I remembered today why I had such an affinity for visiting small cities: Rouen is the most beautiful city that I have ever seen (edging out Freiburg and Aachen).
Also, I was smart enough to take some notes today, so I should have more to say than usual.
I begun my day much more sentient than on Thursday, when, having confused the cleaning lady in the hostel's breakfast room with the cook, I asked if I could eat her sponge, which I had taken to be some sort of exotic, rectangular omelette. Today I had no such difficulties, though I questioned the point of visiting so many cities near Paris all of the way to the train station. I kicked myself for my perfectionism, for trying to see everything instead of enjoying myself, and for generally being too ambitious in my travel plans. When I got to the train station, I learned that the train schedules that I had found online were wrong and that my travel agent and I had failed to secure several reservations that I would need to visit several of the cities that I planned to see, costing me a bunch of money and causing me to alter my plans to some degree. Once I had finished with my reservations and tickets, I took a walk to finish what I had started yesterday: I went to see the inside of Notre Dame.
One of the great joys of walking through Paris is that on any central street, monuments that are not marked on the map jump out at one. I passed a couple of triumphant arches, some churches, an art institute, and, later, a monument to Tivoli without even knowing that I would do so. I had more time to reflect on French culture as I walked to Notre Dame. On the way, I saw two people leaning over their balconies and beating their rugs several stories above the people on the sidewalk beneath them, and I was reminded that Parisian pedestrians flaunt rules just as much as Parisian drivers. People jaywalk constantly and often even cross the road right in front of cars when the light is green; by contrast, I do no remember seeing a single person jaywalk in Austria. Some people would call the Austrians' strict adherence to rules restrictive and unoriginal, while more straitlaced people, like me, find the French's disregard for rules illogical and disorderly. I suspect that little tics of social behavior like these are part of what contribute to national identity, though it might be more appropriate to call them facets of it, since cause and effect are so closely intertwined here.
The inside of Notre Dame is astounding. While the cathedral itself is not quite as impressive as those of Speyer, Worms, or Cologne, it is also more austere. It has no gilt surfaces, unlike much of the rest of Paris; it had a modest chancel; and it was full of open spaces and mostly lacking in the type of ornamentation that makes church interiors so lush and decorative. It seemed to me that the cathedral of Notre Dame may very well have been made to worship God's greatness; people inside the cathedral were even good enough not to make much noise. The only thing that I disliked about it was that all of its stained glass windows seemed to tell more or less the same story, and the images of Christ's crucifixion seemed like propaganda. These issues are in no way unique to this particular church, though, and did not make my experience of it negative.
By the time I left Notre Dame, I knew that I was going to be late for the train. I had tried to cram too much activity into the two hours between getting my train tickets (for the next couple of days) and the train's departure, assuming that if I cut it close, things would work out all right. When I got to the train station, I saw that a train would be leaving for Rouen in only seven minutes, and I tried frantically to get a ticket from a machine, to no avail. I went to the train station's ticket office and ran up against the French way of doing business.
While the French railway system might be just like the German rail system in many ways, all sorts of little details make it less pleasant and efficient than its eastern counterpart. The numbers on ticket counters are too small to make out from across the room, which makes it easy to miss one's turn in line, and the French are very insistent on one's choosing the exact time on which one will take the train in advance. When I arrived at the ticket counter, I discovered that I had an open ticket for the day, meaning that I could take whatever trains I wanted to and from Rouen provided that I head back earlier than midnight, but I had been unaware of this, as my tickets both had specific times printed on them. In Germany, I would have been given a ticket that was clearly for the whole day and a printed schedule of times to and from my destination. Perhaps the French eschew this practice in order to save paper; perhaps it is part of the particularity that defines them, the apathy towards doing things correct. "Ve vill have vine and cheese now, and ve vill solve our problems later," they seem to be saying. "Ve are a bunch of snail-eating faineants."
When I left the ticket office, I discovered that I had confused arrivals and departures; the next departure for Rouen was going to be at 2:17. What I discovered, as I waited, was that there was a piano set up in the middle of the train station for anybody's use. A very skilled pianist was playing something that I could not recognize, then he ceded to a less skilled young woman, and the two of them played, together and separately, for something like half of an hour. What is so weird about this is the station's having paid bathrooms: the people running in cared enough about the artistic satisfaction of its patrons to put a piano in it, but they could not figure out to make its bathrooms free. I chalked this up to another one of France's peculiarities.
