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Thursday, November 5, 2009
9:50 p.m.
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All right — with apologies for the continued delay, as promised, here's the conclusion of my super-long write-up of my trip to Paris last weekend. It left off with me going back to the hostel to sleep Saturday night, and then Sunday I already discussed part of in my moody post two back. After the Orsay fiasco, which left me sullen and dripping on some random Parisian boulevard with five hours to waste, I headed off in the right direction to make good on a vague idea to see the Jardins de Luxembourg, but two-thirds of the way there I got so tired of walking and being wet (and finding restaurants whose tea was all above €5) that I ducked into any old metro station and decided to play a little mathematical game. Using the Fibonacci sequence as a random number generator, I decided that each left or right turn in a metro station hallway would be decided by the parity of the next Fibonacci number, which would lead me to a platform on a metro line, where I'd get on the train. Then, starting with the 3, I'd ride a number of transfer stations equal to the next digit of pi, where I'd get off and repeat the process again by using Fibonacci to navigate me to the next metro line and platform. Theoretically, you're only supposed to use a single metro ticket for up to an hour on a one-way journey, but they don't seem to check those things, and you can continue making a "one-way" trip by changing trains forever as long as you don't step outside the turnstiles. Unfortunately, my brilliant plan ran afoul immediately because my first hop put me at a mismarked "transfer" station on the 10 line where the only transfer was to take the 10 back in the other direction. Following that, I was then directed to the 8 line, where I got on in a direction where there weren't any more transfer stations. After I tried to abort by getting off at a one-way platform where turning around would have meant using a new ticket, I kind of lost my nerve and just took the trains more directly to the Père Lachaise cemetery. In doing so I passed up a chance to ride on the interestingly named 3bis line (bis in French is like "A" in English, like "Exit 8A" or whatever), but I got to see something new above ground instead. Parisian cemeteries are no different from the rest of the city: unimaginable population density. The style here seems to prefer above-ground mortuaries above below-ground graves, so walking through Père Lachaise felt to me a lot like wandering the corridors of a giant hotel. A weird hotel, certainly, because the rooms are labeled with things like "Famille Duvalier" carved in stone, and the floors aren't really floors so much as a succession of angled ramps and stairways, but that latter characteristic makes for some really interesting pictures. I didn't take too many due to the rain on one end and a certain feeling I have on the other that says it's a bit incorrect to do tourist things in a sacred resting place for the dead, but I walked around for a while until it started to get dark. I had promised myself a very low-budget day after blowing so much on food Saturday, but then I decided that I kind of wanted to eat at La Terrasse again. (It was where we had all three of our Paris dinners in 2000, and the waiter or the manager gave my friend Devin a free chocolate mousse on the third night after she'd managed a long conversation in French with him about how she wasn't feeling so well.) I was down to my last two metro tickets, and La Terrasse was neither near the hostel nor near the train station, so in order to make everything work out I had to walk back to the hostel from Père Lachaise. Not a bad walk, though. I retrieved all my stuff from the hostel, then took the metro to La Terrasse, which is nice because if you follow the avenue Bosquet exit from the École Militaire stop, you end up about six feet from the restaurant door. The place seems to have changed somewhat. I have this impression, from 2000, of a large open area, open to the outside too, with a number of long tables. What I found this weekend was an enclosed, fancy-looking dining room with just the usual narrow strip of tables under an awning out front. It seemed silly not to sit on the terrace at La Terrasse, so I asked the waiter for a place outside. He seemed very intent on serving me something to drink, appearing quite unbelieving when I only asked for tap water. ("Que ça?") Then, when he left me to sit out in the rain for more than 10 minutes without bringing either the water or a menu, I started to wonder if I was being given the idiot and cheap foreigner treatment as penalty for not attacking things in the proper French spirit of starting off with an apéritif. I starting thinking about just walking out, since I wasn't going to sit there all night with the staff inside laughing at me, but then I realized that no one else outside was eating dinner — they were only stopping by for drinks or hot chocolate or snacks. Which led, of course, to the realization that my American meal times don't translate so well over here, so the thought probably never even entered my waiter's head that I was there for a meal. And of course it would be pretty unbelievable, working from his point of view under the assumption that I was coming for a mid-afternoon drink, to