Better late than never?
During our time in Paris we had a lot of things to get used to. The language, the culture, the food and of coarse getting around the city. As we became accustomed to the culture, getting used to certain social cues, and using the metro with confidence Paris felt less foreign every day. By the time it came to return home to the states there was just one thing about Paris that I still didn’t know how to process, their toilets. No, I never saw a bidet while staying here but still they have some pretty funky bathrooms here. Every time we would walk into a restroom we had no idea what we would encounter in there. Call me crazy but I documented as many toilettes as I could and here they are.
This first isn’t so scary but still, a button? Not to mention the tiny amount of space in there.

This next one is what started this all. It’s a Turkish style “toilet”. No those aren’t foot petals…. They are grippers for your feet. Caution when flushing, these actually sanitize EVERYTHING in there. We encountered one in Normandy as a stand alone public toilet, you pay 30 cent euro and the door unlocked letting 1 person in to use at a time. We figure we would “rig” the system so we wouldn’t have to pay each time for all of us to go, bad idea. The whole inside of the “room” became one big toilet bowl. It was quite a show, too bad we were too busy laughing to get a picture of it.

This next one threw me for a loop. After experiencing the Turkish style I had no idea what except from there on out. I’m looking for a knob or a button or a lever to push to flush the toilet. On this one I’m looking around and find no lever or knob. I do see this metal thing on the wall that looks like the trash chute in an airplane bathroom. It was the only thing in there that could have possibly been the lever to flush and lucky for me pressing it worked!

So this next one has two buttons. I know that France is very energy conservative so each button has meaning for how much water is used. The problem was that I had no clue which one was which! I just took a guess.

So given the last toilet I posted here are two more buttons. Thinking the same thing as the last one I would have to choose one button over the other. Nope, not with this one. That smaller button is just for show, it has no purpose with this toilet. If you press one the other goes down too, no rhyme or reason it to.

This toilet was in our dorm in the “creepy” bathroom that we avoided as much as we could. Our dorms were not as bad as this bathroom makes them look, after coming home I actually missed my dorm a lot more than I thought I would. We were in the American house and this was the most “American” toilet I found during the whole trip.

This one was at Claude Monet’s gardens (in the gift shop bien sûr!) just looking at the toilet you couldn’t see that there was a button there to push right on the back! I looked around for a while and was about to start touching everything trying to find the secret button when I saw the small indent on the edge of the button.

Ummm, I think there is something missing… Maybe a seat? No clue why all the toilets in this restaurant were like this but they were.

These three photos go together because this bathroom was crazy. This was the restaurant we ate at in Montmartre before heading to the Moulin Rouge. How fitting was it that this toilet was red on the night we go to the old “red light district”. It also has that weird airplane trash chute as the flusher. What else was weird about this bathroom was the men’s stall. It was just 2 swinging doors that lead to a urinal. The doors were like the swinging saloon doors you would see in old western movies. It was pretty strange but it gets stranger. To turn the water on in the sink you had to hit this lever with your knee and keep it there. Defiantly the second strangest bathroom we encountered (because the strangest was the Turkish style toilets).

This next one was my favorite because i was so proud of myself for figuring this one out, I actually had to tell the new people on my floor they had to “pull up to flush”!

This one was unfortunately the last french bathroom we used. At Charles de Gaulle airport we had to say au revoir to Paris, it was a sad good bye (to France, not their bathrooms)

During our layover in Dublin, Ireland this is what we found for toilets. Pretty similar to that toilet in Paris that was missing the seat, except this one wasn’t missing one! They just come that way I guess.

Back in America at Logan airport we have the typical public restroom toilet. Standard automatic American toilet.

Unfortunately I did not get to document every single toilet I encountered in France. This all started because I never knew how to flush the toilets, after almost a week of being in Paris I thought it was a little ridiculous that this was still happening. I never knew if I had to pull a chain hanging from the ceiling, step on a pedal, push a button, pull a knob, or potentially put my hand in a trash chute and for another thing I didn’t know if I should run for cover if the whole stall would turn into one big toilet bowl!

Overall I had a blast collecting photos for this blog and every time someone from the group would come back from the restroom they had to report back how it was in there. We all had a great time in Paris and it was definitely the trip of a lifetime!

So today is the day that we all knew was coming but were dreading, departure day. Staying up all night packing and remembering our first days together it feels weird leaving now, it feels like I’m leaving home. Im so happy that I went on this trip with this group of people, I couldn’t have imagined a better group to go to Paris with. We stayed up talking about how it feels like we only just arrived at the Cite but going back and actually talking about our favorite parts of the trip made us realize how much we have done and that it has been 3 weeks. Three weeks of packed schedules, museums, tours, cafes and sightseeing the days start to blend together, in a good way. The goodbyes have been hard, to our favorite food places that quickly became “our place” we called him “the crepe man” and he was really our best friend here.
Saying good bye to this city, on our walk back from a bakery we got breakfast at it started lightly raining and we looked a each and said the city was sad for us to go. Leaving my room this morning for the airport I looked around my room to make sure I had all my belongings and I got this feeling that I would be back here for certain. On the RER to the airport I was expecting to feel really sad about leaving but it ended up not being so bad of a ride because we just talked about how much fun we’ve had on this trip and are planning our reunion back in Lowell already. Once in the airport and our professors had to leave us it really started sinking in, this is the end… of this program. As we were boarding the plane we saw our last french ads and listened to our last french announcements, it hit me, we have been LIVING in France for the last 3 weeks. We came here as students visiting a country, tourists, and ended up feeling like we could belong there. The flight to Dublin was short and I kept feeling like we weren’t complete as Jia, Lilly our professors remained in Paris. It will be strange coming back to America and readjusting to our culture and not being with this amazing group every day. This was an amazing trip and I met amazing people during our time abroad. Even if I don’t see some of the friends I made we will always have Paris.

Today was the day that it really sank in, we are here in Paris!
We took an open bus tour around Paris to get ourselves acquainted with the city and our surroundings.

Rowdy came along for our tour.

Rowdy is in front of the French University, this is where the French dictionary is made and maintained. It has a council that meets to discuss the words in the dictionary and the membership is for life. The are known as “the immortals”.

This monument that Rowdy is posing in front of was made in Egypt but was stolen by Napoleon. It was brought to Paris by a team of elephants! if you look closely you can see the hieroglyphs craved into the sides.

Our next stop was l’arc de Triomphe. Unfortunately I could not (safely) snap a picture of Rowdy here because if you think driving in Massachusetts is crazy then you have not been to Paris. It is a giant rotary but with no lines on the pavement and lots and lots of cars, trucks, buses and mo-peds everywhere!

 

We didn’t get to go up La tour Effiel yet but Rowdy got to take his picture with it.

We had lunch in the latin quater where we discovered that the french love to talk about love and politics. On our way back to the Cite Universitaire we stopped at a cafe to have a cold drink, people watch and discuss the differences we have already noticed between American and French culture. On our return journey on our metro line the RER we were all crammed into the subway cars. In America it is acceptable to look around at people and too make eye contact with other people, in France that is rude. I never noticed before how much eye contact I usually make with strangers instead of saying hello, or bonjour in Paris.

We completed our day by watching the film, Paris, Je t’aime, which is 20 short films about the 20 arrondisments of Paris. They all had common themes of love, communication, compassion and loss. It was the perfect way to end our day of just a taste of Paris.