The Spirit of Adventure - Michael McCafferty

Day 7: Taxi Ride from Hell, Haircut in Heaven
Paris, France
While Carl was attending to the many details of re-assembling the biplane at the
Euralair hangar at Le Bourget, I ventured out into Paris to find aviation navigation charts
for Paris, Northwest France and Britain.
Yesterday, our new friend, Alain Strausz, had given me the address of a shop
called General Aviation, in the south of Paris which could supply the needed charts. I
called the hotel front desk and requested a taxi with a driver who could speak English.
This was no small task in itself because the clerk at the front desk could barely speak
English herself, but we finally muddled through it.
It seemed that the French would not speak English if they could avoid it, and
delegated the speaking of English to foreigners specially imported for the purpose of
dealing with other foreigners. As a case in point, my taxi driver was Vietnamese, an ex-
Army officer, a fact that came tumbling out of him almost instantly when I spoke my first
words to him. He also was quick to say "My brother, my sister, my mother at Saigon
Hilton." That was, it seemed, the extent of his English vocabulary, but I didn't know that
at the time. I proceeded to verbally give him the address I wanted to go to on Rue
Mademoiselle, he thought about it for a moment and then nodded enthusiastically.
I asked him several more questions as we drove along, but each of them was either
ignored (as if I was not speaking to him, but then who else?), or he would look at me in
the rear view mirror as if I was speaking Martian. On occasion, he would say something
back to me in a language that didn't sound like French at all. This got me to wondering if
we had ever really communicated at all, and would I ever wind up at the Rue
Mademoiselle.
After 210 francs were counted on the meter (about $40), my concerns were proven
correct. He slowed down and pointed to a huge building with a dome, what looked like a
government building and said "General Aviation" (in French). This was ludicrous to me
that a little pilot supply shop would be in such a place so I asked him "Rue
Mademoiselle?" and he said "Oui" and looked at me as if I were mentally retarded.
That's when I took pen and paper and spelled it out for him. He took out a
magnifying glass (I swear to you!) and looked it over suspiciously, not seeming to
comprehend what I meant. I looked for street signs and saw that we were on a street that
resembled "Mademoiselle" only in that it began with "M." I pointed to the street sign, then
again at my piece of paper. That's when he took my paper and started to guess at each
letter: "F?" (NO! "M"), and so forth, until we had gone through the alphabet several times
and he seemed to have finally understood how to spell it. He then consulted a huge
listing of every street name in Paris, and with the aid of his magnifying glass finally
located "Mademoiselle", and then compared it to my paper, and then seemed to explode in
a fury composed of despair, hatred for all Americans for ruining his homeland, but for me
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