Since sleep has been eluding me for the past 2 hours, I finally gave up and started poking around the house. As I start this blog, it’s 6 AM CST, 1 PM Paris time, and I’ve been in bed for 7 hours, sleeping fitfully for the first 5, and watching the paint peel for the last 2. I thought I would tie up some loose ends from the trip, now that we are back in the States. It’s not exactly a cliff-hanger, but someone somewhere might care about what happened to us during our last day in Paris. Sort of a “Last Tangle in Paris.”
When I left off last time, I was loitering over Thursday’s blog and Beth was packing the suitcases. We finished both, and hailed a taxi to take us and our box of statues to DHL to send it back to the States. Arriving at DHL, the same pleasant but monolingual girls were there, and presented us with two forms to fill out.
90 minutes later, we were still sweating over the forms.
The first, a DHL manifest to attach to the box in the little plastic envelope, was in French, but a particularly diabolical bureaucratic French. Beth and I can both read well in French (the vast number of French cognates don’t sound anything like the English words when spoken, but look very similar on paper), but this was to our written comprehension what Waterloo was to Napoleon. The second form, for the U.S. Customs, appeared to be geared for American expatriates stationed for prolonged periods oversees, say in the armed forces or the diplomatic corps.
We struggled to the bitter end with the forms, signed them, and gave them to the girls along with the box of statues. Then came the final coup de grace (or was it a coup d’etat, or a mal a la tete?): we asked the girls for a de-tax form for the statues, and received a perfect French blank stare.
The day before, we had returned to the Artisanats shop where we bought the statues, asking the owner for a de-tax form for the statues. She agreed, but when we told her that we would be taking 6 statues in our carry-on baggage, and shipping 9 of them by DHL, she said that she could only do the de-tax form for the 6, and that DHL would do the de-tax form for the 9 statues to be shipped. I questioned why they would give us a de-tax form when we didn’t actually buy anything at DHL, and hadn’t paid any taxes there. She shrugged, palms up, pouted a little at the lower lip, and said, “c’est normal.”
Back to the DHL girls: when I described to them what the Artisanats lady told me, they shrugged, palms up, pouting a little at the lower lip, and said, “ce n’est pas possible.”
Finally aware of the Sisyphean nature of my task, bureaucratically speaking, I gave up, sealed up the box, and left it to its fate in the bowels of DHL. There was no way I was leaving the DHL office still in possession of my 55 lb. box. We then walked back to the Latin Quarter, looking for supper for our last evening in Paris, and realized that the Artisanats shop was still open!
Just a short digression here: classically speaking, in Greek theater and later with Shakespeare, the tragedy form reached its zenith. In these plays, a basically good protagonist (like Hamlet or Oedipus) with a fatal flaw, is forced by fate to begin down a path that will end in tragedy (usually with the death of the protagonist, his girlfriend, her father and brother, the bad king, the good king, the jester, and everybody else except maybe the milkmaid). Many times through the scenes of the play, he receives warnings of various sorts to divert from his current path or face the tragedy. Because of his fatal flaw (jealousy, revenge, lust, or just plain stupidity), he is unable to change his course, and comes to a bad end.
Having averted disaster at DHL, my fatal flaw of de-tax revenge drove me into the shop to demand a de-tax form for the shipped statues. Two pleasant but monolingual dowagers were at the shop, and together we struggled to come to an understanding of the task that lay ahead. They finally succeeded in phoning the owner, who was shopping at the local market for her evening meal, and after haggling quite a bit over what the issue was, she reluctantly agreed to return to the shop and fill out the form.
Emerging triumphant with form in hand, I realized that the real test, and perhaps the tragic finish, would occur on Friday when we presented de-tax forms for 15 statues, while only actually having 6 of them in our possession. Like Hamlet, I shrugged it off. We greeted our friend the optician one last time, and he suggested Le Procope for dinner. It’s just across Boulevard St. Germain, on rue de l’Ancienne Comedie, and is a lovely old time café.
Started in 1686 by an Italian named Procopio, the café has served everyone from Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Caron de Beaumarchais to Marat and Danton, instigators of the French Revolution. Each table has one or two brass plaques with the names of famous Frenchmen who ate there. We had a lovely meal, mine was French classique: escargots, Trout Meuniere, and for dessert, Baba au Rhum (a rum-laced sponge cake with raisins, introduced to France in the 1800s by a Polish prince in exile in Nancy who named it after Ali-Baba, his favorite character from “Tales of the Arabian Nights”).
