AWC Going Dutch March 2019

Unconventional Travel: Paris and Athens
While Ashlynn was off at castings for shows
during Paris Fashion Week (although she
wasn’t offered any jobs, she found the process
interesting and loved the opportunity to
really get to explore Paris), I took the subway
across the city to La Defense, which is
Europe’s largest purpose-built business district.
I had found a fantastic price for a long
weekend at CitizenM, which is an affordable
boutique hotel chain
that I highly recommend.
by Melissa White
While I was excited to be on my own
adventure in Nepal, I was quite
disappointed that I wasn’t in the
Netherlands when my 18-year-old daughter
Ashlynn set off for Paris to begin working as
a full-time international fashion model for her
gap year. I was thrilled when she invited me
to visit her just a few days after my return.
My window of opportunity was small because
of her nearly frantic schedule of “castings”
(interviews for modeling jobs), but it was an
offer that I couldn’t pass up. It was definitely
not a conventional trip to Paris.
Last-minute train fares in mid-September
were quite high, so I followed Ashlynn’s
lead and booked a ticket on the Oui Bus, a
French bus service serving much of Europe.
I’d never been on a long-distance bus ride
before, but the € 48 round-trip fare was hard
to pass up. The pick-up location was around
the corner from Den Haag Centraal, and the
bus made just two stops—Lille and Charles
de Gaulle Airport—before reaching Paris in
seven hours. The bus wasn’t full and I had
two seats to myself, which was handy as my
carry-on wouldn’t fit in the extremely small
overhead storage. It wasn’t the most exciting
way to travel, especially when we got
stuck in traffic, but it gave me plenty of time
to write my Everest Base Camp Trekking
articles and start on the related book, which
is my big project for 2019.
I was pleasantly surprised that Ashlynn was
there to greet me when I exited the bus as
she’d instructed me to meet her at the studio
apartment in the Latin Quarter that she’d
rented from Airbnb for five weeks. She was
very excited to show me her neighborhood,
so we walked instead of taking public transport.
After pulling my suitcase along for an
hour, I was relieved that I didn’t have to
carry it up to her sixth floor flat. The elevator,
however, was so thin that it was difficult
to maneuver both the suitcase and my body
inside. It barely prepared me for how tiny
the apartment was. Ashlynn was absolutely
beaming when she opened the door to show
me the very first place she’d ever lived on
her own. It was truly compact, but quite
nice with an excellent view. Unfortunately
it only had a single bed, so I spent that first
night on the floor since she had to work the
next day and needed her beauty sleep.
Ashlynn would be joining
me at the hotel, so I
put our bags in storage
and set off to the Louis
Vuitton Foundation (www.
fondationlouisvuitton.fr),
an art museum designed by
renowned architect Frank
Gehry that opened in 2014.
The museum was between
temporary installations and
only had a few sculptures
on permanent display, but
offered some interesting
free tours about the incredible building;
the facade consists of 3,600 glass panels
and 19,000 concrete panels. I was really
enjoying the two-mile walk back to the hotel
up until the point when the skies opened up
and I got drenched.
I met Ashlynn in the city center after her final
casting of the day and we set off looking
for dinner. Ever since Ashlynn switched to
a plant-based diet three years ago, we have
switched to using the Happy Cow app instead
of TripAdvisor when searching for
restaurants. Happy Cow allows users to
filter restaurants by vegetarian-friendly,
vegan-friendly, fully vegetarian or fully
vegan. In an effort to keep to a strict budget,
Ashlynn hadn’t been eating out much during
her stay in the city. She was thrilled that
I was along to foot the bill so she could try
some vegan restaurants.
The following day Ashlynn and I went to
the Atelier des Lumieres (www.atelierlumieres.com),
Paris’ first digital museum
of fine art. Housed in a former 19th-century
foundry, this museum features immersive
art displays unlike anything you’ve ever
seen before. Our tickets were time specific
so that visitors arrive at appropriate times to
see the entire show as artists’ paintings are
projected 360 degrees around the vast space
using 140 video projectors. During our visit,
we saw much of Gustav Klimt’s work >> 36
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34 GOING DUTCH
MARCH 2019 35