Reading: maps and guidebooks

Moving: walked

13 September 2001: Traveling

Thursday we checked out of the Edwardian Kenilworth. We had heard on the BBC news the day before that Usan travelers were requested to tell their hotels their itineraries, which if possibly a violation of Usan civil rights seemed a reasonable thing in a country without a Bill of Rights where a subsequent attack wasn't unlikely. But that request was only for plane travel, because of course flights weren't going. We cabbed quickly to Waterloo, exchanged pounds for francs, and waited.

I have heard ever since I began to ski (or, if you insist, to wear the equipment and get myself down the slope through actions that only charitably could be called skiing) about the differences between Usan and European skiing That Usans form tidy lines but Europeans crowd; that Usan mountain food sucks (this much is true) and European food doesn't; and that Usans ski hard all day while Europeans are more laid back. In contrast to the Usan one price per day ticket, on European mountains you pay only for the vertical feet you climb. Which is much fairer from my point of view, who might do only three or four runs in a day when an able skier might do ten or more. About the lines, I didn't know. I figured it was a Euro stereotype or a defense to stereotypes about Usans. In Europe for two weeks, in almost every travel situation, there were crowds instead of queues, but they involved people from all over the globe. I expect that if it's part of your culture it's not rude, and I wonder if people who normally wouldn't shove and jostle did on the When-in-Rome theory.

Our train was almost an hour late leaving. The ride itself was lovely, three hours of zipping through little towns with bizarre names in southeast England, pausing for a signal change within sight of a communal garden (are individual plots those things called "allotments"?) where magpies feasted on maize, pausing again before entering the Chunnel (which didn't trigger my claustrophobia as I feared, underground, in the dark, under lots of very cold water, eek!), seeing how the landscape so abruptly changed between Kent and northeastern France, and, finally arriving au Gare du Nord with Montmartre and the Sacré Cœur à droit. Wow.

There was quite a queue for taxis. I guess we might have figured out le métro, but it was so late--in addition to the train delay, France is GMT+1--that we opted for Fastest Possible. This queue, I should say, was much better than that to board the train. We were glad to progress past a little niche that many had used as a chamberpot, but actually the line moved rapidly. Not rapidly enough for some, who tried to cut through the maze and met more hairy eyeballs than only mine. I didn't get to say my new line, "C'est à moi!" not that I probably would have yelled that, afeared as I was of being an Ugly American in act as well as in wardrobe and weight.

Our cabbie was a hoot, or so I could think after I had survived him. We had thought traffic in London was pretty bad and the bike commuters even braver than they are in the U.S., but we hadn't been in Paris yet. The streets are as narrow as I thought they wouldn't really be, figuring that movies are shot in the most picturesque bits of town. Everyone sped along at about three inches a minute slower than the speed of light. I hadn't yet read enough of Poisonwood Bible, but I laughed when I got to the bit where Rachel complains about having to slow way down at stop signs because the drivers in Brazzaville are so bad. Somewhere near the Louvre, within sight of the Royal Ballet, another driver offended our cabbie particularly, thought I couldn't see what had happened any worse than any other near-miss. "Une femme," the driver ejaculated, with something I took to be a curse. Then he remembered me and waved his hand self-deprecatingly. "Pardon." That was pretty funny, but I was mostly gawking out the windows.

Paris. I had thought London was beautiful. And it was, it was, but Paris is something else. Of course there's the immediate sense that you have no idea what's going on around you because you've forgotten every iota of French from high school. Paris felt more crowded than London, in architecture if not in population. Ancient sycamores grew here as well, but buildings were taller, narrower, and more densely packed. The older buildings in New York are similarly packed, but the streets are wider. And of course Denver is incredibly sprawly. So Paris much more sardiney. I would like to take a Great Fire walk in London. In contrast Paris never had such a single devastating fire, but its messiest revolution was both more messy and more recent than England's. And, at least according to Le Flâneur, which I would get to, the city was redone under Napoleon III. The two cities look incredibly different. Does every European capital look so different from the next, at least in the preserved sections? I've been in Boston, New York, Washington, Miami, Denver, San Francisco, New Orleans, Santa Fe, and Seattle, and even as much as the country's been McDonaldized, I can tell them apart, either by knowledge or by feel or by the cities' own individualities. I didn't expect London and Paris to be identical to each other, and indeed they aren't. I guess I hadn't expected myself to perceive how distinct they are, not at first.

