Paris in real life

Lily borrowed a telephone at the @Milk internet cafe and we waited for our first host, Sven from Luxembourg, in front of the Panthéon, from where we caught a glimpse of the most horrifically touristified, and, if I may say so, most thrillingly famous sight-to-see in Paris, the Eiffel Tower. It may be overrated, but it’s quintessential — and it sure took my breath away that first time: we were in Paris, France. We made it!

In Sven’s tiny student flat I had my first taste of France wine from a bottle — oo là là! We watched the little activist video Lily and I had made about my bike tour, which prompted a rather heated but good-natured debate. Sven ventured that if there were no cars, there would be, for example, no milk in Paris. But I begged to differ — if there were no cars, the dairy industry would just look a lot different than it does now. Think closer cows(smaller cows?)(or just goats instead), urban farms, milk deliveries on box-bikes, cheese trains, vegan radicalism… limited only by your imagination, really.

After a couple days of exploring the city, riding around delivering Lightfoot letters, we had to move to Guillaume’s much bigger, much swankier apartment in the 7ème arrondissement. Guillaume is très Parisien, well dressed, well manicured. Style and class, how else could one live? But he was genuinely interested in all things environmentalist(his coffeetable literature included a guidebook to dangerous food additives) and despite being a little freaked out by Lily’s dumpster-diving movie, the next day he came home with a “Look what I got out of the trash” fully functional flat-screen monitor. I went out to open a few dumspter lids in the neighborhood (there was a weirdo lady doing the same who thought I was making fun of her until I offered her some of the bananas I had found) and along with a baguette de campagne and Guillaume’s insane selection of gourmet honeys, made some kick-ass free-the-food sandwiches, which helped to heal the rift that had been developing between Lily and I….

Yeah, though it’s sad to say, things were not so happy and carefree those last days, despite being in la ville de l’amour. If we were expecting to be blown away in some hot breath of Parisien romance, we’d have been a bit disappointed. We were parting ways soon; Lily was looking forward to a visit with her mother in Antwerp, and my mind was working on my own bike tour plans. Our final days were a clouded with our mutual yet nonetheless impending separation.

But we were still a good team, still flirting on bikes. With our last week together, we took photos at the Eiffel Tower, cycled up the Champs-Élysées boulevard and saw a pink deep-V’d fixie messenger in the midst of the traffic nightmare that is the Arc de Triomphe roundabout. We climbed the big hill to Montmartre, a Paris quarter famous for the film Amélie and a mix of high-falutin’ aritsts and tourist gouging; we had ice cream and crêpes while overlooking the city from the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur cathedral. Lily even took me to a fancy French vegetarian-vegan restaurant for a romantic dinner. The waiter was rude and the food was amazing!

We had to switch hosts once more – usual couchsurfer maximum is three or four days – this time to Colombes, a northern suburb, quite outside of any glitzy Paris arrondissements. For a few kilometers of the ride out there, we cycled with a woman returning from work — when I told her I was from the USA, she was very proud to show me the grease-stained McDonalds to-go bag in her handlebar basket…. Yeah… thanks, I can smell it from here. Way to go, lady. Yeuch!

It was a relief to meet our next host, Mr. Fred. He’s a real grand Frenchman; no Mickey Ds in sight. After a delicious gourmet vegan pasta, I found myself with a glass of red wine in one hand and a piece of chèvre in the other, thinking, “Now this is France!”

She left the next day. It was gray morning, cloudy, moody. She had repacked into hitchhiking mode and was going to leave her bike with Fred, so I pedalled Soleil fifteen kilometers, all the way to the chosen hitch spot, with Lily and her huge backpack sitting Dutch-style on the back rack the whole way. We said our heavy goodbye, surrounded by traffic, there in the shadow of the motorway; a sweet final few minutes and wondering “Will I ever see you again?” I’ll always remember the sight of her army-olive backpack disappearing in the distance.

And then, just before she was completely out of view, she turned and yelled to me,

“You’re so cool!!!”

True romance. It’s never like the movies.

The ride back to Colombes was dreary. Soleil started making rattling complaints and the sky seemed darker than before. Two tough guys on a crowded bridge gave me a challenging look but my tears brushed them away. She was gone.

I was alone.

* * *

My first urge was to move, to get out of town – “What the hell am I doing here in Paris?!?”

But hold on, emotionally triggered reactionary impulses: I actually had an answer to that question — I was trying to organize an interview with the Agence-France Presse. This cold, hard, definable-results goal kept me distracted from the piercing loss of my inspiration-dream-partner, and I was able to occupy myself during the interim with various other activities around town.

