Paris travelogue in Ali Baba’s travelogue-1401 Alibaba magazine

This work was sent by Saeed Aghakhani to Hazarvik Safar (Alibaba travel writing contest-1401) and in Alibaba tourism magazine has been published.

I arrived at Imam airport at twenty minutes past five. I went to the place where the cargo is delivered. I put my bag and handed over the ticket, the baggage control officer said: “Where did you return the ticket?” I said: “I don’t know exactly what day I will return, that’s why I didn’t take it.” He said: “You can’t go like this, you can’t go until you get a return ticket.” He didn’t know how hard it is for me to say this sentence and believe it, because he didn’t know how many years I’ve been going this way and if this trip doesn’t happen, the dreams I imagined for myself will all perish with one sentence. Now it’s 5:30 in the morning and the plane takes off at 6 o’clock without any delay.

At that time, buying tickets was done on the website and it was not as easy as it is now to buy tickets with the application. God, what should I do now? I had an iPhone 4, and I lost a lot of time if I wanted to go to the browser to buy a ticket from there. Now I only had fifteen minutes to get the ticket to my house, and I couldn’t call him. At five thirty in the morning, I should call my dad, explain the Windows alphabet to him, then tell him what Internet Explorer is, and guide him by drawing. It was already 12 noon, so I had to Hamid, my friend and our roommate, call me, I just remembered that the death of Internet Explorer was announced by Microsoft some time ago, this shows that I am getting old, let’s go, that servant of God woke up and I told him the origin and destination, the date is also ten days. Then I said and he sent me the photo of the ticket. I couldn’t believe that everything became colorful again, all dreams came alive again. Just a few seconds ago, everything went to the brink of destruction and came back to life. Like the heart beat of a patient who has cardiac arrest and the smooth line on the monitor moves again.

Maybe there were only a few minutes left until the flight, or rather, until the first flight, the first flight for me, which I had always seen in movies up to the point where they go up the escalators and then when they go into the plane itself, there was never a gap between these two. I didn’t know what a broom was and finally I saw it.

The next inspection was also carried out and everything went ahead according to the procedure; Because I understood in the previous inspection that I have to take off my seat belt. I hurriedly went to the hall that was marked and then I saw the queue, I went and passed through the tunnel and I saw the plane that I was going to board and it was going straight through the tunnel into the nose of my plane. I was the only person in the world who had never boarded a plane before. The flight attendant greeted me and guided me, and I was praying to be next to the window so I could see outside, now why? I don’t know

From here, I gradually got a feeling that I had experienced very mildly before, I felt how tight and compact the plane cabin was, and on the other hand, we were lucky that a group of 30 Chinese people had crowded the bottom of the plane, and that’s all. They beat, they are fast, I, who had not eaten anything since I woke up at four o’clock, felt that I was getting cold, first my hands got cold and I said let me put on the sweatshirt, maybe I will warm up a bit, I put it on and it didn’t show, little by little I felt the air getting colder, the deeper it got. I was breathing as if less air was coming in.

My hand was freezing, it was burning like when I was playing in the snow, what was worse was that I also heard the sound of the plane door closing or I thought I heard it, it didn’t matter what mattered was the feeling that I should be in this closed space for at least three and a half hours, like this I thought about how many people before the plane take off and said I’m not coming, I want to get off and is it even possible? Is it the bus that I should take the next bus? I really wanted to get off, I just said to get off now. If they ask me, why didn’t you go? Let me say that I felt pressure, let me say that I was scared. What can I say to myself, how many years have I been waiting for this trip? In any case, I stopped myself and stayed; But would he let go? The sound of this huge Chinese crowd gradually became quiet, like in the movies, I said to myself, “It’s going to be alright now, when I saw that my eyes were going black, I could only raise my hand and tell the hostess to come.”

I said to him, can you bring me something sweet? In my opinion, I said it loudly, but he asked three times what I don’t understand? I was talking so softly that you couldn’t hear me. In short, he brought me a fruit juice and a few minutes passed and I got better. Years later, I found out that an actress had the same problem and I learned from her instead of saying that I was scared or panicked and spent two hours explaining what happened like this. That’s how it happened and it’s not the person’s hand, and I’m saying that I have claustrophobia, with emphasis on the hole on the slide, or the claustrophobia. Before we continue the journey, I want to say something about the roots of this claustrophobia.

