The educational arms race
September 21st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
As we head into another year of hard work and hand over €2000 for our free education, Emer Sugrue asks, is building up huge debts while living off beans and vodka for four years really worth it?
What is a degree worth? I know that it is worth at least €2,333 to you this year. It’s probably worth a whole lot more. How high would the fees have to go before you would refuse to pay them? We may find out next year.
But giros aside, what is it really worth? You know what you are putting in; money, work and several years of your life, so you should know what you are hoping to get back for it. If you were to think like a banker and evaluate your investment (ok, well, not one of our bankers obviously, but a good banker, a banker who is good at his job and shouldn’t be in prison), you should be able to figure out what your returns will be.
The answer may depress you.
The number of people going on to third level education has risen steadily throughout your lifetime. Third level student numbers increased by 105 per cent between 1990 and 2004, reaching 55 per cent of school leavers by 2005, and rising an average 1 per cent per year since. The number of young adults aged 25 to 34 (the age at which there is most competition in launching a career) who have degrees is 41.6 per cent, far ahead of the EU average of 29.1 per cent. The Irish workforce has never been more educated.
The problem is that while education for it’s own sake is a wonderful thing, it doesn’t actually benefit you, apart from on a sort of intangible spiritual level. Getting a degree has never been more costly while providing fewer advantages. Once, any degree pushed you ahead of the crowd; now it just brings you up to average. Each extra degree there is in the country makes yours less valuable. We are more educated but there aren’t more jobs. This is educational inflation at its worst. Degrees, like everything in the world, have their value measured by rarity. Gold isn’t valuable because it’s useful, it’s because there’s not much of it about.
Now that third level education, at 60 per cent of the young population, has become the norm, the de facto minimum school-leaving age has been pushed forward into our mid-twenties. Twenty years ago a young person could finish their free education, Leaving Cert results in hand, and get a decent starter job in an office. Sure, it wouldn’t be glamorous, and they’d spend the first couple of years filing and getting coffee, but they had a wage and independence and they worked their way up.
Now a school leaver must first shell out thousands of Euro to spend three wage-less years getting a completely irrelevant degree to get the same job, probably having spent three summers working in offices for free to build up their CV. Followed by a few of years of filing, getting coffee and working their way up. An Arts degree is becoming something you do on the side while building up your portfolio. A hobby, a crèche for young adults.
These days a degree is worth precisely sod all (I calculated) in terms of job advantages, but this isn’t to say it’s not worth getting; in fact it’s the opposite. You need it now more then ever. You need it just to keep up. It may not be an advantage to have one, but it is most certainly a disadvantage not to. The jobs available to school leavers are scarce, and need impossible amounts of work experience. They’ll find themselves under-qualified for dish washing and shelf stacking, but don’t worry, I hear they offer unpaid internships for that.
A rising tide raises all boats, and it has left us in the same position but drowning in debt. Educational inflation is nothing new; once upon a time the majority left education at fifteen to start work, and the change has been nothing but positive. The big difference is, secondary education is free. There are expenses such as books and uniforms of course, but nothing like the fees we are obliged to pay for college. Ireland has ended up in the worst of both worlds, we have fees while pretending we don’t.
The only option for someone to compete in the jobs market is to get even more degrees. More than ever before there are students going on to do Masters degrees, unemployed people going back to college to retrain, managers using their work experience as prior learning to get fast-tracked into business, management or even science degrees. When everyone else has a degree, what can you do?
The educational arms race is in full swing.
Trial and error
September 21st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Amidst a wave of public misunderstanding of scientific method and the rise of alternative therapies, Emer Sugrue examines how scientific research and clinical trials operate
The human brain is an amazing thing, but it is easily fooled. We are conditioned to search for patterns in life but we often see patterns where they don’t exist. Things can look like they are related when they are not. An intervention can look effective while being useless, or worse, causing harm.
