WHAT. A. WEEKEND. - Part 2: Saturday

Saturday 7:15 a.m. 


Oh god. This time of day shouldn't exist. Especially on a Saturday. My eyes struggle to open like a heavy, old, rusty-hinged door. Devyn and I have to be at the bus at 8 to take us to the first of our two champagne house tours. Why did I think this was a good idea the night after some intense Parisian reveling? But the idea of touring two vineyards/champagne houses and getting some possible free samples was too enticing to just hit the snooze button. So in a blur, we're in front of one of our school buildings, coffee in hand, and boarding the bus with the rest of our puffy-eyed, yawning revelers from the night before. 


It's very funny to share each other's "morning after reveling" processes. Our friends from Loyola University in Baltimore keep going on and on about their intense desire for a bagel from some bagel place to cure their post-reveling condition. 


(** By now you've realized that "reveling" is my word of choice for certain collegiate activities. Keeping things PG here people. I have two grandmothers following this blog. Shoutout to you guys, Nana and Mimi. **). 


Now I'm sure all the GW folks out there have their own "morning after reveling" process, but this will hit home for most of you. Someone who will not be named in our GW group then utters something to the tune of:


"I would kill an infant to get a Deli bacon, egg, and cheese right now."


All us GW folks nod our heads in agreement while our friends from Loyola stare somewhat horrified at this person's willingness to bump off a young baby for a breakfast sandwich. But all you GW folks know what I'm talking about. ANYWAY...


The bus departs the city limits of Paris and we see the beautiful countryside with the sun shining, the grass greener than I've ever seen, and the sky a bright blue.


I'm completely kidding. We all look like this for the entire 2 hour trip.

After a pretty solid nap that reinvigorates us just enough to lift our heads and look out the window, we see the G.H. Mumm champagne house. Our first stop. We're led into a small movie theatre where a film begins to play and tells us a bit of the history of G.H. Mumm Champagne. I was still a bit groggy, so honestly the narrator sounded like the adults in a Peanuts cartoon. The film ends, and the screen retracts into the ceiling, revealing a door that our tour guide leads us into, down some stairs and into an underground chamber with multiple pathways stemming out in all different directions. My mind immediately flashes back to the Catacombs and I know sure as anything that I'm not in the mood to see a bunch of human bones. That never happens. Instead, we're led through tunnels lined with gigantic barrels of champagne made from grapes across the French countryside. 

Through more passageways we go as we listen to our guide explain how champagne is made and how they carbonate it. Now this is an abroad blog not a champagne blog, so forgive me if I don't take you through the elaborate process of champagne-making. 

We then turn a corner and standing there just chilling in the middle of the tunnel are two massive bottles of champagne, one of the biggest sizes possible. The Melichizedek. 30 liters of champagne. My head spins just at thought.

After taking this gem of a picture, we continue into the storage tunnels of the champagne house where the bottle are stored. Here sediment from the grapes gather at the bottom of the bottle to be removed later before being put into production. BAM. CHAMPAGNE FACT. Through a caged area, we see the oldest and first bottle of champagne the house has ever made, held here as kind of a monument to what G.H. Mumm has become. 

After walking through all these tunnels, my mind starts to get foggy again. All of the things about champagne were interesting and everything, but I need some food or a seat or something. We go up to ground level and are greeted by a welcome sight.

YAHTZEE!!


It's not exactly food, but ya know, ya gotta take what ya get. And I take a few. The champagne is absolutely fantastic. Chilled to a perfect temperature and just bubbly enough to pleasantly tickle your nose without being overwhelming. I enjoy the champagne so much that I decide to take some artsy photos.

By now though my stomach is growling and I'm ready for something that can give me a bit more satisfaction than alcohol. The trip we went on included a lunch at this little restaurant just down the street from G.H. Mumm Champagne House. Now when I think of "lunch" I think of something like a sandwich, a side, and possibly a dessert. What we got was a 6 course meal that consisted of so many different kinds of French dishes, it was almost difficult for me to finish. And that's saying something since I can pretty much take down a Thanksgiving meal like it's a salad. There was a duck salad, some kind of strawberry sorbet mixed with a champagne liqueur, this melt-in-your-mouth chicken doused in a champagne cream sauce, a chevre cheese block salad, and this pink block of something that had the consistency between cake and ice cream, if that makes any sense. All with continuous bottles of wine being brought to us as soon as the last red drop of the previous bottle fell into a glass. I felt like a king.

Feeling like we could hibernate for the rest of the winter, we get back on the bus and continue on to the next champagne house, a much smaller, family-run business led by this little old French man who spoke no English whatsoever.

