Ca Marche!

We performed the breakfast rites for the final time this morning and made our last journey of the trip across Paris which required a suitcase trundle from Le M Hotel to Montparnasse Metro. It was a last chance to admire the attractive, well thought out and thriving streets of this city. London is  not known for its high buildings, but Paris even less so. There is a business area to one side of the city with tall buildings but it stands respectfully to one side and allows Paris to carry on being Paris. Mind you, Paris, as it is now, hasn’t been around for that long. In 1853, Napoleon 3rd decided that the city coffers were particularly full and commissioned Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann to give the city a makeover. This meant demolishing vast acres of buildings that were already there. This included mostly shabby buildings but no doubt much of it would now have been hauled into the 21st century and gentrified. There were doubtless some areas that had been there since Roman times. Imagine being allowed to do that now. The occupants of these building s were given no choice. They were simply moved out. I doubt they were then moved back into the spacious white, wide avenued, tree lined, beautifully proportioned grandeur that replaced it all. Sweeping away most of a city and saying, ‘right, let’s build a new one’ was quite extraordinary. Apparently this cost an eye-watering, 2.5 billion pounds. And I’m not talking in today’s money!

We arrived back in Gare du Nord, calculating that we had one journey each left on our metro cards. We’ll settle for that. The procedure for getting through customs seemed better laid out at this station, than St. Pancras. This said, we arrived at the passport checking area and were asked to divide into EU and British Passports.  Kate has an old passport which says EU on it and mine is new, saying British. I put this observation to the little French official. He reacted with the disdain, contempt and irritability so commonly seen in French officials. “That was rude” remarked someone in the queue. “And wrong”, I added. The irony was that though we both therefore queued in the British passport line, Kate’s passport was accepted and mine was refused! I had to be taken off to the EU counter which was controlled by a real person instead of a machine.

Our train was delayed. I couldn’t help thinking that this was probably due to issues on the British side of the journey. Leaves on the track at Ashford. The wrong kind of wind at Rochester. You know the kind of thing. Still, it left time for the obligatory coffee in the departure lounge. 

I wish I could remember the exact location and details of this next bit, but... at some point we saw a menu which had next to it, an Englsh translation. There were three options for a particular meal and we noticed that the third option was a 'greedy' one. We were intrigued. It turned out that this was their translation for the French, Gourmand!  I feel like I've been found out. I love café gourmands! It just confirms what I already knew about myself....

And then, there we were again. Hurtling. If ever we have hurtled, it has been on the Eurostar. There’s no other word to describe it. An LED sign in the carriage informed us every now and again that the top speed reached by one of these trains was 354 kph. That’s a lot for hundreds of people balanced on a couple of rails. As before, the most exciting part of the journey was reserved for the British side where the train was still determined to maintain what sometimes seemed like reckless speed despite the many hurdles that are Kent. The only part I recognised was when we shot over the river Medway near to where Kate hails from. She would have loved to see this bit too but chose this very moment to go to the loo….

And so to St. Pancras and then the busiest part of the journey by far as we fought our way to the Northern line and so on to Finchley. But would our car be waiting for us. Or had it been wheel clamped/stolen/vandalised by now? No, it was waiting for us, patiently. This ‘Just Park’ website really does work, it seems.

Actually, the whole trip worked. It still strikes me as funny, how someone can sit there on their phone for a while and, at the touch of a few buttons, create a holiday. Even I, with my haphazard, somewhat chaotic approach to life can manage it. Ca marche! Aren’t mobile phones wonderful. Hang on, what did I just write!

        Rather random shot if Gare du Nord...


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Paris! Well, Finchley.

Image
Surprise! That was how Kate got to find out that we were going to Paris. Doing a Surprise like that for someone who doesn't do surprises was a particularly brave act of mine. She took it well but then taking the Eurostar to Paris was a 'bucket list' thing for her. In the end, taking the train to Paris from St. Pancras required spending the previous night in a travel lodge in Finchley. Going from a North Yorkshire village to Finchley felt about as foreign as going to somewhere like Paris. We could have stayed there for the weekend and tried getting our heads round warm weather, a cosmopolitan vibe and watching people drive very fast in big cars and felt that we'd achieved enough in terms of a holiday. Our arrival in Finchley started with the slightly surreal experience of parking our car on someone's drive who we've never met and never will, and hoping to find it there, in fact, when we return to it, post Paris. It's a very clever website which enables people...
Read more

Eurostarry

Image
Within minutes of leaving our travel lodge, we were being whisked to St Pancras/King's Cross on the Northern line. We thought we'd done our usual 'leaving way too early' thing but in the end, it was a quick Paul's coffee and time to board.  It was fairly 'airport like' with passport checks and taking all your clothes off to walk through an arch which detects whether you're a good person or not. I was asked to remove my cap. "OK, OK, so I've got no hair. D'ya wanna make something of it, pal?" was what I was tempted to say, but I acquiesced as I always do. We were then kettled into an impossibly small space for the three eurostar trains which were scheduled to leave. I'm always impressed/concerned by the amount of people waiting to board an A380, but three trains worth is a lot of people.  The train was big. It was long and higher than usual trains.  We were sat at a table of four. Opposite, were two separate French females who both o...
Read more