England Plus Paris: Part 0

It was April 9, 2002. I was at the international terminal of San Francisco airport, plenty early. I wanted to make the most of my time, and remembered something I'd heard. I looked at a map of the terminal, but didn't see what I was looking for.

I approached a Traveller's Aid desk. The nice volunteer behind the counter was explaining something about SAMTrans to a family of tourists who concentrated and nodded. Then they were done, and I asked my question:

"No More," intoned the Traveller's Aid volunteer. He looked sad. He missed that Peet's. He missed it with every fiber of his being. He was a junky with no source.

I could have said, "That's okay. I'm sure that there will be good coffee in Paris," but I didn't. He was already suffering plenty.

Be a Tourist in Your Own Home Town

Airport meal vouchers look easy to forge. But how much effort would you put towards stealing airport food?

When the gate agent announced that my flight would be delayed three hours, I took the offered $12 meal voucher and obtained banana pancakes at an airport restaurant.

I looked around the airport. There were Automatic External Defibrillators in cabinets in the walls. I tried to convince myself that this was fascinating. I looked at a phone directory posted next to a courtesy phone. There were entries for "Aviation Library & Museum" and "Miltary Command." I tried to convince myself that this was exciting. I looked at a panel of buttons behind an empty checkin counter. The buttons looked like they controlled a luggage conveyor belt. It looked like a home-built job; each button was a different color, a different shape. I tried to maintain my interest in the panel of buttons to no avail.

I looked at a couple of doors that were labelled "Special Systems", wondering what lay beyond. But I did not wonder enthusiastically. I thought, If I had some coffee, I would think I was enjoying this. But I didn't seek out coffee. That way lay madness.

Light Shaft in Greenland

I was sprawled across a couple of seats in the airplane, drowsing. Awoke with the dawn and looked out the window. We were flying over snow. As the sun rose, shadows emerged below; there were mountains there, their shadows emerging. It was gorgeous. Then we were over a crinkly coastline. I wasn't sure what fjords looked like; was I looking down at fjords? There was ice, ice on the surface of the sea. How beautiful, I thought. I thought, If our flight had been on time, it would have been dark when we got here.

Running Like a Well-Oiled Machine, Slipping Off The Tracks

I was pretty impressed by the airport when I first arrived. It had covered conveyor belts--that is, there were enclosed escalators that criss-crossed in a sort of courtyard. Maybe I had a hard time finding the way out of the baggage-claim area, but what did that matter? Maybe I was surprised that there was no-one at the customs booth; maybe someone hadn't heard about our late flight.

But then I tried to find my way to the airport shuttles and eventually gave up. And I had to use elevators instead of escalators to change floors, a strange thing in an airport.

Next, I tried to figure out the minimalist signs for the shuttle buses that whisked people to different parts of the airport. There seemed to be multiple bus routes, but no route marking on the bus. I wanted to go to the train station. I got on a bus, and tried getting off where everyone else did. It wasn't the train station, but it had better signage. Finally, I figured out how to get to the train station.

The train was easy. We rode through suburbs. The suburbs seemed to be full of tacky faux-stone houses. I'd seen houses like these back in the USA, and had always thought that they were tacky imitations of something European. I'd always assumed that back in Europe, I'd see houses like this, but not tacky.

I didn't yet know if there were quaint stone cottages in Europe, but that train ride taught me that they had no shortage of tacky imitations.

Soon we arrived at Gare Du Nord in Paris. I waited in line for a cab. Everyone was waiting in line politely.

The French people were waiting in line politely. I shook my head. Another stereotype shattered.

A Person Who Speaks Two Languages is "Bilingual"; A Person Who Speaks the Wrong Languages is "American"

The cabbie did not speak English, and seemed pretty confused by the map which showed my hotel's location. But he got there. The cabbie had terrible handwriting, and so when he wrote down the fee on some paper, I think he was asking for something like &@.70 Euro, but I read it as 70 Euro. I was sleepy enough to hand 70 over, but woke up in time to ask for most of it back: the basic ride price was only 10 Euro, and the luggage fee should be less than that. So we talked for a while, me pointing at the meter and at the money and using what little vocabulary I knew; and him encouraging me to leave.

