It Took Me One Coffee to Understand Paris

I kept thinking today about the purpose of this blog and why I feel this need to write something. A part of me has become almost addicted to it and would like to write to you every single day. But I wonder whether daily posts would eventually lose some of their substance, some of their purpose.

Today, I decided to go back in time and tell you stories from my life and my childhood. Maybe that’s a good way to get to know someone. I know I would enjoy reading stories from other people’s lives.

The question is: which story should I tell you?

In the 40 years I’ve lived, there have certainly been enough moments worth telling. But how do you choose the first one? Maybe one of the first stories worth telling is how I ended up in France, in Paris, for the very first time.

It happened at the end of 2010, after I won a competition organized by a French radio station. My wife had entered my name without me knowing. So not only did I have no idea there was going to be a draw, but out of ten possible trips to France, I somehow ended up with Paris.

A lot of people would probably have loved to have that kind of luck.

My wife took the responsibility of showing me the city very seriously. Our entire trip was just one weekend, from Friday to Sunday. As we all know, Paris is a big city. How exactly are you supposed to see everything in just a couple of days? We couldn’t. But I can assure you that we tried. First of all, it was my first flight.

I hated it then, and I still hate flying today. For one thing, I’m a control freak, and I don’t like my life depending on someone else. Coming from a hospital environment, I know very well what it means for a human being to be pushed to the limit.

I remember working 24-hour shifts in Minden that seemed as if they would never end. We would enter the operating theatre in the morning and provide anesthesia for everything scheduled that day. Each anesthesiologist was assigned an operating room and was responsible for it. At 4 p.m., the on-call shift officially began, and from that point onward only cases considered urgent were supposed to go into surgery.

The problem was that, somehow, by 4 p.m. the surgeons usually managed to accumulate enough cases to keep the operating rooms running until 10 or 11 at night.

So from the very beginning, we knew that no matter what we did, we weren’t getting out of there before midnight. And by the time we managed to finish the existing cases, new emergencies had arrived. Often, there was only one hour during the entire night when I had absolutely nothing to do. I used it to take a shower. Somehow it always refreshed me, and I preferred feeling fresh and changing my clothes to sleeping for an hour.

Eventually, I developed my own routine.

Before getting into the shower, I would call the delivery room. “Do you have anything for us? Anything unclear? I’m asking because I don’t want to come running with soap all over me!”

Once my colleagues gave me the green light, I knew it would probably remain valid for the next ten minutes.

Most nights, the intense hours would finally begin to ease around 5 a.m.—assuming we had managed to avoid emergency C-sections during the night. At around five, the road accidents would start coming in. Most often motorcyclists who apparently hadn’t had enough coffee yet to notice a pothole or some other obstacle. Or elderly patients waking up with a stroke.

Either way, it meant more work—either in the operating room or in radiology. The problem was that I could feel my abilities declining as the hours passed. Fortunately, I was always able to do my job without problems, and I never heard of any of my colleagues making a serious mistake because of exhaustion.

But I was always aware of it. Toward the morning, I would catch myself checking simple things again and again. I never really understood how we were legally allowed to work that many hours in a row. If it was obvious that we were actively working for at least 16 hours, then perhaps the entire on-call system should have been changed. If a truck driver is required to rest after a certain number of hours, why is a doctor allowed to work for 24 hours?

And it’s not that we couldn’t do it physically or mentally. We all proved that we could. But legally? How can society expect someone at five in the morning, after already working for 22 hours without a real break, to have the same reflexes and the same ability to think as someone who is well rested?

Because I know what exhaustion feels like, I understand that the same thing can happen to airline pilots. After all, I haven’t exactly heard airlines rushing to improve working conditions. I’m sure pilots are under pressure when it comes to their flying hours as well. And at the same time, life happens. A pilot may finish his scheduled flying time and officially be off duty, but then drive another hour home, where his wife and children are waiting for him, together with everything else that comes with normal life.

So that long-awaited moment of rest probably doesn’t begin instantly. It’s entirely possible that our pilot returns to work almost as tired as when he left.

I’ve made quite a detour here. I hope you’re still able to follow the story. I just wanted to explain why I don’t like flying. In short, one thing I learned as an anesthesiologist is that you have to trust the machines and technology around you. And although it may be difficult to accept, people make mistakes. Machines fail much less often.

So, back to Paris. For me, the trip started badly: with a flight. Once we landed, a new kind of ordeal began. My wife was so excited to show me the city that she tried to compress the six months she had spent in Paris into two days. And so we ran. From the Louvre to the Opera. From Les Invalides to La Défense. The Eiffel Tower, the Champs-Élysées, Galeries Lafayette.

Although we saw a lot, only a few memories have truly stayed with me.

One of them is just how many steps there are to climb in Montmartre. My first encounter with Paris—and therefore with France—was a catastrophe. I was miserable, exhausted, and my legs hurt terribly. By Saturday evening, I had started to believe that both the city and the trip were some kind of curse. Paris had been romanticized so much, and I simply couldn’t understand why. I remember how happy I was on Saturday evening knowing that the next day we would be flying home. Clearly, France and Paris were not for me.

The next morning, after checking out of the hotel, we decided to look for a boulangerie and have a coffee. I think there must have been something hidden in that coffee. The streets were empty. It was Sunday, and somehow all the chaos had disappeared. We were almost alone outside. It was the perfect contradiction: a busy city that seemed to run at full speed 24/7 had somehow stopped. It was nine in the morning, and we were alone in the streets.

Slowly, I started paying attention to the architecture of the buildings, the narrow streets and the strange way they seemed to be positioned. Somehow, everything had a certain charm after all. On a street corner, we found a small neighborhood boulangerie and bought a sandwich. Even today, I remember how fresh the bread was. It had been made that morning and was still warm. It had absolutely nothing in common with the food we had eaten during the previous couple of days.

It was obvious. We were no longer in the tourist areas. This was my first real encounter with France. From there, we went to a café and had a coffee. All I remember is that by the time I finished it, I no longer wanted to leave Paris. Somehow, in that cup of coffee and that sandwich made with a fresh baguette, everything had charm. Everything had a purpose. Even the man in the neighboring building whom I had been able to watch taking a shower from our hotel room no longer seemed stupid or bizarre to me. The buildings were so close together that I could almost have offered him a bar of soap.

I had felt that same sense of being squeezed together in the café. Apparently everyone else was perfectly relaxed. I was the only one who felt as though I needed more space. But slowly, all those feelings began to fade. I was starting to see the charm of the city.

Now that I live in Colmar, I’m beginning to understand the French. For a long time, I thought they were nationalistic, constantly pushing the “Made in France” label. I always wondered why anyone would believe that a Renault or a Citroën was better than a Mercedes or a BMW. Why do so many French people buy French cars?

The answer is ridiculously simple. For the same reason they buy French products: to support their own economy. Think about the sheer range of industries France covers—from wine and perfume to cars, machinery, and military technology. France is capable of sustaining its own agriculture and, if necessary, building its own trucks to transport its goods—just look at Renault Trucks—as well as defending its own strategic interests militarily.

It is one of the very few European countries with its own nuclear capability and a very high degree of strategic autonomy. The United Kingdom, by comparison, still depends on the United States for certain critical components of its nuclear system.

In a world in which the United States seems increasingly unpredictable, a mentality built around independence and self-sufficiency doesn’t seem like such a bad strategy after all.

I hope you can still follow my somewhat distorted train of thought as it jumps from one idea to another. In my defense, it is two in the morning.