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Impèrial Blatter-- an impenetrable French signDateline: Friday 27.8.1999 12:46 Location: TGV 976, Geneva -> Paris After yet another all-too-hasty departure (had I stayed an extra 15 min or so to eat lunch at CERN, I probably would've missed by train!) and devouring a huge slice of ciabatta to quell my rumbling stomach, I can once again look out the window and see that I am on a train. But not just any train! This is a TGV, train à grande vitesse, the original and still the fastest "bullet train" -- although, as I had suspected, this Genève-Lyon stretch is on ordinary track at ordinary speeds. The carriage is cramped, ugly and in bad shape with peeling paint and whatnot -- only the airplane-type overhead panel and smoothly purring engine let on that this isn't quite an ordinary train. I still think I prefer the Shinkansen...
My baggage now contains a "BonAqua" bottle brought from Estonia via Israel and Hungary, topped off with a Coke bottle cap from Rome and filled with Genevan tap water. Not bad.
Odd: a girl in a bikini is sitting opposite me. Yes, in the train, which is air-conditioned. I barely even blinked when the train from Bled to Ljubljana went past several nudist beaches (a popular pastime in all of ex-Yugoslavia), but it's quite a bit harder to ignore a pairs of tanned C-cups jiggling 50 cm in front of your face. Others in the vicinity seem to have a similar problem feigning gentlemanly disinterest...
TGV my ass, this thing is now 2 hours late (on what should have been a 3:30h trip). Way to go SNCF!
Not that I really minded: I kept myself busy by pondering over a friend's letter, jotting down notes for my eventual reply. Fate, predestination, free will, meme theory, zen koans... much more interesting than weather reports or the dog's latest tricks.
You know you've been traveling too long when all your gear starts to fall apart. My trusty 10-year-old LL Bean daypack is coming apart everywhere, as are my moneybelt, my pants and most worrisomely my rucksack, which now has a broken compartment and a number of dubious zippers. My combination lock got jammed a while ago, but fortunately I managed to pry it open again. Ah well, only a few more weeks to go...?
Dateline: Friday 27.8.1999 21:22 Location: YH d'Artagnan, Paris
Things had been going too well. Lady Luck decided to deal me a pretty bad hand tonight: first, Antoine cancels our meeting because he has to visit his grandparents (which he hadn't remembered when we talked on Wednesday). Second, Evelyn isn't answering, and still no word from E. either -- were those two missed calls yesterday from her...? So I trucked over to this rather dumpy youth hostel, ate a greasy but tasty and cheap couscous-and-chicken meal at the local Tunisian fast-food place ("Couscous-Pizza-Döner-Panini") and was just about to leave to see the Champs-Elysées at sunset -- when a final, literally crippling bout of gastrointestinal distress confined me to the hostel to stare at the sickly hospital green walls. <sigh>
Accommodation in London is so expensive that it makes no sense to go there without arranging a place to stay, so if I can't reach E. by tomorrow 9 AM, I'll stay in Paris for time being. Not entirely a distasteful prospect, quite the opposite in fact, but it does mean I'm virtually certain to miss Derrick May and Carl Cox's sets.
Get on. Get off.-- L'Opentour (a sightseeing bus) mottoDateline: Saturday 28.8.1999 10:40 Location: L'Arc de Triomphe, Av. des Champs-Elysées, Paris
And here I am on the Avenue of the Hallowed Fields, sitting below yet another megalomaniacal monument with 17 quadrillion other camera-toting tourists. I'm told that the worst tourist season is already over, I wonder how many hours long the lines to the Louvre/Eiffel Tower/etc are...
So far, Paris has pretty much matched my expectations: a huge French city full of decaying monuments and buildings, glazed over with a veneer of mostly unsuccessful French attempts at high-tech. The city is greener than I would've thought, though, and the metro system is incredibly easy to use (at least if you know French!). One ticket goes everywhere, line & area maps in stations, station maps in the trains themselves -- even the buses are easy to use. Now if I could just find a free, portable city map...
I'd always had a mental image of the Champs-Elysées as a quaint little pedestrian street filled with tiny cafés and expensive boutiques, like the streets of Vienna's center, but no: it's a tree-lined, wide, busy, multi-lane thoroughfare... albeit one filled with, yes, tiny cafés and expensive boutiques. The first thought that struck me when crawling out of the underground was: "Hot damn! This looks a lot like Tokyo's Aoyama-doori!" -- which, as I recalled seconds later, had indeed been called the Champs-Elysées of Tokyo.
