France

Let’s make this into a Benjamin Button story and begin from the end. About 2-3 years ago me and my friend Andreas went to Marseilles mostly to get as close to Monaco as possible, but I will tell you about Monaco at another time.

I had heard so many good things about the French Riviera and I thought Marseilles was a part of it, but I would quickly find out it wasn’t. We arrived late at night at the Saint Charles train station with the bus from the airport and on the way to the hotel we saw a worn-down city with dog shit everywhere and lots of homeless people and this wasn’t the view I had expected since I had image searched the Riviera. We went straight to bed in the hotel in separate rooms which looked more like prison cells and it always feels so weird to be in a new place without being able to get a feel of where you are before you go to bed. I couldn’t sleep that well and the next day we went straight to Monaco so I was still confused about Marseilles, but I knew one thing, I wasn’t looking forward to going back.

When we arrived back in Marseilles we stayed at the same shitty hotel but at least this time my room had a view of the city so it didn’t feel as claustrophobic. We went out in the city for real for the first time and went down to the sea where there was a monument of a gate for the Orient. I remember at that moment I thought it was a gate for Africa since it was facing the sea and I thought I would be able to see Algeria in the horizon. I think I need some lessons in geography and some stronger glasses to be able to see 450 miles away. But at that moment I felt closer to Africa than ever before, which wasn’t true at all.

Andreas went swimming while I was sitting at the beach watching the boats sailing. I only saw two naked breasts hanging around on an elderly woman walking by so I felt that it’s a myth that women go topless on the beaches of France, at least nowadays. Andreas was topless though, so he went all in to feel like a French woman from the 60’s.

We walked and walked and realized that Marseilles has got little to offer. We went by the Stade Vélodrome where the football team plays and this was at the time when the Swedish football star Zlatan Ibrahimovic was playing for Paris so it was fun to see the stadium where he sometime played. Then we went down the harbor to see if we could find a park to sit in to have some beers but the only park we could find was on a wall, so inconvenient.

Instead we sat at a depressing place and drank some beers and it just felt miserable. We decided we would give a bar a chance in the harbor instead and that atmosphere was perfect. Except for the French people that is. It was impossible to get in contact with anyone, and it didn’t help that Andreas invited himself to a conversation by saying “Are you from Mars…” and then after a long break ended it with “…eilles?”. As in Marseilles. By then she already hated him and said in perfect English that she didn’t know how to speak English so she wouldn’t have to be bothered by us.

We went to the other side of the harbor to see the football match on a TV screen that Paris Saint Germain would play this night. The only bar that had a screening was a non-alcoholic bar where you could only smoke hookah, I know it sounds wrong. We convinced a near-by bar to serve us beer so that we could sit outside at an abandoned bar and look at the match in the hookah bar with a blurry see through screen between us and the TV screen.

It was so depressing and funny at the same time and of course the easy win for Paris ended in a draw since the goalkeeper in Paris did a big mistake at the end. It was time to go back to the hotel and when we were walking in the harbor a random guy yelled at us to try and make us stop, and then he ran after us. We had no clue why and he said something about taking a photo of us, and I couldn’t understand why. Then he did something with his phone and he showed me a pornographic picture of a naked girl and he laughed hysterically, and to this day I still don’t know why. I just don’t get French people. 

While walking back to the hotel we saw that a place called Dark Side Pub had opened, we had been curious about the bar earlier on when it was closed and now two goth women who worked there tried to get us in. The pub lived up to its name since it was pitch black inside and we were the only guests. It was so depressing, the theme of the trip.

The next day we were going home early in the morning and on the way to the bus, which would take us to the airport, people were still out partying in the streets and people yelled at us to get our attention. It felt like a hostile environment and so I ignored it all and just walked as fast as I could to get to the bus in safety. On the bus to the airport the sky opened with thunder and lightning and heavy rain and I thought I would get stuck in this hellhole. After more than an hour of delay the flight was ready even though it was still bad weather, but I would rather die in a flight than stay in Marseilles one more day. I saw the lightning strike under us when we were over the clouds and that was a special feeling.

