My train ride to Amiens was uneventful but fairly pleasant. As yesterday, my environs grew much prettier as soon as we left Paris. The surrounding countryside was mostly flat but featured a river, perhaps the Seine, for part of the way, and it was blanketed by copses of birch, trees similar to gigantic stalks of broccoli, and oversized birches with lots of branches - beeches and ash, respectively, I think. The forests north of Paris appear to be largely deciduous, which probably says something about soil content and the area's climate.
I may have seen a Roman column on the way to Amiens, and I will probably never know if I did. It was some forty or fifty feet high, very solidly build, and standing in the middle of a field on its own except for a broken-down cousin standing next to it, which is what led me to think that it was Roman. The birds that I have seen have mostly been unremarkable, though I spotted a couple of magpies today, something that looked like a heron, and a hawk-like bird; the fields leading into Amiens were ugly, grassy and flat, though they were rich with the blood of poppies.
My main gripe about Amiens is that it has so little to see compared to Rouen. Perhaps this is unfair; perhaps it is like comparing Rachmaninov to a high school band director; but, given that Amiens contained a UNESCO World Heritage site, its cathedral, one could have expected more out of the rest of it. Amiens developed, as far as I know, mostly as a market town, a stop-off for merchants going north and south of it, and it has not grown much beyond that. It has an extraordinary cathedral, a few nice churches, Jules Verne's former house, and a few nice statues, but it has none of the historical cache of Rouen, none of Rouen's half-timbered houses or million-year-old buildings, barely cobbled together, with uneven roofs and tiny attics. I finished seeing the city within about an hour and a half of getting there, had lunch at an overpriced cafe, having started to die of starvation, and arrived at the train station only to discover that I had again confused departure and arrival times on the train station's overhead display and would be stuck there for another hour and a half.
Luckily, I had important business to attend to: I had to change some of my bookings and rework my plans for the coming weeks. If my travel agent and I had been smarter, I would have booked a spot on a train to Reims before leaving Vancouver and seen Amiens from Lille, as the two of them are close to each other. Instead, I arrived in Paris with no reservation and learned that it would be very expensive to buy one for Monday, as a result of which I have had to shuffle my plans a little and will be seeing Reims on the twenty-first en route to Lille, a day before I had been planning to go there. I might end up saving money overall by having done this, as I will be squeezing more total train travel onto the days on which I use my rail pass, but it will also force me to see Lyon in a hurry before leaving for Clermont-Ferrand, which should not be too much of a problem, in the end. I am going to have some down-time in Lille, which should not be a bad thing given how much I will have been rushing around until then, and I have cut Aix-en-Provence out of my itinerary, as I want to lighten my itinerary for Avignon.
Onto greener pastures! It appears that I will not be able to visit Tours, in all probability, as my train from Nantes to Blois, a smaller town where it was easier to find accommodation in the end, is direct, but I doubt that I will be missing out on much. I again fell so soundly asleep on the train back to Paris that I did not notice our arrival, only time I was woken up by chance by the people walking past me. I went back to bed when I got home and napped for an hour or two; it seems that I have fallen behind on my sleep by a little.
As I may have mentioned, I have an easy day planned for tomorrow. I am going to take the subway to the Chateau de Vincennes, visit the Place de la Nation, and walk through Paris until roughly lunchtime, when I should be free to return to my hostel and get some work done. My fridge stopped working today, as a result of which my cheese might go bad before tomorrow morning; there is not much that I can do about this, as, even if I had told the hostel managers earlier in the evening, they probably would not have fixed it immediately. My only real discovery of note today was that I saw the best-dressed French girl of the entire trip. She was wearing sandals that reminded one of those of the ancient Greeks, only with unnecessary, fake jewels on the straps, and a pure-white, muslin dress with two layers, the outer one diaphanous, that reached almost to her knees. She wore a thin, brown, braided belt around her waist, and her whole outfit created an impression of lightness and nicety. Perhaps there is something to be said for Parisians' sense of style, or perhaps this was the kind of girl whom one can find in any city in which people of discriminating taste live. Suffice it to say that I am not one of them, but I can recognize one when I see her.
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| This is a cathedral. |
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