VARIOUS CITIES (SOME ARGUABLY TOWNS), France — The first time I visited France, I was on the subway when a woman and a group of elementary school–aged girls rushed into the car. It was midday; I was confused, but assumed nothing. Everyone in the seats stood, which is the usual habit for making space in a train car; the chairs by the door fold up, making room on busier trains.
An East Asian woman who was sitting in one of those chairs, whom I noticed because she spent much of the ride engaging in French-style PDA with her partner, leaned back over to me and said, in Mandarin, “Tell your friends to be careful.” By friends, she meant my sisters, who were a bit squished to the back of the train car but otherwise untouched. Be careful about what? I told her that I thought they were doing fine, and then she elaborated: “They are trying to trick them.”
I conveyed this message to my sisters, also in Mandarin. The warning was more confusing than informative; the general message was urgency. We arrived at the next stop. The group of children once again rushed out, and then rushed back in the next door. Then there was a call from the crowd on our side, “Attention, pickpocket!”
The woman leaned back over and said to me, in English, “They target Asians.”
Not racist, of course. You can’t fault a pickpocketing gang of children for their ability to clock tourists—that’s just good business practice—though the usual demographics in France make it easier to draw the mental heuristic between Asian, specifically East Asian, and tourist. A later debrief revealed they had asked for directions in clumsy English; a girl had grabbed my little sister’s hand and touched her rings. Unfortunately, we had nothing worth stealing, which almost made an attempted pickpocketing just another experience of France’s rich culture, except for the off-putting sensation that dogged me for the rest of the day, of being so obvious. That is, being so comprehensively read and not knowing enough to prevent it, which can only be rectified by doing and learning.
I often feel self-conscious when I ride the New York City subway, which is probably a psychological issue considering, in the words of my sister, the sort of characters you see on the New York City subway. If I were to try to explain, I would say that looking lost while navigating a subway station is the easiest way for people to clock that your presence is either 1. illegitimate (faux local) or 2. a general irritation (tourist), and shift their disdain accordingly. This is unfortunate, because it is very easy to get or look lost on the New York City subway. Also, it’s a dumb fear, fueled by a general tendency toward self-consciousness; the simple fact is that other people simply don’t care that much about people’s business, unless they are trying to pickpocket you.
The previous two global trips I had taken were to China and Japan, which boasted clean, easily navigable stations, and an ease of blending in, at least demographically. There are still tells. A very different sense of casual, popular fashion (much cleaner cut, more monochrome); in Japan, talking on the train. It takes a little extra lifting in France, though it’s a bit easier traveling alone than with your whole family. This summer, while I was in Paris alone, I stayed with a college friend, Australian by primary residency, American by higher education, French on their mother’s side of the family, fluent. They mentioned having to eliminate the American habit of smiling upon making eye contact, and after about two years, they’d more or less gotten there.
It was good to be armed with the legitimacy of visiting and/or traveling with a French friend. But while wandering alone, it was time to engage in a game of pretend. Memorizing routes well enough to not be staring at the phone and so on. One would hardly want to reveal themselves as an American by publicly drinking water. As it turns out, I too would rather permanently wreck my kidneys than try to navigate the public bathroom situation in France.
France has not yet moved past the discursive move of, “Where are you from-from?” though it is occasionally more honestly framed as, “What are your origins?” My friend’s roommate, a middle-aged woman who works in the film industry and welcomed me with a bottle of red wine, told me that her own mother was Vietnamese; she visits Vietnam every other year or so. She usually bikes everywhere because she hates the subway.
Tell a Parisian that you love their Metro and they will often respond with skepticism and point to delays and cancellations. An answer to that is, “Try SEPTA,” though it is xenophobic to wish that upon a European. In her case, it was all the bodies. People pushing and shoving; no sense of respect for others.
You take for granted the fundamental act of occupying space with other people until put in a new situation, like being in a country where people do not walk on escalators. The worst of this in France took place not on a subway, but at an open studio at an artist’s residency where a clutter of the artist’s guests and strangers were milling about, which is to say broadly standing about, in a relatively enclosed space. Walking from point A to point B was a nightmare. There was an impressive lack of give in a group of people not dense enough to become a solid medium.
The subway, meanwhile, never bothered me with crowding or delays or cancellations, though I also rode it very little, and typically at off hours, in favor of walking everywhere. (31,000 steps in one day must be a new record for me; 20,000 steps as an average over a week definitely so.) Except for the horrors of parsing Châtelet station when my little phone did not list an exit that was on the signposted exits, the metro had pretty much everything you’d expect from a great system—some automatic lines and automatic gates, rapid headways that mean you really don’t need to run for a subway train unless you’re about to miss a real train, the occasional old train that you have to press a button to make the doors open for the variety—paired with very disappointing accessibility accommodations and a clunky fare system that, should you tap into the wrong side of the track, locks you out of accessing the other side once you leave.
