Destination: Paris
The Curse of the Tenacious Tourist
by Michael Yessis | 09.17.03 | 1:29 AM ET
How do you shake the fellow traveler who clings to you and just won’t let you be? It’s not easy, writes San Francisco Chronicle columnist John Flinn. His ditching of “Gaston,” a fifty-something, air-guitar strumming Parisian postman who wouldn’t leave him and his wife alone has left him feeling awful. “It had to be done,” Flinn writes. “But instead of feeling relief, I felt horrible, like a real jerk.”
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Yahoo! BuzzTale of a Travel Martyr
by Michael Yessis | 09.09.03 | 1:17 AM ET
September’s GQ features a terrific story by Michael Paterniti about a man who “lives” at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. The story is unavailable online, but its first sentence is. In fact, Village Voice media critic Cynthia Cotts features it in her annual celebration of great magazine ledes. Here it is: “He is a man without a country, a family and a home. For more than a decade, Merhan Nasseri has been living in Terminal One at Charles de Gaulle Airport, waiting. For what, he doesn’t know anymore.”
When Travel Really Stinks
by Jim Benning | 07.22.03 | 9:59 PM ET
Anyone who has traveled in Southeast Asia has undoubtedly encountered the durian, perhaps the worst-smelling fruit on Earth. It smells so bad that it is often banned on trains. Writer Zona Sage noticed the stench shortly after the plane took off from Paris, but she couldn’t identify it. Flight attendants and passengers were baffled, scouring the plane for the source. Bad cheese, perhaps? Then they realized a Vietnamese nun had brought on board medicine made from the dreaded fruit. “The nun turned over the contraband that she had succeeded in carrying through innumerable security checks—a large plastic container of the King of Fruit, as its fans call it,” Sage writes in an entertaining story in Sunday’s South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “The flight attendant held it out ahead of her as she went forward with it.”
Frivolous Update: MTV Cast Working For Frommer’s Guides
by Jim Benning | 06.04.03 | 9:12 PM ET
According to today’s Los Angeles Times, cast members of MTV’s “The Real World” in Paris (see item below) were each given a job writing for Frommer’s travel guides. The things publishers will do for publicity. (Registration required.)
Americans in Paris, Like, MTV-Style
by Michael Yessis | 06.04.03 | 3:01 PM ET
The new season of The Real World debuted last night on MTV, featuring the crazy, young, always dramatic and frequently intoxicated American kids living abroad—in Paris. Tuesday’s show included a couple of cast members arriving at a Paris airport, hollering in English at passing Parisians, asking for directions to a train into the city. They were, of course, largely ignored. (They’ve obviously been taking travel lessons from those Americans on “The Amazing Race” who scream at people, regardless of the country in which they find themselves, only in English.) Tuesday night’s show also featured obscure references to the job that cast members would be assigned while living in Paris: writing a new series of travel guides. God knows what this is about. But if you ever see any of these guides in a bookstore in future years, run. Or at the very least, skip the train directions.
Administering the Beer Test in Europe
by Jim Benning | 04.22.03 | 3:32 PM ET
James Gilden wondered how Americans would be received in Europe these days, so he went to Paris, Berlin and London to find out. He interviewed Americans about their experiences, and he ordered beer at bars in each of the cities and dutifully studied the bartenders’ responses. What did he find? Despite the controversy over the war, he writes in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, the Americans he talked with were having a grand time, encountering no ill will. As for the beer, “My beers were delivered with no more or no less aplomb or foam than in any of my previous visits to London,” he writes.
Whew. We’d hate to think that politics could get in the way of a good beer.
Seeking the Joie de Vivre of “Amelie”
by Jim Benning | 03.13.02 | 9:36 PM ET
The Joy of Procuring Exotic Stuff from Really Far Away
by Jim Benning | 02.19.02 | 2:32 PM ET
After she returned home from her Bora-Bora vacation, Debbie Seaman contacted Tahiti to special-order the same soap stocked in her hotel room. Why? Not because it gets her any cleaner than the stuff she can buy at the local store, she writes in Sunday’s New York Times, but because its scent takes her right back to an azure lagoon. Seamen doesn’t confine such pleasures to soap, either: “When I eat bona fide Dijon mustard, for example, I like to pretend I’m back at the Paris bistro where, following the lead of the French, I first tried it on my frites instead of ketchup. I want my eyes to tear up, my nostrils to quiver, and my taste buds to revel in recognition.”
A Bench in London
by Michael Yessis | 11.12.01 | 9:27 PM ET
Paris was Marylin Bender’s town. Her husband’s was London. When he died nine years ago, Bender began visiting some of his favorite places. At London’s Berkeley Square, she noticed that plaques adorned the benches. Bender decided to try to secure one in her husband’s memory, resulting in an unexpected journey of errors, persistence, sweetness and heartbreak. “As a teenager, after my family had moved to Manhattan, I had a few park bench trysts with impoverished students in Central Park,” Bender writes in a New York Times essay. “None ended happily until, years later, a man I had met a few months before proposed that I accompany him on a business trip to Europe and Asia as his wife. I accepted instantly, we married, and thereafter we snuggled on benches in the gardens of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, in the Tuileries in Paris, along the Hofvijver in The Hague and regularly in Berkeley Square.”
Checking In: Americans Living Abroad
by Michael Yessis | 10.29.01 | 8:39 PM ET
The New York Times tracks down U.S. residents in Italy, France, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and other countries to find out how lives of ex-pats have changed in the six weeks since the terrorist attacks. Some anecdotes sound like benevolent urban legends: “Most Americans in Saudi Arabia live on enclosed compounds…At one recent dinner the conversation inevitably turned to security concerns. The couples traded stories, like the one about two Americans whose car broke down on a stretch of desert highway. They were immediately wary of two Saudi men who stopped to offer help. Sensing their unease, one Saudi turned to the Americans and said, ‘By the way, we hate Osama bin Laden.’ ” Other stories are a bit creepy and, possibly, paranoid: “Not long ago, [24-year-old English teacher Gabrielle Parnes] said, she was with two girlfriends [in Paris], giggling and talking loudly when a group of Arab-looking men walked by and purposely elbowed each of them. ‘I can’t be sure they knew we were American,’ she said. ‘But I think so. Before I might have thought they were just nasty guys. But now I can’t help thinking it was because we were American.’”
The White Zone is for the Immediate Loading and Unloading of Pilots and Contortionists Only
by Michael Yessis | 08.24.01 | 9:10 PM ET
Musician, artist and frequent flyer Peter Gabriel, and director Robert Lepage, have teamed to create Zulu Time, a “theater piece” set in an airport. According to Rolling Stone, the work features pilots, stewardesses, terrorists, drug traffickers, dancers, robots, acrobats and contortionists. “I think it’s surprising how little mythology there is about airports,” Gabriel says. “If you look at what there used to be about trains and stations. There’s so many road movies that it’s a genre in itself, which isn’t the case with air movies, aside from Airplane.” Zulu, which has already been performed in Zurich and Paris, debuts in the United States September 21 at New York City’s Roseland Ballroom.
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