Right from the beginning, the whole point of me moving to France was about language – specifically, learning the French one. However, I’ve learned that moving to Europe to study in a foreign language is never just about one language. It’s about many.
The first thing is that Paris is multilingual. Unlike Australia, where people only speak English and tourists have to do their best approximation to make themselves understood, in Paris it’s all about making yourself understood to the tourists. English is the primary language, of course, but there are people speaking Spanish, Italian, Portuguese…well, pretty much anything that isn’t French that they think will make them money.
Then there are the non-French speakers who live in Paris…well, like me. It’s such a melting-pot, more so than Australia, really, but it’s worth noting that the whole of Australia is a melting-pot. Paris is probably the only place in France that can truly claim that title, but it does it well. Poorly-accented French is mixed in with the languages of all the immigrants and exchange students from around Europe and the world. Walk into any bar on Rue Mouffetard in the 5th and you’ll hear at least one language other than French. This all means that my favourite trick of switching languages when I don’t want to talk to someone is less effective, unless I’m particularly careful in choosing my languages (like German. That works really well).
What really fascinates me is the languages' use in relation to me. When I walk into a tourist shop, for example, looking for presents to send back home, the store owners always greet me and start spruiking their wares in English. Customarily I reply in French, partly ‘cause I’m in France and partly because it’s easier to keep talking and interacting in French, since that's the language that I usually use. The surprise on their faces when they hear my reply is evident – “Vous parlez francais? You speak French?” They assume, since I’m a clean-cut white girl in their souvenir shop, that I’m an ignorant tourist who can’t speak French. I very much enjoy dispelling this stereotype as I explain in fluent French that I live and study in Paris, I’m just looking for something to send home to my best friend/sister/mother, which is why I’m in a shop catering mostly to ignorant non-French-speaking tourists.
Then there’s what happens in other shops. I walk into…a café, a boulangerie, anything, really, and address whomever I need to speak to in French, outlining my order, question, request. They hear the Anglophone accent that I’m told tints my fluent French, and suddenly when they reply they’re speaking English. It’s clear from my vocabulary, syntax, grammar, hell, my confidence, that I speak French pretty damn well, probably far better than a lot of Frenchmen speak English. Yet they seem to assume that as a native English speaker I would rather speak English than French.
People occasionally suggest that it’s because they want to practise their English on me. Sure, that happens sometimes. My « copine » (girlfriend) at the boulangerie gets an occasional laugh from saying stuff to me in English when I show up for my baguettes, and I’m happy to teach the lady at my favourite creperie that it’s pronounced ‘dor-da’ and saying ‘dah-durr’ makes you sound like you just walked out of the American south. But most of them aren’t like this. In the middle of a formal, professional conversation they just switch to English. I wish they wouldn’t. After all, I’m in France, which speaks French, and I clearly speak French. There’s no call to speak English. None at all. But this is the rub of living in a multilingual society like Europe.
D’accord, then.
Showing posts with label Paris. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paris. Show all posts
Wednesday, 15 May 2013
Saturday, 11 May 2013
Europe Lessons #2: People and Trust
I’ve never been the most trusting of people, it’s true.
I usually take a while to get to know someone before I’ll tell them my secrets, lend them my stuff, be myself around them, and even then I’m always a bit wary.
Living in France, and Europe, has been a journey of trust and how I view people. And I’m sorry to say that I think it’s changed my perspective for the worse.
I’d never seen a beggar until I moved to Paris. There aren’t beggars in Melbourne. I’ve seen people selling The Big Issue on the street, sure, but even in the CBD late at night I’ve never seen disreputably dressed people with a suitcase full of stuff curled up on a piece of cardboard with a sleeping bag over the top. Here, it’s sadly normal. The metro stations seem to be a common haunt for them – dry, and not too cold. You can usually find them curled up behind the benches in Cluny-La Sorbonne or other stations around the centre of Paris. By day they usually take up stations on various street corners around Paris, dogs on their lap and containers and signs asking for money.
They’re not the only kind of beggars. People often get on the metro and walk up and down, asking for money, often with a small child in their arms. It’s mostly young Indian/subcontinental women that I’ve noticed (along with the odd possibly drunk, slightly disreputable middle-aged bloke who stands at the door of the metro and proclaims his poor fortune in a loud voice). I might be a little more sympathetic if they weren’t all reasonably well-dressed and neatly presented, with a good-quality baby sling strapped to their chest. Then there’s the RER beggars. They have a set of cards with information neatly printed on them in French asking for a euro or a ticket restaurant (meal coupon). There’s usually a date of arrival in France from some less fortunate country, the number of children or siblings they’re supporting and some other set of unfortunate circumstances that make them perfect candidates for charity. They walk through the train, placing these on seats next to passengers for you to read and leave a small token next to when they come back to collect the note.
Again, the RER beggars are usually quite well-dressed, and they clearly have access to a computer and printing services (and the money to pay for them) if they’ve got nicely printed cards. I’ve even seen one little girl, 11 or 12, walking through the train placing cards on seats, and with every card she put down she pulled a small disposable pack of tissues from her backpack and put it with the card, presumably as a gift for generous donors (nice purple backpack too, by the way). My first thought: if you’re so hard up for money, why don’t you just sell the tissues instead of giving them away? Sure, it didn’t end so well for Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl, but unlike her, these beggars aren’t in rags, far from it, and they all own baby slings or backpacks – definitely a step up from Little Match Girl Poverty.
Then there’s the older, apparently Muslim woman who sits in the stairwell at the Le Bourget train station with her hand held out, or the guy who approached me at the Barcelona metro ticket machines asking for my change. It happens so often.
All of this has made me very wary of my wallet and handbag. When I go to an ATM, I put the money straight in my purse and walk away as quickly as I can, because a young girl at an ATM would make a perfect robbery target, or even a good begging target, perhaps. On the metro, too, there are multilingual announcements to beware of pickpockets and keep your bags closed and in sight at all times. They’re not kidding, either. It happened to one of my exchange friends last semester. Her backpack was opened while she was wearing it and her wallet stolen from inside.
In Australia, I would never worry about closing my handbag while slung over my arm. Just not necessary. Here, if I can’t close it because I have textbooks in there then I flip the clasp closed to hold it together and then keep it tucked very tightly under my arm. When I first arrived in France, I was using my battered old backpack to get around with, and the zip on one of the outside pockets was broken, so I didn’t use it except for rubbish. More than once I had people try and close the pocket for me, or tell me it was open – even one of the staff at the Louvre sprinted down a corridor after seeing me from behind and noticing that my backpack was ‘open’. It’s not something that would cause alarm in Australia – in fact, people would probably think it was a fashion statement. Here, it’s a serious problem.
There’s more, too. There’s this trend, and I noticed it in Rennes as well as Paris, of 20- and 30-something Indian women running petitions for goodness knows what, hassling passers-by to sign it. In Paris they have a pretty much constant presence on the corner of Quai Saint-Michel and Petit Pont, about four of them at a time. It bugs me, and I’m surprised the authorities haven’t stopped it for the same reason, since that’s a big tourist area and it must be thoroughly off-putting for tourists to be harassed in any number of languages about some petition which means absolutely nothing to them. Headphones and complete lack of attention are usually pretty good at repelling them, but I did say no once to one who got very much in my face and received a jab in the shoulder with a pen for my troubles.
Usually when people like this come up to me I switch languages to whichever I speak that I reckon they don’t. Sometimes they switch too, if I’m pretending to be Spanish or French (somewhere other than France, that is), in which case I’ve distracted them long enough to make walking briskly past them possible, and other times they honestly believe that I can’t understand them and let me go. The technique is most effective on men who are trying to hit on me. Yes, sadly I’m serious.
It’s happened a heap of times now. I’m not talking about guys my own age flirting or being cute, I’m talking about men at least 10 years my senior trying to seduce me, literally. This one time in Strasbourg I was openly propositioned by a guy old enough to be my grandfather, who then decided to try and guess how old I was. “15? 16?” Apart from the insulting fact that I’ve worked hard to look my whole 20 years, I’m pretty sure THAT’S ILLEGAL. I mean, it is in Australia, and France isn’t THAT backward.
This was far from an isolated incident. There was the guy in Madrid who started off nice (“You look just like Monica,”) and got clingier and clinger. The one who groped me on the metro. The one who tried chatting me up as I walked down the street to my apartment. The one on the RER making eyes at me and giving me a creepy grin. I don’t encourage them – heavens, I don’t even KNOW them – and once I realise what they’re up to I do everything in my power to ignore them, avoid them, switch languages, whatever works.
If they were my own age (and a little less creepy) then it wouldn’t bother me so much. I could just put it down to some seriously inept flirting (and probably the fact that they’ve never had a girlfriend). My problem lies in the fact that I don’t think a single one of these guys has been under 35. In fact, I’ve been joking for months that I’ll throw a party if I get hit on by someone UNDER 35. These guys can tell how old I am – I barely even look 20, in fact – and they’re deliberately setting out to ensnare a ‘naïve’ girl who’s almost young enough to be their daughter. Such an age gap is far from socially acceptable when one of the parties is as young as I am, and it’s certainly not acceptable to me.
My lack of interest is no deterrent either, and that’s something that comes up in conversations about rape culture and sexual harassment. It becomes harassment when it’s unwanted attention. If you’re interested, show your interest, and if it’s clearly reciprocated, then take it further. If it’s not clear, back off. Well, I’m clearly showing that I’m not interested, and they keep at it. It makes me feel uncomfortable and threatened, but unfortunately, short of leaving France/Europe (an enticing solution at times) or becoming a hermit in my apartment, there’s no way I can avoid putting myself in the public situations where this occurs.
Case in point: at the youth hostel I just stayed at in Rennes, there was this African guy in a blue jumper, late 20s-early 30s, who was very familiar in the way he addressed me, winked at me, right from the start. Me, being wary, avoided him and his gaze, only saying a polite hello over breakfast, that sort of thing. Basically avoided him for the whole time I was there, showed no interest and showed that I was actively disinterested. At the train station today, I ran into the Canadian friend I’d made (who, incidentally, was not scared of blue-jumper guy like I was) as we were both boarding our trains. “Oh, by the way, that guy at the hostel wanted me to pass on a message to you. He wanted me to tell you that he thought you were very pretty.” We both burst out laughing, since I’d already confided to Canadian my experiences of creepy people hitting on me and we both agreed this guy was a player.
But how was that sort of comment appropriate? Blue-jumper KNEW I didn’t want to talk to him, didn’t even want to look at him, and yet it’s OK for him to send flirty messages to me like that? The way I see it, not cool, and yet it’s happened so often that maybe this is actually the norm in Europe. I hope not. It’s not fair on the girls is happens to, for a start, and it’s not exactly promising for respectful relationships between men and women around here – I’m talking about in the workplace, in the shops or in cafes, as much as in romantic relationships. If this is how guys in Europe think they can treat girls…what does that say?
Between all of the above experiences, I’m now terrified every time someone approaches me that they’re begging for money or going to hit on me or asking me to sign a petition or going to tell me that I have ‘beautiful eyes’ (they must learnt this one at their mother’s knee, ‘cause I’ve heard the exact same line from about three different guys). I practically cringe when I see them coming, and I’m actually relieved when I hear the native Anglophone accent of a lost tourist looking for help. I don’t open up to people or chat to random strangers in the street, always terrified that I’m going to give too much away and they’ll use it against me somehow.