When I got on the train to Rouen, I learned that the bathrooms there, which were free, were out of order. I spent part of the train ride just wanting to get there, but I quickly grew absorbed in the passing landscape. The area directly outside of Paris has vastly more trees than Paris itself, and its houses look much older than those of Paris, perhaps because Paris' older houses almost all burned down in fires or were removed to make way for the massive apartment blocks that now line its streets. The area outside of Rouen has rolling hills, scraggy, white cliffs, and even a little river, and the city itself has something almost unique within France: free bathrooms.
Rouen was rich enough in culture to make one's head explode. Its most outstanding features are its narrow streets and religious architecture, the former of which are lined with so-called half-timbered houses, the kind in which people have lived for hundreds of years. Rouen had much less statuary than Paris, though it did have plaques commemorating the city's most important achievements, and it had a war memorial, a destroyed church, for people who had died defending the city. Most of its streets were so narrow that two-way traffic was impossible, which contrasts directly with Paris' enormous avenues. It strikes me that Paris' broad avenues, like its unnecessarily-tall doorways, might have been designed to accommodate large numbers of horse-drawn carriages, the copiousness of which must have bespoken of the city's affluence.
Rouen's churches and cathedrals were beyond comparison or description; suffice it to say that each one was more impressive than the last and that there are practically as many of them as there are people in the city. I was reminded, as I walked through one of them, that fighting ability was highly valued in Ancient Greece, as constant warring made the ability to defend one's city of paramount importance. It seemed to me that the principal values espoused by the catholic church were of suffering and repentance: Christ seems almost always to be represented in extreme physical pain, and there seem to be very few scenes of happiness in stained glass besides that of the immaculate conception, which might merely have been propaganda to make people believe in the value of having children. I would be curious to talk to someone who knew something about stained glass, as I am probably reading far less into it than is actually there, and its purpose might be to supplement the Gospels rather than corresponding directly to them. I also have come to wonder how pious people were in Ancient Greece, although it is probably a failure to characterize it as one, homogeneous nation; one is curious to know which cultures have, historically, valued religious piety more than others.
Since I was strapped for time, I was unable to sit down to a real meal, or even to order something from a cafe, during my sty in Rouen. I had to grab something quick, and the most appealing candidates for consumption were ice cream from an ice cream stand and a doughnut, which I did not even end up really wanting, from a stand next to it. I am generally uninterested in eating sweets on this trip, as I already know what they taste like and want to eat healthily, but, as I stated earlier, I do not want to spend too much money on food. My main impressions of French food so far, ignoring my time in the French Alps, have been that it is light and low in vegetables. The French seem more interested in the experience of eating or of drinking coffee than in filling their stomachs, unlike, say, the Germans: it seems that those who have money are willing to spend a lot of it on food that is high-quality and satisfying in taste, texture, and preparation, while those who have no money eat the cheapest stuff that they can find with no mind for its salubrity or taste. French crepes are tasty, but they are insubstantial; their myriad of fancy entrees are dainty to the point of decorativeness; and their dinners and deserts alike are more for gustation than for filling one's stomach. I do not know where this disquisition was supposed to lead, but I believe that the French's focus on refinement is a defining national characteristic and is reflected in much of their food, though it varies, naturally, from region to region. (The food in Chamonix was some of the best that I will ever eat.)
Also, I was smart enough to take some notes today, so I should have more to say than usual.
I begun my day much more sentient than on Thursday, when, having confused the cleaning lady in the hostel's breakfast room with the cook, I asked if I could eat her sponge, which I had taken to be some sort of exotic, rectangular omelette. Today I had no such difficulties, though I questioned the point of visiting so many cities near Paris all of the way to the train station. I kicked myself for my perfectionism, for trying to see everything instead of enjoying myself, and for generally being too ambitious in my travel plans. When I got to the train station, I learned that the train schedules that I had found online were wrong and that my travel agent and I had failed to secure several reservations that I would need to visit several of the cities that I planned to see, costing me a bunch of money and causing me to alter my plans to some degree. Once I had finished with my reservations and tickets, I took a walk to finish what I had started yesterday: I went to see the inside of Notre Dame.
