Tips From a Not-So-Perfect Parisian Trip

As I turned the corner I was greeted with buzz saws, power sanders and hand drills. Since I had not slept in about 36 hours, this was a rather disturbing scene.

When I reached my hotel room I discovered that the hot water in the tub would not turn on, and the cold water would not turn off. The spout on the sinks was attached to a flexible pipe. To use the shower, I had to pull this spout from the sink to the bathtub where it hung on a hook.

Then "cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo" sounded the electronic wake-up call, and my spring break began.

These were all features of the Hotel Frantour, situated in Paris' slightly-less-than-classy 18th arrondissement. That would be north of the city's popular red light district, where only three nights later a bouncer offered to wave the fee if my female friends and I would accompany several of our male companions at a sex show.

The Frantour was the locale for Harvard Model Congress Europe (HMCE) 1997. This conference regularly draws 300 high school students from four continents to participate in a simulation of both U.S. and international government organizations.

The conference was definitely the most rewarding part of my spring break (I helped run a committee that produced a twice-daily paper about conference news), but I'd like to pass on a few tips I learned on our nighttime rambles through Paris.

For starters, if you're traveling with a large group, you should go to Italy. I felt rather like I was in Italy during this trip, because every night we ate Italian food.

A group of my fellow HMCEers would gather in the lobby each evening at about 6 p.m. From there we would venture into the city by foot or by metro and wander for hours looking for a restaurant we could all agree on.

Not too French, not at all American and only slightly expensive, Italian restaurants always seemed to fit the bill. So we habitually supped on cannoli and occasionally linguine with French red wine.

When the urge to sample native French cuisine overcame our Roman tastes, there were several options. On one occasion my colleague, former Crimson President Joshua J. Schanker '98, chose elegant escargot as an hors d'oeurve. Several of the gourmands in our groups sampled these delicacies to the great amusement of a groupe francaise at the neighboring table.

These Italian dinners were inevitably followed by bar-hopping, and then one of my favorite venues for food francaise: the street corner creperie.

Open all night and a great follow-up to beer and Long Island iced tea we drank at an American bar, the hot crepe with applesauce made me feel like I was experiencing Paris as...an American college student on spring break.

So Paris en bref: Take the cabs, they're likely to be Mercedes, go for random walks on sunny afternoons so you can get lost among the winding streets in old neighborhoods and, most importantly, always carry a map.

I'll be flying to Paris again this March for another HMCE. The group will no longer reside at the lovely Frantour, trading the city location for the more historic Sheraton a cote d'aeroport Roissy/Charles de Gaulle.

But we will still do the things that make the Parisian vacation so special, that is, adapting the ammenities of a decidedly different culture to our own peculiar American tastes.