"Eiffel Tower at Night" by Zeny Cieslikowski (Photo by Zeny Cieslikowski) "Notre Dame and Boat" by Zeny Cieslikowski (Photo by Zeny Cieslikowski) "Notre Dame and Moon" by Zeny Cieslikowski (Photo by Zeny Cieslikowski) "Figures Along Seine" by Zeny Cieslikowski (Photo by Zeny Cieslikowski) "Notre Dame and Books" by Zeny Cieslikowski (Photo by Zeny Cieslikowski) "Eiffel Tower at Night" by Zeny Cieslikowski (Photo by Zeny Cieslikowski) As a 24-year-old, I flew to Europe for the first time. The societal and political upheavals in the United States due to the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
were still a year away as were the exhilarating Prague Spring and the Troubles in Ireland. Those events and the huge student protests in Paris and throughout France were to blossom a year later as well. I was thrilled and overwhelmed to be walking on the same sidewalks where Molière, Pablo Picasso, Émile Zola and even Paul Cézanne may well have walked.
I had a well-read, dog-eared copy of Arthur Frommer’s “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day” as my guide, and I actually stayed pretty close to my budget for hotels and meals. To save money, I took a bus from Orly to a central bus terminal in Paris and then got a taxi to the general vicinity of the Left Bank, where my hotel was located. I don’t know why I didn’t ask the driver to go directly to the hotel.
I practiced the French phrase for “please drop me off on the corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Boulev.