Jetlag Rating: F-
They say that jet lag occurs when a person travels across at least two time zones, and the more time zones they cross, the worse their symptoms become. These can range anywhere from brutal daytime sleepiness, insomnia, whole-body fatigue or malaise, headache, indigestion, irritability, and lack of concentration. Exciting, right? These facts are especially true when flying east, and it takes about a day of recovery for each time zone crossed. Paris is 9 time zones east of Denver, so you can imagine how hyped on adrenaline we must have been to have stayed awake after arriving on our first morning in Paris.
I have been accused, from time to time, of living in the world of movies, television, and books, rather than the real one. So it makes sense that after landing at Charles de Gaulle Airport and taking the shuttle to our hotel, I convinced Tim to go with me to the neighborhood where my favorite films took place. Montmartre, a place I’ve dreamed of visiting since first watching Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge” when I was 13 years old, is a large hill in the 18th arrondissement with a large basilica at its summit. This is the hill Amélie Poulain sends Nino Quincampoix up in a scavenger hunt, slyly waiting at the bottom and fleeing once he spots her, leaving a note asking if he’d like to meet her. It is the area of town in which the famous Moulin Rouge is located. It’s featured in An American in Paris, Beauty and the Beast, and is for me, the first place I fell in love with in Paris.
We began at the summit, looking out over the city. The views were spectacular, rivaled only by the massive Basilica at its peak. We took the stairs down the hillside, passing fountains and steel railings bulging with locks left by lovers, friends picnicking on the hillside, arriving at the base adorned with an old carousel that no longer seemed to run. It was dreamlike to have known a place so intimately without ever having actually visited it before.
We could, at this point, both feel the jet lag setting in. If you’ve ever pulled an all-nighter, for whatever reason, it feels just like that. You’ve been awake far too long, you are sweaty and tired, and the sun is out when it feels like it shouldn’t be. Still, I dragged Tim to the Café du 2 Moulins, where Amélie worked as a server in the movie. I posed inside the café, identical in almost every way to what I’d watched so many times before. A server greeted us, and we decided to have a Nutella crêpe and two cafés, stealing a moment and imagining what it would be like to come there every day as an aspiring yet fruitless novelist or a hopeless romantic pining after the woman behind the cigarette counter. On our way back to the hotel, we took a quick picture of the Moulin Rouge, its iconic red windmill on the roof.
The Hotel Lutetia opened in December 1910 and has been a home away from home for guests like Pablo Picasso, Charles de Gaulle, Josephine Baker, Peggy Guggenheim, and James Joyce. It was remodeled in 2015 and reopened in July 2018, after a $234 million restoration. None of this happened to concern me on our first day because when we got back I face-planted onto the bed and immediately fell asleep. A few hours later, I had to summon titanic effort to get in the shower; we were going to watch Taekwondo in the Grand Palais.
The Grand Palais des Champs-Élysées is a historic exhibition site and museum built for the Universal Exposition of 1900. It underwent renovation in March of 2021 and was reopened just in time for the Olympics.
Neither of us knows much about Taekwondo, so at first the scoring seemed totally subjective. Coaches are allowed to challenge calls, and often times they are overturned, adding to the confusion. We watched Korea’s Park Taejoon win gold over Azerbaijan’s Gashim Magomedov 2-0. Less than a minute into the match, we watched Magomedov crumble to the ground with what looked like a fracture or a very bruised ankle. He kept fighting, limping as he tried to make a comeback before going down again. There was booing in the crowd as Park kept at him relentlessly, maybe a bit too relentlessly, and Magomedov fell a third time seeming to be in intense pain halfway through the second round.
When we got back to the hotel there was a dinner buffet open until midnight, so we had some sandwiches and drinks and went to bed. I fell asleep sometime around 2:00am, because you know, jet lag, and dreamed boundlessly about what day two might bring.
