Disgressed

We’d had a slightly overcast week in Brittany, but when we arrived in Paris, with lots of queueing in store, it turned hot. The high thirties in centigrade – when you came out of the air-conditioned hotel, the sun just hit you.

Still, we did alright: Eiffel Tower (now with sparkly lights every hour at night), Arc de Triomphe, Louvre (We did a pretty good day-long stab at it, walking about five miles through all the galleries. Did you know that at one stage the Louvre was only half of a gigantic palace, with a mirror image western wing? The mind boggles.) and all the rest.

We were treated to a performance of the Parisian Gold ring trick: as we were walking along the banks of the Seine, an urchin picked up a “gold” ring ( I actually saw them drop it, too, which was a bit of a flaw in the pitch). “C’est vraiment de l’or? Vous pensez?”.

The idea is that this lucky urchin has stumbled on a real gold ring lost by someone: there’s a complicated proposition they work through but the gist ultimately is that you should give them about 20 euros for a ring which is actually some crummy thing worth 20 cents at most. The depressing thing is that they can rely on your not wanting to hand it in to the police and also on your being keen to rip off the apparently naive urchin by giving them a fraction of the ring’s supposed real value. I imagine this helps them to think you deserve all you get: but in my case I literally saw them coming.

There seems to be an unlovely trend towards tourists having their pictures taken in front of famous pictures or works of art (it seems to be mainly oriental tourists for some reason). It’s annoying enough to have people in the way when you’re trying to look at something, but now it seemed matey often wanted to stand in front of the exhibit too, and took it for granted that everyone would clear a space for five minutes or so while his mate was fiddling with the process of immortalising him.

You wouldn’t mind someone standing in front of, say, Castiglione if they appeared to be scholars who had worked on The Courtier for years and saw this as the nearest thing they could get to visiting the Master himself; but it was painfully obvious that the sub-text was always more along the lines of:

“Hey! Check out me with some really weird beardy guy in this kind of a gallery place or some sort of shit full of like all sort of junk that the French were really crazy about. LOL!!!1!1!!”

My expectations of hostile or condescending Parisians proved baseless (to be fair most Parisians were absent, it being August). At one point some friendly French people stopped and asked if they could offer us directions or any other sort of help?  Even the waiters were fine. Watching my fellow tourists in a place north of the Rue St Germain, I even felt some sympathy. OK, so you don’t speak any French at all and you’re not even going to try.  OK, so in fact you don’t even speak English particularly well, but that’s your language of choice for communicating in Paris. You want all the tables rearranged, but some of you want them rearranged differently to others. You don’t want anything on the menu or anything you could reasonably expect in a French restaurant: some of you want a kind of German food I’ve never heard of; others want American hamburgers; and some of you want to be offered vegetarian food.  You haven’t sat down yet, but you’ve already asked me three times whether service is included. Can I be forgiven if the edge of one nostril just trembles ever so slightly?

For someone like me, who spends a lot of time in London, it was impossible not to make comparisons between the two cities, but also impossible to get  the conclusions quite right. Paris seems more compact and coherent, and sort of older (with modern insertions), though London’s ancient roots are much more evident. In some ways Paris seems much more tourist-friendly, though the sense London gives of a vast, almost indefinite labyrinth of varied districts might be more appealing to the adventurous visitor.

It was so hot and we did so much standing in line at Versailles and elsewhere that the girls spontaneously suggested that we need not go to EuroDisney after all.