Une Nuit a Paris
 

More than one night, actually. Come springtime, I'm going on the Paris field trip. Yes, thats Paris, France. A good few thousand miles away. I actually wanted to go to Rome more, but Paris is gonna be fun, I'll love the art... though possibly be less loving of the cuisine.

My best field trip was to Hershey. It was 15 minutes away.

We went to now renamed Olympic Lake. 50 minutes from the school 5 minutes from my house... quite a bender though.

Well when youre going to a very expensive private international school (that YOU pay for!)...

Don't listen to whiners, have fun fella!

How many other students are going? And how many chaperones?

I think about fifteen or twenty kids, maybe even thirty but i doubt it... and five or so chaperones.

Paris is great. Except yeah, they weren't very fond of Americans. Might have just been my experience, but I've heard many people say the same.

If they cut you guys loose, go to Pigalle (or get off the metro at Place de Clichy and walk through the red light district) and walk to the top of Montmartre. That is probably my favorite place in the entire city. And bring booze, it's hard to find once you leave the main blvd.

Aside from the fancy schmancy stuff you see on TV, "normal" french fare is surprisingly simple. If you eat the following, you will have covered most of the bases:

- panini (jambon avec brie is a must)
- crepe (minimum two: a ham, egg & cheese one followed by a nutella and banana)
- moules frites (steamed mussels with fries)
- croque monsieur/croque madame
- any type of cheese with a hard, moldy rind
- croissant (PAIN AU CHOCOLAT!)

Pizza in paris is actually pretty good. And you MUST eat a sandwich grec with french fries IN the sandwich - there is no other way.

I much prefer Rome to Paris, so I applaud your taste, but Paris can be fun too - depends how much time you have.

French food is great! Anything with a chicken or bean base is likely to be well flavoured, well cooked and reasonably priced away from the main restaurants. And yes - DO have moules frites et biere (which you will be able to drink if accompanied by an adult)

Parisians don't hate Americans - they hate everybody. If you work on that assumption, you'll be delighted when and if you are greeted with courtesy.

How's your French btw? Things will be much easier with basic reading and listening skills, but it's not necessary to speak it - in most places your French will be viewed with derision unless you're very fluent, so my advice is play the ignorant foreigner and point :)

Don't mess about on the Metro. Two friends of mine when I was in my teens were "arrested" for general horseplay. They were probably behaving like idiots, but nothing that would have come to the attention of the authorities in London. They had to present their passports at a police station and were given a talking to. I wasn't there at the time, but I know it scared them rigid. It was a while ago now, but I can't believe security has relaxed in the current global situation.

I agree with breakingnews 100% - if it's at all possible, go to Montmartre (if you want a flavour of what it looks like before you go, watch the French film Amelie)

Finally read if you want to get the most out of it. Get a good guide book and decide what interests you and what you want to see. There are hidden gems everywhere, and only you will know what floats your boat. Above all - enjoy :)

I don't have a lot of choice on where I go and when, like I said, it's a field trip.

I can say bonjour, count to five or six, and... all the other words every american seems to know.

I dont eat meat so the meat dishes are out, I dont drink (and I'm, again, on a SCHOOL field trip) so the booze is out, and I'm a damn picky eater so just about everything else is out too.

I hope to go back relatively soon without the school, but until then I have about as much choice in where I go as a toddler.

Is there an official reason for this field trip.....exposure to art....exposure to french.....exposure to Europe......the chaperones want a free trip to Paris? :confused:

Sorry, I forgot your age- our school trips were when we were 17-18. We were given some time to ourself and yes we did manage the odd beer :)

It's still worth reading up on the city, you might find yourself walking down an otherwise nondescript street that means something to you because of your personal knowledge.

I'll undoubtedly research the city, I like not feeling like a bewildered tourist... even when i am a bewildered tourist.

The trips are to Rome, Paris, Istanbul/parts of Greece, Africa, and Taiwan. Last year it was Thailand, Taiwan, or Cambodia, cause last year was Asian Studies in humanities (linked english/social studies), and this year it's Western Studies.

I'm currently reading Bill Bryson's "Neither Here Nor There," a great travel book about backpacking through Europe (he did the trip as a teenager and 20 years later decided to retrace his steps). He definitely summed up something about Paris that I could not put a finger on. Anyway, if you're bored, pick up one of his books, any of them. Easy reads.

How terribly amusing to read about your American forays into Europe . You will never understand . Henry James is the only American who understood Europe .

Your families sacrificed their culture for the idea of freedom . Freedom is a terribly noble word , but what your families really wanted was MONEY . Nothing wrong with that of course . But that heritage means that you have lost Art . And you have no culture of your own in strictu sensu .

Hey, they have like a 1000 year head start... give us a chance to catch up! Now that we have some money, we can buy us some culture.

france and culture are 100 years apart and repelling each other by ever increasing orders of magnitude.
The french traded their culture for imperialism then fascism, and more recently for multi-cultural-ism that's coming home to roost in such a way that french will mean nothing at all.:ninja:

The French...in my experience, are a very rude and arrogant bunch, even when they're in someone else's back yard. They can shove their culture up their clacker and get some manners through the back door.

If they ever decide to apologize for blowing up the Rainbow warrior or Islands in the south pacific, they might get me (and maybe others) to care about their so called 'culture'.

It turns out there is a continuing low level of violence in the Paris suburbs. 3000 police wounded this year. An average of 112 cars PER DAY torched in France this year.

