Never any end to Paris
On my way back from Croatia I stopped in Paris for a couple of days, where I haven't visited since 2019. I made the mistake of opting out of their municipal cycling system and using the mėtro to get around instead, and boy has the thing complexified since I last used it. As has the CDG airport. Or am I getting too old for the multiple lettered terminals and airport navettes and interrupted RER lines of a long weekend.
Why on earth would I have said no to the bicycle, the best mode of transport for Paris? Well I did stay in Bercy, the south-east edge of the city, and expected that metro-ing would be more efficient. Tickets are gone, as in a lot of public transit systems of the developed world, but the credit card tap readers are not there yet, so a special transit card needs to be obtained, and there are more than one type, depending on zones. This time I’ve had more conversations with transit staff around the city than I would have strictly wished. As I was about to get to the street level at Muette, the far west stop to which I travelled in order to meet a relative, I spotted that the RATP staffer inside the renseignements office used a simultaneous translation tablet to handle the unilingual anglophones. An elderly couple first, then a younger, mixed race couple talked to the tablet and then stared at it waiting to receive the written translation of what the mėtro employee said in response. The staffer was patient and never lost it, taking as much time as necessary with repeated questions as if it wasn’t his umpteenth person that day without a word of French. Madame, vous n'êtes pas la seule, mumbled a lady behind me in the queue, meaning she’s taking too much time, to which her husband demurred, Ah, c’est bien compliqué.
Sorry about this very Toronto intro, we are transit obsessed, it’s our neurosis. Not by choice.
Paris was as Paris always is, a delight. Good, unpretentious bistros and cafes at every turn, with characterful servers. Fresh baked goods purchasable at all hours (fresh baguette at 22h30 at a modest sandwicherie when everything else in Bercy is closed, bebe). Lots of mediocre to bad hotels that will however cost a Canadian more than $200 per night. (The UK-based soeur cadette, who often travels through Paris on her way to Switzerland and can I suspect afford the Ritz, keeps testing these mid- to low-range establishments for suitability, proximity to Gare de Lyon, etc but couldn’t really recommend any, as none deserved a repeat visit. We all have our eccentric hobbies.) The city’s bad hotels made a cameo in my second book too, a slim, mad novella that was Paris-bred. They all look terrific on the outside, in their Haussmannian, tall-double-windows garb.
There wasn’t much music-wise of interest while I was there. La Philharmonie offered multiple nights of the Laurent Pelly-staged Gypsy with Natalie Dessay in the title role which just sounded nuts for so many reasons. Having checked the reviews, I wasn’t really into seeing Warlikowski’s Don Carlos at the opera either. I lucked out with the Centre Pompidou, however, which offered a retrospective of Suzanne Valadon’s work.