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We woke up somewhere around Dijon, and pushed up the window to watch the sunflower fields go by. Southeastern France was very pretty, with neat, checkered fields and frequent sunbursts of flowers. Gradually, we approached the Paris metropolitan area, although it seemed that, at the rate the train was slowing down, there ought to be more buildings around, since we had heard Paris had something like 3 million people.
Our train station, Paris Bercy, turned out to be the very southernmost train station in all of Paris - several miles from the city center. After getting over the shock of seeing everything in French (again), we managed to negotiate two tickets (deux billet, si vouz plais, or something like that) onto the Metro.
Hari, who had been here before, looked around the Metro station and said, "I don't remember it being this nice." It was amazing. The floors were clean. There was no graffiti. The trains traveled through big, clear, glass tubes, and the doors lined up and opened automatically, one set on the train and one set on the tube. The trains themselves were clean and quiet. Hari looked stunned.
We took that line two stops, and got off to transfer to our line. We went up a few flights of escalators, where the atmosphere gradually got darker, hotter and smellier, until we found ourselves at the other train line. It turned out the nice trains only serve southern Paris, where no one ever goes. The rest is served by hot, crowded, dirty trains.
We rode one of those to the Gare Lazare, the closest train station to our hotel. Then we walked. It was hot and humid - 80 degrees with 80 percent humidity. The smog hung in thick brown clouds around the city, where it stayed for the rest of our trip.
There was no point in showering, because we couldn't dry off. Water left sitting did not evaporate, which only partially explained the mold in our hotel bathroom.
About the Hotel Les Jardines de Paris - Saint Lazare:
We arrived around noon, tired, hot, sweaty, and hoping to take a quick shower and then go see the end of the Tour de France, which we expected to be rushing up the Champs de Elysees in an hour or two.
The hotel clerk, who seemed nice enough, was helping someone else, so we waited about 15 minutes in their inferno of a lobby. Finally, he helped us, sort of. He couldn't find our reservation (looking under "Eric," not "Simons," even though we said "Simons" first). He asked for our confirmation number (we hadn't received one). When he did find it ("Simons"), he didn't know which room we had. In fact, he hadn't assigned us a room at all. He asked the cleaning lady which rooms were clean, but she didn't know. He finally picked one, gave us a key, and sent us off.
It turned out to be the wrong key. He took out another one and led us off himself, to a room with two twin beds. Before he would let us sit down, he decided we would prefer a double room. He then made us wait at the front desk while he took one key, went up the elevator and came down five minutes later cursing the cleaning lady.
"I cannot work with her," he said. "She has just come here. She does not speak French. Either I am crazy, or she is crazy. And I think I am not crazy." At this point, no one cared whether he was crazy or not. We just wanted a room.
He took another key, did something at the computer, and whisked Hari's luggage off to some upstairs room.
He came downstairs a few minutes later and insisted we follow him, and took us to a room for which he had not brought the correct key. He let us in with a master, which he had not remembered to bring before, then disappeared, instructing us to come find him later to get the key. The room was small. It had not been vacuumed and the walls were dirty. The shower was moldy and the shower curtain smelled of mildew. We hung it out the window, which they noticed two days later and hung up in the shower again, without comment. We promptly removed it.
The Tour de France was supposed to end somewhere between two and four, and we walked over around two. People were lined up along the Champs de Elysees, but only about one person thick, so there was still some space. We wandered up for a while toward the Arc de Triomphe before settling down to watch from a spot that was not in the shade.
The caravan arrived around 2:30. The caravan is like advertisements on television during the Super Bowl. It was an hour of glorious commercialism, taking advantage of a relatively captive audience, in which each sponsor tried to outdo the other with fancy cars, floats, stunts, gimmicks and flashy colors. Amazingly, they went around twice -- and it was agonizing to see the beginning come by again and know they were circling around and the whole half-hour procession was repeating. There were ads for bike things (water, parts) and non-bike things (coke, coffee, cheese, the French police, France telecom, Disneyland) and official sponsors (credit unions, banks and steroid manufacturers).
The standard format was four cars, each brightly painted, with a bright and cheerful model in back to wave at the crowd and dance jerkily to whatever music the car was playing. It's hard to dance while sitting on the back of a car. We stood in the sun for an hour melting and wishing the models would fall out and stick to the street.
