Champs de Retail

Travel Yes and No – A Reply for Gez and Helvi.

Three weeks in Paris with FM.  I had this planned for some time but it took an eternity to work up the courage and find the cash to make the commitment.

Although she has travelled the world many times before Tim the Cabin Boy was born, this is her first trip to the city of light and my fourth – in 30 years.  Two years ago I came here with Emmlet II and her old school pal – for five days only – but it was the trip before that in 2004 with the whole tribe – for 10 days over Easter that put Paris in my “must go every now and then” list.

In every visit I always had that “I wish I had seen ……..” feeling when I came home.  There is simply too much to experience in perhaps even a year or two.  And in every case I learnt things that I should avoid or find some way around.

The first thing was that it is so far away that the trip can be exhausting – so we spent a bit more cash and flew premium economy (where your nose just misses the passenger in front’s head instead of touching it).  The second distance buster was breaking the trip at Singapore for a couple of days.  Both of these proved to be good ideas but stole time and cash.  Always the trade-off.

Luck out #1 was an upgrade to business class – free champagne and a “reclining bed”, no crowd and delightful QANTAS cabin service for the ten hours to Singapore.

Less wonderful event #1 back to premium economy for the Singapore to Paris leg – departing at 23:30 and flying all night – which means three or four movies and no cabin service and no reclining bed when you could really benefit from it.

Getting from Charles de Gaulle into Paris can be a nightmare for the language challenged.  Solution: I booked a great hotel in an ideal location (for just two nights to get over the trip and because the cost was frightening) and a car to pick us up – avoiding jetlag on the peak hour metro plus navigation on and off the thing with bags. This proved to be very good thinking and the hotel people were great.

After that we moved to an apartment I found on the internet through the massive TripAdvisor site – which had used in the last two visits – TripAdvisor that is, not the same apartment.  First it was only five minutes walk away from the hotel – easy.  Second it was very economical and proved to be huge and modern by Paris standards (like 55 square metres huge) – close to three metro stations (ideal), shops, the twice a week giant open air markets at Boulevard Richard Lenoir near Bastille.  Food there is cheap and excellent – even in this early Spring (cold, by our standards and unreliable weather like Sydney in October).

Echoing your sentiments, visiting monuments, galleries, churches and museums has been an interesting event for us.  FM loves art, but is easily put off by giant queues – and so I confess, am I.  So whereas I kind of expected to line up at Musee D’Orsay and the Louvre, we have decided to give them a miss.  Just too hard and big wasters of time.  Everyone goes to the Eiffel Tower.  But not us, this trip.  The Parisian engineers had carefully ensured that on the Easter public holidays, one of the lifts was broken down and the massive queues (in biting cold wind and light rain) were advised that the wait was over two hours.  To get a birds eye view of three or four landmarks and what is a beautiful but rather homogenous Paris central skyline.

You might recall that I expressed disappointment with the Picasso exhibition visiting Sydney recently.  Our apartment manager lunched with us on the first day and asked me what I thought of the Picassos – still on travelling exhibition while their Paris digs are under renovation.  I was honest.  She beamed and almost shook my hand.  She said that the story behind the collection is that the heirs to the Picasso legacy were facing a huge tax bill when he died – which, under French law they could “pay” in kind.  So they took all of the crap that was still in the paintings shed and gave it to the people de la Republic.  She thought they got the unsaleable rubbish – which I feel reflected a certain slight anti-Spanish sentiment as much as it did a major disapproving artistic judgment.

But to be fair to Paris, the exhibition in the Musee Marmotan (many smaller Monets and other impressionist and post-impressionist artists ) was on a human scale and excellent to visit.  Musee Carnavalet (Museum of the History of Paris) was also a good experience – FM said she thought it might be better going two or three times.

But perhaps the most significant difference was in our views about what is important and therefore should be the focus of spending our time.  FM is a fashionista – hard core and many of her favourite designers are here and in London.  So shopping – the real exchange of serious wads of cash and the indolent wandering – flaneur-style around the cities are her priority.  My kind of Y chromosome carrier detests shopping in all its forms – so we have trod a careful compromise of DIY.  More Shakespeare and Co for me than any number of designers.  And more time to take it easy, read, drink wine and coffee and eat (oh, my fat and growing torso) for me.

Getting back to your reluctance to travel as sightseers, I think the internet and international security and all the hassles of travel are speaking loudly in support of your view.  If you want – for some reason – to see monuments, they are only as far away as google.

But shopping is apparently not like that.  I cannot imagine anyone being a monument-viewing-aholic.  Stuff from precisely the same designers in Paris is different in exclusive shops all over the world – and surprisingly little choice is available in Australia – relative to what you can see wandering (with intent) in Paris.  So for FM, the London and Paris designer-specific shops have been a real eye-opener.  And so too were the shops in Singapore.  You really (apparently) do have to be there to feel the width.

A tiny snip of the Orchard Rd Retail Megatropolis

Australians have for years spoken of Singapore as a Mecca of shopping.  It was incredible in terms of the scale of the retail universe there.  But perplexing too.  There was shop after shop after shop all selling the same “exclusive” brands.  Exclusive by cost, not by availability, believe me.  I’m surprised that a Zegna suit failed to attach itself to me just through repeated exposure.  for reasons of personal financial safety, I’m OK about not returning to the Asian capital of retail.

As a person somewhat interested in information technology, I paid a special visit to the “Can’t Remember Jalan Centre”.  A tired and dilapidated, if not downright grubby octagonal building of six stories each with a double ring of mainly small one man stores, many temporarily closed or just plain dead, met my countenance.  Hundreds of little businesses all selling much of a muchness with a little specialisation in communications, security or whatever, here and there.  Things have clearly moved on from the cowboy PC with everything days.  The Apple stores are nowhere to be seen in this retail backwater.  They are amongst the high fashion stores.  And they are packed to the raffles with products and customers clamouring for today’s and tomorrow’s IT.

This is in itself surprising, because anyone with a quid can buy any Apple product from the comfort of their own house without ever having to step outside.  But Apple have made their technology and their retail palaces cool places to be and to be seen.

So maybe that’s where the 21^st century monuments will be found.  Not in the expensive real estate of major cities far away, but on the desk in the spare bedroom – now called “the home office”.  And since the internet can usually provide us with a picture of just about anything, I think it will be OK to pull down the Eiffel tower and build a few more Apple and Big Mac stores – and save us the cost and hassle of the trip and the bother of the retail zone.  It’ll be locals only – but then, we are all locals anyway, are we not ?

Alternatively, perhaps we can take a leaf from Lehan’s book and send a hologram of ourselves to visit a hologram of the Eiffel tower – just so we can, with some confidence, say “yeah, haven’t been there, done that.”