I love it, but I hate it too. But seriously I love it. (But seriously, I hate it too a bit.)

Prepare to detest me in 3, 2, 1... Now; I'm on holidays in Paris and I'm miserable.

I wish I wasn't. Really, truly, honest. In fact, I rather blame my concerted efforts not to be miserable in Paris for my misery. You see after my day 1 trek I was feeling incredibly tired and a little bit fragile in a wanting to just curl up and watch sitcoms kind of way. I told myself that perhaps I would just take it easy on my 2nd day. I even considered going to a cinema to watch The Avengers movie.

But then I kicked myself and said, 'Katie, you're in Paris. You may never be again. Go do extraordinary Parisian stuff.' And then I thought to myself that The Louvre was going to be open late that night so I thought it would be a good day to buy my 2 day Museum Pass.

After purchasing my Museum Pass I looked over all of the places that it gave me entry to and I revised my plan for what I would use it for, adding 2 or 3 more places to my list with my Go Paris! attitude.

It seemed simple enough too, I just needed to walk pretty much the exact way I had the day before down to The Seine and cross over to Ile de la Cite and I would be at The Conciergerie. Well, my funny little broken internal compass from the day before was still spinning madly and I ended up wandering the 9th arrondissement. Finally, deciding that walking wasn't going to plan I decided to catch the Metro. I had to get off at Chatelet but I took the wrong exit and ended up walking about a mile underground and then exiting through the Les Halles exit. So now I was unknowingly heading north again. I recognised the Musee des Arts et Metiers and turned myself around again and finally crossed the Seine.

There was no queue at all to get in to The Conciergerie so I strolled in and wandered around the vaults. I saw the recreation of Marie Antoinette in prayer in the recreation of what might have been her chamber but was probably in fact a bathroom. Once I found myself snooping around the gift shop I knew it was time to go so I checked my map and headed out with the intentions of going to Sainte-Chapelle next.

This is how you get from Conciergerie to Sainte-Chapelle:

I walked for 20 minutes and found myself at the back of Notre Dame. I thought I could mess with my already bungled schedule a little and walked through the cathedral, stopping to light a candle for Joan of Arc (not really a huge fan of her attitude towards religious wars but feel I've got to get behind any other strong willed women who hear voices.)

After that I noticed that my museum pass also gave me entry to the Tours (towers) Notre Dame. I saw the line and it was about as long as the one in to the cathedral had been and I'd only waited 15 or so minutes for that so I thought I'd give it a whirl.

It was about a 45 minute wait throughout which I had to endure the sickening displays of affection of an American couple in front of me, obviously honeymooning.

Nevertheless, I waited and finally it was my turn to climb up 400 steps. Amazingly, I didn't die. I felt like I was going to around step 370, but I actually didn't die. Or throw a tantrum and sit down on a step and refuse to move.

The view from the top was breathtaking and I was glad I had made it but they hold the group up the top for quite a while, which is great if you are really into photography or you and your friends or loved ones want to take repeated photos of each other in front of the Eiffel Tower in the distance. Or if like the American honeymooners, you want to grind up against one another on the wall of a cathedral. But I didn't fit into any of those categories and I really needed to find les toilettes.  By the time they let us down I was busting. I thought that surely near such major sites there must be public toilets but I couldn't see any. I wandered Ile de la Cite hopefully but I couldn't find anything that might relieve me.

I walked back to the Right Bank and thought I'd make my way towards the Louvre or the Jardin des Tuileries where I thought there must be toilets. I'm not sure exactly how I did this but somehow I walked past the Louvre building and ended up in a construction site. Fortunately I found a map and it showed me where the nearest public toilet was. When it came into sight I nearly wept with joy but when I got to the automated door the light was on to indicate it was occupied.

I was on the verge of passing out from bladder pain when the door opened and a middle aged man stepped out. I moved towards the door but he stopped me and pointed to the lights on the door. Evidently there was a cleaning cycle that runs between each use so the door slid shut again and I had to wait a further 3 excruciating minutes with the sound of sloshing water assailing me.

Once relieved I realised I was famished, which was unsurprising as it was almost 2pm. By sheer luck I stumbled past Patisserie Gosselin and picked up une tomate et fromage quiche et un beignet chocolat. I took them with me towards what I now realised was the Louvre. I hoped there would be a lovely patch of grass for me to rest upon while I took my repast but I could only find a dusty forecourt. I perched on a baking hot step and ate my quiche and began to eat my beignet. It was delicious but in the glare of the sun I just found that I wasn't particularly hungry. Certain I would not be able to take food into a museum I tossed away half of it.

It occurred to me that Musee de L'Orangerie was nearby and I might be better to go there first since the Louvre was open late. I checked my map and sure enough it was very nearby. It was at the end of that luscious cool garden I had been sitting approximately 250 metres away from.

