day2 - UFO-looking airport, awesome graffiti, whimsical ticket machines
The elevated highway that stretches out from the center of the cylinder-shaped, 70's-sci-fi-flavored Charles DeGaule airport is filled with pinky European cars swiftly changing lanes like clever insects. The efficiently small, but incredibly ugly Smart Cars are everywhere, but they do not stand out as one might think, for almost 90% of all the other cars are similar hatchbacks, only slightly larger than the Smart Cars. Partly due to the absolute ease with which we entered France (the immigration officer only glanced at our passports, and there wasn't even a single personnel at the custom), and partly due to the jet lag, the fact that we are in France does not come home to me. The gloomy grey sky without any sense of time, visible from the windows of the airport bus, further accentuates the surrealness of the situation. The bus dropped us at a station of RER train, which connects Paris suburbs to the center of the city, and is expected to take us to the city.
Having quickly found out that the automatic ticket machines do not necessarily like our foreign-issued credit cards, though one machine did accept Patrick's on a whim, we joined the crowd at a line in front of the man-powered ticket office. The ticket lady, who obviously was used to tourists murmuring some gibberish not even remotely reminiscent of the renowned beauty of French language, gave us the two over-priced tickets to the center of the city where our hotel for the first night is located. Tasting the bitterness of our first of the many linguistic defeats, we boarded on the train.
Under the grey, misty sky, the train flew through unexploited fields of odd green, leafless bushes of thin, smoky red branches, and breathtakingly elaborate and bold graffiti that throng on every space available---on the walls of houses and stores, inside of dimly lit tunnels, abandoned buses, train cars rusting on sidings. According to Patrick the walking encyclopedia, those graffiti date back to the 17th century when retainers of noble lords in rivalry boasted the lord of their side by leaving their marks in towns and fields. Ambiguous history aside, it was exciting to see the mysterious rises and falls of the quality of the rail side graffiti as the train proceeded to Paris. Counterintuitively, as the city approached, the overall quality of graffiti noticeably dropped. Does it mean that diligent and skilled street-artists venture into the further wilderness of the suburbs, whereas lazy ones satisfy themselves with the already cramped walls close to their urban homes? In any case, after having seen so many jauntily spray-painted walls and trains, spotlessly clean Chicago streets started to seem strange to me. True it is clean and feels safe, but doesn't it feel dead as well?The train silently pulled into the final tunnel before the Gare de Nord (North Station), with us on board, half dazzled by the plants we were so unfamiliar with (hence the oddness to our eyes of the green of the grass), all the assertive graffiti, and unfathomable French conversation being had in low voices around us, so hard to distinguish from the buzz and squeaks of the train.
Gare de Nord was a large station with TGVs, several lines of Metro, and the RER in which we arrived. Sniffing the tempting smell of buttery pastries and fresh espresso sold in stands, we set out for a quest to claim the tickets we had reserved before we left. After several conversations in broken English, which was far better than our horrible RosettaStone French consisting of only a few useless words and phrases such as "the horse jumps" "a boy under a ball" and "a girl in a white shirt and another in a polka-dot shirt," we found another of the whimsical automatic ticket machines. Of course it spat out my credit card in disgust, possibly because it didn't have the little metal chip that is a standard feature of European credit cards. We joined the line for the human ticket booth again. Judging from the perplexed faces of the French customers in front of the ticket machines and occasional curses (or something that sounded like one) drifting from where they are located, the automatic ticket machines seemed to be fairly hard to please even for the locals. Long lines for the man-operated ticket booths and almost neglected automatic ticket machines puzzled us at first, but now all that had fallen into place. We successfully claimed our tickets to Nice and Strasbourg from a partially English-speaking African-Parisian, and stepped out of the grand station, relieved. It was eleven o'clock local time, about two and a half hours after we arrived at the airport.
Having quickly found out that the automatic ticket machines do not necessarily like our foreign-issued credit cards, though one machine did accept Patrick's on a whim, we joined the crowd at a line in front of the man-powered ticket office. The ticket lady, who obviously was used to tourists murmuring some gibberish not even remotely reminiscent of the renowned beauty of French language, gave us the two over-priced tickets to the center of the city where our hotel for the first night is located. Tasting the bitterness of our first of the many linguistic defeats, we boarded on the train.
Under the grey, misty sky, the train flew through unexploited fields of odd green, leafless bushes of thin, smoky red branches, and breathtakingly elaborate and bold graffiti that throng on every space available---on the walls of houses and stores, inside of dimly lit tunnels, abandoned buses, train cars rusting on sidings. According to Patrick the walking encyclopedia, those graffiti date back to the 17th century when retainers of noble lords in rivalry boasted the lord of their side by leaving their marks in towns and fields. Ambiguous history aside, it was exciting to see the mysterious rises and falls of the quality of the rail side graffiti as the train proceeded to Paris. Counterintuitively, as the city approached, the overall quality of graffiti noticeably dropped. Does it mean that diligent and skilled street-artists venture into the further wilderness of the suburbs, whereas lazy ones satisfy themselves with the already cramped walls close to their urban homes? In any case, after having seen so many jauntily spray-painted walls and trains, spotlessly clean Chicago streets started to seem strange to me. True it is clean and feels safe, but doesn't it feel dead as well?The train silently pulled into the final tunnel before the Gare de Nord (North Station), with us on board, half dazzled by the plants we were so unfamiliar with (hence the oddness to our eyes of the green of the grass), all the assertive graffiti, and unfathomable French conversation being had in low voices around us, so hard to distinguish from the buzz and squeaks of the train.
Gare de Nord was a large station with TGVs, several lines of Metro, and the RER in which we arrived. Sniffing the tempting smell of buttery pastries and fresh espresso sold in stands, we set out for a quest to claim the tickets we had reserved before we left. After several conversations in broken English, which was far better than our horrible RosettaStone French consisting of only a few useless words and phrases such as "the horse jumps" "a boy under a ball" and "a girl in a white shirt and another in a polka-dot shirt," we found another of the whimsical automatic ticket machines. Of course it spat out my credit card in disgust, possibly because it didn't have the little metal chip that is a standard feature of European credit cards. We joined the line for the human ticket booth again. Judging from the perplexed faces of the French customers in front of the ticket machines and occasional curses (or something that sounded like one) drifting from where they are located, the automatic ticket machines seemed to be fairly hard to please even for the locals. Long lines for the man-operated ticket booths and almost neglected automatic ticket machines puzzled us at first, but now all that had fallen into place. We successfully claimed our tickets to Nice and Strasbourg from a partially English-speaking African-Parisian, and stepped out of the grand station, relieved. It was eleven o'clock local time, about two and a half hours after we arrived at the airport.
posted by uBookworm at 11:00
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