This station on the line 1 is the oldest existing metro station – construction started in October 1898. Its name indicates its location at the intersection of the Rue de Rivoli and the Place du Louvre.
The station foregoes commercial advertisements and instead showcases copies of exhibit items from the Louvre, from Antiquity to the Middle Ages – a foretaste of a visit to the museum above!
Concorde métro station was part of the very first metro line, the 1, it was opened in the summer of 1900. It takes the name of the Place de la Concorde above. However, barely two months after its inauguration, Concorde is the site of the very first metro accident, with 38 injured following a collision of two metro trains.
In 1910, metro line 12 is added to the station, later line 8.
The platform of line 12 will delight solvers of crossword puzzles and players of Scrabble with its lettered ceramic tiles. Do you have the patience to read the text, namely the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789? It is spelled out without spaces, and if you are looking for punctuation marks, you can find them neatly grouped at the bottom!
Did you know there is a logic to the street numbers in Paris? There is, and it’s really quite simple and has helped me many times in pre-cell phone days or when I am on a bike and my phone is in my pocket.
The rule is very simple and distinguishes streets running (roughly) perpendicular to the river and streets running (again, roughly) parallel to the river.
For the perpendicular streets, numbering starts on the end closest to the river. Uneven numbers are on the left, even numbers on the right. So if you’re looking for a number higher than the one in front of you, go away from the river.
For the parallel streets, numbering starts upriver. The south side of the street will have the uneven numbers, the north side the even numbers. So if you’re looking for a number higher than the one in front of you, go downriver.
Easy-peasy, right?
Visiting Paris and your children need a break from Champs-Élysées and Louvre, Musée d’Orsay and Boulevard Saint Michel?
In the 4th arrondissement, between the Rue de Rivoli and the Seine, nestled in between storefronts of the Rue Saint Paul, hides one of Paris’ smaller and less-well-known museums – the Musée de la Magie.
Enter and immediately descend a flight of stairs into the underground realm of Magic and Automatons. A hundred automatons await you and your children, wind-up toys, optical illusions, magic mirrors and more. And of course, a magic show.
In terms of food, is there anything more French than the baguette?
Did you know the word baguette literally means “stick”? And that a baguette magique is not a magic bread but a magic wand?
La baguette is omnipresent in France. Every bakery (and every supermarket nowadays) sells it, and even if you don’t buy one yourself, you won’t spend a day in France without seeing someone carry a baguette.
Bread in this long thin shape was first mentioned in the 17th century. Back then, it was considered a luxury because it didn’t keep as long a the traditional round bread loaves. However, in 1957, it replaced the round bread loaf in the standard shopping basket of the French Statistics Office.
The classic baguette is made with only a few ingredients – water, flour, salt, yeast, and that’s it. It is 60cm long and weighs 250g.
If you go into a French bakery, it’s easy to get lost among all the long thin breads there. If you want to make sure you get the classic baguette, ask for a “Tradition”. In order to protect the bakers’ craft, a law of September 13, 1993, forbids any additive or fast freezing of these baguettes.
France being France, the Tradition is a candidate for the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage.
Now you have bought your Tradition, what are you going to do with it?
Here’s what the French like to do:
My thanks to Jamy Gourmaud and his Youtube video on the baguette.
When establishing your fantasy or sci-fi world, one element to take into account is time keeping. I already mentioned it in my post on anachronisms, but the way people measure the passing of time will influence their daily lives and therefore impact in one way or another in your story.
You don’t necessarily have to flesh out all the details of your world’s time measurement to your reader, as Tolkien did in Lord of the Rings (Appendix D), but you as the writer have to know them.
Is time measurement as accurate as in our world? If not, what would people say instead of “give me a minute” and how would they make appointments? Would they refer to the sun (mid-day) or the moon, for example?
In Ancient Rome, the day was made up of twelve “hours” of equal length between sunrise and sunset. As the length of days varies, so did the length of these hours.
In Monica Hughes’ fantasy duology Sandwriter/The Promise, a ten-day is the equivalent of our seven-day week.
Does your world have an equivalent of weekdays, and how are they named? Are there days that are different from the others (like our Sundays or Sabbath), or is every day the same unless it’s a special holiday?
If your story is set on a different planet, astronomy comes into the equation:
How does that planet orbit its sun? Is there more than one sun? Are there moons, and how many? Does the planet have seasons?
Also, are your characters natives of that planet and naturally use the astronomical references for time keeping? Or are they colonists from Earth and try to stick to Earth time measurements? If they have been there for several generations, have they kept it up, or are they gradually shifting to adopt the natural references of their new home?
If your story is set in space, do your characters follow Earth time-keeping? (Astronauts on the ISS, who are in close contact with Earth, work on GMT.) Or have they established a generic time-keeping system? Are they even from Earth?
All this will play into your story, as it has a direct impact on how your characters think, speak, and generally manage their time (or not).