After a short final stroll around the Latin Quarter, we made for the hotel and bed, planning to meet David Schlough for a final time for breakfast Friday before we left for the airport. We ended up just meeting him at our hotel for an hour Friday morning, as we were running a little behind schedule. We checked out of the hotel, hailed a taxi, and headed for the airport and our rendez-vous with the douane agents.
Aeroport Charles de Gaulle--Roissy is, like other modern French grands projets (like Centre Georges Pompidou or the Biblioteque Nationale), enormous without being impressive, technologically advanced without being user-friendly, and bizarre without being charming. Your trip absolutely depends upon the taxi arriving at the correct terminal (there are 3), and even then, one of several common problems could result in a missed flight.
We got there almost 3 hours before our flight, dragged our luggage around the entire central walkway of terminal one’s check-in desks, and finally found the de-tax center, operated by the customs agents. After standing in line for 10 minutes or so, watching several unhappy passengers turned away without the magical stamp on their de-tax form because they didn’t have the merchandise with them (having presumably already checked in and placed the merchandise in their check-through luggage), I began to worry that my tragic end indeed awaited me, with incarceration and hard labor endlessly hauling luggage around CDG airport as my punishment.
I also pondered a lovely French version of a Catch-22: an item on the customs window clearly stated that, in order to get the magical stamp one needed: the form, the merchandise (“no merchandise = no stamp”), your passport, AND your airline ticket. Wait, if I need my ticket, then we have to check in first; no, then they will take our check-through luggage with all the purchased items in them, so if no merchandise, then no stamp. But we need a ticket to get the stamp…
Fortunately, one lady produced a copy of her itinerary and received the prized stamp, so I knew that hurdle had been cleared. We tremulously approached the throne and I began to address the douane in my very best French, even though he had just gotten done sending another merchandise-free lady away in perfectly good English. I shoved my passport and itinerary at him, then each of 5 different de-tax forms, showing him pictures of the statues and pointing at the various bags, backpacks, and valises we had hauled up to the counter. Evidently, between my passable French (he even complimented my on how good my French was “for an American”), the pictures of the statues, and the apparently daunting task of hauling each heavy valise up onto the counter to actually examine the contents, he blithely stamped all 5 papers without any attempts to see the merchandise.
We ran out of there as fast as we could before he changed his mind and decided to have a look at all 15 statues after all. Next stop was to carry all our gear down a flight of steps to the mysterious “hall 5” where we were to check in for the flight. Like Northwest in Minneapolis airport, they give Air France all the good check in areas, and relegate Iceland Air to the forgotten corners. We got in line with what seemed like 100 French people who all knew each other and were talking and laughing. It must have been a tour group heading for Reykjavik for holidays.
We got on the plane, stowed our treasures safely where no one could damage them, and sat in our seats in the back. All 100 of the chatty French folk sat down around us. Well, they only sat down until the plane took off and the captain turned off the seatbelt sign. Boy, would Southwest Airlines be proud of the way these people were “free to move about the cabin.” I know, it’s “country”, but I’m sure they are currently freely moving about the country of Iceland, so it works. In the cabin, they moved about so freely, all congregating near the back of the plane (around us), that I feared that the plane would be forced into a nose-up stall, and we would all die singing Frere Jacques.
It was interesting to note the difference in this gregarious, loud, casually dressed group and the rather private, buttoned up, more reserved Parisians we had just left. Either these people were not from Paris, or there is a dis-inhibition process that goes on when Parisians leave Paris behind on vacation. This group was every bit as funny and obnoxious as any American or Australian groups we’ve seen overseas, except that everything always sounds more exotic and interesting in French.
After that, everything was basically a blur, and all at once there we were, standing outside our house, opening the door on the happy but surprised canine greeting committee, and pushing heavy suitcases inside. As usual, a bittersweet time: sad for leaving the magic of Paris, relieved to finally get to the end of our journey, and happy to get a face-washing from our canine companions. Finally, dogs we can pet without having to ask somebody’s permission in French…
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