welcome to paris

The first part of my visit to a big city makes me acutely aware of being a small town kid. Pella, my hometown, is a safe, clean and relatively affluent place. The first leg of our vacation landed us just outside of Paris, trying to figure out which train to take into the city. After finding seats, we were followed in by an older man with a wine bottle. He stayed on the train and walked up and down the car asking for cigarettes and money. He was polite to us, but began to pester some of the other passengers. Eventually he stuck to a family made up of a woman and her two teenage kids, one boy and one girl. Not knowing French, we couldn't tell if he was being offensive or just obnoxious. The twenty-something, well-dressed Frenchman across from us could understand him though. After the mother had yelled at the man to leave them alone, the Frenchman, calmly and deliberately, placed his book back in his bag and took out his earbuds and put them away. He then turned around and gave the drunk man the evil eye.

This was noticed and drew the drunk guy away from the family, towards the Frenchman. The first couple of back and forths were calm, but eventually the Frenchman yelled at him. The drunk man moved back for a bit, but he shortly resumed his efforts to offend. It worked. The Frenchman stood up and gave the drunk guy a shove. The drunk guy changed his grip on the wine bottle from "hold-as-to-drink" to "hold-as-to-swing-at-guy-who-just-shoved-me" and began to put it to use. This was met with gasps and "no, no, no," stopping the swing. The Frenchman stood his ground while the drunk guy walked away, muttering until he got off at the next stop. It looked something like this,

After he got off, I clumsily asked him if he spoke English. He did, and he explained that the drunk guy had been saying crude things to the teenage girl. He had been looking at us to for reactions to see if she was alright, but since we had no idea what was being said we were fairly useless for that. It turns out our Frenchman does not regularly deal out street justice; we thanked him and got off at our stop. 

Skip ahead to the next morning, we headed to montmartre where a pigeon pooped on my head. With these two events, Paris welcomed me.