Silly Little Country

Hey Tourist - stay in my Arrondissement!

Paris politics must be fascinating. We were staying on this trip in the Xth Arrondissement (district?), across from the Mairie (District Town Hall?), which was a pretty major building (post to come documenting this). In fact we shared a courtyard with the offices of Tony Dreyfus, the Socialist mayor of the 10th Arrondissement.
Meanwhile there is a separate Paris Mayor with his own City Hall (even more major as a building).
But I want to talk about being a tourist. We rely on the maps in our hands as we wander about (we two averaged over ten miles a day of walking on the days we were exploring), but we also found the various maps posted around town, usually near Metro stations, very helpful. Most major tourist cities have such facilities (even Toronto).
Here is a good example of a useful map. You likely have to click on it to see the details, in particular the little 'You are Here' (the red target) symbol more or less in the middle, which allows you to plan your next moves in any direction (because it is in the middle).

I suspect these maps are provided by the overall city administration. Note that various locations are also identified by the number of the Arrondissement in which they sit.
Occasionally there are maps provided, it seems, by the Arrondissements. They have much the same features as the 'good' maps but you often find yourself in this predicament (click to enlarge and find the little target symbol, and imagine you want to walk north (the map is oriented in the normal way):

The message as I read it is, "Hey buddy, you are leaving my Arrondissement, so you are on your own! Good luck".
At points where we wanted information we ran into this a few times; as in the picture above, trying to find the fastest route back to the Xth Arrondissement Mairie, and earlier, in Place Pigalle, trying to find a good route up into Montmartre. What it always did was make me determined not to spend any money anywhere near that sign.
Now it may not be that the sign has the parochial meaning I take from it; it may just be another one of these cases where the French love of what they think of as logic causes them to miss some obvious points of human behaviour (more on this later).

posted by Alan Adamson @ 3:57 AM