Many boxes of popcorn ago, Eurostar was the stuff of Bond movies. Who can forget that scene in The Spy Who Loved Me: the spectacle of a Lotus car driving into the sea and transforming into a submarine? Twenty years later, we can all be James Bond. It is now possible to travel from Dublin to London and onwards to the Continent in a day, via 33 miles of the Channel Tunnel's underwater trickery.
Eleven million people have already travelled beneath the English Channel on the Eurostar. Eurostar is the high-tech train that's been running between London, Paris and Brussels since 1994. Waterloo to Gare du Nord is a distance of 308 miles: not so much a matter of how the crows flies, as how the fish swims. The journey takes three hours, subsumed as it is along the way, in the Channel Tunnel. The tunnel journey itself takes only 20 minutes; about the length of time it takes the DART to go from Monkstown to Pearse Street.
Three capital cities in one day is like experiencing a virtual Europe, glimpsed only in tantalising snapshots. Leaving London's City Airport, the chrysalis of the controversial Millennium Dome can now be seen emerging from its Greenwich location. Composed mainly of cranes and a great deal of expectation, at this early stage, it's looking like some extraordinarily exotic and gigantic fruit basket.
Eurostar leaves from Waterloo Station, from beneath an undulating glass and steel roof that's designed to put you in mind of the sea. Although you do not set eyes on so much as a seagull from the train itself, which enters the tunnel beyond Ashford in Kent and emerges like a supersonic mole in France, at a speed of 180 miles an hour.
Eurostar. It's a peculiarly celestial name for such a subterranean method of transport. The train itself has a purely business-like interior, lacking completely in atmosphere. It's no Trans-Siberian with samovars in every carriage and the illusion of intrigue (unless you count muffled mobile phone conversations), or anything like the rattly trains of Eastern Europe with their sepia pictures and wooden compartments, where an Irish passport is still an object of curiosity to border guards.
Sadly, there's nothing romantic about the Eurostar - unless you include the place where the trains are cleaned; a depot between Paddington and Reading called the North Pole.
It's a train whose essence is efficiency and function. The miracle is all in the technology, costing £24 million a train. Eurostar is so self-effacing in decoration that you are, in fact, the decor: there are slices of mirrors between each window, which are themselves made of mirrored glass. The result is that when the train enters the tunnel, all you can see is yourself and your fellow passengers, reflected a dozen times, as if you were all lined up for entrance to the underworld of some Greek myth. The excitement of travelling by Eurostar is all in the idea - commuting between countries at a distance of 90 metres beneath the sea, playing tricks with geography, and being able to drink champagne while you're about it. Blink as the train resurfaces in France, and what immediately registers are the endless lines of needle-thin poplars, all the way to Paris. The speed of the train on the French side is 180 miles an hour but you would never guess it, so quiet and smooth is the journey.
After the plane, train and automobile epic to Paris, we had dinner that night in Vaudeville, a restaurant near Opera. It has a beautiful interior of dappled ochre marble and art deco lights, where showy waiters carry laden trays purely on the strength of their fingertips, and the diners look impossibly elegant and favour shouting as a method of conversation. It was the perfect opportunity to try France's equivalent of Irish stew. There were no frogs legs on the menu but six snails arrived in a little metal tray, resting in snail-shaped hollows. They tasted like urban periwinkles.
With only a short morning next day, and the whole of Paris lying out there like scattered treasure, where to explore? In the end, I settled for walking from the hotel in the 16th Arrondissement to Gare du Nord, collecting images along the way like photographs.
The Eiffel Tower rearing up like a bemused Tyrannosaurus Rex alongside the Seine, glassy in the clear sunlight. Signs for the Bateau Mouche. The solid arch of the Arc de Triomphe at one end of the Champs Elysees and the slender needle of the as-old-as-Newgrange obelisk at Place de la Concorde at the other. Looking in the windows of the Champs Elysees. Through one window, seeing a woman having her hair sculpted like a meringue, and diamonds as big as the Ritz in another.
Tiny poodles wearing tiny coats, tucked under arms like fragile bags of shopping. Wolfing down the best pain-au-raisin I've ever eaten. Being intrigued by dead trees painted white and planted like frozen installations at intervals along Place de la Concorde: eerie, simple, and ghostly.
Even the litter in Paris seemed stylish that morning. An orange paper bag blowing in the breeze outside Palais de Chaillot bore the name Hermes. The Flamme de la Liberte, at Place Alma, which was given by the US to France, seems to have become the site of Paris' unofficial memorial to Princess Diana. The entrance to the infamous tunnel lies beneath Place Alma, and the underpass wall is now entirely covered in graffiti of all colours. There's a palimpsest of messages of sympathy from people from seemingly everywhere - Poland, Turkey, the US, India, Iran, Switzerland, South Africa, Prince Edward Island, New Zealand, and countless other countries. Months after Diana's death, there are still armfuls of fresh roses and lilies heaped everywhere, flickering candles, and clusters of people standing around in silence.
There are maps of each arrondissement at regular stands along the footpaths, and at every bus-stop, so it is possible to travel the whole city by orientating yourself from these.
On Boulevard Haussmann, there was only enough time to look at one shop. I chose the flagship Printemps, the Brown Thomas of Paris, taking an escalator to the top and having a brief look around each floor. It was as good as being in a gallery, looking at the collection of modern glass and all sorts of sleek and desirable furniture. Philip Treacy's hats and bags are to be found on the third floor. They're displayed like pieces of art in glass cases, all wild shapes, and vividly coloured feathers and net. His extraordinary bags look like velvet conch shells, and the glass case comes in useful to prop yourself up against once you've read the price tag.
As for the clothes - the floors and racks and rails of them, it was like looking at a virtual copy of Vogue. I kept expecting to see a catwalk pop up, complete with a few supermodels strutting their stuff. For dedicated followers of fashion, Printemps even has a special map, designed as a guide to which floor-levels the different labels are located within the shop. The map organises clothes into categories, called things like Very Feminine, Very Chic, Very Creative, and Very Fashion. They could all come under the collective description of Very Expensive.
Often accused of being inhuman, Charles de Gaulle airport is currently being extended and now looks so science-fictional that they could film another Blade Runner there in the morning. But it does have a brutal beauty all its own. Half-built flyovers, seemingly unsupported, end in thin air; there are curves of roads that go nowhere and roads that seem to go around only in endless circles. In the middle of all this, there is a stunning new Hilton hotel, rising cleanly like an urban liner from between two flyovers, built in the shape of an angular oval, with no visible means of access.
Aboard the Dublin-bound Cityjet, I looked out at the ephemeral landscape of clouds, drew breath, and thought my sightseeing over. But there was one more sight to see - a missile-like looking jet which looked to be heading straight for my window, and which flew close enough over our plane to keep my heart doing bongo-like drum impressions all the way home.
Getting There
Alan Lynch Travel (01 670-8877) and Cityjet (01 844 5566) have teamed up to offer Eurostar short breaks. Offers include flights to London, with an overnight there, taking Eurostar onwards to overnight in either Paris or Brussels, and flying back from there to Dublin. Prices start from £257.