Okay, so as mentioned before, this post is going to be a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. So buckle up tight, grab your barf bags, and Prepare . . .
In which Gru is me.
We'll go chronologically, same as always. Monday morning came early, with the sun not even up yet as I walked to class. I always love walking to the RER when it looks like this:
Oooh, preeetty.
And, as is often the case, there was somebody performing on the metro that day. Video:
I don't think I've heard brass instruments on the metro in Paris yet. It was cool!
What happened next is a little bit embarrassing (to me, anyway), but ultimately it turned out pretty well. After French class in the morning we normally have religion class, but on this day that was not so. The schedule had been changed, but I forgot to check, which is how I ended up at the Institute building alone for about half an hour. When I realized class must have been cancelled, I was embarrassed, but more than that, I was bummed because it can be really hard to coordinate hanging out with people once we're all out and about in separate parts of Paris. I hadn't counted on spending my day alone; I wasn't sure what I should do next.
But then I remembered: in all my two months here, I still hadn't seen the inside of the Paris Opera house! Why not go now?
I couldn't see a reason not to. So I hopped back on the RER and went, and OHMYGOSH Best decision ever.
The chandelier is about five times bigger than it looks in pictures. I was completely stunned by how cool it looked!
There are also mirrors alll over the building, at least in the places where tourists can go, which means some nice mirror selfies with pretty (but blurry) chandeliers in the background:
And of course I also visited Box 5:
They don't let you go inside, but just seeing that little sign was enough for me. I can officially cross that off my bucket list.
Sorry there aren't too many pictures of this; the first time I went I was just trying to soak everything in and I wasn't too focused on taking pictures. (I've been multiple times since then, of course, so never fear: many more pics to come! >:D)
I spent a good three hours wandering around in the Opera Garnier on Monday, not because the areas you can tour take that long to see, but simply because I did not want to leave. Like, seriously. Can I live in this building? Please let me.
Ahhh, well, there weren't any beds so I decided not to actually stay the night, haha. Instead I headed out through the opera gift shop and walked toward the metro so I could get back to the Institute for FHE. On my way though, I saw this restaurant that I'd never seen before, and it looked so cool I just needed a picture.
If you're wondering, yes, those are statues of Elvis and others on the facade. Weird, but cool.
That's basically it for Monday, oh, except for when I was on my way back through the gigantic train station right by the opera house and I watched a guy run for a train at the last minute (never ever never do that, btw), and he got his foot stuck in the train door while the rest of his body was still on the platform, and for probably twenty seconds I watched in horror as four or five large men rushed up and tried desperately to pry open the door so they could free him, and when they finally succeeded it got stuck on his FINGERS and he started swearing really badly in French . . . he eventually got out, but man, it was scary.
Anyway, on Tuesday I had class like normal, and in the afternoon I did walk #17 with Rachel, which is in La Defense, the business district of Paris. This area, which is kinda in the direction of the banlieu (suburb) where I live, looks much much closer to a traditional American skyscraper area than the rest of Paris, I mean, just look at it:
It was definitely a change from what I've grown used to. (I'm trying not to think too hard about the architecture shock that's gonna come when I go home.)
Anyway, on our walk we passed many statues and exhibits that screamed 'modern art,' which was pretty much in keeping with the rest of the place.
This thing is supposedly the biggest mosaic in the world. Unfortunately, the area was under construction so we could only see about half of the mosaic . . . laaaame.
Like I already mentioned, walking around in all this overt modernness and urbanity after so long in Old Paris was kind of trippy. It sounds dumb, but when you're around buildings that were built in the late 19th century all the time, you kind of start to forget what normal cities look and feel like. Which resulted in me seeing overpasses and stupid stuff like that on this walk:
and going, "what a curious and technologically advanced structure! I wonder how it works! Some sort of witchcraft, perhaps?" like an extremely incompetent time traveler from the 1800s,
We continued to pass interesting buildings and sculptures (not a ton of historical substance to this walk) and I thought this guy was pretty interesting:
that has to be the most out-of-whack proportion of arm-to-head size that I have ever seen. Modern art is weird.
This fountain area as we got closer to the Grand Arche (the big arch in the background, duh), was pretty cool. It does cool 'dancing water' effects every hour or so.
