Friday, December 12, 2008

Paris, part two

I love trains. That’s how I got around when I was little. The car was a clear second. I remember weekend outings with my buddies (and an adult or two to keep things sane), and sleeper cars to Budapest. When I was thirteen, a train took me non-stop from East Berlin to Vilnius to a three-week summer camp fit for the son of Politbüro member. I have no idea how my dad got it. He wasn’t even in the communist party. The ride took 28 hours.

Ever since they opened the Chunnel, the rail tunnel underneath the English Channel, I’ve wanted to fly through it. This desire started to burn hotter and into the foreground when St. Pancras was opened after a Milliwaysian refurbishment (where little expense was spared to give the impression that no expense had been spared), making it the new launch pad to Paris, just a bit more than two hours away.

On Tuesday afternoon, I was finally aboard one of the trains, and slightly dissatisfied. For all I had been looking forward to, the ride was spectacularly anticlimactic. When we left the station, night had already descended and it was completely dark outside. When we hit the tunnel, all went black, easy to miss unless you pay attention. My perception was blunted by an earful of music. Resurfacing in France twenty minutes later, it was still dark.

Besides the nonevent of the tunnel, there was also the nonevent of speed. While the train wasn’t as smoothly cruising as an ICE3 where you can leave a bic pen on your seat table and it won't roll off, it was infinitely calmer than the bone-rattling traditional TGV that is as much about speed as it is about communicating that speed to the passenger. The Eurostar moves, noticeably, but it doesn’t shake or bounce, and it doesn’t accelerate as madly as you would expect for a train hitting 180 mph.

You know it’s going fast, though, when, while passing a station, you can’t tell where you are because you can’t even read the signs three platforms away. It’s all blurry with speed. Once the train was on its way, I collapsed into my iPod and woke up, a few hours later, in Paris. Here are some of my first impressions, put to paper that same night, but only committed to the blog just now.

The metro doesn’t give a good first impression. Discarded tickets are all over the floor, and intricate scratch designs in the windows. The tunnels are dimly lit but covered in bright graffiti. At the stations, there are no attendants. People jump over ticket gates or squeeze through in pairs. A faint smell of anarchy hangs in the air. For all the ubiquitous whining about the London tube, it looks like a clear winner to me.

Once outside the underground system, the Haussmannian gracefulness of the city is striking. The ground floor of most buildings is extra tall, with enough space for a restaurant’s mezzanine or a shop’s storage space. All windows are really French doors. Only little metal gates prevent the careless from stepping trough these doors and falling onto the sidewalk. At night, all windows are closed with metal folding shutters.

In contrast, the textbook London dwellings are dilapidated Victorian terraces. They were built at about the same time as their Parisian counterparts but should have been demolished a long time ago. Substance is crumbling. Thin walls and rickety windows let heat escape unhindered. Paint comes off the walls or has been splattered back on in the most haphazard way. Trash bags are heaped by the front door because there’s no room for them in the entrance portal. Scratch this, there is no entrance portal in the first place.

There are exquisitely elegant buildings in London as well, in the posh central districts, characterized by enormous sash windows, washed brick façades and bright white trimmings. Not unlike medieval fortresses, these buildings are inevitably surrounded by ten-foot deep trenches, revealing troglodyte dwellings for those with the delirious desire for a prestigious address but without the financial means. Herein lies an enormous difference between the English and the French. I think a Frenchman would rather camp underneath a bridge on a Seine quai than degrade himself to living in a basement. After all, where would he put his wine?

I didn’t have the time to contemplate all this upon exiting the metro because my hotel was straight across the street. I didn’t have to look for it. I didn’t even have to think about where to look for it. It was like limo service without the car. I didn’t have to walk. I just climbed a few steps and arrived. Of course I went back out again after checking in and dropping my bags.

Talking about luggage, have you ever noticed the guys selling fake designer bags in Rome or Milano, scattering their wares on a tarp so they can grab everything and run off in one go should police appear? According to a story in the Economist a while back, they all belong to a particular ethnic group from Senegal. In the cities where they operate, they have communities, rules, safe houses and soup kitchens, and ways of transferring money back home. This doesn’t exist in London, but is alive and well in Paris, except what I saw them offer were trinkets for tourists, Perspex Eiffel Towers and Mona Lisas with blue LEDs for eyes, not bogus luxury goods.

I saw these guys—this is not hard to guess—underneath the Eiffel Tower, a very special place indeed. The perplexing, entangled steel construction is a marvel of civil engineering and a piece of art to my eyes. The tower is at the end of the Champs de Mars, a large public garden and park whose name derives from the Roman god of war.

These days, it’s a much less belligerent place. There’s even a monument to peace at its other end. As I was walking by in the quiet of a cold night, I couldn’t help but be infinitely grateful for living in peaceful times, when Germany isn’t invading France every half century and England doesn’t try to rule the world by force. I prefer economic prosperity over military mastery, and fast trains over fast bullets.

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