France

September 18–22, 2004

Shortly before setting off I decided to go online and book a car rental in advance. I went to the “Europcar” website. It turned out to be so abominably horrendous and dull-witted that it is only thanks to my great desire to pick up the car right there at the airport that I coped with this indigestible product of someone’s withered brain. The Russian version is altogether undercooked, whereas the English one tortured me for a whole hour, refusing to recognise the login and password it had itself issued me with a minute ago. Plus there are all sorts of useless ticks, buttons, and captions all over the place. In short, marketing has triumphed over reason yet again. Although you’d think that it couldn’t get any simpler — just put in your credit card number.

Paris

I landed, picked up my diesel-run Mercedes, and went to sleep at a hotel. Across the road everyone had been fast asleep for a long time — the window gave on to Montparnasse cemetery.

I’ve written about Paris before. I didn’t like it the first time round and its reputation hasn’t been restored to date. On the bright side, on this trip I made it to the Pompidou centre during opening hours and had a coffee on the top terrace.

I found not one but two very stiff parking fines on my windscreen in the morning. However, since I don’t speak French (six years of French classes at school were all for nothing), I decided that the tickets had been swept away by the wind.

Postbox.

Rennes

Next stop — Rennes, a city where the traffic lights look like a L-series Canon lens.

The city itself is small. Lots of the buildings look like they’re from the fifteenth century. Hardly any of them are at a right angle to the ground.

There’s a metro here. Why you need a metro in a city with a population of two hundred thousand remains a mystery.

The dinner I had at the lavishly titled “Amicochon” stubbornly insisted that I spend the night in Rennes. Or rather, it was the bottle of wine, which was so thoroughly enjoyable that even a cup of French coffee didn’t ruin it.

Nantes

A moderately pointless city.

Traffic light.

This cup of coffee was consumed to the sounds of restoration work being done on the castle — and on we go.

Niort

This is the sort of place you go to to spend the summer at your grandma’s.

I didn’t grab a coffee here because the day was drawing to a close, but my road trip around France was not yet complete.

La Rochelle

Petrozavodsk’s sister city. A delightful place, complete with a port from which ferries set sail for Fort Boyard (just so people don’t think that it’s populated by boyars i.e. a privileged class of landowners in 13th and 14th century Russia, it’s transcribed as Boyard in Russian, even though the “d” is silent).

They’ve also got some amazing traffic lights here.

Last look at La Rochelle.

Île de Ré

To the ri? To the le? To the Ré: a sizeable toll bridge connects the island to the mainland.

A few of the small towns on the island bear a striking resemblance to oligarchs’ holiday homes. The road brought me to a town called Saint- Martin-de-Ré. It’s outrageously similar to a city in Portugal called Faro. It’s got the exact same port dotted with little restaurants, a line of one and two-storey buildings and castle ruins behind it, as well as the exact same atmosphere.

The hotel room is tastefully designed: the bath curtains hang directly across from the bed. If you draw these curtains, you can lie under a blanket and watch someone watching you from under some bath bubbles, and so on and so forth. There was also some cutting-edge digital technology in the room — a “Sharp” LCD TV. When you turned it on you would get a mirror image. You had to press the “flip” button twice in order to be able to watch TV normally.

The only fish restaurant in town also turned out to be the best restaurant in town. The waiter deigned to be patient while I entrusted him with pairing a wine with the fish. He reverted to his default state of superciliousness as soon as I’d placed my coffee order.

A tour of the island revealed that it’s also very similar to Faro in the details.

View overlooking the marina.

Found a Lilliputian traffic light in the wonky streets:

Next, a 20-minute drive to the tip of the island, to Saint-Clément-de-Baleines, where there’s a 57-metre lighthouse. I’ve got an excuse for trudging up several hundred steps to get to the top — I can post the resulting photo on my website. What other people are doing up there remains unclear. Nothing of interest is visible from the lighthouse.

Bordeaux

They have a terrific tram with equally terrific tram stops.