Many years before that I went to Paris for the second time with my bandmates in Ninjaspark, we played music made on Gameboys and synthesizers. We got a gig at Pixel Party and it was our biggest achievement ever as a band, we convinced the arranger to let us stay in Paris a couple of days before the gig too and we mostly got wasted during that time. Let’s call my bandmates L and R to not give them away too much. R took us to the Louvre museum to show us Mona Lisa but me and L had no interest and R even had to pay for us to go in. It was so boring and our idea of fun was more like running around the hotel naked in the corridors, which we did. We played hide and seek without clothes and when we went into the elevator after a while to go back to the room we noticed that the elevator didn’t stop at our floor. It went straight down to the reception, the doors opened and there we stood naked covering up our genitals with only our hands when a shocked bellboy was on the other side of the doors. “Sorry” we said and quickly hit the button again to go up to our floor to run for cover in our room and hope we would not get a visit from the manager.

I had no good memories of Paris the first time I went there and this was no different, I just can’t understand how it can be perceived as romantic when it’s just dirty and noisy and the people are arrogant. I guess I have a different view of what’s romantic. We met one nice guy though, we sat drunk on the metro and yelled in Swedish how hungry we were, and after a while a random French guy asked “Do you want weed? Is that what you are yelling about?”, we said “Yes, sure, why not?” and he took us to his place. I thought it was kind of weird that he would take three random Swedish drunk guys home so when I was at his toilet my mind was racing and I thought he must be a serial killer or something. But then I saw that his toilet paper was pink, which is my favorite color, and so I thought that if I die after I’ve been using pink toilet paper, then I can die happily.

He was no serial killer, just something as odd as a friendly guy in Paris, and the next day me and my bandmembers went out to the suburbs of Paris to play at the festival. We saw our name on billboards and it felt surreal that our little band was being promoted on the streets of Paris. The suburbs were much nicer than the city center, it felt more like the real France and I was really looking forward to the gig. We soon discovered we would play for like 30 persons in a venue that was located next to the library and it was quite a disappointment. The other bands who were French gave me some local alcohol that tasted like cough medicine and I really liked it. When I was a kid I always wanted to get sick so I would get to have some cough medicine because it tasted so good in a weird way.

And now to the reason why I don’t tell my bandmembers real names, the day after the gig we were going home early and R felt like he really needed to go the toilet. There was no time for it since we had to catch a train to go to the airport. He seemed more and more desperate and I tried to calm him down by telling him that they must have a toilet on the train since it takes an hour. Well there was no toilet on the train and since it was impossible to wait an hour he took a dump right on the floor of the train while passengers were entering the train at the next stop. I guess that wasn’t what they thought they would see going to the airport this morning. And I guess he was thankful that free newspaper is common nowadays so he had something to wipe with. This must be one of his worst moments ever.

Many years earlier in 2004 I went to Paris for the first time with my friends P and O, once again I got to hide their real names, Paris seem to have that impact. We went up in the Eiffel Tower, visited Jim Morrison’s grave, got yelled at by an angry French drunk and other tourist stuff like that. And now we get to the reason why I won’t tell their names. We heard about a place called Pigalle and since it almost sounded like Piggelin (a Swedish ice cream) we thought we should go there. We jumped in a cab in the evening and when we told him where we wanted to go he was warning us to go there. He said that it’s the worst neighborhood in Paris and that clubs in the area, which often turned out to be strip clubs, sometimes won’t let tourist out of there without taking all their money or one of their fingers. This just made it more interesting to us and we had to go there.

It turned out to be the weirdest night of my life when O brought a 50 year old prostitute with missing teeth back to our hotel, and it was so awful when she took drugs in our hotel bathroom to cope with her job. I should have felt more sorry for her than my friend but mostly I just couldn't wrap my head around what my friend did to himself by doing this, and it was like going by a car accident, you didn't want to see it happen but at the same time how can you ignore it when it's happening in the same room? It will probably be the craziest thing I've ever witnessed and I guess he will regret this night for the rest of his life. And maybe it's for the best that his grandma doesn't know where the money went that she had saved for him to get a driver's license.

___________________________________________________________________________

UPDATE*

I promised myself to never go back to France until I realized they had stolen a couple of islands in the Caribbean. My friend Christofer and I met up in Paris to fly over the endless Atlantic Ocean for 9 hours until we reached the Caribbean Sea and finally saw the small island of Martinique.