I think I was 7 or 8 years old at that time, my cousin Farid and I used to play together, either he would come to our house or I would go to them, and the age difference between both of us and my uncle was small, about six years, and we always fought each other, my uncle too. who was only a teenager at that time and loved martial arts as we used to go to my mother’s house every time (God forgive me) this was a Nanchiko in his hand and he thought it was Brucella. Razmi continued to fight and chose us as a training opponent and moved towards us; I even remember that kickboxing pants were torn that day. On that blessed day, the number of children was strangely large, we were a large family, seven or eight of us would beat my uncle, and he would defend himself and hit me, that is, the way we got bruised, he hit me less. Because Zarti would break his hands and feet, but he would beat Farid. Maybe he imagined himself in Bruce Lee’s movies. In short, he beat everyone.

I don’t know which one of God’s ignorance brought a blanket and another one of God’s ignorance threw this blanket on me and several others of God’s ignorance jumped on me at the same time and suddenly everything became dark and the sounds became less and most importantly the lack of air made me breathless. I was breathing more deeply, the air was running out sooner, I couldn’t make a voice to shout, say that I was wrong, get up, say, I promise, I swear I won’t be naughty again, for God’s sake, get up, I’m suffocating. The loud sound of their laughter is heard and I said to myself that my death is over, death is like this. Maybe it really took three seconds, maybe thirty seconds, but it was enough for me to stay away from everything that binds my hands and feet and makes me feel cramped and dark for the rest of my life.

The flight attendant came and checked the seat belts one by one, and if the seats were vertical and no one had a hand-free and no one was sleeping, I was a little better, and the plane started moving. Well, I thought it would fly right now and I was waiting for it. Maybe he was moving slowly for ten minutes and he was going around until he reached the take-off line. The plane stopped and the engines became so loud that I thought it was going to explode, and then it moved forward at an incredible speed. The way I first remembered the movie fast and furious, then nitrous in the underground game, then the video of the Boeing and Lamborghini race, and finally, it was the curse that I transferred to the Wright brothers.

The plane took off, my God, what is this that has been created by mankind? We are really separated from the ground. I look at my arm to see if he is scared like me. I see a man lying on the couch in the living room watching a wildlife documentary. I want to say, why is no one afraid? Can you calm down, sir, this plane is going higher than the last height I left the ground, of course, my last height was this free fall device in Erm Park, eighty meters, but it went higher, believe me, it crossed eighty meters and Maybe more, and I’m still looking under my feet and I’m worried that it won’t be empty under my feet, when I see that we went into the cloud, Lord, how far does he want to go up, how does the pilot see the cloud now, if there’s no bird in the cloud, let him eat it. Glass or lamb in the engine of the plane, before when I saw the plane from below, it was not very far from the ground, but it was like it was, and now this pilot decided to go around, and going around, which is not like a car, is like a bicycle, when we wanted to, without tilting the steering wheel. To go around, we used to bring the bike close to the ground, or it is exaggerated, motorcycle racers who hit the ground with their knees, which I later found out because the rim of the tire is less than the middle, it makes us go around, I had to think about these things. It was so weird because the plane turned from horizontal to the right side so much that if someone looked down, they would see a white cylinder because the right wing was completely down and the left wing was completely up and there was a passenger on the side, it would fall on me and I was really scared after a few minutes. In a minute, it returned to the horizontal position and went up again, and then the sound of the engines died down and I said that it wants to get rid of it from here to Paris itself.

Although almost 1 hour had passed since the flight; But I was still concerned about the altitude and how far we are from the ground now, the pilot says twenty one thousand feet and I am just getting the word foot, which really means the foot of a human being equivalent to a foot in English, that is, the sole of a human being’s foot Taking an average of 30 centimeters, so 21,000 feet is almost 6 kilometers, Everest is 8,800 meters high, then I think about Everest that it is not on our way, otherwise the plane would touch the tip of Everest.

Believe me, I have to think about these things and I cling to any irrelevant idea so that I don’t think that now there is nothing under my feet as much as six kilometers. I look out of the window and see Europe for the first time in my life, smooth and green everywhere, and then a booming voice interrupts my thoughts: “That’s why they call it the Green Continent” and introduces himself and begins the story of his life. Saying this for the first time, I deeply enjoy talking to a stranger along the way because it makes me think about nothing.

Point one is that he came to France twenty years ago and that he only knew Bonjoq which means hello, and point two is now the owner of a company in Paris. With almost two hours of memory, he connected point one to point two, and I heard the best story of my life, or rather, the best story I could hear. The story itself was not important, the time and place where the story was told was important, because it made me aware of the story. Fear of heights, throw away.

