The Institution of Civil Engineers, in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the birthThomas Telford, has launched a blog in the name of that great Scottish engineer. The blog will contain extracts from diary entries and letters by Telford, the ICE’s first president. I have to confess that though Telford is credited with thousands of structures, a great number of which remain standing, I do not know enough about him. I hope that this blog will help me fill some gaps!
Today I sat the final exam for what has probably been the most enjoyable course that I have studied during the last four years, the ambitiously titled “History of Construction”. The course took place not at Les Ponts, but at the neighbouring architecture school EAMLV
The lecturer expertly lead us through building sites from Egypt to Millau and described building materials as diverse as granite and linoleum. But what got me really excited about the course was being in a room full of real live architects. All those asymmetrical haircuts, those interesting glasses. From the outset I fully expected to see my own haircut lose its symmetry and that my sight should deteriorate sufficiently for me to make a purchase at the opticians. I imagined myself sitting among the trendies, smoking cigarettes with my new friends (smoking is clearly an initiation rite).
In the end, it didn’t quite work out like that. On the plus side, the lectures were excellent and really quite inspiring: it constantly reminded me of all that stuff about why I went into engineering. I have to say that unlike my other exams here, this one wasn’t such a hit and miss affair. But lets look at the bad side… I left the architecture school for the last time looking less trendy than I did at the outset (I got dressed in the dark this morning), my eyesight is just as good as it was before, and I haven’t managed to give up “not smoking”. As for new architect friends, well there was this one guy who I was chummy with, who used to say hi and stuff, but when it came to saying goodbye, both of us knew there was no need to exchange emails. All I could muster when shaking his hand was a feeble “on se revoit sur un chantier un jour” (see you one day on a building site). Disaster.
When Haussmann was busy tearing down and rebuilding large swathes of Paris, he wasn’t doing it all by himself. His chief engineer was this fellow, M Alphand. In this portrait by Alfred Roll, he is standing on the building site of the Petit Palais in 1888. Appropriately, it is now hanging in pride of place in the Petit Palais. As far as our history of art lecturer is aware, it is in the only portrait of an engineer in Paris.
The Petit Palais is an interesting place, although not as immediately so from a structural point of view as its glass-domed big brother opposite, the Grand Palais. This mock classical building has frescoes on its ceiling that, first time round, failed to draw my attention. On a second lap however, I was invited to take a closer look at these paintings. Sure, there were the cherubs floating around, but the clouds in which they were flying were not in fact clouds, but smoke rising from factories in one corner, and a steam train in the other. Progress!
We have just had the first of two earthquake engineering exams, and this one was hard! Revision for the exam was doubly frustrating: firstly because the key topics that we had been told would be on the list had been well hidden among three dense handouts; secondly because of all the twenty topics on the list, only two came up. Still, I am at least pleased that I didn’t waste too much time revising last night as none of the subjects that I would have studied came up anyway. This may be a reactionary comment admittedly, but I seriously advise anyone thinking of coming here next year to think twice about studying this subject.
This exam has been preventing me thinking about the rest of the term and now that it is over things are looking more rosy! Next week Dan and I will be sitting the History of Construction exam at the architecture school. I don’t think I have ever looked forward to an exam more: we will be asked to draw and annotate sketches of buildings ranging from the pyramids to the Milleau Viaduct. I do this kind of thing on holiday!
More exams like this please, and less involving a calculator.
Today I developped the film that I shot while in the south of France over Christmas. It is magical watching the images appear out of nothing in the developping fluid. I was really happy with this set and I hope to be printing some full sized images tomorrow rather than just a contact sheet. ENPC paid for the film and for all the developping chemicals, and now that I know who holds the key to the dark room, there is no stopping me…
hello readers I would like to apologise for the lack of posts of late. This blog was meant to be about engineering and my life in Paris. Well, it seems that I have been rather too successful at engineering myself a life in Paris to have the time to write it all down. But all that will change as New Year and its concomitant resolutions beckon. In the mean time, joyeuse fête! Eiffelover 
Thursday 2nd November – Friday 3rd November
The platform at Sofia station from which my train was due to leave was lit only by the dingy light coming from the carriages. Onboard I was greeted by a big friendly sleeping car attendant. I had stumped up the few extra euros to pay for a bed in a three bunk compartment and to my delight it seemed I would have all three bunks to myself. My accommodation for the night was more deluxe than the previous night’s, coming with more kitsch features such as the fold out basin in the corner and a full length wardrobe. It was a real luxury to be able to hang out my clothes albeit for a few hours.
As I ate my dinner of Serbian bread and tomato paste accompanied with Bulgarian pickles from a jar, I tried to make some sense of my day. I think that the hassle at the station in the morning had set me off on a bad foot and then nothing else that I saw or experienced really cheered me up. A few hours in a place is not enough to form any valid opinion – I would need to stay much longer there to do so. Unfortunately, my experience is unlikely to inspire me to choose to go back to Bulgaria in a hurry when there are so many other places that I want to visit.
At around midnight the train reached the border. This time there were five different groups of officials who came into my cabin. One, quite young looking official just came in and stared at me for what seemed like an eternity before I said to him “I have nothing to declare” and then he went away apparently satisfied. I was left wondering what all these people will do when Romania and Bulgaria are both members of the E.U. and these borders become completely open.
I woke up half an hour before the train was due to arrive at Bucharest Gara de Nord. Outside the was nothing but blackness. There was not a light to be seen in the Romanian countryside. I dozed off for a bit and awoke with a jolt at the station. I couldn’t afford to miss my stop, much as I wanted to stay onboard to the train’s final destination: Moscow!
Related posts
Thursday 2nd November
Regular readers of this blog may be either frustrated that I have not posted any entries recently. Or thy may think I got lost in Sofia and have never come back. But no no, all is well, and I’ve just been a bit busy. You know how it is…
So back to Sofia…
When I got off the train I was not really prepared for the crowd of people around the door all offering me help. Most were wearing badges that bore their photo and the words “Official Information”. Very convincing. Thinking that I could do without their help I bounded off down the subway into the quite overbearing and immense communist era station complex. Its enormous hall is decorated along its length on one side by a twisted steel fresco depicting eagles and stars and all sorts of Soviet fun. Accidently going to the wrong ticket counter (I was immediately buying my ticket to leave – not because I had already written off Sofia but because I was only meant to be staying one night there and I didn’t want to miss the train that evening) I was clearly identified as a lost tourist and was pounced upon.