It was the first time I realized how small percentage of the world that is actual land, and the Atlantic Ocean was totally empty of boats and human life. I thought about my own existence in the terms of how small humans are compared to the force of nature. I have never been afraid of flying since I figure it will be a quick death if anything goes wrong, but now when we went closer and closer to the water to go for the landing I panicked for a second because I had seen how vast the ocean was.

To no surprise we survived the landing and the French island of Martinique greeted us in the evening. It was dark outside when we arrived downtown and I couldn't realise that we were in the Caribbean since everyone spoke French, paid in Euro and the country was even a part of the EU because of its attachment to France.

We arrived in the capital of Fort-De-France but Saint-Pierre used to be the capital on the island until it was destroyed in 1902 by a volcano erupting. All of the 30 000 people living in the city were killed in 2 minutes with the exception of 3 people. One of these were Ludger Sylbaris who was in the fire proof prison without windows in his cell for a minor charge, pretty funny story.

We were approached by homeless people, and you could tell some people have a rough time living here. They were sleeping outside of public toilets and being mentally ill and talking and screaming to people only they could see. This wasn't what I had expected at all after watching endless beaches while googling the Caribbean. After a rough night with almost no sleep since they partied outside of our hotel window in the big La Savane Park and playing carnival style music, we woke up at 5 AM. Not by ourselves but by a carnival band marching through the streets with drums, probably drunk from the night before, going home. I appreciated it even though they had been waking me up, and when I stood in the window I could see the French flag on the Fort Saint Louis in the background and I got confused about where I was once again.

We hit the streets and saw the eye-catching Schoelcher Library which looks like an old rugged canvas with bright colours that has been faded by the sun.

The statue of Empress Josephine has been beheaded and red colour has been put on her body to symbolize blood, a sign of the old times when the natives became slaves under the French regime. The statue in itself is nothing, but the beheading of her from an anonymous native is what makes it great art and I respect the action. Someone had put a yellow vest on her too because of the yellow vests movement in France, I didn't quite get why though.

The small city center of Fort-De-France and the small beach in the harbour didn't meet up with my expectations of the Caribbean.

A man was walking around in a Paris SG football shirt and kicking and heading a ball as a show along the boardwalk, but he didn't seem to do it for anything else than his own enjoyment. Two guys came to a quick stop with their moped at the place where Christofer had a panini, one of them went into the shop with a clown mask on his face. I thought it was a robbery but no one seemed to care and the clown just bought a panini and went on with his business. The relaxed attituted of the Caribbean was a fact.

We boarded a cruise ship later that evening and our first stop was another French island in the Caribbean called Guadeloupe. It has even been Swedish in the year 1813, but it was quickly given away to France the next year, and we understood why when we arrived. Before the trip I had been thinking about using my role as a European Union citizen to be free to settle and work indefinitely in one of the European islands in the Caribbean, but after Martinique and Guadeloupe I was disappointed.

Football is popular on the island and I can see why because there's nothing much else to do. Thierry Henry, Anthony Martial, Lilian Thuram, Alexandre Lacazette and many more football stars are of Guadeloupean descent in one way or the other.

We did the only thing there was to do in the city of Point-A-Pitré, and that was to visit the Memorial ACTe, which looks like a birds nest, even more beautiful in the evening when it lights up.

It hosts an exhibition of slavery & the slave trade but I thought it was a bit scattered and that it didn't tell me anything new. When we left the exhibition and got to talk with one of the women who worked there it was far more interesting. She told us how the slaves became nameless to lose their sense of who they truly were, and then they got new names by the slave owners. She showed us how they now tried to build digital family trees for all the former slaves in Guadeloupe, and then we went up to the Memorial Hill that has a beautiful walkway before you reach the top. 

We went back to Martinique and Guadeloupe with the cruise ship one more time on the route, and Martinique grew a bit on me while Guadeloupe was still as boring the second time around.

* Best things about France – probably the French Riviera but I only saw it from the train window, pink toilet paper and garlic baguettes are nice too

* Most mediocre thing about France – the football league

* Worst things about France – the arrogant attitude amongst people

Best countries in the world according to the nerd (will be updated with every post):

1. Andorra
2. Cyprus
3. Denmark
4. Belgium
5. Estonia
6. Finland
7. France
8. Bulgaria
9. Bosnia And Herzegovina
10. Albania