Paris, direct from Zürich

I prefer the slow lines, usually, so it is a small betrayal of my own principles to say the train I enjoyed most all year was the fast one. The TGV Lyria from Zürich to Paris is about as far from a panorama line as a train gets: double-decker, reservation only, well over three hundred on the flat parts of France with the window shivering in its frame. What I loved is the thing a Swiss rail romantic is not supposed to want. It takes away the change. You sit down at Zürich HB with a coffee and stand up at the Gare de Lyon four hours later, having done nothing in between but eat, read, and watch France arrive too quickly to take in.

It slips out through Basel, where the French half of that odd station finally earns its keep: the train glides onto the SNCF side, the announcements switch language mid-breath, and you have left the country without arriving anywhere. Then Mulhouse, the long flat reach across the Franche-Comté, a trolley with a respectable little lunch if you've paid for upstairs, and the speed building until the near fields blur and only the far ones hold still. Marc slept through most of France. I watched all of it.

Up the stairs into the Train Bleu

You come into the Gare de Lyon and, with any sense, you don't leave straight away. Up a staircase off the main hall, behind doors that look like a bank's, is the Train Bleu: the station restaurant, and the most beautiful room I have ever eaten in. Gilt and frescoes and painted scenes of everywhere the old Paris–Lyon–Méditerranée line used to carry you, brass and velvet and waiters who have plainly been at it since before I was born. You can order a coffee and they won't mind. We didn't order a coffee. We had no shame and a long weekend, so we had lunch with three pieces of cutlery you have to think about, and Marc, restored by sleep, was at his most expansive. I let him be. A room like that is wasted on the tense.

Paris itself I won't pretend to add anything to. We walked a lot, got cold, ducked into a bistro near the Bastille for the second dinner of the day, split a steak and a carafe of something rough and red while the place filled with people who actually live there. I understood about one sentence in five at the next table, which is the right ratio: enough to feel the shape of it, not enough to eavesdrop. We took the evening train back two days later, and I read almost the whole way home.

— Tobi