Fair enough, I was a bit lost, and my new-found friend insisted on walking me to the international tickets booth, then to the currency exchange place when it turned out the ticket booth didn’t take plastic, then to his mate when it turned out that his mate offered a significantly better exchange rate than the official one, then underground to the locker room where I was shown a locker to put my stuff in, guarded by another of his mates. And then I was asked to give them money for their assistance. Aware that we were alone in this underground space, I didn’t really feel like I had much choice, but it is true that they had helped me find the things I needed in half the time it would otherwise have taken me. I agreed to give them some money but only upstairs as I needed some change (when I needed a one bulgarian monitary unit piece for the locker and only had a fiver, they had taken my fiver, given me the one and pocketed the difference!)
With so little time and no guide book, I reckoned upon doing little more than wander around the town centre and warming myself with regular doses of food and coffee. The centre is a twenty minute from the station along a bleak suburban boulevard. When the mobile phone shops gave way to important looking buildings with flags atop, I was reassured that at least I was heading in the right direction. Feeling the cold, I dipped into a shopping centre for lack of any other shelter. Though Bulgaria is not quite yet in the E.U., the western chains of shops are already well installed, from Miss Sixty through to Timberland and Zara, all of which was quite depressing to see especially when the products are being sold at Parisian prices despite the poverty I had seen coming into town. I quickly left.
Giving up the main streets, I found a friendly and, best of all, warm looking bar selling food. I was feeling low on account of the weather, the hassle at the station and maybe because of a touch of loneliness – nothing however that a beer and an enormous pizza for 1.50€ couldn’t fix. Recharged and re-inspired, I set off again into the snow that was falling thick but not yet settling. I walked through the beautiful houses of the embassy district, I resisted the temptation to buy an accordion from a man in the street, and sat for a while in the serene confines of the basilica.
In a leafy neighborhood bordering the centre I found a shop selling scarfs. Using my best Bulgarian (a language which is closely related to Serbo- Croat) I was able to ask for a scarf that matched my orange shoe laces. The shopkeepers were surprised to hear that it was colder in Sofia than it had been in Belgrade. That scarf however made all the difference, I was toasting!
When I did venture to take my camera out, it was in front of the beautiful state theatre. I was immediately pounced upon by a man who said he had seen me a few blocks back and had been following me to see if I could sell him any currency. It took my some time to shake him off. As night started to fall, I went back to the station, all the time paranoid that my friends from that morning had kindly taken my backpack off of my hands.
Of course, when I got to my locker, all my worldly goods were where I had left them. I later encountered the only tourists that I would see in Bulgaria: a group of Americans and Canadians who hadn’t even planned to come to Sofia. They had been on a night train from Istanbul to Zagreb and had been turfed off at the Macedonian border because they didn’t have the right visas. They had had to spend the night in a prison cell before being put on a train to Bulgaria where they were allowed without a visa.
My last act in as a tourist in Sofia was to buy a bottle of water, to understand the price as it was said to me in Bulgarian, and to manage to use up the last of the tiny coins rattling around in my pocket.
Wednesday 1st Novemeber – Thursday 2nd November
Half an hour later than expected the Belgrade Sofia express night train creaked its way out of the station in the pouring rain. Out of the window I could see signalmen in their signal boxes crowding round televisions to watch the football. To save a bit of cash I had opted for a six-person sleeping compartment (compartments tend to come in twos, threes or sixes, with privacy varying inversely proportionately to beds). As luck would have it however, I had the entire six-person compartment to myself. I took pleasure in using all the little kitsch features in my moving hotel room for the night: the little hooks, reading lights, built in radio and light switches everywhere. Bizarrely I had to ask the attendant for permission to change bed even though I was the only one in the cabin.
I awoke at 4am to bright headlights shining into my cabin from both sides. I had forgotten to close my curtains, and dazzled by the lights, I scrambled to close the curtains without compromising my modesty. Anticipating that we had arrived at the frontier I lay there for some time, maybe half an hour, waiting for the border guards to come into the cabin to check my passport. Being quite drowsy it took me a while to notice the dull metallic clicking sound coming from outside. Finally I got up to find out what was going on. It transpired that my carriage was in fact stopped midway across a level crossing – hence the lights shining in from both sides. The train had hit a car which I could now see shunted over to one side of the road. The clicking sound was the sound of the alarm to warn people that train was coming.
I was able to ascertain that the while hurt, the driver of the car had not been killed. It was a rather unsettling spectacle. My mobile hotel room had unexpectedly arrived in their high street. I felt like an invader; a morbid tourist. There was little else to do except go back to sleep.
When I woke again it was eight and we still hadn’t crossed the border. The train cut its way through steep-sided valleys and as we climbed the rain that been falling since we left Belgrade turned to sleet. We arrived at Dimitrovgrad, the last stop before the border, six hours later than expected. There was little to distinguish this station from a goods yard save for the fact that most of the passengers on board got off here. Shuffling along the ground between the high-sided goods trains, the alighting travellers struggled with heavy suitcases in the sleet, which was now turning to snow – the sinister side of this spectacle didn’t escape me.
With the border guards happy, the train left an hour later towards the frontier. On the road that followed the tracks, a traffic jam of lorries stretched for what must have been several kilometres leading up to the customs point. Sights such as this demonstrate just how much easier trade must be within the Schengen zone. Finally we left the mountains of Serbia and made headway into the brownish high plains of Bulgaria, the rhythm of the rattle of the train on the tracks have changed when we changed country.
Apart from the odd isolated village and an enormous open mine, there was little to see in that barren landscape until the train started to approach Sofia. I could see the city appear on the horizon. First there were tower blocks, but before we reached these, the train went past fields just filled with rubbish. These fields gave way to ramshackle houses typically made up of a solid core supporting lean-tos and tarpaulins. The sight was quite unlike anything else I have seen in Europe. We went past train sidings where carriages stood with trees growing out of them. The train slowed and on either side I could see people walking along the tracks in the direction of the train. Seven hours later than expected, I arrived in Sofia
Wednesday 1st November
Having decided upon taking a detour via Bulgaria, I embarked upon finding out some basics about the country before my train that evening. My first port of call was the Architecture faculty where I met Barabara who was able to get me on line. An hour of searching yielded a map of Sofia city centre, a vocabulary list, an article about Bulgaria’s president (who if I remember correctly is the only democratically elected European head of state who has also been the king of the same countrt) and a key piece of advice from Barbara: in Bulgaria one nods to say “no” and shakes the head from side to side to say “yes”. This latter point proved a bit of a challenge for the old neuro-linguistic programing.