Biarritz

All the Russian authors took turns going on holiday here before the Soviet authorities set aside the Peredelkino and Komarovo dacha complexes for them. A delightful backwater resort.

Some of the residences elicit bouts of class hatred.

Rubbish bin.

This is where I went to a chocolate museum (the chocolate wasn’t any good) and moved on.

Foix

Its lone tourist attraction is the old castle, which the pedantic ticket officer didn’t let me visit because I turned up one minute after the official closing time.

I was trying to drive out of the city when the road led me to the top of a mountain, then, in a cruel twist, hit a dead end. On the bright side, the view was truly spectacular, confirming yet again that the best place to die is in the mountains, not in some elite apartment block with well-developed infrastructure, socially homogenous residents, a tanning salon, and security guards.

While we’re on the subject of music. Aside from listening to the radio, there isn’t much else to do on the road. In Spain they have a wonderful national radio station. When you get sick of it there’s always something else worth listening to. In France it’s the exact opposite. FM radio in France is the absolute pits, wall-to-wall “Country hour” and its ilk, endless accordion concerts, and stale hits. It makes your ears bleed.

Montpellier

Half of the city is decorated with a staggeringly pointless totalitarian- celebratory building complex under the theme of “the road to Europe”.

A path, about a kilometre long, leads you to a decapitated copy of Europa. There are sculptures stuck in along the way (for instance, a monument to Zeus in the convulsing fountains), as well as government buildings and residential blocks. A full-blown architectural crisis.

Time to have some coffee and get out of here. The intercity navigation system is ideal in all French cities. Right in the centre there are road signs you can follow to exit the city in your chosen direction. Also, just like in other self- respecting countries, all of the roads are numbered, and not just on the maps. For comparison’s sake, let’s imagine there’s a guy who wants to drive to Suzdal from the centre of Moscow. Actually, scratch that, let’s let the poor fella go right now, given that our experiment is sadistic to begin with.

I should say a word or two about French roads. The road surface in France is good. There are road surface markings. But if a motorist spots a stretch of lit road on the highway it means that three hundred metres later he’ll have to pay up. Another three hundred metres after that the streetlights will disappear again. True, you constantly have to cough up large amounts, but it’s still not enough to warrant calling the road lighted, not even as a joke. For reasons unclear the French are too stingy to install a comfortable number of retroreflectors on either the road markings or the traffic barriers. Driving around at nighttime is no fun.

Highways in France are ruthless. If you miss your turnoff you can only double back forty or so kilometres later. In other words, the slightest error will cost you at least half an hour. In Spain it’s the opposite: you constantly come across underpasses you can use to turn around, so you feel eternally grateful to the highway engineers who designed them.

I can’t live without coffee, that’s just the way it is. In France they brew dishwater. It’s the same everywhere in Europe (including Russia). The only place where they make good coffee is Italy.

Italian coffee is unparalleled. Especially ristretto. Especially ristretto doppio. Even the espresso is damn good. The closest city to Montpellier where Italians make good coffee is Turin. So that’s where I went.

When I got to Turin I sat down in the first café I saw on the first square I came across and downed four cups of double ristretto one after the other. The passers-by out that evening couldn’t figure out the reason I was glowing. I was just happy, simple as that.

I clocked in 1019 kilometres in one day. It costs 39 euros to go through the tunnel under the Italian mountains. It costs the same to go back again.

Lyon

I liked Lyon right away. How can you not like a city with traffic lights like these?

Moreover, it has all of the hallmarks of a great place to live. Big city with old buildings.

River.

Mountains.

* * *

I saw a real a traffic jam in Paris. Moscow’s traffic jams can’t hold a candle to Parisian ones. Here a traffic jam means eight lanes of motionless cars stretching for twenty kilometres.

By the way, returning a rented car here was ridiculously easy. There’s a Plexiglas box hanging at the airport. On it is a sign that says “For keys”. You drop the car keys in there and go off to catch your flight (the main thing is not to get the boxes belonging to different car rental companies mixed up). No one comes out to inspect the scratches on the bumper, in contrast to say, Spain.