I wandered through Jardin des Tuileries and found Musee de L'Orangerie. The Monets are simply breathtaking and I took a while to sit and reflect upon them.

I then wandered back past the trampolines and the carousel to the Louvre and opened up my Louvre audioguide app. It was for The Masterpieces tour. The guide provides commentary and directions through the halls of the museum. I'm not sure what happened but I got lost just past the Venus de Milo. I tried going back but I found myself in unfamiliar halls so in the end I just followed the exit signs until I made my way back to the main foyer and started again. This time I followed the directions properly and worked out that I'd been turned around by the directions into the Salle des  Caryatides. They tell you to stand behind the statue of a man putting his sandal back on and I assumed I was in the wrong place because all you can see is a shiny, marble butt. Turns out they want you to look at the shiny, marble butt.

I ambled on and found myself in the room of the Mona Lisa. The crowds were immense and it was difficult to look past the crowd as most of the crowd members had their arms in the air with a phone or selfie stick extending from that arm. And their faces were distracting, because you see they weren't facing the Mona Lisa, no, they were facing away from it so they could get a selfie with it.

I politely pushed to the front and stood for a moment looking at the expression playing upon her face. But it wasn't very pleasant as the selfie takers were facing away from me so couldn't see when they were about to back in to me or elbow me in the back of the head. I made my way onwards to the Salle Rouges and I was marveling at the Coronation of Napoleon, a painting that has a surface area larger than my apartment when a museum attendant made an announcement about '... fermeture quinze.' I approached her and said 'Mais neuf le vendredi?' and she replied, 'Yes madam, but it is Thursday.'

So that was the end of my excursion to the Louvre.

As the museum attendant pointed out, it was Thursday so that meant that the Musee D'Orsay was open until 9pm. I successfully crossed The Seine this time and wound my way through the galleries of the museum. I knew that the Musee D'Orsay had an impressive collection of Impressionists work but I wasn't prepared when on the top floor I turned a corner and there was L'Absinthe by Edgar Degas.

I love this painting. The despondency on the women's face speaks to me of so many times in my life. I was standing in front of it for I don't know how long, tears streaming down my face when a woman bumped me out of the way so she could take a selfie in front of it. Suddenly I felt inconsolable. I wanted everyone to go away and let me cry in front of the paintings. But that's actually not what happens at museums.

Mum had told me about the cafe at the Musee D'Orsay behind the old clock face. I needed to sit down. I needed a glass of wine. The waitress showed me towards a table tucked away behind the kitchen. She seemed somewhat surprised when I agreeably sat down. I realised afterwards as I watched people enter that everybody asks to sit by the clock face. I didn't mind being away from it. It meant I was away from everybody else.

While I was sitting down I realised how sore and tired my feet were. It was unsurprising really but it meant that when it was time to get back up on my feet the weight of them was painful.

As I was leaving the museum I tried to think of what to do next. My feet were saying 'go back to the hostel' but my head said 'you won't get a chance to sleep for hours yet while all the wild young things are partying.'

I crossed back to the Right Bank and saw a sign pointing me towards Champs Elysees. It seemed like the right time of evening to go up the Arc de Triomphe so I set off in that general direction. My feet were killing me though. I looked at my map and saw that I was near Concorde metro station. I knew there was a metro station right underneath the Arc de Triomphe so I made that my plan. For once I marched in the right direction only to get to the entrance of Concorde metro to find that it is closed for renovations at present.

I looked up at the great Arc and it really didn't seem too far away so I started trudging down the Champs Elysees. Turns out it's a 35 minute walk. The Velo tuk tuk drivers who earlier couldn't leave me alone were now cruising by inattentively. I thought about hailing one of them but I feared that if they saw how desperate I was for the ride the prices would suddenly attract a high premium and I would be out 50 euro for a 5 minute ride.

I made it to the bottom of the Arc after crossing beneath it twice without seeing the entrance. I didn't think I could take any more stairs but I thought I'd come that far so I started the climb. Just when I thought I'd made it there was another staircase and when I got to the top of that there was a sign pointing to the lifts. I said a secular prayer and turned the corner only to find an out of order sign on the lifts. As I made that final ascent I played out a narrative in my mind that it had been painful and horrific and I'd almost given up but then I got to the top and it was all worth it. Let's just say that's what happened. Let's just say that I was so blown away that I forgot my pain. That there weren't 700 or so other tourists up there pushing and jostling. Let's say that I didn't start crying for the second time that day only from pain and exhaustion.

It was almost midnight by the time I got back to the hostel. I got into my pyjamas and fell in to bed. I was just drifting off when I heard an alarm tone coming from underneath my bed. I realised that in flight or when I'd been moving things around in my bag that I'd turned on the alarm on my travel alarm clock. I scrambled around in the dark trying to find it to turn it off. I felt like the worst dorm mate ever for having a ringing alarm go off in the middle of the night.

