Les Déreniers Jours à Paris

Hey All,

I suppose that this will be my last post on this blog. I still have to go through and edit photos for those who wish to see them, but that will likely take a bit longer. The web page will stay up indefinitely in case anyone fancies reading any past posts.

It is hard to determine exactly when I felt that my time left in France was becoming limited. The semester went so fast that it seemed like no time at all before my professors were taking about final exams and projects. Looking at my “to do” list drawn up at the beginning of the semester which predicted I would have a dozen countries under my belt and would have visited every province in France, I realized that I would not be able to do everything there was to do in Europe, or even in the country. Even though my rather ambitious plans weren’t completed in full I had amazing adventures through Europe and within France. Let’s not forget that I had a full course load of engineering classes too!

I think the thing that I can appreciate the most is the experience of adapting to life in a big city. When my fellow students and I were in Paris we were able to get around without ever looking at a map, go into cool looking bars and cafes without fear of not being able to communicate, and cross a busy street or jump onto a metro as the doors are closing without fearing death, just like locals do. The time that I have had to familiarize myself with the diversity of the city is one of the things that I am most grateful. Now leaving the country, I find that I feel as though I did not just visit Paris, but lived there.

The last few weeks were busier than I had expected. I first of all had to finish up my research project for a class, “Electromagnetic Interference Mitigation in Mixed-Signal Circuit Designs”. I also put in a great amount of study for my exams in all of my classes so my last two weeks in France were almost all spent in Cergy. I'm glad to say that it all payed off since I ended up earning a 4.0 GPA for the semester.

It was only two days after my last exam that I was scheduled to leave. It felt very surreal to pack up my apartment in anticipation to go. I met with all of my professors and the directors of the FAME program and we talked about future improvements. I will also get the chance to welcome two ENSEA professors to UB in the fall to talk about the program to prospective students. The Chair of the Electrical Engineering Department has asked me to help her with some recruiting work next semester as well.

My last real day in Cergy was a Thursday, just one day after my last final. In an all-day frenzy I pulled my suitcases of the shelf where they had been gathering dust since January and put away all my things. To get back my security deposit I would have to clean the apartment well and have it checked over by staff. I had apparently done the best job of anyone who had moved out recently since the cleaning lady was pleasantly surprised and remarked I must have been raised by good parents (though she may have just been happy to not have to clean the apartment herself). I handed in my keys to the secretary at the office who told me to say hi to Obama for her.

Since my flight was very early I stayed in a hostel closer to the airport for my last night. Though I got some looks for carrying three huge bags through the city, it was a great move since I would be much closer to the airport and it had made checking out easier. I took one final walk around what we call the “tourist loop” covering Notre Dame, Arc de Triomphe, and arrived at the Eiffel Tower as the sun was setting. Staying until it began to get cold, I followed the lower walkway along the Seine back towards the hostel. It was a beautiful summer night: the streetlights of bridges were reflecting on the river, boats were cruising slowly by, and underage Parisian teenagers were gathering in small groups to drink wine under the cover of darkness. I grabbed one last late night crêpe and walked along the familiar main roads back to the hostel. Less than eight hours later I was leaving the city behind as I climbed up into the clouds to cross the Atlantic and head back to America! 

-Adam

l'Allemagne

Finding my train I climbed aboard to find it completely deserted. It was one of the types where seats were arranged in cabins of six seats with an individual closing door. I walked up and down the length of the car, yet there was no one inside except myself. I was about to check that I was on the right train when it started moving. The conductor came on an made announcements in Italian and German. I understood very little of it, but caught the word München, the German name for Munich, my destination.

Having had a full night’s sleep the night before I was not tired enough to fall asleep for the journey so I decided to sink myself into the novel that I was working on reading, Les Miserables, a French classic by Victor Hugo. I was disturbed from reading only twice on the trip. The first time was by the ticket inspector and the second by the magnificent views that came to surround the railway right after we crossed the Italian border into Austria. The train wound along on the side of a hill by a river that cut a path through the mountain range. All around were green fields with old homes and farms whose occupants were busy attending to their chores. The fields quickly rose up steeply and turned into mountains, most of which were still snow capped despite the warm and humid day. We passed through whole villages that were built quite literally into the sides of mountains in about as little space as one could fit a cluster of buildings large enough to be called a town. Around the German border other passengers started filling the empty car. It was dark when we pulled into the station.