The way we can tell whether things really work or whether it’s our minds tricking us is to have a controlled trial. This writer can feel science students rolling their eyes from here, but it’s something that is poorly understood, and not just by those of us who frequent the Newman building. Measurable outcomes are frequently dismissed by those promoting alternative therapies claiming that “science doesn’t have all the answers”. The media bizarrely portrays scientists as unelected authority figures, dictating conflicting decrees on how we must live our lives. The only science news most people see is the Daily Mail’s campaign to report every substance known to man as either a cause or cure for cancer. Scientific research is not a proclamation from on high, and science certainly does not have all the answers; but with patience, it can ask the right questions.
To help me understand more about the role of clinical research and how it works in Ireland, I spoke to Dr Peter Doran, Scientific Director for the UCD Clinical Research Centre and Professor Pat Murray, Professor of Clinical Pharmacology.
Clinical research centres are a fairly new institution in this county, with the very first opening in the Royal College of Surgeons in 2001, and the UCD CRC opening in 2007. Dr Doran explains the role of the CRC in the scientific community.
“The objective was really to create a core infrastructure to allow any patient-orientated research to happen. So whereas before that might have been done in outpatient departments and the hospital, the idea was to create a proper infrastructure.
“Since the CRC opened we’ve had about 20,000 research patient visits. Our investigators have leveraged about €12 million in funding so it’s made a significant impression on the research landscape. Very importantly, what it’s allowed us to do is make sure that new treatments, new interventions and cutting edge programs are there so Irish patients can benefit from them. Ultimately that’s been the major objective, how Irish patients can get access to the best emerging care.”
Most clinical research that involves the testing of a new drug progresses in an orderly series of steps, known as phases. This allows researchers to gain reliable information about the intervention and protects the patients. A new intervention starts off as a hypothesis for a how a particular drug might work. If it seems promising in theory, you try it on animals to see if it kills them. It probably will, and it’s probably back to the drawing board at this point. But should Fievel survive, then it’s time to test it on people.
Phase I trials are the first studies done in small groups of healthy humans to evaluate how a new drug should be given, how often, and what dose is safe, how quickly it is excreted from the body and so on, and to see if it kills them, of course. In Phase II the treatment is given to a larger group of a few hundred people with the relevant ailment, to see if it is effective and to further evaluate its safety. Phase III trials test the new treatment on hundreds or even thousands of people, comparing the new treatment to the existing standard or a placebo.
Bringing a treatment to trial is a lengthy and costly process. It costs around $500 million to bring a new drug to market, and even getting as far as initial trials is a huge endeavour for a research scientist.
“Assuming you have a completed protocol, and that’s a big assumption,” laughs Dr Doran, “the Irish Medicines Board approval is a maximum of 90 days, and that’s assuming that at your 45 day review you’ve to go back with a lot of information so that’s the maximum. Then the ethics committee turnaround is probably 60-90 days as well for most protocols. I mean, that’s assuming that the protocol is appropriate, because you may have a situation where somebody writes a protocol and it’s rejected and then they have to go back and do a large amount of work to bring it up to the standard that is required.” Altogether it takes at least a year, if not several, to bring a hypothesis to trial.
The reason trials take so long to get approved is a rigorous adherence to ethics. A proposal will have to go through several medical boards and ethics boards before patients are even approached. Ethics in science has advanced dramatically in the past few decades. Horrifying stories emerge every so often about patients purposely infected with diseases or left without treatment, but such events would be impossible today. Ethical science today doesn’t just take into account the basic health and rights of the subjects but the design of the experiment in regards to how useful the research is.
Professor Murray explains that “the one thing that everyone agrees on, and the ethics committees make a big point of this, they’ll look at not only the risks to patients and any potential benefits when deciding whether the trial is ethical, they’ll also look at if the trial design is adequate and are you studying the right number of the right kind of patients to actually get an answer. If they think your design is a mess they’ll reject it and say that’s not an adequate trial, you’ll end up wasting several hundred people’s time and spend a lot of money and you won’t actually answer the question.
