The French Dispatch: Limbo in Paris

We made it back to Paris, just barely.

Manifesting in Montpellier

We had to check out of our rental approximately six hours before we needed to catch the train back to Paris. What better way to kill time than checking out the local ex-pat community’s No Kings rally?

We went to the square in front of the Montpellier Opera House to watch. My niece kept reminding me that it wouldn’t be a good idea to take photos that showed signs or peoples’ faces since we would soon need to go back into the US and they might check our phones.

Excuse me? What the cluck? We have to censor ourselves to get back into the “land of the free”?

Yeah, I guess we do. More on that later…

So, I went to the demonstration, which the French call a manifestation. I think it‘s a much better term. Manifest used as an adjective means “clear or obvious to the eye or mind” as in obviously we fought a long and bitter war 250 years ago because we were being ruled by a distant and arguably unstable king, so why would we tolerate one now? As a verb, manifest has the definition of “to make evident or certain by showing or displaying”; as in holding up a banner that shows the words “No Kings” and displaying an image of a crown with a red line across it while standing in a large public square.

It did seem fitting to hold a No Kings Manifestation in France. After staying near the former site of the Bastille, I found that Paris itself is a living museum of what happens when a small group of entitled elites demand huge sums from a vast underclass in taxes so they can enjoy a lavish lifestyle while paying off substantial war debt.

The ex-pat community in Paris skews to an older demographic. So, we found ourselves surrounded by tanned and hearty Baby Boomers hoisting up neatly lettered protest signs and bobbing their heads to a local musician playing Crosby, Stills & Nash without a molotov cocktail in sight.

The heat in the south of France is tropical and the sun was baking the stone paving in the square to pizza-oven level. I would have loved to stand side by side with my dad while he and my stepmom grooved to Bob Marley and Donovan songs, but the sun was about to ignite my flesh. Like a vampire, I crawled to the shelter of a small tree casting its shade by the sidelines. From there, I could at least take some long distance photos and if they got flagged I could argue that I was only trying to capture the majestic facade of the Opera House.

For a place as chill as Montpellier, there do seem to be a lot of law enforcement people around. We would round a corner and find a small squad of fully armed soldiers casually patrolling the street. There were also bands of police everywhere stopping street people and searching their backpacks. I was photographing a two-story merry-go-round next to the square when I noticed a man and woman being surrounded by the police.

I used the merry-go-round as a “duck-blind” to aim my phone camera at the scene unfolding a few feet away. The woman had been wandering through the manifestation crowd a few minutes before. She was very thin and her enormous backpack seemed to weigh more than she did. She sat on a bench looking a little dazed while her partner gestured and argued with the police. He dug out a document from his pack and handed it over, then kept waving his hands while they inspected it. After a few seconds it was over and they went on their way down the street.

Montpellier seems to be the equivalent of Ft. Lauderdale in the US. It’s liberal, artsy and warm so it attracts a lot of homeless people. Most of the people I saw were sitting quietly outside boutiques and train stations with a spare change cup next to them. As far as I could tell when the police do stop someone, it’s because they are trying to discourage the street drug trade. It’s a tough situation, seeing people stopped and searched based on their appearance. Still, having something like a “Mass & Cass” debacle in your city would discourage well-heeled Americans from moving there.

Saying Goodbye is Hard to Do…

Especially in a room full of people with varying information-processing issues.

My sister had taken on the Herculean task (or Sisyphian depending on the day) of being the itinerary coordinator for the trip. I break out in a cold sweat buying so much as a subway token, so I was immensely grateful when she emailed all of us with a detailed word doc of our trip’s details. Every day was accounted for and she had also reserved not only the plane tickets, but the high-speed rail ones so we could get to and from Montpellier.

The only problem was that all the ticket reservations were on her phone and it was refusing to connect to the internet. She had noticed this phenomena the night before at the restaurant where we ate dinner, but everyone was having wifi issues at this little cafe so it was shrugged off as weak wifi signal. Plus, in France, it’s considered “un peu impoli” to focus on one’s phone during a dinner out. But now, that we were two hours out from boarding our return train, she had come to the realization that the issue was not weak wifi, but her cell carrier’s service had apparently stopped working.

This would be stressful for anyone living in the 21st century, even if they went to MIT. My sister was an English Lit major in college and hold’s a Masters in teaching. She had managed to take screenshots of our train tickets so in case of emergency, we at least had the barcodes to scan (highly recommended to do!). But now, any attempt to do anything involving the internet wasn’t working.

My sister and I are both the type of person who needs to turn down their car stereo to find an unfamiliar address. So I felt for her as she tried to navigate between her iPhone settings and her email app to find her tickets. Her husband kept trying to use his phone to look for a solution, but being on the same phone plan wasn’t helping. My niece was making Gen-Y suggestions, and our cousin was waxing expansive on how we have all become addicted to internet culture.

