Paris is like a bicycle: old-fashioned yet modern, modest but pleasurable, classic and trendy and as clean as it is well-engineered. And like a good bike ride, a holiday in Paris is an instant crowd-pleaser for those who can manage it. The simple fact of doing it can't help but make you smile.
It seems fitting, then, that I should feel as happy and carefree as I ever have while sitting astride a heavy Parisian rental bike, coasting along the tree-lined bike path beside the Seine.
Approaching is the Eiffel Tower on my left, the Arc de Triomphe on my right. All around are badly dressed tourists scarfing down softee ice cream cones, but I couldn't care less. I am on two wheels and one tree-lined path. In a moment, I will turn and pedal over the bridge toward the Jardin du Luxembourg where I will eat a ham sandwich and drink Tuborg straight from the bottle in my basket. There is no helmet on my head and no cellphone in my pocket. This, as they say, is the life.
I also understand that in doing this - spending a week in May bicycling around Paris, purely for my own selfish enjoyment - I am living a cliché.
According to the much-hyped website Stuff White People Like (stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com), both "bicycles" and "Paris" rank highly among women of my ethnicity and tragically bourgeois aesthetic leanings.
The site says, "White women have a lot of fantasies about idealized lives, and one of them is living in Europe and riding around an old city on ... bikes. They dream about waking up and riding to a little café, then visiting bakeries and cheese shops and finally riding home to prepare a fancy meal for their friends, who will all eat under a canopy with white Christmas lights."
Are the smug little hipsters who put together this site correct in their assessment? Yes. Does this impede my pleasure in riding a bike along the Right Bank on a spectacularly beautiful May morning? Absolutely not.
Because I am not just happy about being on a bike and in Paris, I am also happy to have discovered how easy it was to acquire one - and for this reason I have resolved to ride a bike in Paris at least once a year for the rest of my life.
My delight hinges on the Vélib rental bike program.
This wildly popular new transit scheme, launched last summer, has seen more than 20,000 rental bikes installed at more than 1,400 permanent pickup points around the city. The drill is simple: Just put in your credit card, collect your ticket and pedal away. Then return the bike to the pickup point of your choosing anywhere in the city. The prices are equally reasonable: €1 for a day, €5 for a week or €29 for a full year's pass. Better yet, the first half-hour is free, meaning that many people can use the bikes to commute each day without having to pay a dime.
Unlike other failed free bike schemes of the past (most notably the Amsterdam project of 1968), thefts are deterred by both the bike's distinctive design as well as the €150 deposit that comes directly off your credit card when you rent one and don't return it.
And while the whole thing smacks of government funding, it's actually privately run. The program was launched by the advertising agency JCDecaux, which owns and maintains the bicycles in return for free advertising on the Paris transit system.
One of the other things that white people love that didn't make it on the website is: Systems That Work. And make no mistake, Parisians (of all ethnicities, actually) love their Vélib bikes.
"If you see 10 bikes on the street in Paris, seven of them are Vélib," my friend Lenni, a Canadian singer/songwriter living in Paris, told me over a glass of wine in a café by her flat near the Bastille. "Children use them to go school. Old people take them for exercise. Everybody uses them. They're faster, cleaner and cheaper than the bus."
And way more fun.
Will Vélib bikes ever make it to Canada? With our nanny-state helmet laws and brutal winters, I seriously doubt it. There is talk of the program coming to London, but existing street congestion, a lack of bike lanes and the thought of tourists careening the wrong way around Hyde Park Corner send most Brits into cruel hysterics at the thought.
Paris, with its combination of tourism, climate, size and order, seems the perfect city for a free bike scheme. In fact, it might just be the perfect city full stop.
But then, I'm just a white woman living out her idealized fantasy life. Feel free to roll your eyes. I won't see you as I whiz off on my Vélib bike.
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