My favorite task has always been to be a tour guide. When I was a student, in order to pay for my vacations, I used to offer my services as a tour guide for students in Paris. I did that for several summers and even for spring vacations. Of course, there were requirements. The first was to be in love with Paris, which I was, and the second was to have some training. I remember the one training we had for Versailles, an old lady teaching us how to give tours. She must have belonged to the old French aristocracy, who would have painted the people during the Revolution as hooligans. It was funny.
I grew up in Paris during the somber years of the war, and then, after the war, when we were poor, we could not afford all the beautiful toys I buy now for my grandchildren, like scooters, bicycles, and electric trains. In those days, the most luxurious toy I got from my parents was a pair of roller skates. When I asked for a bicycle, my father told me he could not afford it. But we knew how to enjoy whatever we had. When I reached teenagehood, I ventured to the center of Paris, to the Grands Boulevards, where I was dazzled by the beautiful stores, the cafés, and the cinemas. A little later, I started to haunt the jazz clubs in the Latin Quarter. It was magical. I loved New Orleans jazz. As I developed a taste for jazz, I also developed a real love for my city.
A few years later, I started to have paid jobs as a tour guide. Most of my tourists were English schoolchildren and their teachers. They were not very demanding and always enjoyed my explanations. This was not the case with three groups of Hungarian tourists in 1960 or 1961 who were sent to Paris, not so much to enjoy the city as to try to persuade me that their Communist paradise was much better than my city. That was, until the day I decided to shut them up for good, arriving deliberately a few minutes late in my sister's car. Of course, I told them it was mine—implying that I, a poor student in this capitalist city, was able to afford a car by just doing summer jobs. That was the end of their criticism.
I enjoyed what I was doing because I was like a tourist myself, visiting the beautiful places in Paris and taking pleasure in showing them to others, while making a little money that I could use to pay for real vacations and clothes. When I turned 18, although I was still a student, I decided that I would no longer rely on my parents to pay for my luxuries. In France, it is not like in the United States, where children get jobs at the age of 16. In France, at that time, when a young man or woman got a job, it was as though their parents could not afford to pay for their needs. I think today things must have changed, and youngsters are no longer looked down on when they get a job.
I also remember once taking a group of Cambodian students to the beautiful Chateaux along the river Loire (Chambord, Blois, Chenonceaux, etc.). These students were full of joy. They brought bongos, and they spent the two days of that trip playing and singing. The bus driver and I had a headache, but their pleasure was contagious. I can't help thinking about them now and wondering what happened to them during the Cambodian genocide, when intellectuals were seen as "the enemies."
Later, I traveled outside of France. A tourist organization was looking for language students to take French vacationers to other European countries. I applied based on my knowledge of English and Spanish, and in the summers of 1961 and 1962, they sent me to Austria. For me, it was an opportunity to discover another country.
That love of being a tour guide is still with me. Some 20 years ago, when a very good friend of ours, an Israeli woman, wanted to offer a tour of Paris to her son for his high school graduation, I wrote an itinerary for them, and she and her son were delighted. Then, two years ago, I took three friends with us for two weeks to Paris, the Chateaux on the Loire, and the Normandy beaches. They are still thanking me for that opportunity.
I love to do that, and most of all, I love when people enjoy the beautiful places I show them as much as I enjoy them myself. But I could not have done that work without my love of traveling and discovering beautiful places, and my eternal love for Paris.
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