Later that afternoon we met Ana, and after some divine tasting cakes (that ensured I wouldn’t be eating again for at least two days) we scoured that capital for an English language guide to Bulgaria. The main shopping street’s many book shops are well stocked with lonely planets to anywhere you could think of – the Azores, Vietnam, Jamaica, Vancouver Island – everywhere it seemed except Bulgaria. It seemed extraordinary that I couldn’t find any information about the country next door! On the one hand, the prospect of going somewhere off the not-so lonely planet beaten path (as it appearded to me from Serbia) was quite exciting. On the other, it did leave me wondering why so few people, judged purely on the relative number of books detailing the deligts of other local capitals, seem to head next door.
My tireless and ever-resourceful guides took me on a tour of the disused dock area down by the river Salva just before it joins the Danube. The dockside buildings are in the process of being converted into super-trendy galleries and a bar. We had drinks on an almost floating bar – that is to say, it wasn’t floating but on dry land, but from its windows one might think one is afloat- the nearby real floating bar having been booked out for a private function. To help us believe that our bar was in fact floating, we drank coffee laced with booze. It worked.
By early evening, the cold dry spell had given way to rain. I tried to buy my train tickets to Sofia down at the train station, only none of my cards wanted to work. Ana was able to lend me the cash, but I was suddenly worried that I would arrive in Bulgaria with not a euro cent. I tried to do the sums in my head. With the 100€ in my pocket, I might just have been able to buy tickets to take me as far as Budapest from where I already had tickets home booked, as long as I only ate apples along the way. It didn’t bode well.
Luckily however, just when my worst fiscal nightmares had flashed before me, a cash machine finally decided to be nice and give me the dough. Stocked with food for the journey it was time to wait on the dark and dingey platform for the train to take me away. I was sad to be leaving Belgrade. I had had such a great time with my friends and I was in no mood to continue on my own. Ana and I plotted when we would see each other next. When we first met in Ljubljana the year before, it hardly seemed possible that we would meet again, such is the distance from the UK to Serbia. But with two visits to Belgrade since then already in the travel log, the city doesn’t feel that far away. Roll on our next encounter, Paris in the spring…
Tuesday 31st
I first went to Belgrade in this summer enroute to Greece with Mary so I already knew bearings in the city. After a very agreeable lie in I met Ana and Barbara for the start of a more comprehensive tour. We started in their favourite and super trendy coffe shop “Greenet”. We then made our way over to a street on which each of them, as part of a group project on their architectural course, had a house to redevelop. The street has some buildings which are derelict and some which are still inhabitted. The principal question was whether or not to keep any parts of the old buildings or to start afresh.
We continued through the neighbourhood. Belgrade has some beautiful old buildings, some of which are in desparate need of repair. It also has some quite oppressive concrete architecture in a greyey-brown darker than I have seen anywhere else. Down some more side streets and up to the Orthodox Church, the largest (or 2nd largest??) Orthodox church in Sebia. It is still under construction but we were able to stroll inside beneath its souring arches. It looks beautiful from the outside, but what is incredible is the sheer volume contained beneath it’s concrete vaults. Huge slabs of marble lay to the sides waiting to be bolted onto the walls. High above us, workers were busy in the dome above our heads. It was only then that I realised we had happily strolled into the middle of a building site with materials being moved around thirty metres above us and we had no hard hats. Still, if a lump of marble falls on you from that height, there is not a lot a hard hat is going to do…
We traversed back across town and back across the main shopping area to a much older part of town. Enroute we passed the site of another project site for the faculty of architecture. This time it was a busy junction with trams cars and people intersecting in a very tight spot. The project had been to untangle as best as possible the mess. From what Ana and Barbara said, there are a great many architectural contests in the city which must make Belgrade a great place to study architecture. Unfortunately only a handful of them are built as there is just not the money.
Ana had picked out a cosy restaurant for lunch. Ever since arriving in Vienna I had been a bit on the chilly side. I really hadn’t reckonned upon it being this cold, a symptom I suppose of the apparently mild autumn we have been having in Paris. As we ate we were accompanied by a traditional Serbian band comprising a clarinet, accordeon, guitar and double bass. The band would improvise on one tune, and then all of a sudden the accordeon player would change tune and a few moments later, the rest of the band would catch on.
I was left to my own devices while Ana and Barbara went to a design workshop. I spent some time rethinking my itinerary for the rest of the week. I had been due to take the train the next day to the Romanians mountains where I intended to do some hiking, but I was feeling more and more apprehensive about this plan. I was concerned about turning up in northern Romania and finding all the hostels shut. I was also a little nervous about the train connections I would have to make, including one change in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere with a two hour wait in between. With all this mind I had another trawl through the timetables and another plan came to mind. It was thus that I decided to go to Bucarest (not orginially on my itinerary) and to go via Sofia. The plan had the advantage that I wouldn’t have to worry about accomodation as I would be sleeping on night trains (ultra cheap in this region). There was also the added bonus that I could spend an extra half a day in Belgrade.
That evening we undertook a tour Belgrades night spots including a very cool cocktail bar hidden down an alley, up a stair case and behind a very plain looking door that you had to buzz to open before making your way into the brightly lit lounge. While Ana and I were up for a party, I think the rest of Belgrade went to sleep early that evening but that didn’t stop us having a great night chatting until the rather small hours.
Monday 30th continued
When it comes to rail travel in Eastern Europe, Budapest is a hub, which is why this is the third time I have arrived in Budapest by train. I had tried to pick a train time that would have allowed me to have a cheap as chips massage at the thermal baths but it didn’t work out in the end. Budapest also seems to be where fast western european trains stop and slow eastern european trains start. Still on the “Avala”, I appeared to be the only passenger coming from Vienna who stayed on the train. I was accompanied to the border by a lady with enormous reusable tesco bags that seemed to take up half our cabin.
The train trundled south at a sometimes painfully slow pace. The line is only single track so numerous times we had to wait in sidings to let a terribly important train carrying logs go the other way. The platforms also seem to stop in Budapest: anyone getting off the train had to make an heroic leap down to the ground, luggage being caught by loved ones below. I passed time until the border in the luxurious and ludicrously overstaffed restaurant car. I was the only customer and as I drank my coffee, the head waiter, his assistant and the chef sat down to a three course meal on the table next to me.