And even when someone doesn’t fit into one of the previously identified categories above, I’m still wary of interacting with them in case they’re some variant I haven’t met yet. Like the boy in Rome, 12 or 13 years old, who tried to help my parents with their luggage at the train station, tried to help us find our seats, tried to help us get settled on the train, and all in the hopes of earning a few euro. I in return was almost outright rude as I refused to acknowledge what he wanted, since we’d refused his help the whole time. I hate that I’ve turned into this rude, dismissive, sheltered, fearful creature. I hate that Europe’s turned me into this. I wish I could change, go back to the open, carefree person I used to be. I hope, in a friendlier country like Australia, I can.
I usually take a while to get to know someone before I’ll tell them my secrets, lend them my stuff, be myself around them, and even then I’m always a bit wary.
Living in France, and Europe, has been a journey of trust and how I view people. And I’m sorry to say that I think it’s changed my perspective for the worse.
I’d never seen a beggar until I moved to Paris. There aren’t beggars in Melbourne. I’ve seen people selling The Big Issue on the street, sure, but even in the CBD late at night I’ve never seen disreputably dressed people with a suitcase full of stuff curled up on a piece of cardboard with a sleeping bag over the top. Here, it’s sadly normal. The metro stations seem to be a common haunt for them – dry, and not too cold. You can usually find them curled up behind the benches in Cluny-La Sorbonne or other stations around the centre of Paris. By day they usually take up stations on various street corners around Paris, dogs on their lap and containers and signs asking for money.
They’re not the only kind of beggars. People often get on the metro and walk up and down, asking for money, often with a small child in their arms. It’s mostly young Indian/subcontinental women that I’ve noticed (along with the odd possibly drunk, slightly disreputable middle-aged bloke who stands at the door of the metro and proclaims his poor fortune in a loud voice). I might be a little more sympathetic if they weren’t all reasonably well-dressed and neatly presented, with a good-quality baby sling strapped to their chest. Then there’s the RER beggars. They have a set of cards with information neatly printed on them in French asking for a euro or a ticket restaurant (meal coupon). There’s usually a date of arrival in France from some less fortunate country, the number of children or siblings they’re supporting and some other set of unfortunate circumstances that make them perfect candidates for charity. They walk through the train, placing these on seats next to passengers for you to read and leave a small token next to when they come back to collect the note.
Again, the RER beggars are usually quite well-dressed, and they clearly have access to a computer and printing services (and the money to pay for them) if they’ve got nicely printed cards. I’ve even seen one little girl, 11 or 12, walking through the train placing cards on seats, and with every card she put down she pulled a small disposable pack of tissues from her backpack and put it with the card, presumably as a gift for generous donors (nice purple backpack too, by the way). My first thought: if you’re so hard up for money, why don’t you just sell the tissues instead of giving them away? Sure, it didn’t end so well for Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl, but unlike her, these beggars aren’t in rags, far from it, and they all own baby slings or backpacks – definitely a step up from Little Match Girl Poverty.
Then there’s the older, apparently Muslim woman who sits in the stairwell at the Le Bourget train station with her hand held out, or the guy who approached me at the Barcelona metro ticket machines asking for my change. It happens so often.
All of this has made me very wary of my wallet and handbag. When I go to an ATM, I put the money straight in my purse and walk away as quickly as I can, because a young girl at an ATM would make a perfect robbery target, or even a good begging target, perhaps. On the metro, too, there are multilingual announcements to beware of pickpockets and keep your bags closed and in sight at all times. They’re not kidding, either. It happened to one of my exchange friends last semester. Her backpack was opened while she was wearing it and her wallet stolen from inside.
In Australia, I would never worry about closing my handbag while slung over my arm. Just not necessary. Here, if I can’t close it because I have textbooks in there then I flip the clasp closed to hold it together and then keep it tucked very tightly under my arm. When I first arrived in France, I was using my battered old backpack to get around with, and the zip on one of the outside pockets was broken, so I didn’t use it except for rubbish. More than once I had people try and close the pocket for me, or tell me it was open – even one of the staff at the Louvre sprinted down a corridor after seeing me from behind and noticing that my backpack was ‘open’. It’s not something that would cause alarm in Australia – in fact, people would probably think it was a fashion statement. Here, it’s a serious problem.
There’s more, too. There’s this trend, and I noticed it in Rennes as well as Paris, of 20- and 30-something Indian women running petitions for goodness knows what, hassling passers-by to sign it. In Paris they have a pretty much constant presence on the corner of Quai Saint-Michel and Petit Pont, about four of them at a time. It bugs me, and I’m surprised the authorities haven’t stopped it for the same reason, since that’s a big tourist area and it must be thoroughly off-putting for tourists to be harassed in any number of languages about some petition which means absolutely nothing to them. Headphones and complete lack of attention are usually pretty good at repelling them, but I did say no once to one who got very much in my face and received a jab in the shoulder with a pen for my troubles.
Usually when people like this come up to me I switch languages to whichever I speak that I reckon they don’t. Sometimes they switch too, if I’m pretending to be Spanish or French (somewhere other than France, that is), in which case I’ve distracted them long enough to make walking briskly past them possible, and other times they honestly believe that I can’t understand them and let me go. The technique is most effective on men who are trying to hit on me. Yes, sadly I’m serious.
It’s happened a heap of times now. I’m not talking about guys my own age flirting or being cute, I’m talking about men at least 10 years my senior trying to seduce me, literally. This one time in Strasbourg I was openly propositioned by a guy old enough to be my grandfather, who then decided to try and guess how old I was. “15? 16?” Apart from the insulting fact that I’ve worked hard to look my whole 20 years, I’m pretty sure THAT’S ILLEGAL. I mean, it is in Australia, and France isn’t THAT backward.
This was far from an isolated incident. There was the guy in Madrid who started off nice (“You look just like Monica,”) and got clingier and clinger. The one who groped me on the metro. The one who tried chatting me up as I walked down the street to my apartment. The one on the RER making eyes at me and giving me a creepy grin. I don’t encourage them – heavens, I don’t even KNOW them – and once I realise what they’re up to I do everything in my power to ignore them, avoid them, switch languages, whatever works.
If they were my own age (and a little less creepy) then it wouldn’t bother me so much. I could just put it down to some seriously inept flirting (and probably the fact that they’ve never had a girlfriend). My problem lies in the fact that I don’t think a single one of these guys has been under 35. In fact, I’ve been joking for months that I’ll throw a party if I get hit on by someone UNDER 35. These guys can tell how old I am – I barely even look 20, in fact – and they’re deliberately setting out to ensnare a ‘naïve’ girl who’s almost young enough to be their daughter. Such an age gap is far from socially acceptable when one of the parties is as young as I am, and it’s certainly not acceptable to me.
My lack of interest is no deterrent either, and that’s something that comes up in conversations about rape culture and sexual harassment. It becomes harassment when it’s unwanted attention. If you’re interested, show your interest, and if it’s clearly reciprocated, then take it further. If it’s not clear, back off. Well, I’m clearly showing that I’m not interested, and they keep at it. It makes me feel uncomfortable and threatened, but unfortunately, short of leaving France/Europe (an enticing solution at times) or becoming a hermit in my apartment, there’s no way I can avoid putting myself in the public situations where this occurs.
Case in point: at the youth hostel I just stayed at in Rennes, there was this African guy in a blue jumper, late 20s-early 30s, who was very familiar in the way he addressed me, winked at me, right from the start. Me, being wary, avoided him and his gaze, only saying a polite hello over breakfast, that sort of thing. Basically avoided him for the whole time I was there, showed no interest and showed that I was actively disinterested. At the train station today, I ran into the Canadian friend I’d made (who, incidentally, was not scared of blue-jumper guy like I was) as we were both boarding our trains. “Oh, by the way, that guy at the hostel wanted me to pass on a message to you. He wanted me to tell you that he thought you were very pretty.” We both burst out laughing, since I’d already confided to Canadian my experiences of creepy people hitting on me and we both agreed this guy was a player.
But how was that sort of comment appropriate? Blue-jumper KNEW I didn’t want to talk to him, didn’t even want to look at him, and yet it’s OK for him to send flirty messages to me like that? The way I see it, not cool, and yet it’s happened so often that maybe this is actually the norm in Europe. I hope not. It’s not fair on the girls is happens to, for a start, and it’s not exactly promising for respectful relationships between men and women around here – I’m talking about in the workplace, in the shops or in cafes, as much as in romantic relationships. If this is how guys in Europe think they can treat girls…what does that say?
Between all of the above experiences, I’m now terrified every time someone approaches me that they’re begging for money or going to hit on me or asking me to sign a petition or going to tell me that I have ‘beautiful eyes’ (they must learnt this one at their mother’s knee, ‘cause I’ve heard the exact same line from about three different guys). I practically cringe when I see them coming, and I’m actually relieved when I hear the native Anglophone accent of a lost tourist looking for help. I don’t open up to people or chat to random strangers in the street, always terrified that I’m going to give too much away and they’ll use it against me somehow.
And even when someone doesn’t fit into one of the previously identified categories above, I’m still wary of interacting with them in case they’re some variant I haven’t met yet. Like the boy in Rome, 12 or 13 years old, who tried to help my parents with their luggage at the train station, tried to help us find our seats, tried to help us get settled on the train, and all in the hopes of earning a few euro. I in return was almost outright rude as I refused to acknowledge what he wanted, since we’d refused his help the whole time. I hate that I’ve turned into this rude, dismissive, sheltered, fearful creature. I hate that Europe’s turned me into this. I wish I could change, go back to the open, carefree person I used to be. I hope, in a friendlier country like Australia, I can.
Friday, 10 May 2013
France Life #2: The Confession
I do not like Paris.
I know that already half my readers have collapsed in shock. "But it's PARIS! But you've lived there for almost a year now! How can you not like it?" Well, there's essentially two parts to that answer.
The first part is, I'm not a sheep. I'm not a 'let's go to Europe 'cause it's cool' tourist. I am a discerning tourist, a traveller. I need a reason to like a place. 'Because it's cool' and 'because everyone else says so' are not reasons. They're excuses made by people without the ability to think for themselves and who care more about their image of chicness in the eyes of other people. I am not afraid to judge. I'm not afraid to have opinions. I'm not afraid to say 'No. I don't like it.'
Paris, from the first, never grabbed me. Maybe it was the phenomenon of stranger build-up, hearing so much about a place that it can never live up to the expectations, no matter what they may or may not be. Maybe it was because I'd just come from a place that DID grab me, very, very strongly. Whatever it was, Paris never caught my attention. I'd been there twice before I moved there. Only at the end of my second trip did I catch a small glimpse of its potential. But still, there was no 'Oh my God' moment. There was no 'Hey, this has all been a little bit cool, actually,' either. I've been to places that have made me go 'Oh my God'. I've been to places that have stolen my heart and never given it back. I've been to places that have just been so pleasant and enjoyable that I'm looking forward to going back. Paris was never one of those.
