Parlez-vous anglais? Our trip to Paris!

My mom and sister visited last week! Besides showing them the typical touristy things, I surprised my sister with tickets to a football match (aka soccer).  The “Hibs” (Hibernian Football Club), based in Edinburgh, played a team from northern Scotland.  We stuck out like a sore thumb once we arrived at the stadium- everyone around us was wearing green in support of the Hibs. To make up for it, Kelli and I got our faces painted, our entire faces painted… the result was quite scary, I’ll be honest, but people definitely knew who we were rooting for. As we were getting them done, the girl brightly remarked that we were the oldest ones to get it done; before us the title belonged to a 12-year-old. Excellent.

We celebrated what I like to call a “Jewish Easter,” but first let me tell you what happened on Jewish Easter Eve. I was sleeping over at the hotel my family was staying in, and around 5am Easter morning, the fire alarm went off! I poked my head out the door and sure enough people were trudging out of their rooms, so we followed suite. Outside, some guests were wearing nothing but towels, or even worse, no shoes! I can only guess they had thought they had woken up anywhere but Scotland. We had to be at a bus tour early that day, and when it looked like we weren’t getting to be let back in to the hotel anytime soon, I had visions of thrift shopping extravaganzas (we were only wearing our pajamas). Maybe for the better, we were eventually let back in, so no thrift shopping ensued.

This bridge on the way to the Highlands is almost 1.6 miles long!

We spent our Jewish Easter up in the Highlands on the same Hairy Coo tour I had taken my boyfriend on. After a long day of touring, we feasted on a dinner of pizza, chicken wings, and garlic bread, eaten in the comfort of our own hotel room. Room service, you ask? Nope. This was our own special picnic dinner, inspired by my new idol Rick Steves, who writes travel books and has amazing tips on traveling cheaply. The picnic dinner idea he suggests is divine. If you don’t have a room to go back to, just pop a squat wherever you please and voila, your picnic meal is served.

Ha! Good to know.

After spending a few days in Edinburgh, we headed to the wondrous city of Paris. Did we speak a lick of French before we got there? Nope (unless bonjour counts). Everyone had assured us that “it’s so touristy, everyone speaks English.” Well, apparently not the checkout counter lady who yelled something incoherent to us followed by the only English words she must have known- “quickly, quickly!” You want us to do what quickly? (It turned out we needed to weigh produce before going to the checkout counter. Crisis averted.) And the lady who we later figured out yelled at us to not take pictures of the plane when traveling back to Scotland. At the time, the best we could do was give a nervous laugh and walk away. That was actually our strategy most of the trip. Just smile and nod, and assume we weren’t doing anything that France deemed illegal.

Cool street artist at the Sacre Coeur

Our other winning strategy, suggested by Rick Steves, was to revert back to a caveman dialect. For example, when we were in the Louvre searching for the elusive Mona Lisa painting, I would go up to a museum worker, say “Mona Lisa” and they would point us in the right direction. Or there was the time when, after Kelli’s requests, I asked “The Last Supper?” only to be answered with the word “Italy.” I must’ve seemed real brilliant. The first day, we spoke four different languages- English, feeble attempts at French, Spanish by accident, and Italian, also usually by accident and also on purpose at the Italian restaurant we ate at for dinner.

The Louvre!

Besides the language barrier, we loved Paris! The city has so much variety- Indiatown (not its official name, just what we called it), where we got lost on our way to our hotel, the typical touristy sections, super lavish streets, adorable parks, and bustling artsy centers. Sneaking into a tour group at a perfume museum, enjoying a quiet moment inside the Notre Dame, emerging from the Metro station directly below the epic Arc de Triomphe, tearing up at the adorable lock covered bridges, admiring the designer stores along the Champs-Elysees, lounging in the grass at the Sacre Coeur, strolling leisurely along the Seine River… it made me woozy seeing all these iconic places. The best was the Eiffel Tower lit up at night- for 10 minutes once every hour, the lights twinkle. Cue the tourists darting around like madmen, ravenous to get the “perfect” picture. Ok fine, we may have done it too…

The picture!

So while I loved Paris, I could never see myself living there. I need a place where I would feel no shame walking around in sweatpants on a lazy day, and Paris for sure would not tolerate that. Someone would probably yell at me in French J

In front of a lock covered bridge

After returning back to Edinburgh, for better or worse my mom and sister stayed in my flat since they hadn’t booked a hotel for the last two nights here. What I learned is that family should never stay in college apartments, flats, houses, whichever you prefer. Our flat is probably one of the cleanest in our building, but that didn’t make up for the lack of heating in my room, or the towel that they had to share, or the sweatshirt that my sister used as a pillow, or the sleeping bag they used as a blanket, or the nuts and Nutella “dessert” we had one night… 

Their last day in Scotland, we journeyed to the distant and unknown Glasgow (aka Scotland’s other major city only an hour’s train ride away). Glasgow is known for being a rather rough city so I was pleasantly surprised to find myself frankly loving it. The plentiful free art museums were of the modern type, which I much prefer over everything else, we climbed a tower and got superb views of the city, and the city was buzzing about with people protesting (in a non-violent way I promise) and others shopping. So when we ventured out of the city center to find a cathedral only to turn around two minutes later because the streets got kind of terrifying, I wasn’t upset. We might not have gotten to know the real Glasgow, but we weren’t mugged either. I’d say it was a win.

The streets of Glasgow

My mom and sister left the next day, and a few days later I traveled to Spain for a short trip! Next post coming soon. And to close, something amusing we saw in Glasgow:

 

Funny, and honest bathroom sign