I think that is in Asne Seierstad’s book “With Their Backs to the World” (that same author wrote “The Bookseler of Kabul”) that one the people featured quips that there must be more border guards patrolling the frontiers within the former Yugoslavia than in the rest of Europe combined. Becoming now almost a frequent traveller in these parts, I must be becoming familiar to many of them, although admittedly they are more likely to recognise me in my pyjamas as I always seem to cross the border in the middle of the night. These midnight border crossings come with a pang of fear that I am going to be kicked off the train for not having the right visa, despite that little access-all-areas purple book that I keep in my back pocket. Indeed last summer when we were travelling from Belgrade to Greece some Canadians were kicked off the train in the middle of the night at the crossing because they didn’t have the write paperwork.
This time however I was crossing in the middle of the afternoon and the whole experience was a whole lot less worrysome although the border guard did question me for some time on my reasons for going to Belgrade. Safely into Serbia, I transferred to the cabin of an elderly lady where I had spotted that there was a socket from which I could charge my camera. My Serbo-Croat is not that hot and she didn’t speak any English. Nevertheless we were able to communicate to some extent. I found out that she was called Elizabeth and was from Bosnia but was now living in Novi-Sad (of excellent music festival fame). I think she understood that I was an engineer. And when I told her I was going to Romania she started waving her hands above her head in alarm. It’s amazing how far you can get without words. (I later foound out that my Serbian is even worse than I thought: upon verification with higher authorities that evening, it appears that I had told Elizabeth that my name was English and I had asked her if she spoke Oliver. Oh well, at least I tried)
We said our goodbyes at Novi Sad, by which time it had already grown dark. There are not many lights in that part of the Serbian countryside and there was nothing but blackness outside my window. Whereas up until Novi Sad, I had always had fellow passengers and hence, somehow, their company, I felt quite alone on that last bumpy hour of the journey. Finally the train rattled its way across the Danube and slowly made its way into Belgrade station. There to meet me on the platform with warm embraces were Ana and Barbara. It had been almost a year since we first met on the IACES exchange to Ljubljana. After a year of promises to come and see them I had finally arrived in their home city, quite exhausted after twenty-eight hours of travel, but with still enough energy for some celebratory beers. Geeverli! (Ana, please advise on the correct spelling!)
Monday 30th October
I must have slept well in my reclining seat as I completely slept through Munich and Saltzburg, although I had been aware of many different people having sat beside me during the night. When I awoke the train – still the Orient Express – was pulling out of Linz. When I had gone to sleep I had been surrounded by people with coats pulled up over their heads to help them sleep but by the time we left Linz these had all been replaced by smart Austrian commuters tapping away at their laptops. It was all rather disconcerting. Between Munich and Vienna the train snakes along the foothills of the Alps, a beautiful site to wake up to. Leafy suburbs appeared and then Vienna rolled into view, looking pristine in the morning sunshine. With an hour and a half to kill I stretched my legs in the vicinity of the station. The first thing that stuck me was how cold the air was and I was cold wearing both of the coats that I was travelling with. Only they day before I had been in Paris wearing a t-shirt!
Wien Westbahnhoff is a bright and airy mordernist station with large windows that bathe the quitely ciruclating masses in morning sunlight. All around me seem very relaxed, almost noislessly moving from platform to platform. Time for a coffee and to stock up on provisions and then it was straight onto my next train, the 10am “Avala” to Belgrade.
In contrast to the western side of Vienna the landscape to the Danube Valley to the east is wide and flat. Between the capital and the border I saw hundreds of windturbines slowly turning over in the breeze. At the border with Hungary I caught sight of the river and on the opposite bank, Slovakia. On the Hungarian side of the border, the river continues eastward for about an hour afterwhich, then it makes a sharp right and heads south to the capital. By 1 o’clock we’ve arrived at Budapest Keleti station.
Sunday 29th October
The Gard de l’Est is my favourite of Paris’ railway stations because of the desitnations on its departure boards: Strasbourg, Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna… and even, with a change of trains at the border, Moscow. This evening I left Paris on the first leg of another trans-European journey: to Romaina and back by train. It was five o’clock by the time we pulled out of the station on the Orient Express from Paris to Vienna.
The first few hours of travel were quiet and I dosed off as we pushed on east. Around 10pm we crossed the Rhine and continued into Germany. I tried to find the man with the trolley so that I could buy a sandwich. The conductor pointed to the cabin door on which I should knock. Just before I did knock, between the drawn curtains I saw a hand slide up a bestockinged leg, accompanied by shrieks of laughter. When I did knock on the door, the laughter became muffled and after some delay the door openned to reveal a sheepish looking man and woman sitting on either side of the compartment with the food trolley between them. I felt guilty for disturbing them especially since none of the food was vegetarian so I couldn’t buy anything anyway.
Back in the carriage a baby had been crying for some time, clearly not impressed by its mother’s best efforts to amuse it for the past hour. I retreated to the vestibule with the girl in the adjacent seat to gain some respite and to play a bit of guitar. No sooner had we started singing a song from the backpacker’s cannon of standards (surely a Beatles number. No tell a lie it was Mamas and Papas) did the mother and baby come out as well, followed by a little girl. The children where thrust into our care and their mother went into the toilet. I carried on playing guitar and the crying stopped. Evidently relieved, the mother took back her kids and returned to the carriage. Suzanne got off the train at Karlsruhe sometime in the middle of the night. When I returned to my seat, the cease-fire between mother and child seemed to be holding and I was able to go to sleep.
This afternoon’s lecture on earthquake engineering was a struggle. The mountains of photocopies that we were given didn’t really match up with what the lecturer was saying, which had the effect of further lowering Friday afternoon lecture attentiveness. I was however paying attention when the expert before us showed us a map of Europe showing the magnitudes and location of the major earthquakes that have hit the Mediterannean region. The largest seismic event shown I seem to remember wiped Lisbon off the map in during the 1700s. A line of seismic events can be drawn from the mid Atlantic, through the Straits of Gibraltar, joining the dots all the way to Naples, neatly following the southern edge of the Eurasain tectonic plate. When there is an erathquake Eurasia and Africa move relative to one another along this fault line.
So why am I giving you this geography lesson? Well I have just read in the ICE newsletter that a company has made a bid to build a tunnel under the Straits of Gibraltar (http://www.ice.org.uk/knowledge/spec_news.asp?ARTICLE_ID=1622). At 44km it will be longer than the Channel Tunnel. What’s more, the depth of the tunnel ( the Channel Tunnel is relatively shallow at only 50 odd metres below sealevel ) and the fact that the tunnel will have to pass through several different types of soil make the project barely feasible.
