The Aerie

Driving to Paris

This blogging stuff just takes too darned long! I've got the last four days of photos uploaded to my server, but I don't have time to rotate, crop, and comment all of them right now, to say nothing of blogging about the last four days in any detail.

However, I do have a blog entry I wrote while disconnected from the Internet during the period when my spouse drove us across France. So without further adieu, I will add that, and I'll see if I can't get one day of photos added to the gallery before we leave for breakfast on the way to Versailles...

Wow, my spouse is driving.

We're in France, passing through Metz on our way to Paris for a five-day excursion to our honeymoon city. It will be interesting to see if I can detect the differences after eighteen years. Probably not: the city has been around for two millenia and likely shrugs off a fraction of a century.

My spouse has been too intimidated by the autobahn to want to drive a stick-shift minivan on it, and I can't blame her. With no speed limit one spends as much time looking in the rearview mirror as forwards, lest a BMW park in one's trunk while you're passing a semi. So for the past 1800 kilometers I've been the one behind the wheel.

But France has "normal" driving, including strictly-enforced speed limits, so as soon as we crossed the border she steeled herself to driving a stick again and got behind the wheel. So far so good.

You really see a lot of differences when driving in Germany and France from driving in the U.S. I'd say the biggest difference - when not on the freeway - is the prevalence of bicycles. In the U.S. there seem to be two types of people bicycling: delusional sportspeople and crunchy-granola greens.

The first dress in matching spandex uniforms and bike helmets, and hunching seriously over their racing-bike handlebars. They clog the River Road while ignoring the bike path not a yard to their right, because They're Serious Bikers. A subset of this group are the Mountain Bikers, whose handlebars are straight rather than curved. These bikers eschew fenders as some kind of sissy acoutrement that might shave crucial seconds off their times, and so their fancy duds become stained by stripes of muddy water starting at their asses and streaking up their backs.

The second group are the crunchy-granola types, skinny boomer ex-hippies on recumbent bikes saving the Earth one pedal at a time.

I guess the third group are bicycle commuters, but this seems to be a fairly small portion of the biking community, and mostly consists of students who have better sense than to try to own a car while attending college.

Out of all of the bikers that I see, the commuter seems like the smallest fraction. Well, except for pairs of Jehovah's Witnesses with their helmets, white shirts and black ties. But ordinary people out running errands on their bikes seem like an infinitesmally small portion of the biking community, to say nothing of the transit community in America.

In Germany, commuter or errand bikers are almost the entire community. They ride everywhere, often in perilious proximity to automotive traffic, and almost never while wearing a helmet. As with smoking and food-service hygiene, bicycle safety is lodged firmly where America was in the 1960's. Everyone smokes everywhere, flies and wasps crawl on the pastries behind the counter, and nobody wears a bike helmet. But everybody bikes. Everywhere. Bikes are entirely commonplace, and entirely normal. Nobody looks twice at a bike hauled aboard a train by a middle-aged man, or a grandma biking up to a shop to load her basket with groceries. You don't get the sense that anyone is out to stroke their egos or save the Earth, they're just going to the store in the most expedient
fashion, and frequently that's biking.

It helps that there are plenty of bike paths, but in addition to that bicycles are so commonplace that making way for them on the streets is simply what one does when driving. Nobody seems to care if they have to slow down for a short while until it's safe to pass a bike, or their motorized cousins, the Vespas.

Like bike safety, the grocery stores are also lodged in the Sixties. The nearest one to the home where we are staying is an Aldi, part of a chain that competes with Edika and the incongruous "Norma," named after Marilyn Monroe and featuring her face on their bags. Both Norma and Aldi are oddly-stocked collections of, well, stuff. While they are ostensibly "grocery stores," they feature a little of everything. Around the perimeter of
the local Aldi are refridgerated cases with a little meat, a little cheese, ice creams, etc. Milk is frequently not refridgerated, nor are eggs, but are stacked like most other merchandise in haphazard pallets that make up the outside aisles of the store. The eggs come in cartons of ten, not twelve, and the milk comes in these ubiquitous cardboard liter containers that are also used for juices. Both open with a little plastic spout on a flat top, rather than American cardboard milk cartons with their origami spouts.

