Day 13 - Angers

My objective, upon my leaving Paris, was to see Chartres and then Angers. Plenty of trains went to and from Chartres; it is only a one-hour train ride; and the city itself is small enough that one can see the interesting parts of it in an hour or two. This plan, like many others, did not turn out. The trains for Chartres and Angers left from different stations, requiring me to take the subway between them, and I got a little lost, as Paris has two separate subway systems, and its designers had the pernicious habit of referring to both subway carriages and trains as "trains," meaning that one can rarely trust signs saying "trains this way" when one is looking for actual trains that go between cities. I accepted Chartres as another loss - one cannot win them all - and grabbed lunch at a Dutch pancake house near the train station, giving my last, unnecessary subway ticket to a young woman at a bus stop, who was very grateful.

In general, I tried to see far too much in and around Paris in the five days in which I was there, from which I hope to learn not to rush so much in future. One of the joys of Paris - one of the few joys - which I forgot to mention the other day was that one stumbles on all sorts of churches and buildings while merely walking through the city: one sees some things unexpectedly and fails to see other things that one plans to see. Although I did not see every church that I had scoped out on the map for the morning of the 10th, when I had already given up on going to Chartres, I had already started coming to accept that one cannot see every single church, historical city, or sight in any country. I think that the last vestiges of my perfectionism, as I had probably mentioned before, show in my style of travel, and I hope to conquer them, trying to get the feel for a place and enjoy myself rather than documenting everything that a country has to offer (which is impossible regardless). I left Paris yesterday afternoon with these thoughts, but I was also tired and felt ready to go home.

While I slipped into my typical oblivion on the train ride to Angers, my arrival there was magical. I found the hotel in which I would be staying within about three minutes and found myself in a city with breathable air and almost no buildings taller than three storeys. As it was almost dinnertime when I got there, I quickly sought out a place to eat, taking the hotelier's advice to look at a place around the corner. I learned there that it would not be open for another hour, and I considered crossing the street to look at another restaurant, but there were two lanes of French drivers in my way, all of whose days it would have made to run me over; I decided that I was fated to take the hotelier's advice. I bought another almond cake pastry to tide me over for the hour, bought groceries for the next night's dinner, explored the nearby cafes and other eateries to find a place to get lunch, and read a bit of poetry on my computer, showing back up at the restaurant at 7:00 PM sharp.

I love the nineteenth-century literary trope of saying, "If I were a poet, I would describe this in the greatest detail, but, alas, I am not," and then proceeding to describe something for several pages. I felt that some sort of momentous sentence was needed to start this paragraph, but I could not find one to try to sum up my experience of eating at a real French restaurant. To being with, some basics: although the place had a name, the sign out front merely said "restaurant." It displayed its menu outside - I will not eat at places that do not - but, when I went inside, the lone waitress, the wife of the cook, whom we could see working, told me that they only served one dish on Tuesdays: pitas with an assortment of "garnishes." I killed a roach or beetle of some sort that had started wandering up my leg as she said this; she said, "Oh!", and a look of consternation flashed across her face, but we continued talking as usual. She was in no rush as we talked; she was happy discussing the menu and France in general; and she did not pressure me to drink anything other than water. Service in France is pretty good.

It must have taken ten of fifteen minutes for the first part of my meal to come. The cook made the pitas in a massive kiln, an old-fashioned oven of several cubic meters, roasting them on a metal slat that he removed with giant metal tongs. The waitress explained to me that they were very hot, and that one ate them by cutting them open and filling them, like pouches, with the so-called garnishes that she was bringing me. The first two garnishes were some sort of garlic butter and pork paste, which was stewed pork cut up finely. Both were fantastic. These were later replaced with creamy, mushroom-based sauce and a ratatouille, and the final dish was baked Camembert cheese. For dessert I was brought smaller pitas, along with jam, a chocolate sauce, and a caramel sauce. By the time at which I finished, it was 8:30, and I thought that I was going to die, as I had been given enough food for two people. The restaurant was gradually filling up, but I knew that it would not be full by the end of the evening; there were still more flies than people in it. I sat motionless for twenty minutes, waiting for the waitress to bring me the check, until I saw the couple next to me get up and go to her. They had ordered wine with their dinner, and it was a wonder that they did not fall asleep in their chairs. I suppose that French people get acclimated to this type of food.

