something to look forward to

Talking philosophy of physics with Gabriel Catren in the Latin Quarter tomorrow. Topped off by a celebration, at the Ecole normale supérieure, of the PUF series in which L’objet quadruple will appear. Then the conference the next day.

And then back to Cairo for ten or eleven more days of swine flu vacation. The fact that Paris will only be 3 days will make it a fairly weird memory a week from now.

But no, this will not be the shortest amount of time I’ve spent in Paris. That award goes to my first and highly unlucky Paris trip in January 1991. It was supposed to last for several days. What happened instead is that someone picked my pocket as I slept on the Prague-Berlin overnight train, and I had to go through the whole rigamarole of borrowing one night’s hotel fee from the U.S. Consulate in Berlin while money was wired to me from relatives in the States. By the time I got to Paris (I flew out of London on that trip) I was in a predictably cranky mood over the pickpocketing. Not knowing my way around Paris at all in those days, I walked randomly out of the Gare du Nord, and did the very unimaginative thing of walking the main street all the way down to the Bastille area, which of course is about the least impressive walking route in Paris that is possible. Then I made a cranky tour of the Louvre for a couple of hours, which was of course nice, but the circumstances led me to conclude that “Paris is the most overrated city in the world.” I never even set foot on the Left Bank that time. And I refused to return to Paris for a number of years, on principle.

What led me to give it a second chance was that my brother took a belated honeymoon to Paris from Prague, where he was then working. And of course he came back saying “Paris is the best city in the world,” which of course it is. But I didn’t realize that yet, because I still had that very negative memory of January ’91. But since my brother and I have the same tastes in almost everything, I knew in advance that he was right, and immediately booked my next vacation tickets to Paris. That was in April ’97, and ever since, I’ve been just another of the millions who rightly sing the praises of the greatest city in the world.

Back to the Prague-Berlin train pickpocketing incident… The people at the U.S Consulate were perfectly reasonable. They’re not friendly, but they can’t afford to get emotionally involved with everyone who comes in. The most interesting thing at the Consulate was while waiting. I sat next to an American man, of the Vietnam War generation. He had been stationed in Berlin with the U.S. Army during the Vietnam period. Rather than risk a transfer to Vietnam, he crossed into East Berlin and defected. He eventually did quite well in the old DDR, getting married and establishing a successful business of some sort. After the Reunification of Germany, however, he suddenly found himself in legal trouble. I can’t remember why he was at the U.S. Consulate that day, but I do remember his saying that there was a certain chance he would be arrested on the spot. I’m not sure if it happened, though, because he was still waiting when I left. I do remember that his hometown was Pittsburgh. He was obviously not in a friendly mood, but he was talkative, and did answer all of my questions.

The hotel to which the Consulate sent me was another adventure. It was in the Wedding district of Berlin, close to the former Wall, and apparently had/has a reputation for being a bit of a rough part of town. But it was the middle of the day and wasn’t too frightening. The really bad thing was this… The hotel address given to me by the Consulate was something like #65, on a certain street whose name I’ve long since forgotten. But when I got to #65, it was a vacant lot filled with rubble. This seemed like the cruellest joke ever. Repeated calls to the hotel for assistance were not the least bit helpful. Somehow, and I don’t remember how, I eventually figured out that the street randomly jogged over one block at just that point, so that the rubble-filled lot was now on a differently-named street, even though it was in a direct line with the street I was looking for. Crazy. The hotel was just one block over.

This reminds me (pardon the Proustian digressions) of the only hotel experience I ever had that was even weirder… Before my Alaska trip in 1998, I booked all of my hotels in advance, having been warned they could be hard to find in Alaska in the summer. For Fairbanks, I booked a hotel whose name I remember but which I won’t mention here, because I don’t want to harm their business undeservedly. A week or so after I booked, they sent me the most oddly sentimental registration materials. It featured a Christmas Card type photo of the middle-aged owners, showing them to be a solid, very moral married couple. I think there were many references in the enclosed materials to what a great family-oriented hotel it was. There were also weirdly, painfully detailed directions for how to find that place once you arrived in Fairbanks. It seemed like overkill.

On the trip itself, I reached Fairbanks after a 3-hour drive from wherever I was before. It was a terrible 3 hours, because I had gotten into the wilderness spirit by picking up a hitchhiker, something I normally never do, and he turned out to be a mildly insane special forces veteran who ended up bragging about how “if he wanted to” he could hide out for months in the wilderness and the feds would never catch him. Most imprudent thing I ever did while traveling, hands down, though he was most likely a harmless blowhard.

After I dropped that guy off at a strip mall in Fairbanks, I had a hard time finding the hotel, and kept phoning them as well. Every time I called, they gave the most convoluted possible directions for how to find them, and something seemed not right about it.

Eventually, I figured out the reason for that, and for their over-the-top “we’re such good family folks” promotional mailing… For the easiest possible directions to the hotel would have been: “Go to where all the seedy sex clubs in Fairbanks are, and we’re right smack in the middle of them.” It was unbelievable. This smily, wholesome, ma and pa hotel was located exactly in the midst of the Fairbanks red light district, or the near equivalent thereto. No wonder they were so evasive about their location, and so desperate to get you on their side with mailings before you arrived in Alaska, took a look at their neighborhood, and said “NFW” and left. I’ll bet 98% of their business was advance bookings. No normal traveller would see that district while looking randomly and say: “hey, I’ll bet there’s a good hotel over here.” You’d just laugh and drive elsewhere.