TALES OF A TRAVEL ADDICT:MY TWO MONTHS at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris has left me mithered. Excited by all the great things I've tasted, experienced and thought, but pining too for the lost sanctuary that I am leaving behind – the elegant lay monastery that has been sheltering Irish people in the Quartier Latin for 250 years, but which so few of us take the trouble to go to. This time I was on a writer's residency, but generally it costs me as little as €730 a month if I stay a couple of months.
For me, what is most precious is that it makes me see the world anew. Paris has the capacity to make me wince with the intensity of its wonder. This time it was La Défense that sparked the first epiphanic jolt that has coloured my thinking ever since and made me excited about the future. The beauty and engineering prowess of the most recent skyscrapers in this business district is glass-clad proof of how far we’ve progressed from the crass high-rises of the 1970s and 1980s. These sleek, new, luminous buildings bear no relation to the turgid hexagonal, tiled, smoke-glass monstrosities that proceeded them, and use only a homeopathic fraction of the energy of their crude-guzzling forebears.
A primary role of cities has always been to inspire visitors, to make us ruffians from less exulted expanses dream anew and, while most of Paris’s time-capsuled boulevards make one nostalgic for the past rather than hopeful about the future, La Défense is the opposite. It is as much an aspirational vision of where we might be heading as Tokyo or Vancouver.
Its raison d’être when designed in the 1960s was as a new City of Light on the very edge of the ancienne grande ville; a continuation of the Axe Historique that runs through the Champs Elysées and the Louvre. Of course, it was also a showcase of capitalism and financial wheeler-dealing, but the fact that its core icon, the clean-lined, cubic Grande Arche, is a monument to humanity and humanitarian ideals rather than the militaristic triumphalism of l’Arc de Triomphe and the statue of La Défense, points to the direction the world has taken in recent decades.
The potential for adapting the best of the old world to the requirements of our current lives is apparent throughout Paris, where one lives a thoroughly modern life inside the shells of former palaces and mansions. Tattoo parlours, crêpe stalls and internet cafes shelter under medieval and Baroque roofs and, most excitingly, tiny electric cars, shared by all, buzz about the crescent-cobbled millennium-old streets.
This new Autolib’ car-sharing scheme is similar to the Vélib’ bicycle-sharing service that inspired the Dublin Bikes scheme. Autolib’ was set up last December, with 250 electric cars that one can borrow from hundreds of charging stations for around €7 per half-hour. Some 50 new cars are being added each week – by late June there will be 1,750 cars, and there are already 2,000 parking spots, with new charging stations constantly popping up. There have been some hiccups, naturally, but most have been overcome and the pioneering new battery has thrived, keeping its charge even through February when the Stade de France pitch froze for the Ireland-France Six Nations game.
You can register your driving licence at any of the automated kiosks, pay a small fee and pick up a key straight away. Where else but in Paris can you become part of a revolution in urban transport on a weekend getaway – a cavalry soldier in the campaign to move from owning cars to using them? Here, you need never again listen to taxi-drivers’ poisonous ranting, or pay for parking: you just leave the car for someone else to take away. Vive la Révolution.