It's touristy, insanely so. I hate touristy places. The transformation into a touristy place tends to destroy what made it worth visiting to begin with. The Parisians are not the most friendly of people. They can be, but I suspect that I have an advantage in being a competent French speaker and in being Australian. There are no unresolved beefs to cause tension, and I'm not an ignorant, irritating tourist who thinks that everyone speaks English if I just say it slowly and loudly enough. But even so, they can be a bit gruff sometimes.
Paris does have some great locations, I'll give it that. Places like Saint-Chapelle, the Basilica of Sacre-Coeur at Montmartre and Pere Lachaise Cemetery are incredible in their own ways and have a great history. But the Eiffel Tower is not particularly attractive, remarkable, or important in any way except that it gives a good view the one time you climb up it. The Champs-Elysees is just a street. The Seine is just a river. In short, Paris is more or less just like any other city, with some really cute history and architecture and undiscovered gems, but there's nothing to make it more special than London, or Tokyo, or many other places I've been. It's earned a reputation which has been repeated by woolly-headed tourists and never been revised.
Also, it's a horrible place to live. It's crowded, frequently dirty, the public transport system can be great or disastrous, the bureaucracy is HORRIBLE, and when you live there you have all the niggling tasks of daily life without any joys in recompense. Basically, it's a place I'd like to visit once in a while, like I visit Sydney, but not somewhere I'm keen to live again. Paris and I have made our peace, I've learned to like her, but I'm ready to move on.
Part 2 of my answer is not really about Paris at all. I calculated yesterday that I've spend half my life living in the city and half in the country - born in Melbourne, moved to the country when I was a little girl, back to Melbourne for uni and then shipped off to Paris. So in short I'm pretty equally informed on the whole city-country debate. And the thing I've noticed more and more as I get older is that I'm a country girl. Despite being born in Australia's second biggest city, the country is my home, where I feel comfortable and happy. I first noticed this when I moved to Melbourne, and the conviction has been growing ever since. Regular trips home helped ease the pain of separation, though. When I felt a hankering for some trees and green and quiet I could hop on a train on Friday night and find myself in a house in the middle of the bush with four sooky cats and an exasperated sister who couldn't wait for me to leave again (at least, that's what she always told me, but there's evidence to the contrary...).
And then I moved to Paris. A city with the population of half my country, and suddenly I couldn't hop a train home when I missed the quiet and the green. I remember the first time I realised that, sitting in class one Wednesday afternoon thinking it was a long time since I'd been home and I was missing the sound of the wind in the trees in Creswick, and maybe I should...but oh. It's a little hard to get to country Victoria from Paris. That was also when I learned the true meaning of the word 'pang' - the tight feeling in one’s chest after one realises something slightly painful.
Anyway, my time in Paris has clinched and accelerated that realisation, that cities are not for me and the country is where it's at. Unfortunately, at this point in time the country is not an option for me. I find myself calculating how long til I can get out of Paris, find somewhere smaller and quieter, praying that whatever crops up next in my life won't require me to stay where I am or move to another big city.
And now every time I travel I get this wistful feeling, watching out the windows of trains and buses, staring at the views of rural coastal Normandy from the top of Mont-Saint-Michel, thinking about how beautiful and uncomplicated and tranquil it all looks, the full-sized houses with their front yards and the tiny town centres that are completely deserted and calm and everything that I miss about my own little hometown, and a little part of me wants to cry. Even when I travel I have to travel to cities, because there aren’t youth hostels in tiny towns in the middle of nowhere, even if I had a way to reach them, so I’ve been all over the upper half of France and can tell you how to get from A to B in Lille, Strasbourg, Rennes, Tours, but I have no idea of what the vibe is, what life is truly like in the smaller rural places that make up most of the geography if not the population of the country.
So instead I have to content myself with glimpses out the window, dreams from my own imagination of how it must feel to walk those fields I see and climb those trees, the snatched moments in obscure places that I find myself in for my work and which are the only times that I ever travel to the hidden, undiscovered locations that are my true joys. Domburg, in Zeeland, Holland; Cerilly, in southern France; La Foz, in Asturias, Spain – this is how I get my fix of country, saving the colours and the peace and landscape and mentally cursing Paris the whole time for being a big, dirty, grey, impersonal, unwelcoming city.
So really, the distaste I feel for Paris at moments like these is not Paris’s fault. Paris just represents everything that I don’t want but have to put up with because I don’t have another choice. But even if you told me I had to live in a city again and gave me all the choices in the world, Paris would not be on that list. In fact, I’ll take Melbourne over Paris anyday. We’ve actually got it pretty good down there. But that’s another story.
I know that already half my readers have collapsed in shock. "But it's PARIS! But you've lived there for almost a year now! How can you not like it?" Well, there's essentially two parts to that answer.
The first part is, I'm not a sheep. I'm not a 'let's go to Europe 'cause it's cool' tourist. I am a discerning tourist, a traveller. I need a reason to like a place. 'Because it's cool' and 'because everyone else says so' are not reasons. They're excuses made by people without the ability to think for themselves and who care more about their image of chicness in the eyes of other people. I am not afraid to judge. I'm not afraid to have opinions. I'm not afraid to say 'No. I don't like it.'
Paris, from the first, never grabbed me. Maybe it was the phenomenon of stranger build-up, hearing so much about a place that it can never live up to the expectations, no matter what they may or may not be. Maybe it was because I'd just come from a place that DID grab me, very, very strongly. Whatever it was, Paris never caught my attention. I'd been there twice before I moved there. Only at the end of my second trip did I catch a small glimpse of its potential. But still, there was no 'Oh my God' moment. There was no 'Hey, this has all been a little bit cool, actually,' either. I've been to places that have made me go 'Oh my God'. I've been to places that have stolen my heart and never given it back. I've been to places that have just been so pleasant and enjoyable that I'm looking forward to going back. Paris was never one of those.
It's touristy, insanely so. I hate touristy places. The transformation into a touristy place tends to destroy what made it worth visiting to begin with. The Parisians are not the most friendly of people. They can be, but I suspect that I have an advantage in being a competent French speaker and in being Australian. There are no unresolved beefs to cause tension, and I'm not an ignorant, irritating tourist who thinks that everyone speaks English if I just say it slowly and loudly enough. But even so, they can be a bit gruff sometimes.
Paris does have some great locations, I'll give it that. Places like Saint-Chapelle, the Basilica of Sacre-Coeur at Montmartre and Pere Lachaise Cemetery are incredible in their own ways and have a great history. But the Eiffel Tower is not particularly attractive, remarkable, or important in any way except that it gives a good view the one time you climb up it. The Champs-Elysees is just a street. The Seine is just a river. In short, Paris is more or less just like any other city, with some really cute history and architecture and undiscovered gems, but there's nothing to make it more special than London, or Tokyo, or many other places I've been. It's earned a reputation which has been repeated by woolly-headed tourists and never been revised.
Also, it's a horrible place to live. It's crowded, frequently dirty, the public transport system can be great or disastrous, the bureaucracy is HORRIBLE, and when you live there you have all the niggling tasks of daily life without any joys in recompense. Basically, it's a place I'd like to visit once in a while, like I visit Sydney, but not somewhere I'm keen to live again. Paris and I have made our peace, I've learned to like her, but I'm ready to move on.
Part 2 of my answer is not really about Paris at all. I calculated yesterday that I've spend half my life living in the city and half in the country - born in Melbourne, moved to the country when I was a little girl, back to Melbourne for uni and then shipped off to Paris. So in short I'm pretty equally informed on the whole city-country debate. And the thing I've noticed more and more as I get older is that I'm a country girl. Despite being born in Australia's second biggest city, the country is my home, where I feel comfortable and happy. I first noticed this when I moved to Melbourne, and the conviction has been growing ever since. Regular trips home helped ease the pain of separation, though. When I felt a hankering for some trees and green and quiet I could hop on a train on Friday night and find myself in a house in the middle of the bush with four sooky cats and an exasperated sister who couldn't wait for me to leave again (at least, that's what she always told me, but there's evidence to the contrary...).
And then I moved to Paris. A city with the population of half my country, and suddenly I couldn't hop a train home when I missed the quiet and the green. I remember the first time I realised that, sitting in class one Wednesday afternoon thinking it was a long time since I'd been home and I was missing the sound of the wind in the trees in Creswick, and maybe I should...but oh. It's a little hard to get to country Victoria from Paris. That was also when I learned the true meaning of the word 'pang' - the tight feeling in one’s chest after one realises something slightly painful.
Anyway, my time in Paris has clinched and accelerated that realisation, that cities are not for me and the country is where it's at. Unfortunately, at this point in time the country is not an option for me. I find myself calculating how long til I can get out of Paris, find somewhere smaller and quieter, praying that whatever crops up next in my life won't require me to stay where I am or move to another big city.
And now every time I travel I get this wistful feeling, watching out the windows of trains and buses, staring at the views of rural coastal Normandy from the top of Mont-Saint-Michel, thinking about how beautiful and uncomplicated and tranquil it all looks, the full-sized houses with their front yards and the tiny town centres that are completely deserted and calm and everything that I miss about my own little hometown, and a little part of me wants to cry. Even when I travel I have to travel to cities, because there aren’t youth hostels in tiny towns in the middle of nowhere, even if I had a way to reach them, so I’ve been all over the upper half of France and can tell you how to get from A to B in Lille, Strasbourg, Rennes, Tours, but I have no idea of what the vibe is, what life is truly like in the smaller rural places that make up most of the geography if not the population of the country.
So instead I have to content myself with glimpses out the window, dreams from my own imagination of how it must feel to walk those fields I see and climb those trees, the snatched moments in obscure places that I find myself in for my work and which are the only times that I ever travel to the hidden, undiscovered locations that are my true joys. Domburg, in Zeeland, Holland; Cerilly, in southern France; La Foz, in Asturias, Spain – this is how I get my fix of country, saving the colours and the peace and landscape and mentally cursing Paris the whole time for being a big, dirty, grey, impersonal, unwelcoming city.
So really, the distaste I feel for Paris at moments like these is not Paris’s fault. Paris just represents everything that I don’t want but have to put up with because I don’t have another choice. But even if you told me I had to live in a city again and gave me all the choices in the world, Paris would not be on that list. In fact, I’ll take Melbourne over Paris anyday. We’ve actually got it pretty good down there. But that’s another story.
Thursday, 9 May 2013
France Life #1: The Pet Peeve
During all my time in France, I’ve come across any number of small differences between life here and life in Australia, in all kinds of tiny ways. Some of them are useful, like the boulangeries or the comprehensive train network. Others are irritating, like the bureaucracy, or the doggie souvenirs all over the footpaths. One, however, exasperates me to the point of insanity (which is maybe taking my annoyance insanely far) and has become my absolute pet peeve – fare evaders.
We have fare evaders in Australia, too, but it’s much easier and much more impersonal. Many train stations in Australia don’t have any kind of ticket gates or barriers, so those who wish can just walk straight onto the train. In France, however, every station has a ticket gate, and sometimes in the bigger stations like Chatelet-Les Halles there are ticket barriers between the RER and the metro areas, even though they’re each validated-ticket areas themselves. The metro stations have barriers, too, but the key difference lies in the type of barriers. This is where things get interesting.
