Nobody knows exactly at what time and place Saturday, Dec. 26th began for us, for it is the nature of life in a jet airplane that time and space become intertwined in a complex way that is interdependent, yet completely irrelevant to anything of consequence. Had anyone been nerdy enough to attempt to figure out what time it actually was, it would have been purely for the intellectual challenge of it, and it would have gone something like this:

First nerd: What time is it right now?
Second nerd: That depends, what time zone are we in?
First nerd: Well, I might be able to figure that out: we have a rough idea of our flight path, if only I could estimate how far along it we've traveled...
Second nerd: That's easy to figure out. We left at 6:30 p.m. travelling 600 mph, so we've gone...let's see... what time is it right now?
First nerd: I hate you.

Editor's Note: Shari is not one of these nerds.

In any event, we played the usual game of transatlantic hide and seek with the sun, sending it on its way right before our departure, then racing around 1/3 of the earth while the sun went around in the other direction, as if our ultimate goal might be to hide behind a cloud until the sun came around again, then jump out and shout "Boo!"

In any event, we awoke somewhere over the North Atlantic, the sun's golden rays seeming to say: "oh, hello, is it you again?"

We touched down at London's Heathrow, limbered our creaky joints, and disembarked. Time itself was re-started, and recalibrated to around 11 a.m.. Thanks to an unusual tailwind, we had had a spectacularly fast transit, barely 9 hours 15 minutes.

We passed through the X-rays but not UK customs or immigration, as is the privilege of passengers who are connecting onwards, and found the "departure lounge," as they call the combined passenger accumulation and queueing area for all departing international flights.

Heathrow has a system that must have taken its cue from the guy at Disneyland who figured out how to design the park so that all rides exit through a gift shop. There are no departure gates in the sense that we think of them, with seating areas for passengers awaiting the aircraft—instead, there is just a doorway and a podium/desk, and that's it. In lieu of the seating and waiting areas, all of the podium/desk/doorway arrangements for all flights are spaced around the perimeter of a single giant duty-free mall area. This is the "departure lounge", although there isn't much opportunity to lounge there.

Part of the reason they can arrange the boarding gates this way is because of a breakthrough in airport architecture. The designers of Heathrow had the genius to discard that old myth in airport design that the boarding gate needs to be anywhere near the aircraft—at Heathrow, once you have your ticket taken and walk through the boarding door, you are not on a jetway, but in fact are just in a maze of hallways, the other end of which does culminate in an airplane, but that may be many hundreds of yards from your current location. Strategically stationed agents prevent any passengers from taking any wrong turns or going anywhere they aren't supposed to in the maze. Well, it still beats those stupid lifting bus/lounge things that they use at Washington DC's Dulles airport to hide from the passengers the fact that when they go through the boarding door, they aren't anywhere near their aircraft either.

Lest one's forced presence in a duty-free mall doesn't motivate impulse purchases, these are further encouraged though two other expedients. One: there isn't any place to sit near your boarding doorway. Two: Which door your flight will depart from isn't revealed until a little under an hour before the flight, when it suddenly appears on the monitors. The departure door seems to be chosen by a sophisticated system which tracks where in the duty-free mall the passengers are currently loitering, then chooses the farthest door from that location in order to maximize distance traversed through the shopping area and thereby maximize impulse buying.

We sat in a bar and drank cola (tiny, with no ice), Shari had a cheese sandwich, and I had a bowl of "chips" (which are french fries, of course) just to get us through the next few hours. Shari had a conundrum deciding which was the regular mustard, and I made fun of the packets of "Brown Sauce" and the British way of labelling the ketchup as "Tomato Sauce."

I put it on a credit card to avoid having to change any money to UK pounds, but it turned out I needn't have worried about that. The shops there are well prepared for passengers with different currencies, and are set up to take anything that looks like money. Had I set down some aboriginal sea shells, they probably would have had an exchange rate for them.

Our connecting flight left soon enough, and we packed onto a crowded sardine-can for a mercifully-short 45-minute hop into Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport.

Upon our arrival, we claimed our bags, which were among the first off the plane, and we were quickly and efficiently moved through the border controls. To Shari's disappointment, the immigration officer didn't stamp our passports at all. To my delight, the "nothing to declare" line at customs was nothing more than a side-path out an exit. Finally, we were officially and legally in France!

The moment we got onto the main floor of the airport terminal, I had the excitement of completing my first ever conversation in French with a Frenchman in which two-way communication and comprehension occurred. It went like this: "vous voulez un taxi?" "non, merci."

