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Paris The Re-Up: The Riot's Gone

Fun fact: France and most of Europe celebrate Labor Day on May 1. A fact I learned a week before when trying to buy a ticket to Versailles. I was throwing a fit because the site wouldn’t let me choose May 1 and I couldn’t find an explanation for it on their site. I finally googled “Versailles May 1” and found out Versailles and pretty much every other major museum was closed that day. It was a real blow to the schedule that I had planned out to the T and ended up sending me into a panic. As I’ve said before, looking back at these meltdowns it’s like “lol why tho?” but in the moment these hiccups are the worst thing that can happen to you and there is no rationalizing. It’s all or nothing.

May 1 started off all well and good. That’s misleading… it was a good day all around. After a quiet night full of watching the last 20 minutes of Madagascar in French followed by the last 30 minutes of the Jennifer Lawrence movie Joy (also in French, there really is no give here) and spying on the youths (not kids, just anyone the slightest bit younger than me I considered a youth) hanging on the stairs outside the hotel drinking Heineken and watching a soccer game on their phone, I headed down to the hotels dining area to enjoy my favorite breakfast of croissants, demi baguettes, and black coffee. I said hello and chatted a bit with Beth and Grace in between stuffing my mouth with carbs. As I was on my second croissant, I started watching the news. By watch I mean I could only stare at it because it was of course all in French and I just had to guess what was happening. They were showing the beginnings of a protest in the Montparnasse area (at least that’s what I could gather.) In case you aren’t aware, there have been riots in Paris and throughout France over the last few months against the government. Most of these end up becoming violent with vandalism, tear gas and rubber bullets, mass arrests, etc. I assumed something would happen that day, what with it being Labor Day and all so I wasn’t surprised to see this. There was a protest in the streets the last time I was in Paris and of course it happened when I was just going to the grocery store and thought “meh I don’t need my camera.” I learned later that this particular protest was over a cigarette tax and end with the protesters dumping a truckload of carrots on the doorstep of a politician.

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After accepting the sad fact that I could not ingest any more carbs, I showered, gathered my things and headed out to walk about the city. It was sunny and super warm that day so my plan was to just walk along the river past the Eiffel Tower to the Statue of Liberty and then back again. No big deal. Just a couple miles. I didn’t really get a sense that anything was off until I got closer to the river. Most stores and restaurants were closed but I just chalked that up to 1. Labor Day and 2. it was only like 11am. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then I started to get into the fancy shopping areas and I noticed that all the designer stores had boarded up their windows and the police presence increased tenfold. The police were also outfitted in riot gear, not at all unsettling, but they were all just standing around hanging out and people moved about like nothing was wrong so I was comfortable. Then I got to the Louvre. The Rue de Rivoli, the major road running alongside it, was blocked off to traffic and pedestrians couldn’t go past a certain point. Then I found most of the gates to the Tuileries, the gardens of the Louvre, to be closed. There was only one open on my side of the museum and right after I entered, a line of police that had just been chilling got up and started checking the bags of every person that walked through the entrance.

I walked through the Tuileries for awhile, grabbed a seat along side a fountain and people watched for a bit, watched a man on his phone almost get run over by a group of police on horses. How you’re so absorbed in your phone that you don’t hear 12 horses coming up behind you is beyond me. After some searching I finally found an exit that was opened and I headed out along the river. Over the course of planning this trip I found multiple spots throughout the city, all scenic, that I wanted to visit. This particular day’s goal was the copy of the Statue of Liberty situated in the middle of the river. It was the furthest point I had saved on my map and since it was along the river I knew I couldn’t get lost trying to find. That wasn’t a lead up to me getting lost trying to find it. This day was really only like a 6 on the scale of being interesting. Sorry.

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Along the way I stopped at the Palais de Chaillot for a great view of the Eiffel Tower. You may know this location as the spot where Britney Spears unveiled the Eiffel Tower after building it. It’s a nice little touristy spot full of people trying to get optical illusion photos of themselves touching the top of the tower or Instagram girls making their boyfriends take a couple dozen photos of them gazing at the tower like they were simply caught in a moment and not a manufactured moment they spent 20 minutes fixing their hair for. It’s also at the top of a lot of stairs. I believe I mentioned this earlier but everything in Paris is UP. So after spending what I thought to be an amount of time worth climbing all the stairs, I dodged all the vendors pushing their cheap berets and light up key chains of the tower and headed back out again.

*Inception noise*

*Inception noise*

My next stop was the Pont de Bir-Hakeim. Or as you know it, that bridge from the movie Inception. You know the one. There was a surprisingly large amount of photoshoots happening around the bridge. There were at least 2 weddings, an engagement session, an amateur fashion shoot, and an endless amount of Instagram girls. I’m probably going to end up doing a whole post on Insta girls and how obnoxious I found them to be because the more I think about them the more they irritate me. Anyways, I spent a good amount of time stepping out of people’s shot. The island that the Statue of Liberty (replica) is on is connected to the bridge. As I have a tendency to do with most things, my expectations of the whole thing were incredibly high. So of course I ended up pretty disappointed. The island itself is a bit sketchy and not maintained very well, if at all. Or maybe it’s a whole protest about American and French relations. I don’t know. The island is quite long and near the end of it, where the statue lies, another bridge crosses it and in the underpass is a public gym of sorts. One of many I saw. At a distance, I just thought some white guy was doing handstands and acrobatics for the hell of it, as they tend to do in public spaces, but as I got closer I realized he was just working out and there were other people there boxing and using an elliptical (I don’t know how to explain the existence of that one) among other things. 10 feet from the Statue of Liberty (replica). It was a bit of a bizarre moment. The statue itself was another moment of “oh. hm. alright.” I don’t know.. it’s hard to describe how I felt. It wasn’t an awe inspiring moment or anything unique. It was just another statue that had it’s base covered in graffiti. I didn’t stay long, I crossed to the other side of the river and started heading back.

