How I came to work on a boat by the Eiffel Tower... in the 1970s

The Earful Tower: Paris

Oliver Gee

Arts, Paris, Society & Culture, Travel, Places & Travel, France

4.8 • 749 Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2022

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

My Dad worked on Paris peniche, moored on the Seine, in 1976.

I didn't know much about the story, so asked him how it came to be.

His tale included hitch-hiking, thievery, a police station in Arles, and finally a boat in Paris.

Here it is in full :)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's 2022, and this is the first episode of the year for the Earful Tower podcast.
0:05.4	My name's Oliver G. It's a show about France. It's a show about Paris, and it's hosted by me
0:10.4	an Australian in Paris. Now, you might think, I don't care about Oliver's nationality.
0:16.3	What's it got to do with the story? Well, today it does, because the interviewee is my dad, Peter, Peter G. And,
0:26.0	well, by popular demand, he's here because in one of the last episodes of last year, I was telling
0:32.8	the origin story, the story of how I sort of ended up in Paris and I hinted that there was a good
0:41.3	chance that my dad's time in Paris working on a boat on the Sen River may have given me
0:48.1	some kind of, I don't know, leaning towards moving to Paris.
0:51.9	Now I went down to Australia for Christmas, First time I was there in five years,
0:55.7	and I stayed on my parents' farm in the state, the island of Tasmania.
1:02.3	A lot of you guys asked on social media, are you from Tasmania? Not at all. I'd never been there
1:05.6	before, and they only recently moved there. It was all new for me. Reverse culture shock and a nightmare journey to go there.
1:12.7	Stories I'll tell in due course. But the reason I'm bringing it up today is because I did interview
1:19.2	my dad about his origin story and how he came to Paris and how his life was for a while working on one of these Panish boats.
1:29.9	Before we get into it, there's a little bit of housekeeping before I forget.
1:34.0	He found out later that he did get paid 10 francs an hour, so you can make of that what you will.
1:40.4	Also, he talked about the district where he lived.
1:45.0	I looked it up. It's in the 16th hour on this one rather than the 11th.
1:48.0	That's all the housekeeping you need.
1:50.0	I'm going to be back at the end of the episode
1:53.0	reading from some of the crazy amounts of emails I got over the Christmas period
1:58.0	and actually quite a lot of physical mail too.
	...

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