As someone who has spent relatively little time in France, Paris was quite an exciting prospect for me. Something about capital cities and stereotypical images just puts me in an excitable mindset. However, I offer people the very good advice of planning well in advance, with ideas less vague than my own, before attempting Paris. Consider this your first free lesson.
1. Driving
This was an experience that will haunt me for the rest of my life. Whoever designed the Paris road system: You are a fucking idiot. Spare me the "the city is constantly expanding and the roads and streets become ever more complex" excuse. It was designed by someone having a seizure while holding a pen.
This is not complimented by French drivers. White lines on a road are something of a decoration rather than a guide for driving in Paris. So at junctions with 3 theoretical lanes, the number of cars in each one goes something like 5, 3, 4, 1 , 12 and so on for about a km backwards. Moscow was better than this.
This is a real graphic of the Paris road system. If what I believe is true, then anything marked in black or white is inaccessible by vehicle.Once you've survived a junction, if you can make it more than 100 metres without having to make a detour because of a one-way street or 1000 mopeds piled 3 high across an intersection, you've done well for yourself. Our Sat Nav lady must have been crying on the inside. We found our hotel easily enough, but then couldn't find anywhere to park within 3km of it. Which leads me neatly to my next point.
2. Hotels
We were quite lucky in the respect that we were able to find a hotel online with relative ease, which isn't bad considering we booked it December 29th. It was fairly cheap too. We got a few glimpses of it, with sad eyes, from the car window as we slowly passed it by 400 times. And after 45 minutes, we found a car parking space.
At this point, we were so pissed off and tired that we decided to go for the first hotel we found; we had no idea even what direction our original hotel was. After seeing the first hotel we came across and the leopardskin-clad man-woman smoking outside, we voted to push on for the second. It looked like this. I think the star-rating system was a forgotten dream it had as a child.
That isn't bog roll in the toilet. Nor had anyone been to the toilet. Nobody knows what it is. The things on the floor are also dead bugs.
This picture isn't actually blurry. This is to try and show the questionable stains on the mirror. I call this my "screw Paris" face.
We didn't watch any telly for fear that whatever is growing on the wall and bedside thing had laid its spores in the remote.It was also in a bit of a shit part of Paris. I won't go as far as to say it was a Banlieue but it wasn't too far off. I'm also gutted in retrospect that I don't have a picture of the curtain for you, which was a sheet pinned to the wall.
3. People
I have no qualms in poking offence at the people here. I have met lots of French people. They can be lovely. Most of the ones we met in Paris were either needlessly grumpy or just plain weird. It's been a few years since I learnt French, and though I used to be quite good at it, my parlez-vous-ing has been a bit crap of late.
The guy at the hotel had no concept of "je ne parle pas Francais" as a meaning for "no speak the lingo, use more sign language please" so we struggled our way through that one somehow. And everyone else was either suppressing anger or, like I say, were just weird. One man stopped to stand next to us and smoke, telling us some story in French while we nodded and smiled and sidled away slowly.
4. The Metro
Now, the tube in any country is always a challenge for me, particularly on home soil as many of you have experienced. If the Underground was in instrument, I'd be crap at it despite years of practise.
This one was the worst yet. The French, it seems, have yet to discover the wonders of what we know, so second-naturedly, as a day travelcard. As in, a ticket which allows for a days worth of travelling without having to change. We didn't have the French version of an Oystercard, so this meant buying a new tube ticket for every journey we made, which wasn't exactly expensive, but after a days worth starts to strain the old wallet.
These cards are so limited per journey that you can't even get through the barriers at the other end. We had to wait in a little enclosure until someone came in from the other side, at which point we ran and quickly pushed past the barriers before they shut again.
If you look in the middle of the destinations in this photo (click to enlarge), you'll see where we took a brief detour to Russia.
I was also a big fan of this man, who has mastered the art of retracting his head into his body during sleep.
The last underground related thing I can think of was the guards we saw in one station. These weren't armed police, these were regular soldiers doing the rounds. I thought this was quite a good move on France's part, what with increased terror alerts of late, until I saw that none of their weapons contained any bullets. Nor were they carrying any. Nothing says security like a magazine-less rifle.
5. Sightseeing
The Eiffel Tower remained as elusive as it did last time I was here, so I decided to check out the Arc de Triomphe. It was certainly an arch. There was also some Triomphe to boot.
Those blips on the top are people. It is what I can only describe as a fuck-off arch. It is mahoosive. We didn't decide to go up the arch (is that even the right phrase? to go up the arch?) because it was getting late, and we were having stirrings of 'we don't wanna be in this country for new year' so we bailed out. Paris is ok, but my god, make sure you get it right.This is Charles de Gaulle with a seagull on his head.
At half 3, we brushed our teeth in an underground car park and hit the road for Amsterdam. France does have some highlights I guess, but no amount of half-arsed Parisian charm can hold a candle to the Netherlands.
