Shall we talk about Paris again? Shall we mine my past for content? Yeah! Let’s talk about a school trip to Paris in 2002.
Between living on the south coast of England and taking French & Spanish A Level, I ended up doing four school trips to France. I’ve already talked about Cherbourg 1998. Later I’ll do the Year 10 French Exchange and I’ll probably never talk about the Year 13 Paris trip, just because none of my special friends were on it and it was something I did because I had to – although if you’d tried to stop me going…! – and there’s nothing in particular to say about it, other than that it was a bit of a copy of this one, only less fun.
The Year 10 French Exchange was more about having fun, experiencing Paris and sharing the culture of our penpals. We went shopping and to the pool and hung out and attempted to communicate with our penpals in really bad French. But by the time we reached Sixth Form, it was supposed to be more serious. It was supposed to be about improving our language skills and learning more about France and French culture and history. Mr Moore made us an interesting itinerary for our handful of days – and perhaps I use the word “interesting” in a thoughtful way, rather than in a genuinely enthusiastic way.
There were five of us. I still have a photo of the other four on my desk, although I have to peer awkwardly between my screens to see any of the people in it. Of course, there was me. There was also Catherine (who you may remember from Italy 2000 and from my trip to Arne over Christmas) and Chris, Dave and Andy (who you won’t remember because they’ve never popped up on this blog before). Catherine kind of sneaked her way onto this trip, as the only one of the group who didn’t take French A Level. Can’t blame her; I did it for the Russia trip a few weeks later as the only one not studying History. Andy was nice, I can’t say a bad word about him but I will also say that he was never one of my particular friends and I’ve never hung out with him before or since. Dave I’ve known since we were tiny – we were at school together from the beginning and his aunt worked with my dad so we went to a few company barbecues together when we were small, including the legendary occasion when we won the three-legged race, by virtue mostly of Dave running and half-carrying me. Chris was new in Sixth Form and became part of our extended friendship group – kind of a secondary circle that joined the main one in a couple of places. So that’s our cast of main characters.
The first sign that either this is a grown-up Sixth Form trip or that modern life has moved on is that this time we travelled by coach via the Channel Tunnel instead of via a ferry. I remember very little of the journey down. I guess it was relatively quick and utterly uneventful. We were staying in a hotel – the first time we’d ever stayed in a hotel, except that night the bus broke down on the Spanish trip and we got benighted on the French border – in the Place d’Italie area. We shared twin rooms and naturally, we spent most nights in and out of each others’ rooms, trying to scuttle back at 1am without being caught by any of the teachers. Turns out, aged sixteen, most of us didn’t have the sense to keep a bit quiet. I only have photos from the first night in what I think was Fiona & Rebecca’s room but I suspect it went on every night. As an adult, I feel a certain sympathy for Mr Moore now.
On our first full day, we went off to Louis Vuitton’s gaff for some bubbly. Yes, we did. We were taken on a tour through the Louis Vuitton workshop – sorry, atelier – first. It’s all hand-made. It’s not even high-tech. I vividly remember watching someone polish the shiny gold corners of a trunk using a toothbrush. They were cutting that iconic leather into shape and all the shavings and strips got thrown in bins. We weren’t allowed to take any of them home as souvenirs, even though they were unwanted, because nothing imperfect is ever allowed to leave the atelier. I guess that makes sense but no one’s going to see a scrap of offcut leather half an inch wide and mistake it for an imperfect handbag, are they?
This was before I really knew anything about designer stuff and it was before Louis Vuitton had its big explosion and its big ripping-off, when half the kids at school are using a fake bag they bought on the beach in Spain as their schoolbag. Before it turned its brown and tan design into a rainbow of logos on a white background. This was when Louis Vuitton was still decadent and beyond the reach of anyone you could ever imagine knowing.
I didn’t take much interest in the obscenely expensive handbags but the trunks were another matter. There was an absolute mountain of steamer trunks, the kind you’d use if you were on a grand voyage two hundred years ago and although you’d never get me on a big boat and I’d take my backpack anyway, I do kind of covet an obscenely expensive designer trunk for my imaginary voyage around the world.