For me, this street Looks Like Paris. Well, maybe not. The streets don't tend to be so wide and there's only the one person on the street. Also, this is later in the day, trying to find Shakespeare & Co.

When I chose the Cayré Golden Tulip, I thought from the address that it was in the fifth arrondisement, in the Latin quarter. No. It was in the seventh. Aside from the lovely walk we had up the Avenue St. Germain past Sartre's hangout Les Deux Magots toward l'Île de la Cité, this meant we couldn't see le Musée National du Moyen Âge that day. We crossed the Seine at Pont Neuf, crossed the island to look at the Right Bank, wove back toward the upstream, left end. We stopped at a café across from the Palais de Justice, I think, for some bread and cheese, and here had the only surly service we were to experience. But it's been a long while--probably since I was about four or five months old, since I grew any for myself--that anyone with fewer teeth than I have has tried to pull attitude on me. It was interesting that he fulfilled both stereotypes, of rudeness and dentistry, at once.

On to the end of l'Île de la Cité and the Cathedral of Notre Dame, which seems not to have its own website but whom a tourist board introduces and someone at Bluffton College illustrates. The plaza on which the western facade opens lets you know this is a prime sight to see but it so didn't feel like a cheesy attraction, like the Most Photographed Barn in America in White Noise. It's merely just as impressive as you'd think. The sun was low in the west, casting its light under the clouds overhead.

I guess it is much more touristy than Westminster in that photography is permitted. I tried to take pictures of the whole shebang and also of details, but either the large scale fail to convey the grandeur and scope or the smaller are useless without context.

I need to find my grad school art history notes. I am disgusted with how little I remember of the iconography of sculpture. One saint on the left side of the left portal, le portail de la vierge, held his head in his hands so I figured it must be John the Baptist or professor Carl Hill from "Reanimator," but in Le Mans or somewhere we saw the same figure labled as someone else whom I now forget. I'm quite fond of representations of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as a man, lion, bull, and eagle. Another taint of medievalism. Maybe I just like beasts.

The tympana of the portals were meant to put the fear of God into an illiterate populace. But I couldn't piece together all the stories they told. The Last Judgment is easy, but the nuances escaped me. Sigh.

In the cathedral, as I had not in St. Paul's or in Westminster, I understood the effect of stained glass--for the light in which you worship to be mystical in its colors. We were too late for a tour, malheuresment, because the tremendous organ blocks the magnificent west rose window and only by touring up to the upper levels can you see it eye to eye. We walked slowly, gazing and contemplating the square towers on the west end, the rose windows, chapels, a statue of Jeanne d'Arc, a priest available to anyone of any faith or language, votive candles. We read memorials and I thought of A Tale of Two Cities and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the latter of which I haven't read. I suppose if I had might I know more about the layout. Or at least about the bells. Also we were too late to gain admission to the trove, which looked, from my glimpse down the passageway, sparkly and gold enough, considering how much didn't survive the Revolution.

Either here or later we would read in papers of suggestions for a memorial to 11 September, such as a second of silence for each death. This idea was countered in a letter to the editor pointing out that in contrast World War I gets only two minutes. I saw more evidence of the world wars in London and Paris than ever in the U.S.: England and France lost so many more men and it was there--even in England during the First thanks to Big Bertha. But I never knew until reading A Year Down Yonder how much has been lost in the U.S. for WWI at least. That book is set during the 1930s, and on 11 November, at 11:00 in the morning, everyone in the little town faces east, roughly toward France, and stands silently for two minutes. When did that custom stop here? According to the letter to the editor, Europe still observes that ritual of silence in memoriam. Anyway, in Notre-Dame as in every cathedral we had or would see, there was a chapel to the fallen of the wars.