The arch itself is really very huge--and it's actually a skyscraper, there are offices and stuff inside of it! That funny-looking long dark tube in the middle of it is an elevator that takes you all the way to the top, but unfortunately it was under construction on the day we went so we couldn't go up. Super lame. But the view from the top of the steps underneath the arch was pretty cool, too. We could see the Arc de Triomphe way down on the Champs Elysees (squint reaaallly hard):
We're cute, too, so that's something, I guess.
This was technically the end of the walk, but we prolonged it a little by getting a gaufre (waffle) from the mall next to the arch and splitting it.
It also had salted caramel ice cream with a lot of yummy whipped cream on top of that. I loved the ice cream. The waffle, however? Let's just say that Belgian waffles actually made in Belgium are better. (By a lot.)
I had such a good time hanging out with Rachel and talking as we ate the waffle and tried not to drip ice cream on each others' pants. She is just so smart and funny!
Anyway, that's how Tuesday ended. It was really fun!
On Wednesday after morning classes I did another walk--#19--which is a walk in the famous Pere-Lachaise Cemetery. A bunch of people in our Study Abroad group joined together to do it, and we had a blast, even though it was in a giant graveyard. And I do mean giant--it's the city's largest cemetery, with 110 acres of land. We were there for two and a half hours at least, and some of the people in our group were a little freaked out by the fact that we were in a cemetery for that long. But to me, this cemetery was just so different from anything that I'd ever seen that I was absolutely mesmerized by it the whole time. There were some normal headstones, but most of the grave sites were actual literal mausoleums, which I've never seen in person before, stationed along either side of these big wide avenues like so:
It made it feel less like a cemetery and more like a weird town full of ghosts where everybody knows everyone else and you can just knock on the door of one of the mausoleums and a ghost will come to the door and go, "Yeah you can borrow my lawnmower, go for it man." Spoopy.
It was a beautiful day for a walk, with the sun shining and ridiculously beautiful leaves covering the little 'streets:'
Seriously, wow.
There were a lot of famous people buried here, which was super cool. For instance, we have Oscar Wilde's grave, which people apparently used to kiss all the time, so they installed a glass barrier and now people kiss that instead:
The tomb of Heloise and Abelard, two famous French lovers from the middle ages:
And I also got to fulfill another bucket-list item by visiting the grave of Frederic Chopin!
I love his music so so much, I was basically classical-music-nerding out when we found it. 10/10, good grave.
I really can't stress enough how much I loved this place. Does that sound weird, that I enjoyed being in a graveyard so much? Maybe a little. But it was just so wonderful, a perfect fall afternoon. I've compiled some of my favorite pictures to share with you. Enjoy!
In addition to some really beautiful sculpture work like the examples above, there were a few statues that kind of made me burst out laughing. For instance, I don't know why, but the 'draw me like one of your French girls' pose is a popular one for artists' and writers' headstones:
I take it back, actually; that second statue is more like the guy's saying, "No, no, go on, your story about the time you knocked over all the soup cans in the pyramid display at Costco is fascinating. I wasn't snoring, I just have a deviated sceptum."
That was weirdly specific, but that's just the way my brain works, okay?
And last but not least, there was this excellent statue that is just begging to get the Incorrect Caption Hour treatment.
Ahh, Incorrect Caption Hour. I will so miss you once I leave.
All in all, I had a really fun time at the cemetery! (She said in a completely not-creepy way.) I had some homework to catch up on, so I went home afterwards.
If you've read this far in the blog, you may be wondering, okay, what gives? Where's the emotional rollercoaster part of the blog?
Oh ho ho. Oh ho ho ho. You are so not prepared for what's coming.
