Good Timing Enhances Trip to Paris and London

by Tim Young

From SIF SATELLITE 48, Fall 1997

Sometimes good timing is a matter of luck. Just ask Yumiko Sato; she and her friend Masami Maruyama planned a trip to London and Paris that happened to begin on September 6-the day of Princess Diana's funeral. This was good timing because they could see for themselves the outpouring of emotion that most of us only saw on TV.

Arriving at London's Heathrow Airport that Saturday, they then changed planes and headed for Paris. There they saw the tunnel where the tragic accident had occurred a week before, but only from a distance; she showed me the photo she took. "I walked here to take pictures, and some police said, 'Don't take any pictures...' " Is Yumiko a paparazzi?

Yumiko, a native of Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture, says she saw a lot of flowers and people outside the tunnel, but this was nothing compared to what she and Masami found in London several days later. Her photo shows a sea of flowers outside Diana's last home, Kensington Palace; bouquet after bouquet, as far as the eye can see. This photo becomes all the more staggering when you realize that Yumiko did not squat down to take this photo; the poetry-adorned bouquets in the foreground are at eye level! Bouquet upon bouquet had simply piled up so that, by ten days after her death, the floral ocean had almost reached Yumiko's height of 158 cm. No wonder so many people were impressed by the outpouring of emotion following Diana's death.

In addition to the sea of flowers and poetry at Kensington Palace, Yumiko recalls being impressed by the number of teddy bears that had been placed there in memory of Diana; she felt that the teddy bears were "very like England." Many of the flowers had been bought from entrepreneurial florists near the train station; Yumiko characterizes the scene at the station as resembling a Japanese train station "after a baseball game finished."

Of course, our two travelers did not set out on a Diana pilgrimage; this was a vacation. They saw many of the usual sights in Paris, such as the Seine River, Napoleon Bonaparte's gigantic tomb, and the Eiffel Tower.

Inevitably, there were linguistic problems, particularly since neither Yumiko nor her friend knew French beyond a few useful words. "We couldn't speak French, just "oui", "no" "combien", how much, and "bonjour", only four words, so it's very difficult to go around. I wanted to buy a strip of ten train tickets, [kaisuken in Japanese], but I didn't know the word, so I pointed out, 'this, this, this', and the people selling tickets laughed," she recalls. While in this particular case she did sense some of the parochialism that the French are reputed to have, she hastens to add, "other French were much nicer than British!"

She recalls an incident that occurred while they were shopping in Paris. "I tried to speak French, 'combien', or something, and the saleslady thought I could speak French! So she started speaking French very fast, and I couldn't understand the meaning." She didn't even know how to say, "I can't speak French!" Of course, many things can be communicated through pantomime. She laughs as she recalls that, in a drug store, she acted out putting eye drops into her eyes to communicate, successfully, what she wanted to buy. "I thought, it's the same action when you put in eye drops, all over the world! And I was relieved."

Yumiko pg 2

Travel & Culture Home