The metro stations have three-armed turnstiles with a small door after them, designed to be difficult to open from mid-air if you’re trying to jump or climb over the turnstile. It is, however, possible – I’ve seen it done many times by people jumping the turnstiles to get into the metro. It’s wrong, but at least I don’t have to worry about it, I’m not involved in any way, and I can just let them get caught by the bevy of inspectors frequently hanging around Censier-Daubenton metro station.
In the RER stations, however, they have automatic metal gates taller than a person, which slide open at the insertion of a valid ticket and remain open just long enough for one person to walk through. I walk up, touch my transport pass and walk through while the next guy touches his pass to keep the gate open and follows me through. Easy. Unfortunately, these gates AREN’T easy for the fare evaders. Unlike the metro ones, where you can swing your legs over the waist-high turnstile with relative discretion, the gates are too close to slip between and too tall to scale without climbing onto the ticket-checking machine and literally stepping over the top – which is sort of noticeable for any public transport officials who may be nearby (which is not to say I haven’t seen it done – and with a bicycle nonetheless).
Instead, the Evil Fare Evaders at RER stations have come up with a new way to avoid buying a ticket – use someone else’s. They hang around the entrance barriers at the RER station – the outdoor entrance at the suburban stations – and wait for a person with a ticket to come along. Once they’ve walked into the barrier stall to scan their ticket, the EFE walks up behind them and blockades them into the stall like a racehorse. When the barrier opens and the person walks through, the EFE puts their hands across the gate slots to prevent them from closing again and follows the other person through, letting the gates shut behind them.
This irritates the hell out of me.
It’s happened to me more than once. When I approach the station there’s usually once or two guys (it’s always men, never ever seen a woman do it), older (30s+), and though I hate to racially profile they’re often Indian or black, who are just standing around paying a little too much attention to anyone who approaches the ticket barriers and is carrying or pulling out a ticket. Once you’ve walked into a stall, you’re fair game, and with them standing behind you, you can’t exactly just back out. Instead I usually stop just short of the barriers and pretend to rifle around in my bag for my wallet until someone else lets them through, or if they corner me in the stalls then I use my transport pass’s temperamental nature to my advantage and pretend to be stuck.
But for me, the worst part is that they EXPECT it. They believe it’s their right to be let through the barriers by someone else, even though you’re paying for the service and they’re not. If you refuse to go along with it and let them scrounge off your hard-paid public transport access, then you become the bad guy. Recently, pissed at the situation and not wanting to give anyone a literal free ride, I tried waving through a guy who was trying to follow me into the barriers (“No, you go. “No, please.” “No, go right ahead.”) He got sick of it pretty quickly and instead followed another hapless victim who walked up at the same time, but he took the time to turn and give me the finger as he walked through. He then waited for me to pass through the barriers before turning and giving me an earful – all for not letting him pass through the paying ticket barriers for free on my own personal public transport pass (which I do pay for, by the way).
How do they get so entitled? I mean, a fare evader in Australia is at least honest about the fact that they’re being dishonest. They never drag anyone else into their schemes and just do it themselves. If they can’t get around the rules themselves, they don’t fare evade. But here, people expect you to help them dodge the law and to pay for their ticket. It’s their RIGHT, and if you infringe upon it by insisting that they, oh, I dunno, pay for their own ticket, suddenly everything’s your fault and you’re the one who’s broken the social code. It makes me SO MAD. Cheating is one thing, but unwillingly roping innocent bystanders into helping you cheat is just a new form of low. And they don’t even seem to notice that there’s anything wrong with it.
We have fare evaders in Australia, too, but it’s much easier and much more impersonal. Many train stations in Australia don’t have any kind of ticket gates or barriers, so those who wish can just walk straight onto the train. In France, however, every station has a ticket gate, and sometimes in the bigger stations like Chatelet-Les Halles there are ticket barriers between the RER and the metro areas, even though they’re each validated-ticket areas themselves. The metro stations have barriers, too, but the key difference lies in the type of barriers. This is where things get interesting.
The metro stations have three-armed turnstiles with a small door after them, designed to be difficult to open from mid-air if you’re trying to jump or climb over the turnstile. It is, however, possible – I’ve seen it done many times by people jumping the turnstiles to get into the metro. It’s wrong, but at least I don’t have to worry about it, I’m not involved in any way, and I can just let them get caught by the bevy of inspectors frequently hanging around Censier-Daubenton metro station.
In the RER stations, however, they have automatic metal gates taller than a person, which slide open at the insertion of a valid ticket and remain open just long enough for one person to walk through. I walk up, touch my transport pass and walk through while the next guy touches his pass to keep the gate open and follows me through. Easy. Unfortunately, these gates AREN’T easy for the fare evaders. Unlike the metro ones, where you can swing your legs over the waist-high turnstile with relative discretion, the gates are too close to slip between and too tall to scale without climbing onto the ticket-checking machine and literally stepping over the top – which is sort of noticeable for any public transport officials who may be nearby (which is not to say I haven’t seen it done – and with a bicycle nonetheless).
Instead, the Evil Fare Evaders at RER stations have come up with a new way to avoid buying a ticket – use someone else’s. They hang around the entrance barriers at the RER station – the outdoor entrance at the suburban stations – and wait for a person with a ticket to come along. Once they’ve walked into the barrier stall to scan their ticket, the EFE walks up behind them and blockades them into the stall like a racehorse. When the barrier opens and the person walks through, the EFE puts their hands across the gate slots to prevent them from closing again and follows the other person through, letting the gates shut behind them.
This irritates the hell out of me.
It’s happened to me more than once. When I approach the station there’s usually once or two guys (it’s always men, never ever seen a woman do it), older (30s+), and though I hate to racially profile they’re often Indian or black, who are just standing around paying a little too much attention to anyone who approaches the ticket barriers and is carrying or pulling out a ticket. Once you’ve walked into a stall, you’re fair game, and with them standing behind you, you can’t exactly just back out. Instead I usually stop just short of the barriers and pretend to rifle around in my bag for my wallet until someone else lets them through, or if they corner me in the stalls then I use my transport pass’s temperamental nature to my advantage and pretend to be stuck.
But for me, the worst part is that they EXPECT it. They believe it’s their right to be let through the barriers by someone else, even though you’re paying for the service and they’re not. If you refuse to go along with it and let them scrounge off your hard-paid public transport access, then you become the bad guy. Recently, pissed at the situation and not wanting to give anyone a literal free ride, I tried waving through a guy who was trying to follow me into the barriers (“No, you go. “No, please.” “No, go right ahead.”) He got sick of it pretty quickly and instead followed another hapless victim who walked up at the same time, but he took the time to turn and give me the finger as he walked through. He then waited for me to pass through the barriers before turning and giving me an earful – all for not letting him pass through the paying ticket barriers for free on my own personal public transport pass (which I do pay for, by the way).
How do they get so entitled? I mean, a fare evader in Australia is at least honest about the fact that they’re being dishonest. They never drag anyone else into their schemes and just do it themselves. If they can’t get around the rules themselves, they don’t fare evade. But here, people expect you to help them dodge the law and to pay for their ticket. It’s their RIGHT, and if you infringe upon it by insisting that they, oh, I dunno, pay for their own ticket, suddenly everything’s your fault and you’re the one who’s broken the social code. It makes me SO MAD. Cheating is one thing, but unwillingly roping innocent bystanders into helping you cheat is just a new form of low. And they don’t even seem to notice that there’s anything wrong with it.
Monday, 25 March 2013
Living The Glamourous Life
So I've been really slack in posting lately, and I do apologise. My life is crazy. Apparently moving to another continent hasn't changed a thing. Between uni and work I barely even have a social life anymore! And my exchange has become fairly humdrum, anyway. All the things that were weird and notable and exciting when I got here are just regular old Paris now. Either way, I offer a series of random stories, thoughts and updates from the past little while.
I got my first piece of homework back from one of my literature classes today. It was the devoir sur table (in-class written assessment) from my Literature and Opera class. I've been worried since I've been doing all my assessments as commentaire composes, since that's all I know, but I'm still not sure I'm doing them right, and I warned the teacher about it. I was worrying for nothing. I got a 15/20 for it, which is supposed to be really good in a French uni, and her main criticism was that my spectrum of inquiry was too broad, so I didn't have time or room to go into detail on any points, but what I'd written was good. There was a bunch of grammatical mistakes and miswrites (typos by hand!) but there were no 'construction' problems and she marked a few areas as 'good', and when she talked about the themes of the extracts and what we should have covered (as a general idea), she even gave the title of my devoir as an example of a good one-sentence analysis and theme for the commentaire. I was amazed! Hopefully I'll get another assigment back tomorrow, but after this first mark I'm feeling pretty optomistic about this semester.
I've been freaking out my European friends with the amount of travelling I do. I spent this weekend in Belgium - went up Thursday night and returned last night, Sunday. E3-Harelbeke was on Friday and Gent-Wevelgem was on Sunday, both major cycling races, and both Harelbeke and Wevelgem are a short distance from Kortrijk in Belgium which is just over the border from Lille and Roubaix. While I was there I spent a bit of time in Gent and its suburbs, lots of transfers through Kortrijk and an afternoon in Brugge. In other words, I'm now really well acquainted with the West Flanders region of Belgium. Feel free to check out Peloton Cafe for my E3-Harelbeke and Gent-Wevelgem pieces and my profile-feature on Mitch Docker, Australian Orica-GreenEDGE cyclist.
Attached is the beginning of an unfinished post from a few weeks ago about a class trip...
I also made some friends on this trip. I finally talked to some of the French girls in my Lit and Opera class, which is handy, because two of them are in my Medieval Language class directly after Lit and Opera on Mondays. Up til now I've been too shy and unsure of my French to talk to the native French students, so I was pretty proud of myself. I've also made a couple of friends in my Morphosyntaxe class - we've been teamed up for an oral presentation next week, but I like them alright. My linguistics classes this semester are great - Medieval to Classical Language and Morphosyntaxe are really engaging and interesting. Even Lit and Opera and Divine Love Lit classes are pretty good, since I've mostly enjoyed the texts we've studied. It's Thursdays that are a bit trying, but there's only five more weeks of class left, so I'll survive (five weeks! Holy moly! Where did the semester go?) And then after that I apply to graduate and I enter the big wide adult world! Scary thought.
In my quest for the best hot chocolate in Paris, last weekend I went to a teahouse called Angelina's that a friend recommended to me to test his assertion that they have the best hot chocolates. I've never been to a cafe that has a queue before, that was an interesting experience. Unsurprisingly the hot chocolate was rather disappointing - it was Spanish-style, not French-style, and the Spaniards don't know how to do hot chocolate. The place was worth it for the experience though, I'd recommend it.
I think that's all for now. I might post some photos at some point if I get around to it. In the meantime I need to eat dinner and then finish ghost-writing Tiffany Cromwell's blog. Ah, the glamorous life of the professional journalist...not.
