Down and Out In London and Paris

There is a saying attributed to everyone from Winston Churchill to a number of evangelists:  “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”  Some sources add, “and don’t stop to take pictures.”  Humor and encouragement in a single packet of words.

In the summer of 1999, we took 23 freshmen and sophomore high school students on a nine day trip to London and Paris.  Both cities were experiencing unprecedented heat and humidity, making for a deeply unpleasant tour.  There was no A/C in any hotel where we stayed.  We had to move all of us through the cities on foot, often during rush hour, using public transportation.  We spread out through the crowds on the subway platforms (the Tube and the Metro) and when the car arrived, we had to push our way in and hope no one got left behind.  Then I would shout out the destination so all the students would know when to get off.  Miraculously, we never lost anyone.

However, the students were often less than cooperative.  One called her mother back in the states to complain that we were not allowing her enough time to shop.  One got lost at night on the way back to the hotel from dinner.  She spent several late hours wandering the streets of Paris and only by some miracle of fate, managed to find her way back to the hotel by check in for the evening.  We had told the students to carry the hotel address in their pocket or wallets for just such an emergency; she had not followed the directions.

Once, after we had settled in for the night, we got a frantic phone call from students saying their room was flooding.  We rushed up two flights of stairs to find water cascading from cracks in the ceiling and running down the walls.  I ran upstairs to the room above where we also had students and banged on the door.  A girl answered, in near panic, saying, “We were just trying to call you.  Something is wrong in the bathroom.”  I ran through the room and burst into the bathroom to find one of my students fighting to control the hand-held shower nozzle which was writhing in her hands like an enraged viper spitting a voluminous stream of water around the room to pool on the floor.  I grabbed the nozzle from her and was immediately soaked to the skin before I could shut it off.  I breathed a sigh of relief but then realized I was standing with one of my female students in her hotel bathroom with only a very modest towel between us.  I even more quickly ran from the room and let my wife, also a chaperone, deal with the clean-up.

We were up and running from 6AM until whenever we could snatch a few hours of sleep.  We were constantly dehydrated and ate sparingly; the food provided by the tour company was abominable (as was the useless “tour guide”) and no one really had an appetite due to the heat and humidity.  On one of the final days in Paris, I passed out in the Louvre.

A good moment—and there were a few—was coming back to the hotel at the end of a too long day.  I would take a cold shower and chug down three 1.5 liter bottles of water and then pass out for a few blissful hours of sleep.  It was not healthy; we sustained damage.  I did not have a bowel movement for nine days.  I had only recently been diagnosed with Type II diabetes and could not control my blood sugars or my neuropathy.  The flight home from Paris, roughly ten hours, nearly killed me.  I thought my intestines would explode—although, if that relieved some of the pressure, I was willing to let them fly.  I sweated through my clothes which felt like cardboard due to all the perspiration they had absorbed over those hellish days.  I was feverish and barely remember relinquishing responsibility to the parents who greeted us at the airport upon our return.

What did I learn from this?  Never take charge of 23 kinds in a foreign country, even a U.S. ally.  Second, the quote above applies.  We could not cut the trip short and go back where we came from, so our only option was to keep going and get through the nine days.  We did stop to take a few pictures just to have evidence of what happened.

I do not consider London and Paris hell; in fact, along with New York, they are my three favorite cities on earth.  In the end, we got through it, didn’t lose anyone, and saw some incredible places.  Sometimes we must face difficulties to understand ourselves and our world, and it can be a life-changing moment if we seize the day and keep ourselves open to what we see and experience.  We just have to be willing to keep going.