Even MIT people can get overwhelmed when they are stressed out and being bombarded by environmental input. Plus, this was our last 30 minutes with our now 90 year-old dad before heading back to Paris, then America. It wasn’t supposed to be spent rummaging through the iPhone’s maze of settings.

After five minutes of this, my sister channeled our mom’s patented stress reduction method and loudly, as politely as she could, requested that everyone be QUIET so she could focus on finding the tickets. It almost worked. However, our dad had missed the memo and now began to circulate the room trying to get everyone to watch an Instagram AI video of crochet toy tanks. I guess he thought it would lighten the mood.

@davidszauder on Instagram

Now, it was me who was spiraling. Our last few minutes with our sole remaining parental figure were turning into an encapsulation of our entire family dynamic and we were a three-generation tableaux of genetics and sensory-processing issues.

Finally, we realized that the only solution would be to travel to Paris where my sister would have the time to call their cell phone carrier. After some deep breathwork (on my part), a few tears and a lot of hugs, we packed our luggage into two taxis and took off for Gare De Sud station to get back north to Paris.

My First Uber Order

As we got on the train, my sister asked me if I could use the train’s wifi to order an uber to pick us up at Gare de Lyon in Paris. Even though I drive for Uber, I had never actually used it to order a ride. So I logged onto the train’s wifi service (after interpreting the all-French instructions) and ordered my first Uber ride.

France uses a high-speed rail line that goes roughly the same speed as a plane does just after landing, about 180 mph. So, after 4 and half hours of whizzing past lavender fields, dairy farms and red-roofed stone farm houses, we were pulling into the vast Gare de Lyon station. Uber told me that Mahdi, our driver, was waiting for us at something called “Place de Antone”. But, Gare de Lyon is an enormous two level station and I couldn’t see anything called Place de Antone on the station map. And apparently, all the staff were either on strike or on holiday. I tried to wave down a security guard, but he turned away and ducked into his office. Good thing I wasn’t trying to tell him about an abandoned duffel bag making a weird ticking noise. So, with only the Uber gps to guide us, we tried to find our way out of the station.

After five minutes of trying to follow the gps while explaining to everyone that it was highly unlikely that our Uber driver would be waiting at the taxi drop-off, our driver called me. He kept yelling into the phone that he was at “European Cafe” and we were to go there. No matter how many times I tried to ask him what street the cafe was on, he just kept yelling the name of the cafe into the phone. After three minutes of this back and forth, my niece had found a “Cafe European” on Google Maps and was navigating us there. Mahdi continued to call and repeat the cafe name ad nauseum.

Finally, we reached the entrance level of the station and I saw the European Cafe sign and underneath, a large man in a soccer jersey screeching into a cell phone. I ran across the street and tried to make peace as he loaded our suitcases into his van. “Je suis desolee, tres fatigue c’est soir. Je suis un Uber driver aussi.”

The realization that I was also one of the Uber brethren seemed to mollify him and we spent the ride commiserating over Uber’s wretched gps and Parisian pickup regulations in both broken English and French. As we passed by the Bastille monument, dozens of police vehicles whizzed by. A few minutes later we passed a statue that had been completely covered with fresh graffitti and realized that by being late to our Uber pickup, we had just missed being in the middle of a large No Kings rally in Paris.

We were exhausted, sweaty and sick of being in motion since 9am. So it was with relief that we tumbled out of the Uber and said goodbye to Mahdi. He waved impatiently and sped off into the night, hopefully to find passengers that wouldn’t take 15 minutes to find his car.

The WTF Rental

With our luggage piled around us, my sister pulled out her printed instructions for getting into our rental. Unfortunately, the multi-step instructions were not matching up with reality. There was a code that the instructions said were to get into the “front entry”. My sister tried over and over to navigate the keypad, which was a collection of cryptic buttons in various colors with faded symbols underneath. After multiple tries, my niece called the phone number above the instructions. They managed to get a person, but it was a customer service rep who just read through a prepared script without really taking any input.

I looked at my printed intinerary. There was the rental’s address, but it said 58A. We were at a building labeled 58. The blurry image looked a little different than the door we were attempting. Years of living in New England where apparently it’s a code violation to put your house number on your home had prepared me for this. I went to the building immediately to the left of 58, which had an iron gate that led to a courtyard, and tried the code on the small keypad.

“Click”. It felt like that moment in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy realizes the Nazis have gotten the Egyptian staff measurements wrong. We had been digging in the wrong place. We were now in the door, but then there was another door with another code. And then…a lockbox at the top of some stairs with the key to our apartment.