But don't let his being old, short, and chubby fool you. The guy was a creeper extraordinaire. He must've thought that we were all stereotypical American kids who didn't know a single word of French. Au contraire Monsieur Creepy, but as you mutter to your friend that there are a lot of pretty girls in this group and you wouldn't mind having them work for you during the summer, I can completely understand the hysterical French phrases coming out of your mouth. All I can do is chuckle to myself.

After a quick little tour of his small champagne-making operation, he and his wife bring out glasses for us and begin popping bottles like nobody's business. The buzz from lunch has slightly worn off, so I accept a few glasses. Monsieur Creepy's champagne is even more enjoyable than G.H. Mumm's. Achieving the perfect balance of lightness and body, and carbonation. I guess you'll get that when you're in the region where champagne was invented.

In no time whatsoever, the bottles are empty, as are everyone's glasses. We load up the buses and make our way back to Paris, our stomachs much more content than they were at the start of the journey. The bus ride, however, passes in a similar fashion as the first. With a through exploration of the inside of my eyelids. I wake up to see a brightly lit Eiffel Tower glistening with its flashing lights as if to welcome us back home. Okay France, you've pulled out the stops today.

We drag ourselves onto the metro, back to our apartment, and collapse onto the couch ready to get some major shut-eye. We wouldn't be given such a gift. Lindsey and Julie rush into the apartment urging us to go out with them. Being that it's their last night in Paris, we oblige. The night passes in a blur, not from reveling, but from sheer exhaustion. A few hours pass and we finally get to jump into our beds and pass out from an awesome trip. 

But the weekend wasn't over yet. 

End of Part 2

WHAT. A. WEEKEND. - Part 1: Friday

We shall start at the beginning.


Friday 1:30 p.m.


My phone buzzes in my pocket and a wave of excitement surges through me. I know what the text says before I even read it. Our friends have arrived. This was mine and Devyn's first weekend acting as hosts to some of our other globe-trekking friends. The fantastically insane Lindsey Brenner, Devyn's Alpha Phi sister and roommate and my partner in crime in many mischievous acts back at GW (mainly dealing with hacking Facebook statuses). And Ariel Stein, one of my first friends at GW, who still for some reason is my friend despite witnessing my awkward freshman in college phase.


I rush back to my apartment to await their arrival, but come home to find that Devyn and Lindsey had began their Parisian adventures without me. 


Whatevs, I made a sandwich.


Soon Ariel arrives with her two friends she's studying with in London. Their fascination with the tiniest details of my apartment building was absolutely hysterical, especially their shared understanding of the phrase "so French."


"Guys, this courtyard is so French."


"Look at these stairs. So French."


"Oh my god we're so French right now."


What made this trip up to my door so funny is that I get to witness how I looked the first time I stepped into my building. You just get hit by the intricate carving of the stone courtyard walls, the smooth marble of the front steps, the tilted and warped nature of the wooden spiral staircase. 
I guess I've just gotten used to these details. Does that mean I'm becoming "so French"? Interesting.


We drop off Ariel's bags and don't even waste our time unpacking them. We're immediately walking along the Seine, the Eiffel Tower being our destination. It's the first sunny day in 2 weeks and we're not wasting any of it indoors. And good thing we didn't because this is the view from the Eiffel Tower that rewarded our 3 mile walk.

Won't be my last trip up here that's for sure.


The ladies go off to have their own adventure as I meet Devyn and Lindsey beneath the Eiffel Tower. I meet Lindsey's friend Julie, also studying abroad with her in London, and we head back to our apartment. As we make our way, a little shop filled with all kinds of sandwiches draws us in as our stomachs growl. 10 minutes later and just 4 euros poorer, a warm Chicken Parm sandwich becomes my dinner, an excellent foundation to lay for a night of...hmmm how should I say...revelry? Yeah, that's PC enough. Revelry.


Tonight is AUP's Back to School Party, for which the school has rented out an entire club for students to have a night celebrating the start of the semester. As we finish our sandwiches and get ready, a bottle of wine is opened and the night begins. Once the ladies are satisfied with how they look (after many a debate over outfits and hairstyles that makes me shake my head and laugh as I sat here watching Homeland) we left for our AUP friend's apartment to lay another kind of foundation for the night. This little pre-party can be best described in the following pictures:

Enough said.


As the boxes of Juicy Juice (100% Juice for 100% Kids!) grew empty and a euphoric state settled over the group, it came time to go the club. I cannot emphasize how insanely cool this place was. It was called The Caprice Loft and wasn't so much a club as a wonderland of a playground for a well-juicyjuiced college kid. You walk in the door and are hit by crazy-colored spinning lasers and lights. The dance floor surrounds a giant pool, candles floating gently across the water. And the casual jacuzzi in the corner.

