Paris and York
- Isaac Cui
- Sep 22, 2021
- 9 min read
On September 13, 2020, I was on a plane to the UK. By a funny coincidence, I spent the morning of September 13, 2021, on the Eurostar, a high-speed train that connects London to Paris. Amazingly, the journey was only a bit over two hours long.
I left on a 7am train from Kings Cross (of Harry Potter fame). Since I moved out to Greenwich, I ended up having to take the first tube train that left from North Greenwich (which left at something like 5:12am!); I was surprised and sobered to see how many folks were waiting for that first train. I went to France with my friend from LSE, who has featured prominently on this blog previously. Here are some of the pictures of that morning, as well as our first (of many) croissants.
Our trip generally was meandering. My friend had been to France many times, and so while she wanted to show me the “must-see” aspects of the town, she didn’t feel a need to fit a bunch of stuff in. As for me, I have been socialized by my time in Britain to view the French with disdain. (I kid. Mostly. Really, it’s that I know very little about French history and society, so I didn’t have the same excitement seeing Paris as I did, say, the Tower of London.) Anyways, the result was that we were willing to wander a lot, and we spent a lot of time looking at more esoteric stuff than what I think you typically do on one’s first Paris trip.
We first saw Montmartre, a hill famous for its artsy vibes. Wikipedia tells me famous artists including Monet, Renoir, Degas, Mondrian, Picasso, and van Gogh all had studios or worked in the area. So that’s something. It felt rather touristy to me. The hill was nice, though, because you could see throughout Paris — a city that looked remarkably flat to me. Indeed, I was a bit disappointed with the skyline compared with that of the City of London or Canary Wharf. (I have marginal regrets, though, that I’m increasingly becoming a London snob.) Here are some pictures:
After Montmartre, we walked to the garden next to the Louvre (Jardin des Tuileries), where we had a picnic lunch. On the way there, we walked by the Saint-Lazare Station (Gare Saint-Lazare), of Monet fame, so I had to take a picture of it. (Funnily enough, we would end up at the train station two days later.) We also walked by the Arc de Triomphe (not the first arch we walked by), which was — in my view — disappointingly covered. (My brother observed that people were going to Paris to see the Arch covered as an art installation, so perhaps I got lucky.) I admit that the Jardin des Tuileries was gorgeous, although it was very carefully manicured, like Marston Quad, rather than having the rustic charm of many British parks, which feel a bit more wild.
Let me take a quick digression to talk a bit about the food we had. I was quite impressed, generally speaking, with the food we had. The croissants were absolutely amazing. (By the end, I had six croissants over the course of four days.) I found that what made French food generally so good was the fact that everything had butter in it. For example, the food I had in the Jardin des Tuileries was a ham and cheese sandwich, along with a sparkling lemon-wine and a canelé. The sandwich shouldn’t have been that good. But it was truly amazing, because they put butter in it. (I should note that we got the canelé because one of my friends had been gushing about them to me for like half an hour on a call. She told me she had never had one before, but was so eager to try one. My LSE friend, on the other hand, had had them before, and thought they were terrible desserts, which is why she looks so skeptical of our canelé. My LSE friend was correct; it’s a mediocre pastry.)
Beyond the sandwiches and croissants, we had other French staples: beef tartare, normal steak, galettes (we had those in Bayeux since Normandy is apparently famous for its galettes), quiche, and an éclair. Oh, and lots of fries; I thought it was some kind of joke that we call them “French fries” (or Freedom Fries, as the American does), but evidently fried potato is very common in French food. I also ended up thinking that the wine was quite drinkable (normally I really dislike the taste of wine), as was the Norman brandy that we got in Bayeux. The espresso in the typical bakery (boulangerie, or patisserie for pastries specifically) was also quite good. I’ve never been an espresso person, but I think I may have been converted in Paris.
Anyhow, after leaving the Louvre area, we walked along the Seine, saw the Notre-Dame de Paris (Notre Dame technically translates to “Our Lady,” so there are many different Notre-Dames), and walked around a lot more, eventually winding our way back to our hostel after dinner. This trip was also my first experience in a youth hostel — I thought it was really positive, and I didn’t feel like there was much of a downside to living it in compared to, say, a hotel or AirBnB.
The next day, we spent a lot of time among the dead. We started (after our croissants and coffee, of course) in the Cimetière du Père Lachaise (which included notables such as Chopin, Delacroix, and Fourier).
Then we went to the Parisian catacombs. The story, in essence, is that Paris ran out of cemetery space sometime in the mid- to late-1770s, so they decided to move bones, en masse, to former stone quarries. And they did so kind of weirdly. Here are some pictures — you can judge for yourself. (I did admire, as you’ll see in the last picture, the fact that the gift shop sold catacomb-styled condoms.)
Next to the catacombs is the Cimetière du Montparnasse, where we ate lunch. We visited, among others, the graves of Poincaré and the shared grave of De Beauvoir and Sartre. The De Beauvoir and Sartre grave seemed to be almost a place of pilgrimage; many people left ticket stubs on the grave, and there were also kisses left on the tombstone. Interestingly enough, we also stumbled upon Susan Sontag. I was hoping to see Durkheim, who was somewhere in the graveyard, but after a surprisingly long time of searching, we gave up.
After that, we walked west to see the Eiffel Tower. It is quite impressive. I expected it to be somewhat dinky, but it was a magnificent piece of architecture, I have to admit. We had a bottle of rosé in the park nearby and debated (of all things) how Covid policy ought to be set by LSE. We also saw one of a few replicas of the Statue of Liberty, and we walked back to the hostel in the rain.