only ask for tap water. The next time he came back to serve two ladies who were sitting next to me, I corralled him and asked for a menu, which I hope had the effect of setting the record straight. And I sort of implicitly excused myself for failing at French cultural norms by explaining that I was in a bit of a hurry because I had a train at 8:00 at the Gare de Lyon. (I bumped up the real time of the train by half an hour, just in case, since I'd only come in at 6:00.) In the end, my €13 cheeseburger and fries was pretty good, although I don't know if I'd go back given the chance. It's not really what I remember. My car of the Sunday night direct train from Paris to Grenoble was almost completely full — a lot of students, like me, running up for the weekend and taking the last train home, although some of them had some pretty large suitcases. I got wedged against the window in a square of four, and the guy between me and the aisle fell asleep such that I had to time my escape to the bathroom for one of the intervals when he was awake for a few seconds. I have to say that I'm not a fan of this square seating (a pair of seats facing another pair of two seats across a fold-out table). I suppose it'd be ideal if you're traveling with a few friends, but when you're by yourself it just means that everyone's legs are vying for the same bit of floor space, and no matter where you look you're looking right at someone and making them wonder why the creepy guy with the weird hair is staring at them so much. At night you have the same problem even if you look out of the window: it's totally black, and the train is well-lit, so all you see is the reflection of some guy on the other side of the train... who immediately starts to wonder why the creepy guy with the weird hair is staring at him so much in the window. I tried to read a lot of the way back. |
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
11:13 p.m.
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I still have to say something about the rest of my time in Paris before my next trip comes up (this weekend) and I end up with too many new things to write about. I took an 8:05 p.m. train from Grenoble on Friday night, then, and got to the Gare de Lyon around 11:35. I didn't feel like buying a metro ticket, so I just walked the half-hour or so to my hostel near the Place de la République. Even though a fair number of people were still out partying and eating and drinking — I know this also because a group of three horrible Americans came into my hostel room at some awful time of the night, talking at full volume and browsing Facebook — I was still kind of wary of them because I looked like an obvious import with my backpack on one end and my giant camera bag on the other. I stayed at the HI "Jules Ferry" hostel, which had some pretty awful reviews online but which seemed just fine for me. It may be because I speak French, and one thing I'm definitely noticing here in France is that I often feel like I get more privy information or more preferential treatment than the English-only types as a result. Not, however, the case with those horrible American tourists I mentioned a minute ago. I figured, since they came in drunkenly at 2 a.m. or whatever, that they'd sleep the whole morning, but no: before 7 a.m. they were up again banging around, running water, talking, and generally acting like there weren't three other people in the room. Well, it meant I got a very early start to Saturday, being out by 8:30. I bought a carnet of metro tickets and used one to get to the Abbesses station in Montmartre, which you might recognize from the "Amélie" movie several years ago. From there I followed gradient ascent on the streets to arrive at the Sacré Coeur under a dull grey sky and hazy or misty viewing conditions of the rest of the city. I found I had come in kind of the back way; the main tourist highway was up through the gardens, where Amélie sent Nino following the arrows in the movie. It would never happen in real life, though, because that whole area is clogged with tourists speaking about eight different languages, and you can't go three steps without getting accosted by someone trying to sell you something or trying to pickpocket you. The pickpocketing attempts follow a pattern revealed to me by the oracle of Wikitravel, so I knew that as soon as a guy came up to me with a length of string, I didn't let him get past "Excuse me, sir" before I was flying in the opposite direction as quickly as possible. I eventually wandered around a lot of Montmarte except for the Sacré Coeur gardens: I found the rue des Saules and rue Saint Vincent, like in the Yves Montand song (singing bits of the song as I walked the length of the latter), and then I worked my way to the address I had of 15, rue Lepic to eat lunch at the Café Les Deux Moulins, again from "Amélie." I got in and was seated at a table looking over a menu, but then I noticed that all the items were breakfast and brunch things, so I got to the waiter and asked if I was too early for lunch. He said I had to come back after noon, so I looked at the time on my camera ("5:30" + correction of six time zones = 11:30 a.m.) and decided to waste an hour just walking the streets. This being accomplished, I was quite startled to find the marquee on the pharmacy next to the cafe still saying 11:30. But then I realized my error: my camera