Blinking in the bright daylight, we walked around the cathedral's north side, along the river, looking at gargoyles and the archbishop's manse and being impressed by the eastern end's flare of flying buttresses. On the eastern end of the island is a memorial to Holocaust victims and survivors, closed now as it was after 6:00. Nisou has been to either Auschwitz or Dachau and says she is glad to have gone but would never go again. The letters cut into the stone here look like the attenuated iron figures forming the gates of that camp. They're nearly cuneiform, harsh and bleak.

Anticlimatically leaving l'Île de la Cité at this point, we recrossed the Seine by the Pont de l'Archeveche and skedaddled up to the Avenue St. Germain in the rain as I tried to figure out where Shakespeare & Co. would be. We were near the correct métro stop and I had a street name and number, but my map wasn't detailed enough. We asked an officer--un gendarme, un flic? I suppose the latter is derogatory, like cop. I asked the officer: "Excusez-moi, monsieur, nous cherchons cet(te) addresse." This would be my one great French phrase, though I'm sure there's a better idiom. He pointed out Avenue St. Jacques, I think, and we headed thataway.

We passed a tempting little fish market right on the corner, from whom a neighboring restaurant bought its shellfish on demand. It smelled wonderfully salty and clean and seafood suddenly sounded exactly right for supper. Then we found ourselves at the Seine again, right across from the Cathedral. And there was Shakespeare & Co., which CLH said had lost some of its charm but was still a must-see, which we already knew. New and used books, Hemingway's hang-out. Of course we had to go. I found Peter Ackroyd's English Music, which is out of print and which I need to reread. I was delighted to see that when I bought it, the clerk stamped its inside cover with a logo of the store. I was sure RDC would be disappointed to leave without a book, but he couldn't decide on just what. Finally he found a book by (or about, I forget) Sylvia Beach.

I don't know why we passed by the seafood restaurant again. Budget, maybe. I did love all the little doorway- or alcove-sized shops, the patisseries et boulangeries et charcuteries et everything. We continued strolling in the Latin quarter. I ddin't have the Lonely Planet Paris with me but only a Michelin pocket guide that fit in my bag. It named a restaurant up the hill a bit as genuine and not too pricey so up the Boulevard St. Michel we trotted, passing the Panthéon. I didn't write a thing in my journal Thursday except the name of the hotel and Rue de Raspail in large clear letters for the taxi driver, so I don't remember what we ate except that it came with a side of a wonderful potato-and-cheese dish that was severely charred on the top. Umm, burned cheese. Good stuff. I could read enough of the menu to get along, and we entered and that was it for English. I remembered my "Bonjour, monsieur," the formal couresy Usans tend to skip, and the maître d'hotel--would a place so small and without rooms have a maître-d?--anyway, the host asked "Deux personnes?" which I understood, good for me, painfully obvious as that is, and we sat.

We hadn't ordered yet when a party of eight Japanese men came in. I could see we were at the only eight-top in the place, and I caught the host's eyes and pointed to myself and then to the deuce in the corner. He was very appreciative, all in gestures, and as we sat at our new table, two of the Japanese came over and bowed their thanks to us. (Oh, and in Trafalgar Square, RDC was bowed to by a Japanese couple whose picture he'd taken.) Have I mentioned the superfluosity of oral language to express basic sentiments? I loved that, every time it happened.

Ordering consisted of my orally butchering the words we pointed to. I was able to ensure that RDC could order seulement une verre, pas un botteil, du vin, although at about this time I wanted my pocket French-English dictionary which, come to find out, I must have left in London. Haitch had lent me Rick Steve's French, German, and Italian phrasebook. We had only just arrived when already I wanted a dictionary. Haitch has the vocabulary in her noggin but I needed a book, a dictionary. The phrasebook only translates your English meaning into the three other languages; it doesn't help you understand anyone else. This I decided was typical Usan egoism.

I wondered about walking home, but it was of course fine. I wondered for two reasons: my French instructor specifically warned against riding the métro after dark so I didn't know what the surface would be like either, and my bladder was full--the toilet in the restaurant was Turkish so I had been grateful for my Bladder o' Steel. (So despite us and the Japanese in what looked like a neighborhood place, I decided it wasn't a touristy restaurant. The French couple next to us wasn't from Paris either, but conversation was hobbled by my minimal French and their lack of English. I don't know where they were from.)

And so we were in Paris.