Stepping out of the train I was overwhelmed not only by the large train station, but by all of the signs and advertisement. In France I can read just about anything that’s written in public. In Spain and Italy we were able to use our limited knowledge of the languages and the similarities between English and the vernacular to distinguish what most everything meant. German would prove to have more differences. As soon as I stepped off the train I instantly aware that I was in another country.

German uses the same Latin alphabet as English, but with a few additions of accent marks such as the addition of an umlaut, two dots above a letter, and the conversion of two letter ‘s’ side-by-side into a ‘β’. It is an interesting written language in it that it combines nouns and their modifiers into one word, rather than adding space as we do in English or in French for that matter. This makes for words that can easily be thirty to forty letters in length.

I wanted to get to may hostel, but I was terribly hungry as my last meal had been breakfast in Italy. I ordered from a café just outside the train station getting the first chance to practice my spoken German. Satiated, I set off looking for my hostel, but the search did not take long. It was almost right next to the train station.

Our hostel was very lively as late arrivals such as myself were checking in and other groups were getting ready to head out for the night. The building was huge with several floors of dozens of rooms. It had its own computer lab, kitchen, bar, and a two story common room with a glass ceiling and live plants growing. It was hard to believe that we were getting such a place for only a few euros per night. In the room I met up with Sai, a fellow ENSEA student who had gotten in recently as well. After unloading my stuff we went to use the computers to tell our other ENSEA friend that we were here, but we ran into him and his high school friend on the way down the stairs. They told us they were about ready to head out for the night and we quickly joined them.

We headed to the beer garden that was associated with a major Munich brewery Schneider-Weisse. The place was lively and large with tables and hanging lanterns strewn throughout an area at least the size of a football field. Here they served beer by the maβ, a large glass holding a liter of drink that was heavy even when empty. Throughout the garden were waitresses in traditional dress carrying up to eight glasses at a time, burly German men collecting empty glasses by the dozen, and workers rolling barrels of beer down the hill from the storehouse. The calm of the warm summer night was broken only by the excited chatter and occasional drinking song of the patrons.

We came to the conclusion that Munich was the best guy’s city in possibly the world. The city was known for its sausage and beer, and the favorite pastime seemed to be watching sports and drinking. The next day we opted for a nutritious breakfast of sausages and breads also taking the time to see the city itself. We ate dinner at one of the largest beer halls in the city complete with dozens and dozens of huge picnic tables and benches made out of old beer casks. I ordered a plate that contained more meats than I am proud to admit, but it was excellent.

Of course, the main reason that brought us to Munich at the time was the annual spring festival, Frühlingsfest! Like Oktoberfest held at the same location in the fall, the fair was a huge affair for the region and brought people from all over the country in traditional Bavarian dress to eat and drink with friends and random strangers alike. The festival was home to three different beer tents each filled to capacity with hundreds and hundreds of people from teenagers to the elderly. There were bands playing live music and waitresses delivering huge plates of food and large glasses of drink. As the night went on more and more of the people got up on the tables to dance, so we naturally joined in. We ended up meeting quite a few people that night as well, almost everyone our age spoke perfect English.

 The next day was significantly more relaxed. We had time to sleep in late, eat a breakfast that involved food groups other than meat, and tour around the city before Sai and I parted ways with our other two friends to head a bit further west to Stuttgart.

Stuttgart was another very cool city that mixed old and new architecture in a downtown space analogous to that of Buffalo. Despite being a smaller city, they had an excellent tourism office with interactive touch screens, destinations grouped by category, and an extremely helpful staff. I thought that an office like that would be especially useful in a city such as Buffalo since both cities have a lot of hidden treasures that the average tourist wouldn't know to go just having arrived. We checked out some of the small German villages nearby containing traditional wooden houses and a manor of one of the medieval ruling families. Of course, being a smaller city there was nearly no one outside of our hostel who spoke English so we were able to get some good practice our German.