One of the great joys of walking through Paris is that on any central street, monuments that are not marked on the map jump out at one. I passed a couple of triumphant arches, some churches, an art institute, and, later, a monument to Tivoli without even knowing that I would do so. I had more time to reflect on French culture as I walked to Notre Dame. On the way, I saw two people leaning over their balconies and beating their rugs several stories above the people on the sidewalk beneath them, and I was reminded that Parisian pedestrians flaunt rules just as much as Parisian drivers. People jaywalk constantly and often even cross the road right in front of cars when the light is green; by contrast, I do no remember seeing a single person jaywalk in Austria. Some people would call the Austrians' strict adherence to rules restrictive and unoriginal, while more straitlaced people, like me, find the French's disregard for rules illogical and disorderly. I suspect that little tics of social behavior like these are part of what contribute to national identity, though it might be more appropriate to call them facets of it, since cause and effect are so closely intertwined here.
The inside of Notre Dame is astounding. While the cathedral itself is not quite as impressive as those of Speyer, Worms, or Cologne, it is also more austere. It has no gilt surfaces, unlike much of the rest of Paris; it had a modest chancel; and it was full of open spaces and mostly lacking in the type of ornamentation that makes church interiors so lush and decorative. It seemed to me that the cathedral of Notre Dame may very well have been made to worship God's greatness; people inside the cathedral were even good enough not to make much noise. The only thing that I disliked about it was that all of its stained glass windows seemed to tell more or less the same story, and the images of Christ's crucifixion seemed like propaganda. These issues are in no way unique to this particular church, though, and did not make my experience of it negative.
By the time I left Notre Dame, I knew that I was going to be late for the train. I had tried to cram too much activity into the two hours between getting my train tickets (for the next couple of days) and the train's departure, assuming that if I cut it close, things would work out all right. When I got to the train station, I saw that a train would be leaving for Rouen in only seven minutes, and I tried frantically to get a ticket from a machine, to no avail. I went to the train station's ticket office and ran up against the French way of doing business.
While the French railway system might be just like the German rail system in many ways, all sorts of little details make it less pleasant and efficient than its eastern counterpart. The numbers on ticket counters are too small to make out from across the room, which makes it easy to miss one's turn in line, and the French are very insistent on one's choosing the exact time on which one will take the train in advance. When I arrived at the ticket counter, I discovered that I had an open ticket for the day, meaning that I could take whatever trains I wanted to and from Rouen provided that I head back earlier than midnight, but I had been unaware of this, as my tickets both had specific times printed on them. In Germany, I would have been given a ticket that was clearly for the whole day and a printed schedule of times to and from my destination. Perhaps the French eschew this practice in order to save paper; perhaps it is part of the particularity that defines them, the apathy towards doing things correct. "Ve vill have vine and cheese now, and ve vill solve our problems later," they seem to be saying. "Ve are a bunch of snail-eating faineants."
When I left the ticket office, I discovered that I had confused arrivals and departures; the next departure for Rouen was going to be at 2:17. What I discovered, as I waited, was that there was a piano set up in the middle of the train station for anybody's use. A very skilled pianist was playing something that I could not recognize, then he ceded to a less skilled young woman, and the two of them played, together and separately, for something like half of an hour. What is so weird about this is the station's having paid bathrooms: the people running in cared enough about the artistic satisfaction of its patrons to put a piano in it, but they could not figure out to make its bathrooms free. I chalked this up to another one of France's peculiarities.
When I got on the train to Rouen, I learned that the bathrooms there, which were free, were out of order. I spent part of the train ride just wanting to get there, but I quickly grew absorbed in the passing landscape. The area directly outside of Paris has vastly more trees than Paris itself, and its houses look much older than those of Paris, perhaps because Paris' older houses almost all burned down in fires or were removed to make way for the massive apartment blocks that now line its streets. The area outside of Rouen has rolling hills, scraggy, white cliffs, and even a little river, and the city itself has something almost unique within France: free bathrooms.