“The scientific integrity is just as important in many ways as the ethics and the protection of subjects, because if you do any one of them wrong you’re not doing valid clinical research.”
However, various aspects of clinical trials have been criticised. There are frequent claims that pharmaceutical or industry-funded trials are biased. In 2003, a systematic review scrutinized thirty separate studies regarding whether funding affected findings and overall, studies funded by the drug company were four times as likely to give results that were positive and favourable to the company than independent studies. The UCD CRC itself is partly funded through the industry, but Dr. Doran does not believe that this is an issue:
“Industry protocols are all approved by what’s known as the competent authority; in Ireland the competent authority is the Irish Medicines Board so the protocol is very clear in terms of what’s being done. Before we get involved in them at the CRC they have to be approved by the ethics committee so there’s a very clear line in terms of what the protocol is.
“Everything in the Clinical Research Centre is done in accordance with a set of standards called ICH GCP, the International Committee for Harmonisation Good Clinical Practise guidelines. They’re a global set of guidelines which tell us how to do clinical research and everything is done with GCP in mind, regardless of how it’s funded or where it originates from.”
There are also allegations of publication bias, particularly associated with industry-funded research. Publication bias refers to the practise of positive trials being much more likely to be published than negative ones. In an anonymous survey published by the scientific journal Nature in 2005, 6% of scientists admitted failing to present data that contradicted their previous work. Another paper, published in the New England Journal of Medicine went through all known trials on SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors, a class of drugs used widely as antidepressants) registered with the Food and Drug Administration and attempted to explore possible correlations between published results and industry interests. There were 37 studies which were assessed by the FDA as positive and, with a single exception, every one of those positive trials was published in full. There were also 33 studies which had negative or unclear results; 22 of those were not published at all while the remaining 11 were written in a way that showed them as having a positive outcome. Professor Murray assures me however, that safeguards are in place to prevent this sort of misinformation.
“There’s now a need for clinical trials to be registered on a international electronic database so that even if your trial is negative and you don’t like the result, you still have to post the results on to that resource so people will know. They’ll know not only about the one that works, which is what you want them to hear about, but they’ll hear about the other nine that didn’t work and they can make an informed decision about whether that represents how the literature should be.
“Whether the answer is what you would like it to be or whether is isn’t, it doesn’t differ between industry and academics. Industry may want it to turn out a certain way because there are financial implications, academics may want it to turn out a certain way because of academic implications, but in both cases you actually have this very rigorous design so you end up publishing the truth, whatever it turns out to be.”
It is the ideal of truth that is so fascinating. In the arts anyone’s opinion is as good as another and entire careers are made from revisionism, post-revisionism and post-modern revisionism where you just deconstruct your own life choices. The UCD CRC and all other research centres attempt to reduce human error in scientific research and despite the complexity of ethics, money, reports and dead mice it all comes back to one basic question; does it work?
Bratislava
September 21st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Bratislava is a place I had barely heard of when I arrived. I had heard nothing of it’s reputation, good or bad. My ignorance of the place can be summed up when I arrived in the station and didn’t know whether they used Euro or not. They do, as it happens, and everything is amazingly cheap. It was fantastic, beer was €1.20 and I had a two course meal for €3.50. It was only soup, chicken and chips but still. Even fancier meals never broke the 10 Euro mark. I had had a few days on my own between saying goodbye to Andrea and getting to Bratislava where I was being joined by Astrid, my friend who I had visited in Paris, and Sebastian, a German guy who I know from college in Dublin. Astrid was arriving on the 7th like me, and Seb the next day and Astrid wanted to go out for drinks. I should preface this story by saying that Astrid, if you didn’t gather from my Paris post, is a bit mad. She’d deny it down to the ground but the fact is, if she takes you out drinking there’s really no guessing where you will end up.
