I had several errands to do today… It’s bitter cold (for Paris) right now and I lost my gloves in New York. Anyway, I walked around two opposite sides of town and got lost both times.
Paris, with its arrondissements, is built like a snail’s shell—or that’s what I read somewhere once.
The center of the shell is the 1st (where I live) and then circles around from there until you get to the 20th. Yeah, it makes no sense for people who come from gridded cities, like New York and even Philly.
So I have this theory that this town has a million wormholes that you step through, just by making a left turn instead of a right, or vice versa. There are routes I know to certain places like the back of my hand. Now, logic would make it seem that if you take the street that’s parallel to the one you’re on, you’ll still wind up at your destination at approximately the same time.
Not so, mon ami!
I have literally tripled my walking time just by taking the next parallel street over. Because that street circles around, weaves in and about some sort of Gallic space-time continuum that leaves you feeling like a fool at best (discombobulated or “bouleversée,” at worst) for even trying to venture off the narrow path that you know leads to your destination.
It’s a big French F-you to people who did not grow up in the snail’s shell. Even today, I had to ask a kind old French lady for directions and she very specifically wanted to know the address, because if I went one direction, I wouldn’t be near enough to the place I had to go. So I had to take, yep, the next parallel street over in order to get there in a more timely fashion.
To bypass the wormholes, I mainly try to use The Force or sheer luck, turning onto a certain street because it “feels right.” So far, I’ve got about a 60% success rate using that technique. And yes, I have one of those indispensable Plan de Paris, but I’ve just misplaced mine at the moment.