Surprisingly, I got some work done that night, thanks to my abstemiousness. The hotel in which I was staying was so nice as to make the hostel in Paris seem like a bad dream: while it did not have a fridge, it had a normal-sized bathroom, comfortable bed, and evidence absence of dust. This was the kind of place in which one could spend a week or two, visiting nearby castles in the Loire Valley and getting fat off of spectacular dinners in the evening. I am inclined to say that the restaurant at which I ate in Versailles (the town), at which I was served wiener schnitzel, more or less, was a fraud and that French food is better than its German or Austrian counterparts. I discussed this at some length with the waitress the other night, as she was gregarious and I was the only person in the restaurant for some time. When I mentioned wanting to try a fricassee de volaille, or stewed game, in Bordeaux, she scrunched up her face in doubt, telling me that it was best in Anjou and that I had better try the duck farther south. (I just realized that this type of nitpicking makes me sound like a rich gourmand. Oh well.) I have made it my goal to try either duck or fowl before leaving France and to have pork cheeks, which I first tried in the French Alps. I do not know if the food that I will get on this trip will equal what I had in Chamonix, as I was on a tour that directed us toward high-end places, but it will probably be one of the highlights of the trip.

I forgot to mention two things in my earlier discussion. One, which I forgot again and just now remembered, is that, as I am choosing my spots with pastries and trying to learn to choose my spots with cities, I am not going to have fancy dinners every night, having decided to reserve them for cities known for their food. Tonight, for example, I had tinned fish (mackerel, this time; sardines are more expensive per unit of mass) and canned vegetables, which sucked (but were nutritious and very cheap). Tomorrow, in Blois, I am going to have something fancy, as I will probably do in Bordeaux. In Toulouse I am going to eat relative garbage (cheap, healthy food from a grocery store), and I will not eat out more than once or twice in Avignon. If all of this travelling can teach me to lead life with greater moderation and to see things less in black and white, I will have come out on top, even if it has entailed certain missteps and frustrations.

The other thing that I wanted to mention was being amused at seeing two brothers sitting side-by-side, looking at their cell phones before their dinner was served. I realized, perhaps before dozing off on the train to Angers, that travellers are lucky in being able to find magic in the everyday. Frenchmen going to Angers or Nantes on business probably do not find it very interesting, yet to a traveller taking the subway or a train can be exciting, as it is new. I do not know how to turn this into a life philosophy beyond recommending that all of us try to find some magic in our everyday lives; that is rather cheap advice, as I do not practically know how to do it, and I expect that I am parroting what anyone else would say anyway.

I regretted having to leave for Nantes the following morning as I went to bed last night. I felt that having spent a few days in Angers, perhaps with day-trips here and there, and giving myself more time for writing would have made for a more enjoyable experience and given me just as much of an understanding of what that part of France was as trying to tear across the whole country. My plans are set, however, and they are too intricate to be reworked on any large scale. The lesson that I have learned - or am, as I said, trying to learn - for the future is to pick my spots carefully rather than compulsively trying to traverse entire countries, seeing every major city on the way, and to spend more nights in a row at every given hostel or hotel that I choose. I should be able to make this trip work, as I do not have that much work to complete, after all, by the end of the summer, and I suppose that I have had realizations like this on every one of my trips. I could never have known that Angers would be so wonderful, that seeing so many different cities would be exhausting, or that seeing every major city or attraction was not actually necessary until I had tried it. Let us hope that experience teaches me in the future.

Half-timbered houses like this one make me lose my head.

Day 12 - Paris

I wish that I had more time to write, as I could give you more blow-by-blow descriptions of what I have been doing each day. Having little time, I may as well assume that those are not as interesting as my generalizations about travel and that the most interesting things that I have thought or experience will remain in my memory.