Thanks to the vast storehouse of information in Shari's Palm Pilot, she already had the answer to the usual moment of "well, we're here, now what?." She led us to the exact right area to find the shuttle-van company that was doing our airport to hotel transfers. My choice would have been to ride "le Métro," but the van came free with our vacation package, and it turned out to be fast, efficient, and easy, and I ended up being very glad we didn't have to lug our suitcases up and down all those stairs to get through the Métro.

A van took us on about an hour's ride into and through Paris, where we enjoyed the new sights and sounds of a night in the life of a bustling city. The van was to stop at several very small hotels, and one older couple at a stop before ours took forever to get off, unloading suitcase after suitcase, stacking up an improbably huge pile on the front step of their hotel. Shari jumped and shrieked about eight tenths of a second before I could when one of the bags they unloaded was mine. She leapt off the van to go get it, and the people actually tried to argue with her and claim it was theirs! By the time I managed to squirm to the door and get off the van, Shari had straightened the whole thing out, but we were quite shaken by the disaster that would have occurred had we not been in a position to see exactly what was being unloaded.

Finally, it was our turn. The much-anticipated Hôtel Louvre Saint-Romain, which we had carefully chosen from among many possibilities and discussed for months on end, now finally stood in all its glory before us. The street was just a one-way alley with barely room for the van to squeeze between the lines of cars parked on both sides, so even the San Francisco style of "screw everyone and just double park" wasn't going to help. I should have known they'd be ready for this, though—the driver used the simple but effective tactic of stopping in the middle of the street and letting all the traffic behind him just back up. We got off, tipped the driver, and headed in the front door of the hotel.

The Hôtel Louvre Saint-Romain is a small place, typical I suppose of old city-center hotels in Europe. It is one building in an identical row of connected ones, as is the style of construction in the center of Paris. The front desk staff always spoke English, although we tried our best to view that as a backup and a luxury and not to abuse it. They had our reservations—ready and pre-paid—and in the European style, they basically just handed us a room key with almost zero paperwork.

The elevator was very interesting. Yeah, interesting—as a HISTORICAL ARTIFACT, maybe! The interior was less than 2 feet wide from front to back and probably five feet across sideways. The mirror-lined interior was a truly pathetic too-little too-late attempt to make it look bigger. There was simply no way the two of us, plus our two rolling suitcases, were going to fit. A quick question flashed through my mind: which is more miserable, climbing the stairs to the 3rd floor, or riding this claustrophobic elevator with the luggage? I decided that the latter would be the more miserable, and sent Shari up the uneven, creaky, curving wooden stairs while I literally packed the elevator with our two suitcases. I instantly doubted that that was the right choice—I had miscounted some by forgetting that the 3rd floor in a French building is one level higher than in an American one—the entrance level is counted as zero, and the "first floor" is one level above that. On the other hand, the elevator was tiny, closed with bi-fold closet doors, bucked and shook in ways that made it seem certain that it wasn't going to move again, and didn't look like there was any convenient way for anyone to get you out when it (inevitably?) became stuck. During the ride up, I was glad I hadn't subjected Shari to that. On the other hand, when I got out and saw the bedraggled state she was in from climbing the stairs, I waffled on that decision yet again. In any case, I wrestled the suitcases out of the elevator, and we found our room.

Our room was not what Americans expect from a hotel, but it was quite adequate and comfortable for our needs. It was tiny, so small we couldn't both find any place to open our suitcases at the same time unless one of them was on a bed. (Shari would fix that the next morning by unpacking her suitcase into the wardrobe cabinet, leaving the one suitcase-opening spot for me). We had a bathroom which was even tinier, but at least it was our own, it was clean, and it had a hot shower. All the amenities other than square feet were in evidence—a tiny TV set, a little mini-bar, a phone, even a little safe in the wall, although we never figured out how to open it. The room was always warm, but I never did figure out how that came to be, because the old radiators were always cool. The carpet was thin, almost what we would consider indoor-outdoor carpet or the carpet you'd use for an industrial building. The beds were definitely not modern-firm and were actually fairly crappy by my standards, but were as good as one usually gets in older hotels in Europe. There were several lamps, each too small to ever satisfy AAA guidebook requirements, but together enough to put out a serviceable amount of light. The room was clean, and everything worked.

