Things I Have Learned From Travel
As long as I’m talking about Things I Have Learned From Travel; here are two more: the United Airlines breakfast egg and sausage croissant is bad. Don’t. The Hotel Mercedes, at 128 Avenue de Wagram, Paris 17, is charming. The staff is knowledgeable and helpful and the design is stylish. The only possible drawback is that the walls are thin. This would be more or less of a problem if the clientele were less or more interesting; as it is you get to overhear muffled cell phone conversations from Spanish businessmen. Nice if you’re into insider trading of three-star companies.
The price of gas is gradually taking us back to the era of sailing. As this applies to international jet travel; there was a period of time when airplanes would fly in a great circle route from SFO to LHR and we went pretty much over the same territory each time: Northern Hudson Bay, Baffin Island, Greenland, Iceland. It isn’t like that any longer. There’s much more information about wind conditions and much less jet fuel; so pilot are instructed by their computers to fly a variety of carefully minimized tracks with lots of tailwinds, so that they can arrive with a little fuel left over at the scheduled time (notice that the schedules have stretched out a bit to improve on-time performance. They were always unrealistic before.)
The day we left, Sunday February 26, there was a wind from the south, so much so that we took off the opposite direction from usual and turned around to catch a 100 kph tailwind heading northwest all the way to Victoria Island. Then we turned to just slightly east of north and continued to the Great Slave Lake, and then made a right and caught another tailwind, which was bumpy at first. The northernmost point of this flight was almost exactly 77°N which is farther than I’ve ever been north in a plane. There was another tailwind that took us down to England. Good job, computer.
(There is such a thing as a stupid question. We all knew that. “What’s that?” “A GPS.” “Does it work this high up?”)
Money changers have gone out of fashion and the spread they offer is .74 Euro (if you’re buying Euros) – .91 (if you’re selling them). Only one bank, the Banque Postale, has even hinted that it would change money: Banque Postale will give you .79 Euro for each dollar, provided you have an account with them, and if you have $100 bills, which is what we have, it takes one week while they have the cash printed up or send the dollar bills back to Washington to check the serial numbers, or whatever it is they do.
I brought cash because I thought that in West Africa cash was king and I wanted Euros. In retrospect, we all should have used our ATM cards here. In fact, Dave got 300 Euros and I got 400 Euros out of a machine this afternoon after we gave up trying to change the dollars. Online banking consultation reveals that his rate was 81.9 Euro cents for a dollar. Mine hasn’t been posted yet.
When the Euro came into being, three quarters of the business of the money changers must have vanished.  When ATMs took over, even though they charge 3%, another three quarters of their business must have vanished. Who needs to change cash in Paris now? West Africans and people who are looking to trade with them. The cost of protecting that much cash is spread over a tiny market and the unit cost of transaction goes up accordingly.
STOP PRESS: across from the Hard Rock Cafe on Boulevard Montmartre is a completely anomalous money changer who offers a spread of 81 to 84. I wonder how that came about?
Other Paris observations:
The phenomenon of 24 hour flower shops in Paris makes a lot of sense. If it’s an occasion in the middle of the night that a French person is going to need to be bringing home flowers, the later it is, the more he needs them.
At the suggestion of Harvey’s friend Rob, we went to the Monde de Arabe museum on the south side of the river. They had an exhibit of the arts and sciences of the Islamic world while Europe was under the thumb of fanatical religious obscurantists — quite the opposite of the situation today. My favorite part was the astrolabes.
Religion does not foster original thought even when it is less than totalitarian: the astrolabes were up to the job, but the Muslim astronomers could not free themselves of the Ptolemaic mistake that the earth was the center of the universe. They simply created more refined epicycles of second and third degree. I suppose that epicycles constitute some kind of a basis vector set, and can be used to describe planetary movements accurately in the same way that integers can be manipulated to describe pi … but … it wasn’t a predictive model, and it was left to a later scientist in a Christian country to overturn the Intelligent Design of 1200 years with a more elegant explanation.
Some of the manuscripts were illuminated to the level of any Monkish doodlings. The Arabs have always been way out front in calligraphy. If there are other people who object to computer programs who attempt to entertain you in the course of their use, with dancing Macintosh animations or transparent pull-down menus which use up endless processor cycles helping your desktop attain the visual effect of a stack of patterned placemats onto which you have spilled your drink — well it started in the middle ages — all those gilt figured capitals and nobody was expected to read that font anyway, the facts didn’t matter any more than they do for Wired Magazine (which used to be more illegible than it is today, did someone suggest to them at one point that they were to be taken seriously and ought to be writing for History? History will snicker.)