Taking a hard look at Stuttgart, one would also notice the lack of buildings built before the 1950s. Like other small European cities such as Caen in Normandy, Stuttgart was nearly completely reduced to rubble over the course of the Second World War. There is a hill in the landscape of downtown of at least one hundred feet that is quite noticeable. We were told that that hill was formed just by pushing all the rubble from the center of downtown together which was eventually overgrown by grass. It was a startling reminder of the devastation that the continent had faced.

Of course, our decision to visit Stuttgart was not influenced solely by architecture and quaint German towns. Stuttgart was also holding a spring festival that week which was similar to Munich’s, but serving stronger beers brewed exclusively by smaller local breweries delivering their casks straight from the production line.

Another night of dancing on tables with German co-eds behind us we wandered around the city before getting on the night bus back to Paris that evening. I expected the ride to be long and not very comfortable from my experience with the train to Barcelona the previous week, but at one third of the flight or train price I couldn’t complain too much. The air conditioning wasn’t working well in the back so I woke up every few hours, but I slept a decent part of the time. I remember waking up at about 6am in Marne de la Valley the home of Paris Disneyland which was the penultimate stop of the route. Though we could have gotten off here and taken the RER straight to Cergy but we decided since the bus was due in Paris proper in a half hour we should just wait.

About two hours later when our huge bus was winding through the narrow streets of the French countryside outside of Reims, I decided that we had made the wrong choice. Our bus driver apparently had a tenuous grip on directions of the route and made several wrong turns that took us more than an hour outside of the city. With the help of some passengers he eventually found his way back about three hours later than expected. A train ride later we were back in Cergy. Though it was only afternoon I was exhausted and went to bed. Luckily I had another entire day to finish up work before school started up again.

Venise

Our airplane made a low pass over the lagoon as we banked towards the mainland. As I looked out below I saw a cluster of at least a dozen large islands with a long highway connecting the largest with the mainland. Through the center of the main island flowed a gently curving river. Catching the sun’s reflection as we flew lower, I could see that the river was connected to hundreds of small channels crisscrossing throughout the island. We had arrived in Venice.

Since the airport was located on the mainland we needed to take a shuttle into the lagoon to find our hostel. The bus took us along the long bridge and dropped us off at a parking lot on the main island cluster. After crossing a bridge and leaving the busses behind we would not see another vehicle for nearly three days.

Venice is the world’s only true all-pedestrian city. Sitting in the middle of a lagoon a few miles out from shore the city is made up entirely of narrow roads connected by hundreds of bridges that cross the canal system which goes throughout the entire city. All tasks that would normally be preformed by trucks or cars are replaced by a combination of man-powered carts and boats. Many families own a boat that is moored in the canal directly outside their home. Garbage is collected by hand carts and loaded into garbage boats that cruise up and down the canals before returning to the mainland full. Deliveries for stores and restaurants are unloaded from the nearest dock. Police, fire, and even ambulance services are all accomplished using waterborne vessels.

I don’t believe a single person has visited Venice without getting lost in its vast maze of small alleyways and roads that wind amongst the land between rivers and canals. Even the best map of the area can only show so much detail making navigation between landmarks more of an educated guessing game than anything else. However, many will say that this is the charm of the city and that by getting lost in its back roads one finds the best plazas and the most picturesque canals.

Transit in such a city is very interesting. Walking is obviously the primary form of transportation much to the chagrin of tourists with large bags who wish to be dropped off directly in front of their hotel instead of wheeling large suitcases up and down small roads and bridges. There are private taxis that one may take, of course in the form of motorboats painted in a taxi color-scheme with an “on duty” light and a meter in the wheelhouse. However, the main form of public transportation is the city’s vaporetto system which one can equate to a metro system but taking place on the water instead of below ground. The ‘stations’ are floating platforms either along the main river or the outside perimeter of the islands. Each station has a color-coded route number and direction, much like a regular metro station. A map shows the different routes, labeled with numbers like in New York City, their stops, and a timetable. A vaporetto will arrive and get close enough to touch up against the side of the dock at which time a worker will open a gate letting people on and off. I can only assume he also says the Italian equivalent of “mind the gap”.

Since you are on an island there is a limit to how lost one can get. In addition, at every major road and plaza there are signs pointing to the two nearest vaporetto stops that you can orient yourself with. At any given point you have a fairly good idea of your general location so if you meander long enough in one direction you will find your destination. The address system is smart in it that it uses island cluster numbers, rather than relying on the small and short streets for location. To find an address one just has to get to the correct island and follow the numbers either going up or down.

