A friend, during a conversation a few days before I arrived in Paris for nearly three-weeks with my wife (Licia) and a friend (Ann) who will be with us the first few days, described with childlike wonder and glee the pleasure she has been taking in designing and entering escape rooms—those playful spaces where you willingly allow yourself to be locked into a room with other people so you can all collaborate on how to escape in the shortest time possible from the seemingly exit-less room.
This is all far from my thoughts when, arriving at the flat where we will spend the first of our three weeks in Paris, we are met by the mother of the man who rents out the flat. She lovingly and patiently shows us around. As any good trainer-teacher-learner would do, she shows us how to get into the building and makes sure we understand how everything in the flat works. Reminds us that we haven’t a care in the world and shouldn’t do anything other than have fun while we are here. Then leaves us.
Everything is perfect for about five minutes. And then her brief, informal training session begins to fall apart. Because we are tired and don’t absorb everything she tries to teach us. And because she shows us how things work without taking time to make us practice what she demonstrated.
The fun begins when, after briefly settling in, we decide to take an early evening stroll and find a place for dinner. But we don’t even make it out the door of our flat on the premier étage—the first floor of flats, one level up from the narrow shop-lined street with multi-story buildings featuring shutters and grill-work on the balconies—before we begin to stumble. Walking toward the elevator, we look—initially unsuccessfully—for the stairway she used while we brought our suitcases up in the elevator. All the doors initially look the same through my weary eyes. All seem to be entrances to other flats. It is only when the doors to the elevator are closing and my field of vision is forcibly narrowed that I realize the door across from the elevator—which I had assumed led to a flat since it had a number “1” posted on it—actually was quite different in appearance from the others (plain rather than ornately decorated as the others are, so much so that I really hadn’t seen anything other than the number before visually searching for an entrance to the stairs). So I step back out of the elevator. Look to see what is behind Door #1. And voilà! There they are: that hidden-in-plain-sight spiral staircase, descending into darkness. (Reminder to self: when working with learners, be sure to overtly draw attention to the subtle clues that help them remember what they are struggling to absorb. They might be as tired as someone who has just stepped off a cross-Atlantic flight and might not be operating at full capacity.)
The adventure in learning-a-new-environment while somewhat exhausted—not the best of conditions for any training-teaching-learning situation—is far from over. Stepping into that dark stairwell, I am unable to activate the wall switch to throw some light onto the situation, so abandon this part of the journey and gladly rejoin Ann and Licia for a quick ride down to the lobby. Exiting the elevator and now in full-alert mode, I begin looking for other hidden traps. Like the one that is immediately visible when we look from the small elevator lobby toward two consecutive sets of glass doors that separate us from the street—and we have no idea now to open the first set, which leads into a space created by walls to our left and right and those two glass doors forming a small perfectly square room with mailboxes between where we are standing and where our destination—the street in front of the building—is. It immediately becomes worse: we realize that even if we were to figure out how to open the glass door leading into the miniature lobby with the mailboxes, we have no assurance we would be able to reopen it to get back to the elevator or open the door that finally provides access to the street.
We stop. We look for options. We are stumped. Our only tools are the key to our flat and the small fob that is supposed to open doors like the ones we are contemplating. But we see no mechanism against which we can place the fob to unlock the doors. We try pointing the fob everywhere possible since there doesn’t seem to be a button to press on the fob to active it. We try pressing it against everything that looks like it might be activated by a fob—small white squares on the wall, the handles to the door, even the glass doors themselves.
Nothing.
We start pressing anything that looks like it might unlock the first of the glass doors.
Nothing.
And finally, out of sheer desperation, I begin running my fingers over the small white squares on the wall next to the interior glass window. And finally feel what my eyes were not perceiving: one of the squares has a very small lip along its bottom…which allows me to use my fingers to lightly press down on it and release the heretofore unperceived switch.
But now I’m really cautious. Apprehensive, And—admittedly—a bit excited by the challenge, for it’s clear to me that if we step into that middle glassed in space without identifying the release mechanisms—we could easily become trapped in that glass escape room, unable to re-enter the elevator lobby or exit to the street-until someone else came along to release us from captivity.
“OK,” I say with far less assurance than I am feeling, “let’s figure this out before we let that inner door close. You stay in the elevator lobby so you can hit the release switch if I can’t find my way out of the next room.”
This, of course, is not going to be easy; finding the solution to an escape room never is. I try everything—obviously looking for a similar white square that could be lifted from the bottom to release a hidden-from-view latch. Tapping the fob against everything that looks like a potential recipient for a signal from a fob. But to no avail. At which point we agree that Licia and Ann will go back to our flat to try to call the owner for a refresher lesson in Escape-From-Your-Building 101 while I continue trying to find a way out of our situation. And just when I’m assuming we’re going to spend the rest of the evening in our flat rather than on the streets of Paris, I notice a small black circular object on a wall-mounted intercom fixture next to the set of mailboxes. Which, of course, has a barely visible red light in its center. And which turns green and releases the latch back into the elevator lobby when I press the fob firmly against it. Which suggests that if I find a similar black circular object close to the door leading out to the street, I might be on the verge of finding the escape the three of us have been seeking.
When Licia and Ann return to the lobby without having yet managed to reach either of our potential rescuers, I proudly show them what had been quickly shown to us earlier this evening and just as quickly forgotten in the overload of information—the path to dinner.
It’s been a very long journey. And the evening is just beginning. Licia and I are ready to move. Ann, understandably exhausted and unnerved by all has happened since we arrived, decides to stay in for the evening. So Licia and I venture out. Find a charming market where we buy the basics for the breakfast we plan to prepare the next morning. Return to the flat to make sure Ann has comfortably settled in for the evening. Then, like the lifelong learners we are, we set out in search of a meal and a re-introduction to a city that neither of us has seen for more than two decades.
NB: This is the first in a series of reflections on traveling and learning in Paris.
Building Creative Bridges 