I was too excited by the city to stay indoors yesterday, but today it was time to catch up on sleep. I woke up half a dozen times, and kept thinking “nope!” and dropping back onto the pillow.
The final tally according to my watch was eleven hours.
Around noon, I threw all my clothes into the tiny washing machine under the counter, puzzled over the French interface, then got it started. As it churned I did some writing and work at the table. It was Friday, and that meant I could put in a workday today, then have the whole weekend free to go exploring.
Three hours later I realized I needed food, and though I knew it would be possible to find some kind of food no matter what time it was, I wanted to catch a bakery before they all closed. I picked one at random, and cycled out.
There are many, many, many bakeries to choose from.
There are many, many, many bakeries to choose from.
So many delicious things! I pointed at stuff until I had at least two meals, then pedaled back to the apartment. The first thing I devoured was a cookie:
Two kinds of quiche from two bakeries, plus other goodies.
Two kinds of quiche from two bakeries, plus other goodies.
The quiche was next. I ate it while spending half an hour trying to figure out how to activate the drying mode on the weird clothes washer installed in the kitchen.
More work, more snacking, a brief walk around outside… Then it was sleep again.
I heard Nick leaving in the middle of the night, to catch his flight down to Portugal. The bike would be staying here until our paths crossed again in a few weeks for the journey to Edinburgh.
I fell back asleep and brought my total to 7 hours. Not bad. When I sat up and realized the sink and bathroom were up two sets of stairs, I decided I would sleep in the little upstairs room for the rest of my stay. I didn’t need all this mattress.
I took my first shower, and discovered that the bathtub was made of plastic and not anchored to the floor, so it tipped alarmingly when I reached for a towel. The curtain didn’t go all the way around, so the floor got wet. That was fine because the floor was a shower stall: The drain of the bathtub went into a hose, which went into a shower drain in the corner.
Why does this AirBnB have so many plants to take care of?
A plastic tub shoved into the shower stall. Classy.
It was pretty funny. I’d been in some really janky places all over America, and yet I’d never used a setup this janky. Even the bare cement showers in RV parks usually compensated for their brutalist vibe by being spacious. It was a fact I would be learning repeatedly: Physical space is clearly the most expensive commodity in Paris.
I also noticed a sign by the dishwasher that I’d never seen before, even in the most uptight AirBnB units of Iceland or New Zealand:
Why leave high-maintenance silverware in a flat you’re renting out to people on a daily basis? This makes no sense.
Why leave high-maintenance silverware in a flat you’re renting out to people on a daily basis? This makes no sense.
This little apartment generates something like five grand a month for these people. What do they care if the silverware gets tarnished? Shouldn’t grandma’s fine utensils be somewhere else?
I shrugged. It’s not like I would be doing any cooking in this place more elaborate than heating up bread. Time to go see the city!
I rode directly down to Ten Belles, since it was on my “must try” list, but it was exploding with people. There was one tiny free table and a long line out the door. I picked streets at random and wound up near the canal again. On the other side was a café named “Residence Kann” that looked interesting, and not too crowded. They advertised a “mochacchino,” which turned out to be a lot like the mocha from Bluebottle back home. Very foamy and smooth, but with enough chocolate to make it a “real” mocha.
I decided I would eat at a different café at least once every day, and always order a mocha or the closest equivalent, so I could rank them all against my very severe and subjective 1 to 10 Worldwide Mocha Ranking Scale. “Residence Kann” got a respectable 7.5! They also served avocado toast, which is catnip to us middle-class wankers, so I got some.
This was the first place where I saw little signs on the tables indicating “no laptops”. I hadn’t seen any Parisians with laptops anywhere yet, so perhaps this was a city-wide custom and the signs are for the crude tourists (like me) to get a clue.
Computers are TOLERATED for a certain time. Otherwise, we Parisians hate you remote-working yahoos. Get out!
I wondered if it’s also considered insulting to the waitstaff to be sitting there doing the thing that makes you a much higher wage than they do, while they bring you food and wipe up your crumbs. But surely being a waiter in Paris earns a good wage?