The next morning I had to take my bags from the hostel near Gare du Nord to the apartment I'm staying in near the Latin Quarter. With the walks to and from the metro stations and the change at Chatelet Les Halles actually involving a 9 minute walk I walked around on my exhausted feet with 35 kg of baggage for about 40 minutes. When I finally took my pack off my back at the apartment I felt stabs of pain in my lower back.

I didn't know what to do. I was in so much pain but I also had plans for all of those places left to visit on the Museum Pass. I stupidly put my pain down to tiredness and told myself I'd be alright as long as I just caught the metro everywhere and avoided too much walking. Easier said than done because in my pained, addled state my sense of direction worsened. After visiting the Rodin Museum I tried to walk back in the direction I had came and found myself instead 30 minutes later underneath the Eiffel Tower but still unable to locate myself on a map. And again it was nearly 3pm and I hadn't eaten lunch. In a street near the Eiffel Tower I found a very sweet looking bakery where they microwaved me a Croque Monsieur made with Wondersoft bread and served me a 5 euro stale plum tart. I was so disappointed. Mostly in myself for not being able to find a good bakery.

After failing to read the metro map correctly and catching the train the wrong way I eventually made it to the Picasso Museum and the Centre Pompadou. I'm really sorry Messrs Picasso, Kandinsky, Koons et al but I didn't really take great notice of your artwork. I was just in too much pain.

I'm trying to revise my plans for the rest of the time here so that it doesn't involve walking of any sort but that's actually impossible. Perhaps I should just blow my remaining cash on a pass for one of those get on get off open topped tourist buses but just ride around all day and never get off. I have a ticket to see Juliette Binoche in a production of Antigone at Theatre de la Ville for tonight (Saturday) which should be manageable but my plan for the day was to visit a flea market and also take a stroll through the 5th arrondissement. I honestly don't think I can do either of those things. I'm scared that if I even try to leave the apartment that I'll get lost and end up wandering for hours and my pain and disorientation will only worsen.

So you see I'm miserable in Paris and I don't know what to do.

Ups and Downs Katie Goes Away

Regular readers of my irregular blog post might have picked up that I like blog post titles that have layered meanings. This one I’m particularly proud of as it could refer to the fact that my blog has essentially ceased to be due to neglect. Or it could be that I don’t feel so much like Ups and Downs Katie these days. The past eight (?) nine (?) months have seen me on a fairly even keel. I’m still prone to maudlin outbursts and the occasional full scale tantrum. I cried while listening to a Taylor Swift song very recently too but I’m beginning to suspect that these things might actually be the guts of my personality and no amount of lithium or mild, medically supervised head trauma is going to get rid of them. Mores the pity.

And the third, and my most favourite, meaning is that I have literally gone away. I am typing this from Shanghai Pudong airport where I’m waiting for my flight to Paris.

I was in hospital last week for some maintenance TMS and a good once over to make sure I was right to travel and one of the nurses suggested I chronicle my journey, both as a means of recording my tales for posterity but also so that perhaps if my mood does start to veer off we might have some clues to what preceded it and how things could perhaps be remedied e.g. “April 27^th Paris, stayed out until 5am drinking and smoking heroin with some skinheads who also happened to be experts at negging and believed mental illness was just people showing off to get attention. Just realized I haven’t eaten in 3 days. Not feeling crash hot today.” Remedy for that would be bed rest and confiscation of funds once leafy green vegetables and restorative broths have been purchased.

I was going to just write in my actual travel journal but to be honest these days I’m really slack at finishing writing anything I start writing by hand. I’ll be in the middle of artful prose and then lose interest and the rest of the page is given over to doodles of cats (they’re the only thing I can draw), shopping lists and attempts to rewrite the lyrics to catchy pop songs so that they’re not so laden with internalized misogyny and I can sing my own version to myself (once I crack Bang Bang by Jessie J I will post the new lyrics for you to see.)

OK, so if I’m going to be candid about how I’m traveling I should start now. I’m feeling pretty crap.

I left Melbourne with what felt like the fixings of a cold brewing and while it hasn’t come to fruition my overall wellness has not been improved by 10 hours in a tin box. I am well past the stage of believing there is anything luxurious about air travel but this flight from Melbourne to Shanghai was bad. There was the usual crap food, crap seats ordeal but I was also unfortunately surrounded by people who in no way felt the need to be shy about their body functions. I had a woman actually coughing on me from one side so I scrunched myself to the other edge of my seat. I had a centre aisle seat but on the aisle across from me there was a man who snorted and hocked up god knows what, he must have gotten to vital organs by the end of the flight, at regular intervals and then spat it into either the airsick bag or after the meal had been served, a clear plastic cup. Mmm…

