visited Paris for a few days, then Edinburgh, then London for a week. I’m going to go through some highlights and impressions of each city, and some of the more interesting circumstances surrounding the trip.
First of all, the travel itself got off to something of a bad sport. We were supposed to take a sleeper train from Toulouse up to Paris on Friday night. However, thanks to the national French sport (going on strike), a whole bunch of trains had been cancelled, including ours, and by the time we found out, the trains for next morning had already been booked up. Thus we found ourselves in something of a predicament, because we already had our apartment booked for that night, but we wouldn’t be able to get a train until the next day. Cue dad renting a car and us making a seven hour drive up to Paris, arriving about nine or ten hours later than expected. Our landlady wasn’t pleased.
Paris itself is something of a study in odd contrasts. In all the pictures, the media, everything you hear about it, it’s beautiful and glamorous and elegant, and it is – if you’re in the right places. Walk down the Champs Elysées or through the parks at the centre of town, look at the historical buildings and the big attractions, wander through the shopping districts, and everything is clean and well-kept and lovely. But as soon as you step off those tourist-friendly paths, you discover a very different city. It’s dirty. It looks shady. Many buildings are worn down or covered in grime, and you notice, because in the places that draw in tourists and bring money, everything is kept clean. The area we were renting in was very Indian; there were sari shops everywhere and we must have passed dozens of Indian restaurants – yet another side of Paris no one ever seems to talk about. There are a lot of homeless people around the train station. There are a lot of beggars. Maybe not significantly more than in other cities in France, but it’s jarring and obvious because that’s not what you expect from Paris – that’s not what you’re told Paris is. It was something I found difficult to reconcile.
What is true about Paris is that a lot of the shopkeepers are pretty snobby. You know that stereotype of French people as ultra high-class, snooty, snobby jerks who wear berets and won’t give anyone the time of day? In France, that’s the stereotype of a Parisian, and in many ways it’s not entirely unwarranted – though berets are actually pretty rare. My advice to anyone who wants to look like they fit in in France is to avoid the berets altogether, and buy a long, rectangular scarf in some light fabric like cotton, and wear that tucked around your neck – or, better yet, fold it in half, drape that over your shoulders, and then pull the ends of the scarf through the loop. Typical French style, especially for women.
Paris is a huge city, and there’s no way you can see everything worth seeing in a few days. We visited the Basilique Sacré-Coeur, the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower (we didn’t go up it – I don’t really think it’s worth the huge lines or the fees when there are plenty of other monuments you can climb for an amazing view), the Champs Elysées, Notre Dame, the Louvre, and so many other things, and we barely even scratched the surface. Sacré-Coeur has a great view of the city, and is very beautiful inside, though it’s very obviously geared towards tourists; on top of all the signs inside providing information and asking for donations, there are also rows and rows of men (mostly Middle Eastern or Indian, for some reason) camped out around the church selling cheap Eiffel Tower trinkets off blankets – don’t buy them, they’re literally all over the city.
I think for a lot of things in Paris, it’s worth it to just go see, if only because if you don’t go see them and then tell people you went to Paris, everyone is going to ask you, “Did you see – ?” with any number of significant monuments taking up the empty space, and I imagine it would get tiresome after a while. The Eiffel Tower is worth a walk around, but, like I said, I don’t think it’s really worth going up. Likewise, take a look at the Arc de Triomphe, and climb to the top of that one if you’re interested – it’s not very expensive, it’s a good view, and there’s virtually no line. The Louvre is definitely worth looking at, if you have time – you could spend a week there and still not see everything, so either make an intensive trip of it, or just pick and choose what you’re interested in and go after that.
Notre Dame, however, I will endorse wholeheartedly. It is absolutely beautiful.
Other interesting things to check out in Paris include the sewer museum, which takes you though a bit of the history of the Paris sewers (and doesn’t smell too bad, either, despite being in and around a few storm sewers); Les Invalides, which was a hospital and retirement home for war veterans, and is now a museum of items and monuments relating to French military history, as well as the final resting place of Napoleon Bonaparte himself; a small art museum near the Louvre called the Orangerie, which has an amazing exhibit of Monet’s water lilies; and the Catacombs of Paris, which are absolutely amazing and well worth the trip.
The Catacombs are a series of tunnels in what used to be Paris’s stone mines. They became an ossuary in the 1700s, when the graveyards of Paris were filling up and the risk of pestilence was imminent. The grounds of the former mine were consecrated, and the overflowing graveyards of Paris were emptied of the bodies that had already sufficiently decomposed. Those bones were brought below the earth, where they were laid out in mass graves along the winding underground halls of what had now become the Catacombs. The bones are arranged in artistic and geometric patterns; some of them make up the decoration on pillars; there are no markers for individuals, but plaques bearing the names of the cemeteries the bones were brought from are placed in the piles. Also present are monuments, carvings, and sayings related to death (in multiple languages) engraved in the stone. The tunnels go on for what seems like kilometres, and hundreds of thousands of dead were interred there over the course of about eighty years.
The Catacombs were one of the last things I saw in Paris, and a fitting end to the trip, as far as I was concerned; the next day we got on the Eurostar train to travel under the English Channel to travel to London, and once there we changed train stations (London’s rail and underground system is even more insane than the Paris metro) to catch another train up to Edinburgh. Now, Edinburgh is a city I would definitely not mind visiting again. It’s the perfect kind of city to just wander around and look at things in – exactly my type of place.