Rouen was rich enough in culture to make one's head explode. Its most outstanding features are its narrow streets and religious architecture, the former of which are lined with so-called half-timbered houses, the kind in which people have lived for hundreds of years. Rouen had much less statuary than Paris, though it did have plaques commemorating the city's most important achievements, and it had a war memorial, a destroyed church, for people who had died defending the city. Most of its streets were so narrow that two-way traffic was impossible, which contrasts directly with Paris' enormous avenues. It strikes me that Paris' broad avenues, like its unnecessarily-tall doorways, might have been designed to accommodate large numbers of horse-drawn carriages, the copiousness of which must have bespoken of the city's affluence.
Rouen's churches and cathedrals were beyond comparison or description; suffice it to say that each one was more impressive than the last and that there are practically as many of them as there are people in the city. I was reminded, as I walked through one of them, that fighting ability was highly valued in Ancient Greece, as constant warring made the ability to defend one's city of paramount importance. It seemed to me that the principal values espoused by the catholic church were of suffering and repentance: Christ seems almost always to be represented in extreme physical pain, and there seem to be very few scenes of happiness in stained glass besides that of the immaculate conception, which might merely have been propaganda to make people believe in the value of having children. I would be curious to talk to someone who knew something about stained glass, as I am probably reading far less into it than is actually there, and its purpose might be to supplement the Gospels rather than corresponding directly to them. I also have come to wonder how pious people were in Ancient Greece, although it is probably a failure to characterize it as one, homogeneous nation; one is curious to know which cultures have, historically, valued religious piety more than others.
Since I was strapped for time, I was unable to sit down to a real meal, or even to order something from a cafe, during my sty in Rouen. I had to grab something quick, and the most appealing candidates for consumption were ice cream from an ice cream stand and a doughnut, which I did not even end up really wanting, from a stand next to it. I am generally uninterested in eating sweets on this trip, as I already know what they taste like and want to eat healthily, but, as I stated earlier, I do not want to spend too much money on food. My main impressions of French food so far, ignoring my time in the French Alps, have been that it is light and low in vegetables. The French seem more interested in the experience of eating or of drinking coffee than in filling their stomachs, unlike, say, the Germans: it seems that those who have money are willing to spend a lot of it on food that is high-quality and satisfying in taste, texture, and preparation, while those who have no money eat the cheapest stuff that they can find with no mind for its salubrity or taste. French crepes are tasty, but they are insubstantial; their myriad of fancy entrees are dainty to the point of decorativeness; and their dinners and deserts alike are more for gustation than for filling one's stomach. I do not know where this disquisition was supposed to lead, but I believe that the French's focus on refinement is a defining national characteristic and is reflected in much of their food, though it varies, naturally, from region to region. (The food in Chamonix was some of the best that I will ever eat.)
I saw all of Rouen in under two hours. I left the train station at roughly 3:50 and returned to it in time to use the free restroom, eat my doughnut, and wait for the platform of my coming train to be displayed on the overhead timetable. One of the joys of small cities is that one can see them more or less in their entirety over the course of a couple of hours. While big cities tell us a lot about a country's culture, their monuments are often spread out over a vastly larger area, and they are not always so much historically important as financially successful or important in recent history. Rouen, it seems, has been around for around as long as Paris, and, while its population has not exploded like the former city's, it can give visitors at least as good an idea of how people lived in France a few hundred years ago and, as such, tell us at least as much about the country's origins. I expect Amiens and Reims, assuming that I get to see them both, to enlighten me about French culture just as Rouen has done.
My remaining notes will be scattered. My pants have stayed zipped up for the past two days, which is very genteel of them, and I came to suspect yesterday, after my third subway pass stopped working, that the passes work magnetically, so I have kept them away from metal objects since then. I was lucky enough, in one of Rouen's cathedrals, to be able to read a little about its erection. I read just enough of the notes about it to learn that its facade was redesigned in the fourteenth century on the orders of some ruler or other in order to comply either with contemporary fashion or that ruler's prejudices (It may have been designed specifically to strike the fear of God into people's hearts.). When one thinks about it, the construction of cathedrals, building of the pyramids, and even restructuring of entire cities or societies have mostly been carried out on the whims of individual men. Of course, one could argue that it is societal structures that have allowed for the existence of such men in the first place, but I still think that much of our planet's history has been somewhat arbitrary.