So I spent much of the flight reviling and shuddering and trying to block out the noise of coughing and spluttering on one side and hocking and spitting on the other. It made for a pretty tense flight and I had already been pretty tense when I boarded. On top of the usual pre-travel anxieties I got stuck literally but fortunately not figuratively in the middle of an argument in Customs. The lines were immense and a number of people were muttering about whether they’d miss their flight. Then a group of young people from the back of the line pushed their way forward, unclipping the retractable barriers as they snaked their way to the front. They went past me but I assumed that one of the customs officials must have told them to do this but when they cut in front of a couple who had been craning their necks and anxiously checking the time the guy stopped them and asked what they were doing. They said they thought they were going to miss their flight and he replied, quite rightly, that many people in line were in the same situation. They kept moving forward and the guy called out to the people in front, ‘Oy, stop them, they’re queue jumpers!’ Now what I haven’t mentioned is that this group of young people were almost certainly all Muslim, four of the young women were wearing headscarves. As soon as people heard ‘queue jumping’ and saw Muslims it was an open invitation it seemed for the more racist amongst the horde to start calling out such helpful things as ‘Go back to where you came from’ and ‘You should all be deported’ and the ever so helpful in a secure airport area, ‘Terrorists!’

The staff responded pretty quickly to restore order but there was a moment in there of absolute dread that my holiday was going to be over before it started due to a race riot or suspected terror plot based on the inappropriate outburst of a yobbo.

So, I’m in Paris now. By the time I was due to board my flight in Shanghai I was so exhausted that things weren’t making sense. I asked a flight attendant a question and then I thought she was laughing at me. She wasn’t. She was a cardboard cut-out. I left my passport, medications and laptop in the box at the security clearance and when I finally made it on to the flight I forgot that you’re not supposed to clap when the flight attendants finish their safety demonstration. Even if they are really good. Just don’t do it, they treat you really weird all flight.

But all that is done. I scored a new PB of 8.5 hours of sleep on an airplane and arrived in Paris, well still fairly rooted but perhaps not the danger to myself that I was at Pudong Airport.

I read that the best things to do to kick your body into a new time zone are to move your body heaps during the day and get as much morning sun as possible. So I walked the streets of Paris from 8am – 6pm. I walked from Gare du Nord to Marche Saint-Quentin for some pastries and coffee and to ogle the cheese, past Gare de l’Est, past the Metiers Art Museum and le Centre Pompidou to the Viaduc des Arts and the Promenade Plantée and Marche Place d’Aligre and back along the Promenade Plantée past Monument a la Republique (I forgot to put this on the map, but I also then got very lost looking for the Picasso Museum which was only going to be open for 1 hour by the time I found it so I didn’t go in) and then along Canal Saint Martin to this hipster haven bar/second hand trader/ DJ venue/ museum of African culture called Le Comptoir General. Then I was going to walk all the way back to the hostel but I couldn’t work out which way to go so I caught the Metro and it turned out I was only two stops away.

Usually I think I have a fairly good sense of direction. Today, I was useless. I would look at a map and get a simple route clear in my head like turn left then take the third right but after fifteen minutes I would look at the map and I’d realize I’d walked in entirely the wrong direction. Even with the map in front of me and a sign posted intersection in front of me I’d take the wrong turns. So I hadn’t really intended to walk to any of those places but that’s where today’s wandering led. And no wonder my feet are sore if I walked, I’d say at least 13 kilometers!

I had un délicieux croissant au beurre et une centaine de grammes de fromage. And then I kept seeing windows with more pastries and chocolates and meringues and other things that I don’t even know the name of but they looked sweet and potentially creamy. And I walked past pizza places and pommes frites and I didn’t feel like them either. So in the end for lunch I had some fresh baby radishes, cheese, baguette and ham and some strawberries. I had a snack of yoghurt in the afternoon. And for dinner I ate the rest of my radishes with a green salad and tuna.

Doctors tell me occasionally (only occasionally – it would probably be more often if they thought I’d listen) that I should eat less fried chicken and more vegetables and get more exercise. I think I’ve found the answer Doc! Just write me up a prescription for living in Paris.

Having said that tomorrow is a new day. And while I fully intend for there to be lots of walking and maybe even a bike ride there will probably also be some new pastry I will immediately need to eat four more of. And cheese. There will always be cheese in my life.

Now I’m nestled into my dorm room bunk bed. My roommates seem nice. I’m adding the words ‘like’ and ‘totally’ into more sentences in the hopes that they won’t realize I’m a million years older than them. I may still earn their disdain with a remarkable effort of snoring throughout the night.

I’ll try to post again soon and often after that, although knowing me that could mean it will go either way. And I will add some photos once I can find the cord that connects my camera to my laptop (I have taken some Mum!)

And new candid statement on how I'm feeling: tired but good.

Jetlagged but happy