16.1.13

Postcards from Paris: {Le Train Bleu}






Even after a two week holiday, the idea of travel never ceases to amuse me. The simple thought of train rides and train stations is invigorating enough, but an opportunity to be in the middle of it increases my excitement.
There is a bien-connu restaurant in Le Gare de Lyon, called Le Bleu Train that overlooks passengers departing and arriving into Paris. It is another exhaustingly ornate, beautiful, decadent restaurant with formal suited waiters carrying silver trays and linens drapped over their arms. This very scene is amongst Paris’ many beautiful restaurants, but the difference is that one can live vicariously as a traveller with all of the thrill without the stress of time.
I met a friend there to catch up with each other and to indulge in a deluxe cup of chocolat chaud. We conversed through several changing phases of patrons, who came in with suitcases and tickets in envelopes, and were off to either venture into the city or to voyage onwards.
The restaurant is named after a luxury express train with the same name. Le Bleu Train stopped running in 2007, after operating for 121 years. It was a status train, taking the wealthy and the famous passenger between Calais and the French Riviera during two decades before World War II. Initially called, the Calais-Mediterranée Express, after World War II it formally changed to Le Bleu Train because of its dark blue sleeping cars.
The restaurant has captured the idealistic lifestyle of what we imagine it must have been like on the train back and forth Calais and the French Riviera. We are just grateful to have the option of choosing a vicarious afternoon of travel or one of luxury and decadence, or both.
Bisous,
Reba

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