Destination Paris

The first thing you notice about Paris in December is that it does not start to get light until about 8:30. Coming in from Chicago, we had already cleared the English mainland when I checked my watch: 8:30, Paris time, and still, in a black sky, had appeared only the first blue band shell of day.

At 9:30 we touched down at Charles de Gaulle in a gloomy, cold dawn and taxied forever to our parking place. Foreign airports regularly park American carriers away from the terminal. We descended tented stairs and walked through the dawn, which really was gloomy and cold, to buses that ferried us to the foot of the terminal, through double doors, up echoing stairs, into a queue at passport booths. Our clerk was young, beautiful, dark hair and eyes. Welcome to Paris. Sunday morning, Dec. 17.

We were on our own. We followed signs into an area, very plain, very institutional, of baggage carousels. Our bags were among the last to appear. It gave me plenty of time to wonder what to do next. We needed to find an ATM, to get some Euros. We needed to find a taxi. Our instructions said the bus would be far cheaper, then from the city terminal a taxi to our rented flat near the Marais district. But we had traveled all day and all night and I wasn’t in a mood for riding buses and humping luggage. Besides, it was our honeymoon.

We stacked the bags on a free cart and headed off in the only direction available, away from the sterile baggage area. Ahead lay more sterility, whose walls channeled us left, toward sets of blank, unpromising doors. The doors popped open, and on the other side, waiting like Wonderland, was a bustling terminal, bright with signage and potential. In no time we spotted an ATM and I was grateful when it accepted my card, gave me directions in English, dispensed 140 Euros into my hand and gave me my card back. Karen had the same success with her card, and we were in business.

The terminal was very crowded. We pulsed forward, found a sign pointing toward “Taxis” and followed it through glass doors outside, into the gloom, that had lifted somewhat, and the cold, that hadn’t. We walked up to a young uniformed woman who was dispatching taxis. “Deux?” She asked. “Qui,” we said. She motioned into the distance, and forward rolled a taxi, a compact Peugeot station wagon. The driver was young, black, with a musical accent in which he spoke a little English. I handed him the address of our flat, which I had written on a note card for this purpose before we left home. He looked at it, checked his Paris version of Thomas Brothers, shifted into first, and eased out into traffic. I settled back, thinking for the first time that things seemed to be going well.

It was Sunday morning, a 14-mile ride into the city, and enough traffic on the freeway to make it interesting. Paris drivers are nothing like Italy, but this man wasn’t bad. He could have made the Italian junior varsity. I had hoped for some countryside, but it was all suburban commercial as we sped forward in this lane or that. In less than half an hour, we were negotiating surface streets in the city of Paris, France. Our driver checked his maps again. “I know where it is,” he assured us. “I only need to see if it is one-way.”

It was. He missed a crucial turn too complicated to explain here, which obligated him to back up, the length of a long city block, in a street no wider than an American alley, lined with cars parked half on the sidewalk, half on the street. He stopped in front of a huge, brown door, like a barn door, set into an old building like all the other buildings looming four or five stories above the tiny street. We paid him, tipped him (rounding up, as the travel guides said), followed our instructions for getting through the door. Inside, we found a second door, as promised, and inside that, a very tightly spiraled stairway, very narrow and worn wood steps, ending at a small landing before continuing up. At the landing was a gray door. From my pocket I took a key that our landlord had given us back home, inserted it, and after some fumbling the door opened, lifting a considerable weight off our backs.

Inside was a kitchen, a living area, a bedroom alcoved off the living area, and off the entry area, a compact water closet. Across the living area from the kitchen, windows looked out onto the street. Crooked ceiling beams, a shiny wood floor, couch and stuffed armchair, a small table and chairs beneath the kitchen passthrough. A small flat, the right price, potential for coziness. At the moment, though, it was gray, cold, and uninhabited. We hoisted the luggage up the tight spiral of steps, got the heat and lights turned on, unpacked, poured drinks from our bottle of duty-free Johnny Walker, and wondered whether to go out right away – the Seine supposedly was a 15-minute walk away – or take a nap. The nap won. Paris had been there for centuries.