Mini-Holiday | Paris #4

I decided to make the Paris underground as a unique theme not only because of the photographs that I took, but also because I wanted to express a bit of my opinion on it. I’ve traveled in three different underground systems: the Portuguese one, the English one and the French one. Any doubts that I had that our system wasn’t that great, they were all confirmed when I used the other two.

I’m not going to include the English one in this discussion but it is definitely several times better than the one we have. Honestly, I don’t know why people hated so much the new coaches that the Lisbon underground had for a few months – they were so much more spacious and visually appealing. Anyway… The Paris underground is also a much better system than ours. I would say that the coaches have probably the same quality, even though they actually have more seats and somehow an appearance of more space. Some of the coaches also have a really good map of the stations – it lights the button of the station you’re in, so it’s super easy to know where you are, where and when you bees to leave.

Nevertheless, what is really good about the Paris underground system is that it is indeed FAST! Not the apparently fast as ours but the really FAST FAST. It may seem that it doesn’t matter but it actually makes a really big difference at the end of the day. Also, the time that you have to wait between trains is almost perfect (and this is something that the Paris and London underground have in common). I know we’re talking about two larger cities than Lisbon with a whole lot more inhabitants than we ever had but still the time that we have to wait for a train is ridiculous. We’re talking about a different between waiting for one or less than a minute (two minutes in the most extreme cases) and waiting for five or more minutes. The best part it’s when we’re in the middle of rush hour in Lisbon and there’s an 8-minute gap between trains. And yeah I know what the second photograph shows, but trust me, sometimes it said it would take more than 5 minutes, but in reality it was a lot less than that.

The other reason for which I created this separate theme was because of the publicity posters that I photographed in one of the stations – Bastille. And in some way this was also due to my obsession over the band ‘Bastille‘ – but that’s not the point here. The posters in the first photographs are completely random but I found them to be really visually appealing. And the remaining ones are merely referent to the ‘Minions‘ film, something for which I’m also obsessed. I think these posters were brilliant made.

All of these photographs were edited using the programme ‘pixelmator‘. You can check the remaining posts from my trip to Paris here, here and here.