But that was just the downstairs. Go upstairs and instead of a pool in the middle of the dance floor, there is a trampoline net filled with pillows above the pool.

I KNOW.


They say a picture's worth a thousand words, so I'll just show you this to describe our sheer elation with this place.

Yup, pretty much sums it up.


We manage to make it home and crawl into bed after one fantastic night. However, we are dreading the 7am wake up for our Saturday trip. What trip you ask? 


Find out in WHAT. A. WEEKEND. - Part 2: Saturday.


End of Part 1.

They call it the City of Lights...guess they forgot about actual SUNLIGHT.

I’ve forgotten what the sun looks like.

Is the sky still blue?

For the last 10 days, a seemingly omnipresent cloud has hovered over Paris, sucking some color out of the city and making everything emanate a gray tinge. Rain has fallen multiple times. Wind has sometimes made walking unbearable. Now wait, I’m confused. I thought Europe was supposed to be this magical place? Where the sun always shines, the cities are bright and colorful, and the wine is cheaper than a pack of tic tacs. Well that last one’s true. Not even lying, I bought a pretty decently tasting Merlot the other day for 2.48 euro and as I was checking out, I noticed some tic tacs on sale for 2.85. I relished in my little victory.

But I digress. It’s raining. It’s cloudy. Right, I’m back on track.

I guess I just expected every day to be a beautiful one. Americans kind of have this expectation of Europe. But guess what? This place isn’t a fantasy. It’s reality. It rains. And don’t get me wrong, this is no unpleasant discovery. I kind of like how this glorious city is slowly but surely becoming more human as my time here goes by. That makes my discoveries and adventures all the more worth it. So I’m just gonna sit here in this little café, let the rain pass, and enjoy a nice glass of wine.

That costs less than a pack of mints.

"So whatcha been up to in Paris?" "Oh ya know, just checkin out dead stuff."

It's been quite a morbid few days.


I came to this odd realization as I sat down at Cafe Chez Papa Saturday afternoon with a few friends to enjoy a little warmth and coffee. Sitting there in that cafe, laughing with friends, and watching Parisians walking by outside, I couldn't help but feel the life of this city surge through me. That's when I realized, despite the vivacity of Paris, most of my activities over the last few days involved people with no vivacity whatsoever.


Aka dead people.


As class ended on Friday, a few of us journeyed into the heart of Paris to conquer the twisting streets and back alleys of the Latin Quarter, a section of Paris rich in history and culture. The streets are basically a maze of sinuous pathways, so it came as a big surprise when I emerged from a tiny alleyway to find one of the coolest looking buildings I've ever seen.

The Pantheon. Originally a basilica but was converted into a secular building to house the bodies of some of the greatest French minds after they have passed away. After we pushed open the gigantic doors, we entered the main hall of the building.

Incredible. What made it even better was that it felt like a discovery of our own. As if the city led us down our windy path for the exact purpose of finding this amazing building. Paris seems to have a way of doing that. We followed the instructions of our tour brochures and continued down the hall, finally descending the stairs  into the crypt below.

Now things were starting to get creepy. What lay ahead of us was a maze of tombs of some of the greatest minds the human race has ever known.

Voltaire the Philosopher

Marie & Pierre Curie

Victor Hugo                                                     

I almost felt like I wasn't worthy of being here, like a simple guy from the U.S. had no place being anywhere near these tombs. Really humbling, yet cool feeling. That feeling was nothing compared to how I would feel the next day. The following afternoon, as a cloudy sky threatened rain, we found ourselves descending deep below Paris into the many tunnels beneath the city that house the remains of millions and millions of Parisians from another time.


The Catacombs.

"Stop! This here is an empire of death."

Welp, that's comforting.

Back in the 17th century, many of the cemeteries outside Paris hit a boiling point of unsanitary conditions and overcrowded graves. To ameliorate the problem, Paris government officials began a project of digging tunnels underneath the city to use as a mass gravesite. What resulted was one of the eeriest experiences I've ever had.

Once again, another humbling experience. We were standing amongst the only remnants of millions of lives. Just astounding. Another feeling that kind of hit me was whether my being here was ethically right. Was it cool for me to pay 4 euro to come explore the graves of people I never knew? Is it right to make someone's grave an attraction? The group of us never outrightly asked any of these questions. But I knew we were all thinking them. No one really talked as we weaved through the stacks of skulls and bones. Kinda makes you acknowledge your own mortality. Something that people my age and especially in my group of friends, with all our planning for the future, rarely think about. But I guess that's the point of catapulting into a completely different world. To discover things about yourself you would never normally realize.

