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Paris > Book reviews > A Year in the Merde > Excerpt 2

book coverA Year in the Merde

Book Review - Excerpt 2
Continued from page 2

The Paris Metro

"....The metro stations are usually full of seminaked women. Take the station near my hotel, for example. First time I went down there, a girl with three-foot-wide breasts was advertising a bra. A girl in a tornT-shirt was advertising a film. Several girls wearing nothing but skimpy thongs were advertising--I don't know what. A drink? Perfume? Vacuum cleaners? Whatever. They had great breasts. The platform walls were covered with nudie posters. How to keep commuters happy when trains are late. Male and lesbian commuters, anyway.

"Commuting, I found, was much less stressful than in London. For a start, at rush hours there was a train about every minute. And yes, French minutes have sixty seconds. If you missed one train, you just waited a few seconds for the next one. No sweat. And talking of sweat, contrary to popular belief, the French don't smell as though they'd been rubbing their armpits with garlic. People were a bit more blank-faced than London commuters, and almost none of them were reading newspapers, but apart from that, the only major difference with London was that if you had to stand, you could actually stand instead of being bent double the way you are in the tube. Why did those London engineers build such tiddly tunnels? Did they think only hobbits would ride the tube?"

    - A Year in the Merde, by Stephen Clarke

Read Excerpt 3: French TV porn


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