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The next and last destination for our two-week trip was France. There were so many places to see. On the first day, we visited the Eiffel Tower, the Avenue des Champs-Elysees, the Arc de Triomphe, Notre-Dame de Paris and Montmartre. My mother wanted to have some coffee at a small cafe in Montmartre. I joined her and had a freshly baked crepe. It was undoubtedly the best crepe I’d ever had. We were sitting at the counter and the next to her was a French man. Although she didn’t speak any foreign language and he was a stranger, she started talking to the man in Japanese. He didn’t understand Japanese but they chatted merrily in some way. During the trip, I often saw her do this without hesitation and realized how much she liked talking to a foreign man. In the evening, we went to the Moulin Rouge. I’d heard that it was a historic theater and the revue was famous, but I found their revue was a leg show of half-naked women. My friend geeky king, a junior high student in the same tour group, was at the table next to us and he had a nosebleed soon after the revue started. He seemed unable to stop it and kept coming and going between his table and the bathroom during the whole revue. Then our tour group had dinner together at a Japanese restaurant. At first, I didn’t see any point in eating Japanese food after coming all the way to France. But as it turned out, that dinner was the first meal I ate up completely since I landed on Europe. My usual appetite hadn’t come back until this dinner, which meant I’d lost it for almost the entire trip. I preferred Western food all my life, and yet, when I had an opportunity to live on authentic Western food, it was Japanese food that restored my appetite. While I longed for Western culture and imitated Western ways of living, my stomach was stubbornly Japanese…