Thursday was the day that it all went down. On Thursday, I was essentially an emotional mess. Why, you ask? Well, because Thursday, October 27th, was supposed to be the day that I went to see Phantom of the Opera in Paris with a bunch of my friends from the group. I had bought my ticket months in advance and I was so, so excited for this--but if you've read my previous blogs, by now you know that the production was cancelled just a few weeks before it was scheduled to open. If you're sick of me mentioning Phantom on my blog, then sorry. But Phantom is kind of my thing, y'know? I have just always connected really deeply with the story, and I find the plot so incredibly moving (even more so where the book is concerned), and yada yada yada, it's a big big deal to me. So clearly I was devastated when I first found out that it wasn't going to be happening, but managed to mostly keep it together after that. But when that Thursday hit, I listened to some of the soundtrack from the musical again and, well, this was basically me for most of the day:
Noooot a pretty sight. I just felt awful and so sad, because who knew when I was going to have a chance to see the musical again? Over and over I just kept picturing what it should have been like for me that day--how excited I should have been, how hard I would have worked to make myself look pretty and go to dinner with my friends before the show as we all got ourselves more and more excited, and then getting to the theatre and watching as the prologue began . . .
Yeah, in this manner I managed to make myself sadder than I had been up to that point on this entire trip. Now that I think of it, though, it wasn't just because of Phantom; what had happened with the show was just the icing on the cake after many disappointments and difficulties and hardships throughout the two months I'd been in Paris. The weight of all the crappy stuff that I'd been through sat on my shoulders at once and I just felt really, really yucky.
I am a naturally positive person, though, so I tried to counteract it! I put on my cutest skirt and pinned my great big lacy bow in my hair, and went to my Art History class, which was an evening class for the first time--it started at 6:30, in the Musee d'Orsay.
This museum is cool because it's built inside an old train station:
Neat, huh?
Class was equal parts fun and difficult; we were looking at Impressionistic art, which I find fascinating, but every once in a while I would be reminded of what I was missing out on--for instance, when we stood over this giant model of an aerial view of the reconstruction of Paris in the late 1800s, and I saw this guy:
Of course, of course the Opera House would be right there. From then on every once in a while I would get a wave of unbearable sadness and start sniffling while we were looking at, like, a painting of a bridge or something. (Ugh, I sound so dramatic.)
It wasn't all bad, really. We saw some gorgeous Monet art:
And (this will make my sister Elise happy) Degas' famous Little Dancer statue!
Cool stuff, huh?
After class got over it was about 8:30, but I was starving and too emotionally exhausted to skip a meal. I went with Maddie and Larissa, as well as Larissa's mom who was in Paris for a few weeks, to get some sushi!
Fun fact: this was actually my first time eating sushi since like third grade when we had a cultural learning program about Japan. I'm not great with chopsticks, but luckily Maddie and Larissa and her mom are really nice people who did not make fun of me. It helped me a lot to have something to focus on other than my little depressing pity party--unfortunately, by the time I started to head home at about 10:45 at night I was sad again.
Sometime after getting off the RER at my train stop and beginning the ten-minute walk to my host family's house, I hit rock bottom in my sadness. There has been so much about this trip that I have absolutely adored, but as I've alluded to, some really hard and painful things, too. I felt so alone on that walk, and like nothing was going right, and at some point I just thought to myself, Nothing ever happens to me! I want something exciting to happen to me. I want to have an adventure.
Which, first of all, like, Okay Alaina, like Paris wasn't a big enough adventure for you? Whatever. But that's just how your brain works sometimes when you're sad, y'know? Anyway, the point of me mentioning that particular thought is as a cautionary tale. Do not ever, ever say that you wish something 'exciting' would happen to you. Or even think it.
Why?
Oh, y'all gone learn why.
When I got back to the gate to our little community it was locked. It was about 11:30 at night at the time. I had my smart phone with me, and when I stood next to a certain spot at the gate I could use the WiFi from our house to send messages. I sent one to Cassidy asking if she could come unlock the gate for me (because my host family never told me the passcode). I would have used my French phone to call her, except for one small problem: my French phone had been refusing to charge for a couple days straight, so I had left it in my room in the house that day. Facebook Messenger's calling application worked, thankfully, but she didn't pick up. (None of what happened up til that point or what followed is Cassidy's fault, btw--she was just asleep, and nobody can fault her for that.)
After, and only after, mind you, I had tried these methods of contacting her, I wondered if perhaps I could try shouting or throwing rocks at her window. Then I remembered that her room is in a section of the house that faces away from the street--there was no way for me to throw rocks at her window, and it was unlikely that she'd be able to hear me even if I shouted.
But wait! You seasoned blog-readers say. This all reads almost exactly like your story of the time you crawled over the fence in a skirt after returning late at night from London! And up to that point, yes, it was almost exactly the same. So, as any rational human being would, I figured that climbing the fence was a viable option again. Why wouldn't I be able to do it twice? I was even wearing the same shoes as last time!
