PART 1: À l’Est

The Bercy train station feels like jumping back in time 25 years. It comes from an era that screams, "Hey, we just discovered this technology called LEDs!" And so do its trains.

In nearly all the train stations in Paris, it’s purely luck that decides whether your train was built yesterday or in the 1990s. As this was my first time taking a train from Bercy, we might have just caught the one old train still hanging onto its tracks. In any case, that’s exactly what we were given. At first glance, it looked clean, sized somewhere between a subway car and the average cross-country railer. It had a handful of single-level cars, no overhead racks, and no bar car in sight. Upon closer inspection, and after walking up and down the aisle in search of a good seat (this particular train is open seating), we noticed most of the tables and floors were covered in a thin, sticky layer of what could best be described as old juice. The seats themselves were a bit worn through. No matter.