It’s reputation is as a party town, the home of drunken stag nights. Almost everyone in the hostel was British or French and making full use of the €1.20 beer. Both Astrid and I were the only women in our respective rooms, and hers was so crowded it felt more like a refugee camp than a hostel. Due to phones not working properly and slight miscommunication when I was ready and met her down at the bar, she’d been waiting for around 30 minutes so of course had befriended a crowd of Liverpudlians. We all chatted away for a few hours with beer and then followed them to a club. As friendly as they were, they weren’t actually interested in us particularly and drifted off to dance leaving Astrid and I to fend for ourselves. We was set upon by another trio of Englishmen, with posh accents and leering stares. One chap, after discovering we were staying not only in the same hostel but the same apartment, tried to hit on me by crossing that oh so subtle line between flirting and threatening rape. Something about surprising me in my room after I had gone to sleep. I politely declined and then ran like hell.
We left the club and went out to find some food. It was about 3.30am and a Sunday so everything was closed. Spotting a group of young people across the road walking purposefully Astrid roared at them to ask if they knew where to get food. They replied that they were heading to McDonalds and she gleefully asked if we could come. They agreed. They turned out to be the first actual Slovakians we had met and by far the nicest people I’ve come across my whole trip. The McDonalds they had in mind was closed and after visiting another bar with them, decided to try and find another. After a few more tries it was suggested we try the one 24 hour McDonald open – in the suburbs of Bratislava. Still drunk and very hungry (and really needing to pee) we agreed and followed them on two trams to the location. The main restaurant was closed so we ordered through the drive-thru window. I have a vague memory of making car noises but I’m hoping I dreamt that…
We went into the main shopping centre and discovered the most beautiful thing of all: a 24 hour Tesco! We ran around happily and bought some bread before being told off by a security guard for taking pictures. Apparently it’s illegal to take pictures of a Tesco (I think anyway, he was speaking Slovak, maybe he just didn’t like our 6am Tesco glee). Our new friends ordered a taxi back to town for us and I crawled into bed fully dressed just after 7. I woke up in a completely empty and cleaned room, having not even heard the hoovering. Rape threats and Slovakian McDonalds, just an average night with ms Astrid Soufflay.
Cultural differences
September 21st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
One of the things I really notice while travelling are the random cultural differences. Not things like fashion, food or music which of course vary hugely (though not as much as before TV, this trip would be way better with time machine) but the little ones you don’t expect to be different. Like crossing the road. Every country crosses the road differently. In Ireland, my base line for normality, there is a traffic light, and you wait for the green man to cross unless there are no cars in which case you cross whenever you like. Cars always stop for the green man, regardless of pedestrians.
My first stop was Düsseldorf where Ciaran had to explain to me the German way of crossing. There people wait for the green man, whether there are cars or not. It’s quite strange to see drunken partiers waiting patiently for the light at four in the morning in a completely abandoned street. I crossed once without waiting on an empty road and was stared at as if I had 3 heads, even though I was pretty sure I hadn’t. They are an orderly bunch the Germans, don’t you just love when stereotypes are true?
Paris is a bit more risky. You wait for the green man unless you see an opportunity to cross. This isn’t for an empty road, because there are no empty roads, but more of a gap in the traffic. It was a bit frightening and several times the Parisians I was with dashed across the road leaving my stranded waiting for the salvation of the green man.
Italy is another thing altogether. Here the green man is a mere token of road regulations. Not only does nobody wait for the man, but the cars don’t actually stop for it. I don’t know why they even installed traffic lights there, they are seemingly meaningless. The only way to cross here is fling yourself desperately into traffic and hope the cars stop, or set up a new life by the side of the road. When you see a person sleeping on the street it’s impossible to know whether they are a drug addicted hobo or merely cautious. A few years ago I went to Rome with my mum and we had terrible trouble moving around. In the end we adopted a policy of waiting for a local to start crossing and we would cross behind them, trusting that at least if the car didn’t stop, the local’s twisted corpse would slow it a little.
