Why I Felt Safe as a Tourist in Paris

“Thank you for coming,” our waiter in the small bistro along the Rue du Temple said to me as he brought us the cheque. “Thank you for not being scared.”

My husband, Nick, and I looked at him, unsure of what to say.

“Merci,” I said to him and continued in mangled French. “Thanks for staying strong.”

Even at the Eiffel Tower the crowds of tourists are thin right now. (Photo: Goncalo Silva/Flytographer)

Life is continuing all over Paris in the weeks following the worst terrorist attacks in French history.

The spirit and the joie de vivre of the country are the same, even though many things will be forever different.

I arrived in Paris as a tourist last week, determined to take a few days off of work to just relax while my husband attended the COP21 talks on climate change.

In the grim days following the attacks we received a flurry of emails from family and friends. The most urgent ones came from both of our mothers.

Across the city, buildings are lit to remember the attacks. (Photo: Nick Aster)

“Are you still going?”

“Are you sure it is safe?”

“Why don’t you cancel and take a nice vacation somewhere in America instead?”

“Aren’t you scared?”

I was scared before we left.

I am the first to admit that I asked Nick if we should still go. I’m rarely rattled by anything, and yet this most recent violence had me on edge. It was the randomness of the attacks that scared me.

La Belle Équipe, the restaurant where gunmen killed 19 people as they sat in the cafe enjoying their dinner, is not far from the Airbnb we had rented for this recent trip. It’s in one of our favorite neighborhoods and could have been one of the places we found ourselves during an unplanned dinner jaunt.

Friends of ours had planned to be there the night of the attacks, and if not for a chance phone call that kept them from arriving to that restaurant on time, they could have been victims.

It was Nick who urged me to put my fears aside. He didn’t say anything as trite as “if we stay home the terrorists win.” Instead he subtly prodded me, mentioning that we are not the kind of people who let fear dictate our lives.

Visiting Paris now is different, but I never felt unsafe. It is a city that has been scarred, but not broken.

At the airport, customs lines were much longer than usual (for heightened security) and wound around the international terminal at Charles de Gaulle. Armed guards wearing maroon berets paced the airport hallways brandishing large guns.

In town, brasseries, bars, shops, and museums were still teeming with Parisians. The French continued to move about the country, going about their business and planning for an abundant holiday. We still needed a reservation every night of the week at most restaurants since Parisians still insist on eating out most nights of the week.

The armed soldiers were a regular sight across the city. Sometimes they roamed in packs and sometimes were hidden within a doorway on a small cobblestoned street.

 

Guards have become a part of the Parisian scenery for now. (Photo: AP)

While I was taken aback at first, I grew to find their presence comforting, and they almost always returned my smiles with shy grins of their own.

Both the RER light rail and the underground Metro system were made free by the Parisian government the week I was there. They ran on time but were more sparse than usual. (The same goes for the rapid TGV train that took me down to the South of France for a couple of days.) When I detrained at the Paris-Gare de Lyon, 10 armed police officers with bomb sniffing dogs inspected the passengers, as a piano player played jaunty holiday tunes in the background.

Paris is a city that has always been filled with tourists — more than 32 million people from around the globe visited in 2014. Now, it is very obvious that those crowds, particularly Americans, have thinned.

Where there is usually an hour long wait, we were able to waltz right into the Cathedral of Notre Dame. There is a conspicuous lack of visitors brandishing selfie sticks around the Eiffel Tower. The Louvre, always jam-packed with visitors shoving one another to get as close as humanly possible to the Mona Lisa, was much more sparsely attended.

Tourist boat rides of the Seine had plenty of empty seats. (Photo: Nick Aster)

While I was there, a friend emailed to ask me if the city is in mourning. He wanted to know if they had even bothered to decorate the city for the holidays. The answer to both questions is yes.

Parisians are very clearly mourning. Memorials to the murdered and injured have been constructed all over the city. Around the Statue place République locals gather to write poems, sing songs, and to cry.

But the city is also festooned with beautiful lights and garlands of holly — they adorn the windows of nearly every neighborhood brasserie. Sticking out from wreathes of pine needles are French flags and signs begging for peace. The decorations and the banners serve to prove that attacks of hate will not destroy the French spirit.

The streets are bustling and, the cafes are crowded. (Photo: Goncalo Silva/Flytographer)

Another friend of mine was supposed to join us in Paris over the weekend, but her husband advised her against it.

I emailed her to let her know that there was not a single moment where I felt unsafe walking the streets of the city. I reminded her that while I was in Paris there were two mass shootings in America that left 17 people dead, leading to the question, Where is it safe to visit any more?

The answer is everywhere and nowhere. We can’t predict where the next lunatic with a gun and a half-cocked concept will attempt to murder innocent people. We can’t predict where terrorists will strike next. What we can do is remain strong and brave and not scared, just like the Parisians.