If you cannot communicate and explain your situation in French, the best way to rectify this situation without fare-evading—which would increase preexisting disdain toward your people (Chinese tourists/tourists of Chinese origin/American tourists/American tourists of Chinese origin/presumably anyone who can be taken as an American tourist of Chinese origin)—is to happen to have a second Navigo card on hand and eat the double fare by adding new tickets to that one. Now that’s problem-solving.
There was some concern about my plan to go to Le Mans the weekend of the MotoGP race. Railworkers were planning a strike, though in the end, 90 percent of trains were running as expected. It served as a helpful little prompt to read a history of leftist organizing and a versement mobilité tax that helped France rescue its transit system from disaster.
Getting to Le Mans from Paris is easy, even on a solid four hours of sleep. It helped that I got to pet a cat—Nika, a tiny, beautiful girl who is, quote, “deeply manipulative”—before I left. Upon arriving at Montparnasse, I walked down several moving walkways, apparently also known as travelators, and navigated the nebulous hall descriptions to find my TGV (train à grande vitesse) direct to Le Mans. Newer lines operate at 320 kilometers per hour, which make them some of the fastest commercial lines in the world.
I was one of the first to find my assigned seat. A while before the train was set to leave, an older Chinese man sitting behind me stood up and asked, first, if I spoke Chinese, and second, if he was where he was supposed to be. You had to scan a ticket to even get on the train, but I understood any form of overcaution. I was no authority on the matter, but I checked his ticket: a 7:44 a.m. train, though he was going to Angers Saint-Laud, and I was not sure about the other stops on the train beyond Le Mans. I confirmed, tentatively, and corrected him on exactly which seat he was supposed to sit in.
He asked me, afterward, “Miss, where are you going?” Nowadays, people informally use 美女 to mean “Miss”; if you aren’t accustomed to it, it’s like being called “pretty lady” as a casual form of address. (The male equivalent is 帅哥, or “handsome guy.”) I told him I was going to Le Mans, the first stop, and then, just in case, asked to see his ticket to make sure I hadn’t misread the date and time and car and seat number. After sitting back down, I psyched myself out again: What if I confirmed the wrong train, and stranded this man? I sucked up the embarrassment of asking to see his ticket a third time, and really, truly made sure that I wasn’t leading him astray. It was, at least, good to feel useful, before the inevitability of feeling stupid and lost in a new place, in a few hours’ time.
There are two brands of high-speed rail in France. One is inOui, a premium brand of high-speed rail. Then there is Ouigo, a subsidiary of SNCF, the French state-owned railway company, which runs a budget service of both normal- and high-speed trains. You have to buy tickets online, as opposed to from kiosks. Beyond the color palette, a bright pink and light blue that’s cute if you don’t mind the garishness, there’s not all that much difference between the actual riding experiences, or, at least, an hour’s length is not enough to notice the lack of amenities or care about the lack of first class.
I did not use the bathroom, assuming that the station would have a nicer one. Big mistake! The station did have a bathroom, and I had to pay 50 cents for it. That’s what you get for drinking water.
Everyone is always asking me how the wayfinding within Le Mans circuit is, compared to SEPTA five years ago. It’s worse! I would personally not recommend wading through signless paths and campsites filled with swathes of drunk racegoers in an attempt to locate the exit, but one can only learn by doing.
To offset, here is an incomplete list of some nice strangers I met at Le Mans: a team member I stumbled upon in my first day trying to locate the paddock, who saw me somewhere I was most certainly not supposed to be, and helped me to where I was supposed to go; all of the circuit staff I clumsily asked for directions in an amalgam of English and repetitions of “tramway” and “porte est,” who helped me to the best of their ability; and a French journalist I befriended who later told me that it could be a pain in the ass to get to the circuit without a car. Again: Learn by doing.
The Le Mans tram, while perhaps unequipped to handle masses of people at peak hour even with their upped 10-minute headways, was very functional outside of peak hours, and also featured one of the tiniest dogs that I’ve ever seen, with a striking resemblance to a coworker’s housemate. I initially planned on tramming back to the station on Sunday, but my French journalist friend had coincidentally booked the same train back to Paris from Le Mans, a two-plus hour slow train, and she offered to drive me after the race. So for the first time since arriving, I sat in traffic as we crawled our way to the station, before she followed some more experienced drivers through local roads to skip some of the congestion.
There is not much to say about the slow train back from Le Mans, other than the fact that the listed time differed from the actual time. For some reason, the listed time said it would take over three hours to arrive at Montparnasse compared to the legitimate, much more reasonable two-hours-and-fifteen minutes. It was one of the physically longest trains I think I’ve seen, and when two trains passed each other they made one of the craziest sounds I’ve ever heard, a high-pitched awkward BLAT, which I imagine is the sound a train would make if it could fart.
