An American in Paris

So, what do you want to hear about? I could go into the places I went and the sights I saw here in the City of Lights, but you know what the Eiffel Tower is like, you know what Sacre Coeur is like. You’re in Paris, you gotta do ’em (or some of ’em, at least).

I hit my share of cliche Paris attractions but I skipped a lot of them, too. In keeping with the mode I’ve been in all summer — being a tourist via sailboat, you’re perceived by the locals much differently than if you just stepped off an airliner — I was trying to immerse myself in some semblance of the Parisian lifestyle, however briefly.

To that end, I rented a small house/apartment, I didn’t stay in a hotel. I used VRBO.com and the place I wound up in was cozy, comfortable and quite charming. It featured a loft area with a big, comfy bed, and a main-floor living area with a kitchen and bathroom. The place was off the street: you’d pass through the coded front door and then a small courtyard. Unlock the gate and travel down a narrow outdoor corridor between rose-covered walls, walking on a cobblestone path before turning right, through an ivy-covered gate and into a small patio of your own. It really was an oasis, a haven from the city that seemed light years away through those doors.

Not that it needed to be. The area I was in — the 17th arrondissement — was nice and also useful. I was a two-minute walk from the La Fourche stop on the Metro’s 13 line, in the trendy Batignolles district. There were plenty of cliche ethnic restaurants (Turkish, Italian, Indian), plenty of brasseries and bars with sidewalk drinking and dining, and useful services such as a supermarket 100 meters from my front door in one direction and a coin-operated laundromat 50 meters in the other. All things considered, I dug being somewhat out of the mainstream — not in the 7th or 8th, for instance — but having easy access via the Metro to any destination in town.

And tour Paris I did. I typically made a mental note of a place or two I wanted to see, or more likely a general area I wanted to head toward, and then I’d just wander. As a result, I covered a ton of ground — which I also dug since it enabled me to see and experience a wide range of Paris. I like to think it helped me learn some things along the way.

For instance, what a change from England to Paris in one major way. In the former, you can’t smoke anywhere public anymore, not even football matches or pubs. In Paris, everyone smokes everywhere. Kids, adults; men, women; indoors, outdoors. OK, that’s not true: they couldn’t smoke inside the bars or restaurants but that meant they just stepped outside the door and created a nice fog for you to walk through on the way out. And by the time 90 minutes of football was over at the Parc des Princes, my lungs felt like those of an asthmatic with a bad case of pneumonia. Not pleasant.

And what is it with the women smoking? Who told them that smoking makes them look good? I’m sorry if it’s a double-standard (though it’s not because I detest smoking by anyone regardless of gender), but talk about a turnoff.

Which is a shame because the beauty on display in Paris was awe-inspiring. There’s such a focus on style and fashion and just plain looking good that even unattractive people looked, well, good. Obviously, this doesn’t apply to me but that’s why I’m able to offer this observation: I was on the outside looking in. A dispassionate observer, if you will.

Maybe it’s just a result of the city’s size, maybe it’s the same thing in New York. But as a fan of beauty, I quite enjoyed the scenery in Paris.

Which is not to say that I took a lot of photos. In fact, I didn’t take any. I shot two quickie photos with my iPhone of the Champs Elysee, but not once did I take my real SLR out of the bag. Nothing from atop the Eiffel Tower or Montmartre; nothing from the garden at the Rodin Museum; nothing from along the Seine. Not that any of the photos would have been any good anyway: every location that I might have shot had eight gazillion people swarming around. So the memories will have to suffice.

Though I might look into making more memories. One thing that occurred to me while in Paris was that if I were going to do city living, I think I’d do it somewhere overseas. I am most assuredly NOT a city mouse so if I were going to live someplace as foreign as a city I’d just as soon do it in a place where EVERYTHING is that foreign: the language, the culture, the mentality…everything. And I may just do that. I was looking into apartments in Paris before I left.