When I was in France, in 1985 there were a few things that stood out to me.
First was how filthy Paris was. (In comparison to NYC , my point of reference) People just dropped their trash as though mom were right behind them.

You could easily spot the metro stations by the thousands of discarded yellow tickets on the ground right around the entrance. It was as if the staircase was vomiting up yellow tickets and hadn't wiped it's face. Looking back on it, I wonder if the riders somehow felt contaminated by the thought of holding the ticket any longer than was absolutely necessary.

The second thing was how politically active the yutes were. (ages 18-28) e.g. (this is a simulated exchange)
a: Hey there's a demonstration tonight over in the 15th arrondisment wanna go?
b: What are we demonstrating against?
a: The standard weight of a baguette has changed from 550gm to 500gm.
b: The batards! I'll be there.

Rocks were thrown, wine was drunk, barricades torched and the next day everything was exactly the same.

Cherbourg was very different.

In both places I failed to detect the hostility that is usually ascribed to the Frentch. (Again, cf NYC)

One thing in my favor was that I had a few weeks of intensive accent drills courtesy of my employer, an American who had spent a decade in paris and could speak perfect French but was illiterate in French.

When I found out I was going to France (another long story) he said to me "you haven't got time to learn to speak, but you do have time to work on your accent, so for the next four weeks we'll speak English, but with a French accent. That way, any French you learn will sound right."

So for the next four weeks before my trip we spoke all day at work in French accents. He would not teach me to say "I don't speak french" He said that phrase was a dead end. Rather he taught me "Je ne comprend pas" Because of my awesomely accurate accent the upshot was that people thought I was either hard of hearing or mildly retarded. No one ever spoke English to me.

A FOAF I was visiting was an American who was teaching French in France, that is how good her French was. When we went out, the French would routinely answer her in English, me in French.

Anyway, that is my France story, as much as you're gonna get anyway.

But they love to drink, but not get drunk, they like to be politically active but not accomplish anything, and they like them some food.

In baser chakra terms, it's all about the foreplay. Orgasm? I've had mine, you're on your own. (metaphorically speaking, of course)

Christ, UT.....that sounds like Iraq. :eek:

anywhere in Italy
 

I spent a year stationed in the vicinity of Catanzaro Lido, Italy and would much rather be there than Paris. I realize the French culture is "truly superior" to anything to be found in Southern Italy, and if the French didn't have the "superior attitude" to match their culture I would probably have enjoyed the week I had planned to stay in Paris in the fall of '66, but after a single morning I moved on to Amsterdam. If I had been able to afford doubling back, I would have spent another week in Italy (in my mind, either Rome, Naples, or Catanzaro Lido would have been preferable to Paris). :greenface
Don't forget, that most French asset of all, French Cuisine, is based on the skills of the chefs brought to France by Catherine di Medici:

http://www.naciente.com/essay93.htm

note - I have been told the phrase you want, especially if you have a good French accent, is " Je ne parle pas Francais". It seemed to work well for me during the week I spent at Villefranche sur mer (where people were slightly less obnoxious than in Paris)

Jerry Murdock

Shame you missed Paris in May 1968 , Jerry . You could have thrown paving stones at everyone who annoyed you there .

"let he who is without sin cast the first stone" (not me)
 

No, thanks, I generally just try to avoid people who annoy me, and I am really hard to annoy. I especially try to avoid riots (kept my head down in a taxi in Panama in '64). There was a lot of serious hatred for Americans in France during the mid-late '60s, and I never found any other place where I felt that uncomfortable.
I did get back to Europe in '69. My ship spent 2 days in Naples & then went to Lisbon for several days. I got off in Naples & divided 12 days between Naples and Rome & then went to Lisbon for the remainder of the time the ship was there.
I always got the impression most American sailors dislike Naples, but it is one of my favorite cities - probably because it is so convenient to Pompeii (and maybe just a bit because of the delicious calamari, gamberi & such and the beautiful ladies) ;)

Jerry

No passionate love ? No closed shutters ? No lovely smiles from lovely girls who brought a slice of melon too . Or a cold beer , and a quick and lovely smile from a girl you knew could never be your wife ?

Of course all that . The fastness of love when, you are young
It has to be fast
Because
We are all going to die .

That's the spirit Ibram. Enjoy, you're going tourist class! I've briefly worked in France; but, never got to Paris. :sniff: My time was spent in, around, and over the Normandy region. It all happened during multinational military exercises for me. I had the advantage of having attended the Defense Language Institute (Presidio of Monterey, CA) course in French and my language skills were marginally acceptable at the time: I even got "adopted" by a couple of families who were exploring American culture and took me home as a guinea pig. One farmer and his 6 year old son even brought me breakfast in bed (he brought a picnic basket out to the poncho hooch where my A Team was camped on his land). A French lieutenant I worked with brought myself and another team member home for dinner with the wife and kids. Somewhere during the exercise [strategic reconnaissance] I managed to jump (maybe I was pushed) out of enough French aircraft that their government awarded me the French Military Parachutist Badge. Except for the one time that the French Air Force put us out too low and too fast for a static line jump causing one team member to hit the side of the aircraft and lose some equipment, another team member to tear an inguinal ligament upon landing, and yet another team member to break a leg, we all had a really good time (afterwards, they were buying all the drinks!). I hope that your experience in tourist class will be as rich and diverse as mine was in working class. It probably couldn't be any worse. :D

Moral of story: be sure when you purchase your airline ticket you pay for a takeoff and a landing.