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  7 - My first day in Paris

  I planned to spend my first day in Paris walking along the Champs-Elysees. Of all places, this fine avenue lined with chestnut trees has a lot of appeal for me, perhaps because of the song, for one thing, Oh! Champs-Elysees, which is familiar to us and also I play the tune on my 尺八. I hoped I might find some chance to play to entertain people and thus become friendly with them. 

  However, there seems to exist somewhere something all the time that dictates my course otherwise. 

  Getting out of the hotel, I walked a while to get to the metro station `Blanche` on the line no. 2, and was already lost. A disoriented Oriental old man, I just stood in the middle of the sidewalk wondering, then, there came walking toward me a French lady apparently in her early forties, who responded smiling to an old Japanese man's asking for help. Moreover, she was kind enough to go back her way to a crossroads where I made a wrong turn.

  I thanked her and about to say good-bye, when she came up with a question in English - "What does `Kon-nichi-wa` mean?".

  Caught a bit off-guard, I instantly answered "aujourd'hui" unthinkingly as the word "Kon-nich-wa" popped into my head in Chinese characters, namely, 今日は, which can also be pronounced - Kijau, Kyou, or, Kyoo, sorry I don't know phonetics, but anyway, the word means today, viz., aujourd'hui in French. "Aujourd'hui !" She exclaimed right after me. Obviously, she'd expected some totally different French word that was eqivalent to "Kon-nich-wa". 

  She was right, After all, the answer should've been "Bonjour".

  Realizing my mistake after parting with her,  I hurried back to correct myself, but she was nowhere to be seen any more. 

  This is the first of many a regret brought about by mistakes I've made in Paris. She was ineterested in Japan, in a way, through the expression for greetins and I'd had her misunderstand by giving her a wrong answer. Now, I only hope that sometime later by some chance she would've got it right and understood that the old man from Japan was mistaken. Thinking this way, I can feel a little relieved.