A Sunny Day in Paris | Adventure Every Day

Paris was beautiful, but not without incident. I've heard plenty of stories about pickpocketing and other assaults that are apparently commonplace in Europe (even the subway in downtown Oslo warns you to be careful), but I hadn't ever experienced anything that even made me feel uncomfortable anywhere. Until Paris.

Jillian and I were making our way down to the river walk when the incident occurred. Right past yet another group of young women pushing forms into our face and hurriedly asking, "English? English?" Jillian replied with a firm "No" in her best French accent. That was enough to discourage the others we encountered, but not this group. Instead, they encircled her and got even more aggressive with the paper pushing. Now they were making physical contact.

The benign pestering immediately turned into the feeling of an imminent threat.

We had to make a quick break. Luckily, Jillian was able to squeeze out of the pack. I'm still not sure exactly what their objective was, but we wondered if the mob and physical contact was intended to be a distraction while one of the group got into Jillian's purse. Whatever the case was, we got away unscathed and with all of our possessions, but left with a definite feeling of discomfort from the experience.

I don't want that to be the focus of this trip though, nor even the rude waiter we encountered at the cafe by the Eiffel Tower, as we found that to be rather charming in fact (French rudeness is real!). Paris is too beautiful of a city to focus on a minor thing that turned out uneventfully in the end. Luckily enough, the nice weather and our hurried pace around the town (we only had one day there, after all), allowed us to see most of the most famous landmarks (and there were many!).

This week, we are headed up to the arctic - Svalbard - for my preferred kind of outdoor adventures (spoiler alert: snow mobiles and dog sleds coming soon), but for now, we'll leave you with a calm city tour on a pleasant sunny day:

Adventure Every Day is a travel & exploration channel started in 2016. In addition to the Steemit blog, I post weekly short films of my adventures to the Adventure Every Day YouTube channel. Please follow and subscribe if you enjoy the content - it inspires me to keep making more and better!