On Wednesday, we went to Bayeux. Originally, I wanted to go to Tocqueville (to see, of course, Alexis de Tocqueville’s grave), but lacking the mental preparation (and because my friend’s level of insanity is insufficiently high to try to make the journey), we settled for Bayeux instead, where the Bayeux tapestry is held. The Bayeux Tapestry tells the story of the Norman invasion of England in 1066, a pivotal moment in British history. I’ve been interested in the Norman invasion for a long time (I think in sixth grade I once wrote a research paper about it!), so it was cool to see the actual tapestry. The tapestry is truly quite long, but it also has all kinds of randomness to it. There are depictions above and below the main narrative that seem essentially random: animals eating their tails, nude men and women, esoteric symbols, and so on. Because we couldn’t take pictures of the Bayeux tapestry, I don’t have many photos from that museum, but we also went to the cathedral in Bayeux, which was absolutely gorgeous. If you notice that it looks quite similar to the British cathedrals that I have often posted pictures of on this blog, that’s because the British cathedrals are often built in Norman style.
Once we got back to Paris, it was relatively late in the afternoon. We walked to a garden (Le Jardin du Luxembourg) to see another Statue of Liberty as well as the Palais du Luxembourg, where the French Senate meets. We had dinner somewhere around the area, and then we walked back to the hostel in the evening, where we saw the lit Eiffel Tower, Panthéon, and Notre-Dame. The Seine was beautiful.
Thursday was the day my friend and I parted paths. She decided to go to Nice (South France) to enjoy the beaches; I decided to return to London. She had a morning flight, whereas I slept in and caught an early afternoon train. I got to see some more political posters, I enjoyed my morning croissant and espresso, and I finished Malcolm X’s autobiography while enjoying a beautiful Parisian day. (More on Malcolm X and the other book I read in Paris — No One Is Talking About This — next week.) It was also a gorgeous day in London, and I spent a while relaxing in a park near LSE after I got back into the city.
I spent the next day in a few calls and trying to get work done. It was fun. On my walk back from LSE, I caught a picture of the sunset from Waterloo Bridge that I’m quite proud of.
On Friday, I had another trip — this time to North England, the town of York, in order to meet my Fast Stream buddy (a member of the British civil servant who is matched with me). I’m actually quite proud of the relationship we’ve developed over the last year, given that it was entirely through Zoom, but it was really nice to see her in person. We had a traditional British afternoon tea. I also finally saw Platform 9 ¾ at Kings Cross. York was a beautiful little town — it has very old English vibes to it. (People say to go to the main tourist areas to get a Diagon Alley feel — narrow, cobbled streets with quaint stores lining the sides.) But mostly I just enjoyed getting to chat with my Fast Stream buddy and seeing a new place.
Things I learned from this experience:
Paris is really good at making public space inviting — there are so many benches and outdoor seats and public bathrooms that it makes you want to spend time with others outside, as my friend observed. I think that’s a big part of why it might properly be called the “City of Love” — it draws partners and friends (romantic or otherwise) out into the public. And the French, we noticed, are not shy about public displays of affection.
The restaurants in Paris seem to seat people very close to others, and the tables are tiny. The result is that you feel like it’s a quite intimate space, where you’re eating with many people beyond your group. Like a party, that can create a very warm and inviting atmosphere — or it can be overwhelming and tiring. I actually quite liked the effect, except for the fact that I was very worried I was going to elbow the person sitting next to me every dinner.
The police in Paris are weirdly militarized, and I came away deeply skeptical of them. At the park near the Eiffel Tower, I took a picture of six police officers walking around in what felt like a military formation, dressed in camouflage and holding rifles. One of the guys came up to me and told me to delete the picture — he even watched me do it! A friend on a call later that week noted that deleted photos on iPhones are saved, so I’ve actually restored it. When we searched up the law, it turns out that France has banned spreading pictures of police officers that can “harm the physical or mental integrity” of police officers; as a news article citing a government official explains, the law bans only images shared “with comments ‘intended to harm’ or incite violence.” What struck me was that the picture I took, in itself, does no such thing (see for yourself below). It is obviously overbroad to ban an image when the law criminalizes only a method of dissemination. But putting that aside, it’s not clear to me why that image itself ought to impugn the integrity of the police officers unless that police officer believed that his very presence, in that formation and context, is in some way problematic. Guilty man, I suppose.
The traditional English afternoon tea is a meh experience. The sandwiches are small and you eat them with a fork and knife. Absolute absurdity. But, the afternoon tea did cement my love of British scones. The key to the British scone, and what differentiates it from an American scone, is that the British scone itself — like much British cuisine generally — is rather tasteless. The scone, rather than serving as a dessert in itself, is merely the vector for delicious clotted cream and jam, a truly scrumptious and diabetes-inducing combination. As it is said, British scones are “class.”
* * * * *
Rose: I think the highlight of my week was the walk back from the Panthéon on Wednesday and then the subsequent morning of reading in a park. Paris at night really is beautiful, and a peaceful morning was a nice way to cap the trip.
Bud: LSE starts this week! I’m excited to dive in fully to social scientific methods training. And I’m excited to meet new people.
Thorn: I made the mistake of going to the gym after getting back from Paris. I was already pretty tired, and then I had to carry a friend’s briefcase as well as my own backpack and duffel bag for about an hour of walking. By the end I was just exhausted.
Gratitude: I’m thankful for both my LSE friend and my Fast Streamer, who showed me Paris and York. It was a really fun way to spend my last week of freedom before going back to school. Also, I’m grateful for my friends who have helped me with my law school applications, whether by talking me through ideas or reading my essays. It’s all been super helpful.
Future topic: Malcolm X and No One Is Talking About This.
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