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.
Showing posts with label Seine-Saint-Denis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Seine-Saint-Denis. Show all posts
Friday, 26 October 2012
Saturday, 15 September 2012
History and culture
Le Bourget is crazy tonight! It's La Fete de l'Humanite in La Courneuve, a 600,000-strong, three-day long festival of politics and music and food and goodness knows what else, and being Saturday seemingly everyone who lives in Paris is there-ward bound. As a result there's more traffic and pedestrians on the street than you could swing a cat at and everyone is going crazy!
It feels like I haven't written much in a while, but Blogger tells me I'm only two days behind, not the ten it feels like, thankfully. I actually haven't been doing a lot - after finding an email from the exchange student's association of Sorbonne offering help opening an account at a kindly bank which only requires X documents, all of which I have, and receiving a reply to my request promising said help, most of my problems have an imminent solution. Once I have said bank account set up I can organise the direct debit for my rent, submit my application for an Imagine-R student public transport pass (which requires a direct debit), apply for the CAF French housing assistance with an account for it to be paid into, and set up the direct debit for my electricity account. Need I tell you the most critical thing when moving to France?
Yes, of course, your visa! What else could I possibly mean?
Given the current state of Firefly-world administration and the requisite minimum set-up of my apartment, I sort of ran out of things that vitally need doing which therefore occupied my days. There's food in the cupboard, dishes in the kitchen, a place for me at university and one soon-to-be-existing bank account to cover everything else, leaving me to explore a shocking new realm - Boredom. Of course, that never lasts too long around me. Between washing dishes, sweeping, collecting and sorting a HUGE pile of mail, mostly junk (and some cards and posters from home), answering emails and doing some work for Peloton Cafe, I found enough to fill my time. Yesterday I made a (mostly redundant) trip down to Sorbonne for the professed purpose of visiting the SMEREP office and the Spanish department (both closed, by the way) which very naturally ended in me running into Anas and having lunch with him and Martin in the cafe across the road (totally don't see a trend developing here, no, not at all....). This time it was ANAS who was stressed out and in need of a hug, a situation which I believe was due entirely to Sorbonne's WiFi networks. This emphasises that fact that more or less everything I've written so far can be summarised by saying that France and Sorbonne hate exchange students and want to make us cry. I'm really beginning to think that if France could close all its borders and live in cloistered seclusion from the rest of world, content with its bureacracy and traffic chaos, it honestly would.
The exchange students group had organised a Paris by night tour outing, which I had been planning on skipping since walking tours are out of my range of abilities at the moment. This decision quickly changed when I realised I had the wrong 'tour' - not LE tour, like Le Tour de France, but LA tour, like La Tour Eiffel. In this case we were going to La Tour Montparnasse, and since Martin lives in that quartier of Paris he took little convincing to come along with me. Suffice to say that the view is beautiful - as Martin had told me from his previous visits, it's the only place in Paris where you can see the whole city as well as the famed Eiffel Tower, something that can't be done from the Eiffel Tower itself. It was a little chilly up on the top-floor 210+ metre terrace, but the view really was worth it. Come 10pm the Eiffel Tower did its sparkly lights thing - scintiller, in French - and Martin and I even spotted the fireworks from Disneyland on the other side of Paris. I'd post photos, but I don't have any that do the scene justice (read: I suck at using my camera and couldn't find night vision).
There was something else noteworthy of the night - would you believe there are GIRLS at Sorbonne? And here I was thinking it was just going to be me and the boys! Well, it still is, since they're still the friends I know the best, but there was a really nice girl from Italy called Margerita, and a lovely German called Viktoria who wondered if I was from Great Britain (there are so many damn Germans here, and none of them have taught me to speak German yet!). Though I love meeting the other exchange students, and coming from Australia automatically gives me a higher level of cool, I'm looking forward to meeting the French students, since they're sort of the reason I came to France and not Germany in the first place. This is no way means that I am throwing over Anas, Paul and Martin, though - we haven't been to Disneyland yet.
This afternoon Julien came down from Lille for the weekend, and we decided to head east from La Courneuve to visit the Basilique de Saint-Denis, a huge cathedral that's the burial place of French royalty and pretty much anyone who's been really important in France, ever. The cathedral on its own was lovely - a pipe organ that I would really love to play and stained glass windows that I recognised as representing the kings of France since the 1100s (my French history classes are coming back to me). Finding ourselves halted at the nave by a large gate, we decided that the price would be thoroughly worth it to visit the cathedral's crypt - doubly so in Julien's case, since it's free for under-25 European nationals. I was therefore flattered to be mistaken for European when the ticket officer handed us two tickets without question - at least until Julien realised that this weekend is the Journees du Patrimoine. A two-day heritage appreciation weekend, most large important historical monuments are free and places that can't usually be visited during the rest of the year open their doors to the public for a cultural experience. As such the cathedral, which I think is more properly called an abbaye, or abbey, was completely open for nothing more than the effort of walking in.