I’m now in Austria and back to the orderly patient crossing, though it’s not quite as strict as Düsseldorf. I think overall I prefer the Germanic way, being hit by cars is overrated.
Italian food
September 21st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
I was going to write a blog about the city of Bergamo, where I was visiting my friend Andrea, about the beautiful medieval buildings and amazing views, but instead I’m going to talk about the food. I know Italian food was good but I was not prepared for this. I didn’t have single pasta or pizza dish, just traditional northern Italian food. Not only that, but I was fed by a real Italian parents. I didn’t just rent them, it was those of my friend Andrea who was hosting me for the week. It was also the birthday of his little brother so there was a particularly amazing feast on my first day. We had spent the day climbing a mountain in the heat so I was hungry enough to eat my own shoe but even I was defeated by the quantity of food they served me.
The dinner was polenta, sausages and salad. That may not sound so impressive, I’ve had all of these foods before and felt fairly indifferent to them but these were of another class altogether. The tomatoes so incredible I felt I could settle down and have a meaningful relationship with them. I kept helping myself to more whenever I thought no one was looking. When they were all gone Andrea prepared some more and I ate those too. They were better than chocolate.
The other unbeatable culinary experience was the gelato. Oh my god. The gelato. For the second part of my tour of Italy I was in desecano, a village on Lake Garda. On the first night there we went to explore the town and thought we’d walk around while eating some gelato. This plan had to be abandoned however as the ice cream was so delicious it absorbed our complete attention and we almost walked into traffic. It was just incredible. The shop had about 30 different flavours, most of which I’d never heard of at least never knew could be made into ice cream and when the lady behind the counter asked me I panicked slightly and pointed at the first 3 things I saw – Coconut, dark chocolate and Fior de latte which is sort of plain ice cream they don’t have in Ireland. I don’t have the adjectives necessary to describe how tasty they were. If I go back to Italy I won’t bother seeing a single thing besides gelateries and green grocers.
Milan
September 21st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Milan is quite a nice city. Coming from Marseilles, everything seems nice but Milan just has class coming out of it’s arse. Even at the train station I was struck by the difference. There were a lot of my glamorous women walking round, and despite it being full of tired travellers I seemed to be the only one not wearing high heels. Second the minimum withdrawal from ATMs in €50. It’s not that they only have €50 notes – I got my €50 in 10s – but they can’t conceive of someone wanting less than that. I mean, how would you tip your chauffeur? When I was in the Metro staring at the map to try to figure out where to go, a man came up to me and started asking me something in Italian. I interrupted to explain I don’t speak any and he immediately changed to flawless English. He was asking me for money. Even the beggars are classy!
Today, on my only full day in Milan I really wanted to see as much as possible. I picked out 2 things which I thought sounded cool, the Castello Sforzesco and the Duomo. The Castello Sforzesco is an old castle featuring about 12 little museums in different parts of the building. I was allowed to enter for free because I’m under 25 which more than made up for the guy I saw vomiting into the fountain outside. My favourite part was their history of musical instruments exhibit. The best one was this:
I don’t know what it was actually called, there was no English but I call it the Guitarp.
After that I headed to the Duomo. I was wearing a sun dress that had bare shoulders so I knew from previous trips to Italy that I would have to cover them up. I had brought a cardigan with me that morning despite the stifling heat for this very purpose so I put it on as I walked up to the cathedral. I walked towards the entrance with confidence but while still about 4 metres away the Duomo guard caught sight of me. He didn’t say a word, he just wagged his finger and glared at my knees. Knees, damn it. Shoulders of the legs. I couldn’t go in. I took of the cardigan and stuffed it into my handbag, defeated. I looked at the outside for a while while I decided what to do and comforted myself with the fact that in the 15 minutes I was there, absolutely no one was allowed to enter.
