Day 5: train through the hills and 'home' to room #12

Trains in France are on time. No, really. Despite what I had imagined about Britain, the train system here does not actually run like a finely oiled machine. Many a time Christien and I have rushed to the station only to find that our train is running ten, fifteen or half an hour late—but I digress.

One of the strange new forms we had to learn in France was the very last-minute announcement of train platforms. There are so many trains, everything running like clockworks, that each platform must have a very precise schedule for each arrival and departure. And the passengers all know to stand about in the main foyer of the station and wait until just a few minutes before the departure time when suddenly the departure platform will be listed on the boards. Just another of those tiny little cultural differences to learn.

The train back to Paris was 7 hours rather than 5 and had a different route. We wound through hills and mountains, past ancient stone towns cut into hillsides. There was an amazing aqueduct, high over a valley, which we crossed—past a village, with the river falling far below us. It was a very full train, everyone was piled in, and throughout the journey passengers continued to wander through the carriages looking for a seat.

There was a kind of all-in-it-togetherness that I noticed on the train journeys in France—a kind of visceral realization about the tightness of everything, the close quarters, the way everyone is used to being quite close to everyone else there. Something I haven’t felt in quite the same way Britain. I’ve always heard about the differences in sense of space that different cultures have. And that I certainly have experienced here. Comfortable personal space is much closer here in Britain than in the U.S. But this comfortable space is even closer in France (and I suspect much of the rest of Europe). Being aware that there would be a difference, and thinking myself rather worldly and able to ‘do as the Romans do’ – I thought I wouldn’t have any problem with this when I first arrived in the UK. But even here, and even being somewhat prepared for it, I found myself nervous and uncomfortable often my first year and a half here. In France there was a slight difference, yet again, to Britain … people queue closer together, slip past on the street with a hairsbreadth between them—but there is also something more fluid and flexible about this closeness. Something unspoken that seems to acknowledge—“Yes, we are standing face to face, body to body in the metro, but we can still maintain our autonomous space.” I am doing my best to put all this to words, but failing to quite capture it I think.

We arrived in Austerlitz station and decided to take the tube back to our neighborhood, rather than walk (long day!) As we turned the corner onto Rue Monsieur Le Prince, we felt like we were coming home. After our initial hesitation about the Hotel Stella, it was truly lovely to come back into the bustling city of Paris and have a familiar spot to land. The landlady was on the stairs as we came up and her initial hard look of “Who are you and what do you want?” changed when she recognized us and she even almost smiled when she gave us the keys to the same room we’d had before. Ah, #12, up a trillion flights of super-steep stairs with its lovely, noisy, clinking street and rooftop views.

Out we went to forage for food and of course found ourselves back outside Notre Dame again, in the garden this time. We wandered a bit, back across to the Latin Quarter on the Left Bank. We went into the famous, or infamous, English language bookstore, Shakespeare & Company. American expat Sylvia Beach originally founded the bookstore in 1919 and it became a home for writers like Hemingway, Pound, and Baldwin. Later, in 1951 George Whitman opened another English language bookstore in the Latin Quarter, encouraged by his friend, poet and founder of City Lights Bookstore, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. After Beach's death, Whitman merged the two stores by adopting the Shakespeare & Co. name. The store is funky, quirky. Besides the shelves and aisles stuffed with books, stories seem to drip from the walls themselves. Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Anais Nin—the store has seen its share of famous writers. The ethos there is one of encouraging young writers, and upstairs, two teens sat typing on their laptops in a little cushioned alcove, while in another room a writing group held a workshop, and in yet another someone gave an impromptu concert and poem recital on an ancient upright piano. At the top of the stairs is a little wooden box-room, looking like an art-installation, lit up inside with xmas lights, graphitized with words, which anyone can duck into to use the type-writer for their next masterpiece. Sadly I didn't have any loose paper to hand.

From S&C we wandered through the crowded, buzzing streets of the Latin Quarter, dodging the exploding plates tossed down by the proprietor of a busy Greek restaurant (calling out ‘Opah’ each time a plate cracked), whirling by the kebob stands, eyeing the crepe carts with greed, past the brilliantly lit tourist shops stuffed with plastic Eiffel Towers and racks of postcards, past Patisseries and thumping Nightclubs, the smells of bread and fish, wine and urine and cigarette smoke all merging in our lungs, and finally found ourselves back at our room, where we spied on the passersby, wandering from bar to bar below us, until we were too sleepy to keep our eyes open any longer.