When I last left you, I was lamenting having gone to Amiens and been unimpressed, I believe. I took the twelfth day of my trip, whenever that was - I am probably on my fourteenth or fifteenth day, at this point - fairly easy, getting up as late as I could without missing breakfast and lounging in my room for awhile before heading out to see the parts of Paris that I had not yet visited. Paris had been having spectacular rainfall and thunderstorms over the past few days, and these continued through the early part of the morning of my twelfth day of travel.

I started my day by visiting the Chateau de Vincennes, which predates the palace of Versailles by roughly four centuries. As usual, I did not go inside, as that would have cost money, and I wanted to end my day early to get some work done in the evening. I visited a few plazas that I had not yet visited, looked at a few churches, found, perhaps, the only free public bathroom in Paris, learned that it would cost 8.5 Euros to climb the tower of the cathedral of Notre Dame, and learned that the catacombs, like many museums in Paris, were closed on Mondays. I dove into the nearest subway entrance right as another shower began, went back to my hostel, and had tinned halibut (I think) for dinner. I do not remember if I got any work done that evening, but I would not be surprised if I did.

A few interesting things happened on my last full day in Paris, the first of which was that I bought fresh fruit for the first time on this trip. On my way from one church to another, I found a Chinese greengrocer selling figs, of all things, at a rate of four for 1.70 Euros. I washed them with a bit of water and ate them on the spot. I expect to be able to eat much more fresh fruit in northern Germany, where, if it is anything like the rest of the country, I will be able to buy one-pound boxes of fresh-picked cherries and strawberries on the street, and I may be able to get fresh fruit in England. Until then, I am going to make do with canned vegetables, fruit juice, and whatever fruit or vegetable matter makes its way into the food that I buy at cafes, restaurants, &c.

The other big event of the day is part of what will go down in history as the Pastry Question. In what quantities should one allow oneself to buy pastries abroad? How able is one to resist doing so, even if one decides to eat healthily? I bought an almond-chocolate croissant-like bun the other day; I think that it was partly to fill me up, partly because it looked delicious, and partly because it was cheap and available. Finding food that can quickly be consumed is always difficult for the traveller who does not stay for long in one place and does not want to spend much time or money on restaurants in the middle of the day. Bread on its own is no good; cheese takes a working fridge; those sausages with a sort of skin around them that can be stored outside of a fridge are overly fatty; one cannot live on trail mix and granola bars alone; and so on. There is not much food that one can simply grab and eat on the spot, and pastries are often a cheap, filling, and delicious option.

What I have decided - I promise to return more directly to the Pastry Question in a moment - is to start looking for "boulangeries" (bread-bakeries) and, even better, sandwicheries (sandwich shops) to eat in the middle of the day. I had not decided that, though, on Monday, which, I believe, was my last full day in Paris. Having eaten the almond bun and, the previous day, my second helping of flan, I made a rough decision: I want to try to eat more or less one of each distinct type of pastry in France. Once one knows a pastry's taste, one does not need more of it (at least, in the context of a single trip), as a second taste of the same thing will not offer a new experience. I had fantastic pain au chocolat in Strasbourg last year; I have already tried flan and croissant-like desserts; I already know that the fruity, ornate pastries held together by gelatin are not that good; and I have yet to try a fruit tart (though I had a low-rent fruit-and-custard tart at a cafe earlier on this trip) and a cream-based, chocolate eclair-like dessert. I will try to eat one of each of those two pastries over the next two weeks, but I will otherwise steer clear of pastries, on the whole.

I forgot to mention something in my last post, which is that religious music is some of the most beautiful and life-affirming that I have ever heard; Christianity is not all about death and shame (or guilt?). If "God" were replaced with "life" and the church's idolatry and conformism were cast aside, I would be on board with it; but that would be something totally different from what we call religion.

