Amelia
I Broke Spring this year in Paris (Pah-reeeee), my first time there since I was 20 when I went with my longsuffering mother, dragging her petulant art-school grumpy-teen daughter from Louvre to Pompidou kicking and screaming. This time my agenda included: seeing my sister and her band perform, taking some photos for a friend’s fashion endeavour, and meeting up with an old friend’s Moroccan family. After my ridiculously long day’s journey into night and then day again, I arrived at Charles De Gaulle and immediately started feeling foreign. In PART 1 of this text you can read my ponderings on the linguistic landscape of Paris. In PART 2 you can read a description of the more intimate linguistic landscape of my week in Paris, among friends from here who were there for various reasons (it is less about language and more about a week in Paris: photos to follow)
PART 1: THOUGHTS
All of the signs indicating for one to continue going straight (as opposed to turning left or right) use a down rather than an up arrow. Already the visual landscape required attentive rather than passive consumption. The audio cues were in French, English and Spanish on the train platforms. The trains came, in sequence, onto the same platform with the same terminus but many different destinations – ATTENTION! was required.
