October 23, 2008, a little after 11 a.m. in Paris
My cab ride into Paris was a hoot. The little dog quietly amused himself by nibbling on his kibble and receiving the occasional scratch behind the ears from the driver. I looked at as much as I could from the windows. I could not tell we had crossed the Seine until we were on the other side already. You can not possibly appreciate much of Paris from looking out a car window but I took in as much as I could. I examined the other cars as much as I did the buildings and streets. There were no SUVs or wagons or even any vans that I can recall. Not until we come close to the hotel do I see lots of pedestrians on the sidewalk or notice the traffic lights are all set very low and on poles at the sidewalk (not suspended across like in most of the U.S.). The GPS guided the driver to the tiny, short street where my hotel is supposed to be but then I have a brief moment of panic when neither of us can find it. But the hotel lacks any sort of ornate front - it's in a funky old building with an entrance positioned oddly at a corner and the main window facing away from the street in its address. The little intersection is one of those odd sort of triangular accidental plazas that form when a city does not grow in a planned manner. When I paid the driver I needed her help sorting out the money. Following my friends advice about tips (from before the trip) I managed to give the right amount (judging by the driver's reaction). Her dog watched me from his window until the cab disappeared from sight.
The guy at the hotel spoke English and was very nice. I arrived a bit before check-in time so he offered to let me drop off my luggage and come back after walking around a bit. My practice in a strange place is to walk in widening circles. This time it did not work out that way. I walked along a street called rue de Oberkampf, a strangely Germanic name for a street in Paris. I see mostly the sort of shops and stores as a local would want/need (no purely tourist crud). I also found, of all things, a store selling Japanese Manga. Oberkampf leads me to a wide, multi-lane Ave. Voltaire (gotta love a place that names the big streets after its authors). Not seeing anything of immediate interest, I work my way back, using my little laminated Paris Artwise map, to the intersection where I find the closest Metro station. This is also where I have been told I can find an internet cafe.
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| A Manga bookstore in Paris |
After a short search in the intersection of 4 streets going in all different odd directions, I find a small storefront which has enough signs outside it which along with my very limited French tells me this is the place. I stand outside it dumbfounded, unable to figure out if it's open or closed or how to get into the place if it is open. Another tourist, who speaks to me in American accented English asks me the same questions that I'm thinking (why does he think *I'll* know and if he thinks I'm French why does he think I'll speak English?). Anyway, I grab what looks like a handle and pull. nothing. Push and we're in. A somewhat overweight middle-aged French guy sits at a desk in a very crowded alcove in front of a narrow doorway leading to a row of 4 PCs. I ask only "Internet" and he points through the door. The other tourist and I go in.
When I sat down at the keyboard I discovered, much to my surprise and chagrin that they had the letters arranged very differently than Qwerty or even Dvorak. When I could not figure out how to make it type the '@' I let out a cry of dismay so loud that the cafe guy came back to see what my problem was. I gestured at the keyboard and said something about how different it was (like he could do anything about it).
The guy in this internet cafe said politely "I'm sorry Monsieur, you are in France." Like the buildings didn't tip me off, they had to throw in different keyboards. He does show me how to make it type an @ sign before he returns to his alcove. I wonder, what exactly did he mean by that? That he was sorry I was experiencing some difficulty or was he was sorry that *I* was in France? Anyway, after I teach the other tourist how to do the @ sign I type a quick message to my friend in Europe. Paying for the session was amusing. I tried practicing my best try at "how much does it cost" in French. The cafe guy replies in French. I do not understand him. He holds up his index finger: "one Euro." He appears a bit amused by me. I would visit him nearly each day while in Paris and every time he saw me he had a look on his face like I was making him suffer. But he was always very courteous and polite to me. I came to call him "Monsieur Grumpy" in my travel journal.
I returned to the Hotel at check-in time and received a key attached to a giant piece of some sort of metal machine part. Nice way to keep you from losing your key. The stairs were narrow and the hallways narrower. I did not know how to work the lights yet so I had to find my way in the dark (no windows). I used a pen with a kind of light gimmick I obtained from a vendor table at a conference who knows when in order to see my room number and locate the keyhole. Later I would see the light switch at the entrance to a given hallway off the stairway landing on each floor. Like book stacks in some large libraries the lights in the hotel's hallways work on a timer. Later I also found a switch outside the door to my room. It does not look like a light switch in the U.S. The light switches in Europe (at least France, Luxembourg and Spain) were 3 inch square plastic panels inset into a narrow frame, pivoting on a horizontal axis in the mid point and activated by pressing the top or bottom half, causing it to pivot about a half inch or so.
This building had been something else some century or two before. The rooms were dry-walled in place and mine lacked a closet. A wooden sort of inside-out sheffrobe, consisting of a horizontal pole above a knee-high platform, served as a place for me to hang my clothes and place my luggage. The bed occupied at least half the area of the room, leaving space only for the imitation of a closet, a small desk and the open floor space to navigate from one to the other and to the bathroom.
The bathroom. Enough space to move about but the shower has about half the space of the average U.S. old-style phone booth (not kidding nor hyperbole). I fit into the shower easily enough but I know some people who could not. My favorite part of the bathroom was the plumbing. The toilet paper roll hung not from a roller fitted to the wall for that purpose but from a dead-ended bit of pipe which was part of the bizarre tangle of metal which emerged from a seemingly random part the wall then twisting around in various directions as if looking for the toilet and failing to find it for a while. The bit of pipe which holds the toilet paper roll at some time in the past had been a length of pipe which split off from the main line. Back in the day it probably led to something else not there anymore then somebody capped it off instead of removing the whole mess to replace it with pipes that proceeded directly to their destination. Generations of avant-garde thinkers, masquerading as plumbers, constructed an accidental work of modern art, right here in my cheap hotel room. Welcome to Paris.
