Ed's Sandbox

Ed's Completely Practical Guide Understanding France

Everyone asks, was France really difference? Is Paris not just New York with the Eiffel Tower instead of the Empire State building?

These are not dumb questions in this day and age. Globalization of the economy and culture makes every place that much more similar to every other place. That being said, I was pleasantly surprised by the way I felt in Paris. I actually felt like I was somewhere different. I had a completely fresh view. Granted, my state of mind may have had something to do with not having worry about bugs and deadlines and doing the build for a whole week. To have literally nothing to do except decide whether I wanted to stroll along the Seine, or sit in Champs De Mars can do wonders to one's mental balance.

In fact, I was more peaceful and content in Paris than I remember being for a long time. In Amsterdam we were just crazy, running around in circles with addicts and whores and tourists, and in Mexico we laid on the beach all day with Pina Colatas, surrounded by topless women of various age and degree of attractiveness. Not that I minded any of that, but there was something about strolling around and noticing all the details of Paris, about riding the metro, about passing out in the backyard of the great sculptor Rodin, that made this a truly life changing type of trip.

I know, I know, You want to hear about Paris. You don’t really care about my 7 day trance or about my fresh new perspective on life, which has faded in the 3 weeks since I’ve been back. Ok!

There are a few key things to understand in Paris, after which everything else just comes together on its own. They are: transportation, food, and (related) customer service. Actually these are just random 3 things I am going to write about before I get completely bored and start playing Snood.

Getting Around
Paris is tiny. I think it's possible to walk the circumference of the city and call it a nice day's walk. No matter how far from the center your hotel looks on the map (as long as it's in one of the arrondissements) you're no more than a half-hour (maybe 45 minutes if you're slow) walk from the Eiffel Tower, Arc De Triumph, Champs-Élysées, etc.

Unfortunately, nobody except me walks around like that. Luckily for you, Paris has a very good public transport system, which consists of the Metro, Buses, and PER trains. There's also some tourist boat thing called the Bat-o-bus but I've never seen it.

I never took the bus, and all I know about the bus is it takes metro tickets.

Riding the metro is a quintessential Parisian experience, and even if you can somehow avoid it, you shouldn't. It's not always pleasant or comfortable, but one thing is for sure: it's different from riding the NYC subways.

You will find websites saying that Paris has 14 metro lines. This is a lie, as there are many more. Some of them just happen to overlap in the center of the city and therefore share the line number. If you've ever taken the A train to Queens, you'd know there's A to Leffers Blvd and there's A to Far Rockaway***. Similarly, in Paris, it's usually not enough to know that you need the 13 line, you need to decide if it's the 13 to Gabriel Peri - Asnieres - Gennevilliers, the 13 to Saint Denis - Basilique, or the 13 to Chatillon Montrouge.

*** I always wondered where they got the idiotic idea of using the same designation for trains going to completely different places. Apparently, from the Paris metro! It's particularly idiotic in case of the A train because out of towners take it to JFK. Is it really fair to force foreign, confused, unfomfortable people to figure out if they ned the A train or the other A train to get to their flight? Why is this needed?

Before you get on the paris Metro, one of the following must happen:

• You have purchased a ticket or a weekly/monthly pass, and passed it through the turnstile machine


• You have jumped the turnstile


• You pressed behind someone you know and walked throug the turnstile on their ticket


• You pressed behind someone you DON'T know and walked through the turnstile on their ticket

While most riders do have tickets, I've witnessed the other 3 situations numerously. This happens right in front of other riders and Metro employees. No one says or does anything because the French don't give a crap about what other people do... or to put it the way the guidebook did... they are very dignified introspective people.

Even as a tourist without any French besides Je ne comprends pas to explain myself in case of apprehension, I felt comfortable jumping the turnstilele. Yes, I had to jump a Paris Metro turnstile, because my Carte Orange was not working and the gent manning the Metro station was too dignified and introspective to give a shit about it. No trip to Paris is complete if you haven't hopped over the turnstile. You simply must do it.

While the above example might make you think the Metro is a place of anarchy, there are actually quite a few unspoken rules that govern your behavior there.

