Wandering Around Talking To Rainbows

Paris. City of Romance. City of Love. City of Really Smelly Drains.

There's a reason the song praises Paris in the Springtime and the Autumn, because in late Summer the place stinks to high heaven. I suspect most cities that size do after long, hot, dry Summers but it colours almost every memory I have of my second visit to the city.

Paris is the city where the dream the dream of travelling begins to crack and the reality of it all begins to sink in. On the Champs Elysée there is fabulous opulence and excess (rich girls in ridiculous heels toting designer shopping bags and tiny dogs) and abject poverty (brassy Romany girls with perfect English ply their patter, whereas their elderly counterparts settle for kneeling prostrate on the ground) rub shoulders, each as unignorable as the other.

I'm returning to a city I've visited before, though only as a young child. I figured it was best to start somewhere I had been before, somewhere I could retrace my steps while making new memories, break myself into this inter-railing lark gently. Sometimes like standing in Sainte Chapelle, childhood claustrophobia forgotten in the face of all those beautiful blues and that stained glass, its a good thing. Others, like the decidedly surreal experience of shuffling round Notre Dame in the tourist queue while badly amped priests give (take?) mass – I presumed they only let you in during actual ceremonies if you were you know there for that, by the time I realised queue of shuffling tourist photographing everything never stops it was too late to fight the tide and get out – were less so. Still it was this city that set me on this journey. Marianne Faithful singing of sports cars, warm Parisian wind and regret, spurring me on to chase this dream.

I take the suburban train out to Versailles, travel through gentile suburbs and ordinary streets where ordinary people live. People get on and off the train, young couples, parents with small children both harassed and calm, old people of all ethnicities shuffle on and off while the guard waits patiently for them to pass. My notebook is open but my pen is still, its really just an excuse to people-watch, to stare out the window a contemplate the ordinary sights of the city beyond the romance. To disguise myself as a student rather than a tourist for a while. For all this train goes to Versailles there are few tourists along with me for the ride. When I arrive at the station those that get off are mostly changing trains, popping to the shops or heading home from the city. There is no easy crowd of tourists with a map to follow but I find my way nonetheless, taking the wrong turn a few times and getting to see more of the town of Versailles itself than I expected and finding a dozen interesting-looking restaurants that I cannot afford to eat at. I presume that the lack of tourists on the train is because its September and tourist season must be winding down (away from the tourist pullers, it was possible to walk through whole galleries at the Louvre without seeing another soul), its not until I reach the Palace itself with its vastness and even more vast coach park that I realise how wrong I am.

I eat instead at a Italian takeaway just round from my youth hostel, which is both the only thing still open and exactly what I was looking for. The pizza is cheap and filling and familiar; it won't be the last time I take refuge in an Italian eatery on my way round the continent. In the morning I will pack my case again and trundle away towards more adventures, eat breakfast in the tiny hidden park beside the supermarket and lunch in a bakery on a busy intersection opposite the Gare d'Austerlitz. Not one of those picturesque patisseries they show on the TV (though I'll eat truly delicious food in one of those in suburban Geneva) but something generic and open plan, tending to busy commuters grabbing their lunch on the go – like the French equivalent of Greggs. I'll find a park (Jardin des Plantes – best park name ever) tucked round the other side of the station and while away the afternoon in the two vastly different natural history museums at either end of the park. I'll remember that park and its museums under grey skies and spitting rain, just as fondly as my far more 'perfect tourist' encounter with Tuilleries Gardens under perfect blue skies two days before.

This isn't the Paris the brochures and the movies promised me. (There are no sports cars or whirlwind romances, but the wind is warm in my hair and it blows away a lot of regret with it.) The city is smelly and messy and rude and friendly and ordinary. It's better; it's real.