Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Those Rollerbladers
A regular disruption in getting around Paris is the Friday evening
event,
La Randonnée de vendredi soir
. This is something like the
“Critical Mass” bike rides in various cities in the USA, but in this case
it is every Friday. Complete with police escort, these rollerbladers
(
rolleurs)
begin from the Montparnasse at 9:30 pm and can number
in the thousands. Making a long river of moving bodies, blocking
the major boulevards along their route, they frustrate car-drivers,
pedestrians, even bicycles for several hours.
Taxes and Other Inconsistencies
To maintain their exquisite capital city, and the best health
care system in the world, the French people are burdened
by the highest level of taxation in Europe (43.8 per cent of
GDP in 2003). France enjoys a mix of the traditional, the
exotic, and the latest technological advances. The country
is well served by their TGV trains, the fastest in the world,
as well as the new Eurostar, with a 2.25-hour train service
from Paris to London.
France was the third country in the world to develop
a nuclear bomb and the biggest user of nuclear power.
Areva, the state-controlled engineering company, is the
world's largest producer of nuclear engineering. Seventy-
fi ve percent of France's electrical needs come from nuclear
power plants scattered incongruously around the beautiful
countryside, though all this is being reconsidered since the
Japanese tsunami in 2011. Yet Parisians still prefer to buy
their bread, meat and vegetables daily, fresh-from-the-farm
at outdoor markets, if possible. They will walk or bicycle
rather than drive. They get dressed up to run an errand to
the post offi ce.
A constant theme in conversation is the deterioration of
the quality of life, while everywhere this visitor looks, its
richness and diversity seem secure.
Politics is King
Four centuries of great literature and philosophy give the
French a profound love of politics. While the notion of
democracy was not invented in France, its principles have
been fi ercely defended here. To this day, the French argue
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