I don't speak much French and have only spent a few weeks in the city all told, but the romanticism of Paris sometimes appears inexplicable... no thanks to writers like this! I wonder what it was like in the 1960s and 1970s? This week I finally sat down and watched Alphaville[0], a 1965 French science fiction film about a dystopian future in which 1960s computing technology (and period Parisian architecture) spawns an all-knowing, all-controlling artificial intelligence with the cunningly original scheme to supersede humans. It is full of brilliant tidbits, from memoire centrale to "I would like to telecommunicate" [...] "Local or galactic?" and perhaps proto-instagrammery if you squint right. The film is well worth a look if you're in an appropriate mood. Produced in 1965, the 1970s saw the introduction of the Concorde[1] and the construction of seedy G's[2], which now seems such a scathingly retro monument to French brutalist modernism, and yet another layer of Paris... what an interesting city!
I was in the subway with a friend, shortly after lunch. As we exit the station, she realizes she doesn’t have her phone anymore, when she definitely had it 20 minutes earlier.
We go find an attendant, and she tells him the story. Some Japanese back and forth ensues, which seemed to be more than just “i lost my phone in that wagon at that time, here’s what it looks like and here’s my contact info”. I might be able to partially understand it now, but this was during my first week ever in Japan so I did not understand a lick of it at the time. As we exit the subway, she tells me that she’s not so sure she’ll get it back, and she was pretty bummed out because she didn’t have enough money to buy a new phone.
She got her phone back before dinner.
The craziest part? The reason why she got agitated during her exchange with the agent is because, she told me, he was being lazy. If he can recover an iPhone lost on the Tokyo subway in 4 hours, let him be lazy!
In Tokyo it has a lot to do with the fact that you can totally trust strangers and there is virtually no crime.
People here, when they want to reserve a seat in a crowded place or a starbucks, they just throw their iphone on the table and leave it there to mark it is occupied.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville_(film) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Gaulle_Airport