The beds themselves, as seems to be a more common practice in Europe, were two twin beds pushed together, an apparent attempt to compromise between the needs of those guests who would prefer to sleep separately and those who would prefer to sleep together. That is what we were expecting, actually, since the room had been specified as a "double," and this was exactly what Shari had speculated might be the meaning of that term. Largely because the beds were on wheels, the arrangement in fact served neither purpose well: anyone who wished to sleep separately would find that, with the beds pushed apart, there wasn't room to get out of bed; and anyone wishing to sleep together would quickly discover that the slightest approach towards the center would cause the beds to skate apart without warning, causing a hard fall through the gap. It was fairly convenient in regard to individualizing the covers so no one could steal them all, but the "falling through the gap" problem was always a bit awkward.

All hotels in Paris are rated on a mandatory government rating system. This one merited three stars. We ended up being quite glad we hadn't paid the extra go to for a 4-star hotel. This was everything we needed.

For the first time ever on a trip to Europe, I wasn't instantly in the mood to collapse into sleep upon arrival, and it was late enough that it seemed like a good idea to try to hold out until bedtime. So, after a brief rest during which we proved to ourselves that French television is just as inane as our own, we ventured out to see what we could find for dinner.

As it is frequently rumored that the eskimos have some ridiculous number of words for snow, so it is with the French and their words for various eating establishments. Shari had tutored me carefully from her guide books in the differences between a "restaurant," a "café," a "brasserie," a wine bar, and a "salon du thé." But what to do when a place has _ALL_ of those phrases emblazoned on its awnings, yet is so small it has only a dozen tables? No matter, the French require that menus be posted outside, so we just wandered a few blocks, perusing menus and turning our noses up at McDonald's, until we found a small brasserie that looked acceptable, and plunked down.

No sooner had we sat down than we happened to look out the window and catch sight of what had to be the greatest horror of anything that could possibly have been lurking in Paris. But first, a bit of background. Shari and I have each had considerable formal education in French in the distant past, and some three months before our trip we had decided to refresh our skills by buying and going through a series of pre-packaged lessons. We bought a three-CD-plus-book set, called French with Ease from a company called Assimil.

We plowed with dedication into the first of the 99 lessons, dutifully doing a lesson every evening. In fact, the first few nights we did four or five lessons at a sitting, since they were easy for us and only took a few minutes each. By lesson twenty, they were getting noticeably harder and we were doing just one per day. By lesson fifty, when they started with the active phase in which you do more than just follow along and repeat, we were bogging down. By lesson sixty, we were groaning and grumbling about it, and by lesson seventy we were only managing to motivate ourselves to do our Assimil two or three times a week. By lesson seventy-five, Shari openly announced several things that had become obvious:

1. French with Ease was bringing us little French and no ease.
   
   
2. These lessons were getting to be a major pain in our buttocks and a source of conflict as we tried to make each other do them
   
   
3. Shari, at least, was not going to do any more of them, and
   
   
4. Assimil was the spawn of the devil.

So what did we encounter, after having only been in Paris a couple of hours, just two blocks from our hotel and right across the street from our first dinner in Paris? Yup. The Paris office of Assimil. I would return days later for a photograph, but that night all I managed to do was thank the fates for having just completed the rigors of a transcontinental trip, for there are few other things on earth that could have allowed us not to instantly lose our appetites. So we turned from the window to the menu, I opened my French-English dictionary, and we deliberated.

Shari enjoyed a "chicken Roti Grand-Mère," which turned out to be an excellent roasted chicken in sauce, while I had a smoked salmon pasta that wasn't what I thought I ordered, but was tasty . Shari attempted to order a house white wine, and the waiter didn't understand, so I supplied what I thought was a serviceable translation: "Vin du table, s'il vous plait" (biting back the inexplicable urge, no doubt conditioned into me in Germany, to say something stupid like "vin du table, bitte"). Well, we did get some cheap wine, but it was red rather than white. Oh, well. It was still good, which began proving to me what I had thought would be the case—you can get good expensive wine anywhere, but the difference with being in France is how good the cheap wine is! We forgot to use the magic phrase from Shari's guide book: "Une carafe de l'eau ordinaire" so we didn't get anything else to drink besides the wine, and left quite thirsty, but since we were 2 blocks from our hotel and about to go home and go to bed, this wasn't a big deal, and just helped us remember it for future meals.

We took some melatonin that Shari had had the foresight to bring in order to adjust our body clocks, shut the curtains with a clothespin (Shari's foresight again), collapsed into our beds, and slept something like fifteen hours.

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All text and photographs copyright © 1999 Sam A. Mahmoud and Sharilyn Horne.