Carnet de Voyage: Got no Camembert, but I Don’t Care!

Travel notes from the real France. Carnet de Voyage is a weekly personal travel story in France sent in by readers. If you’d like to submit a story to Carnet de Voyage, head here for details on how to submit.

“Is that man talking about…cheese?!” asked my 12 year-old daughter on the Paris métro, staring excitedly at a somewhat wild-eyed and gesticulating fellow passenger.  

He was indeed. “Got no Camembert, but I don’t care” – I paraphrase. This was my daughter’s first visit to France since starting to study French, and the excitement of having decoded even this man’s eccentric ramblings was infectious. So, it proved, was Paris, both of us coming back with Covid.  

But we didn’t care! Because this was a trip full of funny and memorable moments. We stayed in an Airbnb on the top floor of a gorgeous 1930s building in a residential neighbourhood, with the world’s smallest lift taking us most of the way up, with a last flight of stairs to our tiny studio under the eaves. But a balcony – and a view of the Eiffel Tower if we craned perilously off it – made the climb more than worthwhile. 

We took the métro, we walked, we cooked in our little studio with food we bought in the supermarché, we went to lots of museums and even wangled ourselves an invitation to a kids fashion show on the beautiful terrace of a department store.  

We kept to a limited budget: a year’s assiduous hoarding of Nectar points [a loyalty card scheme in the UK – Editor’s note] went towards our Eurostar tickets, Airbnb rather than hotel, which meant we could make our own snacks and dinners but with scope for nice lunches out and the all-important ice cream stops. A travelcard for the métro meant we could stay not quite centrally and hop on whenever we flagged. Pre-booking for some of the museums doesn’t necessarily make it any cheaper but does mean you can be sure of getting in without hours of painful queuing, and if you really do plan carefully there are free days at some museums, or at least free tours you can join to make sure you see all the “best bits”.  

I work with French which did help with the planning of our trip, but the most important thing I think was that I never for a moment thought we ought not to do something because she was a child. She last visited Paris in a pushchair, which obviously does hamper long days out, but now Paris is her oyster. Why would you stop at Disneyland Paris if you could also ride a double-decker train, go to a flea market, then eat lunch in the chandeliered restaurant of the Musée d’Orsay?  

We’ll never forget the sights of our mother/daughter trip to Paris, not even Monsieur Camembert, who has passed into family legend now. He’s got no Camembert, and he don’t care.   

Margaret Morrison is a French to English translator based in the UK specialising in the translation of comic books.