We arrived in Paris, the plane landed, I was stuck with the map and finding the route for a couple of hours and I spoke broken English until I realized that I had to take the Homme metro, which is called Eq Oq, like the Tehran-Karaj metro, the suburban metro of the capital. It moves on the ground. I boarded the subway and left Chardougal Airport for Paris. The atmosphere was strange, as if I was in a movie. I used to watch a lot of movies and I still watch a lot. I forgot to say why I came to Paris, what happened? Now is a good time. I am sitting and looking out of the subway window, the suburbs of Paris, the weather is both cloudy and sunny, which I will explain later about the Mediterranean weather. The sunlight falls on my face from the sides of the leaves and I am definitely in one of the European movies, maybe a Darden brothers movie. Drowning in thoughts of what happened, I am here now. I will go back in these years looking for the beginning, I will find it.

“It’s night, I’m almost fourteen years old, it’s almost midnight. Dad is sleeping in the room. Dad always sleeps early. Unlike everyone around me, I like the TV channel Four and my mother stayed up with me to watch movies together. shine Let’s see Kubrick.”

This is the beginning of the story. It didn’t matter what movie my mother was based on and these moments are the most magical moments of my life. Watching this movie with my mother cultivated something in me that still hasn’t left me. Fast forward the years. In high school, I study mathematics, in mechanical engineering university, and then I drop out, and then I take the entrance exam again, and I get accepted to Tehran University, Fine Arts School of Directing, and then I work in theater just to get to the movies. You are probably all familiar with the Prisma app that makes cartoons of pictures. For a while, many people made cartoons of their profile pictures with this app. One night it occurred to me that if I had a few cartoon pictures and put them together, it would be a movie, a cartoon movie. We started with some of the children and recorded some plans. The most ridiculous things that could be done in the boys’ dormitory, for example, someone took a pair of scissors and symbolically cut someone short, and he became shorter like Musterbin. That’s it! The application itself could not be used because the order of the frames was messed up. I found a Telegram channel to which I would send the frame and it would get back to me after a minute. I had almost a thousand frames and without exaggeration, I sat behind the system for eighteen hours to send these frames one by one for him and her to cartoon these images and send them back to me. It was done and I am happy about this success.

A few days later, one of my friends sent me an invitation to a mobile festival in Paris, whose films must be one minute long and recorded with a mobile phone. I had exactly the conditions, I stuck together the same ridiculous plans and made up a story for it and sent it. To my disbelief, the film was accepted and an invitation was sent to me. I really felt like I was living in a movie. I, who had never boarded a plane before, flew from Tehran to Paris to participate in the film festival. I am here now. It’s hard to believe even for myself, but I learned this trick, which I probably turned into a defense mechanism for myself, relax as if it was a normal thing, this is how you make it continue, if you get very happy and excited, it is very likely that this will happen. The sooner it ends, the better.

The interesting thing in the subway is that people have books in their hands more than their phones, and there are many people who have their heads on their phones. I arrive at Kiqime station. beside the river Seine A hostel where I have to live. There is an almost eighteen-year-old girl in the reception area who has no nerves at all, but instead speaks English very well. He gives my card. This card opens both the main doors and the elevator and the room door. Of course, I thought it was a hotel, but it was not a ten-meter room with six beds. I had to put my things in the metal box that was under the bed because other passengers were constantly in traffic, so I had to lock the box. But everywhere there is a smell of a detergent that I had never smelled in Iran and it gave me a good feeling. I arranged the things. I took a shower, made a video call to the house and let’s go out. From today, I have almost four days until the ceremony, and a new chapter in walking will open in my life from today. I take the camera and put it outside the ground and take pictures of the door and wall, the window, the street, our building, people and everything. Everything is so new to me that not only do I not understand the passage of time, but I also do not understand the passage of space. In these ten days that I am staying in Paris, I walk almost eight to twelve kilometers a day without the slightest feeling of fatigue.

The strange architecture of the buildings makes you feel like you are walking in the Middle Ages. There are no skyscrapers in the city, no traffic, no noise pollution, people drive very slowly. A mother tied her baby carriage in front of her bicycle. The city is full of cafes. Cafes that mostly leave their seats outside. The visual space of the city is not crowded. The light does not bother you. I am slowly falling in love with Paris, maybe because it reminds me of Tehran in the seventies, when there were few cars, the air was clean, the pictures were sharp and the sky was blue. The Mediterranean weather, which I didn’t know what it’s like, is that it is windy mostly but not very strong except sometimes, the air is cool and the changes are very high, the humidity is neither low nor high. Exaggerated spring in Tehran.