My final point is that I have found my evenings boring. I often set them aside working on my translations, a grant proposal, and a conference proposal, and, while I often get some of that stuff done, I find myself searching for distractions. Perhaps the issue is that staying in a one-person room is less socially stimulating than being in an ordinary hostel; perhaps the issue is that I have rarely gotten enough rest on this trip and am pushing myself too hard. I have a final image of Paris with which to leave you: as soon as it starts to rain in Paris, people materialize in the entrances to subways with cheap umbrellas for sale, almost as though they had come out of the woodwork of the subway itself.

The castle at Vincennes predates that of Versailles.

Day 11 - Amiens

I am going to have to keep this short. I have been trying for the last few minutes to come up with a clever opener for this email, but I just cannot do it. Amiens sucked.

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.

This is a cathedral.

Day 10 - Rouen

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.)

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.

This church is beautiful.

Day 9 - Paris and Versailles

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.

This type of statue evinces French nationalism.

Day 8 - Paris

I hate to make posts about more than one day at a time, but I could not help it today: my impressions from the past few days have blurred together, and I am too tired to remember them in especial detail. I did a lot of walking today and got a lot of sun. Also, My face is covered in grit,which might be crystallized sweat, grime from the city, or a combination of both. More on that later.

I was apprehensive prior to leaving for Paris. I suppose that, because of its worldwide reputation as a city of culture and refinement, one develops unrealistic expectations for it. I would hazard to say that one knows more or less what one is looking to see when one visits, say, Rome or Istanbul; certain, small parts of the city contain invaluable cultural relics that one is going to photograph. The cities themselves, as ever-changing beings, are not of much interest. Paris, on the other hand, is a living city, so to speak, and one approaches it with the expectation of being drenched in culture with every step that one takes. This may be entirely wrong, but it is my way of explaining why I may have felt nervous prior to going: it is a place, I thought, so surreal that one can barely believe that one is there, and one is behooved, as a result, to sail into the empyrean of higher thought and art appreciation as soon as one gets there.

I could not sleep on my red-eye from Montreal to Paris, which surprised me, as I usually sleep well on flights. I struck up a conversation with the girl next to me and started to rediscover both my love for the French language and my strong preference for Russian over any language other than English. I have discussed this with my brother, who agrees with my general viewpoint, before: whenever I have to speak any non-English language, I reach into my grab-bag of foreign languages and come up with the one that I speak best. It is probably foolish to generalize from this example, as plenty of people seem to speak three or more languages, but my experience is still that I only have room in my head for one foreign language (Given that I hope to learn Mandarin Chinese, I hope that this is wrong.). Whenever I have to speak French, I get frustrated at my interlocutor's not speaking Russian, as much as I enjoy using the language. The girl next to me in the plane laughed when I said that one of my goals was to meet as many Russian speakers in France as I could.

It took me four hours, from arriving in Paris, to get checked into my hostel and start exploring the city. The baggage claim was slow; it took me awhile to figure out how to get to the train station near my hostel; and check-in time at the hostel itself was abominable. I did enjoy my walk from the train station to my hostel, though. A lover of cliches, I am tempted to say that Paris oozes history, by which I mean that everything here looks old. Streets are lined with four- or five-storey buildings of identical height that have white-framed windows; wooden, slatted shutters; iron railings outside of their windows; doors that are unnecessarily tall and directly abut the street; and exceedingly-ornate facades, as though their exteriors were made of freshly-whipped cream. Interspersed with these - often, integrated by them, as though they had been swallowed by the whipped-cream buildings and only their first floors remained - were greengrocers, cafes, and patisseries. I stopped off at one of the latter and ordered a section of flan, as it looked the most filling of everything for its cost. It turned out to be both mediocre and the only food that I ate for the rest of the afternoon; I had enough stuff to keep me busy that I forgot about eating until later that evening.