Like most things truly French, the Metro etiquette is subtle enough to get completely overlooked by a tourist who does not suspect its existance. The signs prohibiting the use of strap-ons in times of affluence may seem humorous but not following these directions is a grande faux pas, which will get you annoyed stares (normally, it's considered rude to look at fellow riders) These funky signs actually state that the folding seats near the train car doors (strapontis) are only to be used when the train is not crowded. I figured that judging a car to be sufficiently empty for the use of strapontis is a skill that one picks up by being Parisian for years, so I took it safe and avoided using these seats unless someone else was using one.

You're supposed to be quiet on the train. If you're riding with a pal, the polite thing to do is to hold your conversation until you're out of the metro. Really! Of course, as in New York, there are people (usually teens, minorities, or drunks) who ignore this little rule. In their absence, one can really marvel how long the train car stays silent in the void of conversation.

Then, there's sort of random shit that happens:

One particularly unpleasant episode stands out from the 13 Chatillon-Montrouge train. I was sitting in the strapontis. Across the aisle sat a rather dignified young Parisienne, doing the eyes-down-and-silent thing that so becomes a civilized transit rider. Obviously a very nice girl. At Saint Lazare, a garish Algerian duo boarded the train. One dashed for a seat inside, while the other hung on to the pole near the doors. The stander clearly had good taste in women, for our dignified Parisienne caught his attention. For the rest of his ride to La Fourche, he stared down at with this a look of completely insane adoration. Not sure how much it bothered her as she showed zero emotion, but had this been in New York, she would have been quite creeped out. When the train arrived at La Fourche, the Algerian shouted to his friend that they had to disembark. Then he looked down at the girl and... slapped her face!! Et vous, beau?*** .. slap again .. Voulez-vous obtenir d'ici aussi?*

***That's probably not what he said. That's what I understood him to say, and then I had freetranslation.com put it back into French for effect.


The girl's facial expression did not change. They left, and she got off the train at Bronchant, the same stop as I. She did not seem traumatized or even slightly bothered by being slapped on the train by a swarthy stranger. She may have been stone-faced by nature, or maybe such things happen often enough in Paris that women don't get bothered by it anymore than women in New York get bothered by being "hollered" at. If this had been New York, the girl would have screamed, the other passengers would have held the guy until the police arrived to arrest him for assault. And yet in Paris, no one batted an eye. This was one of the few things that I saw in Paris that made me think "I rather prefer the American attitude on this"

Sigh, anyway. Besides the metro, there are PER trains, which go to the suburbs, but can be taken within city limits for the same fare as the Metro.

Think of PER as suburban commuter trains as the LIRR or Metro North of Paris. Imagine having to go to Jamaica, Queens from Midtown and taking the LIRR from Penn Station instead of the E train, for the same fare. That's what PER is like. While the Metro lines are numbered, the PER trains are identified by letters. Just like the Metro, the fact that a train has the right letter doesn't mean it will take you where you need to go. To make it a little easier to remember, trains have cute 4 letter names written in lights on their fronts. The names are associated with whether the train is local or express and where it goes. For example the C local to Argenteuil may be called NORA, while the express to the same destination may be called VICK. Etc.

I found the PER a little more pleasant than the metro, mainly because it was less crowded and the stop was as close as the Porte De Clichy stop on the 13 line. Once, a colorful group of teenagers, rolling their nuts off on Ecstasy or god knows what else, boarded my car. Many people made a dash for the other level (PER trains are double-decker) The kids were somewhat amusing as they blew whistles every time the train stopped (they were probably nostalgic for the old railroad days... what's French for All Aboard?). I didn't mind them, but I thought that they stood out much more in this land of culture of form, than they would have in the States.

Anyway, the transport in Paris is quite intuitive, but it shuts down at about 12:30 and doesn't start again 'till 5:30 am. The taxis are more difficult to grab than they are in New York, and if you call a taxi from the hotel, the bastards turn on the meter when you call, not when you get picked up. So you may owe 5-10 euro before you ever get in.

Eating
Food in Paris is nothing short of spectacular, but you must approach your dining experience with an open mind and embrace it for being different. There are two key elements involved in understanding the dining experience:

• It will take a long time, and you will not be served very well.


