Books and beer bottles at bus stops
I saw this scene on the way to work this morning and felt obliged to snap it. What caught my eye wasn’t so much the empty Heineken bottle — a common enough sight pretty much anywhere — but the books left right next to it. Whether all three items belonged to the same person we can only speculate. But the fact that someone had left books at a bus stop does speak volumes, at least in my mind.
France has always struck me as a very literary country. Aside from the country’s long list of writers and the incredible number of bookstores in the capital, France is one of the only countries I’ve visited where you often see people reading in public. You can often spot people reading novels in public parks, and it’s not uncommon to find people carrying novels on the metro. Even beggars sitting on city streets can often be found passing the time thumbing through a novel, making them possibly the most well-educated beggars in the world. Whereas reading may be seen as a nerdy pursuit in some countries, it seems to be viewed much more positively in France.
When I was on exchange at the Sorbonne, I rented a bedroom in an apartment in the rather bourgeois 16th arrondissement. My landlords, with whom I lived, had an incredibly large library of books that sat on a bookshelf stretching the length of the corridor. As one of them had worked for a large publishing house, she would receive free books every so often. The result was that they had books on pretty much any subject imaginable — from art history to zoology (probably). I was free to walk down the creaking corridor of their seemingly haunted apartment and consult any book I wanted.
While my landlords were unusually well-read, you can certainly find many readers in the capital. At the Gibert Joseph bookstore in the 5th arrondissement, it’s not unusual to find people buying five or six books at a stroke.
With that said, I do get the impression that reading — novels, at least — is on decline. The number of people I see reading in public is much lower than a decade ago when I did my university exchange at the Sorbonne. If this is indeed true, I suspect this waning in popularity for the written word may be largely due to the rise of social media. When people once spent time reading Proust, they’re now busy doomscrolling on the ‘gram.
But even if reading may be on the decline, it’s unlikely to ever go away entirely. Indeed, more and more reading seems to be taking place online. But there’s something special and romantic about a tangible book that no e-book reader could ever hope to replace, and so it would be a sad day if sights like the one above soon cease to exist.
That evening, after finishing work, I returned to the bus stop. But the bottle and the books were no longer there.
Roasted chestnuts
If you ever walk around the central districts of Paris, you’ll eventually stumble upon a bunch of guys selling roasted chestnuts on the open street. They’re hard to miss: the scent of chestnuts cooking on a makeshift stove often atop a shopping trolley can be smelled a mile away.
Their stoves are always in tourist-dense streets of heavy foot traffic. What’s also apparent is that their business operations are far from authorised. There usually aren’t many street food vendors in Paris, and when you do come across them, they tend to be in public squares; meanwhile, the roasted chestnut salesmen tend to be in the middle of the street, in the heart of the action.
I suppose the reason they sell them is obvious: they most likely aren’t documented and would struggle to survive by any other means. While it is hard to live anywhere without having a legal status, Paris may be a particularly difficult place to live on account of how expensive it is. You can often find a lot of people begging in the streets while others turn to unregistered business ventures — such as selling miniature Eifffel Towers, bottles of water or roasted chestnuts — as a way to get by.
Their businesses are forever tinged with insecurity, however, because in the event that they’re stopped by police, they’re liable to face unpleasant consequences. And so whenever police may be in the vicinity, they’ll wind up their operations and flee the scene. Only to reappear once the coast is clear.
Weird toilets
Having lived in France for around two years, I’ve seen my fair share of unusual toilets. And the thing is, they can be weird for a diverse set of reasons.
One of the strangest things about street-side public toilets in Paris is the fact that they don’t have toilet seats. They just have the base of the toilet and that’s about it. So when nature calls, I have no idea how most people use them. Sure, you can pee in them. But that option is only applicable to those who can do so standing up. For those who need to sit down, I have no idea how they get on with business beyond hovering awkwardly above the toilet or just saying “To hell with it” and sitting on a filthy toilet base.
As the toilets are automatically cleaned from ceiling to floor after every use, they’re arguably fairly hygienic. In fact, I have a friend who once got trapped in one such stall during the cleaning process and got soaked from head to toe.
But despite their cleanliness, the fact they’re on the street can still invite some odd behaviour. One time I entered a toilet, only to discover two giant logs lying side by side beneath the wash basin. That disgusting image made me curious to know the story behind them. Did someone enter the bathroom, squat down, take a dump, then shuffle over a few metres to the left and take another one? Did that someone take the first dump and then a copycat made an homage? Whatever actually happened, it’s still pretty disgusting to think about.
Besides streetside toilets, the public toilets in places of learning aren’t much better. Like the aforementioned ones, the toilets at the Sorbonne were often pretty filthy. As in French high schools (or at least the one I briefly attended), they tend to be for everyone regardless of gender, which could be quite confusing at first. Especially if they have urinals and all.
But the Sorbonne toilet stalls were also unique in that they always had political graffiti. There’s always some message about supporting the revolution and/or bringing down the bourgeoisie. I also remember seeing graffiti that appeared to have been written in May 1968. It’s funny to think that graffiti from the sixties could still be visible today, which says something about the lack of renovations the building has undergone since then. I suppose there’s almost no point in removing graffiti anyway, since a new tag will appear the next day.