Now, the first thing about Edinburgh – it is a city of hills. It’s built over a series of hills and valleys that were gouged out by the glaciers during Europe’s ice age, and while this makes for a beautiful surrounding landscape, it is a rather annoying feature if you’re intending to be walking around a lot, and Edinburgh really is a walking city. There are lots of little historical museums and buildings to visit – the Georgian House, the Tenement House, the Writer’s Museum – as well as Holyrood Palace, Edinburgh Castle, the Scott Monument, and so many others. But the tourist attractions are not the greatest draw of a city like Edinburgh.
Because of its smaller size than cities like London or Paris, it’s very easy to wander down side streets and find interesting shops in Edinburgh. It’s easy to see how the locals live, what the real heart of the town is like – even when walking down the famous streets and visiting the tourist shops, there’s a feeling of genuine heart in the people and the shops there. The shopkeepers are eager to share their beloved Scotland’s history and customs; the tourist items, things that would seem tacky or forced in so many other places, are given new life, because they genuinely seem to mean something to the people who sell them. When a shop assistant comes up to help you and asks if you have any Scottish ancestry, it doesn’t seem like an act or a sales pitch – it seems like they really do want to help you find your clan tartan so that you can proudly wear the “right” scarf. The surface of their attitude may be put on for the purpose of sales, but there is something very real underneath it, something that prompts them to start small talk, to make jokes and not take themselves seriously, to give you genuine smiles and wear kilts without a trace of irony. After Paris, it was a huge contrast.
If you ever get a chance to visit Edinburgh, I suggest you jump. It’s amazing, beautiful in a way that I can’t recall ever seeing before. Their historic buildings are dirty and blackened, but so uniformly so that it seems casual rather than neglected; their side streets are full of unique and quirky shops (a psychobilly fashion store right next to a colourful shop that sells lip gloss in cupcake-shaped containers, a macabre shop associated with one of the graveyards, a joke shop with a giant pair of joke glasses on their sign); the people who walk by on the street are colourful and alternative and sporting every style known to mankind. It’s a city best discovered by exploring it yourself, and I suggest you do – I know I will, if I ever get another chance.
London, by contrast, is much more like Paris in that you can stay there for a week (we did) and barely scratch the surface. I don’t even know how to describe the chaos that was our London vacation; everything you’ve ever been told is worth seeing really is worth it, and then some. We had an amazing apartment with a view of the Tower of London (which we spent a whole day at) and Tower Bridge (which we crossed twice). We visited the British museum (twice, actually, though I only went once as I was busy on Friday), and, like the Louvre, it is a museum you could spend forever at without seeing everything. The Rosetta Stone really is that cool, though, and a lot bigger than I expected – it’s almost as tall as me. We saw the changing of the guard ceremony at Buckingham Palace (I suggest you get there early, or you won’t be able to see anything). We wandered through Trafalgar Square, and somehow managed to get ourselves up onto the lions next to the Nelson Monument, which we took pictures of. We saw the London Eye (we did not go up) and Big Ben (likewise) and Piccadilly Circus (which has an interesting statue in the centre of the square, but is otherwise not especially significant). There was lots we missed, even with going out every day.
There were three days of the London vacation which really stood out for me. One was Tuesday, when we took a tour out to Salisbury, to see the tallest cathedral spire in England, and then from there to Stonehenge. I know everyone says Stonehenge is really just a pile of rocks, and in essence that’s true, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting, especially when you have a tour guide to tell you the history and myths and speculation that surrounds it, because people still don’t really know what it is. What’s surprising about it is that, not only is it more or less right in the middle of someone’s field (there’s a fence to keep the sheep out, but they’re right there next to you the whole time), it’s also at the fork of two major highways. Because of the lay of the land it’s very easy to take pictures that make it look like it’s out in the middle of nowhere, but it’s not, really. It’s a major attraction, and there are towns only a short drive away.
The second day I remember really well was Friday. On Friday I set off on my own to London Bridge station, where I met up with Laura, an online friend I’ve been talking to these last two years or so. We took the underground out to Camden town, where we wandered around the various alternative shops, made fun of just about everything we saw, were handed many advertising leaflets, avoided arguing with buses, ate free samples of Chinese food, sat in the sun and relaxed with novels and sketchbooks, conversed with tipsy students celebrating St. George’s Day, got lost in the Horse Tunnels in the Camden Market, and generally laughed ourselves silly. Camden is by far the most interesting shopping district I’ve ever seen – picture an entire street and three markets full of gothic, punk, reggae, glam rock, hippie shops, complete with giant bizarre sculptures on the signs and tattoo and piercing places on every corner, and you’ve more or less just pictured Camden. We ran around there pretty much the whole day, then came back to the apartment, where Lau had dinner with us (and we sent her home with a large bag of leftovers to feed her starving student self for the next few days).
The last day I remember particularly, for completely different reasons, was Saturday. We went up to the Globe Theatre (a reconstruction, only about five minutes from the site of the original). We were given the tour, had the history of the theatre explained to us, and wandered around the exhibits of costumes, Shakespearian instruments, and models of the theatre and of London in Shakespeare’s time. We ate out at a pub (I love pub food! And being over the drinking age doesn’t hurt, either), and then that night we went back out to the Globe for one of the first performances of Macbeth in the entire season. The play was amazing and it was really interesting to see done on Shakespeare’s stage, with minimal props and setting. Macbeth and his Lady had amazing stage chemistry, and some great scenes together, and the witches! My god, they were the best part of the show. I was also amused to note that one of the actors seemed to have exactly the face that Ozul (one of my characters) has in my mind. I will admit I was hard-pressed not to giggle.
All in all, it was an amazing vacation, despite getting off to a rough start. I think I’ve had my fill of Paris, but London would be interesting to see again (particularly Camden, at a time when I have lots of money to spend), and another visit to Edinburgh is high on my list of travel plans, right after Venice.
By this point, though, I think I’m honestly starting to get burned out on vacations.