But there is no mention of what steps are going to be taken to make the tunnel earthquake proof. What is going to happen when the bit of the tunnel in the Eurasian plate moves one metre up down left or right relative to the African plate? As far as I am aware, tunnels aren’t like buses; they don’t come in ‘bendy’. (http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/press-centre/image-gallery/gallery.asp)
Finally I would like to know what the tunnel is going to be called. I think that the Gibraltar Strait Tunnel – or even the Gibraltar Bendy Tunnel (geddit?) is unfeasible because it contains the word Gibraltar and so I am sure it will kick of a squabble between the British and Spanish governments. The Algerceras tunnel is a no go because no one outside of Spain will be able to pronounce Algerceras. Which leaves the only other option. The International Tunnel of Tangiers. It is catchy and whats more, it reclaims Tagniers’ former standing as an international city. Unfortunately I don’t think my name is going to stick as it I think it will be a long time before a tunnel linking ‘North’ and ‘South’ is named after a place in Africa.
Last week I got wind of a course at ENPC in photography. After a little research I found out that it is actually an advanced course for people learning English, the content of which happens to be photography. Since the course takes place during one of my free slots, I tried this week to sneak along. I asked the teacher whether, given my level of English, I could sit at the back and listen. He happily accepted me onto the course but rather than sit at the back and listen he wants to speak up as afterall two native English speakers are better for the class than just one.
The first class I went to was on James Natchwey. We wathced a documentary on how he works and I have to say I was stunned. Have a look at his website to see what I mean: www.jamesnatchwey.com
There is a class blog where we can give each other tips on technique as well as use it to display our photos. I have put a link to this in my blog roll. Most excitingly, the college has a dark room so I will be developping some of my own photos in the not to distant future.
Although I have now been living in Paris for five or so weeks, I only had my first full week of lectures last week. We had to give some indication of the courses that we wanted to take back in April. Ever since then I had been vaguely apprehensive about the classes I would be taking – a mixture really between the fear that they would be too hard mathematically and the fear that I just wouldn’t understand a word of what was being said. Well after one week of full lectures I am happy with the selection so far. In “Conception of Dangerous Strucutres” (there is Ronseal element to some of these course titles http://www2.ronseal.co.uk/) we will be spending the first three weeks looking at designing dams. Then we will move on to nuclear power stations and finally oil platforms. Lots of juicy danger for us to get our risk assessing teeth into. “Bridge Conception” is a tour de force of every time of bridge you could think of, each week given by an expert. Heaven!
The core desgin options – steel and concrete – were not nearly as baffling in French as I had expected. It did however help that we had covered some of this material before at Imperial. The twist here is that we are learning EuroCode instead of fuddy duddy old British Standards, whatever they are. Finally, the one that I feared was going to be the most mathematical, entitled Parasismic Studies, has recently had its maths content reduced after some complaints. Now if this all sounds like a walk in the park then let us not forget that all of the above is in French, as will be my exams. So, all things considered, a little déja vu is no bad thing.
Glen Canyon Dam, as featured in the popular film «Superman»
When designing, building and operating a dam, there are a few steps that ought to be followed in order to avoid large loss of life. Here are a few that I picked up at my first lecture in a series with the title that I have badly translated as “Conception of risky structures”:
1) Pay your workers well. The most dangerous period during the lifetime of a dam spans its construction, the filling of the reservoir and the first year of full service. Going on strike over pay during the construction is dangerous because the dam might not be ready for the winter’s flood waters and subsequently may get washed away.
2) When checking for cracks in the bedrock on to which the dam is to be founded, looking at 50 metre intervals is not good enough. A dam in Wako, Texas collapsed when a section of the bedrock between two cracks about 49 metres apart gave way.
3) If cracks have been found in the ground, it is unwise to leave them unfilled just because your client refused to give you any extra money to pay for this unforseen cost. To do so has led to death and destruction.
4) If you are satisfied with the conclusions of your ground survey that there are no cracks in the ground under your dam, don’t then move your dam a few metres downstream to make your lake a bit bigger without doing a new survey. Doh.
5) If when building, say, a 280m high dam in Italy, you notice that the mountain into which your dam has been founded has started moving(!) at a rate of several centimetres a day, don’t just carry on filling the dam and hope for the best. (In this case though the dam didn’t collapse, the mountain on one side of the lake gave way and a terrific landslide almost filled the lake that had been created, generating an enormous wave which swept over the dam and destroyed villages down-stream)
6) Finally, if your dam once built is not a profitable venture, don’t succumb to the temptation to sell it to a group of anglers. They may use it for stocking fish. This in itself is no problem. The problems arise in the rainy season when they may lose a significant portion of their fish down the overflow pipe. To prevent this loss, they may put a gauze over the pipe to keep the fish in, but which will also unwittingly get blocked with the leaves and branches which usually accompany storm waters, forcing the flood waters over the top, destroying the dam and killing 2000 people in the town below.
These six tips are from real examples of fatal dam failures.
When designing a dam, don’t just be safe, be dam safe.
Rose leaning over the Hoover Dam during our visit in March 2003
Tuesday lunchtime saw the end of the SPEIF (semaine préparatoire pour étudiants ingénieurs en Français – a stunning acronym). With our free afternoon a group of us students had hatched a plan to play football. The day before, one of our number spoke to the manager of the Pont’s sports pitches and said it would be no problem. However, when we turned up on Tuesday we were told that we weren’t able to use the pitches because we were not part of a registered team. I have to say that I wasn’t as surprised as some of my would-be team-mates as I had heard similar tales regarding extra-curricular activities at French universities. The trend seems to be that if it is not sanctioned as a registered team event then the doors or gates will be remain locked. I suspect for example that if I try and set up a band I won’t be able to use the practice rooms unless I can demonstrate my proficiency on the rhythm guitar.
The trouble is that we didn’t want to set up a team, we just wanted to have a kick-around. And even if we had tried to set up a team I wouldn’t have been able to join as I can’t join the sports club, the reason being that I don’t have a vaccine card to prove that I won’t get whooping cough as I step up to the penalty spot and sue the school. In this respect, either I try and dig through the annals of the NHS to find out if I have such a card, or I turn my arm into a pincushion and have all the jabs again at the same time and risk sending my immune system crazy. No, neither of these options were an option, so to speak. I was intent on finding some public space in the Cité Déscarts where we could play. The only large open space that isn’t fenced off is that in front of Les Ponts, a couple of acres that would have been perfect for football had it not been landscaped with long parallel ripples half a metre or so in height that would have made it difficult to play. I might even go so far as to suggesting that it had been landscaped in this way to stop us from playing.
