First of all, to call the bucolic Beauvais Airport “Paris – Beauvais” is tantamount to saying “San Francisco - Modesto” or “New York – Trenton”. If you missed those narrowly-scoped geographic references, those are two cool, world-class cities incongruously linked to two much shittier cities because they have cheap airports about an hour and a half away. Of course, I’ve never been to either Modesto or Trenton, but I’ve read their Wikipedia pages. Things aren’t looking good.
Actually, Beauvais is not a bad looking town. It’s got some pretty verdant green fields and some pretty quaint looking countryside. What’s the word I used before? Bucolic? Yes, that describes it perfectly. Truthfully, I’ve always thought that “bucolic” sounds like a disease pathology and not like something relating to the pleasant aspects of the countryside and country life. ORIGIN early 16th cent. (denoting a pastoral poem): via Latin from Greek boukolikos, from boukolos ‘herdsman,’ from bous ‘ox.’, but hey, I don’t get to make the rules. Some old, rich white men do.
After the initial 45 scenic minutes of the shuttle from the afore-insulted Beauvais airport, things started to get grimy and much more smokestack-y. This outer ring of Parisian suburbs, called banlieues in the barbaric native tongue of the Frenchmen, were not what most would consider feats of aesthetic architectural achievement. Most of the buildings are lifeless-looking high rises that seem to have been mail-ordered by the dozens from some sinister art-deco building warehouse.
From what I have heard, many of these areas are not places you would live if you have the means to go elsewhere. They are the French equivalent of the large-scale government housing projects in major U.S. cities, complete with many of the same features of social depression and malaise.
The Parisian banlieues are not a pretty place from a distance, and I know that things are no better from close up. In fact, that word in and of itself in French, like the word “projects” in English, carries a connotation - deserved or not - of crime, gangs, poverty, and of a large minority population. However, like most European cities, their “projects” are on out the outskirts of the city and not inside it. Interestingly, translations of the word “suburb” or “suburban” in many European languages connote the exact opposite of the American English equivalent.
(If you want to see a damn good film that illustrates this phenomenon, check out the movie “Gomorrah” – a modern-day Italian crime epic set in the suburbs of Naples. Not a pretty looking place to live.)
However, seeing Paris’s less glamorous side first was a good introduction for me, an American that has all the wrong ideas about what “France” means. I was thinking berets and mimes and art museums and dinners by the Seine and fine wines and snobby waiters. And while Paris does have all of these things – though perhaps not in the imagined quantities – at the end of the day, it is a giant, world city. And as one of the most important cities in all the world, of course it has soot covered smokestacks and block housing and people on the streets and miles of graffiti-painted walls, claiming injustice and begging for a peaceful (or other) resolution. Of course the people here struggle, of course they are grimey, of course they are on the grind, and of course they fight for what they have, just like anyone else in the world.
Paris is not at all postcards and paintings, and I was naïve to think so.
In real life, it’s much, much more alive than that.
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