Fred and I took a big tour around Paris one day – he loves to see his city by bicycle. He went by Velib, the city’s community bike program. If you’re a Velib-card-holding resident, the first half-hour is free, so all you have to do is keep exchanging the bike every half-hour(if you can find a Velib station with an empty spot and an available bike) and you can ride around all day. The 1500 computerized, magnetic-locking stations all have maps of all the stations in the area, and the city regularly maintains and redistributes all the bikes with big Velib trucks. What’s more, if you return a bike to a Velib “+” station, which are the higher-elevation ones, you get a fifteen minute bonus credited to your card for bringing the bike up a hill.

And they’re pretty nice bikes, believe it or not: rugged Schwalbe tires, (mostly) properly inflated, tough rims and basket-rack combos, Shimano Nexus three-speed rear hub, front dynamo hub for lights at all times. When you return a bike you can press a button to mark it as “in need of repair” which alerts the mechanics.

I met Fred downtown. We walked to the nearest station, he waved his card over the bike’s docking station, and we were on our way, pedalling around taking in the sights. We saw some guys doing parcour on some rocks at the jardin naturelle, we walked our bikes along the promenade plantée. He took me to an alternative coffee shop, “l’Asociatif” where a sewing workshop was going on, and he even took me for a cheap lunch – not an easy thing to find in Paris. I saw a pair of bike cops, one with a “suspect” handcuffed to his handlebar, on foot and struggling to keep up. And it was all really very Paris; berets and baguettes, crêpes and the Eiffel Tower, high fashion, low snobbery, cigarette smoke, scarves waving behind scooters, and little tiny cars smaller than my bike. Aah Paris.

I had been searching for a AA battery charger for my camera for quite some time. Sick of buying batteries, sick of throwing batteries away, and the home-made tire-rubber generator charger I was thinking of building was revealed to be doom for any batteries I connected up, so…. My search results in the city came up with nothing but department stores, but there happened to be one result in Colombes, so close to Fred’s place I didn’t even ride my bike. The fellas in there were quite surprised to have a bike tourist from the States walk into their shop – it’s not even really a shop, just a place they do internet business from. But they certainly had the stock there! One guy had even just finished an order for a bunch of little wind turbine chargers that would’ve been perfect for my handlebar, but I couldn’t wait for it. They were experts on batteries, battery nerds that I could trust, and they patiently explained every last little thing I wanted to know. And they even gave me a discount! I guess that’s buying locally, right? Or do I have to mail-order from Wisconsin to do that?

And then, after a few days, the Agence-France Presse interview came about. Apparently the AFP is on the same gargantuan international level of prestige as the Associated Press… I had no idea, until I got to their offices. Central. Offices. Paris. France. Wow.

We walked with a photographer to the Palais Royale gardens and he took some photos that almost none of the media subscribers chose to use; they ran some other photo of some other bike with front panniers. Maybe he was just an intern or something, or maybe my scraggly haircut was to blame. But the Aussie lady that interviewed me was a pro; relaxed, thorough, and subtle. Mostly. “What other militant activities do you participate in?” Wha huh? She must’ve assumed something from the Dutch army boots and ragged cargo pants; but at any rate I kept my mouth shut about the super-secret mutant feral cat verminocide program in Macquarie. She bought me a coffee and wrote a tiny little mention-article in two languages, which was subsequently uploaded onto their massive world-wide subscribers’ server. Search results for the byline(Un tour du monde à bicyclette … et en bateau) came up as far away as Fiji, but it had mostly only been picked up by online, temporary, news bulletins. I guess I was filler, mostly, but later, Fred did tell me he picked up a cheap-ass paper on the subway one day, and noticed my piece had been printed, on paper, and the publicist at Direct Matin said she would mail me some copies. So my message was spread a little farther….

And what do you know? Lily, away in England with her mom and extended family, taking taxis and trains around everywhere and living the civilized life, had decided to give bike touring another try! Before I left Fred’s place, she wrote me that she would return for the bike and ride solo single-speed from Paris to Germany! Her big red third-hand Dutch postal-delivery panniers that she had left in the corner suddenly seemed much brighter. I left notes for her in there, and drawings, and advice and tire levers and extra ziplock baggies, and I sent all my good wishes her way.

Both on bikes again, hmm, maybe — but no, this time our paths lay separately. It was important for her to try it alone, and as for me, I had unfinished business back in the Netherlands….