♫ Let's go to sleep in
Paris LONDON,
And wake up in
Tokyo PARIS… ♫
-------
Somehow I was fortunate enough to find myself across the pond in April. Unfortunately, I only had about a little over 36 hours in London, and barely 48 hours in Paris, so I didn’t have much time to explore too far off the beaten path. Hopefully, I’ll have the chance to return to both cities at some point in the future and do a better job of exploring them with my camera.
(And yes, I’m using the inclusion of Paris as an excuse to post this thread in the M-Z section, since most of my recent threads have ended up in the A-M section)
First up, LONDON:
This guy didn’t like having his picture taken…
In the center (or centre!) of the image, you can see Westfield London, appropriately located in West London. This shopping center opened in October 2008,
and was constructed at a cost of £1.6 billion. The 43 acre is the currently the largest mall in London, but only the 3rd largest in the UK.
The largest mall in all of Europe, the Westfield Statford is under construction across town and is set to open later this year (2011) right next door
to the Olympic Stadium, and will be 10% larger than the mall you see above.
I’ve been lucky enough to visit London about a half-dozen times, so I’m pretty familiar with the city. However, it’s almost impossible to have seen it all,
and there’s a whole lot I haven’t seen. I particularly wanted to explore more of the East End, since I haven’t spent a lot of time out there.
Plus there’s a lot of construction and regeneration going on around
Stratford & the Lower Lea Valley in preparation for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games. I also wanted to see the famous Heygate Estate in
Elephant & Castle before the wrecking ball comes through in a few weeks,
but anyway, who cares? Enough with that ...
On to PARIS!
This dude was a boss! I wish my clumsy ass had a fraction of the athletic acrobatic talent that he has…You’ll see a couple more pictures of aspiring
professional soccer star Iya Traoré in this thread. If you want to know more about him and see a couple of videos, check out his website:
http://www.iya.fr/
While the piss-soaked Paris Metro is efficient in performing the basic service of moving people from point A to B, there are definitely areas for improvement.
One of them (which I just alluded to) is the fact that in almost every other station (on the lines I rode, at least) there was a strong odor of fermented urine (and occasionally urine mixed with a sauerkraut-like order) in walkways and corridors. In some places (even large train stations like Gare du Nord & Gare Saint-Lazare, you could actually see yellow piddle puddles –sometimes in the middle of a hallway, instead of some inconspicuous corner.
I know this must be connected in some way to the lack of public toilet facilities (especially free ones) in Europe, but I’ve been to other cities in Europe, and I’ve never noticed any major city with such a pervasive problem in this area. I have vivid memories of riding the New York City subway (which is often derided as a cesspool of filth) going back to the late 1980’s and I never remember encountering that smell in as many places as I did in Paris last month.
Also, after scrubbing the subway clean, could the Metro please add a few more escalators? Particularly ones that go in both directions….Instead of just one that only goes up? You know, like London has in almost every single station? Walking ten minutes through an endless labyrinth of tunnels just to transfer from one train to the next while carrying two 35 pound suitcases was delightful enough, but navigating an obstacle course that forces you to walk up and down steep steps, because elevators are often too far between to find, is laying it on pretty thick.
God help you if you’re trying to ride the Metro and you happen to be handicapped.
GATHER ‘ROUND KIDS, IT’S STORY TIME!
Totally by chance, I decided to disembark from the Metro at Strasbourg Saint-Denis, which led to me out right in front of this 17th century medieval gate, you see in this photo above. My curiosity lead me to walk the street away from the monument, and as I raised my camera in the air, about to change lenses…I saw a woman, plastered in multiple layers of makeup, sporting a bright yellow fur around her neck-- BOLT upright from the wall in the alley that she was leaning on…and started screaming at me: “NoNoNoNONO!!!!OHNono!!!SdnfytThoabwkfir nLdj!jUDFDoeeOUrrxzaAAie! …or at least something to that effect (Je ne parle pas français).
While this was happening, some short middle-aged guy walking by, stopped and started speaking to me –of course, I didn’t understand what he said, but I distinctly remember him smiling and slowly shaking his head with the “Awwwwwww….You done fucked up now, ya Yankee tourist twitstick!!!” look on his face.
Then suddenly from the opposite direction, two other scantily-clad women (one with cleavage hanging down to her belly button) rush over from the other side of the street and start yelling at me and jabbing their fingers into the air towards me. A few seconds later, from yet another direction, two more (older-looking) women start charging up the sidewalk at me.
So at this point, my back was facing towards the arch (seen in the photo above) and I was surrounded by 5 women shouting in French at me on three sides. Even though I quickly realized what was going on, I just stood there sort of dumbfounded and detached, watching all of this escalate so rapidly around me in disbelief (in the middle of a beautiful day on a pretty picturesque street in Paris, no less). It almost felt like I was watching a movie.
My survivor skills didn’t really kick in until the original chick, the one in who started screaming in the first place because she thought I was trying to take her picture, put her hand on my camera. It was at that point, her hand got swatted away and I quickly started walking down the street away from the group of angry whores...Of course, being a fully evolved, mature adult, I couldn’t resist shouting a few choice words at them in English as I walked away. Even though my mood was soured at that point, I forced myself to pull out the camera when I got further down the street and take some pictures, in order to distract myself from what the F just happened.
Even though I know I was lucky to get out of the situation without a scratch, I still kind of regret the fact that I didn’t get any secret pictures of the any of the women while all the drama went down...There’s a petty juvenile part of me wants to go back to Paris just to show up on that same street with a well-armed flash mob of photographers, just to settle the score...lol.
Oh and the street in question, which I unwittingly ended up on? Just happened to be the most notorious prostitution street in the country : Rue Saint-Denis.
Taken from a passing Metro train on the 1 Line, crossing over the Seine, from Courbevoie into Neuilly-sur-Seine, heading towards Paris city proper.
Just…because.
Graffiti on subway
Fun fact: If you travel from England to France by coach bus, you will eventually cross the English Channel by train anyway. Doesn’t make any sense? Well, each bus or car is driven into a separate carriage compartment on a car shuttle train, operated by Eurotunnel. The carriages are pressurized and separated from one other by fireproof doors. The parked coach bus rides the shuttle train along with other buses, cars, trucks, motorcycles and even bicyclists. The shuttle train completes it’s journey through the Chunnel in approximately 35 minutes. As you can see, passengers are free to get up and walk through the carriage compartments (There are several restrooms aboard the train cars).
Hmmm. This looks familiar
I didn't notice the Amber Rose stunt double until I after I got home.
I tried to make a concerted effort to position myself in the right place in the right time to take in a nice panoramic view of the city with my
camera around sunset for the two nights I stayed in Paris.
On both nights my efforts resulted in tragically hilarious consequences…On the first night, I planned to head over to Tour Montparnasse,
which I know from prior experience has an open-air rooftop observation deck atop the 59th floor which is perfect for slow shutter speed shots
taken at night. After rushing to get there, and arriving just as the sun was setting,
I arrived only to be told by the ticket agent that the roof deck was closed –currently under renovation until June.
The following night, I planned to head to the top the Arc De Triomphe
at dusk, and after killing time on the Champs Elysee waiting for the sun to set, I finally arrived at the Arc, only to see this sign:
#FAIL.
You read that right. Paris hates me. Of course, the damn thing was open the previous day, when I chose to go to Tour Montparnasse instead.
Well, as a small consolation I will post (for the first time, sadly) some pictures I took from the top during my first visit to the city, back in 2007. I’ll only post two, since this thread is already close to collapsing under it’s own weight already...
La Fin.
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