Suffice it to say that, by the end of my first day here, I had gotten over Paris' mystification and come to see it as just another city full of cars, people, buildings, and other things banal. I started my day out by going back to bed as soon as I had finished breakfast and trying, unsuccessfully, to sleep. As odd as it sounds, I did not want to get up and explore Paris or anything connected to it. 'Damn Versailles,' I thought, 'And damn everything in the world.' I wanted not to lie in bed and never move again. Versailles could wait.
Versailles did wait, in fact, as my subway pass did not work. I met a very nice couple from Houston on the way there, two of a long line of people whom I have met since I got here. I seem to have a strange affinity for fellow tourists. Perhaps it is because we are all in the same boat, confused, excited, and hopeless at the local language; perhaps it is because tourists are friendly per force, being so reliant on other people to get around and, consequently, uncertain of themselves. Whatever the case, I enjoy talking to them, although, even more oddly, I would have preferred taking the subway alone to Versailles to spending the ride with Steve and Dana, the couple whom I met, even though they were enjoyable people. Perhaps I take more in when I am alone in foreign places. It might be that I just do not like small talk.
It was roughly lunchtime when I made it to Versailles. I spotted a decent-looking restaurant that I decided to visit before leaving town. While I am mostly opposed to eating out in Paris, as it is expensive, I also want to try at least a little local food that does not come from a grocery store. I have decided to limit myself to no more than 20 Euros per day for food (while I am here), and I am going to eat principally in cities near Paris that I visit on day-trips, as there are too many cafes to choose from in Paris, and I have no idea which of them are any good.
The number of tourists at Versailles swept me away: I was mistaken when I thought that there were a lot at Sacre Coeur. I recommend visiting Versailles just for the sake of looking at the tourists there. As I approached its gates, a hawker offered me five knock-off key chains for one Euro. "Six," he said as I walked past him, "Take six." Again there were men selling cooled, bottled water, but this time, there were no touts.
Versailles, like every other monument mentioned in this blog, was suitably impressive, and I can see why the French royalty chose it for its residence. It is surrounded by very low hills thickly carpeted with trees and is far from the noise of the city. The inside of the palace is probably quite interesting, but I did not visit it, as I did not have time, just as I did not have time to see the inside of the palace at Petergof, near Saint Petersburg, or see the whole of Potsdam. I would recommend that anyone who visit Paris set aside a whole day for Versailles, as most sane people do; Paris is not the kind of place that one can see at a gallop.
I saw a great many other monuments today, walking myself half to death. The drivers in Paris are the worst that I have ever seen (which says a lot about my limited life experience, I know). They run onto sidewalks while parking; they ignore stop signs and sidewalks entirely; they honk their horns at one another and at pedestrians as a form of sport; they drive way too fast and stop right in front of stoplights when the light goes red, almost running over pedestrians; they cut one another off with impunity; and they generally show no regard for safety. Pedestrians, too, are asinine. One would expect them to show some sense, like the pedestrians in New York (as per others' reports), but they amble along as if they had nowhere to go, walking continually in separate bike lanes and filling up whole sidewalks when they walk together. Bikers have to ring their bells constantly just to get noticed, and they never get up any speed before they bump into another pack of pedestrians.
My other observations about Paris are, unless my memory is failing me, more general. There is a great difference between what I think of as the macroscopic and the microscopic in travelling. What I call the macroscopic are the general, abstract ideas about a place: one pictures enjoying oneself, staying somewhere, learning more about culture, and passing one's time somehow or other. The microscopic, or the physical reality of being there, is always much different from what one would have expected. Actually finding one's hostel, deciding what and when to eat, finding unmarked subway stations, and walking down an unlit corridor to a water closet that splashes one with water every time it flushes are inextricable components of travel of which one never thinks from afar.
Passing by the Sorbonne was, perhaps, my most striking experience today. It is, unless I only saw part of it, a single, opulent building that takes up an entire city block: its sheer mass is amazing. I learned, by reading one of the plaques about Paris' history that are scattered throughout the city, that it was founded in something like the year 1200. This means that Paris has long been a center of intellectual life, and one knows that it has long been a center of artistic activity. Why was this the case? I was so interested in learning more that I troubled myself to skim a few Wikipedia articles about it.