Also, I wondered if a similar anti-laptop rebellion was coming to San Francisco and New York… If it wasn’t rolling in already. Back home I wasn’t seeing “no laptop” signs directly on tables yet, though I was seeing polite signs on walls asking that people limit their computer time to an hour or so. Maybe the Bay Area is too aware that people on laptops account for at least half the money being made there, and no one wants to upset them…?
Well, the cafe is nice even if they don’t like laptop users.
Well, the cafe is nice even if they don’t like laptop users.
I sipped my drink and felt fancy, and tried to conjure up a first impression of Paris, or at least this region of it. It was far more cramped and busy than I was expecting. The press of people was constant, and could easily get overwhelming. The importance of open spaces like the canals and gardens felt very clear to me.
I remembered reading somewhere that people often experience a kind of emotional shock, some time in the first few days, when they realize that the Paris they’re walking around is extremely different from the Paris they imagined. A depression sets in; what one might even call … ennui, and it lingers until they surrender, and adapt to the city on its own terms. Perhaps I was due for that kind of emotional journey in a few days.
I did a little reading, and learned some statistics:
2 million people live in the city of Paris. Somewhere between 7 and 13 million people live in the “metropolitan area” of Paris, depending on how you slice it. 68 million people live in all of France. So, as much as one fifth of all French people live in or around Paris. That’s a massively influential city.
For comparison: 8.5 million people live in the city of New York, while the entire state of New York has 20 million people in it. So if you’re “a New Yorker”, one third of the time that means you’re living in the city itself. This assumption by outsiders is so strong that people have to say they’re from “New York state”, just to make it clear that they’re not living in the city. Along the same lines, it would be plausible to change the name of Paris to “France City,” because when travelers think of France, they think of Paris. Meanwhile, four fifths of French people would have to start pointing out that they’re from “France THE COUNTRY, you dang tourist! Don’t lump me in with those urban jerks!”
I’m sure they would love that…
What’s intriguing to me is that, bustling as it is, Paris used to be much more populated, until the mid-20th-century when huge amounts of people migrated outward due to enhancements in rail and auto travel, and created massive suburbs. Only in the tail end of the 20th century has the population begun to move inward again.
I took a scroll through the history of Paris, and found an epic of war and revolution going back many hundreds of years, casting a long shadow, even over the World Wars. It was one bloody synthesis of king and church after another for 800 years until the French Revolution, then a bloody sequel in the form of the Napoleonic empire, then a confusing run of coup d’états and collapsed governments, with modern reforms and counter-reforms beginning some time after World War II and continuing through the century.
Thinking about this, and based on what I was seeing Parisians do around me just with regard to things like crosswalks, public gatherings, demonstrations, and trespassing, I concluded that the French must have a strong sense of independence from their government, and the laws and order it tries to impose. It’s truly an inspiration for the American attitude that if a law does not promote the common good, the law should be changed. Or in the case of Parisians, the law should be ignored, because the whole damn government is suspect, and may be collapsing some time in the near future anyway.
While I was musing over this, I had an interesting side-thought: Many of my fellow Americans have a strong aversion to talking about “politics” in public, or even in private when they’re not among friends. I suddenly had two questions about that. First: Why this aversion? And second: What does it even mean, to separate “politics” as a subject out from everything else?
As I packed up my stuff in the café and headed for my bike and another random ride around the city, I tried to conjure a few answers.
I figured that Americans try to avoid “politics” because it can cause friction among people who would otherwise just get along with the business of economic exchange, and relating to each other in their immediate context, e.g. at a baseball game or while standing in line at a supermarket. And Americans want to get business done, because they want to survive.
Put another way: There’s a subconscious feeling that peaceful coexistence with neighbors who disagree with you is more important than agreeing on how your government should be run, because you and your neighbor are right here face-to-face, and the government is way over there, potentially in another state, potentially thousands of miles away. This feeling might actually be the reason America still exists as a single country at this point. But what is this “politics” that people are so averse to discussing? My take was, it seems to be something encompassed by “policy” but actually more specific: “Politics” to the American seems to be about the people in government, and the political parties they belong to, and what those people and parties are like, or what they endorse.
