Traveller's tales from Paris. Dinner chez Dumdad involved a trek to the outer reaches of the capital. The real test, as explained in my East/West column in The National, Abu Dhabi, was getting there with all belongings intact ...
For the first time in my life, I punched a number into my mobile phone and announced: “I’m on a bus.”
In recent times, the equivalent call from a train has come to be seen as a moderately serious social faux pas, one I have committed only when feeling guilty about how late home I’ll be. The evidence of my eyes and ears, since my return to Europe from a trainless part of the Middle East, is that people have taken the hint that these calls cause great irritation to fellow passengers.
This was different. For a start, I rarely travel by bus. That’s not because I am too grand for them, but because they don’t often seem likely to reach anywhere I want to go as quickly as would the car, London Underground or even my feet. What is more, I was in Paris so there was a double novelty factor.
Friends had invited me to dinner. I accepted before realising quite how tortuous the journey would be. Right to the end of a Metro line, having had to get to that line from where I was staying. And then the 118 bus for 15 stop-start minutes. I made my call as the bus pulled away from the Chateau de Vincennes Metro station, lowering my voice and taking care to speak only in French to avoid drawing disapproving attention, even though the man I was phoning was English.
I shouldn’t have worried. The French are simply not self-conscious about doing silly things, in full view of the public, that others find painfully embarrassing. Also, unlike poor, behind-the-times London, Paris is a city where mobile phones work underground; a large proportion of the people in any given Metro carriage will have phones pressed to ears or be rattling off text messages for much of their journeys.
Since most of us have come to rely inordinately on our mobiles, the Metro is therefore a user-friendly place to be. One change I have noticed since 2006, when I lived in Paris, is that although beggars are still around, they have retreated to pitches within stations, abandoning the trains themselves. That, based on a dozen journeys in a couple of days, may be a false impression.
But it may equally be a consequence of the beggars being blown off stage. Musicians have taken their place. If people giving something – music – struggle to persuade people to dig into their pockets for small change (and Bill Taylor says the busker in his photo was very good) , those offering nothing may as well reconsider their day jobs.
Another trade remains well represented on the Metro. When my train was halted for a while – without trace, for once, of accordionists or fiddlers – the first announcement about an accident two stops along the line was followed by four or five, in increasingly high-pitched tones, warning that pickpockets were about. Not just in a general sense, but in the first carriage of our stationary train, then in carriage number six ... and finally everywhere. It was almost enough to make me call home to say I was on a stranded, thief-ridden, music-free train.
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