I spent the first week of December in Paris for work, and decided I would rent a car to get around. For some odd reason, I rather enjoy driving in foreign cities. First, there is the difference in vehicles, with most countries have vastly smaller cars than the US, from the go-cart like machine we rented in the Caribbean, to the standard European car, which is sized like our compact cars. Secondly, there’s a sense of adventure. Signs are different, rules of the road are different, and there is mystery around each corner.
This was especially the case in Paris. I’ve spent years driving in Boston and New York, generally considered quite bad by US standards, so driving in a major city is not particularly intimidating. It was quite fun to drive in Paris… there are essentially no rules that I can ascertain, except that every possible space must be filled. In the roundabouts, space that in the US or UK would hold 5 cars driving next to each other is completely devoid of any lane markings, and has about 9 cars in all manner of configurations. Some are sideways, some are going from the innermost lane to the outermost, and there are motorcycles and scooters going every which way in the midst of all the madness. Any unfilled space will soon have a car or motorcycle in it, and while it seems very aggressive, people let you merge or move where you need to be without much fuss, remaining calm in what would result in violent road rage in NY or Boston.
The last point was the most interesting. The driving seemed amazingly aggressive, yet everyone was as calm as could be, almost as if it was all a well choreographed show put on for a foreigner, and everyone was trying to maintain a steady face just before bursting into laughter.
A flick of the turn signal would result in a space magically appearing as someone waited for you to merge, and there was never a polite wave of acknowledgement, nor was there a “one finger salute” should you violently cut someone off. Somehow in all the madness was a sense of respect and amusement, rather than rage and frustration.
Perhaps the best part of Parisian driving was that getting lost would result in suddenly happening upon some marvel of architecture. Missing the entrance to my hotel for the fourth time (it was in a 9 lane roundabout, again with no lane markers), I randomly turned onto the Champs d’Elysse, with l’Arc de Triomphe staring me square in the face. On the commute home from my client site, rounding a curve in the highway brought me a beautiful vision of the Eiffel Tower.
Categories: Travel
No Comments »
