Seeing Europe from the inside

Like Hemingway said, “And then there was the weather,” at the beginning of A Moveable Feast, the only book that I try to reread every year.

In this case, the weather is shit. Flights are cancelled in and out of Charles de Gaulle Airport. Paris is buried in snow, cut off from the suburbs and the rest of the world. It is a city fending for itself for the weekend.

But Paris is unapologetic about its weather. C’est la vie. Deal with it.

This is Paris, after all, a city that is still so perfectly beautiful even under a heavy blanket of snow that falls softly and settles with resignation on the ground.

The city that moved Nietzsche to say, “An artist has no home in Europe except Paris.” This is the Paris awash in a strange green color by Amelie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, in a golden hue by Woody Allen in Midnight in Paris.

Even in this miserable cold, Paris has me putting her back on the top of my list of favorite cities in the world (after a brief dalliance with Berlin — I mean, really, that you can run through Brandenburg Gate without being shot and then grab a cappuccino at Starbucks in what used to be East Berlin?). 

Like many tourists, I think of Paris through a hopeful Hemingway and his merry band of creative misfits, through pop culture, through corny lines in film. I think of Paris when I was broke and young, and the smell of freshly baked baguette gave me such hope.

Paris is a city for writers, for artists, for shoppers, for wandering souls, and to borrow a phrase, for innocents abroad who, according to our local guide Mireille, pronounce Avenue des Champs-Elysées as “Chumps Delysis.”

But no one in this group would dare make that mistake (well, at least not after they heard that). The group is composed of travel executives, marketing people, and journalists based in Asia and put together by Trafalgar, a company that has been doing guided holidays since 1947, on a trip from Paris to Lyon, Nice, Monaco and Milan. There are about 10 nationalities on the “coach,” including our British travel director Hamish Wallace, whose sense of humor is as dry as the Atacama Desert, and our Italian driver Pancrazio Fillari, a quiet former military man.

The Philippine group was organized by Pan Pacific Travel Corp., Southeast Asia’s top GSA for Trafalgar, with airline partners Dragon Air (out of Clark Airport to Hong Kong) and Cathay Pacific (to Paris).

 

A Trafalgar trip means you get to “see the world from the inside” and ours is a week-long through cities and the countryside. 

Hamish, a veteran travel director, sets the tone of the trip, reassuring everybody that despite the weather delays, we are going to have a blast!

As we make our way through the streets of Paris, he explains the 20 arrondisements (districts) of the city.

The arrondissement that most tourists gravitate to is the 8th, home to Champs-Elysées, arguably the most beautiful avenue in the world with its wide footpaths and horse-chestnut trees (bereft of leaves in winter but still a breathtaking sight).

The two-kilometer Champs-Elysées is a democratic avenue, if you will. Sure it has the iconic Louis Vuitton store but just cross the street and you have mid-priced Zara and farther down is H&M. It has expensive restaurants but also tourist favorites like Léon de Bruxelles for its moules-frites (mussels and fries), and Laduree for its macarons.

Champs-Elysées may as well be Paris’s busiest avenue.  Hamish describes it as “12 roads and a circle in the middle” and explains the 50/50 rule here. Since so many cars get rear-ended, the city simply imposed a rule that splits liability and fault 50/50.

Talk turns to art when our bus snakes its way through the 1st arrondissement. As we pass The Louvre, Mireille says, “The Italians are accusing the French of stealing the ‘Monalisa,’ but we say we didn’t steal it, we just lost the receipt. That’s why Monalisa is smiling — she knows where it is.” 

The Eiffel Tower, a stone’s throw away from our home for two nights, Novotel Hotel in the 7th arrondissement, is closed due to maintenance when we go in the morning, so we instead enjoy wandering through the snow-covered grounds.

 Mireille would say later that a lot of people used to commit suicide by jumping from the Eiffel Tower, but now the platform is fenced off.

“And tourists want to know, ‘Where can you commit suicide in Paris?’ They are very concerned about us,” she says dryly. “I tell them, ‘Just cross the street. If you’ve seen the traffic in Paris, you know what I mean.’”

 

It isn’t until we reach the South of France — after wine tasting in the cellars of Patriarche at Beaune and a night in Lyon — that the weather finally looks kindly upon us.

Thank you, Nice the Beautiful.

We hold no grudges against the past days’ brooding skies. We welcome the sun like children who’ve just been let out of the house on the first day of summer vacation.

We are supposed to go to Monaco. But if Monaco were a person, he sure wouldn’t be a morning one — he loves the nightlife (he likes to boogie on the disco floor, too), he doesn’t stir till at least midday and only after two double espressos in bed. So Hamish has decided to make good use of this morning and surprise us with a secret destination before this increasingly noisy bunch goes to wake Monaco up.