I got my first piece of homework back from one of my literature classes today. It was the devoir sur table (in-class written assessment) from my Literature and Opera class. I've been worried since I've been doing all my assessments as commentaire composes, since that's all I know, but I'm still not sure I'm doing them right, and I warned the teacher about it. I was worrying for nothing. I got a 15/20 for it, which is supposed to be really good in a French uni, and her main criticism was that my spectrum of inquiry was too broad, so I didn't have time or room to go into detail on any points, but what I'd written was good. There was a bunch of grammatical mistakes and miswrites (typos by hand!) but there were no 'construction' problems and she marked a few areas as 'good', and when she talked about the themes of the extracts and what we should have covered (as a general idea), she even gave the title of my devoir as an example of a good one-sentence analysis and theme for the commentaire. I was amazed! Hopefully I'll get another assigment back tomorrow, but after this first mark I'm feeling pretty optomistic about this semester.
I've been freaking out my European friends with the amount of travelling I do. I spent this weekend in Belgium - went up Thursday night and returned last night, Sunday. E3-Harelbeke was on Friday and Gent-Wevelgem was on Sunday, both major cycling races, and both Harelbeke and Wevelgem are a short distance from Kortrijk in Belgium which is just over the border from Lille and Roubaix. While I was there I spent a bit of time in Gent and its suburbs, lots of transfers through Kortrijk and an afternoon in Brugge. In other words, I'm now really well acquainted with the West Flanders region of Belgium. Feel free to check out Peloton Cafe for my E3-Harelbeke and Gent-Wevelgem pieces and my profile-feature on Mitch Docker, Australian Orica-GreenEDGE cyclist.
Attached is the beginning of an unfinished post from a few weeks ago about a class trip...
I'm not quite as over-the-top with it as I am with my Disney obsession, but I'm absolutely mad for Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera (though we prefer the term 'phanatics'). I love it so much that the first time I saw an English version of the French novel it was based on (in my university bookshop, of all places) I bought and read it straight away. In fact, the first thing that caught my attention on my first trip to Paris was the Opera Garnier, or Old Paris Opera House. The Opera Garnier was the model for the Opera Populaire in the Phantom of the Opera film, so as soon as I saw it I realised I was in the Phantom city (not to mention the city of many other things that are educated and cultural and have nothing to do with tourist stuff). Anyway, you get the point.
I put my name down a few months back to go to a rehearsal of the opera Cenerentola at the Opera Bastille with my Literature and Opera class. We're studying Cenerentola this semester, since it was developed from the story Cendrillon by French writer Charles Perrault (which later became the Disney movie Cinderella - what, everything relates to Disney!), so I thought it would be good to choose that opera to see, plus the Opera Bastille, I mean, pretty cool, right? So you can imagine the kind of excited sounds I made when I realised there'd been a venue change and we were going to the Opera Garnier. Performer's entrance. Exclusive entry. The whole kit and caboodle. Whoa, dude.
I also made some friends on this trip. I finally talked to some of the French girls in my Lit and Opera class, which is handy, because two of them are in my Medieval Language class directly after Lit and Opera on Mondays. Up til now I've been too shy and unsure of my French to talk to the native French students, so I was pretty proud of myself. I've also made a couple of friends in my Morphosyntaxe class - we've been teamed up for an oral presentation next week, but I like them alright. My linguistics classes this semester are great - Medieval to Classical Language and Morphosyntaxe are really engaging and interesting. Even Lit and Opera and Divine Love Lit classes are pretty good, since I've mostly enjoyed the texts we've studied. It's Thursdays that are a bit trying, but there's only five more weeks of class left, so I'll survive (five weeks! Holy moly! Where did the semester go?) And then after that I apply to graduate and I enter the big wide adult world! Scary thought.
In my quest for the best hot chocolate in Paris, last weekend I went to a teahouse called Angelina's that a friend recommended to me to test his assertion that they have the best hot chocolates. I've never been to a cafe that has a queue before, that was an interesting experience. Unsurprisingly the hot chocolate was rather disappointing - it was Spanish-style, not French-style, and the Spaniards don't know how to do hot chocolate. The place was worth it for the experience though, I'd recommend it.
I think that's all for now. I might post some photos at some point if I get around to it. In the meantime I need to eat dinner and then finish ghost-writing Tiffany Cromwell's blog. Ah, the glamorous life of the professional journalist...not.
Wednesday, 26 December 2012
A Very Merry Unbirthday!
As some of you may know, my 20th birthday was at the beginning of December. And as all of you should know, I'm a huge fan of Disney. I mean huge. There are few Disney movies I can't quote, few songs I can't sing by heart, few princesses whose outfits I don't know. And, being the mature, grown-up adult that I now am, I couldn't help but indulge myself for my birthday. To celebrate entering my 20s, I took myself into a world of children's fantasy for a day. I went to Disneyland.
Normally, my birthday is in the summer months. It signals the first heatwave of summer, and is usually spent in my bathers splashing around in our lake. This year I'm having December in the cold, and my birthday followed the first snow of the season. Saturday therefore dawned cold and frosty. Properly rugged up in my jeans, coat, gloves and scarf, I hopped on the red RER C for the first time to take the trip out to Val-de-Marne - Chessy, Paris' Disney Central.
I was getting thoroughly excited as I walked from the RER station along with the crowds through to the main entrance of Disneyland. Smart move asking about student discounts - saved myself five euro and the ticket was valid for Walt Disney Studios Park as well. Didn't care. All I was interested in was Disneyland.
Main Street, USA. The first Land in the park. I've been to Disneyland before, mind you. Tokyo Disneyland, 2008, aged 15. That was different. Tokyo was newer, more geared towards the rides and big commercialised stuff. Disneyland Paris is more geared towards original Disney - the fairytales, Song of the South, that sorta stuff. I walked into Main Street USA and felt like I was at home. Fairy lights, snow everywhere - and not all of it was fake, either. Slippery white stuff. Weird.
The first thing I saw was Lancelot's Carousel. I love carousels. I jumped in line. See, in Tokyo, Kara and I decided to go on all the little-kiddy rides, cause they're so much fun. There was an added bonus - the lines were no more than 10 minutes long, cause everyone else was riding Buzz Lightyear and stuff over in TomorrowLand. We went on so many different rides because we never had to wait. Unfortunately my birthday this year fell on a Saturday, which, while it meant I was free to go to Disneyland, also meant everyone else was too. I was the lone over-10 in the Lancelot queue unaccompanied by an under-10, and we were all queuing for 40 minutes for a two-minute ride. Well. I was in for an interesting day.
I just went with the flow as best I could. Almost everything I wanted to see and do was in FantasyLand, which has all the traditional Disney from the movies - you know, Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, the girly ones, I guess. I did the Mad Hatter's Tea Cups, It's A Small World, Sleeping Beauty's Castle (in passing), found my way by accident into The Fairy Tale Lands, traversed either by boat or by Casey Jr., the Dumbo Circus Train, and as evening approached I boarded the Disneyland Railway for a freezing cold sightseeing tour all around Disneyland.
I took a break after that and had a really bad burger and fries at Toad Hall, the British restaurant in Fantasyland that played Gilbert and Sullivan - the whole 'He is an En-glish-man, OH! He i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-s an Englishmannnn!' was both comforting and annoying (especially since the food wasn't anywhere near as good as the music). I then proceeded over to AdventureLand next door. There was a compulsory excursion involved. Swiss Family Robinson is actually nothing to do with Disney, but since there's a Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse in every Disneyland I've been to and I love the book, I feel the need to explore. As expected, I spent the excursion clinging to the stairs trying to overcome vertigo and criticising the lack of adherence to the book - too many rooms, they didn't lug a piano up the tree, how did they forget one of the four sons??
And while I was there, I proceeded to get lost in the pirates caves below the treehouse, find Davy Jones' Locker and end up ogling the (completely nautically inaccurate) sailing ship of Captain Hook. And on my way out of AdventureLand via Aladdin's Magical Passage I thought - why not? Let's go explore the Haunted Mansion! Keep in mind I am TOTALLY not good with horror here, guys.
The queue at Phantom Manor was actually moving pretty quickly, so the 30 or 40 minutes it took to get to the Manor doors passed almost before I noticed. The ride was kinda similar to The Nightmare Before Christmas at Tokyo Japan, just themed around a Wild West Haunted Manor rather than a Tim Burton movie. I didn't even freak out too much. And as we exited the house I heard another scream from the FrontierLand island and I though...why not? Let's have a go on your first ever rollercoaster!
Big Thunder Mountain, even at 8 o'clock at night, is hugely popular and has a huge queue. I stood in it for about 40 minutes or so as I got closer and closer to the front of the line and figured out how this thing works. See, Big Thunder Mountain Rollercoaster operates on the island in the middle of the lake in FrontierLand, but you board on the mainland. This then entails that you must somehow get from the mainland to the high-mountain island in the lake. The rollercoaster therefore starts with a death-defying drop into the tunnel under the lake to the island, and ends in the same fashion on the way back. There was a lot of screaming involved. I may have been responsible for some of it. It may have been a lot of wicked fun...totally wanna do that again!
By this time the cold was beginning to creep from my toes and fingers up into my arms and legs, and I'd seen about everything I wanted to see (plus footsie was feeling a little tired) so I decided to bail at last, making my way out to Sleeping Beauty's Castle in the centre of Disneyland. Everyone was standing around, clearly waiting for something exciting to happen, so I paused to pack up my bag and see if anyone knew what we were waiting for and when it would happen. No-one did, and I could live without the Sound and Light Parade at closing, so I turned to leave.
You know in the movies when the exciting thing happens as soon as the heroine turns her back? Well, I dunno what happened since I sure as hell ain't no heroine, but something definitely happened when I turned my back - dunno what, since my back was turned - but the castle was coming to life. Lights, water jets, you name it, the whole she-bang, culminating in a set of sparkly white roofs on all the castle's numerous turrets. With Sleeping Beauty now sleeping pretty, I stopped in Main Street for some birthday fairy floss (I may have been in America but I refuse to call it cotton candy) and visited the bookstore for a little souvenir work.
On my way home I rescued some confused tourists from the torture of the ticket machines, only to discover they were Australians, which gave me some company on the way home. They rode to Chatelet with me before heading to their apartment in Saint-Germain and I headed home to a nice warm apartment and a cup of tea before bed. On balance, definitely a good birthday.
Normally, my birthday is in the summer months. It signals the first heatwave of summer, and is usually spent in my bathers splashing around in our lake. This year I'm having December in the cold, and my birthday followed the first snow of the season. Saturday therefore dawned cold and frosty. Properly rugged up in my jeans, coat, gloves and scarf, I hopped on the red RER C for the first time to take the trip out to Val-de-Marne - Chessy, Paris' Disney Central.
I was getting thoroughly excited as I walked from the RER station along with the crowds through to the main entrance of Disneyland. Smart move asking about student discounts - saved myself five euro and the ticket was valid for Walt Disney Studios Park as well. Didn't care. All I was interested in was Disneyland.
Main Street, USA. The first Land in the park. I've been to Disneyland before, mind you. Tokyo Disneyland, 2008, aged 15. That was different. Tokyo was newer, more geared towards the rides and big commercialised stuff. Disneyland Paris is more geared towards original Disney - the fairytales, Song of the South, that sorta stuff. I walked into Main Street USA and felt like I was at home. Fairy lights, snow everywhere - and not all of it was fake, either. Slippery white stuff. Weird.