My researches show that Paris was an ancient druidic colony (though I may have gotten my facts mixed up; I forget things quickly) that later became a Frankish outpost and only really took off as a major city towards he end of the tenth century AD, when the French thrown was consolidated for quite some time by someone with a last name like "Cadet." Its steady growth thereafter was not explained in the Wikipedia article; one can only assume that power's having been centered in one area helped to streamline the country's economic output, to some degree, which led to its become gradually more wealthy, and, the wealthier it became, the more interested people grew in setting up there. The French fought a great many wars in the Middle Ages, leading to large-scale social change, and France has a generally fascinating history. The main idea that stuck with me, since I cannot see any other reason for its having grown into such a world power by the late eighteenth century, if not earlier, is that its relative stability and centralization of power are what helped it to rise. I doubt that its colonies contributed much to its wealth until the late seventeenth century, though I may be wrong there.
I have not given any bums money so far on this trip, and I frequently wonder if I should do so. Dear readers, I apologize, but I am going to advance a rudimentary sociological theory. I would be happy to pay $2 per year in taxes every year to help the homeless. There are probably around 15 million taxpayers in Canada, to make an uneducated and largely arbitrary estimate, meaning tat we could collect $30 million per year in taxes if my estimate were correct and everyone else were happy to pay the bum tax. Let us say that it costs $3,000 to get some decent clothes, an apartment for a month, and some food and to get signed up for a program (Do these exist?) to both be given some kind of job-related training and, subsequently, placement and to be on welfare for awhile prior to finding steady work. If this were the case, we could get 10,000 bums off of the streets per year. Obviously, the problem is not as simple as all of this, or someone else would already have thought of my program and implemented it. I do not know, evidently, what the problem is, but I wish that people were a little more educated about it.
I have another social theory, as long as I have written that one; I am getting on a roll. I tend to think about future travels a lot, and, during my stay in Montreal, I came to think about all of the strife in northern Africa and the Middle East. I have, naturally, a fairly poor sense of its root causes and possible solutions, but one thing seems simple to me: people who are well-fed, have secure jobs, are physically safe, and have some sense of fulfilling their person desires tend to be uninterested in war, which leads to a lack of the aforementioned conditions. It strikes me that, if we could educate people in the Middle East and northern Africa better, they might be less interested in blowing each other up. Of course, this solution, like the one above, would already have been implemented if it were actually feasible, so something in my perception of education or the particular conflicts going on in those regions must be a little off.
Finally, since I have gotten so much into societal generalizations, I should mention that I used to think that we should bomb everyone in the above-listed places off of the face of the Earth and start over again. I did not realize, at the time, they those areas contained interesting Roman ruins or that the lives of people in war-torn countries were of any value. I am happy to report that my humanity has been increasing, though my desire for peace in those areas is still principally a product of my wanting to visit them. I wish that I could care more, in a deeply emotional way, about people whose lives are abstractions to me, but I cannot. Also, I might go crazy out of sorrow if I could, so it is perhaps for the best that I be so narrow-minded.
I am ready to wrap this up. I have noticed that France really goes in for rah-rah-rah architecture: a lot of its buildings, or Paris', seem to be aimed at showing how great it is. Statues feature decisive military men riding horses or nymphs revealing their breasts; the sheer size of buildings is supposed to reflect their grandeur; all sorts of functionally-meaningless architectural flourishes are carved into the tops of many buildings just because they can be; and themes borrowed from the Romans and Greeks, such as the use of Ionic pillars and mythology, are worked into almost every building. I have grown interested, over the past few days, in the formation of national identity, though my ideas never amount to much. I think and think about what it means to be French or English, and I find myself, pretentiously, reminded of the last two lines of Keats' "When I have fears that I may cease to be," though not, thankfully, because I am about to die. The French seem more interested in their own cuisine than, say, Canadians, Americans, Germans, the Dutch, or Russians, all of whom go in much more for foreign restaurants. They are also very, very fond of smoking cigarettes, though that does not distinguish them from the residents of any other nearby nation.
Final thoughts. I have been struggling through Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children"; I forgot to mention that earlier. I have also decided that six flights over the course of one trip is four too many; I am going to try to avoid flying so much on most future trips. I have wondered what the point is of visiting so many cities, why I am visiting these particular places rather than others, whether I really like travelling alone, &c. - I tend to ruminate a lot on these types of trips. I need, more than anything else, to get a notebook, though I will probably end up reminding myself of this later on. If I had had a notebook, I could have jotted down all of my impressions of Montreal for later and told you about people's being more friendly there than in Vancouver, about their not minding using English, their smoking cigarettes with almost the same zeal as the French, my having visited the best Indian restaurant at which I have ever eaten (India's Oven, at 454 Jean Talon West), and about people's sitting on their stoops and balconies in Montreal for no apparent reason. Montreal's being so bitterly cold in the winter makes its late spring revivification much more pronounced, I gather, than that of Vancouver.