Here's a picture of the fence again, just so you can visualize what happened next:
(Sorry about my thumb in the shot :////)
I was carrying a purse this time around instead of a backpack, so I just tightened it so it wouldn't get in the way as I stepped on top of the same little concrete power-box I'd used before, hitched one foot into place on the top of the six-foot-tall fence, and reached to my right to steady an arm on the stone column so I could stand up straight.
Now, logistically speaking, when I stood up straight on the fence, my arm naturally had to pull away from the stone column. This was a problem I'd dealt with fairly successfully the first time I climbed the fence, by simply reaching up and grabbing the sturdy branch of a tree that's just out of shot in the above photo. From that point the first time around, it was easy to maneuver myself where I needed to go in order to safely drop down.
This time around I stepped, I hitched, I reached, I stood, and I grabbed--nothing. The branch wasn't there. It was absolutely gone--cut off a few days before when somebody pruned the garden. There were only a few little scraggly twigs that slipped slowly from my fingers as I felt myself begin to fall backward.
The interesting thing about falling from any height or in any direction is that it doesn't matter what the height is--time will inevitably slow down and make you feel as though the fall lasts way longer than it really does. People say that it's during this time that your life flashes before your eyes. This is kind of true; however, it's important to note that sometimes not all of your life flashes before you--just every single choice you made leading up to this one event. In cases such as these, studies have shown that you have exactly enough time to review each and every choice, observe it carefully and with an objective view, and then regret it as intensely as physically possible.
My thoughts followed this pattern exactly. I could hear an extremely slow whooshing in my ears as I watched the angle of my feet tilt upward until my toes were pointing up and I couldn't feel the fence anymore. In that half-second or so where I had no physical contact with anything except for air, that brief moment when I was essentially floating, my brain basically went:
-Alaina
-Alaina why
-Why would you do this
-Oh my gosh
-Why are you such an idiot
-Like who
-Who do you think you are
-This is going to be the most humiliating thing ever
-W H Y
-You realize you're Pollyanna now right
-You literally are Pollyanna
-She climbed a tree once and thought she was all that
-But then she did it again and nearly died
-She was paralyzed
-You're so stupid
-You're going to be paralyzed
-Oh my gosh why
Which, as I look at it now, is actually a beautiful free-form poem. At the time, though, it was kind of like a track of somebody screaming that was slowed down to like half-speed. And shortly after the Pollyanna realization, while my brain was freaking out, my body went, 'okay calm down I won't let her get paralyzed, sheesh' and it twisted to the side (with no conscious help from me, btw) so I wasn't falling straight back and the world started to speed up again--and for the second time that night, I hit rock bottom.
Like, literally.
I hit a rock.
With my bottom.
This rock, to be exact:
If that doesn't look like too far of a fall to you, well, technically it wasn't. But I 100% guarantee that you would not enjoy landing on a concrete block on your rear end from that height, either.
Because of the way I was twisted, I didn't actually hit precisely on my tailbone, but rather on a spot just below my right hip, on the back side of my thigh. Landing on top of the concrete block like that was, as strange as it may seem, the best thing that could have happened to my body, because I fell from there to the actual ground. If the concrete box hadn't been there, I would have fallen straight to the ground and my body would have absorbed all the shock of falling at once instead of distributing it between two shorter falls.
For a second or two I was okay. I jumped right up in case somebody was watching, and started to walk a little bit, but about five seconds later oW OW OW. The spot just below my hip where I'd hit was burning. I could walk, but it was not fun at all.
The pain continued to get worse as I frantically tried to get ahold of somebody. It was quickly becoming clear that trying to get over the fence a second time would not be a possibility; I couldn't stay in any one position for more than about a minute. Standing, sitting, walking, leaning--it all gave me this burning, stinging feeling, like somebody had taken a two-by-four and whacked me with it as hard as they could. I was not having fun.
