It seems safe to assume that most people on this campus (both men and women) have at one point fantasized about going to Paris. Literature, film, music, and art have all created the romantic and indulgent image of Paris as a city of delicate pastries, mustached savants, and endless cultural possibilities. So, like any young American girl who has frequently fantasized about sharing a cigarette with Simone de Beauvoir, I was pretty pumped to spend last Thanksgiving in the City of Lights.
The trip offered a lot of the clichéd Parisian fare: smelly people, gorgeous architecture, rude waiters, and an effective public transit system. However, sometimes when you hype a place up so much in your mind, your expectations violently collide with reality in a burst of crack smoke. Let me explain.
I had been practicing how to pronounce “the Louvre” for weeks in preparation for seeing Mona Lisa’s sly little smirk of a face. So my parents and I spent a rather uneventful two hours waiting in line to enter that giant triangle of culture. My father whispered deprecations of the French under his breathe, my mother hummed an off-key rendition of “La Vie en Rose” and I eavesdropped on the conversation of an elderly British couple in front of me. The woman was smoking out of something I would later discover to be an e-cigarette. At the time, I was convinced that this nice old English woman was standing in line for the Louvre smoking some crack out of her crack pipe. When she took a puff and inadvertently blew some cigarette crack smoke in my face, I freaked out a bit. But here’s the thing about inhaling second-hand crack smoke — you can’t really turn to your parents and say, “Mom and Dad, I can’t go in to this artistic institution because I think I am on crack”. So I went into the Louvre, and proceeded to experience the whole thing under the perfectly reasonable assumption that I was under the influence of crack cocaine. It was an hour into the tour when my dad noticed that I was sweating profusely and touching my nose like I had never noticed that I had a nose before. He asked what was wrong and I couldn’t keep it from him any longer. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but a woman blew her crack smoke in my face and I think I’m overdosing”. He laughed. I didn’t.
We left the Louvre, went to a café near the hotel and had some coffee. I didn’t think it was a good idea for me to have more uppers, but my parents insisted, and we shared a crepe as well. I guess the moral of the story is sometimes you go to Paris expecting love, art, and culture, and all you really end up getting is a whole bunch of crack.
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