hadn't been corrected for Daylight Savings Time. Hah, no wonder I got a sort of weird look when I asked about lunch — it was at that time only 10:30 a.m.! In any case, I went back finally at actual 12:15 p.m. and had a croque monsieur and a crème brûlée. At €13.40 it was rather more than I wanted to spend, but I decided you can't come to the Deux Moulins without having Amélie's crème brûlée. The owners of the restaurant know this too, which is probably why it's €5.50. After lunch, with Montmartre duly crossed off my list, I took the metro to the Place de l'Étoile to start a walking tour suggested by Wikitravel. First down the Champs-Élysées to the Place de la Concorde, then through the Jardins des Tuileries to the Louvre. I tried taking a bunch of pictures while in the Tuileries, because I'd never been there before, but the world had absolutely no color in it and even the otherwise very pretty leaves looked like nothing under a sky of solid grey. Near the museum the sun came out a little bit, but mid-afternoon on the last day of October at nearly 49 degrees north latitude isn't know for the strength of its sunshine. Just past the Louvre, on the Quai François Mitterand (who somehow has a road already less than 15 years after he stopped being president?), I ran into Wikitravel Tourist Rip-Off Tactic No. 2 when a woman pretended to find a ring on the sidewalk and ask if it was mine. Instantly wary, I quickly said "Non, ce n'est pas le mien," getting the gender wrong but the sentiment right, and legged it, as the British say, in the other direction. I could have added a further piece of advice: if you're going to try to extract money from a tourist, it might help if your ploy wedding ring isn't big enough to encircle about three of your potential victim's fingers at one time. Although I suppose that if I had a ring that big, it would be more plausible for it to fall off on the sidewalk. The Wikitravel walking tour was supposed to end at Notre Dame, but I only stopped there for a few minutes to eat some tea biscuits from my bag and think about Victor Hugo's description of the cathedral. (Previous journal connection: see the February 17, 2005 post on this page.) At Notre Dame I identified and avoided Wikitravel Tourist Rip-Off No. 3, the fake English-language note about being stranded in Paris and needing money. Then I added a random extension to see the used-book stalls along the Seine and eventually ended up in the used-book stores on the boulevard Saint-Germain. From there, having some vague idea of "Eiffel Tower" in my mind and knowing that if I couldn't miss it if I worked my way along the river in the right direction, I struck out along some quais and some streets to the 7th arrondissement and stumbled — half by chance, half by design — into the old territory from my 2000 France trip. I couldn't believe how much I remembered about the place that I didn't even know I remembered until I was there. For example, I knew I was only a block or two away from the hotel (and in which direction) when I walked by some nameless church that my mind suddenly dug up a reference to. Then, all I had to do was walk across the rue Cler to have the sentence "Ah yes, the produce markets of the rue Cler... and the post office was right down there, wasn't it?" pop into my mind. And yes, I confirmed the next day that the post office was indeed at the end of the next block. I crossed the avenue Bosquet, which I was pretty sure was where we saw the mime in 2000 until I confused myself Sunday by discovering that the rue de la Motte-Picquet also looks exactly like it, and then it was on to the Champs de Mars and the Eiffel Tower. I think the Eiffel Tower is where I met my photographic success on this weekend in Paris. For one, it was dark, so the grey sky was gone, and by staking out a wide variety of angles I think I got some rather interesting shots of the thing all lit up at night. I was mostly impressed by the fineness of its structure. Aside from the largest steel beams that give the tower its shape and trellis, there's a whole network of tiny capillaries running around inside the thing, all of which light up perfectly at night. I ran into a French Canadian guy, whose origins I detected by his accent (and confirmed by a question) when we took each other's pictures. So the overall walk, by the time I finished it at the Champs de Mars metro station, was about nine miles, stretched out over almost five hours. Dinner at Alan's recommended Bien Bien (30b, rue Bergère), a quick metro ride away on the other side of the river. At first, I was almost the only one in the small restaurant, and since Alan said the food was as authentic as actual Thailand, I splurged again and took the €20 three-course menu in order to sample a few different things. It was quite worth it, and the service was insanely fast, although at the end I think I may have inadvertently offended them by leaving right when there were some people coming in who needed to sit right next to my table. Some more Eiffel Tower night shots, this time from a distance, to walk off the food a bit, and then it was back to the hostel for a fairly early night. I suppose this is long enough for one post... and it's 12:30, so I really ought to be in bed. I'll finish writing up Sunday in a new post tomorrow, with apologies for the continued delay. |
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