We lugged our suitcases up the narrow, twisting stairs and at long last tumbled into the apartment. Quickly, I realized how spoiled we had been with our last two rentals. If this one had air conditioning, it had the French version, which is where the room is cooled to just below the temperature that can give one heatstroke. There was one fan that I found in a closet so my niece plugged it in while I figured out how the shower worked. Besides the “master bedroom” there was a foldout couch in the living-room/kitchen and a smaller bedroom off the kitchen that had a window…facing the kitchen. I took this room while my niece took the couch.

A Room With A View

My sister and brother-in-law disappeared into their room to call their phone carrier and we were given strict instructions to BE QUIET so they could deal with T-Mobile. Just before I showered I discovered the laminated sheet next to the TV with the wifi password and texted it to the group chat before shedding my sweaty clothes and washing off the day’s drama and stress.

Fresh out of the shower, starving. By now it was 9:30pm and we hadn’t eaten since 1pm. So I decided to go on my phone to check what was around to eat. No wifi. Couldn’t bring up the network name either. After trying for another 20 minutes my niece came out of the shower and we realized they had unplugged the router while trying to get the sole fan to cool off the apartment. At least that was an easy fix.

An hour later my sister and brother-in-law emerged from the master bedroom, sweaty but triumphant. The wifi was now working on her phone again. Apparently they had waited over 30 minutes on hold and T-Mobile had hung up on them, necessitating starting all over again.

Dinner at 11

Thank the gods the French tend to eat dinner at 9pm. We had seen several cafes from the Uber ride so we knew food was close by. The first cafe was happy to welcome us, but sadly, the kitchen was closed. The next one we found stopped serving in 10 minutes but our server said they could rush our order in. In my hungry/hangry state, I confused “mortadella” and “mozzarella” and ended up with a small plate piled high with sliced ham and a tiny sprig of arugula for garnish. Parisian restaurant food is not easy on vegetarians.

I was just too hungry to care and ate my cold-cut pile with gusto, washed down with a cold beer. After the long hot day of travel chaos, it felt good to be in Paris again.

Things I Learned From All of This

Family Dynamics Accelerate In Proportion To Group Size

Before getting to Montpellier, we had been traveling in a pod of four people. It was small enough that a group consensus could be reached quickly, and we could all focus on one conversation, or work towards a goal (such as getting from Notre Dame back to our AirBnB rental on the Metro).

Once we reached Montpellier, our group expanded to include my dad, my step-mom and our cousin. This brought the total to seven, a number just large enough to create factions and fractured conversations. So, trying to communicate anything to the group as a whole required coordination among multiple mini-pods. Plus, tack on a lifetime of familial relationships to color every interaction and being in an unfamiliar place. Moment spent coordinating navigation always felt tinged with echoes of my childhood, when I first learned to navigate the sometimes choppy seas of family drama.

Uber Drivers Are That Way For a Reason

Just walking around Paris is hard. Every corner has a walk/don’t walk light and we quickly found that trying to go against the green is risking being mowed down by a bicyclist. The streets are narrow to begin with, but here, you are definitely in bike country. And, when cars are allowed, the competition to get anywhere efficiently is fierce. In fact, Paris (and France in general) is so anti-car that rideshare drivers are treated like an invading army. Airports and rail stations do not have any rhyme or reason for accomodating rideshare pickups, so drivers need to find a perch nearby and talk a rider in. It keeps them from getting harassed and ticketed, but for passengers trying to follow the app’s directions to find a pickup, that creates a lot of chaos. Should you ever visit Paris, make sure to text your driver and ask them to give you the address of where they are really waiting for you.

Vacation Rentals Are Like A Box Of Chocolates

Cuz you never know what you’re gonna get. That quaint little apartment “close to everything” might turn out to be a third floor walkup with no ac. But inversely, the place next to the train station in a rundown neighborhood might actually be a newly renovated luxury condo with air conditioning and a working coffee maker. As a rule of thumb, take the three main requirements (cooling system, functional plumbing, coffee making capability) and expect two out of the three to be available. This helps to cut down on the stress of being disappointed.

Overseas Cellular Service Requires A Trip to Your Carrier’s Store

After trying to navigate my carrier’s website to find out how to enable international calling and text, I gave up and just went to a local outlet. There, the service rep just adjusted our account to handle overseas use and that was that. My sister had tried to do it on her own using instructions from her carrier’s website and that seemed to work as well...until it didn’t.

Forget Your Diet, You’re in France Now

Maybe it’s the consistently available fresh meat, dairy and produce. Or maybe it’s the history of surviving centuries of siege tactics and warfare. At any rate, the French do not care about providing oatmilk, and have not heard of tofu. Breakfast will consist of a pastry made with an entire stick of fresh farm butter and coffee is served with whole milk. Lunch is cheese and bread and maybe some wine. Dinner is meat, maybe some vegetables and wine. Dessert is encouraged and that is also cheese, and some coffee with whole milk to go with it. And somehow, you rarely see people suffering from obesity in France. That’s likely because rather than take their chances in an Uber, the French walk or bike everywhere.