Travel Blog 3 is about what I did during five weeks of my Semesterferien (non-term-time, it doesn’t seem right to call them “holidays” anymore); even though I was in England it still felt like travelling because I only spend 5 nights at home over three different parts, and I was living out of my backpack for almost all of it. This one has me going to Paris and then London with Parkour being a large theme of the Paris part.
German university has two semesters (instead of our three terms), from October-February and April-July, and as my last exam was on the 10th of February, this gave me seven-and-a-half weeks until the next term started. I know, year abroad is great. [actually, the second semester doesn’t finish until July 20th, so I’ll be there a bit longer than most UK students, and our Easter break is only 4 days, so it isn’t all that good…]. Anyway, during this break I decided I would travel around a bit for various things – I have a piece of coursework to write which I am doing at the end, but that still gave me a good five weeks free. I had a vague plan of what I wanted to do, but the actual dates and times weren’t sorted until shortly in advance. I visited seven different cities and slept in fifteen different beds (and often floors – all I need is a sleeping bag and a sheet).
Paris
I started with a two-night stopover in Paris – as I travel between Bonn and England by train, Paris is directly en route. I stayed in a hostel, which was a reasonable price (twenty-one euros per night, I think) and a reasonable location (not the nicest place, but it was close to a metro stop and only two stops away from the main stations, which was great for having a short journey when leaving on an early morning train). I was in a dorm of 8 with en suite, but on the first night only four beds were filled. One of my roommates was a musician from Ireland who had been living in various European cities and was currently in Paris deciding where to live next, having just come out of a long-term relationship. I can’t imagine having to decide where to live for the next few years with hardly any information or reasons for certain cities! When I first saw him, he wasn’t very sure, but the next day, as I found him in the social area with a German textbook, he had settled on Berlin. What started as a quick chat about German turned into a grammar lesson as I tried to pass on some of the things I had found confusing and not ever had explained. I also made friends with a group of Argentinians doing a six-week tour of Europe (who spoke a decent level of English, plus a few phrases from my GCSE Spanish), one of whom kept making me repeat the phrase “Would you like a cup of tea?” in my best attempt at a ‘proper’ British accent. The hostel vibe was nice, friendly but not big with a party atmosphere like the one I had stayed in in Vienna.
Looking down into Paris from Montmartre, a cathedral on a hill right by the hostel
On one of the days I wandered around visiting a few sights and landmarks and enjoyed lots of good food. French, or at least Parisian food, is obviously great for its pastries, and as well as better croissants than we have in England there were a few other thing that were new to me, such as macaroons. My french is just about good enough that I can walk into a shop, point at a thing and say “that please”, or attempt to say whatever the thing is called on the sign… but that’s it. I really don’t like being unable to speak a language in a certain place; it feels so obnoxious to talk English.
While I was there I also did some parkour. Paris (or correctly speaking, two suburbs outside the centre of Paris) was where Parkour first came about, from a group of teenagers who used to jump on things and challenge each other turning this from a casual pastime into a serious discipline, and it has a lot of good locations (if you can find them) and people.
One afternoon I met up with a guy (Naim l’consable), whom I had sent an email after seeing his youtube videos (for example this one) which are well-known among the parkour community for being ‘strict’ parkour (about efficient movement instead of flips) and being creative with the obstacles (seeing or making challenges that lots of people wouldn’t notice), and a couple of his freinds. After dodgy communication where I couldn’t get access to facebook by data or wifi and for some reason, our mobiles could not contact each other (we could both text/call other people, but not each other. Really odd.), he phoned me from a different phone and we met up. He said he didn’t train at the famous spots but rather wandered round to see what he could find, which was a different atttiude to most people. Though we were planning on getting a suburban train to somewhere new, the trains were cancelled and after some waiting around a train station (which included twenty minutes of jumping around a set of benches in the station – why should waiting for trains be dead time?), we instead just walked around part of Paris.