So I stopped talking like a tourist who is sweet and polite and wants to be understood. I started talking like a big scary-looking guy who's getting irritated. And I got my change.

Welcome to the Hotel, Californian

Piaw had told me about his bad experiences trying to sleep in Paris: loud garbage trucks had woken him up each morning. I'm glad he told me that, because it made me appreciate the Hotel Castex. It was tucked away on a side street, and was quiet at night. I could hear my wristwatch ticking.

My room had no TV, but I would not have understood French TV. One of the desk clerks looked like an ironic Andrea Frome, but this was only disconcerting for the first couple of days. I'd read reports by people on the web, people sorry that the place was no longer owned by the same family who'd owned it since whenever, but I hadn't known it then.

A sign let me know that doing laundry in my room was forbidden by French law. I would do laundry in my room anyhow, furtively. I desperately did not want to be caught doing this: I did not want to be thrown out of the hotel; and I thought that the other prisoners in jail might not give me much respect when they learned the nature of my crime.

I checked in at the front desk, trying not to ask Andrea Frome what she'd done with her eyebrows and why she was speaking with that outrageous French accent. I ambled across a light well/courtyard to the narrow, low stair which led to my room. I turned on the hall light outside my room and figured out how to unlock the door before the light turned itself off. In my room, I ate a peanut-butter sandwich and collapsed into sleep.

It's Important to Have Goals

At a family gathering, I'd announced my intention to go to France; that I was going to Paris, but didn't know what I wanted to see there. My cousin Kim had been to Paris recently.

She'd been to a few places in Paris with some friends. Most of those places hadn't evoked the Paris that she'd expected. Montmartre had been the exception. She enjoyed hanging out with her friends in Montmartre. It had held the spirit of the city that she had been looking for.

So when I woke up before my first dawn in Paris and started sorting through my luggage in preparation for my first day, I had a goal: go see the Montmartre neighborhood.

Down These Clean Streets a Man Must Go

I was lost almost from the start. I had remembered a poor landmark from my taxi ride the day before. It had stood out in my memory: Indiana, a Tex-Mex restaurant. It stood out because it was American. It stood out because I don't associate the state of Indiana with Tex-Mex cuisine. It stood out because I associate France with the love of good food; good food being the opposite of the state of Indiana; or of Tex-Mex cuisine.

I don't think I'd ever been to Indiana. No doubt that was a terrible generalization for me to make. Nevertheless, it certainly caused me to notice that restaurant.

I'd thought, Why would there be a Tex-Mex restaurant in Paris?. I'd remembered that the restaurant was on the Western side of the Blvd de Magenta/ Blvd des Filles/ Blvd Beaumarchis, the Boulevard that would take me up north from the Bastille area to Montmartre.

If I'd known better, I would have thought, Why would there be a CHAIN of Tex-Mex restaurants in Paris? There was more than one of these abominations festering in Paris. If I'd known, I would not have used one as a landmark.

In Dave Barry's Dave Barry Does Japan he provides some useful Japanese phrases for travellers. One stuck in my mind: "Help! I am at the corner of two nameless streets!"

As I attempted to find myself, I considered the French variation: "Help! I am at the intersection of two streets which probably have names, but no signage!" Most Boulevards were unlabelled: after all, they were big landmarks. Side streets were usually labelled where they intersected a boulevard, but when minor streets intersected each other, often one or both went anonymous.

I muddled my way back on route by means of sun sightings, a magnetic compass, and a willingness to jaywalk.

Don't don't don't let's impart/This is the Montmartre

So there I was in the Montmartre. There was a hill with a big church on top. There were streets lined with boutiquish shops and cafes. It looked like a good place to loiter. I slowed down and started to think about which plaza or cafe would be ideal for my purposes.

As I slowed down to pay more attention, I realized that my plan had a fatal flaw: I do not speak French.

I had no friends in Paris. Reading would have felt dumb: I could do that back in San Francisco, and it would have been about the same.

That left eavesdropping. Who could I eavesdrop upon? People speaking French? I could not understand them. English-speaking tourists?

