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How to Survive a Heat Wave 101

Last week, myself and a group of college girlfriends happened to be in Paris to experience the hottest temperatures in recorded history for the City of Love—and survived to tell the tale! Being from South Florida, I wasn’t too worried about the heat, but I must say that surviving a heat wave is a whole different ball game when most of the buildings around us are not air conditioned—or when there’s no body of water (i.e. an ocean) to immerse yourself in. The usually temperate city is not equipped for 110 degrees. It didn’t help that our AirBnB was on the top floor of an old apartment building with 360 degrees of glass windows—a veritable greenhouse effect.
 
Oppressive would be the best word I can use to describe it. To give you an idea of what our week felt like, imagine being inside a hair dryer. Norbert said walking the streets of Paris reminded him of being in Dubai. It’s definitely hard to dispute climate change when you experience something like this.
 
Still, we somehow managed to enjoy ourselves—hopping from one shopping mall to another, lingering at restaurants, sleeping with wet towels to cool us down, and dipping our toes into any fountain we could find (including the one in front of the Louvre!).


 
I can vividly remember my first visit to Paris in summer 2000. I was 13 years old and my family and I traipsed all over the city. Knowing the city better now, I’m impressed by how much my mother was able to cram into our visit, from a classical music concert at Saint Chapelle to an extensive tour of the Louvre. Since that first visit, I’ve been back to the City of Love on several occasions, whether it was to visit friends or spend a few days in transit before moving on to my final destination.
 
Whenever I’m in Paris, I usually post a message on Facebook to see who else might be in the city—and I never fail to meet up with people who I haven’t seen in forever and who I didn’t know were in Paris. For me, that’s social media at its best, when it truly does what it’s meant to do: connect people.
 
This time was no different, although I didn’t have to post anything on Facebook to connect with old friends. I signed an email to a group of writers that I’d met at the Vermont Studio Center, “with love from Paris,” and lo and behold, one of my fellow writing friends also happened to be in the city! We met up down the street from the Sacre Coeur and caught up about our respective memoirs-in-progress.
 
I’d remembered reading a high school friend’s blog about moving to France from Los Angeles last summer, so I reached out. It turns out that she and her family are living on the outskirts of Paris, and she invited me to come hang out, which I was thrilled to do. There was only one problem: getting there by myself.
 
When we first got to Europe, I was delighted that my phone didn’t have service or data. I had brought a small street map book of Paris that I’d found in my father’s belongings, but quickly gave up on using it; it was much easier to follow my friends from place to place, especially since they had the magic of the internet at their fingertips. But when I considered traveling to my friend’s town by myself, navigating the strange streets and vast metro system (with its many summer closures), I felt paralyzed.
 
In the end, my partner and I found a way to work around his work schedule and go together. While I’m glad that he was able to meet an old friend, I’m also grateful that his phone was able to guide us on the hourlong journey to the outskirts and then back again. Because of his phone, we were able to be dynamic – change our route when one train wasn’t working, call an uber to go part of the way when the heat of the day was pure hell, take a different route back to Paris, stay connected with our friends who were hiding from the heat at Galerie Lafayette, and meet them for dinner at a little Italian place. This simply would have been impossible without a phone (with a working data plan).
 
The experience made me think about my previous visits to Paris, and how all my spontaneous city gallivanting happened without the help of WhatsApp, Google Maps, Uber, Yelp, etc. Somehow, I was wildly successful at meeting up with friends, finding delicious places to eat, and making my way around the city. I do remember a few instances of getting somewhat lost and having a missed connection with a friend at a metro stop, but for the most part, I had the time of my life. Now, it seems as though I’ve lost my confidence when it comes to exploring a complex place like Paris sans smartphone. The city hasn’t changed, but I have—and a reliance on smartphones is responsible for this change.
 
Still, I did feel somewhat vindicated in being smartphone-free in Paris. When it came to finding restaurants, Yelp and the internet simply failed us again and again. You’ll be unsurprised to learn that I really hate using the world wide web to find a place to eat; I’d rather use my eyes, ears, nose, and mouth to find the best places around town. Ask around, see what restaurants are full, follow the smells to someplace random. But my friends insisted on searching for restaurants online. Then, we’d walk a ways to get there (passing several restaurants on the way) and find that they were closed for the holidays (this is France, after all) or that they simply didn’t exist! It was kind of hilarious, although also annoying considering the heat and our increasing levels of HANGRY!

I hope that you're all staying cool in your various corners of the globe! 

Carmella Guiol on Medium
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