Around 4:00 the first cars from the actual race came in, including a car with Lance Armstrong's mother and a big Texas flag. We were right in front of the sprint sign, so we got to see the USPS team ride by in a line out front before everyone else blew them away in the sprint. The next few laps were fairly blurry. A few cars would go by, there would be clapping and then a "thwap-thwap-thwap" of bike tires on cobblestones, and then it would be quiet until they came back the other way on the other side of the street. They did many laps this way, and Eric insisted we stay until the end, although he didn't know when that was. When it appeared they wouldn't ride by any longer, we left and got lunch, and then went back to the hotel, where we finally got to shower, which didn't seem to help anything much.
After a brief trip through a department store, we went to the Louvre, where our magnificently handy museum pass allowed us to walk straight in, ignoring the huddled masses yearning to buy tickets. We bought the museum pass, which covered the Louvre, the d'Orsay and the Rodin museums, at a metro station. It allowed us to flash the pass at the guards and walk in anywhere, saving us hours in line. There was no line at all in the metro station, because no one ever thinks of buying art tickets in a place that smells like rats.
The Louvre was nice. We saw part of the Parthenon frieze, the Venus de Milo, Winged Victory, the Mona Lisa and Hammurabai's Code, the first set of written laws, which has, clearly inscribed in ancient Babylonian: "No flash photos."
Someday, someone in the Louvre will go nuts, vigilante-style, and start chopping people's hands off for taking pictures. We only hope that day is soon.
For lunch, we chose to go to the Hard Rock Café, where they greeted us in English, gave us English menus and brought complimentary water. Eric ordered a bacon cheeseburger. In the gift shop, the hosts, who had summer jobs there to work on their French (mostly Canadians, it seemed), asked Hari where she was from in several different languages, beginning in Portuguese. They said they thought we were Brazilian. In general, people were not rude to us, maybe because we didn't look American. We did discover, however, that when someone asked where we were from, we got a much better response if we said "California" than if we said "United States." Either people in Europe have forgotten that California is still part of the U.S., or they just associated everyone in the U.S. with East-Coast snobs and everyone in California with mellow surfer dudes.
After lunch, we tried to see the city in the smog. We walked into a mass in Notre Dame, and promptly walked out, and took a greenhouse-like boat to the Eiffel Tower, which had a line roughly to Bordeaux. We walked over and watched the sun disappear into the smog from the Arc de Triomphe, which had more stairs but was less crowded than the tower. Still hot, though.
After a morning of administrative chores, which usually involved sitting around in train stations (the Gare St. Lazare; train reservations and hotel reservations), but this time was also spent learning to use French phone cards (it turns out you have to use them at a certain type of phone), we got to the Orsay. Once again, thanks to our pass, we skipped gloriously past an hour-long line that wrapped all the way around the building, although we did get in and then wait in line for the bathroom for half an hour.
The art was cool.
We went next to the Rodin Museum, a short walk from the Orsay, where we walked around in Rodin's stifling ex-mansion. A thunderstorm was moving in, kicking the temperature outside down to an almost bearable level, but it had forgotten to tell the inside of the house that it was cooling off now, with the result that the inside was so warm we didn't feel like lingering.
The neatest stuff was outside anyway: the Thinker and the Gates of Hell.
We found an Internet place, but once again ran up against the preposterous French keyboard, on which we STILL have not found the damned "m." (Maybe the French do not use the "m." Maybe the French are morons).
The only train out of Paris was at 7 in the morning, all the way across town. We made sure we were on it.
Eric Speaks Out About French Department Stores
There is something about France that just drew us to department stores. Maybe it was the snooty clerks. Maybe it was the entire floor of perfumes that looked like a COSTCO warehouse, but smelled like a flower slaughterhouse. Whatever, we ended up in Printemps, THE Paris department store, first thing in the morning. We were looking, officially, for hairpins for a friend of Hari's. We walked first into the men's building, but this did not occur to us until we had taken the escalator up all five floors just to check.
I asked a guard where the women's building was ("Oo ay ... uh ... pour ... uh ... dammes?), and he pointed us to the women's building across the street, where they pointed us to the "Maison" building, which is where we found the perfume warehouse. I wanted to give up, but Hari, undaunted, carried me along and got me up two floors on the escalator, where they didn't have perfume anymore, but did have a lot of mattresses. They told us to go downstairs and navigate the perfume sea to the far end, which either ended in the hairpins section or a big waterfall marking the edge of the earth, no one was quite sure. Like Columbus, though, we sailed and found the hairpins, although we weren't sure they were the right kind, so we tried to give infectious diseases to the employees and promised to come back the next day.
