Asher Kaufman, age 18, set out on June 28 for a yearlong trip to help spread the Children's Rosary in Europe and Africa. He has been spending the months of July, August and the first two weeks in September in France. He grew up helping the Children's Rosary and participating in it. He now is helping to spread the Children's Rosary to more parishes and schools. He is also discerning a vocation to the priesthood and has applied to the seminary through the Archdiocese of Hartford. Please keep both his trip and his vocation in your prayers. He has been sharing dispatches from the trip.
"As I reflect on my time in Paris, I realized I did not spend much time talking about the mundane elements of life in the French capital.
Before coming here, I had heard from various people that the city was nearly dead in August; that is to say, the Parisians empty out to go on vacation, and only the tourists remain. This turned out to be quite true, and it led to a few very interesting consequences.
First of all, it helped me to realize just how seriously people in France take vacation time. In France, it is legally mandated for employers to furnish their employees with five weeks of vacation at a minimum. It seems to be a tradition to take a large chunk of this time off in August; hence, the emptying out of Paris that I mentioned before. One example of the result came one night when I finished with a Church activity that I was helping with very late, near midnight; I had not eaten, so I found a place not far from the student residence that was still open. I took the metro from the part of the city where I was back towards the restaurant only to find it dark and a small handwritten sign in the window, "Closed for vacation until the twenty-fifth; have a wonderful summer." And this was not the only place like this; far from it. I saw all sorts of shops, restaurants, and even a Bose store that were similarly shuttered for leisure.
However, when it comes to the public transit, the vacations are another story. As you might imagine, the flood of tourists to Paris does not slow down in August, and it seems to be a time when the city takes the liberty of shutting down some metro lines for repair work.
The bus that I would take to Fr. Duloisy's parish where I worked would get almost unbelievably full in the late afternoon when I would head over for the evening Mass. With each stop, perhaps one or two people would get off and five to ten people would get on. Very quickly, all the seats were taken, and there were many of us standing in the aisles and next to the doors. Soon, we were standing shoulder to shoulder. Soon, we were physically jammed in, one against the other. It was like a process of slow suffocation, one bus stop at a time. I would count the stops: Porte de Passy, Raffet, Longchamp...until Porte Dauphine when three quarters of the people would leave to get on a tram that also stopped there.
One time, when the bus was particularly full, I began to wonder whether there was a legal limit to just how many people you could pack onto a bus like this without it becoming unsafe. Just then, we pulled up to a stop with ten to fifteen people waiting to get on. "Oh, please," I thought, "Surely the driver is doing to put up his hand, tell them he's sorry but that the bus is just too full to accommodate more people. We're already pretty much pushed against each other; there's nowhere else to go." However, to my surprise and chagrin, the driver opened up the doors without a second's hesitation, and everyone flooded on; somehow, they all fit.
Another time, I had to take the metro from Fr. Duloisy's parish to go downtown, and it had been shut down there for work, so a bus replacement had been set up. The problem, as I quickly realized, was that while a metro was six or seven cars long, a bus was not nearly as big. As the bus pulled up, I realized that this vehicle was so full of humans I might want to consider another means of transport. In the end, I walked the distance to where the metro was open because the bus was so packed, I physically could not fit onboard. I include a picture of this bus. 
For somebody like me who did not grow up in some enormous metropolis like New York, Los Angeles, London or Paris, this whole experience of taking overcrowded buses was quite new.
Nevertheless, these little inconveniences had their own sort of charm, and they are parts of life in Paris that I will not forget, any more than the beautiful churches or endless museums."
To see all of Asher's dispatches from his journey click HERE
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