Once, over breakfast, I eavesdropped on some British tourists. I couldn't help it--two tables got into a conversation. They were talking about food, so you might think that I would be interested. Except they weren't really talking about food. They were comparing how much they'd spent for dinner. They were having a very British food conversation--they were trying to figure out which places offered good value. They said nothing about flavors, ingredients, nor techniques. Did I want to listen to what these people had to say? (No.)

I looked around wistfully, and then left. I reflected that my cousin Kim had been wise to come here with friends.

Read the French Manual

I couldn't understandd what this brass thing did. Looking at the stuff scribed on its face, I think it helped astronomers find some angle relating to celestial objects. But I couldn't tell what it did or how it did it.

The Musée des Arts et Méiers is a great place for a geek. There are many historical scientific instruments. There is plenty of beautifully polished brass. I suppose that many of the things that I looked at were of great interest. But I never figured out which things were of interest and which were not.

Uhm, something to do with cryptography?

I understand as much written French as the next non-French-speaker who has nevertheless struggled through gratuitous French-language snippets typically sprinkled through modern English belles lettres. I've had to figure out a lot of words from Latin roots and/or context. Some of those words have lodged in my brain.

But this museum was talking about sufficiently weird things such that I only understood the interpretive text when it was in English or when it discussed something that I already knew. E.g.,

It was exciting to figure out that they were talking about the rise of business communication devices. But I had learned nothing. Whenever I looked at a display which mystified me, the interpretive text was no help. As I struggled over the Écrire text, I remembered the Codetalkers of World War II, people who had out-encrypted the best devices of the day by speaking a language which their enemy could not understand.

Uhm, something else to do with cryptography?

If I'd understood French, this museum would probably have been a good place to learn about Jacquard's card readers.

Anyhow, I didn't learn much as I looked at the balance-systems nor the factory models nor the meter-sticks nor the Cray supercomputer nor the Napier's bones demonstration nor Focault's pendulum nor many other things. I should mention that some displays did have English interpretive text. I should mention that I've never seen any French interpretive text at any English-language museum.

I'm not saying that the curators of this museum or any other French museum did a sub-par job. Probably some of them did a great job. I'm just saying that I didn't learn anything.

Should I mention that they don't keep Foucault's pendulum together with the rest of their Foucault stuff; that you might think that you've missed it, though you haven't? Perhaps I should mention that. Because I was so grumpy from having "missed" it that when I found it, I didn't enjoy it.

I did have a good time overall, though. I saw some of Edouard Branly's coherers. That gave me a thrill.

One section of the museum concentrated on architecture and the technology of construction. It was full of sketching students. Perhaps they were architects in training. Or perhaps they were art students learning about building structure to improve their architectural-study-drawings in the same way they might study skeletal structure to improve their life-study drawings.

There was a display of old personal computers, including a Thomson by Dubois and an ORIC by Dubois. It occurred to me that I should have Paul Du Bois here to get a photo of him next to these devices, but that was not possible.

There was a life-sized model of one finger of the Statue of Liberty. No ransom note accompanied it.

What's the French for "Ingredients"?

By the time I got to the restaurant , they were out of the vegetarian lasagna (which they charmingly mispelled lasagnes). This was discouraging news: this was one of the few dishes on the menu whose name I understood; the only one of those that had looked flavorful. So I asked for the plat du jour, because figuring anything else out would have required about a half hour of the waitress' time.

I was a vegetarian, so picking something random off of the menu would normally be a good way to order something my stomach couldn't handle. But Entre Ciel Et Terre was a vegetarian restaurant. As much as possible, I stuck to vegetarian restaurants, mostly so that I could safely order things I didn't understand.

A lady at the next table sprayed her hands with some Lysol-like substance; much of it seemed to end up on me and my food. She spent more time playing with her mobile phone than she did talking with her table-mate. It was amazing that, despite the fact that we had no language in common, she was able to non-verbally convey the concept that she was a horrible person.

My lunch turned out to be some kind of split-pea mash with cous-cous. There was something next to it which was almost a curry. I was glad to have found a reasonably healthy lunch in France. It was not wildly interesting, but what do you expect from split-pea mash? Maybe if I'd been more clueful about what to order, I would have had a flavorful lunch. As it stood, I was glad to have something that wasn't smothered under cheeses and cream.

Departures: England Plus Paris: Part 0