On the advice of my father, I brought about eight tons of fish so that I don’t have to spend a lot of money on food here. Here they have a baguette bread that has the shape of a baguette and a barbarian surface. Many people buy bread and eat it empty. I bought the same breads with the tuna fish I had brought, and the taste of Coca soft drink was not really different. This was the plan: walk, tuna fish, photo, walk, tuna fish, photo. Of course, I ate pizza two or three times, but it was really expensive; Twenty euros was the minimum price for a pizza. Of course, it was cheaper and I chose the cheaper one. That was the plan until the end of the trip.

It was time to go see the Eiffel Tower. It was night, I got off from the subway station, I saw a big statue, in the middle of the square, I tried to find the Eiffel on the map, it was behind this street, I started walking, I could see it at any moment, all the images I had of the Eiffel in my mind were these black and white posters. They were selling on the side of the revolution street. I saw it was bright and danced with light. Later I realized that there is a light dance every night at nine o’clock. You shine, it’s a strange feeling, what the media does to you, what’s the point of four metal bars, but it has added value, thousands maybe millions of people have memories with this tower from China to Mexico.

People here who see this tower, a masterpiece of engineering, is a gift from a lover to a lover. These were some of the sentences that were running through my head. This is the lonely feature of traveling abroad, you and yourself. If you say something, you have to oppose it yourself, because probably no one within a radius of a few kilometers knows Farsi to continue the discussion. In short, I took a selfie and went to the area, but I didn’t take the elevator because it was expensive. Then I decided to walk back, it was almost a three-hour walk, but seeing the people and their lifestyles and the right and wrong analyzes that went through my head made me forget everything.

The weather is almost cold, the city is quiet, there is a lot of yellow light everywhere. Every now and then the sound of some young people can be heard laughing loudly in some cafe.

There are also cardboard sleeping immigrants all over the city, I didn’t expect this anymore, it’s like I’m seeing it little by little, I mean, I’m now realizing that in these two or three days, I only saw beauties, and this was the first cardboard sleeping that I saw, as if my body was hot and I didn’t realize it. Along with all the beauty that this city has, there is also this. In the following days, I went to the suburbs. It was full of Halabi Abad around Paris, mostly Muslim Arabs. There are a lot of Arab immigrants in Paris, most of them have sandwich shops with halal written on the front.

There, I understood how the media, the world’s largest imaging device, works. A device that swallows billions of dollars every day must be functional. If he wants to show pictures of the suburbs of Paris or portray the issue of poverty in Paris, he will not have so many tourists. This is why they came up with the idea of ​​the suburbs so that the poor are not in the center of the city and the center of attention of tourists. Probably, in the future, poverty will be removed from the society and become a separate area, just as the modern architecture and urban planning removed the cemetery from the city so that people do not have to worry about death, or a mental hospital where unusual people, a new order is designed. do not disturb This discussion may be long, it is better to go back to the trip.

I’m going to the Louvre tomorrow, I remember the movie The Da Vinci Code, I didn’t know there was a glass pyramid outside the Louvre, I just knew Mona Lisa was there. what a queue A long line for the Louvre Museum. I walk around the grounds, take pictures and come back. I don’t want to go to the museum. I think the people on the street are much more attractive. I’m going to Perlashes cemetery. where Gholamhossein Saedi and Sadegh Hedayat were buried. In a part of the cemetery, the graves were inside the wall. Probably, their ashes were placed inside the wall. Each grave was almost a square of twenty centimeters by twenty centimeters in the wall.

Once when I left the hostel to go shopping, when I was near the store, my hand reached into my pocket and I saw that I didn’t have any money. It hit me dry in the middle of the street. I brought all my money with me because the hostel didn’t seem safe at all and no credit card works there, and I said to myself that I was miserable. Now how can I return to Iran, at that moment one doesn’t think right, later I realized that nothing special happened, but at that moment I was very scared, maybe the foreignness was what scared me, that all these people are strangers and they don’t help me, I can’t even talk to them. Even though they are really one of the best people I met in Paris, when you say hello, they answer with a smile, when you ask for an address, they say it so accurately and long that you feel ashamed, it doesn’t matter what your skin color is, maybe all this is because the city is a tourist, but it doesn’t matter in any case It’s like this. I had put the money in the secret pocket of my jacket and it had turned around and I didn’t realize it was there.

At the beginning of the trip, I remember that they forced me to buy a return ticket at the airport, and I told Hamid to get the ticket for me, we are dealing with this Hamid. On the night of the ceremony, I wore a turtleneck and jeans because of my love for Steve Jobs. I arrived a little late, MKD Hall, in the north of the city. Red carpet? I don’t believe this anymore, but it was. Maybe because I arrived a little late, everyone was on the red carpet with their photographers and no one was paying attention to me. I went to the hall, what a crowd!