The first thing I saw was Lancelot's Carousel. I love carousels. I jumped in line. See, in Tokyo, Kara and I decided to go on all the little-kiddy rides, cause they're so much fun. There was an added bonus - the lines were no more than 10 minutes long, cause everyone else was riding Buzz Lightyear and stuff over in TomorrowLand. We went on so many different rides because we never had to wait. Unfortunately my birthday this year fell on a Saturday, which, while it meant I was free to go to Disneyland, also meant everyone else was too. I was the lone over-10 in the Lancelot queue unaccompanied by an under-10, and we were all queuing for 40 minutes for a two-minute ride. Well. I was in for an interesting day.
I just went with the flow as best I could. Almost everything I wanted to see and do was in FantasyLand, which has all the traditional Disney from the movies - you know, Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, the girly ones, I guess. I did the Mad Hatter's Tea Cups, It's A Small World, Sleeping Beauty's Castle (in passing), found my way by accident into The Fairy Tale Lands, traversed either by boat or by Casey Jr., the Dumbo Circus Train, and as evening approached I boarded the Disneyland Railway for a freezing cold sightseeing tour all around Disneyland.
I took a break after that and had a really bad burger and fries at Toad Hall, the British restaurant in Fantasyland that played Gilbert and Sullivan - the whole 'He is an En-glish-man, OH! He i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-s an Englishmannnn!' was both comforting and annoying (especially since the food wasn't anywhere near as good as the music). I then proceeded over to AdventureLand next door. There was a compulsory excursion involved. Swiss Family Robinson is actually nothing to do with Disney, but since there's a Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse in every Disneyland I've been to and I love the book, I feel the need to explore. As expected, I spent the excursion clinging to the stairs trying to overcome vertigo and criticising the lack of adherence to the book - too many rooms, they didn't lug a piano up the tree, how did they forget one of the four sons??
And while I was there, I proceeded to get lost in the pirates caves below the treehouse, find Davy Jones' Locker and end up ogling the (completely nautically inaccurate) sailing ship of Captain Hook. And on my way out of AdventureLand via Aladdin's Magical Passage I thought - why not? Let's go explore the Haunted Mansion! Keep in mind I am TOTALLY not good with horror here, guys.
The queue at Phantom Manor was actually moving pretty quickly, so the 30 or 40 minutes it took to get to the Manor doors passed almost before I noticed. The ride was kinda similar to The Nightmare Before Christmas at Tokyo Japan, just themed around a Wild West Haunted Manor rather than a Tim Burton movie. I didn't even freak out too much. And as we exited the house I heard another scream from the FrontierLand island and I though...why not? Let's have a go on your first ever rollercoaster!
Big Thunder Mountain, even at 8 o'clock at night, is hugely popular and has a huge queue. I stood in it for about 40 minutes or so as I got closer and closer to the front of the line and figured out how this thing works. See, Big Thunder Mountain Rollercoaster operates on the island in the middle of the lake in FrontierLand, but you board on the mainland. This then entails that you must somehow get from the mainland to the high-mountain island in the lake. The rollercoaster therefore starts with a death-defying drop into the tunnel under the lake to the island, and ends in the same fashion on the way back. There was a lot of screaming involved. I may have been responsible for some of it. It may have been a lot of wicked fun...totally wanna do that again!
By this time the cold was beginning to creep from my toes and fingers up into my arms and legs, and I'd seen about everything I wanted to see (plus footsie was feeling a little tired) so I decided to bail at last, making my way out to Sleeping Beauty's Castle in the centre of Disneyland. Everyone was standing around, clearly waiting for something exciting to happen, so I paused to pack up my bag and see if anyone knew what we were waiting for and when it would happen. No-one did, and I could live without the Sound and Light Parade at closing, so I turned to leave.
You know in the movies when the exciting thing happens as soon as the heroine turns her back? Well, I dunno what happened since I sure as hell ain't no heroine, but something definitely happened when I turned my back - dunno what, since my back was turned - but the castle was coming to life. Lights, water jets, you name it, the whole she-bang, culminating in a set of sparkly white roofs on all the castle's numerous turrets. With Sleeping Beauty now sleeping pretty, I stopped in Main Street for some birthday fairy floss (I may have been in America but I refuse to call it cotton candy) and visited the bookstore for a little souvenir work.
On my way home I rescued some confused tourists from the torture of the ticket machines, only to discover they were Australians, which gave me some company on the way home. They rode to Chatelet with me before heading to their apartment in Saint-Germain and I headed home to a nice warm apartment and a cup of tea before bed. On balance, definitely a good birthday.
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| Shameless Disneyland selfies |
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| Lancelot's carousel |
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| It's A Small World |
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| India - It's A Small World |
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| The Little Mermaid's ship and castle in the Fairytale Lands |
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| The courtyard in Belle's poor provincial town in France |
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| Belle and her sheep |
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| The city of Oz |
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| Casey Jr., the Dumbo Circus Train. I drove! |
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| The castle. Who knows which princess lives here |
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| Sleeping Beauty's castle by night |
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| The sound and light show |
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| Pink...yes, pink.... |
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| Sparkly turret roofs |
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| Disneyland and I share a birthday! |
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| And my present - she hasn't got a name yet! |
Sunday, 2 December 2012
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas
I love December. The end of another school year, and my birthday too, of course, but it's the 25th of December that I really love. Christmas is my favourite time of year. I love the atmosphere - Christmas tree hunting, 10 boxes of decos for me and Kiri to hang on the tree, Dad climbing around on the roof putting up the glowing reindeer, planning out an elaborate menu that Mum will never ever approve, late Christmas shopping nights in the main street, carols night at the church, Bucko and Champs playing on repeat in the lounge room - and I love sharing it with my family too. I'm home for the holidays and I spend the whole month in preparation and anticipation for that one day of the year. In fact, I probably like the month leading up more than the day itself!
So this year I find myself wondering what I'm going to do for Christmas. Noel in Paris is slowly but surely kicking off, but for the first time I'm not in the middle of the spirit of the season. I have no family in Europe at all, and all my friends are flying home for the holidays. There are no decos in my apartment. No room (or money) for a tree. The Bucko and Champs CDs are in Mum's stereo back home. Apart from McPedro (and Spiderplant and Dumbledore), I have no-one to share any of it with anyway, and I'm too sober for McPedro to talk back in any case (if you don't get the reference, read some more Girls With Slingshots). The other night my friend Aida took me to the Christmas market on the Champs-Elysees. It was huge, and wonderful, and the carols over the loudspeaker were in English, but it also made me realise that this will be a different Christmas to all those I've known before.
I've considered going away for a trip somewhere like any other uni holiday, but travel is really expensiv eat Christmas, obviously, and even if I end up in a tiny deserted hostel in the most obscure town in a forgotten Baltic nation, people will still be celebrating Christmas. There will still be carols and decos and Christmas trees and it will still be just me and Lassie sticking out of my backpack, on our own. I've also considered staying in Paris and trying to find some kind of event for exchange kids, a church group that does Christmas lunch for students or something like that, but, honestly, it wouldn't make me feel any better. I wouldn't know any of these people, they wouldn't mean anything to me, and say what you will about sharing the Christmas spirit and fellow mankind and whatnot, Christmas to me is about being with people I love, my family and friends, and a traditional lunch and carols with strangers isn't going to make up for that. The best idea I've had so far has been to buy some Christmas presents for one of the Christmas appeals - you know, like the Kmart Wishing Tree or something.
So, what will I do for Christmas? I still don't know. I have friends coming to Paris in late December and early January who want to see me, so maybe I'll just go away for a few days over New Year's so I can catch up with friends in Paris. In the meantime I'll try and put aside the niggling heartsickness that the mention of Christmas brings on and try and enjoy the experiences of fairy lights and Christmas-themed Disneyland.
So this year I find myself wondering what I'm going to do for Christmas. Noel in Paris is slowly but surely kicking off, but for the first time I'm not in the middle of the spirit of the season. I have no family in Europe at all, and all my friends are flying home for the holidays. There are no decos in my apartment. No room (or money) for a tree. The Bucko and Champs CDs are in Mum's stereo back home. Apart from McPedro (and Spiderplant and Dumbledore), I have no-one to share any of it with anyway, and I'm too sober for McPedro to talk back in any case (if you don't get the reference, read some more Girls With Slingshots). The other night my friend Aida took me to the Christmas market on the Champs-Elysees. It was huge, and wonderful, and the carols over the loudspeaker were in English, but it also made me realise that this will be a different Christmas to all those I've known before.
I've considered going away for a trip somewhere like any other uni holiday, but travel is really expensiv eat Christmas, obviously, and even if I end up in a tiny deserted hostel in the most obscure town in a forgotten Baltic nation, people will still be celebrating Christmas. There will still be carols and decos and Christmas trees and it will still be just me and Lassie sticking out of my backpack, on our own. I've also considered staying in Paris and trying to find some kind of event for exchange kids, a church group that does Christmas lunch for students or something like that, but, honestly, it wouldn't make me feel any better. I wouldn't know any of these people, they wouldn't mean anything to me, and say what you will about sharing the Christmas spirit and fellow mankind and whatnot, Christmas to me is about being with people I love, my family and friends, and a traditional lunch and carols with strangers isn't going to make up for that. The best idea I've had so far has been to buy some Christmas presents for one of the Christmas appeals - you know, like the Kmart Wishing Tree or something.
So, what will I do for Christmas? I still don't know. I have friends coming to Paris in late December and early January who want to see me, so maybe I'll just go away for a few days over New Year's so I can catch up with friends in Paris. In the meantime I'll try and put aside the niggling heartsickness that the mention of Christmas brings on and try and enjoy the experiences of fairy lights and Christmas-themed Disneyland.
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| The Paris Christmas market |
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| Lights display on the Champs-Elysees |
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| Me with Aida...you know, I've forgotten all the others |
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| Surrounded by Christmas lights on the Champs-Elysees |
Friday, 26 October 2012
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.
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.
Tuesday, 9 October 2012
Ups and downs
I've developed a love/hate relationship with France. My mood goes from one extreme to another depending on what new cultural idiocy or idiosyncrasy the day hands me. One moment I'm depressed by the gloomy Parisian weather, the next I'm as pleased as the cat that got the cream on finding a fast way in and out of the city. Today was one of those days.
I was in a real funk all morning, wanting nothing more than to curl up in bed with a large pile of Lindt and Pride & Prejudice, even though I had to go into the city to buy my books for class. Didn't want to. I was in a real funky funk. But my sense of duty wouldn't be denied, so I pulled on my crumbling backpack and took the RER to Saint-Michel, just south of Notre Dame.
I heard about this bookstore called Gibert Jeune from the other exchange students as the place to buy cheap books in Paris. I looked it up online - there's about seven stores scattered around Place Saint Michel, each with a different area of specialisation depending on the type of books. I was still in a bit of a funk when I arrived, and this didn't improve when I couldn't find any of the books I wanted in the main store, and none of the others seemed to fit the bill. Eventually I asked the clerk on the third floor where I would find the books on my list. "Oh, they're livres de poche ('pocket books')," she said. "You'll find them in the Pochotheque on the next floor."
