Oh what a greve.

Gare du Nord

In the typical French fashion, despised by every French person I know, metro’s, radio’s, university professors, the RER, and some TV channels were all on strike. Being a city girl, accustomed to the easy transport of New York and Paris, I expected the city to come to a grinding halt. I imagined crowds of desperate people yelling at occupied taxi’s, roads packed with bikes and pedestrians. But Paris looked much the same. Taxi’s idled around with illuminated signs, people continued to descend subway stairs to explore Sarkozy’s newly mandated “minimum service”, racks of “velibs” (a public bike system in Paris) stood available and unused.

As I had a train to London on the day of the strike, I had spent the night before at a friends house to be closer to the train station. I expected that the 4 miles between my house and the “gare” would be a mob-filled taxi-desert of impossibility. But I awoke to a Paris that calmed me with it’s easy familiarity. Gray skies of a dark, thick, hanging, luminous fog that only Paris can produce. Cool gray stone walls of columned and domed monuments. The even and repetitive skyline broken only by the shining gold tops of the obelisk of Concorde and the statues of the Pont Alexandre.

I grabbed a velib, shoved my duffel bag in the basket, and set off on my adventure. I had never biked before in the busy, dangerous, and highly volatile Parisian traffic, but decided that the “greve” would be the perfect excuse for my first attempt. As soon as my foot touched pedal, the safe, familiar streets took on an entirely new identity. The cars I had learned to predict when crossing streets were now beside me, and in a city suspiciously devoid of turn signals, I had no idea how to read their French driving body language. The luxuriously large sidewalks along the Seine were now denied me and I occupied a small lane with other bicyclists, motorcycles, and buses. I was finally free from the constant Parisian worry of stepping in dog-doo, but the 5 lane roundabout of the Concorde proved to be much more of a challenge.

Several stops to read my map, and many abandonments of traffic law to walk the bike on the sidewalk, I arrived (miraculously) safe and sound at Gare du Nord, a full two hours before my train. I retrieved my ticket, and settled down to eat a pastry and drink coffee. But as I was enjoying my tiny paper cup of caffeinated goodness, a sudden thought robbed me of my calm self-confidence. I didn’t have my passport. I had become so accustomed to considering myself a european resident, that I forgot that England is a foreign country and requires passport control. I waffled for a few seconds, trying to decide if I could convince the border patrol to take a California driver’s license before running panicked out of the station. I grabbed a taxi and was relieved to hear that it would only take 15 minutes to arrive at my house, giving me plenty of time to make the return trip before checking in for my train.

I settled into the back seat and stared out the windows at my favorite gray city as the glowing red numbers grew quietly in the background. I was pleased to realize how much of Paris I know. I hardly ever take cabs, and never in the daytime, so I never have the opportunity to see so much of the city at once. The grand Opera Garnier, accompanied by the nearly equally ornate Galeries Lafayette, the Place de la Concorde once the Place de la Guillotine, the impressive drive up to Les Invalides, and of course, the iconic Eiffel Tower. Back at the train station, passport in hand, after my very scenic and very expensive taxi tour of Paris, I checked in and boarded my train without further difficulty.

The train ride passed quickly, reading in French and English, staring at the expansive fields dabbed with forests and tiny villages. We plunged into darkness and emerged in the one country in Europe where Americans feel most at home, and I immediately felt out of place. The vegetation was different, the houses were short and squat, the announcement on the train was in English first, and I was thrown into linguistic confusion. My automatic responses to strangers have been set to French, and going home I had no problem setting them back to English in familiar American surroundings, but British people with their accents and accentuated manners seemed to provoke French in me. For the first time in months, I felt abroad. And I realized that France is no longer a foreign country. It may take an unGodly number of hours to get there, I may need a visa to stay there more than 90 days, it may have a different government, customs, ideals, but it is no longer foreign. It is home.