Metro-Mania - Food and Travel

Metro-Mania

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by Sally Hammond

French film star Audrey Tautou starred in the 2001 film, Amélie. In case you missed it, Amélie, was a sweet and whacky Parisian girl living in a gently skewed world, who in a few key scenes uses the Abbesses métro entrance with its original painted glass Metropolitain sign, an Arte Nouveau design credited to architect Hector Guimard.

Amélie, should she have ever existed, was just one of the estimated six million Parisians and visitors who use this enormous system on a daily basis. To service it 15,000 staff are employed, and every map of Paris shows the criss-crossing network of lines and stops. With this city's magnificent métro system if you can get to one of the 283 stations then you can reach almost everywhere else. Today fourteen lines covering 211 kilometres of track shuttle 3500 carriages on a precise schedule between stations.

Once only, during many trips to Paris, did our trusty tickets apparently let us down. When they were not accepted at an exit gate we were nonplussed until a friendly Parisian explained that we were trying to use métro tickets on an RER line. We didn't know there was a difference, but we had obviously strayed outside the inner section of the city. One person offered for me to squeeze through with her, but I was too hesitant, then another used her own season ticket to let us through.

Now, who says Parisians aren't friendly?

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