There was the bike tour day, then the Paris day, then today. The Paris day, I don’t think I’ll forget. Today we go to Paris again, but only to go further onto Nantes.

The lady at the kiosk today understood how the payment card thing was interfering with the ticket reader. Apparently there’s no way to disable it. Epic Apple moment. But also, it’s interesting to note that she immediately understood that, whereas the man yesterday did not even after repeatedly seeing it fail. The man yesterday was security, this lady was wearing an actual transit uniform. She also had a card reader to scan the ticket directly, whereas the other guy of course didn’t. But I still can tell he didn’t understand since he kept insisting on brightness, zoom, etc.

I hope it will be sunny in Nantes. The rain doesn’t feel purifying here like it does in Switzerland, maybe just because of what it falls on. It feels a lot like Anaheim CA, weirdly. It’s a city, but just a regular city, and I think the greenery around it is what makes it feel like Anaheim. The Dutch style brick buildings are outside the train station. Some ugly concrete block buildings too.

Freeways, construction, and dead trees. Fields and power lines. I think Switzerland’s only difference is that the trees were alive and the nature surrounding them was prettier. Switzerland also had construction, etc. When I get home I will want to watch videos of these same train routes but during summer. At SOME point these trees must be alive.

Both beauty and ugliness are contagious. The same field of mud can suddenly become tolerable depending on its surroundings, and vice versa. To what extent is this legitimate, I.E not able to be overridden by conscious thought? And sometimes the context which makes a thing beautiful or ugly lies outside of direct sight, it exists only in knowledge of the broader landscape. And sometimes non-visual elements can also infect the visual with an emotional value. For instance, warehouses seem comparatively less ugly, strangely, than some of these fields, because it easy to understand that a country must have warehouses.

Somehow, the country seems innocent of its status as a nuclear power, whereas the United States seems to always be aware of it, to always be what you expect of such a country. Bleeding power from every crack. Here, the hotel concierge pulls out a card reader from a cabinet behind the desk and fumbles with four feet of unremoved receipts. There is no such hotel in an American city center.

The countryside, here at least, between Lille and Paris, seems no different than those of the American east coast. It is reminiscent of Asheville and New York. There are, notably, towering wind turbines, some of which disappear into the low fog, becoming ethereal tower gradients with no points. They look like something out of a Simon Stalenhag painting. A lone cottage, looking to have about 3 rooms, sits isolated in a field amongst them. I wonder what the fallout radius of a nuclear power plant would look like on a map of France? But I think the turbines are beautiful and inspiring, anyways.

People seem shorter here and the first class seat sides dig into my shoulders. The businessmen next to me seem to have the same problem though, sitting upright and all 3 of them tapping at laptops. It must be that they start work on the train, then take a break as they head from the station to the office. I suppose they may also be remote workers heading to somewhere else for fun, but none of them seem as leisurely as that. They are focused on their work, and it is 8 in the morning. Whatever stereotypes there are about the French working lackadaisically, they do not apply to these men. Two are in their 30s and one has all-white hair. He wears the circular style of glasses that seem very popular among the elderly here. AirPods are another common feature of first-class train travelers.

This region of France is just as flat as the Netherlands - no, wait, I stand immediately corrected. There are large, gentle hills, around a hundred feet tall or more, but so wide that their incline is no more than 30 degrees. They do hide towns and roads, and are enough to create the sense of different areas within the landscape.

It seems France lies at a geographic and climatological intersection in Europe. Perhaps, like the Santa Fe Institute identified, this is what gives them a wide enough array of letters to confer an advantage in geopolitical Scrabble and turn them into the superpower of the EU.

It’s no wonder how this landscape makes jogging and biking popular outdoor pastimes, compared to Switzerland’s hiking, and America’s… off-roading? You want to run between these towns, these outposts of something in almost surreally large fields of nothing. But the impracticality of that leads immediately to the bike, clearly the funnest way to experience this landscape. We humans are more water than we even think - look how definitively our entire form and flow is defined by something as simple as the height and width of the terrain. The train, however, blasts through these differences with tunnels and overpasses. And then the plane, which ignores all of this, becomes, almost as if by some Daedalic form of punishment, relegated primarily to international travel. How could its business be with the land it spurns? It deals only with the formless and meaningless airspace between them.

This town leaves tons of dilapidated junk on their balconies and in their backyards. Why? Is it not ugly to them? Do they have some outer context that I don’t, as mentioned earlier, which makes it beautiful? Or do they simply not care? Or perhaps it is something neutral to human nature, and it is that they lack some negative context I possess? But I suspect it is the same hopeless carelessness brought about by poverty that I have seen in the poor neighborhoods in downtown Phoenix. Why make the effort to take care of something that will never be nice anyways? And this is the same unfairly maligned mentality: why save money when I’ll never have enough anyways?

Girl reading poetry book, bitten finger skin. Old lady with “liberte, fraternite, DISegalite” on bag, man reading PDF book scans. Girl with 🎉 vacances 🎉 note and plans. Fake nails, podcast shorts on Instagram. Old lady, henna on hand, physical book. Men are hardly on their phones at all. Young men keeping screens dark. One old man on Facebook shorts, flipping through them without pause.

This new TGV is much nicer and fits me much better. It’s clearly newer. A lady helped me understand how to turn off the seat light which I accidentally turned on. She nearly got up to help when I finally pushed it hard enough. It was very nice and she was very polite. Next to us is a woman with a book, who is making sketches of who I assume is her grandchild. The sketches are not much beyond one of my less talented friend’s artistic level, but she’s trying! She seems frustrated though. She just gave up with a fluster and pulled out her phone.

The problem with systems of scale is that by being large and making large effects, they gain the ability to displace the consequences of an action to a physical location very remote from the action itself. Climate change brought about by manufacturing in one country is displaced to affect an entirely different country.

Francois Delaroziere seems interesting to look into

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