We did just the same thing to find our lodging for the night. From what I could tell online, Venice does not have a single hostel, so we chose to stay instead in another Bed & Breakfast. The building we were looking for was located at the end of an alleyway off the main road so narrow that if you stretched out both of your arms, you could touch the walls of both buildings on either side. There were several homes along this road with the large door at the end of the alleyway belonging to our lodging. It was funny to see a building so hidden away like it was and it must have had the same effect on others since we had our picture taken by passing tourists coming and going from our hotel several times throughout our stay.

The large door opened up to a small garden surrounded by a high brick wall and two buildings, one for our host, and the other the guest house. Both were very old, as we would find nearly every building in the entire city to be. Our room was nice, hosting two large beds and a private shower.

Being a small city starved for living space, there was not much in the way of large attractions nor huge parks or gardens as one is accustomed to in other European cities. Aside from two large plazas by the universities, there is no notable nightlife to speak of. Thus, the majority of our visit consisted of walking around the streets discovering old buildings, churches, hidden plazas, small gardens and squares, and looking at the luxurious shopping and eating that was available for the extremely wealthy tourists that the city attracts.

Like Rome, all of the people in the tourism industry spoke several languages including English and French. True, we noticed that the majority of tourists there at the time were speaking French, I even found a discarded Paris metro ticket on the ground outside our hotel (I almost didn't notice it at first since I had become accustomed to seeing these small tickets littering every public space in the city and surrounding suburbs). Though we didn't have the time in our short stay to leave the main island, we adventured through as much of it as we could occasionally stopping in to museums, churches, and, for Kaitlin, Italian shoe stores of which there was an abundance. The Italian bakeries were out of this world and made fresh pastries, pizzas, and focaccia breads that we opted for instead of an actual meal a few times.

Walking down the stone-paved side streets with children playing soccer, women hanging laundry out to dry, and men chatting and smoking cigars, one could feel that they were in a small seaside town. On the other hand, the main roads along the water were thriving with life, street performers, cafes, and all sorts of goods for sale.

We enjoyed some time at a cafe on the waterfront with outside seating that looked over one of the main roads of the city. We also were able to see a funny cat and mouse game between the local police and the gentlemen illegally selling knockoff goods in the street. The venders would set up ‘shop’ on a park bench or bridge for a while then all of the sudden would gather their goods in their arms and start walking quickly in one direction. Some ran when the police grew closer. We saw one guy being chased in circles around a kiosk like in Scooby Doo before eventually darting off into in alleyway away from police.

I find street vending amusing because each city seems to have a specific item that people tend to sell. For example, in Madrid every block you would run into a man selling whistles whereas in Rome all the people were selling gel animals that when thrown on the ground would flatten out completely before returning to their original shape. Of course in Paris everyone sells Eiffel tower keychain rings usually walking around with a large ring of them like a warden would keep his keys on simply jingling them back and forth. Then there are always the people selling “authentic” Louis Vuitton handbags and Prada sunglasses for 10% of the price. I am always surprised how many people seem to sell the same trinkets in each city. With so many sellers, I would think the market would quickly saturate, but there must be enough tourists buying these things to keep them in business. Of course, none of these people who sustain themselves by selling these goods can afford to live within the touristy parts of the city and thus must make a commute in from the less affluent suburbs. The funniest sight in Venice was seeing the main train station just after dark when crowds of people with handbags, boxes of sunglasses, toys, and costumes for street performances were all waiting together for the next train to the mainland.

It is hard to pass through the center of Venice without running into Piazza Saint Marco, with its basilica and bell tower. Once called “the drawing room of Europe” by Napoleon, it is one of the only places in Venice that can hold sizable crowds of people. We were lucky enough to happen upon the city not only on the day of the founding of Italy, but on the exact 100th anniversary of the restoration of the tower. To celebrate there was a full concert orchestra and several other musicians playing from the balconies in the square accompanied by a light display from huge projectors onto the sides of buildings. We stayed an watched for a while before heading back for our last night in Italy.