Another one of the spots I wanted to stop at was by the Eiffel Tower. The last time I was in Paris, I went to the Eiffel but I didn’t up because that costs money and I had none to spare. So instead I ate a baguette with a ball of mozzarella and wandered around it. I stood underneath it, got some cool shots looking straight up, avoided some scam artists, stared directly into the cameras of a few tourists with video cameras. Pure fun and magic. This time around though, not so much. There’s now a glass wall surrounding the tower so you can’t even walk under it unless you have a ticket. The wall also really puts into perspective how long the lines are to get in. I bought a ticket earlier in the week but the only time I could get was for 9:30am on the last day I was there. Which I figured would be fine but after seeing the lines I was like “nope” so spoiler: I didn’t go. Maybe the third time I go to Paris I’ll finally get up there. First time: stayed on the ground. Second time: Bought a ticket, still stayed on the ground. Third time: buy ticket, finally leave ground? Who knows. So again, I didn’t spend much time here. The particular spot I was going for gave you the chance to get a shot of the tower behind some typical Parisian buildings. It was here that I really wanted to use my Holga, I thought it would be perfect. Well, true to form and because I can’t have all 4 cameras working properly: It stopped working when I went to take the shot and I still have yet to get it working again. So I snapped a few with all my other ones and headed out again.

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Along the way, I finally accepted the fact that I was tired and getting over heated by wearing jeans and a black shirt on a mid-70’s, cloudless day. I stopped off at a little stand by the river, grabbed a Pellegrino and sat along the water to finally relax. I pulled out my phone to take a picture and noticed that I had multiple missed calls from both Veronica and Derek and a preview of a message from Derek saying “If you want to come home early, we understand and we’ll try to figure something out". Immediately I went to “oh my god, who’s dead?” and went into a slight panic mode. I got right back up and headed for my hotel. I was able to calm myself down because I knew it couldn’t have been anything going on in the city because I would’ve noticed that. Plot twist: It was.

When I got back to the hotel, after stopping off to buy a ham sandwich and some chips from the grocery store (isn’t comfort food great?) I was finally able to pull up the messages. Apparently, the protests that had started earlier that morning devolved into riots. The cops were using tear gas and rubber bullets and had arrested hundreds of people. Yet, I had no clue that was happening. There was no sense of alarm at any point during my venturing. There were sirens from passing police cars of course but it was no more than you would hear in any other city on a normal day. I’ve probably heard more in Lakewood on a Tuesday afternoon than I did that day. Veronica said she pictured me being all photojournalist and getting up in the action when in fact I was sitting in my hotel bed in my underwear eating a ham sandwich going “hm what a day.” It’s weird to think about something so big happening but there being zero indication that it was even going on. It’s dystopian in a way.

Anyways, after the riots, a nap, and a shower, I headed out for dinner which I won’t talk much about since it was incredibly disappointing. I sat outside and had a lovely view of the alley and the apartment building across the street. I ordered a steak and had my doubts of ever ordering a steak at a restaurant confirmed. For dessert I got profiteroles which they filled with ice cream and then topped with hot fudge. Which is fine but at the same time the hot fudge become pointless once it’s on the ice cream for too long. Also I’m pretty sure you don’t fill profiteroles with ice cream. The wine was good though. I had a lot of that.

I didn’t really notice it in the moment but looking back on it a couple days later, I realized I never gave myself the chance to just sit down and relax or enjoy my walk along the river. It was all “go go go” and for no reason whatsoever. I had nothing scheduled. Dinner wasn’t until 9pm. Even when I sat by the fountain in the Tuileries, I only sat for maybe 5 minutes before setting out again. You may have noticed that I haven’t really shared any photos in this post and that’s because when it comes to photography, I know when I’m feeling it and I know when I’m not. When I’m in this mindset of “you gotta go, you gotta get this shot, you gotta do this.” it never works out. Whereas when I’m relaxed and just going along, snapping what I see, it turns out so much better. You can see the difference in my photos, or at least I can, from the first day or two and the last two. You can feel me trying in the first ones whereas the other days, there’s no effort. It’s something I’ve noticed before when I would paint. I do it very rarely and only for a couple of days because by the end of those 3 or 4 days my mindset becomes “okay do this, put that there.” etc. and it throws me off. It no longer because some kind of relaxing thing then I freak out and don’t try again for a couple years. Which is maybe why I’m taking so long to edit all these photos from Paris and write about it. I’m stretching myself thin already and they’re the two things where I can say “okay well this doesn’t need done right away.” But I’m working on it.

Cory WilliamsComment