Two more points: I had to buy a device for extracting photos from my camera today because my computer lost the ability to do so, causing more money to leak out of my pockets, and my hotel room has serious enough bolt to keep out the Mongol hordes. Goodnight.
Versailles did wait, in fact, as my subway pass did not work. I met a very nice couple from Houston on the way there, two of a long line of people whom I have met since I got here. I seem to have a strange affinity for fellow tourists. Perhaps it is because we are all in the same boat, confused, excited, and hopeless at the local language; perhaps it is because tourists are friendly per force, being so reliant on other people to get around and, consequently, uncertain of themselves. Whatever the case, I enjoy talking to them, although, even more oddly, I would have preferred taking the subway alone to Versailles to spending the ride with Steve and Dana, the couple whom I met, even though they were enjoyable people. Perhaps I take more in when I am alone in foreign places. It might be that I just do not like small talk.
It was roughly lunchtime when I made it to Versailles. I spotted a decent-looking restaurant that I decided to visit before leaving town. While I am mostly opposed to eating out in Paris, as it is expensive, I also want to try at least a little local food that does not come from a grocery store. I have decided to limit myself to no more than 20 Euros per day for food (while I am here), and I am going to eat principally in cities near Paris that I visit on day-trips, as there are too many cafes to choose from in Paris, and I have no idea which of them are any good.
The number of tourists at Versailles swept me away: I was mistaken when I thought that there were a lot at Sacre Coeur. I recommend visiting Versailles just for the sake of looking at the tourists there. As I approached its gates, a hawker offered me five knock-off key chains for one Euro. "Six," he said as I walked past him, "Take six." Again there were men selling cooled, bottled water, but this time, there were no touts.
Versailles, like every other monument mentioned in this blog, was suitably impressive, and I can see why the French royalty chose it for its residence. It is surrounded by very low hills thickly carpeted with trees and is far from the noise of the city. The inside of the palace is probably quite interesting, but I did not visit it, as I did not have time, just as I did not have time to see the inside of the palace at Petergof, near Saint Petersburg, or see the whole of Potsdam. I would recommend that anyone who visit Paris set aside a whole day for Versailles, as most sane people do; Paris is not the kind of place that one can see at a gallop.
I saw a great many other monuments today, walking myself half to death. The drivers in Paris are the worst that I have ever seen (which says a lot about my limited life experience, I know). They run onto sidewalks while parking; they ignore stop signs and sidewalks entirely; they honk their horns at one another and at pedestrians as a form of sport; they drive way too fast and stop right in front of stoplights when the light goes red, almost running over pedestrians; they cut one another off with impunity; and they generally show no regard for safety. Pedestrians, too, are asinine. One would expect them to show some sense, like the pedestrians in New York (as per others' reports), but they amble along as if they had nowhere to go, walking continually in separate bike lanes and filling up whole sidewalks when they walk together. Bikers have to ring their bells constantly just to get noticed, and they never get up any speed before they bump into another pack of pedestrians.
My other observations about Paris are, unless my memory is failing me, more general. There is a great difference between what I think of as the macroscopic and the microscopic in travelling. What I call the macroscopic are the general, abstract ideas about a place: one pictures enjoying oneself, staying somewhere, learning more about culture, and passing one's time somehow or other. The microscopic, or the physical reality of being there, is always much different from what one would have expected. Actually finding one's hostel, deciding what and when to eat, finding unmarked subway stations, and walking down an unlit corridor to a water closet that splashes one with water every time it flushes are inextricable components of travel of which one never thinks from afar.
Passing by the Sorbonne was, perhaps, my most striking experience today. It is, unless I only saw part of it, a single, opulent building that takes up an entire city block: its sheer mass is amazing. I learned, by reading one of the plaques about Paris' history that are scattered throughout the city, that it was founded in something like the year 1200. This means that Paris has long been a center of intellectual life, and one knows that it has long been a center of artistic activity. Why was this the case? I was so interested in learning more that I troubled myself to skim a few Wikipedia articles about it.
My researches show that Paris was an ancient druidic colony (though I may have gotten my facts mixed up; I forget things quickly) that later became a Frankish outpost and only really took off as a major city towards he end of the tenth century AD, when the French thrown was consolidated for quite some time by someone with a last name like "Cadet." Its steady growth thereafter was not explained in the Wikipedia article; one can only assume that power's having been centered in one area helped to streamline the country's economic output, to some degree, which led to its become gradually more wealthy, and, the wealthier it became, the more interested people grew in setting up there. The French fought a great many wars in the Middle Ages, leading to large-scale social change, and France has a generally fascinating history. The main idea that stuck with me, since I cannot see any other reason for its having grown into such a world power by the late eighteenth century, if not earlier, is that its relative stability and centralization of power are what helped it to rise. I doubt that its colonies contributed much to its wealth until the late seventeenth century, though I may be wrong there.