I looked up what else there was to do in Milan, but most of the travel sites advised shopping for €500 handbags which I felt would ruin having got into a museum for free somewhat so I decided just to wander around for a bit and see what I found. I did find a shopping district but it was all the same boring shops that are all over Europe, the same stock for the same prices. I hate when you feel you could be anywhere. Apart from the ridiculously hot weather I could have been in Dublin. I went back to Castello Sforzesco to walk around the park around the castle and read my book for a while. Milan is very pretty but there’s actually not that much to do there.
Turin Breakfast
September 21st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
I very stupidly decided to spend a night in Turin. Having looked at maps I thought it looked like a decent midpoint between Marseilles and Milan so I went ahead and booked a hostel. Then I went to book a train.
I was incorrect. While there are several if expensive almost direct trains to Milan from Marseilles, Turin would take four trains and a grand total of 10 hours travel. I whipped out my laptop and logged straight on to Hostelworld to see if I could change my trip but there was nothing else free at such short notice. It was Turin or the streets. At least the trains were free with my Interrail pass.
It was a very cheap day all in all as I made myself lunch and brought it with me. Top travel tip: never carry an open packet of ham in your handbag. You will just end up with an empty packet of ham in your handbag, and some ham in your handbag. It was an all right day, I ended up at some weird stations out in the backwaters of southern France but I read my book, listened to music, played computer games.
In Turin I had terrible trouble finding the hostel. I was relying on my phone with google maps for directions which ran out of power as I got off the bus. I wandered up and down a long street for about an hour, in 27 degrees and my rucksack on my back. Eventually I found a bus stop with a map and found the right place.
The hostel was quite strange. It was very big and eerily quiet. The kept asking for more and more documentation to check in, and kept shoving pieces of paper at me to sign. I’m pretty sure I gave one of the power of attorney. I went to my room which had four beds but nobody else arrived. It was very clean, but that just added to the strange atmosphere. It felt like I’d maybe checked myself into a mental asylum. I was hungry but discovered it had no kitchen. It was 9pm and it was so far from the civilization that there was no possibility of buying anything else. I just went to bed.
I had opted to pay €2.50 extra for the breakfast. I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before and I was absolutely starving at this point, so I was a bit disappointed when I found that this breakfast was cereal. There was a very loud Italian lady serving coffee who would bellow across the room when asking what you wanted. I asked for a coffee. She shouted “coffee?” Yes, I replied at normal levels, some coffee please. “black coffee?” she roared. I nodded. She handed it over, rattling the windows with her wishes of a good breakfast. I approached the cereal. There were no bowls. Nor were there spoons. I retraced my steps, had I missed them when I got my coffee cup and tea spoon? No, nothing there. Just some flimsy plastic cups for orange juice. I sat down and pondered the situation while attempting to make my coffee drinkable. Should I ask the lady about the bowls? She might compromise the foundations of the building if given a question to answer. Some other people approached the cereal problem. They poured the cereal into the plastic party cups and ate them with the teaspoon.
I decided to check out early.
The hostel didn’t have anywhere to store my bag and I was so tired and bewildered by the whole city that I decided to go to Milan without seeing a single thing in Turin apart from the hostel.
It was amazingly hot so I decided to wear shorts for the first time on the trip. It’s been a very long time since I’ve worn shorts, mostly because I’m from Ireland and it would be silly. Shorts give out a very strong message. In most places the message is: ‘its fucking hot’. In Ireland, because of the general state of the weather, the message is ‘I’m fucking hot’. It’s not something I would risk. I wore the shorts but I was a bit edgy about confronting the world with my thighs, made worse by a middle aged man staring fixedly at me on the bus. I was getting very nervous that I was committing a massive tourist faux pas and scandalising the nation when I looked back and realised he was actually staring at my tits. He was just a bog standard pervert, hooray! On to Milan.
Marseille it ain’t so
September 21st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Wow, Marseilles, where to start? There is so much to say about this city, but how to put it into words… It’s shit. There we go.
