Some things, though, made me think of France.
Par exemple, the free guided tour of Grand Central Terminal. When I took it, the tourguide explained how many features of the building were carefully designed with the traveler in mind. Like how the width of the floor tiles is just the length of the average human-in-a-hurry stride, and how the main foyer entrance is ever so declined, subtly inviting you inside. The designers of the terminal believed that “travel should be enjoyable,” he repeated over and over.
I think that French people, or Europeans in general, know this better than we do. Efficient, smooth rides and (mostly) well-kept cars on the French TGVs certainly come to mind. (They’re superior to Amtrak at least, where the trains go thirty-five miles an hour and are bumpy to boot.) Also, on my AirFrance and AlItalia flights to and from Europe, respectively, I was fed an entire meal and one or two snacks, plus plenty of drinks. Even the two-hour flight from Switzerland to Rome was substantial enough for breakfast and coffee.
The museums were also a bit of a nostalgia-fest for me. Within the collections of both the Met and MoMA are works by numerous French impressionist painters who, of course, painted their own country. I was both happy and sad to recognize those tableaux of places I’d been, of Honfleur, of Rouen, the Gare Montparnasse in Paris, the beach towns of the French Riviera.
Second-floor foyer, MoMA.
Also in the MoMA, there’s a live exhibit called Wish Tree, created by Yoko Ono, wherein people are invited to write a wish, anonymously or not, on a tag and hang it on the tree in the MoMA garden. I didn’t do it, but I did nosily take a look at the ones already there. Little kids wished to be rich, or famous, or live in a mansion; one person wished for a job; one person wished for her friend to be cancer-free; one person wished to come back to New York again soon.
What would you wish for? Success? Happiness? World peace?
Plenty of people, young and old, were hovered around that tree, scribbling away. Everyone has a wish. The world is huge, but that much is universal.
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