The side walls of the grocery stores are refridgerators, the outer aisles are piles of goods, sometimes stacked on shelves, as often as not just jumbles of boxes. The middle aisles of the grocery store are a wonder of diversity. Ever been out shopping and discovered that you needed a canvas granny-bra? They're in the center aisle, as are shoes, ratchet sets, and two-hundred-Euro portable DVD players. In fact, almost any random thing seems to qualify
for placement in the center piles of these grocery stores.

Except vegetables. As far as we can tell, Bavarians by and large eschew vegetables, and derive sustenance solely from milk, cheese, sausages, and a bewildering variety of fruit juices. One gets the notion that the produce sections are mandated by law, stocked in a surly fashion, and eyed suspiciously for rogue Frenchmen blowing their cover in a desperate search for something, anything, to sautee. In this they are rewarded only with mushrooms, which Germans celebrate with the exuberant name "Champignions," doubtless also adopted as
a lure for malnourished French infiltrators.

It's hard to see why the French would need to infiltrate Germany: both nations have gorgeous countryside. France, at least this northern area we're traversing, is a ittle more flat and given over to broader croplands. Bavaria is more lush and hilly, with narrow valleys crammed with smaller croplands. France sees fit to decorate its roadsides with geometric shapes in tie-dye colors: all along the road we pass spheres, pyramids, cubes, and totem-pole-like cylinders interspersed with flat colored triangular, square and circular panels. The Germans would brook no such effete nonsense.

Or maybe they would. So far the German reputation for brusque no-nonsensism has only manifested itself in one category of native: the old German woman. The Germans seem perfectly friendly right up until they become old women: then, as I told my kids, their hair turns silver and they mistake it for a crown. I've already mentioned the server who nearly whacked my daughter for trying to order breakfast weisswurst at dinner. On our way back from that trip, another old lady simply shouldered me aside in order to argue with the pink-haired cashier at the gas station; another shoved my son asid yesterday as he stooped to pick up some parade candy flung at his feet. The old German woman snatched it up for her own grandchild.

I'm not sure if the Germans would tolerate public art on their autobahn or not. Certainly it would be challenging to program an installation for an audience zooming by at any speed between 50 and 150 miles per hour. Traffic moving at a constant pace is no problem: while riding the underground between Mariansplatz and the Haufbahnhof in Munich, there is a series of video panels placed on the tunnel wall. As the train passes these spring to
life in sequence to display advertisements. How this is superior to placing a single panel inside the car is not certain, but the flashing video display does grab the attention.

Another thing that grabs the attention while travelling are these giant power-producing windmills looming over he countryside. The closer you get to these things, the bigger they seem until you're right under them: each blade is like a block of surban street spinning through the air, and the generator is as big as a house, all up on a ten-story
steel pole. They seem more commonplace here than in the U.S., or maybe the roads just pass closer to them. Energy production in all forms is more diverse and more casual than it is in the U.S. Gas stations stock not only diesel, but PREMIUM diesel. This stick-shift minivan we're driving burns diesel, and it seems considerably less expensive that the unleaded-automatic version of the same vehicle we drove back in the States. I've seen
houses equipped with solar power panels, which at least in the States indicates a considerable outlay of capital for an uncertain return. With all these sources of energy, I get the impression that the oil companies don't have the same tight grip over the public that they do back in America, where any form of energy aside from petroleum
is deliberately slandered into ridiculousness by companies earning more money every year than any company has ever earned in history.

Urban planning is also considerably different here, not the least reason because the towns and villages are not new settlements in the last 150 years, but are modern incarnations of hamlets that have existed for hundreds or thousands of years. Or, sometimes, they are new settlements on what has traditionally been farmland. I think the little development where we are staying is one such: it has a newness about it and a planned orderliness to
its streets that is at odds with much of the surrounding area. To be sure the town of Pölling itself doubtless hals from the days when the Romans exacted tribute from the local farmers: our little portion of it seems like the recent addition. Pölling is a satellite of Neumarkt, which in turn is a suburb of Nürnberg, but I get the sense that the three are merely arranged so by the advent of the automobile: one hundred and fifty years ago Pölling was a suburb of Neumarkt, and Nuremberg was a good two-day jaunt away.

