Happy Bastille Day !!!
Fifty-five (55) years ago today on July 14, 1970, my parents and I, as a nine-year-old, had lunch in the restaurant in the middle of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France. We were on a 28-day trip around the world.
I remember this because we were only in Paris for two or three days, and we visited the Eiffel Tower during only one of those days. The first observation deck, where the restaurant was located, was open, but the next observation deck and the top observation area were both closed because of the national holiday of independence.
I also remember my cute French babysitter at the hotel. I think she was 14 years old. (Remember, I was nine years old.)
We started our trip in New York City near our home on Long Island, New York, and traveled to San Francisco, Honolulu, Tokyo, Osaka (Expo 70), Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Bangkok, (refueled in Calcutta and then in Karachi), Rome, Sturno (in Italy to visit my great-grandparents and cousins), Paris, London, and then back home.
Since then, I have returned to France twice.
During the summer of 1978, when I was 17 years old, I visited Paris on a one-week, cultural trip with my French teacher and three girls, all of us with West Islip High School on Long Island, New York. I got lost in the Galeries Lafayette shopping mall on the last day and ultimately missed my flight home.
During the summer of 1984, when I was 23 years old, I studied the French language (six university credits of conversation and composition in three weeks) with many other students from Villanova University along with a group of senior citizens from the United States. We all lived and took classes in a high-rise school/dormitory with students from China and northern Africa in Massy, France. We only took the half-hour bus ride to Paris on Saturdays and Sundays, and that was mainly to attend supervised gatherings at museums.
(I took a total of 18 university credits of the French language for a minor to go with my major, bachelor of arts in communications. I spend two and a half years in the pre-med program before changing my major.)
One evening, we attended the ballet, so I had the rare experience of seeing famous ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev getting booed for performing a ballet vignette wearing clothes from the 1950s. While I didn't enjoy the dancing that much, I loved the music performed by the symphony orchestra.
One Saturday night, a bunch of us Villanova students stayed late in Paris to have fun in a discotheque. We listened to loud music, danced, engaged in a little drinking, and lost track of time. We missed the last subway train to our bus at 2 a.m., not that the bus was running either. Subway service restarted at 5 a.m., so we all fell asleep on the red-velvet, roundish couches throughout the disco. I remember being awoken by a bartender with a shake of my left shoulder at 5 a.m., telling me (and everyone else) to go home.