Still, unflapped by another apparent barrier, we used our keen engineering eyes to survey the plot and found that between two of the ridges there was just about enough space if we played partially on the grass and partially on the helipad at one end of the field. With laptop cases for goal posts we were all set.
Apart from Michi who I think has had some pretty top-notch football experience, we were all tired after about ten minutes, (such are the barriers to exercise in France!) but we played for an hour or so. And no one was really keeping score – it was great just to have been able to play.
Freedom of speech for the mute
Today I taught for the first time my other English conversation class. This class is larger than the first; twenty to the previous lot’s eleven. It was hard work to get them talking, and that’s all my boss at in the language department wants me to do! I knew that the students of this second group were broadly from science and computing courses so I opted in the first lesson to teach from an article on Google’s recent entry in to the Chinese Internet market. Before we worked on the article itself we had a good session generating useful vocabulary for all to use. My second preparatory item however, a discussion about freedom of speech, was not so successful. Questions such as “what do you think freedom of speech means” and “do you have the right to say what you want here in France” were all met with stony silence. I had to hide the smile on face. It did seem a little ironic that we were talking in essence about a country where there isn’t the right to freedom of speech, and there I had a bunch of students in a ‘free’ country who could have said anything for all I could have cared but instead exercised their right to say nothing. A case of freedom of speech for the mute. Still, things picked up with a vocabulary quiz at the end where students had to buzz in with animal noises. That old pedagogical chestnut!
Cookie Doog
In August I went for an ice cream with my grandmother at an ice-cream parlour oft frequented by us on trips to the seaside on France’s Atlantic coast. She was giving the order, so I asked her to order me a double cornet with vanilla and cookie-dough ice cream. Not certain what I meant by cookie-dough, I pointed to the little card above the box that gave its name. There was no French translation. She wouldn’t even venture trying to say cookie-dough with a French accent so I made the order myself sticking to the English pronunciation.
The ice cream itself was unmemorable, but the question of how to say cookie-dough in French stuck. Clearly the ice-cream parlour didn’t think there was a translation. I was reminded of this question when I went to see Indégènes at the cinema the other day. There again was cookie-dough ice cream. I had by now reached the conclusion that French for cookie-dough is in fact cookie-dough which then raised another question, how do you say it with a French accent? My grandmother clearly didn’t know and Mary sidestepped the issue by plumping for vanilla (boring).
According to my dictionary, dough is pronounced “d
This post refers to an event I took part in a couple of weeks ago and I have been meaning to write about it for some time. One afternoon Mary and I were walking past Place Gambetta in the 20eme when we were approached by a woman getting people to sign up for a peace protest in the following week. The protest coincided with the interational day of peace, I think. Anyway, what caught my eye was their plan to make an enormous CND sign using people holding flaming torches. I think that this kind of protest can attract a lot more meida attention than smaller activities and so can have more impact. This human CND sign was to be formed infront of the Eiffel Tower, so as to get a good photo shot from above. Mary couldn’t make it but I signed up there and then and bought my wax torch for the protest (the police wouldn’t let the protesters sell the torches at the event itself)
So later that week, I sauntered down to the Champs de Mars with my rather menacing enormous wax-covered batton. When I signed up I was given a number which corresponed to a position in the CND sign at which I would be standing. And sure enough, on the grass beneath the Eiffel tower I found my number written in flour in the glass. Not being a regular protester, I naively assumed that things would kick-off on time. Silly me. But over the next hour, the crowd started to gather. Pic-nicers enjoying a romantic glass of wine beneath the tower became unaware that they were slowly becoming encircled, trapped, overwhelmed by an enormous symbol of peace (I’m only kidding – everyone seemed quite friendly really). All of a sudden it was time to light the touch papers. From the ground it was hard to really make out the form of the symbol. There we stood for an hour while speeches and demands were called out. I only narrowly avoided setting light to the hair of my section commander. It’s amazing actally that no one’s hair did go up in flames. Then it was time to go home, satisfied that the world would surely take notice and get rid of all its nuclear weapons.
From the ground
From above
As far as food at institutions go, the grub at ENPC ain’t half bad. For the early morning caffine boost, elevenses and mid-afternoon pick-moi-ups there is the coffee bar situated in the full splendor of the atrium. Canny students know at precisely what time to grab the left-over croissants before they get put out at the end of the day. That just leaves lunch which is served in the cafeteria. There is a generous selection of hot and cold food not to mention the bulging desserts. Not only does it taste good, it is also subsidised, but instead of knocking ten percent off the cost of any purchases as they do at Imperial, they just knock 1.70 Euro off the bill. This reduction makes a meaty main course half the advertised price. But if you opt for the enormous bowl of salad from the salad bar costing only 1.50, when it comes to the check out my discounted meal has a negative price. That is, everytime I eat there, I earn money! All I need to do is eat 75,000 more lunches there and I will have paid off my entire student debt! Yum…
It’s one of those things about growing up. People start calling you Mister. For a long time it was just my bank or anyone asking me for money. It wasn’t until I started teaching maths in the states that I had to get used to the sound of Mr.Broadbent on a regular basis. You see, the trouble is it’s just not me, it’s my Dad, or even his father.
Since I have been at Imperial, things have been pretty quiet on the mister-stakes. Today however, I became Monsieur Broadbent when I stepped for the first time into the English conversation class that I have now started teaching at the University of Marne-la-Vallee. There are few things that I hate. Nuclear bombs and radishes. Apart from those the only other thing I really dislike is the sound of ‘Broadbent’ said in a French accent. There is no way you can twist Broadbent to make it sit comfortably on a French palette, and I have tried. So no sooner had I become Monsieur Broadbent did I quickly rebrand myself as ‘Oliver’. Original, I know but it just seems to sit well with me. My parents like it. If it wasn’t for all the trouble it would cause with French bureaurocracy, I would just ditch the Broadbent bit all together for the year. Just like Brittany did.
So with an oven installed in our ever-better equipped kitchen, I decided to invite a few of my new international chums over for dinner. We discovered that our modest dining room table normally used for sitting two to four people, can actually accomodate eight. I cooked up a tomato soup (1.5 kilos of tomatos for a euro!) and some pesto to go with. The guests came with offerings of cheese and a fine selection of wines (all ticked off of course on our gastronomic maps). Christna and Alex’s tortialla espagnol was the best I have ever had – suspiciously good in fact. It turns out that for a piece of coursework that had had to do on quality control processes, they investigated the factors that affect how good a tortilla tastes. (Fingers crossed that the secrets will be divulged).