So as I sat in that cafe, relishing in the tantalizing wafts of baking bread, the warmth of good company, and the vivacity of the city outside, the juxtaposition of the life above the streets and the death below seemed almost poetic in a way.

Poetic. That's actually a great word to describe Paris.

       Poetic.

What a French flea market can teach you...

Saturday took us off the beaten trail of the tourist scene here in Paris. Our friend Emmy had heard about this flea market out in the 18th arrondissement, which we ended up learning is the largest antique flea market in the world. Le Marché aux Puces. Literally "the market of fleas." So away a group of us went to the outskirts of Paris.


And the outskirts it was. Gone were the beautiful, old buildings that define the collective vision of Paris. Gone were the famous sights of the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, and Le Grand Palais. What replaced them were drab buildings, graffiti-laden bridges, and people either asking you for money or trying to sell you a fake watch.


Contrary to how one should have felt arriving in such an area, a wave of pleasant surprise hit me as I took in this newfound scenery of Paris. In the center of Paris, you feel like you're in a completely different world. A modern lifestyle set against a backdrop of classic, elegant architecture, a surreal blend of honoring the historic and embracing the innovative. Something that you just don't see in the U.S.


But here, in this somewhat rundown, urban neighborhood, Paris was grounded. To discover that such an iconically beautiful city had a slightly unpleasant side made the city feel more real, which I guess is why I wasn't put off by it.


Emmy led us underneath a bridge completely covered in French graffiti. Not really the Impressionist style France is known for. We were greeted by multiple alleyways of booths with fake luxury purses, jeans, leather jackets, fare that you would find along Canal Street in New York City. Emmy, acting as a fearless all-knowing leader turned down a tiny alleyway off the beaten path. As I turned the corner myself, I entered a completely different world.


Now I'm not trying to over-dramatize this experience or anything, this is actually what happened. The sound of traffic and creepy men trying to hock fack D&G wallets faded away as a series of twisting pathways lay ahead of me. 

Lining these pathways were ivy-covered shops, tiny booths and semi-permanaent huts and enclosures all filled with a vast array of items. Furniture, statues, busts, hand-blown glass vases, paintings, photos. The list goes on and on. Across all genres of items. It didn't really hit me how cool this all was until we each began to make little discoveries. Emmy, having a real affinity for old antique knick-knacks, entered every shop with the air of a little kid jumping into a pile of leaves in autumn. She found little mint boxes with tiny figurines in them. Old bottlecaps from drinks long since imbibed. One of my favorite things was a bench carved out of a huge piece of petrified wood.

The more we found, the further we were pulled in, eager to make new discoveries. I'll warn you now, I'm making a Harry Potter reference, but I felt like I was sifting through the Room of Requirement, a room piled with things Hogwarts students across the ages had left behind. In real life, the market simply looked like this.

But to my overactive imagination, it looked like this.

We stumbled upon a little shop of trinkets that looked incredibly old. After picking through the piles, I found an old leather case with a pair of binoculars inside. Emmy immediately fell in love with them. After asking the French shopkeeper the binoculars' age, we learned that they dated back to the early 1800s.

Nearly 200 years old these binoculars were. It suddenly hit me how many people had probably looked through these in the last 200 years. Amazing how one little pair of binoculars have probably seen so much. All kinds of people with all kinds of perspectives on life have looked thorough these. Not to be all deep and philosophical, but it was a really cool feeling to look through these and throw my perspective on the world into the history of perspectives these binoculars have probably witnessed. The realization I got from this little experience is the idea that we as people are all connected. Not just with people alive now but with people that were alive across the ages. We walk the same streets, we breathe the same air, we even look through the same binoculars. I was in the middle of a maze of stories, stories of people that had once lived but were now gone. Stories that I could discover if I just delved deep enough. We came to a little hut with stacks of postcards and photos. After sifting through a few of them, I found this.

A post card from 1938. A woman vacationing in the south of France, writing to a friend in Paris, simply telling her where she's been eating lunch and her other daily activities. A tiny story she never thought would be known 74 years in the future. 


I guess this little experience kinda taught me that each person's life may seem small in the grand perspective of the universe. But the fact that a postcard can be read over 70 years in the future or this blog could be read by people hundreds of years in the future shows that each of our lives, however small, have a permanence on this Earth. 


So I'm gonna make sure I live mine to the fullest.