Paris Arrival - Day One

Arriving in Paris after an 11-hour red eye is alternately exhilarating and overwhelming - I am by turns overjoyed and miserable, in equal measure.

Funny how you don’t remember a smell until you suddenly smell it again: to me the smell of Paris is instantly, surprisingly, familiar. It’s suddenly 1983 and I’m 14 again, sitting in a Paris cafe with Annie and Jean Marie and Veronique, having just arrived on a flight from California, drinking Coca Cola out of a tiny glass bottle, gawping at the streetscape, drinking it all in.

It’s hot here. Humid and hot. The airport, thank goodness, was reasonably comfortable, although remarkably lacking in any signage whatsoever for the Orlyval train linking Orly to the RER. That led to three full tours of the airport before I finally found an airline employee who pointed me in the right direction. (The Orlyval station, it turned out, was directly above the gate I’d exited originally!)

Orly, which sounds so glamorous when shopping for Paris flight tickets from my California living room, turns out to be a small, second-rate airport with few amenities (and did I mention the terrible signage?). It does, however, have very clean and spiffy red bathrooms. It’s also patrolled by some very heavily armed soldiers cradling scary-looking machine guns. And it’s just as outrageously expensive as other, better appointed airports. I decided to forego the €6 iced tea at Starbucks, but used one of their tables to catch my breath, eat the orange I’d brought with me from home, and get ready for the next leg of my adventure.

Like everything here, Orly is linked to the world by train. Eventually I found and boarded the Orlyval, an autonomous electric skytrain which brought me to the (very hot, no AC) RER, which finally dumped me into the bowels of the RATP on the 14 line at Chatelet Les Halles. (I briefly met another woman my age there, who teamed up with me when we found the ticket machines wouldn’t let us out; together we got help from the “gillets bleus” - blue-vested assistants sprinkled throughout the Paris Metro system - who first told us to go down some long and mysterious hallway to find the person who could verify our tickets; but then when we asked, couldn’t he help us, he whipped out a key that unlocked the gate, held it open for us, and wished us both a Bonne Journey. I’ll never forget the knowing look she and I gave each other before going our separate ways.)

Finally, I emerged into the newly refurbished Gare St Lazare, which I used to frequent, back in the 80s, when I would come on the diesel train from Rouen to spend the day or the weekend in Paris. I certainly hadn’t  remembered it as a four-story subterranean shopping center… maybe it always was? But a lot can change in 40 years.

Next step: buying a ticket reservation for Cherbourg. After waiting in line to enter the SNCF air conditioned room, complete with red vested “Normand” attendants, I used an excruciatingly bad touch screen interface to buy my ticket, then grabbed some food at a Monop’ shop before getting on the train. (The ticket inspector a t the gate even gave me a bottle of water, when he realized I needed to fill my water bottle and wouldn't be able to on the train - so kind of him!) I ran to the end of the second class section and made it on to the Normandy train destined for Cherbourg en Cotentin with three minutes to spare.

So now I’m flying through the countryside, passing stone villages and fields of what looks like wheat, on a clean, quiet electric train. (Cost: $63€. Eurrail passes, I now know, require 24 hours to process, so the pass I bought online from the airport this morning  isn’t valid for travel until tomorrow. I imagine the ticket would also most likely have been  cheaper if I hadn’t bought it fifteen minutes before departure.) The WiFi is terrible, but the scenery is beautiful, and I’m glad to be almost to my first destination: the home of my French host sister, Veronique.