France

By David Salazar (s5)

A few years ago I went on a trip through Europe with my cousins, visiting England, France and Italy. While England and Italy were quite enjoyable, unfortunately I can’t say the same about France.

We got there on an underground train from England which would carry us underneath the English Channel. It got stuck halfway there, for 30 minutes, and we were left to contemplate darkness out the window. To this day, I’m still surprised the trip had gone wrong even before we had arrived at our destination.

Finally we got out of the train with our bags on our hands, stepping on French ground and breathing French air. I’ve got to admit, many people have said this and it sounds too stereotypical but it’s true: France smells bad. There’s no other way to describe it other than “similar to dusty, molding cheese”. It’s just some old stench that’s been stuck there as long as the French Revolution it would seem. In addition to the smell, the climate was also being harsh on us. It was VERY cold, even colder than England which seems unreal as we were actually moving closer to the Ecuator.

We got to our hotel, and we enter not expecting much; but we should’ve expected less. The lady at the front desk didn’t speak a word of English, just French and some more French (and none of us spoke a word of French besides baguette and omelette). Somehow we managed to get our message across and she finally gave us the key to our room. She pointed upwards at the third floor, and obviously it would seem like a good idea to ride the elevator up there: the damn thing was broken.

We carried our bags up the spiral staircase, and onto the eerie corridor whose architect had clearly been a six-year old with crayons. As you walked further along, you started to realize the walls closing into you: the halls got narrower as you traveled through them.

The room wasn’t that big, but then again the hotel had been lousy so far so how could it start getting any better? It was a single room with two beds, and one bathroom. We were one bed short so my cousins had to share a bed, but that wasn’t the biggest of our problems. What really got on my nerves was the fact that the bathroom didn’t have a shower. Apparently French people don’t feel like taking baths (which could probably explain that stinking reek).

“Everything’s going to be better tomorrow” we all thought. Yeah, we’re going to visit some important French landmarks and have some fun, but to start our day we had to get breakfast first. Some hotels offer breakfast to their guests, and often nothing very complicated: a bowl of cereal or some sausage and eggs if you were lucky. Where we stayed served a croissant. Nothing else: not even butter to put on it or a glass of orange juice: just a plain piece of flaky bread.

So we leave breakfast hungry and head out into the world. We’re going to start off by visiting the Eiffel Tower, that’s got to be good. Just one problem: it was packed with tourists (just like ourselves). As with all large places with lots of people, it was easy to get lost, and that’s exactly what I did. I looked for my cousins for hours while they looked for me, which ended up meaning we were going around in circles avoiding each other.

By then it was lunch-time, and France is famous for its food so there must be some nice restaurant where we can grab a quick bite. I had just forgotten a tiny detail: France was famous for its expensive food, and with each restaurant being even more costly than the last we realized we were going nowhere. We ended up eating the most expensive hamburgers at McDonald’s we’d ever eaten.

The remaining few days we visited Disneyland Paris (which is nowhere as fun as the one in Florida) and the Louvre Museum (with its smaller-than-I-imagined main attraction, the Mona Lisa). To sum up what I’m trying to say, France was a cold, stinky, expensive, boring country. Frankly, I wouldn’t recommend anyone go there. Even so, I’ve heard its nicer in the summer (although I highly doubt that).