williamwataru

14:19 We just arrived in Paris.

We took the train from the airport into the city and then walked about 15 minutes to our hotel. My first impression of Paris was just how dense it felt. Tokyo and New York are dense cities too, but Paris felt dense in a different way. I think part of it might be the amount of life happening outside.

The particular street we walked down had rows and rows of tables and chairs set outside restaurants and bars, with most of the chairs facing toward the street. It almost seemed designed specifically for people watching. Compared to patio seating in the US, it felt much more integrated into the street itself. You are walking past people eating lunch, drinking wine, smoking cigarettes, and talking with friends, all while watching everyone else walk by. It made the city feel extremely social.

Our hotel room also came with a little bit of culture shock. The room itself is small, which isn’t unusual, but getting to it was interesting. There is an elevator with enough space for barely one person that takes you to the fourth floor. From there, we had to walk up another two flights of stairs to reach our room on the sixth floor. 

I was sweating profusely carrying our backpacks up the stairs, but I loved it. 

20:39 It’s now the evening of our first day in Paris.

After dropping everything off at the hotel, we spent most of the afternoon walking through the city toward the Eiffel Tower. We could have taken the train, but the walk was about an hour and we figured walking would let us experience more of the city.

One of the things I kept noticing was how much Paris seems to have its own rhythm. A lot of restaurants appear to close around 2pm and then don’t reopen for dinner until 7pm or later. The happy hour deals also seem to last much longer than what I am used to in the US. I saw one bar today advertising a daily happy hour from 4pm until 10pm, which is almost unheard of in the States.

It made me wonder why happy hour back home always seems to end right around the time most people are actually getting off work. Here, at least from what I saw today, it seems like the timing is built around when people would actually want to sit outside and have drinks with their friends.

On the way to the Eiffel Tower, we stopped at a supermarket and bought some food for a picnic. We got a variety pack of cheeses, a ham and cheese sandwich, pasta salad, and some wine. Nothing particularly fancy, but it’s something I have been wanting to do for a long time. 

When we got to the Eiffel Tower, there were people everywhere doing exactly the same thing. The grass around the tower was filled with groups of people sitting around eating and drinking, so we fit right in.

The Eiffel Tower is one of the many things in life that doesn’t really translate into photos. I had seen hundreds of pictures of it before today, but seeing it in person was completely different. I didn’t expect the sheer size of it to impress me as much as it did.

There was also something about being surrounded by so many other people who had traveled there to see the exact same thing. Usually I dislike large crowds, but this one didn’t bother me. Sitting there with our supermarket food and wine while people from all over the world were doing the same thing made me feel like I was participating in something much bigger than our own little trip.

It’s strange to think that this morning I was still somewhere over the Atlantic, not quite in San Francisco anymore and not quite in Paris yet. Now I’m sitting in a tiny hotel room on the sixth floor of an old building after spending the afternoon eating cheese under the Eiffel Tower.

Tomorrow we have lunch reservations at a nice restaurant and tickets to the Louvre. Let’s see what happens!