inulro | Random Paris Stuff

To start with: Eurostar. yay! way cool. It took longer to get from home to London Waterloo than it did to get to there from Paris. I had some issues with the tunnel on the way out - I had a cold, and thus much ear popping, but was fine on the way back. No claustrophobia at all. I was reading good books both ways, mind. Jason & I want to go back to the Languedoc but not to drive all the way again - the plan now is to do Eurostar to Paris & then get a TGV to Toulouse, because it takes 5 hours (!!! - look at an atlas if you don't know why that's exciting), and rent a car once we're there. No dealing with the nasty health effects that boat & plane seem to have on me.

Parisians are no longer as rude as they were 15 years ago. Or I've spent too much time in London in the interim. This means they now help you out in English when your French fails, which isn't what I need. So I'm wondering where the hell one goes these days to really have to use French or else. I suspect Quebec.

Paris is much cleaner than it was 15 years ago. That's right folks, even Paris is cleaner than England.

The only thing that's cheap is the Metro. Having said that, the only thing that I found extortionately expensive was hotels. Everything else was on a par with London. (For all I know, London hotels are that expensive too).

I spent my evenings resting my feet in my hotel room & watched too much bad French TV. When I say bad, I mean it. They have "Wife Swap", but it's called "Mum Swap" & seems to be pitched at about the same level. There's a channel that seems to show nothing but game shows. I caught a couple episodes of Stargate SG-1, in which, aside from all the voices being wrong (though not as comically so as in Smallville), I noticed that they inserted lots of cheesy music (not the theme tune) throughout the programme which I'm pretty sure don't occur in the original. And I've seen every episode more times than I should admit.

The French appear to be using a variety of Marc Bolan tunes to sell private health insurance; "Just Like Honey" to advertise the electricity board, and most surreal of all, the new Rammstein album is being heavily plugged on prime time TV.

There's ads in every Metro station for the new gay cable TV channel, "Pink". Yeah, I thought "pink" translated as "rose", but apparently not in the context of gay lifestyle stuff. All the guidebooks say that gay men are more visible than lesbians, and if these posters were anything to go by, they certainly are. It was day 3 before I saw the lesbian version of the poster. I was also there at the same time as a gay lifestyle expo, which might have been interesting, but I didn't think to look at the dates until my last day.

I needn't have worried about going alone - it's perfectly acceptable for both men & women in Paris to go to a cafe alone & open up a book or magazine & nobody bats an eyelid.