After the factory, we went back down to his opulent living room for champagne. I don’t know if that’s a thing ordinary people can arrange to do but we certainly did. There’s a page about the house on the Louis Vuitton website which suggests that you can visit the Louis 200 exhibit there but there’s no info about how you’d go about it and no suggestion of posh elevenses. Anyway, we were sent away with huge Louis Vuitton paper bags, which is probably the closest I’m ever going to come to a designer bag, filled with leaflets. If I ever make this into a scrapbook, that bag is absolutely the best place to store the book.
Next we had a behind-the-scenes tour of the Stade de France. This was May or June 2002, so only four years since the 1998 World Cup final was held here. We milled around in the changing rooms and went out to the pitch and it wasn’t actually very exciting if you’re not a football fan. We definitely didn’t learn any French there.
The next thing I have photos of is La Defense. Did we do anything there except take photos of the towers and the arch? Probably not. My diary says we were just allowed to wander for an hour but it doesn’t say what we did. I can think of better bits of Paris to wander for an hour. It also says the year 13s went somewhere else so it might just have been a convenient place to park the younger half of the trip until the older ones got back. I apparently was persuaded to lie on the ground to get a really good photo right up one of the towers but that really does seem to have been the highlight of that stop.
On the second day we spent the morning at Galleries Lafayette. There was a fashion show and I took about as much interest then as I might now: the photos in my album are helpfully labelled “a model at Galleries Lafayette” and “another model”. It seems we popped into an opera house as well but as I have only one photo of a guide in front of a lot of seats in an under-exposed picture and no mention in my diary beyond “we went across to the opera house” which sounds like it was part of grabbing strawberries at the market on the way to the coach, I have no memory of it. That said, there’s a photo I used to be very fond of somewhere in the photo CD of the whole group on the steps, now I come to think of it, so apparently we did go to the opera house.
Is it sounding riveting so far? A bag factory, a stadium, an opera house while there was no opera on and a big department store. Well, the fun is about to kick in. We were let loose in Paris for the afternoon.
This was the first time in my entire life I was a grown-up abroad, the first time I was put in a leadership position. Mr Moore decided that I knew the metro well enough to take charge of my group. I very much remember a small argument over what kind of tickets to get and I vaguely remember that we might have immediately gone in the wrong direction. It seems I was too occupied with my position to take photos: I have the tickets to say we went up the Eiffel Tower but no pictures, we went to – but probably not up – the Arc de Triomphe and we had waffles at the Trocadero.
I do have a picture of that moment; it’s the one on my desk. It seems we walked up to the second floor of the Eiffel Tower and took the lift to the top from there. I’d not do that now. My knees couldn’t do it for a start, and second, I’ve acquired too much of a fear of heights over the last decade or so. But I guess I did walk down from the lowest floor last time so maybe I could cope with the height. I didn’t take any photos and my diary says that at least two of the group stayed on the ground. But I remember wandering Paris, I remember getting on the metro and I remember that afternoon was enough fun to make up for all the boring that had happened on the official visits.
That evening was our traditional night out in Paris. We were dropped off to find food by ourselves in the Latin Quarter and then had a coach trip around the sights all lit up in the dark. My diary mentions pudding – pineapple au kirsch and fruit salad. I presume we had pizza. Better look through the photo CD later, see if anyone else took any pictures of it. Dinner in the Latin Quarter – I felt more like a sophisticated grown-up aged sixteen doing that than I ever have done travelling solo as an actual grown-up.
My emetophobia was apparently in its infancy back then; one of the other boys overindulged on the alcohol at dinner and was sick all over the coach and then brought up to the front with the teachers – and me. My diary says “I tried to get as far away from him as possible”, not “I smashed the coach door and ran away into the night” like I might if that happened today. Catherine and Chris fell asleep and missed most of the tour. On those occasions when I go to Paris on my own now, I still like to go out one evening and see the so-called City of Love lit up at night but it does work better on foot than on a coach and it definitely works better without drunk schoolboys.
After that, the only photos I’ve got are of the coach outside the hotel and of the group on the coach but we still had two days to go. On the next day we took the metro to La Bourse. My diary from the time can give you everything you want to know about that visit:
The stock exchange was the most boring visit of all. The guide talked a lot about bonds and shares and showed us how to calculate prices but it was all very businessy.
Yeah, that’s it. No photos and two sentences. I’m far more enthusiastic about the fact that we had an hour to ourselves afterwards which we used to buy Toblerones.