For example, the regulation of America’s border with Mexico is certainly a political subject, and people will discuss that – cautiously – while considering details like our shared sense of responsibility to take in refugees, our collective status as a nation of migrants, our desire for respect of the rule of law, and our desire to prevent human trafficking and the movement of narcotics. But, statements like “The Democrats want lawless chaos instead of a border!” or “The Republicans want to separate migrant babies from parents!” … That’s what we call “politics.”
There are a lot of Americans talking “politics” online, on television, on radio… But there are also a lot more Americans who find it aggravating and would rather talk policy. Sadly, those discussions don’t drive mouse-clicks, finger-pokes, and ad revenue dollars, so it’s easy to get confused about whether they exist at all. At the same time, a lot of Americans have the luxury of not engaging with politics – or even policy – at all, because they do not belong to one of the sub-groups that the law is currently victimizing in some way. E.g. migrants, users of illegal drugs, pregnant women looking for medical care, people with non-Christian religious practices, and so on. So from one perspective, these people create stability, which is great … but from another, they create complacency, which is infuriating … and they need to be reached and told what their tax dollars are doing to other people.
Well, that was my quick packing-the-bike take on it, anyway. Next stop: Caféinoman, for a “detox juice blend” and a muffin. (I couldn’t handle any more coffee.) They were both pretty good!
Looking around, I got the sense that most of the dozen-or-so people in the café were fellow tourists. I wondered if I would ever get a clear picture of what Parisians are like, separate from tourists. Probably not. I mean, if you took all the bacteria out of a human body – benevolent or otherwise – would that give you a “clear picture” of the immune system?
Browsing the map, I decided to check out “Jules Verne Park,” because it sounded cool. I dropped my muffin in the street as I was riding along. Dangit! Well, food for the rats I guess.
“Jules Verne Park” turned out to be a kid’s play park, packed full of tiny humans and larger humans chasing them or sitting around looking exhausted. Not what I was hoping for. The noise made me crave a quiet space, so I rode back to the apartment, and used the remaining hour before my first work meeting to sort photos.
Three hours later the meetings were done and I’d written everything useful into a page of notes, so I walked around the corner to the café Nick and I had gone to, and ordered their all-day brunch. I chatted with folks on the phone and did more snacking – what a life I lead! – then strolled to the apartment and pitched myself into the upstairs bed. My brain was full of French history, computer code, and the roar of a thousand conversations that had pressed in around me all day.
Would this be the Paris routine for me? Cafés, history, parks, work, and bicycling? If so, I’ll take it!
When we were going along the Moselle river back in Germany, Nick and I spent a while talking back and forth in badly accented English of various flavors, complaining about how awful Americans are, and how badly Americans do everything. I played the Frenchman, saying stuff like, “Look at zese passenger trains. Zey are so much better than ze stupid American ones. Zey are on time, and zey don’t smell of piss and hotdogs.”
Nick came back with, “Yah, in Austria de trains have actual room, you know? You can put your feet up. But we don’t; ya? Because ve are not de tasteless savages like de Americans. In der flip-flops und baseball hats.”
Well, this morning we boarded our first French train, out of Luxembourg.
Crammed our piles of stuff onto the terribly designed French trains, and we’re on our way…
Crammed our piles of stuff onto the terribly designed French trains, and we’re on our way…
Nick managed to get about half an hour of napping, until a German man wandered into the train car talking loudly on his phone. The man paced the aisle and ranted, getting more and more upset, then disconnected the call and left through the sliding door with a murderous expression.
It’s so gauche to complain on vacation. But from a bike tourist perspective, I do have a few minor complaints to air about the French trains. For one, they sold me tickets with a six-minute transfer time, to get between two trains that arrived at opposite ends of a massive station, and our train pulled in late. Even without two loaded bicycles, we would have needed to move at a dead run, threading through crowds.
When we missed that connection, the ticket counter attendant said that missing the train was “our fault” and that the best they could do was put %15 of the ticket price towards later tickets. So I had to pay another $140 for failing to get across the platform at unsafe speed.
(The elevators were so small we had to stand the bikes vertically and go one at a time. The elevators were also very slow. This is a concern mostly for bicycle tourists like us, but also, woe betide you if you’re in a wheelchair and the person pushing it isn’t willing to sit on your lap for the ride to the platform.)