I am dying to make a generalization here rather than jump into a play-by-play description of my activities: Paris is the Shanghai of Europe. (I apologize to those of you who do not get this inside joke; it would take awhile to explain.) It seems like a city that was extraordinarily rich a few hundred years ago, suffered a major blow with Napoleon's defeats in 1812 and 1815, and commenced to suck thereafter. It is chock full of hobos; its streets are strewn with garbage; everything is at least twofold two expensive; it is incredibly noisy because of all of its car and motorcycle traffic; and it has fewer trees than any given square mile of Vancouver. It is a city of polar opposites, of beggars and kings; just a few hundred meters from famous churches are markets like in Russia, where people sell cloth, rubber boots, ball bearings, suitcases, mugs, and lamps, bumping into one another and shuffling as one great mass through narrow streets, oblivious to the life outside of their own few blocks.

The most interesting cultural monument that I saw was the Cathedrale de Sacre Coeur, which is just a few blocks away from the hostel in which I am staying. Sacre Coeur impressed me, appropriately, as did the hordes of people going to see it. Schoolchildren, tourists, locals, old women, young men, and people of indeterminate age or gender all crowded around its entrance or on the steps leading up to it. It was at Sacre Coeur that I was first struck by Parisians' desperateness to sell things. Outside of the cathedral stood magicians, men with cold water, people selling postcards, and dozens of touts, or seemingly-idle people who try to strike up conversation with other people in order to fleece them. Parisians, or the people living in Paris, turn every one of its tourist attractions into business schemes, and, while this happens in other cities, I have never seen it on such a scale as in Paris.

My next tourist venture was to walk from Sacre Coeur to the Eiffel Tower. During my walk, I passed the opera house, the Madeleine, and the Arc de Triomphe, all of which seemed to outdo one another in splendor and reinforced my sense of Paris' former wealth. I saw some similarities between Paris' architecture and that of Vienna, in fact, probably because of some particular architectural style's having been popular when both cities were at the height of their power. I took the metro from the Eiffel Tower back to Montmartre, the part of Paris in which I am staying, shortly after dinnertime to get groceries. I also discovered that my fly was down, and probably had been all afternoon, due to the zipper's being weak enough that it unzips itself under the slightest tension. There is not much that I can do about this, as the shorts that I was wearing have a fantastical number of pockets, as a result of which I am going to keep wearing them. I apologized inwardly to anyone who had suffered undue discomfiture due to my sartorial shortcomings, bought enough groceries for dinner for the next few nights, and, shortly after that, went to bed.

I would have had a hard time calling France a first-world country on the basis of what I saw after my first day in Paris. A great example of its appearing great but actually being poor is my hotel room. I was checked into a studio apartment for the next five days due to a booking error that was partly my fault and partly the hostel's, and this is giving me a chance to see how Parisians might live. My bed is the top half of a bunk bed with a ladder and is so close to the ceiling that I cannot sit up in it. Beneath my bed are an ironing board, a sofa chair, a space heater, and, I just noticed, a reading lamp. I have a dresser that prevents my window from fully opening, a rack for hanging clothes, a little pantry, some sort of water heater, a mini-kitchen, and even a sink and shower of my own. The problems with my room are mostly of size and quantity, not of what I have. My fridge leaks; my whole room reeks of cigarette smoke; my bathroom sink looks like it was made for a baby; my shower is so small that I cannot turn around in it without bumping the handle that controls its temperature, and it does not seal properly, causing water to leak into the kitchen; there are no electrical outlets in the bathroom, and the sink is too small to use anyway, so I have to shave in the kitchen, which is only a step away regardless (but has no mirror and is not really made for shaving); the hostel had no soap or toilet paper; and it is clear that everything in it has been done to a bare minimum. While readers might suspect me of complaining about my situation and failing to understand that space is at a minimum in a city like Paris, I am trying to highlight conditions that could not possibly exist in a similarly-priced accommodation in a developed country, like Germany, Austria, or the Netherlands; while it is a delight to be in Paris despite its sucking so much, it is also interesting to see how far France is behind other countries in western Europe. I expect that many of Paris' gorgeous old buildings are in a state like this one: they look fantastic from the outside, but they are so hopelessly old as to be almost unusable, ad nobody has done anything to refurbish their interiors while leaving their facades the same, as can be done trivially these days. I forgot to mention, by the way, that the bathroom itself is little more than a literal water-closet, and it is so small that I cannot close the door when I have my backpack on.

