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paris-olympics
If you have never been aboard a high-speed train, and you happen to be in France, or other parts of Europe served by Eurostar, then it is really your chance to experience a ride unlike any other. I took my first train ride aboard the TGV in the latter part of the 1990s, as part of a group of grad students looking to escape momentarily from the pressures of Paris and the university campus.
In the South of France, several French students had leased three sail boats that we were to board and sail to a nearby island, tour a castle in ruins on the island and get back in time to resume our studies and career make or break exams.
The first thing I noticed is how sleek and clean the train cabin was, very modern and austere but far better lit and alive than a commercial airline cabin.
Everything in it looks like a jet plane and yet the big wide windows ushering in daylight and the vista of train station passengers hurrying by in finding their line, and workers tending to customers were in sharp contrast to the tiny round windows that you would be treated to onboard a plane. And there was no center isle, only big reclining seats to the left and right of the main walkway, folding trays, computer power docking plugs, and the large swooping windows were the main attraction.
When everyone settled in and strapped their seat belts, when the train started moving, it was at first imperceptible, you could hardly feel the motion, it was more of you noticing the scenery outside was beginning to slide past you.
As the thing picked up speed, you could feel it in the back of your seat but we were still going at a good pace and it was really enjoyable taking in the view as we left Paris and started traveling in gradually less urban settings.
When the train quickly ascended to cruising speed, it became really difficult to look outside at the pastoral scenery, everything was such a blur, your eyes would start tearing as you attempt to look outside. The TGV was now going so fast it was almost impossible to enjoy the landscape scenery, but if you looked at the center of glass window and at the distance on the horizon, it was reasonably steady, everything surrounding that “sweet spot” was too blurry. It is possible the TGV then may have running faster than it does today*.
The amazing thing is the soft and comfortable ride while you rocketed on the ground moving at speeds that are the closest you will get to a jet plane flying a few feet above the ground.
*Something worth mentioning is that it is completely possible that the TGV today runs at a much slower speed, than the ride I was on in the 1990s. The TGV was at one point in 2007 tested for a max speed of 357 mph but interestingly enough all TGVs today run at a top of 160 to 200 mph, far below the top speed recorded in 2007. Why so much slower? Perhaps for longevity, stability on the track and long distance enjoyment as the rails lines have become inter-connnected and travel via TGV is now possible to Belgium, England, Germany, Luxembourg, Italy and Spain.
It was such a huge disparity from the old trains that still run around Paris and the periphery, the old trains were very modern, but once onboard the TGV those modern trains felt like outdated relics from the past, crammed, noisy, bumpy and rickety crickety, all working wonderfully on time, operated by the SNCF (Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français) which is loosely the National Administration of French Railroads, a government agency that went into operation in the late 1930s, fourteen years after the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris.
Our friends were busy chatting with each other and trading quips, having settled in their seats, but all eyes were on the overhead display in the forward section of the cabin displaying a live graphic and map and our trajectory with the point of departure and destination and with ETA constantly adjusting like a chronometer.
Those of you catching headlines every now and then of the efforts underway by the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, and the President of France would have noticed the City of Lights has recently been the focus of particularly nasty gossip about cleaning up the Seine River around the City of Lights as to make it possible for Olympics swimmers to compete just as they did in 1922.
Headlines in December 2023 were making hey of the issue of cleaning up the river from over swelling of the storm drainage and control system that links up at
multiple sections into the sewage drainage network of the city and has often in the past resulted in leakage of waste when über heavy storms’ rainwater floods their system.
Water charity warns Paris Olympic swimmers face “alarming levels” of dangerous bacteria in Seine River – CBS News April 12, 2024
Tokyo 2020’s worrying water quality a concerning issue that threatens to rain over [Japan’s] Olympic parade – The Independent October 22, 2018
All those reports, mostly caught via American publishing outlets, somehow failed to mention that nearly all waste effluents discharged by Parisians are pumped separately into the Archères waste treatment facility. Built around World War I and modernized repeatedly over the decades Archères became one of the biggest waste treatment facilities in Europe by the end of 1970.
CALIFORNIA’S AMAZING
FIVE STAR STENCH
I would be remiss if I did not mention that right here in fabled Southern California, the land of perpetual golden sands, bikinis and hot bods, our own Hyperion sewage treatment plant has for the most recent decade, on practially an annual ritualistic basis, flooded and discharged hundreds of thousands of gallons of huntreated human waste into Long Beach and vicinity, forcing authorities to shut down access to the beaches and piers as far away as Huntington Beach – until the mishap is diluted into the Pacific.
It would not be worth mentioning had it not been for the tourist attraction these spots represent for the local economy and being nostalgia must-see for lovers of the Beach Boys era and culture. Plus Huntington Beach is now legendary for annual international surfing competitions.
But the history of the sewage network in Paris dates back to 1370 and had become a city underneath a city. In the 1800s tourists were treated to tours of the underground city which also received mention in Victor Hugo’s 1862 Les Misérables novel “…Paris has another Paris under herself; a Paris of sewers; which has its streets, its crossings, its squares, its blind alleys, its arteries, and its circulation, which is slime, minus the human form” and in H. L. Humes 1958 novel The Underground City.
The Seine has been off limits to swimmers and officially illegal for swimming for the past 100 years. Trash, bottles, tires and even bicycles have been removed from its bottom as residents and visitors alike abuse the quais they enjoy. While it is exceedingly admirable that France wishes to roll back the clock on 100 years of industrial development and pollution and make the spot accessible to bathers and formal international swimming competitions as was the case for the 1900 Paris Olympics, it is somewhat arrogant to expect significant environmental improvements to take place in the space of three years (announced in 2021 for 2024), despite a highly touted €1.4 Billion remedial efforts that belatedly kicked into gear only a year and a half ago.
In 2022 alone, the accidental overflow and discharge of sewage in Los Angeles County peeked at a record breaking combined 26 million gallons (two separate incidents) that closed beaches as far away as Malibu, Santa Monica, Redondo Beach, Long Beach all the way to Huntington Beach and southward.
The idea of cleaning up one of the world’s most famous tributaries originally started in 1990 with then Mayor (and later President of the Republic) Jacques Chirac who declared he wishes to have it cleaned up and swim in it by 1993. President Chirac passed away in 2019 without seeing his promise rewarded.
And here we are just one year before the Olympics ceremonies with plans to orchestrate a triathlon and a mixed relay event both involving athletes swimming competitively in the thus far murky unsanitary water, and let’s not forget that France’s desire to host the most flamboyant of Games in memory revolves around the first time ever opening ceremonies to be held with barges and boat parades circling l’Ile de France. Will they succeed when they failed in 1993? To read the 2023 headlines of ongoing tests of bacteria levels in the Seine is to believe that the city of Paris dumps its human waste into the river, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Retooling
THE
FASHION
CORNER
The Seine around Paris in the past decade had become such a huge tourist attraction due in part to annual summer heat that practically caused the deaths of many elderly. As a treat, the City Mayor and advisors have recently been having white beach sand trucked in each summer creating artificial beaches along the Seine that can be enjoyed by residents and visitors alike. Dubbed Les Berges, the Promenades des Berges was created in 2013 when then Mayor Bertrand Delanoë converted the left bank expressway into a 1.6 miles (11 acres) park and recreational patches. Just like the Santa Monica Promenade on the Pacific shoreline of Los Angeles (re-launched in 1989), Paris shuttered the historical expressway in favor of pedestrian traffic and extended the park with floating platforms over the water, firmly anchored and providing extra leisure and recreational space, from hammocks and kids’ playgrounds to gardens and horticultural spaces.
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