Paris, 20th May

20th May 1999 Thursday, 1109hrs Heavy Rain! Bit of a lie in today. After lounging in the Jardin Tuileries for 5 HOURS on Tuesday, we went to get the keys for the flat. Olivier invited us in, gave us beer and we had a chat. It was great. He invited us over for dinner tonight. Wow. (Gemma’s a tad smitten) Hervé’s flat is fantastic. One large room with a futon and sofa bed, kitchen and TV, stereo and another little room with a shower and stuff. Very modern, and the kind of decor with wood ceiling framework and polished wood floor that I’d like one day. (Only bigger!) Yesterday we were prevented from doing the museums by a Ministry of Culture strike. Good luck to them, but we didn’t get to see the Mona Lisa. Both the Louvre and D’Orsay. We went to the Eiffel Tower. For about 4 hours. We stayed at the very top for about 2, and the rest of it for the other time. I rang home from the 1st stage, and watched the sunset, enjoyed a Kronenbourg...nice. Gemma and I have got the hang on the Metro system now, and I went shopping yesterday and didn’t use a ‘mot d’anglais’! Quite proud.

The next day we woke up to torrential rain outside the windows of the flat. There didn’t seem to be a huge amount else we could do in Paris indoors, that wasn’t a museum and/or expensive, so we stayed in, watched TV, periodically ventured out to buy bread or wine, and generally waited for it to stop. There was more thrill of being somewhere so exotic as Paris and doing normal things, like running to the shops in the rain, or tumbledrying your jeans for a few hours, or reading robot comics in French in just your shorts whilst waiting for your jeans to dry. We listened to Olivier’s CDs, which were Air: Moon Safari, which was fast becoming the soundtrack to our stay in Paris, (especially the track with the rain at the start) and another CD that I can’t remember anything about other than the group sounded like an angry French version of The Levellers. We stuck with Air.

The day crawled by, and the rain stopped an hour or so before we went to Olivier’s for dinner. We were greeted very warmly, we handed over the bottle of wine we’d brought as a present, and Olivier cracked out the Kronenbourg. I had anticipated an evening’s smug grinning as Gemma had been swooning over Olivier ever since we met him, but the minute we sat down in the lounge, one of Olivier’s friends came in, and I had to spend a minute or so rummaging underneath the table for my jaw. She was gorgeous. This fact wasn’t lost on Gemma, who lost no time at all in beaming a few of her own smug and eyebrow-raising grins in my direction. I have no idea now what her name was, but she was beautiful. That’s just about all I can remember. She had long dark hair, olive skin, green eyes and a smile that hiked my pulse up by a hundred beats a minute every time she used it. She had been to Morocco, so she gave us a few points on what it might be good to see. She recommended some waterfall, somewhere...I can’t remember what it was called. Sorry. My attention was elsewhere.

Dinner was great, and wine flowed after the beer. We ended up talking all evening, and missed out on a promised stroll around Montmartre, where their flat was, but the evening was amazing. It felt brilliant. Here we were, heart of France and all the rest of it, and we were sat, chatting and drinking with a couple of French people only a little older than ourselves, chatting about travel, politics, philosophy, love, life, jobs, study, that and the other, anything really.

Most people will say, if they take the time to think about it so simply, that travel is about places, and they’re right, but people are what makes travel great. A place without people is an empty, soulless thing, and maybe, in the absence of museums packed with art of all kinds, without five star international comfort and multi-lingual hotel staff, without any money at all really, we’d got a bit closer to the soul of Paris than the average three-day-stop tourists.

Maybe. I had a terrible hangover the next day.