I know it says more about my sheltered life than Marseilles itself but this is the worst place I’ve ever been. And I grew up in Limerick. It’s incredibly run down. It is the oldest city in France, built in 600BC and I don’t think they’ve cleaned it since. The city has a strange vibe, with buildings that may have been pretty at one point but have been left to rot. Think Nice, if Nice had been run by a Romanian dictator for 30 years. The streets are filthy, rubbish and mysterious pools of dirt litter the paths. One street I found was covered in squashed olives, I don’t know why. I imagine they will be left until they also rot into mysterious stains, disappearing amongst the general decay.
I have also never seen so many homeless people before in my life. They are everywhere, it’s incredible. There seems to be as many homeless as homed. It’s terrifying trying to use an ATM as there are at least 3 people surrounding it, bellowing demands for money. My defence so far has been to say I don’t speak French and running away, or pretending my headphones have some sort of vagrant filter and ignoring them. One woman sent her toddler up to me to beg. I would have had more sympathy if she hadn’t been several feet behind him shouting at me. Earlier today I turned up a street and turned straight back out as there was a homeless man taking his trousers off in it. Next to a café. Strange people stalk the streets, and nobody feels safe. It’s like a zombie apocalypse, if Zombies were very aggressive homeless people.
To get out of the city as much as anything else, I took a boat to the Ile D’If, a small island where an old fortress turned prison is situated.
The Château D’If was made famous by The Count of Monte Cristo as the place Dante was imprisoned. The place really plays this up, it’s really the only thing it’s got going for it. They stretch it a bit far though, the inside is covered with things about the book, and signs over the cells saying things like “Edmund Dantes cell” and “This is where Dante went”.
No he didn’t. He’s fictional.
Oh look, it’s the tunnel that Abbé Faria dug to escape… no, wait, he never existed. The tourist board dug that.
It was a bit expensive for what it was, €10 for the boat and €5 for the Château which really is a cheat as it’s the only thing on the island so you have to pay it. There isn’t even a sodding café. I was waiting for the boat back within an hour. The views are beautiful and the boat ride was fun, but it wasn’t really worth it.
It’s very difficult to find anything here. It took me 20 minutes to find a shop in the centre that was selling bottles of water, and after half an hour unsuccessfully searching for a supermarket I eventually had to come pack to the hostel to ask where I could find one. On the other hand, shops selling very cheap and poorly made shoes are plentiful. On some streets that’s all there is. To break it up there is the odd poorly made-clothes shop. I saw a skirt for 3 Euro. It had stains. I didn’t try it on.
The only nice thing is the weather, which was perfect. Completely blue skies, hot without being stuffy and cool breezes. It’s just a shame I was enjoying it in Marseilles. It’s the only city in the world where I would advise you to look directly at he sun.
Paris, je t’aime … comme un ami
September 21st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
I never found time to write about Paris when I was there, even though I had internet the whole time. I don’t even have a hostel to blame as I was staying in my friend Astrid’s flat right in the centre of the city. So I’ll have to blame the flat itself – she lives on the 6th floor and has no lift. No way I could blog after that.
I know it’s an odd thing to say as a tourist but the biggest problem with Paris, was the tourists. There were so many, it was ridiculous. It was hard to move around, on the street I heard more English than French and seeing anything remotely touristy was out of the question. The Notre Dame had not one but two queues, one for the main floor and one to climb up the tower and both were about 4 hours long. They stretched the length of the cathedral itself. I didn’t get near the Eiffel tower. I did see it in the distance, although I couldn’t see it from every window in the city which was just another let down from Hollywood.
Everything else was beautiful. What I mostly did was walk around and get lost amongst all the amazing boutiques and boulangeries and other French B shops. Astrid showed me around her favourite places in Paris, the best of which was a beautiful mosque/restaurant/spa where we had strange little cakes and more couscous than I thought existed in the world. They were terribly nice to us too, even though we stayed 5 hours, I was dressed like a dirty hobo (ah travel) and Astrid’s friends kept talking loudly about gay sex. The worst thing was when she took me to a sex book shop. I’m too traumatised to say what I saw there but there were 3D glasses involved. *shudder*
We also went to that famous graveyard that Oscar Wilde is buried in and got completely lost.