It was like entering another world. The funk vanished. The whole floor of the bookstore was filled with livres de poche, like Penguin Classics in English, but with better covers. It's all alphabetical, and if there's anything you can't find just ask the staff. They can put their hands on any book with 30 seconds (I speak from experience) and if there are none on the shelf then the pull one from the stock in the cupboards just behind the bookshelves. It's a pretty neat set-up. The best part about Gibert Jeune is it's a combination of a new and a used bookshop. Any book with no markings or stickers on it is 'neuf' - a brand-new book - and those with an orange sticker saying 'occasion' are second-hand, and therefore cheaper. I found most of the books I needed and then got so distracted by the pretty orange stickers that I had to grab a basket. I forgot why I usually avoid bookstores. Oops. You can see the results below.
I had just left Gibert Jeune and was heading into the metro station (which accesses the RER station) when I found my second treasure of the day. I could hear music coming up the stairs of the metro as I descended. Buskers are pretty common around the Paris metro, and some even jump on the trains with their violins, piano accordions or portable microphones and speakers to serenade you on your way to work or class. Most of them aren't that great and are easily ignored. But this one was different.
It looked like a collaboration between one of the two girls I'd seen as I passed through the metro earlier and two guys who had come to take their place when they left. The girl had a violin, one of the guys had an acoustic guitar plugged into a mini amp, and the other guy was sitting on what looked like a large speaker that turned out to be a digital drum kit (where you touch the speaker and with how much pressure determines the type and volume of drum). They were doing an improv instrumental piece between the three of them that was so good it drew a crowd of people, something I've never seen in the metro before.
When they finished, to a loud round of applause, the girl and her partner packed up and left the space to the two guys. I stayed and listened for a while longer. I think I stood there for about half an hour with my huge bag of books and feet sore from standing. I have no idea if the boys were playing from memory or just improvising too, but the choice of chords and the poignant melodies were so lovely that I couldn't help but smile. It was even nicer because they looked like they were genuinely having fun too, and the whole experience made me feel a lot lighter. I was glad I had the presence of mind to grab my camera and take a video. So, guys, if you're out there, c’était absolument incroyable, merci beaucoup pour aviver mon journée.
I was in a real funk all morning, wanting nothing more than to curl up in bed with a large pile of Lindt and Pride & Prejudice, even though I had to go into the city to buy my books for class. Didn't want to. I was in a real funky funk. But my sense of duty wouldn't be denied, so I pulled on my crumbling backpack and took the RER to Saint-Michel, just south of Notre Dame.
I heard about this bookstore called Gibert Jeune from the other exchange students as the place to buy cheap books in Paris. I looked it up online - there's about seven stores scattered around Place Saint Michel, each with a different area of specialisation depending on the type of books. I was still in a bit of a funk when I arrived, and this didn't improve when I couldn't find any of the books I wanted in the main store, and none of the others seemed to fit the bill. Eventually I asked the clerk on the third floor where I would find the books on my list. "Oh, they're livres de poche ('pocket books')," she said. "You'll find them in the Pochotheque on the next floor."
It was like entering another world. The funk vanished. The whole floor of the bookstore was filled with livres de poche, like Penguin Classics in English, but with better covers. It's all alphabetical, and if there's anything you can't find just ask the staff. They can put their hands on any book with 30 seconds (I speak from experience) and if there are none on the shelf then the pull one from the stock in the cupboards just behind the bookshelves. It's a pretty neat set-up. The best part about Gibert Jeune is it's a combination of a new and a used bookshop. Any book with no markings or stickers on it is 'neuf' - a brand-new book - and those with an orange sticker saying 'occasion' are second-hand, and therefore cheaper. I found most of the books I needed and then got so distracted by the pretty orange stickers that I had to grab a basket. I forgot why I usually avoid bookstores. Oops. You can see the results below.
I had just left Gibert Jeune and was heading into the metro station (which accesses the RER station) when I found my second treasure of the day. I could hear music coming up the stairs of the metro as I descended. Buskers are pretty common around the Paris metro, and some even jump on the trains with their violins, piano accordions or portable microphones and speakers to serenade you on your way to work or class. Most of them aren't that great and are easily ignored. But this one was different.
It looked like a collaboration between one of the two girls I'd seen as I passed through the metro earlier and two guys who had come to take their place when they left. The girl had a violin, one of the guys had an acoustic guitar plugged into a mini amp, and the other guy was sitting on what looked like a large speaker that turned out to be a digital drum kit (where you touch the speaker and with how much pressure determines the type and volume of drum). They were doing an improv instrumental piece between the three of them that was so good it drew a crowd of people, something I've never seen in the metro before.
When they finished, to a loud round of applause, the girl and her partner packed up and left the space to the two guys. I stayed and listened for a while longer. I think I stood there for about half an hour with my huge bag of books and feet sore from standing. I have no idea if the boys were playing from memory or just improvising too, but the choice of chords and the poignant melodies were so lovely that I couldn't help but smile. It was even nicer because they looked like they were genuinely having fun too, and the whole experience made me feel a lot lighter. I was glad I had the presence of mind to grab my camera and take a video. So, guys, if you're out there, c’était absolument incroyable, merci beaucoup pour aviver mon journée.
I got back from my cycling weekend away yesterday. Sunday went pretty well - I caught a taxi to Chateauneuf-en-Thymerais after breakfast, where I was able to pick up my official press pass and make my way up to the GreenEDGE team bus to introduce myself. I left the team around 4pm in Tours and made my way down to the press room in the mairie (town hall). The presence of a tiny, young-looking journo with two big bags on crutches raised a few eyebrows, but with my nice shiny press pass around my neck no-one tried to stop me. I grabbed a seat in the press room and got stuck into my article for Peloton Cafe, taking a quick break to listen to the interview with race winner Marco Marcato. It wasn't until the second question that I realised the language he was speaking was Italian (and being translated into French for the journos), since I was writing down the key words in both languages regardless! Polyglot much?
I left/got kicked out of the press room at 7.30pm and headed down the street to where I could take the bus to the youth hostel. It was several minutes late, but it was the right bus and I was able to buy a ticket without any trouble. The driver told me when I reached my stop a few minutes later, and I thanked him and got out. Even though the street sign told me I was in the right place - rue Bretonneau - I couldn't find number five and saw nothing that looked like a youth hostel. The couple I stopped on the street to ask directions put me straight - I was on rue Bretonneau, The Suburbs, not rue Bretonneau, Tours. The husband kindly drove me back to Tours and walked me to the door of the hostel to make sure I got there safely. And before anyone starts lecturing me about accepting lifts from strangers, it was 8:15pm on a Sunday night and I was on a street far from where I was meant to be, on crutches with no discernible way of getting back, and I've found that it's usually less of a risk when the strangers in question are a kindly older couple who remind you of your grandparents.
Absolutely starving, I dropped my bag off in my room and headed out to find somewhere to eat. Thankfully there was a whole slew of restaurants nearby, and I parked myself in one of them with some tagliatelle and Tyler Hamilton's new book The Secret Race, which I'd downloaded in Macca's the night before. Heading back to the hostel, I spend the rest of the evening trying to re-send my article to Jarrod, since my email account had apparently gone on the fritz.
I was up early on Monday morning, checking my computer, packing my bag and having breakfast. At 8.30am I took my room key downstairs to check out and asked directions to the Tourism Office for my bus tour. Being too far to walk I was going to have to take a bus, but I was beginning to cut it fine. Thankfully a bus showed up to the nearby bus stop by quarter to, and by the time I'd gotten off in the centre of town and walked to the Tourism Office it was five to. But here's the catch - apparently my 'reservation' wasn't a reservation after all! My bus tour wasn't booked! The lady in the office made a few phone calls and was able to get me a space on one leaving that morning at 9.30am, and I thanked her profusely. I was taking a trip to the chateaux of the Loire valley.
I actually really enjoyed Amboise Castle. Most of the original castle has been pulled down - just two small wings remain, the edge of the foundations and one or two other buildings, like the lovely little chapel where Leonardo da Vinci is now interred. The gardens are really stunning, but I didn't have time to explore them. By the time I'd seen the chapel, admired the view of the town and the river over the castle walls and walked through the main building, we'd run out of time and had to meet the bus.
Our second and final stop for the day was Chenonceau. Some of you might be surprised to find you're already familiar with this castle - remember that giant white chateau in last year's Tour de France coverage that was stretched over the river Loire, like a house build on a bridge surrounded by beautiful gardens? That's Chenonceau. It was a beautiful day, misty, cloudy, and raining a little by the time we reached Chenonceau - just lovely. I'm not being sarcastic. It's easy to love things when the sun in shining. Everything looks so pretty and romantic in the golden rays that you fall in "love" with everything you see. If you can appreciate something in miserable weather then you've really and truly enjoyed yourself instead of just being swept away by the sunshine. In fact, the misty rainy greyness of the day added a lovely element of wistful nostalgia that you simply won't experience when the sun is out.
I didn't like Chenonceau as much. The big draw of Chenonceau is its architecture, its unique location built right on top of the Loire, and you can't see that from within the castle. Inside is standard Fancy Old Western Building - tapestries, paintings, decor, sumptuous four-poster beds, the kind of stuff you can see anywhere. What I really wanted to enjoy was the view of the chateau over the water, and no matter how much I hung out windows I couldn't really get a good look. If you really want to visit Chenonceau, then take a helicopter flight over it or a boat trip under it. Walk through the chateau, explore the gardens and the maze, but make sure you see the castle face-on if you can. I felt a little like I'd missed the point of the trip for not having had that experience.
I bought my train ticket home at the Tours station and had lunch, followed by hot chocolate, in a mall not far from the station. It was an easy, two-hour trip home on the TER, the slower regional trains that are cheaper than the TGV. My plants missed me while I was away - did I mention that I've also adopted some miniature cyclamens that I'm naming Cecilia 1-6? I'm slowly clearing all the junk that's accumulated in my room, and continues to accumulate, since I moved in and am finding homes for all my genuine acquisitions, like books and fridge magnets. This place has an unmistakeable mark of 'Caelli' on it now.
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| For Kiri, after our little discussion |
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| Departures and arrivals at Paris Gare Montparnasse |
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| Double decker train to Chartres |
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| Me at Amboise |
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| Leonardo da Vinci's grave |
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| Looking out on the town of Amboise from the castle |
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| The chapel of Saint Hubert at Chateau Amboise |
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| The chateau |
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| Looking at the chateau from inside the chapel |
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| The grounds of Amboise |
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| So turns out I'm also terrified of suits of armour (along with mannequins, heights and garbage trucks...) |
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| Amboise from behind |
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| The sweeping drive of Chenonceau |
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| Chenonceau from the landward side |
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| The Great Hall at Chenonceau |
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| Looking across the Loire at the castle |
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| The outbuildings and gardens |
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| The castle from the second floor |
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| There's 12 books here and I got change from 50 euros. Not bad |
Wednesday, 3 October 2012
Lille-ies of the Flandres fields
Sorry to keep everyone at home hanging for so long, but it's been a long and busy but worthwhile three days! I'll try and catch you up on everything that's happened before my planned (but not necessarily likely) early bedtime.
I was up early on Sunday morning to shower and pack, as I was catching a train from Gare du Nord at a quarter to 11. The final stage of the Circuit Franco-Belge was finishing on Sunday afternoon in Tournai, a small town in Belgium on the French border, near the French city of Lille, and I was planning to be there. I headed off to Gare du Nord with a full bag on my back to buy a youth discount card and tickets for the TGV to Lille and the connecting train across the border to Tournai.
