By telling us your country of residence we are able to provide you with the most relevant travel insurance information.
Please note that not all content is translated or available to residents of all countries. Contact us for full details.
Shares
To sneak off veiled in darkness – not turning the light on in case I wake her up – is how I imagine one would escape a one-night stand. I get dressed (lots of layers) and take the last of the croissants and the bottle of orange juice from the hotel fridge (reaching past the bottle of red wine filled with cork sediment because we had no corkscrew and only had a pair of house-keys). The only people around at this time of the morning are locals: parents taking their children to school, tight grips as they run across the zebra crossings; a middle-aged man opens up his restaurant, stopping for a cigarette before laying out the rest of the chairs on the pavement; a woman in a charcoal suit sits on the platform opposite waiting for her train – almost reflecting me, but she knows where she’s going and I don’t. The last time I’d taken the metro on my own, I was meeting my parents in Disneyland; travelling, as an adult, back to my childhood. That’s the whole point of Disneyland, isn’t it? It doesn’t rain in Disneyland (it rained as we queued in a massive huddle, pushing to get inside, but once we passed the gates, the sun came out) and there’s not a single piece of litter on the streets (even when a child threw up just before the parade started, if you looked away for a second you would have missed the team of cleaners who disinfected the entire scene before Mickey and Minnie and Donald arrived). Maybe I expected the rest of Paris to be like Disneyland – not with people walking around in huge costumes like sports mascots, but that feeling of cleanliness, that feeling that everything would be cleaned up for you as soon as you turned your back. But, my first experience of Paris was two elderly women asking me to sign a petition to help disabled refugees – I signed without hesitation (although it didn’t feel right when they started demanding 50 euros minimum along with my signature). Turning the corner into the Champ de Mars, I no longer felt like I was on the set of Gigi but noticed all the half-eaten food and plastic cups strewn across the dusty lawn. The more we became enshrouded in the cool shadow of that iron tower, the more we became surrounded by people desperately trying to sell the exact same souvenir miniature of the original that loomed above. Wandering without purpose: if I was them, maybe I’d also try to scam me. The train rattles to a stop at my destination: Montmartre. Coming to the surface, I am relieved to see it’s still dark. When the sun comes up, this place will be filled with tourists buzzing, and chattering, and streaming past each other like an ant’s nest, but for now there’s no one. For now, it’s quiet. I check Google maps, but it’s pretty clear that the only way is up. Everything looks a lot older than in central Paris – and not in the faux-old Disneyland kind of way. I wonder when these staircases were carved into the hillside. Were they carved by pilgrims to make the ascent easier, or simply to plant the seeds of wonder: where might the steps lead? I check the time and quicken my pace. How many staircases to go? I start taking two steps at once, which is a struggle because my legs aren’t long. The sky is lightening, like milk diffusing across black coffee. Can I do three steps in one? But I don’t have to: the white domes start looming overhead, and it’s just in time. I sit alone on a bench and pull out a croissant and orange juice. Maybe someone was playing the guitar, or maybe it’s the birdsong I remember. All I know for sure is that the sun didn’t rise all of a sudden; it melted across the sky in ambers and fuchsias and indigos, more like a watercolour than real life. I know because it lives inside my phone now: I can repeat it forever, a short film from my Instagram story, as real as Disneyland and as real as Paris.