In which I walk home from La Defense and acquire bad karma

So my intention was to wake up this morning and run, but that did not happen.  What happened was, I spent a little bit of time failing to wake up, and when I did rouse myself around eight it was very clear that running was not within my capacity.  So I had some coffee and did some writing... unfortunately that petered out after about 2500 words, but by then I was feeling much more equal to miscellaneous trompings.

First I headed over to the Marais, where after a bit of tromping I went to the Musee Cognac-Jay.  This is fairly typical of Parisian municipal museums in that it is the former home of someone semi-famous, tricked out with his art collection and/or art he might have liked.  In this case, that meant a lot of Romantic portraits and marquetried furniture.  After that, I tromped around until I ended up at Bastille, and then tromped over to Ile de St. Louis.  I looked in a few stores under cover of even-more-touristy tourists, and also bought something called a Tuile Amande, which was an ambiguous-looking almond item so bizarre that I took a picture of it... it did not really taste like much of anything, and I was disappointed, but it turned out to be a good thing that I ate it because it was very filling and I had several hours of tromping ahead of me.

After a brief detour to the Left Bank, and another brief detour home, I set off spontaneously for La Defense.  This is where the keep all the skyscrapers.  I got there around 4:45 and walked around; it was pretty, but surprisingly empty, even when office workers started heading to the subway.  I walked along the esplanade (pictures coming soon) to the next metro station, but when I got there, I said to myself, "maybe I will just walk all the way back!"  This is because I am an idiot.

So I walked.  And walked.  It turns out, once you leave La Defense, you are  not in Paris, but in a town called Neuilly.  I wasn't lost at all because you just follow the road all the way to the Arc de Triomphe, and it was interesting.  I got to the arc and walked down the Champs Elysees.

Then I got fancy.  At the bottom of the Champs Elysees is a garden section, and after that is Place de la Concorde, and then the Tuileries, and then the Louvre.  In other words, a bunch of big, long, boring places, some with lots of traffic and all with lots of tourists, that I've walked through many times.  I decided to go another way, which would also, if done optimally, shorten the distance a bit.

So, la la la, after two hours of walking I turned away from the well-delineated road that I knew exactly how to follow and set off in a different direction.  Which was interesting.  I saw many interesting buildings and fancy stores.  I also saw an alarming number of military people.  I'd been getting worried all afternoon, since seeing soldiers with their guns out at the La Defense metro, that something was going on, and seeing the words Pakistan and avion (plane) and toues (killed) on a big TV screen didn't help much.  Now I was seeing soldiers and cops everywhere, and I couldn't tell if it was normal (there are cops everywhere here, and I was in a part of town I don't go to all that much, which might be where they keep things like consulates) or something really worrisome.  I didn't see anything else alarming - there was a normal mix of people out, and no sirens going off - so I figured it was probably fine, but I was still unbalanced.

And then I became lost.  Well, turned around.  And upon looking for my map I discovered that I'd taken it out of my bag at home to find the proper metro route to La Defense and then not put it back.  And there are maps on the street, but none in my vicinity.  I'd been navigating by the sun, but that only takes you so far, and at the moment I was on a street where the sun was fully shaded.

This was the moment a woman chose to ask me for directions.  People ask me for directions a lot, here as well as in New York, and at home I'm happy to oblige them.  But here it's not so easy since (a) I usually have absolutely no idea, (b) I often can't express the ideas I do have in comprehensible French, and most importantly in this case (c) most of the people who speak on the street are not asking for directions.  In addition to obvious beggars and solicitors and unsavory men, there are a large contingent of female beggars, often very young women, who try to draw you into conversation before asking for money.  This is very trying, and at that time - having been walking for three hours, and somewhat lost, and worried about soldiers and possible terrorist attacks - I was not really in a position to deal with such things.  So I walked past the woman without even looking at her.

I immediately felt bad.  I realized, once she'd disappeared into the crowd, that I wasn't in a very touristy area of town (where the worst beggars hang out) and she was speaking in French (the young-lady beggars speak English, some with almost no accent) and she was, from what I saw in my peripheral vision, very well-dressed and carrying shopping bags.  She was a lost French visitor to Paris is all, and for some reason she thought I was someone who would know something, and I treated her like she didn't exist.

Fortunately, half a block later in the direction we were both walking, there was a big map.  So she is probably just fine without me, especially because Paris is full of actual Parisians who speak French.  Still, the whole experience drove home the foreignness of the city to me.  It's easy, at times, to forget exactly how other Paris is, or rather how other I am in being here.  It's Western Europe; people dress and comport themselves similarly to in the US, to zeroth order, the food is not completely bizarre, they name their streets in large part after people I've heard of.  I know enough of the language to navigate, order food, talk about money, ask directions in a pinch, and be occasionally amused at the conversations of strangers.  It's easy to feel like I'm in the Paris I imagined in French class when I was nine years old, the Paris in textbooks, the Paris of an American's imagination.  Toy Paris, a place with great museums and great food and lots of nice clothes.  And then a day like today happens - a day that was in many ways pleasant and interesting and entertaining - and I realize that I'm in a totally foreign country, that I am concerned that there has been a terrorist attack on this or my own country and have no way to immediately verify, that I don't know if the men with weapons that I'm seeing on the streets are there to protect me or to protect someone from me, that I'm instinctively treating other people as if they are threats because once they get past greetings there is a very good chance I will not understand anything they say and, worse, the instincts that in I can trust in New York to tell me whether a person is too creepy to talk to are largely useless here.

It was a humbling moment.  Fortunately, it happened during broad daylight and on a well-traveled street, and twenty minutes later I was home.