The next day Kaitlin woke up early to catch a plane back to England. I slept in a bit later and checked out of our bed and breakfast. Stopping at a café for some breakfast I noticed many people out carrying or selling roses. As it turns out it was St. Mark’s Day, where the tradition is to give a rose to your sweetheart. All morning I saw men buying roses to bring home later and women walking in groups each holding on to a rose given to them earlier. After a great breakfast and my last Italian coffee I made my way out to the train station. I made sure to grab a sandwich and drink for the road since it would be a nearly eight hour train ride that would bring me through Austria all the way to Germany for the next and final leg of the trip.

Rome

Our plane arrived on the eastern side of the Mediterranean and on the outskirts of the city of Rome in the late evening. After the usual hassle of getting between airport and city we found ourselves at the main train station, Termini. We walked the short distance to our hostel and found ourselves in front of another apartment building with a buzzer noting the hostel’s name. We pressed the button on the intercom. There was no answer on the intercom, only the sound of the door being buzzed open into a dimly lit hallway dusted with construction debris. In front of us was a small elevator, the kind with the metal gate that you pull across, with a sign that said “All guests, use the elevator at your own risk, it’s not reliable.” Not wanting to test if “not reliable” meant possibly getting stuck or suddenly plunging us to our deaths, we opted for the stairs. At the top of the first stairwell we found a glass door that had the name of our hostel painted on it, except the ‘s’ had been scraped off. I guess that they had “upgraded” to a hotel in the time since we had made our bookings.

We were greeted by a friendly Indian gentleman who helped us check in while informing us that he spoke seven languages all of which learned solely “listening to people talk, asking questions, you know.” Upon inquiring about our majors he was glad we were not studying abroad for something such as language studies since that was stupid and “not a real subject.” After catching a bit more life philosophy we headed upstairs to our rooms. The second floor of the building were the living quarters of the hostel complete with three bathrooms, a kitchen, and a desktop computer.

By hostel standards, our room was huge. There were only three beds in a space that could fit six and the other half of the room was deserted and being used as a storage area for dressers and light fixtures. Since the wireless router was unplugged and sitting atop a dresser we correctly guessed that the building did not have Wi-Fi.

For two out of three nights we did not have a guest in the third bed in the room, but there was an older Spanish gentleman whose room was next to ours. To our knowledge he neither slept nor left the hostel since between the hours of 6pm and whenever we went to bed he was sitting at the desk in the common area using both the desktop computer and his personal laptop. We noticed him on a variety of websites including Spanish single men’s chatrooms, but none of which involved any pressing work as far as we were able to discern. Occasionally he would take a twenty minute break to ignore the hostel’s no smoking policy by lighting up a hand-rolled cigarette in the bathroom. He neither cared to let others use the computer during that time nor to ash his cigarette anywhere but on the ground in the bathroom. He took a brief break around 8 each night to cook himself food leaving both his leftovers and dirty dishes to be found by the cleaning staff the next day.

Undeterred by rude guests we made the most of our time by enjoying everything Rome could offer, especially great architecture and excellent Italian food. We found it interesting that Italian restaurants would have two courses: the first being a pasta dish and the second a meat dish with a side. Restaurants around the touristy areas of Rome (that is to say almost the entire city) stand outside trying to entice potential customers with food and drink specials. On our first evening we were standing in the plaza in front of the Pantheon admiring the exterior as a restaurateur near us had conversations with customers in Italian, French, English, and Spanish. I was just about to point his linguistic prowess out to Kaitlin when I saw him walk up to a Japanese couple reading the menu and say a friendly “Konnichiwa, O-genki desu ka?” or “Good evening, how are you?” Thoroughly impressed, we decided to have dinner there. Just as we were served our first course an accordion band struck up in the plaza and played for almost the entire meal!

Rome is a somewhat overwhelming city to visit. At first it is hard to believe that this is the actual city of the Romans, once arguably the capital of the entire civilized world. It is hard to miss the presence of thousands of years of history in the city. Monuments, landmarks, and ancient buildings are found on nearly every city block spreading out a very far distance from the city center.

