The disgrace that has become the Paris metro

I think when you live in a place, even for just a year, and especially as young person, you always associate it with "home," even decades later. For me, Paris will always be home. I came here at the age of 19 to spend a year learning French. I didn't really speak a lick of French before coming here, yet somehow my parents let me go anyway (the older I get, the less I understand their decision). So when I see things like the poor state of the Parisian Metro, it upsets me on a personal level.

I just posted on my Facebook page a photo I shot the other day of my Metro train, line 4, coming into Montparnasse station, just around the corner from Chris and Joelle's (you can see the photo above). As a foreigner, coming to Paris for the first time in 1983, seeing the Metro was like visiting transportation Disneyland. It was a vision of the future, and a first lesson in the sometimes-fallibility of "We're number one!" We had nothing like this in the states, and still don't to this day.

Today, however, the Paris metro is less a vision of the future, and more a disgusting reflection of New York City at its worst.

There is graffiti everywhere - and I mean, everywhere. On the train windows, the train walls, the outsides of the trains, even the tunnel walls between stations. And it's not the "pretty" graffiti they used to get in New York, as if that would be some kind of consolation. The graffiti "artists" are using some kind of acid to etch the walls and windows, so it's just a big scrawling mess, like someone took a screw driver and scratched everything, ten times over.

And the worst part, I come here every year to house sit for Chris and his wife while they're gone on vacation, and it's been this way for years. Either no one is doing anything about it, or what they're doing clearly isn't working. In NYC, they finally put a stop to the graffiti by cleaning it up immediately, every single time it happened - eventually the graffiti artists simply gave up. Here it seems as though the government, and the public utility that runs the Metro, has given up.

It really is disgusting. I can't believe there isn't more public outrage about it. Or maybe the public has given up too.