That may or may not come to pass. I find myself torn between heading back to someplace a little lower key (Reykjavik? Back to Alaska?) or even heading back to the States…I’m even feeling an urge to get back into the game with regard to working for someone else. Hell, I’m even very intrigued by a sailboat that’s for sale in Maryland right now; I may go check it out in the next week or two.

But living in Paris really intrigues me. No, it’s not a case of a fan doing something oh-so-Hemingwayesque because really, that era is so long gone that any attempt to recreate that Lost Generation thing is more doomed to failure than Deadheads thinking a Further show is gonna recreate a show with Jerry on guitar (and, to be honest, my zeal for Hemingway fades as I age). But it does feel as though maybe going out of my comfort zone — living someplace where I don’t have easy, regular access to the things I normally do and love such as surfing, fishing, hiking, hockey, etc. — might be a good way to force a really deep dive into the creative side.

And Paris is someplace that really encourages the creative side. The emphasis on art at the high end and style at the everyday low end can’t help but encourage one’s creative side to come out. Standing in the Musee d’Orsay and contemplating a painting by Monet inspires whether you want it to or not. Contemplating what in the world Rodin had going through his mind as he created The Gates of Hell gets you thinking about what it means to be alive and be human even if the main thing you care about in life is how the Red Sox are doing.

To experience the art that is all around in Paris — from the buskers on the Metro to the masters in the museums to the hacks sketching Notre Dame to listening to the whispers of departed greats at the Pere Lechaise cemetery and other historic sites around town — and the importance placed on art by the French as a whole makes you want to go out and create something of your own, something that puts your voice out there into the universe. Tapping into that urgency might be worth exploring.

And in that case, maybe that would be doing something Hemingwayesque. As I said: there’s no way to resurrect anything resembling the Lost Generation. Literature is so discounted in modern American society that there may not be enough would-be writers left to fill even a bar or bookstore discussing their work. And there’s nothing like a just-concluded world war to cause a great sea of people asking the big questions; nowadays everyone just seems to want to know how to get their own piece of the pie. It seems as though the whole world is just so jaded now. But settling into a foreign culture in order to enforce the living of an artistic life, well, if that’s what Papa and the others were up to then maybe I ought to sign up.

Travel, Uncategorized, ,

Moonlight Sonata

Ahhhhhh!

I realize it’s 3am, but this is the kind of night you dream about — well, that I dream about — as a sailor.

I went topside at 11:30pm, half an hour before our midnight watch, to see what the weather was like, figure out which clothes I would need for the midnight watch, and find out why we were still on a starboard tack headed southeast. Emerging from the hatch, I was greeted by a cloudless sky filled with a myriad of stars and a daytime-bright, almost-full moon. Not a manmade light was in sight from horizon to horizon: no ships, no oil rigs, nothing. And to further improve the scene, seas were calm and the wind was a nice and steady 20-ish knots. Oh yeah…it was setting up for one of those perfect midnight watches.

For the first hour of our watch, we continued southeast with the nearly full moon to the south off our starboard beam. The white moonlight reflecting off the water was bright enough to read by (almost) and served as a shiny, shimmering axis, a rod used by a puppeteer to control a marionette to guide us along our track.

It was really too bright a moon for deep-sky stargazing, but away from city lights all the big-name constellations and sky patterns were readily visible. Lyra, Cygnus and Aquila and the summer triangle of their brightest stars Vega, Deneb and Altair were slowly setting in the west signaling the winding down of summer. Off our stern, the Big and Little Dippers pointed the way north and showed us from where we’d just come. Overhead, all of the players from the Perseus myth were present: Perseus himself, along with Andromeda, Cassiopeia and Pegasus. King of the gods and planets, Jupiter blazed brightly in the southeast while just a touch north, rising in the east, the Pleiades and Taurus the bull heralded the coming of autumn…and winter beyond.

Just before 1am, we tacked over for the straight-line run toward Newcastle. And though clouds started rolling in at that point, it was no matter: the continued spectacular sailing — seven-plus knots and right on the ideal track for our destination — and the joy of an hour of perfect, dark skies kept the high intact. Even the Finnish sourpuss exalted in the conditions, especially when Polar Bear hit eight knots while he was at the helm.