As far as cultural norms, I cannot say too many bad things about the French, as much as I would like to, except that drivers in Rouen are just as bad as those in Paris. That is a French thing, not a Parisian thing. Many of the French people whom I have met have been very friendly, especially the young women, and, as much as I have complained about the train system, I owe a lot to its employees for having helped me to set up such interesting trips as this one to Rouen. People here have a very poor command of English, which is interesting to me. I tend to think that a local population's speaking English poorly will lead to its native language's remaining untainted, but I am probably wrong: it is probably just another symptom of the French's hardheadedness, their desire to do everything in their way and only their way. There is an interesting aphorism about a man who said that if a mountain would not move toward him, he would move toward the mountain. The French take the opposite approach: if others will not move towards us, we will stay put. Perhaps they assume that people will recognize their superiority in everything and eventually grow as sophisticated as they. I hope that they one day realize that they suck at a lot of things and need to learn to pull their bootstraps up like the Germans, but I know that these hopes are vain, as doing that would not be French.
I have not so far noted Parisians' storied feel for fashion. I have seen more women wearing ridiculous shoes in Paris than anywhere else, and women here have more of a tendency than Canadian women to wear clothes that remind one of the body underneath them, but they do not seem more fashion-conscious than women in any other big city. Men here wear pointy shoes, tight designer jeans, sweaters over their shoulders, and expensive-looking sunglasses, just as one would imagine. It is obvious that North Americans' health culture has not made it anywhere near France. People here are much skinnier than in the United States or Canada, as though they were too urbane to work out. When I see trios of French toughs walking down the street in V-neck tee-shirts revealing tattoos and the musculature of twelve-year-olds, I do not even know how to react. Toughness in French culture seems mostly to be associated with spitting, slouching against cars or the sides of buildings, smoking, and having very elaborate coiffures.
My final two notes are about hostels and cultural norms. It will make more sense to write about the latter when I am in a more socially-active hostel, but I made a note to myself to write about it soon because of having thought about it as soon as I checked into the one in Paris. I have realized, since arriving in Montreal, that I am getting too old for hostels (at least, European ones; the ones in Asia are probably vastly different). Many of the people here look like they are twenty-two years old, or even younger, and they have completely different social interests from me. I no longer find it exciting to become best friends with people whom I will never see again or to ogle at exiguously-dressed twenty-year-old girls, who, for some reason, populate these types of places. I suppose that I should try to sound less snide than that, but that reflects my actual point of view. Many of the people who come to hostels are socially naive and overexcited about being on their own, and, while it can still be fun to chat with them some of the time, and they are friendly almost across the board, I am quite happy to be making what will probably be my last hostel-based trip through Europe this year. Accommodations in southern Europe should be cheap enough, and have a short enough history with the very idea of a hostel, that I will be pushed more and more towards renting rooms in hotels and, possibly, travelling with other people. (I just looked up "hostel" on Wikipedia: the first one was started in 1912 for German youth.)
My point about cultural norms will be short. I was thinking earlier of how Americans from the South are so outwardly friendly, while Germans and Austrians, among others, are known for being more reserved, and have concluded that cultural norms tend to be self-perpetuating (though they change, of course, with time - slowly) once they form and that they probably form partly on the basis of religion, wealth, and need, or lack thereof, to rely on one's neighbors.
It is time for me to go to bed. I am going to be visiting Amiens tomorrow and expect to see a little more of Paris, and perhaps Reims, on Monday. As the train exited Rouen this evening, I watched the city recede until it was lost from view, then fell into a sleep so deep that I did not even notice that we have arrived in Paris until the girl sitting across from me tapped me on the knee.