The mediaeval kitchen garden which usually closes at 1pm was not only open but playing host to a small tent, where musicians were entertaining a small crowd. Julien and I listened as we walked out of the abbey and around the garden, me squeeing excitedly over the architecture, the gargoyles or the plants alternatively. I was surprised to hear a beautiful flute-and-guitar rendering of 'Greensleeves' drifting towards me as I rubbed my hands through the thyme, mint and basil. When the announcer asked the clueless French audience, who wouldn't know an English folk song if it hit them in the face, "Does anyone know it?" as they finished, I wanted to jump up and yell, "Moi! Moi!" Given he could hear me singing along under my breath, I think Julien half-expected me to!
The crypt was amazing - the place reminded me of the Pantheon in central Paris, where a lot of pretty famous Frenchies like Marie and Pierre Curie and Victor Hugo are buried. There's an eerie feeling to knowing you're surrounded by the now-skeletonised bodies of people from hundreds of years ago - kings of France, no less. I was just as intrigued by some of the inscriptions - apart from Julien having to tear me away from the Latin, which I was slowly and painstakingly remembering and translating, there were several plaques written in a strange and grammatically-poor form of French. It was mediaeval French, Old French, from when the abbey was first built and people were interred there. They were still using the Latin 'V' for 'U' (LOVIS XII) and there were 'y's where there should have been 'i's. It was like reading the Canterbury tales in the original Middle English - I must have spent half an hour or more staring at these plaques, noting what had changed in modern French from the old version, and how the old version itself had or hadn't changed from Latin. I'm feeling so much more enthused for my French linguistics subjects at Sorbonne now if they're half so interesting as my crash course in the development of the French language - it was fascinating.
I also discovered why the Basilique, the town and in fact the whole region are called Saint-Denis - right in the depths of the crypt, in an original 11th-century burial chamber, was a tomb in which reputedly lay Saint Denis, who had his head cut off by the Romans and then carried it to Montmartre in protest (as Julien told the story to me). Barring the part where I got super-excited over the archaeological-dig aspect of the old crypt, I realised I had come across Saint Denis before. On my visit three years ago to Notre-Dame-de-Paris, the cathedral on Ile-de-la-Cite, I noted that one of the saints carved around the main doorway of the church was headless, holding its head in its hands. I laughed at it at the time and wondered whether the sculptor had gotten bored and hoped no-one would notice, or if perhaps there was a reason for it. I never expected to find out.
It feels like I haven't written much in a while, but Blogger tells me I'm only two days behind, not the ten it feels like, thankfully. I actually haven't been doing a lot - after finding an email from the exchange student's association of Sorbonne offering help opening an account at a kindly bank which only requires X documents, all of which I have, and receiving a reply to my request promising said help, most of my problems have an imminent solution. Once I have said bank account set up I can organise the direct debit for my rent, submit my application for an Imagine-R student public transport pass (which requires a direct debit), apply for the CAF French housing assistance with an account for it to be paid into, and set up the direct debit for my electricity account. Need I tell you the most critical thing when moving to France?
Yes, of course, your visa! What else could I possibly mean?
Given the current state of Firefly-world administration and the requisite minimum set-up of my apartment, I sort of ran out of things that vitally need doing which therefore occupied my days. There's food in the cupboard, dishes in the kitchen, a place for me at university and one soon-to-be-existing bank account to cover everything else, leaving me to explore a shocking new realm - Boredom. Of course, that never lasts too long around me. Between washing dishes, sweeping, collecting and sorting a HUGE pile of mail, mostly junk (and some cards and posters from home), answering emails and doing some work for Peloton Cafe, I found enough to fill my time. Yesterday I made a (mostly redundant) trip down to Sorbonne for the professed purpose of visiting the SMEREP office and the Spanish department (both closed, by the way) which very naturally ended in me running into Anas and having lunch with him and Martin in the cafe across the road (totally don't see a trend developing here, no, not at all....). This time it was ANAS who was stressed out and in need of a hug, a situation which I believe was due entirely to Sorbonne's WiFi networks. This emphasises that fact that more or less everything I've written so far can be summarised by saying that France and Sorbonne hate exchange students and want to make us cry. I'm really beginning to think that if France could close all its borders and live in cloistered seclusion from the rest of world, content with its bureacracy and traffic chaos, it honestly would.
The exchange students group had organised a Paris by night tour outing, which I had been planning on skipping since walking tours are out of my range of abilities at the moment. This decision quickly changed when I realised I had the wrong 'tour' - not LE tour, like Le Tour de France, but LA tour, like La Tour Eiffel. In this case we were going to La Tour Montparnasse, and since Martin lives in that quartier of Paris he took little convincing to come along with me. Suffice to say that the view is beautiful - as Martin had told me from his previous visits, it's the only place in Paris where you can see the whole city as well as the famed Eiffel Tower, something that can't be done from the Eiffel Tower itself. It was a little chilly up on the top-floor 210+ metre terrace, but the view really was worth it. Come 10pm the Eiffel Tower did its sparkly lights thing - scintiller, in French - and Martin and I even spotted the fireworks from Disneyland on the other side of Paris. I'd post photos, but I don't have any that do the scene justice (read: I suck at using my camera and couldn't find night vision).