The streets are laid out much differently than in sprawling American suburbs. Cobblestone, even on new streets, is as common as asphalt. Sidewalks are narrow and the curb is a single low cobblestone rim, making it easy to park on the sidewalk which the locals do seemingly at random. Driveways and, notably, parking lots are done in mosaic cobblestone arrays, the parking slots picked out in rows of red bricks among a grid of dark granite.

Most towns have an "old section" at their center, some of which are preserved for historical purposes, but most of which are active business sections with cars and all, despite being only as wide as two horses passing. Surrounding this is a 'modern' business ring of three-story business buildings, and radiating out from this are spokes of neighborhoods, broken up by various terrain features. Where the sprawl of rapidly-developed American suburbia seems to result in long swathes of identical strip-malls and cheaply-built townhouses,
European neighborhoods seem to use more concrete, more tile roofing, and greater variety. In our little suburb for example the streets wind and curve, and every three or four developed properties are separated by undeveloped lots. Is this a deliberate aesthetic decision, or some happenstance of economic reality? Don't know. But it looks different out the window than an American suburb.

The windows are themselves rather different than in America. Most of thhe modern windows I've seen are of this complicated multi-opening variety that takes a while to figure out. The windows - and even the doors! - in our hosts' home open thusly: handle down means the window is closed; handle sideways makes the window or door open on a side hinge, as one would expect a door to do. But twist the handle upwards and the window or door tips
perilously forwards, until it stops against some kind of catch at about 10-15 degrees open. This resulted in no shortage of confusion the first few days, let me tell you. I'd walk over to open a door, only to have it start falling on me. I nearly got religion the first time that happened and the door slammed to a stop before crushing me like a bug.

A lot of bugs get in by those windows and doors. One big difference between Germany and America that I've noticed is a much more cavalier attitude towards bugs and rodents. When we first swapped homes with our hosts, they demonstrated their mode of living, which involved leaving the entire back of the house open to the good weather. While charming, the house was full of flies and even a mouse that we eventually trapped. Our hosts paid no attention to the flies, although they didn't like the mouse.

When they left and the weather turned cold and rainy we kept the doors and windows mostly shut, greatly reducing the fly problem. Other places show the same lack of concern for insects: when we went to the local bakery the other day the display case was full of flies, and even a wasp, buzzing around inside. I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating because, well, because I find it kind of icky. Maybe its a way in which Americans have become prissy and uptight, but after watching a couple of flies dancing on a sweet roll I am very disinclined to want to eat it.

One way in which we have learned that France is very different from Germany is in the price of travel. Diesel fuel is about 10% more expensive, but even worse, the toll roads are ridiculous. We haven't even reached Paris yet and we've dropped over 20 Euros into these stupid little booths. Toll roads are astonishingly stupid things, in my estimation: in exchange for the convenience of going rather faster than on other roads, they make you
stop every few miles. Like now, outside of Jouarre, with Kelly Clarkson whining nasally on the radio. It's a lot like Chicago, but much more pricy.

But, come on, it's the 21st century for cryin' out loud. If you're going to run a toll road, set up some kind of automatic scanner and read people's license plates, then mai them a bill or something. Not only would traffic not need to slow down, but it would be our hosts who eventually got the bill :-).

Anyway my battery is almost out and we're about half an hour from Paris so I'll wrap up this stream-of-consciousness on the differences between Europe and America. Soon I will have to resume my piloting duties, and I've heard people frown on drivers who ae attempting to blog on a laptop at the same time...

Au revoir! Look for a Parisian photo gallery, coming soon!

Posted by Albatross at August 18, 2006 1:50 AM | TrackBack