• You cannot "have it your way"

Part of the beauty of Paris is its lack of the "time is money" attitude. Nobody hurries. No one is pushing the limits of their sanity in the name of customer service. If you were a waiter, you'd appreciate not having to dance circles around the customers. As the customer, you are just used to not being served with the greatest of care. Francophiles get defensive about this point, as if it puts France down. It doesn't, but you must agree that it's different from the Customer is King mentality we have here.

Since time is not money, you will probably not get waited on immediately. In fact you will wait. You will wait for the menu to arrive. You will wait for the order to get taken. You will wait and wait and wait for the food to get delivered. I once spent about an hour and a half waiting for a salad. The waitress that took the order went off duty sometime after, and it wasn't until the next waiter started that my food arrived. You're supposed to sit and smoke your cigarette and enjoy the view and conversation with your friends. The food will come when it will come.

And oh yes, everyone smokes. They smoke in the airport, they smoke in the train stations and sometimes on the train. They smoke in the restaurants and cafés. They smoke when they're sitting in the park with their infants. If you simply can't tolerate smoke, even in the name of cultural exploration, then Paris is simply not for you.

Anyway, back to the dining. In America we're used to the word restaurant refering to any place that will give you something to eat. Burger King is a restaurant. In France, a restaurant is a place where you must eat a 3 course meal, which can be either lunch (from noon to 2:30 or so) or dinner (from 5:30 to 7:30 or so). You cannot go into a restaurant at any other time. It will be closed. You also cannot go into a restaurant and have something small. You can go to cafés and bistros and brasseries, and salon de thes at those times to have a sandwich or salad to hold you over. You can only enter a proper restaurant at the proper time of the day to have a proper meal.

There's no need to tip in Paris, but you can if the service was good. Any service which didn't seem to you completely horrendous by American standards, is worthy of a tip. How much, is up to you. But you're not obligated.

Customer Service
As hinted by the previous discussion, this section should really be left, meaningfully, blank. The French are not on the "tip" system, so the serveur or whoever you're interacting with has zero reason to serve you well or even give a shit about your existance. This is wonderful for those in the service industry: why should you have to pretend to care when you don't care? But being on the customer side after living in the US for 12 years, it's a bit shocking.

I already told you that I had to jump a turnstile because the Metro attendant wasn't interested in my Cart Orange not being accepted by the turnstile. I also mentioned waiting more than an hour and a half for salad. So I'll finish off this post with two more rather ridiculous but typical examples:

One night we climbed up to Montmartre, and while there descided to pick up some art prints. The store had sign advertising 1 print for (I am making up the numbers) 1 Euro, and 5 prints for 4 Euro. Anyone can do the math and realize that when you buy 5 prints, you pay less per-print than when you're buying 1 to 4 prints. Makes perfect sense: they want to encourage you to spend more money and buy more stuff. Now, someone living in a customer-oriented society would expect to pay less per print if buying 10. After all, if I get a deal for buying 5, shouldn't I get a better deal for buying 10? Ok, so maybe that's a somewhat shaky assumption, maybe the price per unit will remain constant after you buy 5. But, what if you want to buy 11? Will he charge 4 Euro for the first 5, 4 euro for the second 5, and a whole euro for the 11th print? Yes! He will! He will not listen to your very reasonable objection that it doesn't make sense to pay a higher rate per unit when buying 11 than when buying 5, but he will simply shrug. That's just how it is. It's Paris, you can't have it your way.

I think this is how the French got a reputation for being rude. They're not, they're just completely indifferent to going out of their way to accomodate you on things which, due to being American, you except to be accomodated on.

Here's another one. We went on the bus/Seine/Eiffel Tower/bus tour. After getting off the boat, we were instructed to be back at the bus at 5:30. The line for the tower lift was so long that at 5:30, the group was only getting into it and going up. The tour gide was right there and knew what time we went up. We spent maybe 5 minutes up there and came down. The bus was, of course, gone. In the US, the tour company would not leave the entire group behind just because the schedule says 5:30. But in Paris, it's simply not the bus driver's problem that some other events (i.e. long lines at the lift) made you miss your time. His job is to drive off at 5:30 and that's what he did.

Personally I found all this hillarious, but lots of people were steamed.

Anyway, I hope this gives you a little bit of insight into the Parisian mind. Really, it's somewhat surprising that in this day and age, people can have such different notions of value of time, proper behavior, and level of service. But it's good. If the world was the same all over, why would you travel?