Shopping in Paris

Shopping in Paris

I awoke on Saturday morning from another restless night’s sleep in a pool of my own sweat. I’d been staying in a serviced apartment in the Trocadero area of Paris. It was a very clean place of lodgings but completely soulless and without a trace of character. There was not one single attribute that would be capable of endearing me to it in the slightest. When I think of Paris I imagine the great architecture and narrow side streets bursting with history, I imagine Montparnasse, Pigalle, Place de Clichy and Montmartre; a place of art, culture and inspiration, yet this hotel, set just off Avenue Raymond Poincare, had no such charms just an overwhelming blandness.

I jumped into the shower and allowed the hot water to cover my body and scrubbed with intensity as if trying to cleanse my body of the infectious abode. Once I felt sufficiently clean I dried, got dressed and ventured out into the Parisian streets. Outside it was cold so cold that my cheeks immediately flushed and began to sting, it had in fact been snowing the previous day and my clothing was completely inadequate for such harsh weather conditions. I decided that I would take myself shopping to see if I could find a coat more suited to the current climate, especially as I was due in St Polten, Austria, the following week where it was reported to be minus ten during the day. I took an overcrowded Metro from Trocadero to Franklin D. Roosevelt, where I changed line and continued on to Hotel de Ville. There I alighted in the hope of finding some shops where I might be able to find a suitable coat.

Saturday in central Paris was bustling with tourists and Parisian weekenders. I wandered around not really knowing where I was going, jostling amongst the crowd, pushed this way and that as everyone fought for their rightful place on the pavement. I entered a huge department store on the Rue De Rivioli, so big that it spread over two blocks. I eventually found the men’s section and meandered through four floors of expensive clothing. They had a variety of coats ranging from expensive to the completely absurd. I tried on a few that I liked but they didn’t seem to have anything suitable in my size and I wasn’t about to part with that sort of money for something that I was not completely satisfied with. I left the shop and headed into another, not too dissimilar, and had almost the same experience, pushed and shoved, pushed and shoved, jostled from one isle to the next. When I could take it no longer I headed to the street where the situation was not much better. I walked without purpose, desperate to escape the crowds but everywhere was packed out and overcrowded.

I found myself walking along the Rue Reaumur wandering in out of boutiques only to find the same range of inadequate and grossly overpriced garments. I was, by now, starting to feel very uncomfortable and claustrophobic and I remembered having the same nauseating experience when shopping on Oxford Street back home in London; it is the shopping equivalent of self harming, I suppose. Surrounded by vulture like consumers of all ages and screaming children wailing as their mothers hunt out the bargains and fight for position in the streets and isles of the shops. I walked down the block watching the traffic race by when suddenly, and completely by accident, found myself outside the Centre Georges Pompidou. It is one of the ugliest buildings I have ever seen in my entire life, like some kind of arty factory with grotesque funnels climbing out from the concrete.

I trawled the back streets looking for some more boutiques but only to find hip hop type clothing stores, full of trendy youths, which had no interest to me whatsoever. I frantically fought my way through yet more crowds, observing the nameless faces as I passed and suddenly feeling regretful of my youth slipped by. I saw happy young couples wearing expensive clothes and old derelict, half mad senior citizens with long drawn desperate looking faces, muttering to themselves in their native tongue; maybe I will be like that one day, growing old is inevitable after all. For three hours I had endured this madness already and it was rapidly becoming unbearable, and then it happened. I found myself in a small square close to Pont Neuf and noticed that I was surrounded by Starbucks, Subway and a MacDonald’s; this was my own personal hell or maybe I had finally made it to purgatory and this was where I would be forced to wait until my fate was decided. In any case one thing was for sure this was not the Paris of Sartre, Hemmingway, Miller or the Beat generation, this was a savage little pocket of hell that I could endure no longer. This savage beast of a city was starting to get to me, I was getting the fear.

I realised that I was close to the river Seine so made a beeline for the nearest bridge to cross over to the south bank. Halfway across the bridge I looked east along the river and noticed Notre Dame in the distance and began to feel some kind of weird satori; I decided to head to the Latin quarter to seek sanctuary in Shakespeare and company bookshop and when I get to Austria I would simply freeze and get frostbite, anything would be better than enduring this tumultuous shopping ordeal for a moment longer.

I hurried along Quai Des Grandes Augustins, where it was dramatically more quiet and cut quickly along Rue De Bucherie and headed into my favourite shop in the whole of Paris. Once I had entered the bookshop I found myself, once again, engulfed in a vortex of tourists and thought to myself that today was just not my day and that maybe I was being punished for some unknown crime, so alone yet surrounded by so many people. I tried to persevere to alter my mood with the thought of buying a nice novel to lift my spirits but could not find anything that I wanted.

I left the shop with a sense of disappointment and a deep sense of desperation; I needed to find some solace, some sanctuary from the madness. I decided to cut down one of the sordid, desperate little back streets as I always feel more at home in such places and the cafes are generally cheaper and less busy for the very same reasons. I found a dingy little place where I promptly ordered a cafe au lait, swallowed An Alprazolam tablet, more commonly known as Xanax, rolled a cigarette and proceeded to scribble this frantically into my note pad. As I wrote and sipped my coffee I felt the great feeling of unease slowly drifting away, helped along by the prescription pharmaceuticals sent by a friend from Asia. The next day I would travel to Meudon, the birth place of Rodin and I would surely miss this brutal beast of city.