I called Cassidy again and she didn't pick up, at which point I called my mother multiple times because I didn't have Professor Call's number in my smartphone, only in my French phone (which, remember, was inside the house because it was broken.) She didn't pick up either, at first. It was my sister Elise who answered the video call, to see me outside the house trying my darnedest not to start sobbing at 12:30 at night. After a couple more dropped calls I was able to get the message across that I needed Mom to know that I had been injured, I wasn't sure how badly. Elise told my mom, and what followed as I waited outside my gate was one of the craziest games of phone tag ever played.
Mom called the emergency phone number for the study abroad program, and then the people at the Kennedy Center called Professor Call, and then we waited for a little while, and the Kennedy Center people called my mom back, and then Professor Call called my mother. I had plopped on the ground at some point and was resting on my left hip, not even caring how much the right side hurt anymore because I was just so tired (by this point it was probably 1:30 or 2 am). I was in a lot of pain, but more than anything I wanted to go to bed. Then, as my mom was on the landline with Professor Call and using Facebook's calling function to talk to me at the same time, she said those fateful words:
"Alaina, Professor Call sent an ambulance. It's on its way."
And, no joke, the instant after she said that, I started to hear sirens.
Now, I am a relatively calm person most of the time. I don't flip my lid about a lot of stuff. Even being outside in a foreign country at an unholy hour of the night, after smacking my rump on a concrete block, was not unbelievably stressful to me. But when I found out that that ambulance had been sent, I completely freaked out. I didn't want an ambulance! I didn't need one! If the medics wanted to lift me over the fence, then that would be just perfect, but there was no way I would be able to explain what had happened and what I needed next in French. I explained this to my mother, and as the sirens got closer she explained a few key vocab words I could use to explain what had happened. Finally the moment of reckoning arrived. The ambulance pulled up the road, slowly stopping as I waved it down and hung up the phone.
Now, I should take this moment to explain something. When I had called my mom, I had explained pretty clearly what had happened and what my symptoms were. But when she called and talked to the people at the Kennedy Center, there must have been some sort of . . . disconnect, I guess. They thought it was much more serious than it actually was, because when they called Professor Call (in his own words) they made it sound like my life was slipping away as I lay on the pavement. Ummmm, no. Of course, he had no way to directly check with me, and if I really had been in a situation like that, there would be nothing for him to do but call an ambulance. I was not, though, so when he called an ambulance and sent it VERY URGENTLY to my house, naturally the paramedics expected to find some kind of broken body on the scene. What they got was me, extremely exhausted and in a considerable amount of pain, but still sitting upright.
This is important because it kind of explains what the French paramedics did next, which was, essentially, nothing. By which I mean, they just kind of . . . stared at me. A few of them got out of the ambulance and walked a few steps toward me (they were all dudes, btw), and then just stopped. I started to kind of pull myself up and stood up, leaning on the fence. One of them asked, "C'est pour vous?" asking me if the ambulance was for me.
I nodded, and when he asked what had happened, I started to rehearse the words my mom had given me to say, but about halfway through I forgot and just had to like, gesticulate awkwardly at the fence and try to show that I had fallen. They wanted to know what I was doing climbing over the fence in the middle of the night; I tried to explain that I was locked out, but it was clear they didn't understand me. The three guys outside the ambulance looked very skeptical and, dare I say it, disappointed. All the same, they had me limp to the ambulance and helped me inside it, at which point one of them started asking me questions in French.
Sometimes, like any person, I have fantasized about what it would be like to be in a crazy situation that would totally never happen in real life, and imagined myself as the sort of awesome human being who would totally pull through and be able to handle whatever came my way, simultaneously showing my toughness and wit to the people around me and making them go, "Dang, now that is one Cool Girl."
Ha. Haaaa ha. Real life is never so much fun. Because in real life, at one in the morning when the ambulance that I didn't want came to take me away, I was in shock. I didn't know it at the time, but I most definitely was (a fact which the medics completely failed to take into account, btw), and it seriously messed with my Cool-Girl vibe.
I basically forgot every iota of French I'd ever learned; it took me ten seconds to realize that the guy was asking for my age, and then I forgot the number for nineteen and had to hold up fingers. He tried to ask again what had happened, and I tried again to explain, but this time I got through even less of the explanation before forgetting the words. The other two men in the back of the ambulance were starting to exchange Significant Glances.
After the basic questioning was done, one of the guys pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, and asked me to point to where it hurt.
Um.