It was still a surreal experience to be able to walk down a modern city with shoe stores and restaurants lining the sidewalks and to look to the left and see the forum where Julius Caesar was killed or the field where the great Roman fire began. Rome is known for having several distinct hills in the city that were once a home to the members of powerful governing families such as the Medici. The houses were constantly in a power struggle for control of the city for much of their history and the pope usually found himself in a balancing act to keep the peace. Much of our stay was spent walking around the city learning of its history and seeing the fabulous architecture some of which is centuries old.

Of course no visit to Rome would be complete without seeing the Wonder of the Ancient World found in the city, the Coliseum. After chatting with the staff of our hostel who told us that during the spring the site could become exceptionally crowded we decided to go in the late evening a few hours before it closed. This proved to be a good decision as the lines were fairly short at that time.

One of the most amazing things about the Coliseum is that the structure that one sees today is just the underlying framework of the building. All of the original seating, balconies, and concourses throughout the stadium were made of more fragile material and were either lost to the centuries or reclaimed for other building endeavors. Artist renderings of the show the intricate detail of the structure as it stood centuries ago.

The Coliseum actually has a very interesting history. The site originally was just a normal residential block of the city until the year 64 AD when the Great Roman Fire destroyed much of the quarter including the houses of the aristocracy on nearby Palatine Hill. On the cleared land of the hill and surrounding lowland areas the Emperor Nero designed his grounds and built his palace, the Domus Aurea (literally “Golden House” in Latin). After Nero’s death, his successors built the amphitheater to turn some of the lands of the Domus Aurea into a place for the people of the city to use, probably to help shake off some of the bad rap that the emperors got after Nero’s rule.

The tickets to the Coliseum also gave us access to the adjacent Roman Forum, a large park that is home to many old preserved architectural sites including active archeological digs. In the park we walked among houses of Roman nobility and their gardens, an old sports pitch that was still almost fully intact, and a stretch of the massive aqueduct that once carried water into the city from the far away countryside.

Among the preserved sites we encountered active digs with archeologists slowly cataloging finds in their sites. As with the rest of the ancient part of the city, the level of complexity in the architecture was astonishing. Despite being several thousand years old a large part of the structures still stood to this day (obviously with a little help from preservationists over the years). Just to engineer something as the aqueduct system must have taken a great knowledge of physics, architecture, and mathematics impressive for the day and age in which they were constructed.

Before we could leave the city we had to make a trip to the smallest country in the world, Vatican City. Lying in the northwest corner of the city, the head of the Roman Catholic Church had long been just another part of the city in Rome. In 1929, the Vatican was split for the rest of the city and made an independent city governed by the pope alleviating many socio-political problems caused by the conflict between the government and the pope.

The approach to the Vatican was impressive. Crossing over the Tiber, the road ahead of you leads straight to St. Peter’s Square with the Basilica and the city directly in front of you. Of course, most of the Vatican is not open to tourists, the only things that we could visit that day were the Vatican Museum and St. Peter’s Basilica. Security into the city was tight and everyone was made to wait in a queue to pass through metal detectors and to have one’s bags scanned.

In addition to the modern security officers at the entrance, one could find the Swiss Guards throughout the city guarding the entrances to important buildings in their traditional striped baggy dress and carrying large pointed pikes. Of course, if any situation calls for more than a sharp stick the guards also have a well-stocked arsenal of assault rifles just in case.

Our visit inside of Basilica di San Pietro took a while due to the volume of people going through. It was difficult to take a photo that captured either the size or intricate details of the building. Afterwards we made our way down to the Tomb of the Popes, a solemn and plainly decorated grotto beneath the basilica which contains the tombs of many popes from Peter to John Paul II. We also found it interesting that Vatican City is the home to the only ATMs in the world with Latin as a selectable display language.

Around the late afternoon of our last day in Rome I took a long look at our tourist guide for the city. After three days filled with walking, we had only made a dent in all that one could see. The city was simply too big and too historical. Taking solace in the awesome things we did get to see and do we boarded the train to the airport early the next morning to head to our next city.

Le Sud de France

French Riviera, a set on Flickr.

Marseille, Nice, Monanco, and other villages in the French Riviera.

Paris Abandonnée

Abandoned Things in Paris, a set on Flickr.

