52 Countries in 52 Weeks, Chapter 17: France

In Which I Am Wowed The Olympics, The Art, The History, The Paris — And Yet, Surprisingly Not This One Famous French Thing

Watching the Olympic Marathon with the Eiffel Tower in the background is an amazing feeling. But it’s almost as fun to watch the people as it is the runners.

I decided to come to Paris for one day during the Olympics, and decided the ideal day was when the marathon was on (a free event, one day before the closing ceremony), which led to me being crammed next to a couple hundred people at the 38-kilometre mark of the route.

I’ve thought about nationalism a lot this year. Every new country is a crash course of how it binds people together and tear them apart in a ping-pong match lasting for centuries. Every monument and museum and street name reminds you of the heightened stakes of caring for the place you came from.

Then there’s the Olympics.

I know it’s cheesy. But then you’re surrounded by groups of Japanese wearing elaborate matching costumes, Brits waving tiny flags, the ubiquitous American chant of U-S-A, all cheering for our country in a 42-kilometre race with dozens of athletes we’ve never heard of before this month and will forget about shortly after.

You can’t help but being sucked into the most enthusiastic yet benign nationalism we collectively practice every two years.

And then, after 30 minutes, it’s over. All the runners have moved on. You’re left with a crowd of rather silly looking and colourful people with stupid grins on their faces, wandering past the Eiffel Tower and on to the rest of their lives.

We don’t even know who won the race. It doesn’t really matter.

After my marathon day, I went and saw the rest of France, before returning for five days when things were a little less Olympic-y.

Tell 100 world travellers, travel writers, and urban planners to name their 10 favourite cities in the world, and it’s possible Paris would be on more lists than any other.

It does just about everything well, from food to transportation, museums to parks, housing to heritage…actually, it does all of those things more than well. It does them at an exceptional level. I was swept up in the grandeur of what I got to see on daily basis.

More than any other city I’ve been to so far, it felt like I was just scratching the surface of what it offered.

I went to the Louvre and the D’Orsay but missed the L’Orangerie. I wandered Versailles and the Luxembourg Gardens but missed out on some of the more iconic green spaces where Olympic stands were still up. I went to endless cafes but not a single Michelin restaurant. I explored 2 of Paris’ 20 Arrondissements — or neighbourhoods — in depth, and have regrets about missing out on the other 18.

There’s a few reasons why Paris works so well. It is, to use my mullet analogy from a few months back, very good when it comes to the official front-facing things: a centrally planned system of neighbourhoods, boatloads of institutional museums and big parks, the combination of nice wide boulevards and an extensive transit system that tend to come with being the seat of government.

But also, it’s Paris, where creatives have flocked to centuries before “creatives” was a thing: you can feel interesting people doing interesting things in every neighbourhood, public space being maximized whenever possible, a longstanding political culture where the people rise up if they aren’t getting what they want.

True, there’s no oceans or mountains. And the Parisian reputation for brusqueness is, uh, well deserved. Also, they still enjoy a cigarette or two.

Tiny caveats. It’s easy to understand why it’s been one of the greatest cities in the world for hundreds of years.

My only regret is not being able to stay longer.

Of course, I had the advantage of seeing Paris at the peak time for any city in the world — immediately after hosting the Olympics.

It’s the ultimate glam-up for any metropolis, as billions of dollars in funding that otherwise wouldn’t exist suddenly becomes available for the purposes of hosting a sports festival for two weeks.

Having directly experienced it in Vancouver, it brought back memories.

The construction cranes and homeless people mysteriously disappear, there are literal and metaphorical shiny new paint jobs everywhere, some parts of the city have 500% more people than usual while others feel empty.

Paris didn’t build many new facilities for the games — instead utilizing existing stadiums and their magnificent public spaces — but over the past decade, they did invest in two big city changes: a cleaner Seine River and more than 500 kilometres of new bike lanes.

The results of the river cleaning were, um, mixed, as some triathlon competitors were hospitalized after their event.

But the bike lane expansion seemed pretty seamless. Separated* lanes dot the city now, and according to a government planning agency, more residents now use bikes than cars to move through the centre.

(I should note that “separated” lanes in Europe typically don’t mean a giant concrete barrier through the entire lane like in Canada, but often slightly raised pavement for cyclists, or intermittent barriers or planters across a block.)

Perspective is everything: after a couple months on continental Europe, France’s infrastructure didn’t really register to my eyes as something groundbreaking or different.

Like pedestrian-only streets, or e-scooters parked everywhere, or people enjoying unregulated beer gardens on random corners, you go through enough cities where that’s just happening as a matter of course and at a certain point you barely think about it.

But Paris matters a heck of a lot more globally than Copenhagen or Stockholm, so the changes have gotten plenty of attention. The bike lane changes also came in tandem with increased taxes on large vehicles and reduction of speed limits in many areas of the city.