With the meal over, another four people showed up taking the total up to twelve – a record for the moment – before we headed off to the local venue the Flesh D’Or to see a few bands. As we piled out of the club in the early hours, I was glad to only have a ten minute journey home. Some of the others living out near the campus had to wait until five in the morning to get the first train home.
Time is flying by. I am already into my second week of college. These first three weeks are preparatory classes for all the Erasamus students at les Ponts, afterwhich the term starts in earnest. I am being taught in a group of ten made up of two German students, one from Austria, one from Grand Canaria, two Portugese and then the three of us Brits from Imperial. So used to the Imperial timetable (teach 50 mins cappacinno for 10 teach 50 etc) am I that I found the two hour long classes a little hard going to start with. The trick really is to not look at the clock!
Not that the lessons are boring. No, the course is being taught well and as far as language classes go I think it is the most I have ever been engaged in this sort of lesson with a good mix of group work and class disscussion. The aim of the course is to help us to settle in and to bring our French out of retirement. Part of the settling-in is achieved by teaching us about “French culture”. The material is almost priceless in the way it conforms to a sterotype of what kids are spoon fed in French schools (France’s rivers, mountains and departments, as well as gastronomical maps and economic croissants – the term given to the younger and more productive cresecent from Brittany to the northern Alps). We’ve had gastronomical maps – my request for a map of cheeses is currently being processed. More alarmingly, the worksheet that gave the history of names that you are likely to hear in France failed to note that between 15 and 20% of France’s population are from families of immigrants one, two or three generations ago and so do not have names derived from Asterix or celtic invaders. There was also no mention of the foods that these groups might traditionally eat on the gastronomical map. No surprise there. But on the plus side, I have to say that I am sucker for learning things like maps of cheeses so give me a few weeks and you can test me.
Right, got to run for my first test…
Sunday evening I started to pack my bag for my first day of school on Monday, or so I thought… A double-check of a letter from ENPC reconfirmed what Mary has suspected: that I wasn’t actually starting until Tuesday. Brilliant, a free day in Paris, and with my new travel card I could do absolutely anything! I could have started on the Louvre, go for a walk across town, walk across Henry’s bridge, even start a neighbourhood photo diary – obviously being inspired by Sunday’s exhibition. The important thing about being able to do anything is that you must finally settle on something.
I settled on making tomato soup for lunch with Andy and Liz who were staying with us at the time. To this activity I had alotted an hour, but anyone who knows me in the kitchen won’t be suprised to hear that it was ready only just in time for lunch. It was worth the wait though, even if I do say so myself.
In the afternoon, Liz an Andy invited me to tour our world-famous local cemetary Pere Lachaise. Amongst its ‘old members’ lie Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf and a whole host of nineteenth centrury notables including Proust, Hausmann (I will surely write more in the future about this legend of town planning) Berlioz and Chopin (I have heard of these latter two that they are now de-composing!). But I am never entirely sure what I am supposed to when I approach one of these heady headstones/town planner tombstones/composer’s coffins/celebrity sarcophogi. I don’t feel sad for someone who has been dead all my life, and whose great works are not contained this cemetary. It also seems bizarre to be happy snapping tombstones when there are freshly laid flowers all around for the much less famous recently deceased. Still, I am as guilty as anyone: here’s a photo of Liz and Chopin’s grave
So, with still half the day still to kill, we popped back to the apartment only to get the key stuck in the front door. It wouldn’t budge in, out, round or any combination of these. We were locked out and there was no one on the other side to help us out. We waited an hour and a half for a lock smith that never showed up, then found another who said he’d be round in fifteen minutes. Liz, Andy and I were shacked up in a bar next door to the locksmith’s store so I was waiting to follow him up the road to our apartment, thinking he would walk. Only suddenly he put on a helmet and disappeared off towards our flat on a scooter. I chased after him to no avail, but thwarted him at the one way system.
He couldn’t budge the dammed key and so he brought all his skills to bear on his crowbar with which he forced open the door. Though the door and frame were hardly damaged the whole lock had to be replaced. A nice one hundred and eighty Euro surprise.
By the time it was all cleared up, it was gone 5pm. Somehow, though I had had a packed day, it was not exactly how I imagined my free to day in Paris to have been filled!
On Sunday I had the chance to go to a “repas du quartier” – (neighbourhood meal). The deal is that it’s a meal somewhere in the locality, sometimes on tables in the streets, where everyone brings some food and shares it with whoever likes the look of it. Sunday’s repas took place in the local cultural centre, called “Confluences.” There our lentil salad and tzatziki were swapped for various pasta salads, some sizable hunks of cheese and some delicious brownies.
My description makes it sound a little like a battering stall – “I’ll give you a bit of French tart for some of your melons” but it is far from that. You stroll from table to table taking a pick at whatever you fancy. We got chatting to a woman with the most adorable little girl who kept getting chocolate moose on her nose. The mother had brought with her an entire roasted chicken wrapped in foil. It was just like having Sunday lunch with the neighbours.
The cultural centre used this opportunity to promote their programme for the year which included a season of plays, films, something else that a very passionate man spoke about at some length but which I failed to catch a word of, and photography exhibits. At the moment the centre is displaying a set of photos taken by a group of African photographers who were invited last year to come to the Twentieth and photograph the area.
One of the sets of photos was taken by a lady who set about approaching twenty different households and cooking them a meal. In each case a photo was taken, some at the table, some in the kitchen, all very warm photos, and almost all featuring the brightly coloured casserole dish that she brought the food in. Later, when clearing up our plates, we spotted that same casserole dish on a table. The photographer had long gone, her visa having expired soon after the final photo was taken, but the dish that she had used as her prop remains along with her pictures.
This photo display was one stop on a trail of photo exhibits around the 20eme arrondissement called “Nouvelles Africanaines”. We took a map and checked out some of the others. The image below shows a wall of photos donated by residents of a local hotel where the majority of the rooms were filled with families who lived there permanently.
I am really glad to have found out what’s on at Confluence and I am really looking forward to going back there soon to see a play next week.
I saw this ad last spring but it still makes me laugh!
Hooray – I have arrived. Last night, I hauled up the steps the final suitcase into the flat that will be Mary and mine for at least the next year. And unlike my last few visits to Paris, I won’t be getting on a Eurostar back to London at stupid o’clock tomorrow morning, nor the day after (not in fact until the end of October, and that will be an evening train). It feels great to be able to settle in.
First thing this morning I went out to the university campus because I have been given the opportunity, through a friend of Mary, to teach some conversational English classes. The ideal thing about this part-time work is that it would take place in the building next door to where I will be studying. To get out to the campus, it is a five minute ride on the metro down to Nation and then twenty minutes on the RER out to Noisy-Champs on the outskirts of Paris.
