Memoirs of a Tracy Kid
Icontinue from last month’s column regarding our European adventure during the summer of 1971. After Bobbie and I settled into our cheap hotel in Paris, we started our tour of Paris by spending the afternoon visiting the Eiffel Tower, the Arche de Triomphe and walking down the Champs Élysée, a very ritzy avenue in Paris. Without much money, our shopping was limited to looking at the window displays. We were really tired at that point so we hopped on the Metro and headed back to our hotel. After dinner we washed our clothes and took sponge baths in our handy bidet before collapsing into bed, the daily routine during our stay in Paris.
Reading from Bobbie’s notes in her diary, we both found Paris to be cleaner than London, and the French people seemed much friendlier than the more reserved British people we had just left.
Bobbie was studying French in college at the time and spoke the language, albeit, hesitatingly.
Even so, she was able to communicate quite well although she commented several times in her diary about how fast the French talked. We spent the next several days walking and taking the metro to visit the Notre Dame Cathedral which was amazing, the left bank of the Seine River, the Luxembourg gardens, the catacombs, and many other attractions in Paris.
We spent one whole day at the Louvre and saw the Mona Lisa along with the many other original pieces of art. We also took the train to Versailles for a day trip to visit the Palace and its magnificent gardens. While in Paris we found many inexpensive places to eat including a favorite pizza restaurant near our hotel where we could buy a large pizza and a bottle of wine for the French Franc equivalent of $3.50.
After 5 days in Paris, we left on a train to Blois, France to tour the many châteaux in the area. We found a cheap hotel in Blois and spent the day on a bus tour to the many châteaux around Blois, many of which had been painstakingly restored and were exceptionally beautiful.
We had planned at that point to head south and travel along the coast to Spain. However, on the bus tour around Blois, we discovered through conversations with some of the local French people that there was a Cholera outbreak occurring in Spain and people were being turned back at the border with France if they weren’t vaccinated against Cholera. This was a major turn of events for us at the time because we were planning to circle Europe in a counter clockwise direction ending in Zurich, Switzerland, our departure city. Since we wanted to visit Spain, we decided the best option was to get vaccinated in Paris and reverse our itinerary to tour Europe in a clockwise direction leaving Spain for the end of our trip.
The following day we took the train back to Paris to see if we could find a place to get vaccinated against cholera. We were told to go to the Louis Pasteur Institute which was the main hospital in Paris. We made our way to the hospital and after a long wait, we were finally escorted to a doctor’s office and met with the doctor. He spoke to us in rapid French and after a bit of a struggle, Bobbie was finally able to make him understand our need. He immediately asked for payment in cash of 52 Francs which was about $40. Since we didn’t have that many Francs, we gave him one of our $25 American Express travelers checks plus the rest of our Francs. He then wrote out a prescription for the vaccine and sent us off to find the nearest pharmacy. But we still didn’t know who was going to give us the shot.
The hospital didn’t have a pharmacy so we left and found a pharmacy nearby where we purchased the vaccine which included two doses which had to be given two weeks apart. The pharmacist told us that we should go back to the hospital to again see the doctor who gave us the prescription.
We trudged back to the Pasteur Institute where we again waited for about an hour to see the same doctor. He proceeded to pull out a syringe and actually filed the point on a sharpening stone and then put the needle in the flame of a nearby Bunsen burner to sterilize it. After extracting the vaccine out of the bottle, he gave the first shot to me just under my shoulder blade. Boy was that needle big and dull! It hurt like hell but I tried not to grimace too much as Bobbie was next. The doctor again sterilized the point and gave Bobbie her shot after which we left the hospital to cash another traveler’s check for some more Francs.
After that unpleasant ordeal, we found a restaurant near our hotel that was recommended by our $5/day guide. We had a nice roast beef dinner for $5 including wine which helped us forget about our current challenges.
The next day we boarded a train headed north to spend some time in Luxembourg. It was a 5-hour train ride to the city of Luxembourg which is practically the whole country, and after finding a cheap hotel we spent the afternoon touring the city and its historic ruins.
It rained that day according to Bobbie’s diary and we had dinner, which was our first hamburger since leaving the states. It was at a Whimpey’s restaurant and included fries and a coke – a welcome reminder of the good old USA. We retired to our hotel and had another sponge bath in our trusty bidet. We hadn’t had an actual shower at that point since leaving London.
After one day in tiny Luxembourg, the smallest country in Europe, we left on the morning train to Brussels, Belgium. We arrived before noon and found a nice hotel for $6.50/night. After leaving our backpacks behind, we toured the city and saw the Place de Ville, Cathedral of St. Michael, and the infamous “Manneken Pis” fountain which includes a bronze statue of a little boy urinating into a basin. We even bought a miniature souvenir corkscrew version of the statue with a corkscrew in – you guessed it! It’s definitely a conversation piece when we are entertaining friends for dinner and I open a bottle of wine. Maybe the Tracy Central Park upgrade committee will consider replacing the cherubs that were in the original fountain with Tracy’s own little “Manneken Pis” in the new proposed fountain. Who knows, it might become a big tourist attraction.
Belgium also only merited a one-day visit so the next morning after breakfast in the hotel we took a morning train to Amsterdam, the Netherlands. There we were greeted in the Amsterdam train station by a bunch of American hippies who all were in need of a good bath and a haircut. I had rather long hair at that point but compared to the hippies, I stood out like a recent college graduate heading for an interview. Throughout out stay in Amsterdam, hippies were everywhere as marijuana was legal in The Netherlands.
The red-light district in Amsterdam was especially interesting, especially at night. Prostitution, like marijuana, was legal and regulated in The Netherlands. We happened upon the redlight district one night while we were out taking pictures of the houseboats all lit up along the canals where they were anchored. There was one canal with many narrow adjacent row houses on the street next to the canal, each with a red light by their door and a mirror attached to a second-floor window with a scantily clad young woman posing in the window watching potential clients walking by on the street below. If a client seemed interested, he would signal the woman and she would come down the stairs and meet the man at the door. After the appropriate negotiations were completed, they both disappeared into the row house or a nearby houseboat to complete the transaction.
We also took a boat tour of the canals during the day which was very interesting, and visited the Rijksmuseum which included works by Rembrandt including his famous Night Watch painting. We even discovered a Wall Drug sign outside the main train station which pointed to Wall, South Dakota, USA.
On our last day in Amsterdam, we took care of getting our second Cholera vaccine at the main hospital. The experience was the opposite of the first shot in Paris. We got to the hospital at 9 a.m. when the clinic opened. We still had our second dose of the vaccine that we had been carrying with us for the past two weeks, but in Amsterdam, the nurse used the clinic’s vaccine which was already in disposable injectable needles. The shots were painless and the cost was only $4 each. It was a breeze compared to France. After we were vaccinated, we headed to the train station and caught the 11 a.m. train to Kohn, Germany.
Next month: Our visit to Germany and the Swiss Alps
