I Am A Paris Sardine

The French are famous for their gastronomy.  Their best-kept secret, however, is their sardines.  The Parisians do them unbelievably well, but they keep them well away from the tourists.  I am not a tourist, though.  I am the newest Paris sardine.

I'm not, of course, talking about fish.  I'm talking about public transport. The RER, as the suburban train system, is rarely used by the tourists who stay in the city centre.  Instead they travel around on the metro, which, while it gets fairly full around peak hour, is still respectable and dignified.  The tourists never see the chaos that occurs in Chatelet-Les Halles and Gare du Nord around peak hour.

It's like the running of the bulls in Spain.  I've come to the conclusion that a good day is one in which you don't get killed.  Don't get me wrong - as a general rule I love Paris public transport, and the fact that I can get from my apartment to uni in one hour through morning peak hour is great.  The trains run every few minutes on both the metro and the RER, there's heaps of coverage throughout Paris and the suburbs, and the authorities actually do an amazing job of moving hundreds of thousands of people every day.

That said, moving that many people has its problems...like the people all want to be moved at once.  When a train pulls up you nearly get trampled by everyone behind you who wants to get on the train.  Even if you don't move to avoid trampling the person in front of you, you get squashed by the people behind until the whole thing's just ridiculous.  The flux regulators, as they're called, have their work cut out for them trying to let an appropriate number of people onto each train and closing the doors to stop the trains getting too crowded.  They take some flack for it, too, but it's an important job.  After all, someone has to stop people being hooked in the throat by a cane (seen it), accidentally frogmarched into the gap between train and platform or just plain squished underfoot!

For me the biggest problem is my foot - my legs are slightly uneven thanks to the boot, so when standing still, which is an awkward exercise at best, I stand only on my left foot, and often stick my right foot out at an angle.  It has the dual purpose of giving footsie a rest and also alerting others to my crippleness.  This doesn't work so well when you're 10-deep in people and no-one can see your feet, of course...I'm terrified that one day someone's going to shove me while we're playing Sardines on the trains, and Peg-Leg Caelli will go tuuuuummmmmbling to the ground and get trampled.  I can just imagine the headlines back home...

The other day I took the metro home from Sorbonne and changed at Chatelet-Les Halles to the RER.  I've never done it in that direction before, and I don't think I will again.  I like it on my way to uni, since it cuts out most of the long metro trip and still drops me just a short distance from Sorbonne, but doing it the other way means I catch all the stairs at Chatelet (instead of the escalators!) and I prefer to walk to Port-Royal RER and walk home from the station in Le Bourget.  It's good exercise and I have the time to do it after class - plus, it saves me a side trip to the boulangerie on my way home!

The other fun public transport story I have comes from my trip home from Germany.  At the station at Saarbrucken, in Germany right on the French border, I noticed a bunch of police without borders waiting for the train.  It was only when I saw them on the train that I realised their uniforms said 'on', not 'without'...border patrol!  This was the first time I've had my passport checked on an international trip - I've used it on trains before, but usually just as the required piece of ID to go with my ticket.  One of the officers announced in French (oh, sweet, blessed language after two days of minimal comprehension in Germany!) that it was a border ID check and please prepare your passports, and he began at my end of the carriages while his mates checked the back.  The officer was pretty thorough, too.  He looked at the information page of my passport and then flicked through to have a look at my visa.  Given I might have been on a short holiday and not had a visa at all I was surprised and impressed that he checked, though why he insisted on performing the niceties in German (which I did understand, by the way) even though I replied in French I will never understand.  Multilingual people are just strange.