When I asked them which platform the next train would arrive on so I could be prepared, they said they did not know, and had no way of knowing until 20 minutes before the train was due to depart. Not when it arrived … when it departed.
When that time comes due, they start flashing the name and platform of the train on the big electronic signs, including the one in the lobby. At that moment, several hundred people suddenly stand up and begin shoving themselves and their luggage down the hall. The only reason I can think of for doing it this way is so people waiting for a train don’t wait “too close” to the designated platform and interfere with people catching trains before them. … But if they knew the time and platform in advance, with enough confidence that they could time their walk to the platform, most people wouldn’t do that. They’d sit in the waiting area where there are comfortable benches.
The train was ten minutes late, cutting ten minutes off the time it would linger before departure. Nick and I had to wait with our loaded bikes in the main hall, staring at the departure screen, waiting for it to update and show the platform, so we could dash for the correct elevators and ride them up.
When we got to the train we had to run the bikes to the far end of it, to a car with no external labeling indicating it conveyed bikes. The bike area inside was up two steps, around a sharp bend, behind a completely useless sliding door that kept closing on the bikes as we were moving them … and then up two more steps. And again, at the same time, if you’re in a wheelchair or not entirely able in some other way, the French train system says, screw you.
Traveling on the Belgian trains was alright; traveling on the German trains was a pleasure. The French train system is a dumpster fire. Not the trains; the train system. Even the lowly American train stations back home – and the subways, and the bus terminals – can tell you what platform each one will be arriving at, with near-realtime accuracy.
Aaaaanyway…
When Nick and I emerged from the train station with our bikes, we were in Paris, and it was instant chaos. We dropped into the nearest bike lane and zig-zagged through city streets, tumbling in the chaos of cars and people and bikes and scooters all fighting for gaps. It was pretty intense, after polite Luxembourg. Nick performed quite well in it, saying “my rides in Oakland prepared me for this.” We got lots of interested looks and comments from even the jaded Parisians about the bikes we were riding.
This is the face you make when you’ve survived your first ride through Paris bicycle lanes.
We had to pass through two security gates and open an apartment door that was built stronger than the door to any other apartment I’d ever stayed in. It was like entering a vault. We pulled the bags off both bikes to fit them through doorway.
I settled in with the computer, working mostly on photos, and Nick laid down for a few minutes. Then we got up and went searching for food.
We passed several restaurants and cafes, jam-packed with talking people, almost all of them smoking with one hand and drinking with the other. The noise of conversation even outdoors was jarring.
We arrived at a little cafe I’d picked randomly on the map, and the head waiter took our orders. He debated with his companion, who was from Argentina, what the definition of “Argentina spiciness” was, but couldn’t find an English translation. We rolled the dice.
First French meal, at a restaurant a few blocks away.
The meal was tasty but not quite filling. I suggested that we get right up and go looking for another, and Nick readily agreed.
He led the way, picking streets at random. I vetoed a couple of spots that looked too expensive or too boring. We eventually wandered into a restaurant facing an extremely busy traffic loop running around a square, and went inside because it was a little bit chilly in our cycling clothes. The big windows gave an easy view of all the passing cyclists, and I schemed about coming back some later day with the camera to make an anonymous gallery of them.
I ordered a bolognese and ate about half of it. It was very heavy. Nick ordered honey-glazed salmon which was cooked perfectly, and I stole some.
After that we went walking again, generally in the direction of the apartment.
Inside, Nick laid down for a while again, then got up and exploded his luggage and re-configured it into a smaller version, using one of my stripped-down bike bags as a carry-on for the plane flight he was going to be taking soon.
We were both up until about 2:00am, with him organizing luggage and me sorting photos. There were a lot of them to sort… About 1500.
First time I’ve seen an issue of this magazine in person. It’s a bit like The Santa Cruz Comic News back home, or at least, how it used to be before it was defunded.
First time I’ve seen an issue of this magazine in person. It’s a bit like The Santa Cruz Comic News back home, or at least, how it used to be before it was defunded.