The training was more jovial than serious, with lots of laughter and silliness as well as difficult not-straightforward movements (a la parkour imaginatively), and we finished by playing a game of add-one, aka the shopping list game, where the first person does a movement, the second person does that movement then adds on one of their own, etc, until the route becomes 30-movements long and we are so tired that we have to take a break halfway through the route. It was great to see how these guys train as the style and attitude of parkour/parkour training can vary a lot between different people, and seeing a different aspect helps me to learn in a different way and give me ideas, both for my own training or if I’m leading a session.
In one of the evenings (possibly the same one but I can’t remember) I did the other bit of parkour, which was attending a session run by the ADD-Academy (which was started by some of the original Yamakasi and is quite like Parkour Generations of London in being a group which expands with new coaches, so they have branches in Paris, two suburbs of Paris, two other cities in France, and also Singapore and somewhere in South America). This was again a different style of training. It started with knackering conditioning after the short warm-up, including quadrupedie (crawling), jumping and striding up stairwells, and press-up variations. This was tough not because of the individual exercises but because of the volume of them overall. After this was some basic movement – jumping/hopping between bollards, which required balance and precision but was not big or high (the only difficulty being that your legs are shot from the previous hour), and then practising some specific spinning techniques on a railing which were quite new to me (and are a certain style I want to work on more – for example this or this). It was an interesting combination of physical conditioning followed by technical movement with a stark contrast between the two halves of the session.
It was also good to see the group run by some of the original parkour people (despite controversy over the fact they fell out with the original founder, David Belle, ten years previously), even though none of the originals were at the session the coach ran it with their attitude and style. We chatted a bit about what the style was (they use the original phrase Art du displacement – the discipline of movement, instead of ‘parkour’ or freerunning, though what they mean by this is what some of us mean in England with ‘parkour’ having the spirit and philosophy embodied instead of just movement. It also showed that the definition used early on about what ‘parkour’ was (around 2005 when it was very new in the UK) was mistaken, as that focussed on efficient movement from A to B, and so wouldn’t include conditioning or style movements, both of which were in the class. (As it happens, this is still the definition prevalent in America, apart from a few small groups, which doesn’t really have the ‘original spirit’ of parkour at all).
My second and final night in the hostel now had the 8-bed dorm filled by a group of six girls who had travelled together to Paris to see a concert; they were all doing a year abroad in another French city but were all originally english speaking (from England, America, Canada and New Zealand). They were friendly and had been trying to guess what I would be like from the stuff I had left on my bed, which included a plastic Thomas-the-tank-engine plate (which I use for travelling). This night didn’t end up so well, however, as I woke up every couple of hours through the night to throw up.
After one of these bathroom-visits one of the girls asked me if I was alright (as they could all hear me), and was surprised by how ‘chipper’ I was. My positive attitude (it was only throwing up, and felt better once it was out) was a bit less so in the morning, as I had to drag myself out of bed and pack my bag to get the train. By this point I was faint and dizzy, as well as dehydrated, and crawled around the floor getting my stuff together before embarking upon my (thankfully short, but still quite unpleasant) metro journey to the main station. I threw up again on the eurostar and spent the journey trying to sit still, with any attempt to sip water or juice rejected by my stomach.
London
After Paris I had a day in London – in the evening was a dinner by the college law society with current New College (, Oxford) students and alumni who either studied or practice law, so I thought to spend the day there. The first couple of hours I stayed in St Pancras station regaining my strength. Dehydration and lack of food was a problem, but I became able to sip water and eat some light food as I caught up on the news (apparently there were still storms and floods) and planned my day with wifi. In the afternoon I went to a couple of art galleries, still feeling unwell but now with a bad headache (very dehydrated) and weak feeling instead of sickness, as I tried to eat enough food (in small amounts) to regain my strength. It was good that I didn’t have much to do this afternoon so it didn’t get in the way too much.
In the evening I went to the dinner, arriving as a backpacker to get changed into the suit somebody had brought me from Oxford. It was nice but not amazing – the speech by the Attorney General (quasi-cabinet politician who is in charge of all the legal matters of government) was very interesting, but I was set on the end of a table next to one of my tutors and a fresher, so I didn’t get the interesting conversation with any of the guests which was part of the purpose of the dinner.
Coming next: what I got up to in Oxford and then spending a few nights at home.
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