The RER is Paris’ answer to London’s CrossRail – or should that be the other way round since the Parisians designed and built theirs over twenty years ago. The RER station at Nation is an impressive feat of geotechnical engineering. Deep below ground-level, the RER’s platforms are in an enormous tunnel, 30m in diameter and several hundred meters long. The station has some amusing pseudo-technical features that someone who has just missed their train might happen to notice. For example, it looks like the train drivers look at computer monitors to see when people have finished boarding the train, but on closer inspection these devices are in fact a mirrors mounted in the shells of a computer screens. Hmmmm. That along with hi-tec looking train indicator board that actually has all the possible destinations permanently displayed, with a light bulb that lights up next to the destination for the next train, and the ultra-modern-ultra-dated vacuum formed plastic benches along the walls, lead me to conclude that the designers could see the future, they just didn’t yet have the technology to implement it. But enough about stations…
The univeristy campus is called the Cite Descartes. It houses numerous ‘Grandes Ecoles’ as well as the university of Marne La Vallee. The Cite is an architectural playground and I am looking forward to taking a closer look at some of the buildings. After some wondering, I found the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chausses. It is an attractive steel and glass building with an impressive and inviting attrium in the middle. It is in stark contrast to some of the buildings of the University of Marne la Vallee and a reminder of the extra funding that the Grandes Ecoles enjoy over France’s regular universities.
The interview went well, and depending on my timetable at ENPC I will be teaching a few hours of conversational English a week. Some of the teaching will be for science and maths students and there will be also be classes for students studying urbanism. I think it is all going to be quite interesting and I look forward to starting. It will be a good intro to the world of work in France.
This afternoon we went to an exhibiton called “Residencity”, a history of the housing that has been built around the edge of Paris. The exhibition itself was in Montreuil, a suburb in the east of the city, in a beautiful building about twenty minutes from the end of the metro. We were in the heart of the banlieu, a catch all term for anything outside the Periferique ringroad and synonymous with the riots of last year, or so the news would have you believe. This bit didn’t look all that different from the urban landscape you would find around Harrow. I get the impression that there are many who would think of this as a no go area. Seemed quite nice to me!
“Residencity” charts the housing projects that were built to provide accomodation for Paris’ worker population, which swelled at the end of the nineteenth century. Early schemes to clear slums envisaged replacing them with low level blocks of houses among trees remincisent of Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities. These early sketches look surprisingly modern but their age is betrayed by the clothes that the people in them are wearing. Designs for buildings in the 20s are not all the dissimilar to the building that we live in. By the 50s, the developments had taken on the enormous sprawling dimensions typical of some of Paris’ grimmest housing projects. It was all to clear from the posters and protest slogans displayed opposite these designs that slum-dwellers had little choice as to where in these monster developments they were to be housed.
One cartoon particularly made me laugh. It showed the aspirations for housing of three different classes. For the working class, heaven was a detached house with a garden, purgatory the new edge of town developments, and hell, the slums. For the middle class, heaven was a modern apartment block, purgatory a detached house with a garden, and hell, the new edge of town developments. And finally for the upper classes, heaven was a chateau, purgatory was a modern apartment block and hell was a detached house with a garden. Well, it made me smile (Note to self: they do say that a picture says a thousand words – a photo might have been good here)
Some archtiects of these developments were more creative than others. Blue sky thinking is evident in the conception of this quite unbelievable housing development – Les Tour Nuages: (click to see image in full)
26th August 2006 I am on my way down to the south of France for the bank holiday weekend. This is the first time that I have managed to get down to Agen for a long weekend without flying. The difference is being able to stay the night in Paris on the way down. Having stayed the night somewhat fleetingly at the apartment – leaving before I arrived sort of thing – I had the chance to enact Phase 2 of the Move to Paris (the first being the random collection of posters, blankets and books last March described in a previous entry). In the end, I didn’t have the strength of character to take only my computer, underwear and a sharp pencil. Yes, in addition I packed a more predictable assortment of clothes and engineering notes. These were packed into my now-famous US Army surplus army bag. A bag of such enormous dimensions that if for some awful reason Mary and I get turfed out of our apartment, we could easily invert the thing and turn it into a three bedroom teepee on the Place de la Republique. While this bag presents tremendous advantages in terms of the sheer volume of stuff it can take, it is also impossible to lift when full. Presumably the US Army uses Hercules aircraft to move theirs. In March I had to rely on my own Herculean strength to carry that thing up the four flights of steps – sans ascenceur – to the flat, and compacted my spine in the process. This time I was more cautious and only half filled it. I had to leave out my pencil sharpener, which means my sharp pencil won’t stay sharp for long… And now I am zooming south on the train. They’re a sophisitcated bunch on the TGV (train de Grand Valise – train of big suitcase as I like to call it). Apart from the half of the occupants of the carriage who were asleep, the rest fell into one of three catagories: those who were reading a white folio french novel, those engaged in that French game – i’ve only seen it in France – where they have to fill in a completely empty grid with words, and the rest who were almost certainly students because they were copying out almost word for word notes from lectures, carefully underlining words in lots of different colours. No one was heard talking too loudly on their mobiles, and no one was drinking Stella. Bliss.
As I left Paris, I could see the tower who’s engineer is the namesake of this blog, somewhere in the mist. Later on, as the train approaches Bordeaux St-Jean station it slows to a crawl in order to cross the enormous truss bridge across the swollen brown waters of the Gironde. It was only recently that I discovered that this bridge was where Gustav Eiffel first made his name as an engineer in charge of this building site. Arriving at Bordeaux St-Jean, I was presented an exciting array of alternative destinations: the Basin de Arcachon for some Atlantic waves, Nice for the Med and Irun which is only one vowel away from one of my dream train destinations… Only last night I heard the story of two similarly train-minded friends who were enroute to Istanbul by rail. Initially flumuxed at not being able to find their train at the station in Budpapest, they found their single Turkey-bound sleeper carriage hooked up to a train to Bucharest. Their tickets matched the carriage number and so with a certain degree of trepidation they boarded the carriage which was empty apart from a conductor with whom they shared no common language. The next day, their carriage wsa unhooked from the rest of the train and left standing alone – tracks stretching out in either direction in the searing midday heat, Istanbul somewhere in the distance. They waited several hours with no information as to where they were, or when they were going to be leaving. It struck me as quite romantic. Now you don’t get that on a plane.