It was only at that moment that I realized the full ramifications of what Going to the Doctor for a hurt heiney meant. Here I was, at two in the morning, in an ambulance with a bunch of twenty-something guys while one of them pulled my skirt up and pressed his fingers really really hard against the back of my thigh, setting off pain so bad I definitely could have grabbed him by the arm and thrown him out the window. Anyway, the pain isn't the important part here; it's the fact that he just pULLED MY SKIRT UP and went at it. Yes, I know that that is what paramedics are trained to do, and yes, they were all perfectly respectful. That didn't make any of it less weird.
They asked me what my pain level was, to which I said six or seven, and the guy kind of raised his eyebrows at me, like, really? And I just kind of stared back at him like, yes, man, why would I lie about this? Do you think this is fun for me?
Anyway, eventually he called into the front of the ambulance and explained all the info about me that I'd told him. Now, what's interesting about this whole situation is that, while I had basically lost all ability to speak coherently in French, I was perfectly able to understand everything he said (which has kind of always been the case for me--I can interpret tongues real well, just don't ask me to speak 'em) and basically it boiled down to this.
"Yeah, we have this nineteen year old girl back here and she hurt her upper leg. I think she fell off a fence? Well, it's pretty obvious she doesn't speak French very well." he kind of laughed a little bit while saying that (At which point I actually did cock my head at him a little bit and glare daggers into his face because, yeah, he was right, but he was laughing at me and I am the sort of person who is incapable of fighting anyone but wants to fight everyone, y'know? He didn't see my dagger glare, but I'm pretty sure one of the other medics did because he started watching me with nervous side-eyes after that.) "Yeah, I don't think it's that bad, but we can take her in anyway."
At that point, I probably would have preferred for them to drop-kick me into the sun than take me to the hospital, but I didn't know the word for drop-kick in French so I stayed silent for the long, bumpy ride that followed.
Not too much happened that was extremely notable at the hospital itself--they got me a wheelchair, and I continued to be unable to use French (like when the doctor asked me if I could walk in French and I somehow forgot the word for 'walk' so I just went 'ummmmmm' until she said it in English). After more painful poking and prodding they sent me to do x-rays, which involved me going up a few floors in the nearly-empty hospital completely alone--no escort or anything--walking on my bad leg and looking around for the x-ray guy, and then once I found him being obliged to drop my skirt AGAIN for the x-rays, haaaHAHAhaHa it was so much FUN.
They didn't find any fractures, which I expected. After that they released me from the hospital; Professor Call called me an Uber and Cassidy was awake by this point so she could let me in. She told me the gate code, which will now be permanently seared into my brain because I never ever want something like this to happen again ever, and finally, at about 4 in the morning, I fell into bed and slept until about 1 in the afternoon.
While I didn't have any fractures, it was pretty clear that I had bruised myself very badly. I had to sleep almost exclusively on my front for several days; that first week was a long and painful one. Luckily I did heal, although not completely. I still can't run very well, and if I press on the spot where I fell I can still give myself a pretty bad zinger. But hey, at least now I can sit down.
Well, there you have it: the story that will (hopefully) go down in history as the most horrifying, harrowing, and humiliating experience I have on this trip. (Yay alliteration!)
I wish I could say that this particular crazy story helped me grow in some way, that it taught me that I'm strong and tough and able to handle anything that life throws at me. But I'll be honest, it really didn't. I didn't feel brave or competent while I was sitting outside crying with a broken butt at an unholy hour of the night. I felt like a limp noodle that couldn't do anything right. Sometimes that's just the way life is.
But I suppose it wasn't all bad. I mean, if I hadn't fallen off the fence I never would have gotten my favorite souvenir of this trip:
That's right--they gave me x-rays of my rear end to take home.
That's all from me for now. Sorry this post took an eternity to write--this event is a big reason why I've gotten so behind in blogging. But with less than a week left in Paris (!!!!) I'm not going to be able to catch up on blogging. I'll try to post a few more things before I leave, though, don't worry!
Song of the day: "Tous les garcons et les filles" by Francoise Hardy, which is a song about a girl who is sad because everybody's dating somebody and she's all lonely. Pity parties for the win!
See ya later--don't climb fences.
For real just don't.
I mean it.
okay bye for real now.
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