I just ate a 5 F hamburger at the Champs-Elysées McDonalds. Complete with extra ketchup. Vive la France!
A hot summer sun. Endless green parks. Lovers gamboling about on the riverside. Squirrel skulls crunching underfoot on paths of gravel. Lots of sculptures of naked women, both fanciful and less so. (Do note the beer can slot in the head of the modern variant shown on the left.)
L'Arc de Triomphe - check.
Champs-Elysées - check.
Les Tuileries - check.
La Louvre - check. (Not the inside though, that's tomorrow's program.)
Nôtre-Dame - check. (I liked Budapest's Parliament better.)
A stuffed baguette - check.
Musée Rodin - pass. (I already saw all the originals in Tokyo.)
Les Invalides - check.
La Tour Eiffel - up next.
My feet - killing me...
Paris is one of those places where it's very easy to spend staggering amounts of money. How about one appetizer in the Eiffel Tower's "Jules Verne" à 420 F? A cabaret show at Moulin Rouge à 1130 F? A nice leather jacket for 6300 F?
Me, I decided to splurge 39 F on a 3-course meal at a Chinese fast-food joint near the hostel. Good stuff, even if the sweet & sour pork was rather East European in texture. But hey, they had chopsticks and a mug of jasmine tea was included, so no complaints. Just drinking this stuff brings back memories of... discussing esoteric philosophy with a dog in my lap? I'll have to go to China someday.
Fuck. I've exhausted my options: Evelyn ain't answering, E. ain't calling, directory assistance can't/won't look up her number by name and address only, and no e-mail waiting for me either.
(Next door, a girl is sobbing desperately.)
I really don't know what to do now, I even briefly considered hot-footing back to Finland for the 1st of September. (Doable, yes. Easy, no.) I'll take the night train to Amsterdam and hope for a call, but I'm starting to feel more and more like I need to just get out to a Norwegian mountaintop or something for my birthday. ('E's pining for the fjords!) Tomorrow's task: finding Lonely Planet's Scandinavian Europe and the Baltics somewhere, preferably in English. (BTW, Mediterranean Europe, which I lugged along for Phase JO, includes France. Guess how many times I've missed it so far? I can't believe I did my first Inter-Rail with only the Slovenia guide...)
[insert intensive timetable consultation here]
Nope -- if I want to get to my fjords in time, I'll have to forget Amsterdam and take the 16:55 Thalys to Köln, followed by a night train to Copenhagen. A day there -- always a pleasant prospect! -- and then another couchette to Oslo, which will arrive in the morning of the 31st, leaving enough time to get me somewhere intelligent by 1.9. (And plenty of time before my return on either 6.9. or 9.9.)
Evoluons ensemble!-- yet more bizarre French slogansDateline: Sunday 29.8.1999 12:50 Location: Musée du Louvre, Paris
Ay ay ay, it's yet another one of those certifiably ludicrously sized museums: it just took me one hour to make a rapid circuit of one-quarter of one floor of the museum, which means it would take another 15 hours to run through the rest. On Sundays full day tickets are only 26 F, but oddly enough I'm not the only one who has noticed this -- all the "famous" places are packed and I haven't even tackled The PaintingTM, aka the Mona Lisa, yet.
The museum is, however, unquestionably one of the greatest in the world: beautiful art, beautiful setting, beautiful presentation. An unusual trio. But, the French being French, everything is labeled only in French, so you'd need to rent an audio guide to make heads or tails of the explanations... yet another use for my 9 years of studies.
An Italian kid kneeled down next to a 2000-year-old sarcophagus and did a boxing-style count on it, slapping on the marble: "5, 4, 3, 2, 1! He's dead!" Then he ran to the next room and paused above an air conditioning vent. "Aaah..."
Dateline: Sunday 22.8.1999 19:56 Location: Garé du Nord, Paris 
Another day, another train station. By a bizarre stroke of luck, while on my way to the Louvre I stumbled into the Virgin Megastore, probably the only place in Paris open on a Sunday that stocks Lonely Planet -- including a single copy of Scandinavian Europe at an almost reasonable 152 F. Needless to say, I snapped it up, and my birthday destination is the Bergen region: tomorrow I'll pick an exact spot.
Paris Nord is the most airporty train station I've been to. Most services are long-distance and international, since both Eurostar (to London) and Thalys (to Brussels/Köln) depart here), and so is the backpacker-y clientele. Due to the bomb scares a few years back the left-luggage claim is controlled with a security check, the fancy lockers within are falling apart and the overworked maintainer had to bail my luggage/my money out twice.
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