HAMEDY: Passport to Paris

Yes, I did fit two Mary Kate and Ashley references in just the title of my column. And no, I’m not sorry. Nineties references aside, this column is, of course, about my short but interesting experience in Paris.

Paris began with a beret and ended with a baguette. “The City of Love” and I had quite the whirlwind romance. My roommate Kat and I hopped on a train at St. Pancreas Station with our jeans and cardigans (yep, that was to the tune of “Party in the USA”) and got ready for a weekend with some of our Boston University ladies who jetsetted to Europe for spring break.

We got in around midnight and I’ll admit, I secretly hoped we’d hop in a cab with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald (maybe Owen Wilson & Woody Allen, if we want to add more cultural references).

Instead, we hopped in a cab with a driver who, naturally, didn’t speak English, pointed to the address of our hostel and hoped he knew what we were trying to say. He nodded so we felt a little bit more reassured – but for all we knew, he could be taking us to the red light district of Paris. En route to our hostel (appropriately called “Oops!”), we passed a car of people that just screamed “Hello, I’m French.”

Four beautiful boys with cigarettes and booze in their hands as they drove around the streets of Paris with not a problem in the world. They exemplify the French culture – one that contains drinking on the metro with bottles of cheap wine, leaving to go out at midnight the earliest and smoking cigarettes. Lots of cigarettes.

Already I felt the smoke waft into my hair and coat. Le sigh. Bonjour Paris.

The small but quaint balcony of our hostel bedroom was littered with cigarette buts and leftover wine bottles. Paris: Keeping it classy. From the ledge we could see the faint lights of the Eiffel Tower – but mostly just an aerial street view of the Latin Quarter.

We decided to put our Saturday to good use and crammed as much tourism as we could in 24 hours.  Every tourist action led to a French observation. It only took five minutes for me to realize that the French love being French. They pride themselves on their black berets and chic attire. Their food. Their language. Their people. Their nightlife.

We went to Notre Dame – after attempting to find it on a map and asking in poor French, “parlevous English?”

But that wasn’t the interesting part of our day. As we walked from Notre Dame to The Eiffel Tower, something else happened.

Gypsies.

My friend Liz had bought French fries and a coke. As we waited on the street corner, a gypsy approached us. Obviously we know to ignore them because they literally take what they can and run.

But this gypsy was different. With her all-black attire and posse of friends, she seemed to already know what she wanted: food. She came up to Liz, showed her a paper and before Liz could shake her head, she grabbed Liz’s coke bottle and downed it in five seconds. Her gypsy friend yelled, “drink, drink!” and then tried to take Liz’s fries.

This all happened in a blink of an eye and while we escaped the theft, we walked away bewildered.

“So, was that a gypsy?” I asked. And thus became the humorous catch phrase of our travels that reminded us to be more aware.

Clutching our bags, we walked toward the Louvre, only to laugh at Mona Lisa, not because it’s a bad painting or anything but because it is the smallest painting in the room and by far the most underwhelming. You made us smile, Mona.

Later, in the three-hour wait to reach the top of the Eiffel Tower, an Argentinean rugby team serenaded us and spoke in Spanish about their love for us. Babies cried wondering why they were waiting for something and what it was that they were waiting for. A Parisian man played an accordion, hoping to get Euro to buy himself some food. The park was filled with people picnicking, despite the not-so-warm March weather. And while we were cold and tired, the top of the Eiffel Tower made each complaint, underwhelming Mona Lisa painting and even the gypsy run-in worth it.

So that was a brief taste of Paris – We may have been in love for a short weekend, but I think our romance has come to an end. At least for now, anyway.

Saba Hamedy is a College of Communication and College of Arts and Sciences junior, Fall 2011 editor-in-chief of The Daily Free Press and now a weekly columnist. She can be reached at sbhamedy@bu.edu.