For its part, Vancouver has spent almost all of its cycling focus the last four years paralyzed by a few hundred people screaming about the merits of a separated bike lane through a downtown park used primarily for recreational purposes.

Then again, almost any comparison between Vancouver and Paris seems a bit cruel.

There’s more to France than Paris of course. A lot more, which is why I tried getting to a fair bit of the county over two weeks through their extensive rail network.

Caen, Lyon, Marseilles, Avignon, Cannes and Antibes were all wonderful in different ways, but one thing that united them was a deep sense of history.

There’s one room in Versailles that is an unbelievable flex of the country’s history. It’s called “The Gallery of Great Battles”, and it is filled with about 30 massive paintings portraying battles from the time of Napoleon all the way to Clovis, the first king of the Franks, in 496.

All countries are political constructs in one sense or another, but “France” — as a coherent and recognized political entity known as France or Francia — has a longer uninterrupted history than pretty much any other big country outside of China, give or take a few years in the 1940s (and you could argue there was a similar lack of sovereignty in China around the Boxer Rebellion, but now I’m rambling).

In a physical sense, it creates a remarkable breadth of visual experiences through more than a thousand years of history.

Most countries have a clear couple of centuries where much of the impressive statecraft was built, but in France I wandered the imposing island of St. Mont-Michel (built in the 9th century) or the headquarters of the Avignon papacy (14th century) or Versailles and the many Louis XIV-era monuments in Paris (17th century), and was impressed in different ways.

It was another place where Canada’s newness as a political construct felt so striking.

The gallery of battles, the famed Liberty Leading the People painting in the Louvre, the old and the young slowly sipping their coffees and smoking their cigarettes on a street patio in the middle of the day, it all added up to a quiet sense of self-confidence and understanding, that battles would come and go but France would still be France.

Or maybe I just longed to be one of those people on the patio, enjoying an automatic five weeks of vacation and earlier retirement, and watching the young people go by.

Oddly, if there was one area of France I felt let down by, it was the food.

Every day on this trip, I’ve had one “quintessential food” from the country I’m in (and sometimes the city, if there’s an interesting regional dish I want to try).

It’s a fun way to create a nice ending to each of my daily Instagram posts, and provide a bit of routine to my days.

But the main point, aside from giving me a whole new lists of foods to seek out and enjoy when I’m back home, is to learn a bit more about each country from a gastronomical perspective.

In Colombia, the country’s diversity was heightened by the contrast between the more earthy soups and meats in the mountainous interior to the citrus and seafood explosion on the coast.

In Spain, the prevalence of tapas — and the time tapas bars are open until — demonstrated the country’s energy better than any museum could.

In Argentina, the pan-European nature of its influences could be seen in any number of its cafes.

And when you do this experiment in so many different countries, certain themes start to emerge. For example, a lot of national dishes fall into two categories:

1. Here are all the things around us that are pretty easy to collect throughout the year. We turned it into a stew/soup/baked dish.

2. In our country, we have a ton of (insert animal here). This dish takes the least desirable parts of that animal, covers it with a bunch of sauce, and puts it on top of rice or potatoes.

In both cases, scarcity is the dominant driver: people had limited access to meats, so were creative about the ways they used that which was most prevalent around them.

Again, Canada’s newness comes to the forefront. Part of the reason we don’t really have a national cuisine is our bigness, making regional food options much more prevalent.

But another aspect is “we” — and in this case this is very much a colonial settler construct — simply didn’t have the hundreds of years of figuring out how to create palatable local food options before railways and shipping routes made getting food from anywhere in the world easy enough to make the creation of national foods a very secondary concern.

I digress though.

The point is, for all the ways France was great fun, it’s food was…pretty good? A little rich? A bit overly familiar?

In some ways, it is a victim of its own success, with dozens of French recipes sweeping the world in the second half of the 20th century, the country becoming synonymous for delicacies. In turn, that has created something of a backlash to that style of cooking, even in the context of the Olympics itself.

I’m sure that was part of the reason my taste buds weren’t surprised by the food I had in France. And I’m sure the cottage industry of overly priced cafes geared towards tourists also had something to do with it.

My general guide to eating out abroad is to a) avoid the large patios in busy areas, b) use Google star reviews, c) make sure to look at the most recent reviews to make sure it hasn’t gone downhill, d) check the menu ahead of time so you aren’t disappointed if they don’t have something you really want. I did this in France too, but my theory is that tourists get so delighted by the general atmosphere in these cafes that they undervalue the actual food.

I was wowed by the Mona Lisa, by Mont-St. Michel, by the history and the Roman ruins and the coastline and the trains and everything in between.

But the escargot?

I’ve had pesto with scallops before.

No such thing as too many photos from Mont Saint-Michel