Since I had been planning to catch a later train, I wasn't as early as I would have liked, and I arrived at Gare du Nord with just under half an hour until the train departed. This may not sound like a problem but the place is more like a rabbit warren than you'd believe, and despite having figured the station out somewhat on my last visit, this time I wanted tickets not for a regional train as last time but for an international train, which seemed an effort bound for disaster.
This time, however, I had some knowledge of how the station, tickets and transport systems worked to my credit, with my rapidly improving French my secret weapon. With 15 minutes to go I found myself standing in the queue for international tickets with no idea if or how the hell I was going to make the train. There was a vague possibility that international tickets required a prior reservation, in which case I really was screwed either way.
Luckily the train gods decided to smile on me. Just in time I got to a window with a very understanding lady who knew exactly what I wanted and was able to process it fast enough that me and my much-reduced ticket (youth discount card was the best idea I've had all week) were headed for the train with four minutes left. This time I knew how to composter (validate) my ticket and jump on the train, ignoring the part about allocated seats as the train wasn't full and no-one seemed to need the seat I was in.
I was up early on Sunday morning to shower and pack, as I was catching a train from Gare du Nord at a quarter to 11. The final stage of the Circuit Franco-Belge was finishing on Sunday afternoon in Tournai, a small town in Belgium on the French border, near the French city of Lille, and I was planning to be there. I headed off to Gare du Nord with a full bag on my back to buy a youth discount card and tickets for the TGV to Lille and the connecting train across the border to Tournai.
Since I had been planning to catch a later train, I wasn't as early as I would have liked, and I arrived at Gare du Nord with just under half an hour until the train departed. This may not sound like a problem but the place is more like a rabbit warren than you'd believe, and despite having figured the station out somewhat on my last visit, this time I wanted tickets not for a regional train as last time but for an international train, which seemed an effort bound for disaster.
This time, however, I had some knowledge of how the station, tickets and transport systems worked to my credit, with my rapidly improving French my secret weapon. With 15 minutes to go I found myself standing in the queue for international tickets with no idea if or how the hell I was going to make the train. There was a vague possibility that international tickets required a prior reservation, in which case I really was screwed either way.
Luckily the train gods decided to smile on me. Just in time I got to a window with a very understanding lady who knew exactly what I wanted and was able to process it fast enough that me and my much-reduced ticket (youth discount card was the best idea I've had all week) were headed for the train with four minutes left. This time I knew how to composter (validate) my ticket and jump on the train, ignoring the part about allocated seats as the train wasn't full and no-one seemed to need the seat I was in.
The TGV - train à grand vitesse - is strange to say the least. These things go at 300km/h, and though you know you're travelling at a high speed as the scenery whizzes past, much higher than normal, it doesn't look or feel like anything faster than a regular old V/Line train. It seemed like we'd barely gotten on the train - in fact, it was nearly an hour later - when we arrived in Lille, on the Belgian border. I jumped (hobbled) off the train, walked to the adjoining platform and boarded my connection to Belgium, because that's just what you do in Europe. My head still has a little trouble getting around how casually one crosses international borders on this continent.
20 minutes of beautiful French-Belgian countryside later, since I have no idea where France left off and Belgium began, I was at the station in Tournai, barely an hour and a half after leaving Paris. Unfortunately Europe's moved on a bit since Le tour du monde en 80 jours was written and you no longer even have the option of getting your passport stamped when you arrive somewhere new, so I had to forgo my decorative proof of entry into the country and instead celebrated my arrival by falling down the stairs. A couple of kind passers-by helped me up and guided me out of the station and, with rejoinders to be more careful in future ringing in my ears, I limped down the street on my crutches towards the finish line of the race.
Again, I will try to avoid as much as possible from talking cycling on this blog, seeing as I have a whole other blog for my fangirling and journalistic pursuits, but I will speak a little of Tournai (and just a very wee bit of cycling). Tournai is in Wallonie, the southern, French-speaking part of Belgium, which has never made any sense to me given the Flemish-speaking northern part has the wonderful French name of Flanders. Admittedly the Flemish name of 'Vlaanderen' does sound a little less French, but then again so does Wallonie. Europe really is hopeless at this 'countries' thing.
Wallonie and France are almost indistinguishable - in fact, most European geography and scenery pays no attention to international borders, instead following linguistic, historic or simply nature's borders. Wallonie and France share almost all of the above, so the gawking done in Tournai was more or less the same gawking I've been doing for the part three weeks in France. The train station was a huge, amazing construction of stone, and the town had the same narrow, cobbled streets, same feeling of being steeped in history, same surroundings of farmland and green countryside that I've already come to know and love in France.
Just a short cyclistic interlude, since I can't resist - Orica-GreenEDGE, the Australian ProTeam, was racing the Circuit as well, and by dint of some excellent timing, careful stake-outs and a bit of sheer dumb luck, I managed to get a photo with Jens Keukeleire, one of my two GreenEDGE cuties, and also a photo and a chat with GreenEDGE soigneur extraordinaire Joachim of Backstage Pass fame. For those non-GreenEDGE fans who are reading, you need to see this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG6VCBx9kfc&list=UUV9vvIQ8gxceqrBkn-P7rlw&index=74&feature=plcp followed by the first few minutes of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dBfubmcGCE&list=UUV9vvIQ8gxceqrBkn-P7rlw&index=72&feature=plcp to understand why this was so exciting. Everyone on GreenEDGE was chosen so they'd 'fit' the ethos and ideals of the team, and let me just say they did a bloody good job. Everyone, from the riders and DSs down to the soigneurs and mechanics has the same larrikin sense of humour, regardless of their nationality. Joachim was happy to chat with me for a couple of minutes, talking about the upcoming races, and before I left he gave me a GreenEDGE musette full of spare GreenEDGE water bottles. Needless to say, these two encounters totally made my day.
Race over (read the Maillot Jaune article if you want more info), I headed back to the train station and bought a ticket for the next train back to Lille, taking extra care on the stairs this time. My friend Julien, who lives in Lille, met me at the station there, and together we headed to the youth hostel where I was planning on staying the night. Luckily, as the Internet had promised, I found a bed in a girls' 5-dorm, where I met two of my new dormmates, an American called Shaylee and a Russian called Ana. Both girls were staying in the youth hostel while they searched for permanent accommodation in Lille - Ana for her Master's degree, Shaylee for her English teacher assistant program. I dropped off some of my stuff and Julien and I headed out to get dinner.
After sampling a Dutch yummy called croustillants, the predecessor of the modern doughnut but distinctly lacking on the jam front, we ended up at an Alsace restaurant near the station that Julien had recommended. We took our time over the funny Alsatian versions of pizza we'd ordered, Julien quite amused by my reactions to the very pungent French cheeses on mine. I believe I have some way to go on that front before I can be considered properly French.
Heading back to the youth hostel around 11 - yes, I said we took our time - I sat down in the foyer to get stuck into my article on the day's race and start sorting through all the photos. Having exhausted my camera battery during the presentations, I was pleased to discover that Past Me had had the presence of mind to pack the camera charger, too. By half-past midnight I'd finally sent off my article and a selection of photos to my editor, and I headed upstairs to change and perform my ablutions in the bathroom I found.
I got a bit of a surprise to find myself apparently locked out of my dorm, but a bit of quiet tapping succeeded in rousing the girl nearest the door to let me in (and yes, I'm aware that 'quiet' tapping is sort of redundant when your intention is to wake someone). Realising I was a new addition, Chloe promptly introduced herself and shook my hand by way of greeting, as though it wasn't one o'clock in the morning. Like Shaylee, Chloe was in Lille for a teacher's assistant program, though hailing from Britain rather than the US. This was when I also learned my first lesson of youth hostelling - make your bed when you arrive, not before you go to sleep, though a blanket was all I really needed.
I woke at 6am when Shaylee and Chloe left for work, and then fell asleep again only to wake at 9. In a panic, I pulled on my clothes and raced down for breakfast just in time to catch the end of the apple juice, hot chocolate and baguette with Nutella. Upstairs, I packed my bags, said goodbye and good luck to Ana and went back downstairs to check my emails and look up bus tours of Lille. I made my slow, limping way over to the Tourism Office to buy a ticket for the 12pm tour, my right ankle still sore from yesterday's tumble, and then detoured to the Post Office.
On my way back to the Tourism Bureau I felt obliged to stop in at a little place called Le Chat Bleu, which bore the further inscription 'Chocolatier'. I needed no further invitation. I explained my awed gawking at the sheer amount of sweet, sweet goodness to the chocolatier behind the counter by telling him that chocolateries don't exist in Australia - a statement which of course gave carte blanche to speak to me in English! Naturally I needed a couple of samples, and the chocolatier was quite happy for me to take some photos of all the ones I was leaving behind. As he very rightly pointed out, "free advertising". It turns out the store got its name from the two blue Persians cats who greeted visitors to the original franchise, owned by a pair of sisters in Le Touquet in 1912. Cool.
The bus tour of Lille, while normally something I'd avoid like the plague, was definitely a good choice for a girl with a gimpy legfootstump. I listened to the English-language commentary through my headphones as we drove around the town, soothed by the lovely British accents that informed me that Lille had been around for a super-long time, had all kinds of exciting things happen there and was essentially way cooler than anything back home in Australia. I've been getting this message a lot in France.
Afterwards I headed to the station to buy a ticket from Paris, discovering that the train left from Lille's other major train station. An excuse to use the Lille metro! Their metro is freaky in that they have unmanned trains. Unmanned. No driver. The whole thing is automated. It's scary. Of course, that means that they have heaps of excess personnel who instead man the metro station and check every ticket manually, despite the ticket barriers. I managed to buy myself a ticket and boarded a metro train to take me one stop from the old station Gare Lille - Flandres to the newer Gare Lille - Europe, where I bought some lunch and got stuck into Paul Kimmage's book Rough Ride that I'd downloaded onto the Kindle earlier that morning.
It was only an hour back to Paris, during which time I alternated between reading voraciously and staring out the window at the countryside, watching and dreaming. It really did seem an inordinately short amount of time before we were pulling in at Gare du Nord again. I hauled my bulky bag, now with extra weight from the GreenEDGE bottles, onto the RER bound for Le Bourget. Off the train, hauled myself home and collapsed with a cold drink. Most of the rest of the day, and most of today too, was then spent in little administrative tasks - unpacking, emails and the like. Thus ends Epic Adventure 1. Stay tuned for Episode 2 next weekend - but before then, I start classes at the Sorbonne...
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| The TGV to Lille from the Intercity to Tournai |
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| The Tournai train |
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| Typical French-Belgian countryside |
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| The train station in Tournai - how cool is it? |
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| Me with Joachim Schoonacker!! |
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| Me with Jens Keukeleire - what a cutie! |
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| The Lille Opera House |
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| The Lille Post Office - well, that's what it is now |
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| Le Chat Bleu |
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| Yummy! |
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| So much sugary goodness... |
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| Statue from the official lullaby of Lille |
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| Gare de Lille Flandres |
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| The funny unmanned metro |
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| Gare du Nord and my train (I think) |
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| My spoils from Joachim :D |
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