Books I mentioned in this post:
In France, the president is elected by direct popular vote in a two-round election every five years.
Let’s look at this more closely:
The president is elected directly by the people. If you’re French and over 18, all you have to do is make sure you’re on the voting list (and if you’re not, sign up at your local mairie, or city hall).
It’s a two-round election. On the first-round election day, you go to the polling station and cast your vote for one of the dozen or so candidates. If no candidate secures the absolute majority in the first round, the two candidates who receive the most votes advance to the second round. The second round takes place two weeks after the first.
By the way, elections are always held on a Sunday.
The election takes place every five years. It used to be every seven years, and as a president can be reelected once, he can potentially hold the presidency for a total of 14 years (like François Mitterrand did, from 1981 to 1995). In 2000, then-president Jacques Chirac held a referendum to change the term from seven to five years. It passed, and when he was reelected in 2002, he served for another five years, with a total of 12 years in office.
So far, there have been no female presidents. A woman made it to the second round in 2007 and in 2017, and in the 2022 presidential elections, there are four women among the 12 official candidates.
In order to become an official candidate, you need the official support (“parainnage”) of 500 elected officials, such as members of parliament, mayors, or senators. In 2022, there were 64 individuals who received at least one parrainage, 22 of whom were not even trying to become a candidate (such as the astronaut Thomas Pesquet). Add to that 16 individuals who tried to but did not receive any parrainage.
You get the idea, the field is crowded. Some go in for the attention, or to make a statement (political or otherwise).
The serious contenders, those who become official candidates, need to obtain at least 5% of the vote to get a meaningful chunk of their campaign expenses reimbursed. With twelve official candidates vying for the votes, good luck to them.
If you come to Paris at a certain time of the year, or stay for a while and use public transport on a regular basis, you might come across some animals.
First up: Serge le lapin, the official Paris metro bunny and quite probably the stupidest and/or unluckiest bunny in France.
Serge has been around for 45 years, getting his paws stuck in the sliding metro doors. I’ve also spotted him getting hurt on the escalator.
So far so good, but what are the chameleon and the beaver doing on Paris transport? I’ll let you make a guess first, just for fun.
I’m sure you didn’t get it, it’s very far-fetched.
Caméléon (chameleon) and castor (beaver) are the names of two different replacement services. Caméléon busses jump into action when one of the RATP’s ten tram lines is interrupted for one hour or more.
Castor (beaver) is the name of the replacement bus service for the central Paris section of the RER C train that runs along the Seine river through aging tunnels . The almost two decade long “Beaver works” project takes place every summer when the section is closed down entirely for a month or longer, and the “beaver buses” take over. Since this is high tourist season, and the closed section of the RER train includes Notre Dame, Musée d’Orsay, Invalides and the Eiffel Tower, it might actually be useful to know.
La Grande Arche, the Great Arch, is the western end point of the axe historique. It was one of French president François Mitterrand’s “grands projets”, inaugurated in 1989 at the bicentennial of the French Revolution. A 110m high cube, it houses government offices and a viewing platform.
As with the Louvre, the Grande Arche is not centered on the axis but at a 6.5° angle. The reason for this is technical: below the parvis run a highway, the metro and the RER train, and the foundations would have stood right in the way of those. As it is, the shift shows off the depth of the monument.
La Grande Arche was initially known as La Grande Arche de la Fraternité (The Great Arch of Fraternity) but is referred to as La Grande Arche de la Défense or simply La Grande Arche.
La Défense is Europe’s largest purpose-built business district with 560ha (1,400acres). It is located outside the Paris city limits in the département Hauts-de-Seine. and divided between four municipalities: Puteaux, Courbevoie, Nanterre and La Garenne-Colombes.
The name stems from a monument called La Défense de Paris honoring the soldiers defending the city of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. It was inaugurated in 1883 and has since been moved several times to accommodate the changing business district that now bears its name.
180,000 people work here, while only about 25,000 people live in the apartments that can be found in between the office towers. La Défense can be reached on public transport with the métro 1 which has two stations, one at each extremity: Esplanade de La Défense and La Défense (Grande Arche), as well as with the RER A at the La Défense station.
The axis in its extension from the Champs-Élysées was drawn under Louis XV, but it was only in the 1960s that the business district began to grow. It went through several stages until it became the collection of skyscrapers that it is today. Currently its highest tower is the Tour First at 231m, which is also France’s highest skyscraper.
Visitors to La Défense will notice the long esplanade stretching along the center of the district and culminating in the Parvis square between the CNIT, the Quatre Temps Shopping Center and the Grande Arche.
The CNIT is the oldest building of La Défense and the largest unsupported concrete span enclosed space in the world. Entry is free, you just need to look up to see the impressive roof structure.
The Quatre Temps Shopping mall was the most visited shopping mall in France in 2019.
Below the esplanade hides a network of streets, the métro, the RER train, delivery docks, service and emergency access roads, and parking garages.
