In this picture, I enjoy the way the ominous sky seems pierced through by an equally ominous font. Considering this sign appears at the top of a stairway going underground, the entire mood here seems to match the feeling one might get looking into the unfamiliar abyss of the Paris underground. The bright orange glow of the accompanying lamp post seems to indicate even further warning.

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The Eiffel Tour

When you travel the world, you come home with lots of good stuff. There are people that amass refrigerator magnets. There are people that collect jewelry. The most “hard core” travelers will scoff and lecture you on the difference between being a traveler and being a tourist. Theoretically, souvenirs fall into the “tourism” category- the less cool category.

Well I have an embarrassing thing to admit to all of you: I collect Hard Rock Cafe glasses. I find this embarrassing because HRC’s tend to be the most cliche of travel stops. Why for instance, while traveling in Prague and surrounded by incredible culture and food, would you stop into a greasy American hamburger joint laden with rock star memorabilia?

My answer is simple: because the Hard Rock Cafe is what introduced me to the idea of travel to begin with. Some people have maps with dots that show where they’ve been around the world. Well before I had a passport, my first travel collection was a set of Pilsner glasses from San Francisco, New York, and other American cities I randomly got to visit through school trips or mini vacations. I thought it was so cool that I had souvenirs that were a testament to the fact that I had been somewhere other than here.

I’ve since embraced the idea of travel maps, I have a growing collection of puppets from around the planet, and now collect other more meaningful memorabilia that actually reminds me of the indigenous goods that are made in the incredible places that I’ve been lucky enough to visit around the world. However, through my high school graduation trip to Europe (which was only my second international venture), the Hard Rock Cafe glasses were still important proof that I had in fact been where I told people I was going.

Le Moulin Rouge in Gay Paris

After the summer of 2001, when the high school graduation trip was complete, I had three new glasses to add to my collection: Barcelona, Firenze (Florence), and Paris. My collection had gone international! Imagine my disappointment when I opened my suitcase upon my return from the trip and discovered that my Paris Pilsner had been shattered on the airplane (this was of course before I knew anything about packing). And thinking back, I had also accidentally slept through the tour of the Eiffel Tour. All in all, I felt I had not done Paris any justice.

The feeling of failure doesn’t sit well with me, so I always said that I had to go back to Paris. That I had to scale the Eiffel Tour and I had to replace my broken Pilsner. I said it for so long that I actually added the item to my “Life To Do List;” #20: Return to Paris (Scale the Eiffel Tower & replace Broken Hard Rock glass). I guess I was hoping that I’d somehow manifest a trip to Europe in the next five years.

Instead, my best friend and I had suddenly booked a trip to Nepal to shoot our documentary about the Unatti Girls. She joked about also wanting to go to Italy. I told her about my need to return to Paris at some point. I teasingly suggested that since we were already over there (there being over an Ocean but in fact, nowhere near Europe), we might as well add a month of travel and go backpacking from Italy to France after shooting the documentary. Why not, right? And then all of a sudden we were booking tickets from Nepal to Italy, with an unexpected stopover in India.

Striking a pose at the Hard Rock Prague

Once arriving in Europe, I added a couple of shot glasses to my Hard Rock collection when we were in Venice, Prague, and Amsterdam. We always happened upon the HRC’s, even when we weren’t looking, and once there, I couldn’t fight my ingrained urge to collect. Not to mention, the Hard Rock Cafe is one of the only places I got to eat avocado when I was in Europe… and I love me some avocado.

When we got to Paris, getting that darn glass was just as important to me as scaling L’ Tour Eiffel. But after a few days, I forgot about the Hard Rock and became entranced by the beauty that is Paris in the wintertime. The day before we were set to head back to the States, I was having a miserable evening after purchasing a new pair of shoes (having worn the same pair for two months straight). We declined to follow our good friend Dorit to the next stop on the party train and instead searched for the nearest subway stop to get back to our hotel and soak my poor miserable feet. Wouldn’t you know it that the closest subway station was smack dab in front of the very same Hard Rock Cafe I had been in almost 10 years ago! I call it Fate.

Call it silly, but I was extremely excited to get that glass. I was stoked that I had written down a goal over a year ago and that suddenly I was in Paris, had scaled the Eiffel Tour, and was soon headed back to my home in Los Angeles with new glasses to add to the very collection that had ignited my desire to travel so long ago. Embarrassing habit or not, my devotion to the Hard Rock Cafe collection literally landed me Back in Paris, so I guess it’s not a bad collection to have.

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