I have not given any bums money so far on this trip, and I frequently wonder if I should do so. Dear readers, I apologize, but I am going to advance a rudimentary sociological theory. I would be happy to pay $2 per year in taxes every year to help the homeless. There are probably around 15 million taxpayers in Canada, to make an uneducated and largely arbitrary estimate, meaning tat we could collect $30 million per year in taxes if my estimate were correct and everyone else were happy to pay the bum tax. Let us say that it costs $3,000 to get some decent clothes, an apartment for a month, and some food and to get signed up for a program (Do these exist?) to both be given some kind of job-related training and, subsequently, placement and to be on welfare for awhile prior to finding steady work. If this were the case, we could get 10,000 bums off of the streets per year. Obviously, the problem is not as simple as all of this, or someone else would already have thought of my program and implemented it. I do not know, evidently, what the problem is, but I wish that people were a little more educated about it.
I have another social theory, as long as I have written that one; I am getting on a roll. I tend to think about future travels a lot, and, during my stay in Montreal, I came to think about all of the strife in northern Africa and the Middle East. I have, naturally, a fairly poor sense of its root causes and possible solutions, but one thing seems simple to me: people who are well-fed, have secure jobs, are physically safe, and have some sense of fulfilling their person desires tend to be uninterested in war, which leads to a lack of the aforementioned conditions. It strikes me that, if we could educate people in the Middle East and northern Africa better, they might be less interested in blowing each other up. Of course, this solution, like the one above, would already have been implemented if it were actually feasible, so something in my perception of education or the particular conflicts going on in those regions must be a little off.
Finally, since I have gotten so much into societal generalizations, I should mention that I used to think that we should bomb everyone in the above-listed places off of the face of the Earth and start over again. I did not realize, at the time, they those areas contained interesting Roman ruins or that the lives of people in war-torn countries were of any value. I am happy to report that my humanity has been increasing, though my desire for peace in those areas is still principally a product of my wanting to visit them. I wish that I could care more, in a deeply emotional way, about people whose lives are abstractions to me, but I cannot. Also, I might go crazy out of sorrow if I could, so it is perhaps for the best that I be so narrow-minded.
I am ready to wrap this up. I have noticed that France really goes in for rah-rah-rah architecture: a lot of its buildings, or Paris', seem to be aimed at showing how great it is. Statues feature decisive military men riding horses or nymphs revealing their breasts; the sheer size of buildings is supposed to reflect their grandeur; all sorts of functionally-meaningless architectural flourishes are carved into the tops of many buildings just because they can be; and themes borrowed from the Romans and Greeks, such as the use of Ionic pillars and mythology, are worked into almost every building. I have grown interested, over the past few days, in the formation of national identity, though my ideas never amount to much. I think and think about what it means to be French or English, and I find myself, pretentiously, reminded of the last two lines of Keats' "When I have fears that I may cease to be," though not, thankfully, because I am about to die. The French seem more interested in their own cuisine than, say, Canadians, Americans, Germans, the Dutch, or Russians, all of whom go in much more for foreign restaurants. They are also very, very fond of smoking cigarettes, though that does not distinguish them from the residents of any other nearby nation.
Final thoughts. I have been struggling through Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children"; I forgot to mention that earlier. I have also decided that six flights over the course of one trip is four too many; I am going to try to avoid flying so much on most future trips. I have wondered what the point is of visiting so many cities, why I am visiting these particular places rather than others, whether I really like travelling alone, &c. - I tend to ruminate a lot on these types of trips. I need, more than anything else, to get a notebook, though I will probably end up reminding myself of this later on. If I had had a notebook, I could have jotted down all of my impressions of Montreal for later and told you about people's being more friendly there than in Vancouver, about their not minding using English, their smoking cigarettes with almost the same zeal as the French, my having visited the best Indian restaurant at which I have ever eaten (India's Oven, at 454 Jean Talon West), and about people's sitting on their stoops and balconies in Montreal for no apparent reason. Montreal's being so bitterly cold in the winter makes its late spring revivification much more pronounced, I gather, than that of Vancouver.
Two more points: I had to buy a device for extracting photos from my camera today because my computer lost the ability to do so, causing more money to leak out of my pockets, and my hotel room has serious enough bolt to keep out the Mongol hordes. Goodnight.
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| This type of statue evinces French nationalism. |
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