Next we took the metro and RER to Charles de Gaulle airport for a behind-the-scenes tour. For my own reasons, I had a couple of round-ended butter knives in my bag – well, for spreading butter on baguettes throughout the day, I guess. Trouble was, to get into the behind-the-scenes tour, we had to go through the x-ray scanners and those knives would absolutely show up. The trip had to be slightly reorganised so we could leave our bags somewhere to do the tour. That knife hung up on my pinboard in my room for at least ten years after that in memory of the occasion and is now in regular rotation in the cutlery drawer. Can’t miss it, it’s got a red plastic handle. To be fair, someone should have warned us that we needed to be more careful than usual about what we packed for that day. This was post-911, just, so we probably wouldn’t have been allowed drinks either.
We saw the baggage being moved around and we saw a plane from the “passenger tubes”, whatever those might be – jetbridges, I presume. I remember being so bored. And if I remember being bored, then it must have been even more boring than the stock exchange.
And that was it for Paris! I remember this trip so fondly and yet we did so little that was actually interesting. See what I mean about it being an interesting itinerary? It was certainly unusual and something you’d never do on your own holiday but it was also not at all actually interesting and definitely not for teenagers. No wonder my memories of that free afternoon are so fond.
What was interesting was the next day. We spent the evening driving up to our hotel in Lille and on our last day, before we headed for Calais, we went to the Crystal d’Arques factory. I’d forgotten that – I thought we went to Mumm but that was on the year 13 trip – and yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen a glass in a shop since without turning it over and nodding to myself that it was made at that factory. Of course, twenty years on, I discover that Arques and Arc are two different glassware manufacturers (although they belong to the same Group, so I suppose I wasn’t that far off).
Good lord, this was 2002, take a look at the notes in my diary:
Apparently the factory workers are paid “peanuts” and because of the lead in lead crystal (74%), they have to have blood tests every month in case they get lead poisoning.
I’m not 1000% sure that says 74% – that seems a lot, my writing is a little unclear and Google suggests it should be 24% – but it’s 2002 and factory workers are at risk of lead poisoning! Surely that’s a health & safety matter that can’t still be going on in 2022? I’m astonished it still was even in 2002. Isn’t that something that should have been a thing of the past by 1992?
Ok, apparently it wasn’t that interesting because I didn’t even remember it happened. We went to the Mumm champagne cave on the way home from the year 13 trip and I remember that. It was the first time I’d ever really experienced champagne and the first time I’d ever seen people turning the bottles at the speed of light and I think they might even have opened one with a sword for our entertainment. But that wasn’t this trip! We went to a glass factory on this trip which had working conditions apparently unchanged since the place first opened in a previous century!
It seems I bought something there. “I was almost the last served but I got there eventually”, says my diary. Is there a glass downstairs that I bought on this trip, then? I wonder what it was? Judging by Arques’ website and my own taste, it’s probably a stemless tumbler and probably highly elaborate and also probably in my mother’s Best Tableware cabinet where I haven’t seen it since I brought it back. Yes! I went and looked at the stuff that’s too good to use, with the thought “what would I choose if I was there today? That! That’s what I would choose!” It’s exactly what I was imagining as I wrote that last sentence and there it was as large as life and twice as natural and clearly never had a drink put in it in over twenty years. Ok, that’s my office glass from now on. If I’m going to collect good, usable, practical and pretty souvenirs, I want to live my life using them. Like the volcano coasters that live on my desk or the ride photo from Disneyland in June 2000 that’s also sitting up behind my screens – you’re both there right in front of me, Esther, plus I’ve got the three of us at your wedding so it’s all equal shares in this office.
The coach trip back occupies eight pages of my diary, which says loud and clear to me that the trips weren’t the fun bit and also that I probably spent more time scribbling than I did enjoying what was going on. Everything I loved about this trip wasn’t about being in Paris or even being in France. It was just about spending a lot of time with my friends. There was a bit of inter-personal drama which I won’t go into twenty years down the line but overall, this was probably one of the most special trips abroad I’ve ever done. I like having this blog and today I especially like it because otherwise I wouldn’t have looked back at this trip and realised 1) how boring it actually was 2) why I loved it so much.