La Première Beine

Where have I been?

For the last two weeks, I have been entertaining my parents and showing them the crown heads of Europe. I have waited until now to gain some sort of inspiration to write and tell you "how it all went." But, other than my last entry about Paris, I have had little to say.

What is it about spending two weeks with my parents that left me relatively soulless upon their escape back to the Motherland? And, perhaps more important, after having talked to many other friends, this seems to be the norm after a visit from the parents. So, the question is: what is it about our relationships with our parents as adults that in some way robs us of our identities.

I anticipated that I would need at least a week to recover from their visit. As it turns out, I needed two days just to come back to my senses. You have no idea how much management 'the J.' needs. This is why I think kids might be a bad idea for me. I am too selfish and self-centered to see to everyone else’s needs for any given period of time.

What did I do with my parents?


Thursday 3.8

Mom and Dad Arrive, go to sleep early in the first attempt to cure “the jet lag”.

Friday 4.8

Because we leave tomorrow for Paris, I thought a nice quiet day just walking around my little city of Pforzheim might be nice for them. We meet up with our best friends Amie and Ryan, so that my parents can meet them and see their new baby, Loren. We walk around the park, the city, eat ice cream and then send my parents home early for bed.


Saturday 5.8

We leave for Paris. The trip takes 6 and a half hours. It is my parent's first big trip here and they are excited. My father and I go to the restaurant car for a drink, and, while there, the conductor stamps our tickets.

We arrive in Paris. Paris Est is under heavy construction and there are French policemen everywhere with machine guns, a sight that we will become accustomed to on our 3 day sojourn. We find the Metro, and, with my parents in tow, I attempt my first horrible, broken French (my inability to quickly translate amongst the three languages running around in my brain will be a source of profound embarrassment and disappointment for the duration of our stay. The 'use it or lose it' maxim has become horribly apparent with my French. The whole time, my little, inner judge is screaming 'You have a Masters Degree in this language you idiot!' But, without any opportunity whatsoever to use it for more than 3 years, it is rusty at best.)

The Metro is crowded, way too cramped and fast-paced for my parents. They look as though they may just be scared to the absolute core by the throngs of people getting on and off of the Tube.


They look at me like little children, confused at not being able to understand the gibberish coming out of the notably more-ethnically diverse population than any of us are used to.


I still understand the people; I just can't talk to them without inserting occasional German words as the pneumatic tubes of my brain start to misdirect information. (I can just see those little capsules of information slamming into each other, and going in wrong directions in some kind of freak phenomenon of sound scientific principle. Start me in a conversation in any of those languages and I’m ok. Translation, though, for my interested parents is so not my forte.)

We exit the tube, according to my sources, somewhat in the vicinity of our hotel. I awake to a potential problem of our visit to Paris, but from an unexpected source. My father has to use the bathroom, and he's got to use it now--a theme which will plague us during our stay. What's worse, he refuses to use the French pissoirs, because that would mean he would have to pay to pee. Unthinkable! This makes finding the hotel even more important, and stressful, as the eternal question comes, after coming out of the depths of the labyrinthine snake called the Paris Metro: "Now which way do we go?"

After checking in, having a bit of rest after our trek, we ventured out for sustenance. I thought it might give a nice "exotic" flavor to our first day to eat what we all normally can’t, heading off to a good falafel restaurant. (A tip I found in the giant Fodor's guide that I had with me, a hulking 5 pounder from 2005 that I strapped to my back for hints when needed.) The guide said that there was a fabulous falafel restaurant not far from our hotel, one that was cheap and fun. The Centre de Pompidou, in all its splendor, met us at just about two blocks away, with its fun street vendors, caricaturists and otherwise hippiesque population that is the Marais.

Given that we were hungry and, to my estimation, lost, the journey to find the elusive little restaurant did have its humor (we happened, serendipitously upon several gay bars on the way, its customers, sitting in pairs at tables along the sidewalks, gawking at us as we passed. Who knows if my parents even noticed that some bars only had men at the tables? Who cares, anyway? I thought it was fun and another aspect of what would be our adventure.)

We came upon the little street only to find that the restaurant that was recommended had long been closed. We chose another Jewish Falafel shop near it, and ended up having a wonderful time, eating beautifully, and adequately resting before our journey back to the hotel, via Notre Dame. Do you know that falafel is Jewish and Palestinian? Did you know there’s a difference? Yeah, me either.

My parents were unequivocally unimpressed with Notre Dame. We approached it from behind, noting those flying buttresses of great fame.


The folks just wanted to go back to the hotel, but I persuaded them to at least walk to the front to see the façade, where we got a great glimpse of it in the setting sun. So disinterested were they that they didn't even bother going inside. My parents, the religious fanatics, could not be inspired by one of the most important religious icons on God's green Earth. The sweat and blood that went into this beautiful behemoth, the countless fortunes and lives lost only to show the glory of God Himself did not touch them. I practically wept, as I always do, looking at Notre Dame de Paris, while my parents yawned, failing to see what all the hubbub was about. Someone, please explain this to me.


We didn't see one museum in Paris. They only saw the Louvre from a cab, driving though. They were completely uninterested in anything cultural whatsoever. They were only happy when, on the last day, we put them on a 2 and a half hour bus tour of the city, where they could sit and look, from afar, at the two-dimensional Paris they wanted to see. I just don't get it. I think the “bohemian, real” Paris I tried to show them was only seen as the “inconvenient, dirty” Paris to them.

Sunday 6.8

Today we spent much of the day waiting in lines at the base of the Eiffel Tower. The views we saw from the second and third levels were extraordinary. My father seemed to only be disappointed that he couldn't see the airports from the center of the city.


It is from this height that one can see the extreme nature of Paris: its size. This city is so large and so architecturally beautiful; I almost pay twice the cost of what I pay for everything in Germany with a dumb smile, thankful, first of all, that I can pay it, and, thankful, second of all, that, even at this price, Paris even exists. After seeing only tiny kernels of what Germany once was, I have to agree with Vichy and his Empire somehow. The whole deportation and extermination of French Jews somehow, understandably, clouds this issue. Conundrums.

The buildings are almost all of great beauty and some kind of uniform, Parisian (to the layman) style. They are all made of stone, astonishing my parents on an on-going basis, and most have been built at the fin de siècle of the 19th Century. The richesse of France from about 1870 to 1910 is unfathomable. For more on this, read a brilliantly interesting book "The Banquet Years" by Roger Shattuck.