He wouldn’t tell us where we are going but a little over half an hour later, after driving through Nice’s Promenade des Anglais, its mish-mash of late-19th-century-onwards architecture, and its bright blue Mediterranean Sea, we arrive at a hidden treasure on the French Riviera.

Saint-Paul-de-Vence is a medieval town surrounded by walls and bastioned ramparts. It’s said that the light attracted painters from the 1920s onwards, including Marc Chagall who lived there.

Its narrow cobblestone streets are for meandering. You duck into a shop here or an art gallery there,  ponder its somewhat unconventional public art, and take in the sun by a fountain.

I can sit here all day and watch paint dry.

But Monaco is now awake. (Or as Hamish calls the principality jokingly, “A sunny place for shady people.”)

We do the same thing we did in Saint-Paul: We walk around. But it is a starkly and strangely different experience for me.

I can’t help but think of these two places as people. Monaco is given to buying expensive gifts and making grand gestures to win a woman over; Saint-Paul will write you a few lines of poetry and sneak it into your purse or your sandwich bag so you have a reason to smile in your crappy office cubicle.

Monaco will promise you tomorrow; Saint-Paul will make you think of memories, how “Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye, and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag.”

Monaco is best photographed when you’re just about to pay toll and enter the principality or about to leave it— from a distance, where you can see in one panoramic shot the grandness of money, the old stone structures and the glittering yachts on an unbelievably blue sea.

Saint-Paul is best captured in detail — something quirky over there: a sign, a woman in funky attire, an artwork, a table cloth, a marker painstakingly pounded on the ground as if to say, this fortification will never be conquered again.

You wonder and are quite sure in your mind, in fact, which of your friends would go for Monaco and which ones would go for Saint-Paul.

 

We do a countdown and then emerge from a tunnel. Benvenuti in Italia!  The whole coach is clapping. Hamish is mercilessly teasing Pancrazio, “Ladies and gentlemen, look, tears are flowing down his face!”

It was only a few hours ago that we were still in Nice, visiting the perfumery house of Fragonard, and our travel director gave all the ladies a rose each as this is one of Nice’s industries.

It was only two days ago that we were being welcomed at Chateau la Dorgonne for Trafalgar’s Be My Guest lunch, where guests are hosted by locals for an authentic experience. The lunch here was superb and paired with excellent wines from the chateau.

And it was only four days ago when we had our Highlight Dinner in Paris at the Moulin Rouge in the 9th arrondissement. For anyone visiting Paris for the first time, the Moulin Rouge show is a must — it’s lively, sexy, and sometimes funny (and it’s in French, by the way) — and we didn’t even have to line up for tickets. 

This district has always amused and baffled me. That the beautiful Opera House, center of the culturati and the well-heeled, is in the same neighborhood as the red light district and the supermarket-like sex shops. I’ve always wondered  if this was by design or happenstance.

And now we are in Italy on the way to Milan — with a not-so-brief stop at the Serravalle Designer Outlets. A mutiny would have ensued had they driven straight to Milan.

The brands here are mostly Italian like Prada, British like Burberry and Miss Sixty, and the usual American staples like Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger. It’s a mix of upscale and mid-priced.

After Nice, Milan seems a little grubby, like a child whose face needs a good scrubbing. Well, that is, until you get to the Duomo and around it, La Scala, malls and shopping streets.

Our local guide, Marika Magnone, tells the story of the rise and fall of Milan in a teatro that has us as actors. How Milan flourished and was alternately conquered by the Spanish, Austrians, and French through marriage, betrayal, and untimely death.

It sounds like a modern blended family.

Our second night in Milan is also the last night of the trip. A group picture with 43 people, taken on our first day in Paris, is miraculously captioned. Toasts and thank-yous are said over dinner.

And then it was time to leave.

Three hours after the last batch is taken to the airport, I am on a fast train to Rome. I look out the window, to a countryside blurred by a train going 240 kilometers per hour, and I think: I really did see all those places with a different understanding this time. 

And how it really was memorable.

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For more information about Trafalgar tours, call Pan Pacific Travel Corporation at 523-1990 or 536-1265. Follow Trafalgar Asia on Facebook and Twitter for the latest updates and promotions.

Cathay Pacific and Dragonair fly from Manila, Clark, and Cebu to seven cities in Europe (via Hong Kong), including other destinations in Canada, USA, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. For inquiries, call Cathay Pacific Manila at 757-0888, Cebu at (032) 231-3747, Dragonair at 757-0111, or log on to www.cathaypacific.ph.