Graveyard, yay!
I love old grave yards, they are always beautiful and interesting. My favourite is one in Clare where my granny is buried because it’s very higgledy piggledy with grave stones shoved in at all angles. They had a very bad engraver in that village around the 1860′s it seems, there are lost of misspellings and even better, corrections. He stuck in small letters above words with an arrow to indicate where he’s left it out, he sometimes started the letters really big and then had to get smaller and smaller to fit them in. Maybe he was a discount engraver, 20% off per fuck up.
Wilde’s grave was covered in kisses, lipstick and graffiti. I sort of didn’t want to touch it. Some of it was funny but mostly it was slightly wrong quotes from his work. We tried to have a picnic but got attacked by such a persistent wasp that I had to surrender my Orangina and run away.
When I was wandering about on my own one day I stumbled on the Saint Germain Des Pres, a gorgeous old church where I was lucky enough to find a choir practising some old Latin hymns. Have a listen:
Paris is beautiful but I don’t really understand why it’s they say it’s city for lovers. I mean, it certainly is, you can’t go down the street without seeing a dozen foreigners snogging in stripy t-shirts but it didn’t seem more intrinsically romantic than anywhere else. Maybe the Paris tourist board just had a good campaign. I did like the city though, and I’d love to come back when it’s a bit calmer.
Stuck in Dusseldorf
September 21st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
It turns out this interrailing lark isn’t as simple as I thought. I assumed I could go to the station in the morning and get a ticket for that evening without hassle but when I asked to book from Cologne to Paris, I was told that they were booked out for the next three weeks. Three weeks! Apparently trains like that only have a limited number of tickets that interrail pass holders can buy. Even so, being booked out for three weeks is really unusual, the lady who was helping me book said that there were a lot of American backpackers who were travelling in groups and booking out trains. Stupid organised bastards. Anyway, lesson learned. I’ll figure out where I’m going after Paris as soon as possible and book it. The next problem was finding somewhere to sleep for the night, the whole of Düsseldorf was full. Again, pretty unusual. I looked around all the hotels and hostels in the area, and all I found was a depressingly scuzzy hostel offering a bed for €74. Thankfully Ciaran rescued me and let me sleep on his couch, otherwise… I don’t know. Maybe I would have had to sleep at the train station. It’s good to learn these lessons when you have somewhere to stay and someone to translate for you. I’ll have to be much more organised when I travel on my own next week.
After the shock of not being able to make it to Paris wore off, we decided to make the most of it. It wasn’t the sunniest of days but we rented some bikes to cycle around the town and parks, with a brief stop for some mini golf and giant chess. I was DESTROYED. Humiliated. On 3 of the 18 holes I had to give up altogether. Some really were crazy, like hitting the ball into a net some distance away o rthrough a loop-the-loop. The worst was one where when you missed the hole the ball slammed off a metal plate making a huge bang that made everyone look round. I hit it about 14 times in a row. Ciaran said it sounded like I was about to read the news.
We also went through a tunnel that has recently been decorated by local artists.
I’m on my way to Paris now, taking four separate trains. The first was from Düsseldorf to Aachen, which was supposed to leave at 8.40am. It then sat in the station for 20 minutes, when it was announced that the train wasn’t going to Aachen after all and we all had to get off the train and wait for another. This was announced in German however, so I had quite a job finding someone who could tell me what on earth was going on. I was running 30 minutes late at this point so I ran for the train to Liege, which luckily hadn’t turned up yet. When it did come it was very old and rickety, it was like a train from the 40′s. I was worried I might run into Poirot, the last thing I needed was to be accused of murder. He’d have to solve it pretty sharpish though, it was only 50 minutes to Liege. I’m now on the fourth train of the day and I’ve already exhausted my school-leaver pigeon French trying to figure out which train I was supposed to take. I really should have revised.
