Vignettes from Paris #3
We had a great time on our recent 10-day trip to Paris, make no mistake about it. It was relaxing, adventurous, rejuvenating, invigorating, educational and fun.
We did have a couple of quibbles, though. The first was the fact that just about everyone in the city smokes. They don’t seem to have gotten the message that has been delivered with so much conviction on this side of the Atlantic. Most restaurants allowed smoking. In some cases they did have smoking and non-smoking sections, but there wasn’t much to separate them. For example, people sitting outside on the sidewalk could smoke and those inside couldn’t, but since these places usually had the windows open facing the streets, that didn’t isolate us from secondhand smoke very much. I jokingly twisted the city’s nickname into the City of Lighters and that stuck. We grew more tolerant of it as the week went on, but it still baffled us how the smoking rate could be so high.
The other thing that astonished us but didn’t affect us directly most of time was the pandemonium that is Paris driving (and the subset of this, Paris parking). While drivers were generally observant of crosswalks, they often dashed right up to them and slammed on the brakes at the last moment, which was a tad worrying. How far does a person trust their brakes or their reaction times? As the days passed, we grew bolder in crossing streets, learning when it was safe to jaywalk. There were also a couple of fairly large intersections–one near the Trocadero, for example–that didn’t have any crosswalk lights, so you had to edge out into the street and trust that drivers would eventually stop when you got far enough into the pavement. There, too, we grew bolder and more aggressive.
The most astonishing scene was the roundabout at l’arc de triomphe, part of which is pictured above from atop the arc. Twelve major roads run into the roundabout forming l’etoile (the star). There are no lane markers once vehicles enter the roundabout. Traffic entering the circle have the right of way, it seems, which means that cars going around have to stop to let them in. It was a little like watching ants crawling over a syrup spill. Cars went in every direction possible, darting across each other’s bumpers (front and back), stopping and starting. Amazingly, we never saw an accident there. It’s hard to believe that it works, but it seems to.
Most travel guides recommend tourists not to drive in the city, in part because of the manic traffic and in part because parking is so difficult to find. There are a lot of very small cars (SmartCars, little Fiats, Cooper Minis) and they are parked nose-to-butt along every street. Parallel parking skills are a must. We did see a lot of drivers using their senses of touch to park, by which I mean bumping into the cars parked on either side of the vacancy. Some of the SmartCars chose perpendicular parking instead: they’re small enough that they can pull in perpendicular to the sidewalk in a very narrow space and not jut out onto the street.