Paris Abandonnée

Hey All,

This week has been especially busy with finals approaching and projects coming due. I finished my last project for my microprocessors class, a working reproduction of the electronic game Simon of the 1980s programmed from scratch. Our electronics class combines the theory of semiconductor devices with labs where we have to design and test practical applications. The only thing I don’t like about the course is the lab section is at 8am, and playing around with high voltages when still half asleep is never a good thing. Today in electromagnetism we worked on another study in optics where we used a pulsed laser to send audio signals through air. We hooked up my laptop and were playing music using the lasers across a distance of several feet. With the semester ending soon, I have been trying my best to make an effort to explore the city while I still can.

The best thing about being in a city for several months is that you get the chance to explore parts that not even the most ambitious tourists venture out into. Since I arrived I had been hearing about an abandoned railroad that ran through a large part of the city. Finally deciding to look into it I discovered that the railroad indeed existed, it is the former Chemin de Fer de Petite Ceinture (translated as The Little Belt Railway). True to its name, it once made a complete ring around the city in the outer arrondissments serving mainly to link the main train stations into Paris with the rest of the city. Built before the turn of the 19^th century, it saw a decent amount of use until the 1930s when the expanding subway system’s efficiency rendered it obsolete. With the city already built up around its corridor, once the railway fell out of use it simply became abandoned as it is to this day.

The rail corridor is still public property and is posted ‘No Trespassing’ but we couldn’t give up the chance to take a peak at the Paris of over one hundred years ago. We took the metro out to the 19^th arrondissement to one of the best parks in the city, Buttes Chaumont. Transformed into an English gardens from an old landfill and execution site, it boasts a landscape of steep hills, a waterfall and grotto, and a good view of the north of the city. Hopping a fence from the park we climbed down into the railway long overgrown with grass. We were lucky to have a good flashlight with us (thanks, Dad!) since the tunnels were still intact.

Heading southwards towards the Seine we found the old relics of an operating train system still intact. Signaling lights, switches in the tracks, and control booths were slowly decaying away. All were built in a style that one could tell was very old. The railway ran through the backyards of the outskirts of Paris proper neighboring apartment buildings and crossing over roads on rusted bridges. Aside from a few homeless and a couple of other urban explorers, we were the only ones in the railway.

The coolest parts were the stations and platforms that still lined the track. The pavement on either sides of the track was now cracked and overgrown with weeds, but one could tell that they were once in use and vibrant. A few old staircases up or down to the track were intact and locked with a gate. One of the coolest railway stations we found was built on a bridge overlooking the track in with a large glass window and stairs down to the platform. The station had been bought and was made into someone’s house, as we looked in we could see a kitchen and living room through the grand window. Another station we found was long abandoned and covered in graffiti but still accessible from the track.

Walking all the way to the Seine we ran into the intersection with Gare de Lyon, an active rail station linking Paris with the south of France. Not wanting to trespass on a railway that anyone actually cared about, we exited the railway and took the subway back. Aside from a few sections that have been reclaimed or merged for a few miles with other parts of the Parisian rail system the Petite Ceinture still winds through the landscape just like it did decades ago.

I also was able to check out another place just off the beaten path. On either side of the city are two large parks, Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes each several times larger than Hyde park in London. They hold racetracks, playgrounds, and sports centers along with acres and acres of woods and trails for walking and riding. In 1907, Bois de Vincennes was also the venue for a large event in the purpose built Jardins Tropical. Buildings were built for the event to house the many animals from across the globe that were on display. An even more popular display than animals were people, native tribesmen of France’s explored or conquered lands that were exhibited in their ‘natural’ habitats.

Today the buildings of the tropical gardens are still tucked away in a corner of Bois de Boulogne though in disrepair from the ages and their exotic plants overtaken by native ones. Walking amongst the paths you can still see all of the buildings much as they were during the fair. The main concourse of the event was now overgrown with grassy fields. It was a cool glimpse back at Paris of a previous century. 

This afternoon we had a final meeting with the staff of the FAME program to discuss the past semester and collect photos and testimonies for the website. It’s hard to believe that we had a similar meeting just five months ago welcoming us to France and telling of the semester to come. However, I still have time before finals and my plane back home and intend to make the best of it. I also promise to finish writing about my travels, including Italy and Germany before I leave. Until then, take care all.

-Adam