My remaining notes will be scattered. My pants have stayed zipped up for the past two days, which is very genteel of them, and I came to suspect yesterday, after my third subway pass stopped working, that the passes work magnetically, so I have kept them away from metal objects since then. I was lucky enough, in one of Rouen's cathedrals, to be able to read a little about its erection. I read just enough of the notes about it to learn that its facade was redesigned in the fourteenth century on the orders of some ruler or other in order to comply either with contemporary fashion or that ruler's prejudices (It may have been designed specifically to strike the fear of God into people's hearts.). When one thinks about it, the construction of cathedrals, building of the pyramids, and even restructuring of entire cities or societies have mostly been carried out on the whims of individual men. Of course, one could argue that it is societal structures that have allowed for the existence of such men in the first place, but I still think that much of our planet's history has been somewhat arbitrary.
As far as cultural norms, I cannot say too many bad things about the French, as much as I would like to, except that drivers in Rouen are just as bad as those in Paris. That is a French thing, not a Parisian thing. Many of the French people whom I have met have been very friendly, especially the young women, and, as much as I have complained about the train system, I owe a lot to its employees for having helped me to set up such interesting trips as this one to Rouen. People here have a very poor command of English, which is interesting to me. I tend to think that a local population's speaking English poorly will lead to its native language's remaining untainted, but I am probably wrong: it is probably just another symptom of the French's hardheadedness, their desire to do everything in their way and only their way. There is an interesting aphorism about a man who said that if a mountain would not move toward him, he would move toward the mountain. The French take the opposite approach: if others will not move towards us, we will stay put. Perhaps they assume that people will recognize their superiority in everything and eventually grow as sophisticated as they. I hope that they one day realize that they suck at a lot of things and need to learn to pull their bootstraps up like the Germans, but I know that these hopes are vain, as doing that would not be French.
I have not so far noted Parisians' storied feel for fashion. I have seen more women wearing ridiculous shoes in Paris than anywhere else, and women here have more of a tendency than Canadian women to wear clothes that remind one of the body underneath them, but they do not seem more fashion-conscious than women in any other big city. Men here wear pointy shoes, tight designer jeans, sweaters over their shoulders, and expensive-looking sunglasses, just as one would imagine. It is obvious that North Americans' health culture has not made it anywhere near France. People here are much skinnier than in the United States or Canada, as though they were too urbane to work out. When I see trios of French toughs walking down the street in V-neck tee-shirts revealing tattoos and the musculature of twelve-year-olds, I do not even know how to react. Toughness in French culture seems mostly to be associated with spitting, slouching against cars or the sides of buildings, smoking, and having very elaborate coiffures.
My final two notes are about hostels and cultural norms. It will make more sense to write about the latter when I am in a more socially-active hostel, but I made a note to myself to write about it soon because of having thought about it as soon as I checked into the one in Paris. I have realized, since arriving in Montreal, that I am getting too old for hostels (at least, European ones; the ones in Asia are probably vastly different). Many of the people here look like they are twenty-two years old, or even younger, and they have completely different social interests from me. I no longer find it exciting to become best friends with people whom I will never see again or to ogle at exiguously-dressed twenty-year-old girls, who, for some reason, populate these types of places. I suppose that I should try to sound less snide than that, but that reflects my actual point of view. Many of the people who come to hostels are socially naive and overexcited about being on their own, and, while it can still be fun to chat with them some of the time, and they are friendly almost across the board, I am quite happy to be making what will probably be my last hostel-based trip through Europe this year. Accommodations in southern Europe should be cheap enough, and have a short enough history with the very idea of a hostel, that I will be pushed more and more towards renting rooms in hotels and, possibly, travelling with other people. (I just looked up "hostel" on Wikipedia: the first one was started in 1912 for German youth.)
My point about cultural norms will be short. I was thinking earlier of how Americans from the South are so outwardly friendly, while Germans and Austrians, among others, are known for being more reserved, and have concluded that cultural norms tend to be self-perpetuating (though they change, of course, with time - slowly) once they form and that they probably form partly on the basis of religion, wealth, and need, or lack thereof, to rely on one's neighbors.
It is time for me to go to bed. I am going to be visiting Amiens tomorrow and expect to see a little more of Paris, and perhaps Reims, on Monday. As the train exited Rouen this evening, I watched the city recede until it was lost from view, then fell into a sleep so deep that I did not even notice that we have arrived in Paris until the girl sitting across from me tapped me on the knee.
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| This church is beautiful. |
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