The spell finally broke a bit, not long before we finished our watch, as the loom of the lights of Newcastle and an antenna somewhere along the coast came into view. As if to counter the intrusion, Orion began his climb out of the sea back behind us to the east.

Whew. Sorry about that. Sorry to wax rhapsodic to the point of sounding like a greeting card or one of those posters teenagers put on their wall when they hit their I-wanna-be-taken-seriously phase, but it really was a perfect way to wind up the trip — that was likely our final watch as our ETA is 9:30-ish in the morning and we’re not on again until 10.

It was the kind of nighttime watch I love and never get enough of; the kind that makes me want to head right back to the States, buy my own boat and take off. Relax, Mom…not that that will actually happen: I don’t think I could get any boat ready to head to the Caribbean in time for a Nov. 1 departure, and after that it’s getting a little late in the season.

But a night like this (along with yesterday’s rollicking sleigh ride) goes a long way toward redeeming — or at least helping me overlook — some of the shortcomings that have occurred on this summer trip. Combine these couple of days with the sights and scenes of the Shetlands, the Lofoten, Iceland and Greenland, and some of the great people I’ve met along the way, and it really does make for a summer of adventure. Perhaps even the summer of my life.

Travel, Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

THE Sailing Day of the Trip

So, two days out from being over and done with this summer-long journey, we wind up having what may have been the best day sailing so far.

It started with the fresh breeze out of Lerwick, which persisted south of the Shetlands. And contrary to forecasts — not that they’ve been right once this summer — the winds persisted through the course of my 6-9pm watch.

We maintained an eight- to 10-knot speed for the three-hour run, and though the Finns were, let’s call them “directionally challenged” at the helm, we made a good, 25-plus-mile run. The sun went down in a blaze of pink cirrus clouds as the waxing gibbous moon rose in the southeast. And by the time we went off watch, we’d reached Duncansby Head, the northern tip of the mainland of Scotland. Even the Finns weren’t scowling as much as usual.

On top of that, we even had a fly-by by a tall ship. The three-masted behemoth, with sails flying from all the yardarms, appeared on the southwest horizon as an amorphous shape — an island where there wasn’t supposed to be one. As it grew bigger and began to take shape, we could see the brilliant white canvas driving the ship downwind to the northeast. And as she moved past our stern, the lowering sun brightened the fields of canvas into a mirage, an image from a bygone era: a lone tall sailing ship plying a foamy, spray-soaked sea beneath a cloud-streaked sky that spoke of rain to come.

The ship disappeared into the haze on the horizon, as anonymously as it had appeared. Norway’s tall ship headed home after a summer abroad? Seems a likely bet.

Our 3-6am watch that followed was, however, a tad anticlimatic as we came topside amid a field of North Sea oil platforms, ships servicing the platforms and a now-lessened wind that had us full-on motoring to the south. The lights from the plaforms were such that it felt like we’d gone to sleep in the middle of the wilderness and awakened in the middle of Times Square. On top of that, the flames spewing from the tops of the oil rigs recalled nothing more than the drive through the environs of Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Oh well. ‘Twas great while it lasted. In all, we covered about 176 miles in the 24 hours after leaving Lerwick. Now we’re still full-on motoring but the wind has swung through our bow and is now coming from the southeast and building. My watch team is about to go on duty at 2pm, a watch that will run through 4pm. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to roll out the yankee headsail and maybe get our speed back up into the eights and nines (we’re in the mid-sevens right now), and maybe even get in a bit of steering. Yes, with the Finns at the wheel we’ll cover more ground than if we let the autopilot keep us on the straight and narrow. But if it placates them even a little bit, it’ll be worth it.

Two watches to go, in all likelihood: 2-6pm and then 12midnight-3am. We should be nearing the River Tyne around 10am, the time we’re supposed to be on next, which means everyone will be on deck and Boogie will be at the wheel. The countdown continues…

Travel, Uncategorized, , , , , , ,