We arrived at the Paris Gare de Lyon Station dead on time at 06:20 hrs. A multitude of train tracks beneath an intricate web of electrical wires led into a huge modern cavern of a station with all mod cons. The Gare de Lyon (Station of Lyon), officially Paris-Gare-de-Lyon, is one of the six large mainline railway station termini in Paris.
The station was built for the World Exposition of 1900. On multiple levels, it is considered a classic example of the architecture of its time. Most notable is the large clock tower atop one corner of the station, similar in style to the clock tower of the United Kingdom Houses of Parliament, home to Big Ben.
The station houses the Le Train Bleu restaurant, which has served drinks and meals to travellers and other guests since 1901 in an ornately decorated setting, and as our first priority was sustenance it was a welcome sight.
We had the best cup of coffee that we had had for months and buttered croissants put us in fine fettle for the day ahead. Fellow breakfasters ranged from arty Parisians, soapy European travellers with multicoloured rucksacks to alcoholics in for their reviving morning tipple at the bar.
We did a preliminary sortie into the cold winter dawn and spent a quarter of an hour pouring over a displayed city map in search of our location and a route to our destination. We walked back to the Railway Station and waited with a huge Aussie bird and her tiny mate for the Tourist Information Bureau to open at 08.00 hrs.
An old biddy managed to jump the queue and delayed us for about 15 minutes with her pedantic questioning. We grabbed a free city map and set off back onto the streets. The city was stretching and yawning, slowly creeping back to life as we walked happily northwards along the Rue de Lyon.
On the Place de la Bastille, a square where the Bastille prison stood until the storming of the Bastille and its subsequent physical destruction between 14 July 1789 and 14 July 1790 during the French Revolution. No vestige of the prison remains, but The July Column (Colonne de Juillet) which commemorates the events of the July Revolution (1830) stands at the centre of the square, was our first of hundreds of Parisian monuments that littered the city.
Since the 17th century, Paris has been one of Europe's major centres of finance, diplomacy, commerce, fashion, science and arts, and in testimony ornate historical buildings, cathedrals, art galleries, commemorative statues and elaborate memorials were everywhere.
We found the International Youth Hostel at 8 Jules Ferry Boulevard, just off the Place de la République with it’s central statue boxed in and hidden behind scaffolding. Apparently it is a 31 feet (9.4 metre) bronze statue of Marianne, the personification of the French Republic, "holding aloft an olive branch in her right hand and resting her left on a tablet engraved with Droits de l'homme (the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen)."
The statue sits atop a monument which is 75 feet (23 m) high. Marianne is surrounded with three statues personifying liberty, equality, and fraternity, the values of the French Republic. These statues also evoke the three medieval theological virtues. Also, at the base is a lion guarding a depiction of a ballot box. The monument has been described as "an ordinary one, acceptable to a committee in the 1880s and inoffensively unarresting today."
Our spirits fell when we saw the “hostel full” sign on the door but we went in to see if we had received any mail, as we had used this as a Post Restante address. We were delighted to find that space was available if we left our IYHA membership cards and returned after 13.00 hrs.
The Youth Hostel used to be a regular hotel and had a modern bar and common room. Yanks and Aussies exchanged the usual travel banter over breakfast as we took to the open air. We duplicated our breakfast in a nearby brasserie which cost 26 French Francs for 2 coffees and 2 croissants, before carrying out our preliminary recce of the French Capital.
We walked down to the Louvre, across the Place de la Concorde with it’s myriad monuments, glimpsed the Eiffel Tower and headed back in search of a Burger King (we were real culture vultures)! We found Burger King near McDonalds and felt cheated with an insubstantial Whopper in surroundings reminiscent of a “Blade Runner” film set.
We walked along the main thoroughfare which changed names by the yard, from Boulevard Hausmann in the west to Boulevard St Martin in the east. Back at the Youth Hostel we paid for 3 nights and got an unexpected windfall. They gave us 100 French Francs too much change.
We moved into a 4 bedroom on the fourth floor but before long we were out pounding the pavements, following our noses and looking for the “bright lights”. We were amused by the obvious prostitutes that infested the Rue St Martin and browsed through yet more record shops.
At dusk George pounced on a rare Bob Dylan boxed set and we had a coffee in another fast-food cafeteria before seeing “A Clockwork Orange” at 19:30 hrs. Orange mécanique (A Clockwork Orange) est un film d'anticipation britannico-américain écrit et réalisé par Stanley Kubrick, sorti sur les écrans en 1971. “A Clockwork Orange” is a 1971 dystopian crime film adapted, produced, and directed by Stanley Kubrick, based on Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel of the same name. It employs disturbing, violent images to comment on psychiatry, juvenile delinquency, youth gangs, and other social, political, and economic subjects in a dystopian near-future Britain.
It was a film that I had always wanted to see but was too young when it was released in the UK as an X-rated film for over 18’s only. In 1973 A Clockwork Orange was withdrawn from circulation in the United Kingdom, at the request of Kubrick himself and it would remain unavailable for distribution or broadcast in the United Kingdom until Kubrick’s death in 1999.
Although it is often reported that A Clockwork Orange was ‘banned’ in the United Kingdom, the removal of the movie was actually Kubrick’s own choice. In the year after the movie’s cinematic release in 1971, a number of disturbing crimes were reported that seemed to have connections with some of its most infamous and disturbing scenes. It appeared as if some copycats were on the loose, donning bovver boots, white clothing and cod pieces, bowler hats and one false eyelash.
In perhaps the most shocking of these incidents, a group of men from Lancashire assaulted a 17-year-old girl to the tune of “Singin’ in the Rain”, mirroring the brutal scene near the beginning of the movie in the abandoned building. In addition, a 16-year-old boy was found guilty of killing an elderly homeless man, after claiming that he had heard about a similar scene in the movie. The association of real-world acts of violence with the movie was deeply upsetting for Kubrick, and he decided to pull “A Clockwork Orange” from the British market.
The movie reinvigorated an old debate about the potential societal impact of depictions of graphic violence. Kubrick himself had anticipated many of these critiques in the early publicity for “A Clockwork Orange”, and he was initially adamant that his film could not be responsible for so-called copycat violence.
Despite it being dubbed into French we thought that it was visually stunning and packed a punch with its use of classical music and electronic synthetic music composed by Wendy Carlos. It was shocking as it left nothing to the imagination on the sex and violence front.
Back at the Youth Hostel we wrote up our daily logbooks despite prying American bozos and the attention-seeking bores in the common room. Feeling knackered after an extra-long day we went to bed and succumbed to a deep slumber.
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