trapped on the 49th floor...
The Pompidou Centre is, as you might imagine, very Gallic. We all carry special cards which you have to wave at little sensors in order, amongst other things, to use the gents toilet. My little card does not permit me to visit my truck, although mercifully I do have toilet privileges. The theatre is in the basement, at level -1, and to get in, you have to enter through the stage door at level 3, walk through the exhibition spaces (where you rejoin the public, who don't have little cards or the long walk up and round), and down a couple of flights of stairs before you enter smartcard land again. There are many lifts, each one with an initial letter for ease of identification, ours is lift T, for theatre perhaps?When I left for lunch today, I couldn't remember what floor the street level exit is, and because this is a punter free zone there is no helpful information. I opted for level 1, because I thought this might be logical, but no, my lift didn't go to level 1. A couple of interesting trips to levels 6 and 4 later, and I was beginning to get bored, so in the spirit of research I thought I'd go to level 2 and walk down. Big mistake, level 2 turned out to be an unfinished bit of outside, not uninteresting, but not helpful. Also, there were no buttons to call the lift, so I was stuck. After a brief moment to curse the architect and all his first-borne children, I realised that the fire escape was still an option. So I descended, metal gates locking behind me en route, thankfully the gates at the bottom worked, or I might be there still.
On a different note, the french commemorate road accident victims in a bizarre but quite effective way. I have only seen these on Routes Nationales; what they do is place a four foot high black cutout of a person with a red lightning flash through its head; on the site of the accident. When there have been several fatalities you get a morose little cluster. I have a picture, but left the technology for extracting it from my phone in London, I will upload it on my return.
posted by Lampy @ 6/19/2006 07:07:00 pm
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