Friday 27th January 1984
The Youth Hostel breakfast was a meagre affair consumed in the company of our favourite people, questioning trendy hostellers. After a much-needed shower we fled into the grey wet streets to do some sightseeing.
A pied, we steamed up the Champs Elysees for a second breakfast on a park bench in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe. As the central cohesive element of the Axe historique (historic axis, a sequence of monuments and grand thoroughfares on a route running from the courtyard of the Louvre to the Grande Arche de la Défense), the Arc de Triomphe was designed by Jean Chalgrin in 1806; its iconographic programme pits heroically nude French youths against bearded Germanic warriors in chain mail. It set the tone for public monuments with triumphant patriotic messages.
The Avenue des Champs-Élysées the famous avenue in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, France, 1.9 kilometres (1.2 miles) long and 70 metres (230 ft) wide, running between the Place de la Concorde and the Place Charles de Gaulle, where the Arc de Triomphe is located.
It is known for its theatres, cafés, and luxury shops, for the annual Bastille Day military parade, and as the finish of the Tour de France cycling race. The name is French for the Elysian Fields, the place for dead heroes in Greek mythology. Champs-Élysées is widely regarded to be one of the most recognisable avenues in the world.
A light rain accompanied us as we went on to view the Eiffel Tower, a sombre advert for Meccano against a grey dismal sky. North Africans sold useless knick-knacks such as polythene flappy birds near the fountain array in the Jardins du Trocadéro across the river Seine from the Eiffel Tower.
We followed our noses around the shopping streets, looking in the shops that had sales on and searching for the ever-elusive cheap café. Outside the major department stores Vogue-ish women in fur jackets manned external stalls.
Small motorcycles whizzed about suicidally as we walked back passed the multitude of cinemas on Boulevard Hausmann, which is 2.53 kilometres (1.57 mi) long from the 8th to the 9th arrondissement, and is one of the wide tree-lined boulevards created in Paris by Napoleon III, under the direction of his Prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann.
We munched spicy tuna rolls as we wandered along and eventually decided on the Q-Burger as the candidate for cheap coffee. Our final port of call before returning to the Youth Hostel was a supermarket where we got a bottle of French red wine each for 5.10 French Francs a throw.
Thus, the afternoon from 15:00 hrs. to 19:30 hrs. passed in a drunken perusal of the Daily Mail English newspaper and a dissection of the trivia reported therein before descending into a lengthy slumber.
At 20:00 hrs. we went out on the town in search of some “action” and again found ourselves on the Boulevard St Martin stretch. Despite being a Friday night there appeared to be little going on. We strolled passed many restaurants and cinemas and wound up on the Q-Burger again.
Along the road the illuminated Metro signs and leggy black-stockinged girls testified that we were in the French capital. The Paris Métro is a rapid transit system in the Paris metropolitan area, France. A symbol of the city, it is known for its density within the city limits, uniform architecture and unique entrances influenced by Art Nouveau.
It was nice to see a dog-shit clearing motorbike at work on the pavement. Modern telephone boxes composed entirely of glass and coin-operated public lavatory booths on street were other features of the Parisian streets.
We stopped in O’Kitch, another fast-food café after a fruitless walkabout which failed to reveal any nightlife (we were probably in the wrong area). We watched pop videos and cavorting young French black people before going home to bed.
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