Paris is Occupied Again!

Paris is always the answer, so said Audrey Hepburn. How true this has been in my own life. In the summer of ’16, when I was fogged over with grief after my husband’s death, I came to Paris. Here I found answers on how to proceed with the rest of my life. And so, I have returned, but this time I am not alone. My man Dan is by my side. Dan is the perfect sweetness at the bottom of my cup. We are old but intrepid travelers who complain about our creaky joints, but keep moving. Our sunny days have been spent finding the Paris that piques our interests. Dan likes Renaissance art and architecture as well as history, while I look for 1940s Paris when this city was occupied by the Germans.

The German occupation did not close Paris the way this pandemic did. The beautiful hotel where we are staying has just reopened. Traveling during a pandemic is complicated, but France has a strong leader in Prime Minister Macron, who has decreed that everyone must show proof of vaccination in order to eat in a bistro, enjoy a coffee in a café, see a museum, or wander through a store. If you do not want to get vaccinated then you can do all those fun things only if you have proof of a negative covid test taken three days before you want to do anything. While covid tests used to be free here, they now cost 50 Euros, which means that to enjoy your espresso and cig at your favorite neighborhood café at 10 on Saturday, you must plan ahead and spend a lot of money unless you get vaccinated. Clever of Macron, yes? These rules went into effect August 1, 2021. He did not mandate the vaccine, but he is making everyone’s life more difficult and a lot less fun unless you get it. Yes, there have been riots against his decree, but as I see it these protests have been nothing like the anti-vax crazies in the US. What I mean by this is that there appear to be no pandemic-deniers here.

When we first arrived in Paris, Larry, our friendly concierge, maintained that shopkeepers, café owners, waiters could not be expected to police Macron’s rules about vaccinations, but Larry was wrong. Everywhere we have gone, waiters, museum guards, café owners, have inspected our little cardboard CDC cards. Last night the café owner took a photo of our cards. Apparently, Macron also mandated harsh penalties for businesses who do not adhere to his rules. Since commerce in Paris has been locked down longer than in the US, these proprietors are DAMN grateful to be open and hearing their cash registers ring again. Vaccinated Europeans have only to present their green passport to the business, so that their QR code can be scanned, while we Americans must present little cardboard cards like the third world country we have become.

Why can’t the US have a vaccine passport like the EU, the UK, or other advanced countries? Because we let our crazies decide such matters. My rights as a US citizen are infringed upon because right-wingers don’t want to provide me with a modern way to identify myself as vaccinated. All I ask for is an App to download to my phone. An unvaccinated person wrote on a discussion board that she opposed vaccine passports because she and her family would be excluded. Well, lady that’s the point. You chose exclusion.

So, we treat our little cards like the precious commodities they are. We have zillions of copies. We have copies on our phones. We keep our original CDC cards in the safe in our room. We show waiters, etc. a copy kept on our persons. When we go to the Louvre or the Musee d’Orsay next week, we will bring our originals, fearing they may require it.

Of course, we also must mask up. This is required in all indoor spaces. When we come into a crowded outdoor space we put on masks as well. In the Jewish Quarter of the Marais where their world-famous felafel shop was thronged, we donned masks.

Our CDC cards, the masks, all add a dimension of anxiety to traveling. What if we contract the Delta variant here? What if we test positive on the covid test required to re-enter the US and must quarantine? All this we have discussed. We have friends who are putting off travel until 2022. But what if the pandemic remains with us? What if we do not see its end in our lifetimes? We are old but able and ambulatory now. We have the time and the money. And we love to see the world, to experience new sights, to take in the great art of the world, art we have seen before, but revisit like a beloved, much-missed friend. We must live fully now. The world is a beautiful place, so we go.