Little by little, the ceremony was starting and I made my way to the amphitheater one by one. I went to the front rows, where the director was covered with paper. The closest image I had of this situation was our own Fajr festival. The screening of films began. Nearly thirty one-minute short films for such a small festival, the closing costs seemed a bit high. We saw the summary of the films and the film Manam, which was considered a comedy, was broadcast and people laughed and clapped. This was my first experience of the live reaction of my audience in the hall. That is the audience that we do not understand each other’s language at all.

It’s time for the prize. I also forgot to say that I knew I was going to win an award. When I was in Iran and my film was accepted. I emailed them that I don’t have money, I can’t come, well, I was a student and I had been able to buy a house with Hamid by force and I didn’t have money for travel. They also emailed me to come sir, of course they spoke in English and with their own literature. I said I really can’t. Saying, “Come, we will pay for your return trip, but you have to come here so that we can give you cash. We cannot transfer.” I also wondered why they took so much that they didn’t come back. We are geniuses of something in filmmaking that we don’t know about. Then the whole e-mail was like I’m telling you but don’t tell anyone, I said ok, saying you’re going to get an award, sir, saying that the sugar in your heart melted. The minimum prize was three thousand euros. b

Let’s go back to the closing ceremony and the announcement of the awards from the end of YouTube’s commendation and the audience’s vote, the best male actor and the best female actress, and for now there is no news, and we reached the best screenplay, Call Me My Name. It’s a strange feeling, I had never won an award in any domestic festival, I had never participated, and now I was getting the best screenplay for a one-minute comedy film. In short, I went upstairs and thanked him. I came down with a lot of stress and a broken tongue. It’s time for the best director and to announce the name of Hamid. Yes, it is Hamid, my friend and roommate, as the best director. I have never seen anything so strange in my life.

Like me, Hamid had made a one-minute film and sent it, but he didn’t check his e-mail, he didn’t have the habit, and he didn’t know that he was invited. I calculated and saw that together we won six thousand euros. I will return to Iran and we will make a good short film together. Zahi Khayal put a hat on our head, of course, I think this is what he does to everyone, he says that we don’t have the conditions to transfer the money, we will find a producer in your country, he will give you this money, but he didn’t give it to us. When I came back, no matter how many calls and emails, he didn’t answer. I did not know where to complain. At the closing night, I should have realized that these are scammers because they said that Amber Heard was at the ceremony and she wasn’t. She had recorded a video and sent it, which I couldn’t come.

I called Hamid the next morning and told him this unfortunate news. I don’t know how upset he was, but if it were me, I would have been very upset. I also felt guilty that I came and he didn’t. In short, I had one or two more days until the ticket returned, and it went the same way as before, and the big day of the return arrived.

I collected my things and went to Chardogol airport where I came. I left almost two hours early so that there would be no problem. I arrived and showed the ticket where I should go in the queue. The lady said that this flight is not for this airport and you should go to Oghli airport. I froze right there, I’m sure that lady had been making Saddam for a quarter of an hour. I came to my senses and saw that Iqli airport was damaged. I remembered that morning at Imam airport when Hamid got the ticket. I don’t know whose fault it was, but I had almost two hours to get from, for example, Imam Airport to Mehrabad Airport, a similar distance, and after asking, I found out that the subway is the fastest route. Now, during this entire trip, no one had talked to us until now. A French servant of God, I don’t know where he came from, sat next to us and said that I am one of the introducers of young filmmakers to the big producers of the Cannes Festival. And every year I introduce at least one movie. He said and said and I was all aware of the fact that if I don’t get to the airport now, my flight money will go up, I don’t have money to buy a ticket.

It was enough for me to keep calm. To understand! When you didn’t arrive, you would call someone to get a ticket for you, just like what Hamid did, why didn’t you get this guy’s email? This was the worst loss of that trip, I have no way of communicating with him. I didn’t even ask his name, we really met in the wrong place, otherwise it was not unlikely that I would have made my feature film the following year or the year after that. I arrived at Ighli airport after about an hour and forty minutes. I only had ten minutes to catch the flight. The plane was gone and now I had to go back to Iran without the money back. For a hundredth of a second, it crossed my mind to stay here and live! But it remains the same. I got up, reached the Wi-Fi, borrowed money from someone. I called Hamid and told him the story, he took the return ticket for me because there was a ten-hour layover in Istanbul and I had to come. I returned to Chardogol and waited there for six hours until the flight. Then I went to Istanbul and slept in the prayer room. Then I came to Imam Airport and this trip with all its ups and downs was over for me.

I still miss Paris when I think about it, and I’m waiting for some excuse to go there again, the name of my movie was Scissors.

the end

July one thousand four hundred and one