Sometimes you're on one train, sometimes the other

 

I'll show you the pictures first for a change. 

They're really both the same scene, trying to get it right, two versions if you will:

I was thinking about how it is here in this city, living in a vacation wonderland. I remembered an old Woody Allen movie that made a tremendous impression on me: Stardust Memories. In one particularly magnificent scene, the main character is on a grim train, full of disconnected, strange people in a bleak and worn setting. He looks out the grimy window of his old train and sees into the train on the next track, going the other way. Richly lit and luxuriously appointed, this train is full of beautiful people, celebrating, partying, and drinking champagne.

My unfortunately Eeyorish disposition has always been prone to feeling like this, that somehow I am on the far worse train, but I think the feeling comes up a bit extra here. People are having a good time here! With the false richness of vacation they have entered into a starrier version of the world, and my city invites it. They have no obligations, plenty of money in their pockets, and no concerns for the future.

 There is so much made of how unhappy locals in popular European tourists towns are getting. They are increasingly displeased with tourists' loud, disrespectful, and drunken behavior, with the way that the proliferating airbnbs they stay in have blown up the local rents, and with how their foreign tastes erode the local true culture and cost of their city. And while I think there is real merit to their complaints (though even within that there is the usual misdirection of blame that should be levelled at the local rich, the ownership class, and their local government more than the tourists), I think there is also a certain amount of understandable jealousy: "Who are all these people coming to the city where I work, am sick, have plumbing problems, keep to a budget, etc, who get to do nothing here but have a good time!"

We're retired, as you know, and it is hard sometimes to separate out how much we are tourists here and how much we are simply everyday residents in this city. It comes and goes. I think even for people born here there can be a little of both sometimes.

Sometimes we are sipping champagne on the beautiful train and, sure, it can be wonderful.

But sometimes too, I'm just looking longingly into the light, on the way to the Carrefour Market, to get more toilet paper, and maybe a toilet plunger, if they have one.