There was something else noteworthy of the night - would you believe there are GIRLS at Sorbonne? And here I was thinking it was just going to be me and the boys! Well, it still is, since they're still the friends I know the best, but there was a really nice girl from Italy called Margerita, and a lovely German called Viktoria who wondered if I was from Great Britain (there are so many damn Germans here, and none of them have taught me to speak German yet!). Though I love meeting the other exchange students, and coming from Australia automatically gives me a higher level of cool, I'm looking forward to meeting the French students, since they're sort of the reason I came to France and not Germany in the first place. This is no way means that I am throwing over Anas, Paul and Martin, though - we haven't been to Disneyland yet.
This afternoon Julien came down from Lille for the weekend, and we decided to head east from La Courneuve to visit the Basilique de Saint-Denis, a huge cathedral that's the burial place of French royalty and pretty much anyone who's been really important in France, ever. The cathedral on its own was lovely - a pipe organ that I would really love to play and stained glass windows that I recognised as representing the kings of France since the 1100s (my French history classes are coming back to me). Finding ourselves halted at the nave by a large gate, we decided that the price would be thoroughly worth it to visit the cathedral's crypt - doubly so in Julien's case, since it's free for under-25 European nationals. I was therefore flattered to be mistaken for European when the ticket officer handed us two tickets without question - at least until Julien realised that this weekend is the Journees du Patrimoine. A two-day heritage appreciation weekend, most large important historical monuments are free and places that can't usually be visited during the rest of the year open their doors to the public for a cultural experience. As such the cathedral, which I think is more properly called an abbaye, or abbey, was completely open for nothing more than the effort of walking in.
The mediaeval kitchen garden which usually closes at 1pm was not only open but playing host to a small tent, where musicians were entertaining a small crowd. Julien and I listened as we walked out of the abbey and around the garden, me squeeing excitedly over the architecture, the gargoyles or the plants alternatively. I was surprised to hear a beautiful flute-and-guitar rendering of 'Greensleeves' drifting towards me as I rubbed my hands through the thyme, mint and basil. When the announcer asked the clueless French audience, who wouldn't know an English folk song if it hit them in the face, "Does anyone know it?" as they finished, I wanted to jump up and yell, "Moi! Moi!" Given he could hear me singing along under my breath, I think Julien half-expected me to!
The crypt was amazing - the place reminded me of the Pantheon in central Paris, where a lot of pretty famous Frenchies like Marie and Pierre Curie and Victor Hugo are buried. There's an eerie feeling to knowing you're surrounded by the now-skeletonised bodies of people from hundreds of years ago - kings of France, no less. I was just as intrigued by some of the inscriptions - apart from Julien having to tear me away from the Latin, which I was slowly and painstakingly remembering and translating, there were several plaques written in a strange and grammatically-poor form of French. It was mediaeval French, Old French, from when the abbey was first built and people were interred there. They were still using the Latin 'V' for 'U' (LOVIS XII) and there were 'y's where there should have been 'i's. It was like reading the Canterbury tales in the original Middle English - I must have spent half an hour or more staring at these plaques, noting what had changed in modern French from the old version, and how the old version itself had or hadn't changed from Latin. I'm feeling so much more enthused for my French linguistics subjects at Sorbonne now if they're half so interesting as my crash course in the development of the French language - it was fascinating.
I also discovered why the Basilique, the town and in fact the whole region are called Saint-Denis - right in the depths of the crypt, in an original 11th-century burial chamber, was a tomb in which reputedly lay Saint Denis, who had his head cut off by the Romans and then carried it to Montmartre in protest (as Julien told the story to me). Barring the part where I got super-excited over the archaeological-dig aspect of the old crypt, I realised I had come across Saint Denis before. On my visit three years ago to Notre-Dame-de-Paris, the cathedral on Ile-de-la-Cite, I noted that one of the saints carved around the main doorway of the church was headless, holding its head in its hands. I laughed at it at the time and wondered whether the sculptor had gotten bored and hoped no-one would notice, or if perhaps there was a reason for it. I never expected to find out.
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| '1 bus in 4 - demonstration'. I survived a whole week in France before the first strike... |
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| How do our town halls not look this cool? |
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| The aisle of la Basilique de Saint Denis |
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| The rose window - I love rose windows |
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| The pipe organ (and Julien, staring into the distance) |
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| Amazing, gorgeous architecture |
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| Real, live (stone), working gargoyles! |
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| The nave from behind. Beautiful building |
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| Did I mention how much I love 'les gargouilles'? |
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| White liliums in the kitchen garden |
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| Someone who was important in the garden...hey, look! Tournesols! (Sunflowers) |
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| 'Ici est le corps' is modern French for 'here lies the body' |
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| The tombs of kings - Louis XII centre left, Marie Antoinette centre right |
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| The tomb of Saint Denis |
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| My (admittedly kind of Italian) French dinner |
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| Remember I said I'd seen Saint Denis before? This is him at Notre Dame |
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