After my time in Paris and Le Mans, I spent a week in Grenoble. Three separate Parisians asked what on earth there was to do for a week in Grenoble. After spending a week in Grenoble, here is the official answer: Ride TGV to the city (an exactly three-hour trip, riding inOui this time), walk, watch rugby, visit some of the many free museums in the city, ride a bubble up to La Bastille, walk some more, ride the tram, Chartreuse, and ride TGV back.
Despite being in the mountains, Grenoble is one of the flattest cities in France. Because of its position in the basin of the mountains, which is what makes it one of the flattest cities in France, it is also one of the most polluted cities in France. It is so easy to get around in Grenoble proper via walking—including a visit to a sports stadium to watch rugby—that so long as you live within walking distance of the train station and don’t need to regularly access places far across town, you have to go out of your way to take the tram.
Along with the cultural experience of 10 little museums comes the cultural experience of a well-functioning tram in a small city that makes cars a surprise, rather than the norm, along certain streets. This, in turn, makes public life involving eating, drinking, and walking so much more pleasant. A natural wine tasting at Saint-Égrève, a commune (French unit of administrative division, not the other type) that forms part of the Grenoble urban area, was advertised in a board-game café bathroom. As it turns out, it was readily accessible over the weekend via a tram with 20-minute headways; separate enough to be a little irritating for planning purposes, but considering the circumstances, not enough to complain.
I attended on a whim with my friend who was temporarily living in Grenoble, as two people who were not very interested in wine in general and natural wine in particular, and one person in particular who was primarily interested in taking the tram. The worst part of the journey was navigating an odd intersection-roundabout situation to get to the tram station. The second-worst part of the journey was trying to buy a ticket and discovering they only allowed for packs of 10. This time the situation was rectified by buying an additional ticket on my friend’s phone. At the wine tasting, we stopped by a stand with a man from Grenoble who now lived in the south of France with his girlfriend. He walked us through his natural wines, and then asked why my friend was choosing to spend her months in the city. Upon learning she had family there, he said, “Ah, I understand now. I mean, out of all the places in France—Grenoble?”
In Le Mans, there is a massive cathedral that serves as a detection point for locals and tourists: Anyone from Le Mans hardly acknowledges its presence, while the visitors at least point and comment. Similarly, I imagine that locals in Grenoble do not pause every single time they see a mountain and then take a photo or point and say, “Mountain.”
We briefly forayed further into those mountains in order to explore the rich cultural history of Voiron, namely Chartreuse. The transit involved a twenty minute walk to the train station, where we rode a flat fare TER train—effectively regional rail—that took us from Grenoble station to Voiron in about fifteen minutes. Prior to the tour at Caves de la Chartreuse, I knew one thing about Chartreuse, beyond the taste: Chartreuse monks. I wished to know more about them.
For a roughly seven-euro train fare and 12-euro tour, you too can learn a lot about Chartreuse monks. For one, Chartreuse monks are actually Carthusian monks, an enclosed religious order of the Catholic church, who received a recipe of 130 herbs, which they made into an elixir that predated the Chartreuse liqueur. The recipe is highly secret. Two monks know all of the herbs, while a third knows about the liqueur-making process. They are not allowed to travel together, so as to not risk losing the recipe. The history of Chartreuse is also a French religious history: The Chartreuse monks have been expelled twice from the country, and fought against imitations in their absence, though they handled those matters with good business acumen.
After asking, hypothetically, how one would become a Carthusian monk, we were told that you had to be between the ages of 23 and 35 and the whole process takes about seven years. We, being between the ages of 23 and 35, contemplated the feasibility of becoming Carthusian monks and living in the mountains to make Chartreuse, but then decided that our primary motivation being Chartreuse as opposed to prayer and reflection might be disqualifying.
The gift shop contained bottles of Chartreuse; the bar had various Chartreuse cocktails. We shared two Chartreuse cocktails, had some walnuts, and then walked back under the bright sun to ride the train back to Grenoble. That’s an experience you can’t have in a car.
One week in a city is not enough to lose the charm of regularly seeing mountains, but it is enough to gather some familiarity: recognize the particularly aggressive fountain at that street corner, develop a fondness for a coffee shop. By the second time we went to Voiron for continued celebrations of the Chartreuse festival, we were familiar with the route. Partway there, the pressure changes as you pass through a tunnel. That becomes a timing mechanism for knowing how close we were to the next stop.
As it turns out, you don’t need a weeks’ worth of taking trains in order to get familiar with that route. Once to Grenoble gives you the general idea of what you’re going to get going back: a smooth ride with a lot of French countryside, and many tunnels through a mountain. The difference between being on a long-haul train as opposed to a subway ride is that on the former, by its nature, everyone is going somewhere else where they are naturally less familiar. That’s a neutralizing factor. Everyone, too, passes through and feels their ears pop.