October 22, 2020
On the final day of the trip, Nigel met with his old college friend Mina Alessandri in the Jardin du Luxembourg, behind the Palais du Luxembourg, before leaving Paris for good. Mina is American and married to a Frenchman, but like Nigel’s friend Eryk in Poland, has had experiences having children both in New York and France. Similar to Eryk’s family’s experience with childbirth — and consistent with what we learned throughout the trip about European healthcare systems — she agreed that the French system was far more caring and patient centric. However, when discussing what healthcare needs were not being adequately addressed, she brought up mental health, a subject raised by a number of our interview subjects, as well as in person-on-the-street interviews.
After that last interview, we headed over to the Eiffel Tower and through the surprisingly scary Arc de Triomphe and captured some hero shots before heading back to Calais, the Channel Tunnel, and ultimately the United Kingdom.
After reconnecting, we took the Blackwall Tunnel under the Thames into central London. We started getting excited just as we were coming back to the Trafalgar area, where you come out of the tunnel and suddenly you’ve got all these huge, glistening, silver skyscrapers — the Swiss Re Building and the London Eye — as a backdrop to the Tower of London. It’s a brilliant juxtaposition of the old and the new, and it’s quite dramatic, but it also felt like a suitable bookend for the entire journey.
We headed down Trafalgar and turned left toward the Mall, passing Buckingham Palace before meeting up with our old colleague Haig Armaghanian of Haig Barrett and his film crew for a mini-interview at the same spot where we began our journey 25 days earlier. We opened some bottles of champagne, before retiring to the Mitre Hotel for a couple hours of debriefing before ending the night — and the trip.
THE TEAM MET WITH:
Haig Armaghanian and Sarah Flindall, Haig Barrett
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