I think that I have fairly aptly summed up my experiences from the eighth day of my trip: Paris is a hideous city with world-class historical attractions. If you are willing to put up with its unpleasantness, then you will not regret having come, as some of its buildings are among the most impressive that I have ever seen. If you would prefer, however, to visit a city with world-class historical attractions that does not suck, try Berlin or Vienna, both of which are a blast to visit and have been very important in the development of their respective countries', and the world's, culture. For more on Paris, how much it sucks, and how interesting it is to visit, tune in to my coming post!

This is what the Cathedrale de Sacree Coeur looks like.

Days 1-7: Montreal, Quebec City, and Ottawa

I am going to have to make this brief, as I am several days behind on my blog, want to get to bed soon, and have to work on my plans for the next few days. I am also tired; this is not going to be my best post.

Montreal is a city that brings the funk. This is a slang expression that, if I am not mistaken, means "to be outlandish." It is full of street art, hobos, people with tattoos and facial piercings, and a queer admixture of old, decrepit buildings; old, beautiful buildings; and new, standard-looking buildings. It is filthy and smells of weed smoke. It is fairly green. It has a shared bicycle system but too few recycling bins. It has excellent restaurants if one knows where to look for them (I.e., It has excellent restaurants, and one has to know where they are in order to enjoy them.). Its sidewalks are broad enough that people congregate on them to dance, make music, and engage in other forms of social behavior.

I found Montreal horrifying, as it is much less conservative than Vancouver, and I do not have too much to say about it, as I did not take notes while I was there and am not that interested in making this a long post. The most enjoyable thing that I did there was to go biking with my brother. I feel very strange writing this email, as it is going to my family, so they know that my brother and I went biking (My blog posts are direct copies of my emails home.), but so be it. My brother and I had not been on an extended bike ride since I was ten years old, and I was immediately drawn back to that time as he led me through the city, calling directions over his shoulder.

Ottawa was fantastically interesting for a visitor from western Canada (me), as its parliamentary building is famous all over the country, but few of us (I suspect) have been to see it. It was vastly cleaner than Montreal and seemed much more up-scale: even the cafes lining the only pedestrian-only section of the city were fairly expensive. Quebec City, for its part, had a much richer history than Montreal, which I would not have guessed. It, too, seemed much more conservative than Montreal (every city does), though, since its old city was more or less separated from the part where people live and work, I mostly got a sense of what it was like a hundred or two hundred years ago. It turns out that Quebec City was a stronghold for Canada when the country still just barely existed, as a result of which its founders built extensive fortifications, which still stand today. There are many more statues proclaiming Canada's greatness in Quebec City than in any other part of Canada that I have seen; while I swelled with pride over Canada's history and nationhood as a result of these, I also found them a little jingoistic. The most interesting statue that I saw was one of Dante that had no obvious connection with the rest of the city or with the country as a whole. I guess that one of its sculptors was a fan or pseudo-fan of literature.

I am sure that I noticed and thought of a great many more things than I have put in this email, but I am desperate to get through it so that I can get to my other two, the ones about Paris, and get back on schedule. I have been putting off writing in my blog specifically because of not wanting to have to do several posts before attending to the one of the day: catching up on posts has become a stumbling block for me. One interesting facet of this trip is that I have vastly more work to do on it than I have had on any previous trip, which has turned me into a very strange traveller: while I can think of nothing but traveling when I am in Fayetteville, I am looking forward, more than anything else in this trip, to the times when I will be able to sit down and get some serious work done. No one who knows me should have ever expected those words to leave my lips (in that order, &c.).

I am plumb out of ideas at this point! I suppose that a bunch of my impressions have left me, never to return. Once I finish my first two posts about Paris, I should be ready to approach my posts more systematically and make them more narratively-based. Only time will tell!

Residents of Montreal are hooligans. This is some street art.