The Last TIme I Saw Paris

The Last Time I Saw Paris

To find a hotel room in Paris for $10 or less, you will have to tolerate squatting in a Turkish toilet. 

I have a real fixation with France, and most especially Paris. I have travelled all over the world and when people ask me to name my favorite destination, Paris is always high on the list.

Maybe because I can kind of speak the language, or maybe it’s the cheap wine with no preservatives, or perhaps the fact that a buttery basket of carbs is a traditional and essential breakfast!

In high school I started dreaming about the Eiffel Tower, I couldn’t believe that it actually existed. 

After college, I finally made it to France, and Paris, carrying $300 and no credit card. Obviously, hotel rooms had to cost under $10 and I prowled the streets of the 5th carrying ripped out sections of Let’s Go France, the Student Travel Guide published by Harvard Student Agencies 

A hotel room could not cost $15 a night, or even $12. I found the ten dollar rooms, and they were fabulous in their grimness, except for the Turkish toilet, even that I had to admit that was a de trop. (too much). The place to find these hotels was in the 5th. The 5th Arrondisement known then as the student ghetto with miles of cheap hotels, crammed next to every variety of inexpensive ethnic restaurants. Crowded, noisy, crawling with students and tourists.

My favorite affordable meal, brie on a baguette, is still one of the greatest culinary experiences one can have in Paris. It’s not just the monuments, or museums, that I remember, but the great wine sold in any grocery store, the city’s  walkability, and the English bookstore with the infamous host who would invite you to tea if you hung around long enough. The Eiffel Tower was a vital but small part of the city’s magic.

One summer I rented an old cider mill (moulin a cidre) in Normandy for a week, smack in the middle of a sheep field. There was no VBRO, or Airbnb, I must have sent away for a catalogue of rentals, I remember the light brown paper on which it was printed. I brought my mom with me, and we made piles of amazing memories. 

In the cider mill Mom ditched some of the clothes she had packed and didn’t want to carry home. She left a sad pair of flats and some brown stretchy pants draped over the very small wastebasket (corbeille a papier).  We shopped at a fresh vegetable stand and made potato leek soup; (oops I mean vichyssoise) following a pilgrimage to the Normandy American Cemetery where mom found the grave of her beloved cousin’s husband.  

Mom was very brave, at 5am one morning I drove to the local train station and dropped her off where she caught a train to, I guess, to Charles De Gaulle airport. Pretty plucky.

Several years later, in 1985, upon leaving a job of five years, the stage crew got together and bought me a ticket to Paris and a large handful of francs.  On what must have been Air France, there were preset bottles of Moet champagne on every seat, in coach!

Nursing a bad hangover, I stayed in a Paris hotel that was well over $10 and drank blood orange juice with my carb-filled continental breakfast.

Decades later I travelled to Paris several times for work, accompanying a famous singer. We stayed in a five-star hotel, with a terrifying mirrored bathroom far across the Seine from the 5th. Breakfast was carb optional. It felt strange, like I did not quite belong there, not that I minded five-star hotels, but in Paris, it felt odd. After the show, as I walked out of the theatre in a light drizzle, the audience was singing “Don’t Worry Be Happy,” and I was charmed.

On that trip, I walked across the Seine to wander around the 5th, and to book a hotel for my nieces, arriving on their own adventure a few weeks later. At the one-star Hotel Esmerelda, I booked a room with a view of Notre Dame. The owner wrote down the girls’ last name longhand in a large ancient ledger. The Esmerelda has a website now. The young ladies sent me photos of their room, charming with flowered wallpaper and a spectacular view. One star simply means, no services, no room service, and according to Parisdiscoveryguide.com: 

“You should expect a minimalist (meaning tiny) hotel lobby, no elevator, almost certainly no air conditioning, and reception staff available for as little as only 8 hours.” 

But the good news is even 1-star hotels are required to serve continental breakfast!

The trip to Paris that brought it full circle happened last April. I unexpectedly had four days off, and a friend in Paris, so I booked a ticket on Friday for a Saturday departure. I stayed in the 5th, near the Sorbonne, and all the cheap restaurants with barely a tourist or student in sight.

My hotel was not too fancy and not too dingy, it was just right.

I only had those few days, but everything seemed idyllic.  The rainy sidewalks, the bready breakfasts, the cold April drizzle, the bistros I carefully researched; one featuring the dessert Floating Isand, (more charmingly Ile Flotante,) which is meringue floating in an egg yolk custard. My mom often made Floating Island “Good use of both egg whites and egg yolks” she would say. Mom loved to deliberately bungle classic French phrases, for instance A Chacun son Gout (each to their own taste) was transformed into  ‘Shack and Goody.”

I am now the age mom was when we travelled together. She was a wonderful travelling partner and a very good sport. I am embarrassed to recall that we stayed in places that fit my budget, not hers! I miss her, and I miss the me of my first visit, a slender young woman wearing a cheap but flattering French dress, posed in the full-length mirror of my $10 hotel.