Paris- March 27th, 10:35 PM
Now this is probably the lack of sleep talking, but it seems like the time since takeoff has stretched out, almost to the point of impossibility. Especially when I stop and consider that I only just crossed the French border this morning. Early this morning, but still...
Our flight from O'Hare to Charles de Gaulle was delightfully un-crowded. There was nobody sitting next to me, so I got to actually get some quote-unquote “sleep” across two seats. Plus the food was quite decent. The trans-Atlantic 767 was insanely different from the three-seat-across little affair I used for the hop from Columbus to Chicago.
After an eventful trek across Charles de Gaulle searching for the one other flight landing from O'Hare, Jenna, James and I met up with Kristin and Megan. Turns out my phone has major service issues over here, so we were relying on the fact that our group would be able to correctly locate their landing gate. Close shave, as we had to take a shuttle and change buildings and the whole nine yards, and then we managed to find a taxi that would take all five of us into Paris.
See, de Gaulle isn't technically in Paris, it's in Roissy, which is the next town over. And our hotel (more on the hotel later...) is in the middle of Paris (quite close to the Bastille, actually,) so add on the fact that our driver got lost and had to turn around and make a huge circle around the other side of the city, and that makes for something like a two hour cab ride, 90% of it completely silent because we were so sleep-deprived from the previous two nights. We didn't let the jet lag set in, though, and paused only long enough to dump our luggage into our hotel room (I'm going to estimate here that about 80% of the floor space is covered by the five little cot-bed things that they obviously stuffed into a room meant for three. After that, we were out walking
And walking, and walking, and walking.
We saw many things!
It started out simply enough, with the Bastille, and then we realized that we were hungry (only being in Paris for the first time can make you forget that!) and stopped for lunch—our first real French cafe meal, complete with all the little customer-waiter courtesies and ordering in French. (Yes, we've been speaking English amongst ourselves today.) From there, we went to the Jardin des Plantes, which is basically a huge garden leading up to the museums of zoology and geology and whatnot. We didn't want to pay to get into said museums, but were all content enough to snap photos of the few flowers that are out this early, followed a trail of dirt and daffodils, and then somehow those became narrow sidewalks, and then we wound up at the Pantheon.
Go figure, they charge to get into that one too, but that place is quite huge.
That was our only look at the Eiffel Tower, unfortunately, because even considering how much we walked today, le tour d'Eiffel was just too much to ask of ourselves. Instead we went from the Pantheon to Notre Dame. We figured that a church of all things would have the loophole in the “charge admission” thing. Clever, isn't it? So we shuffled past a few beggars with missing limbs and into the biggest darn structure I've ever been in. That place is incredible. Foreboding in a churchy way, but still, it was the highlight of the day for me. Plus it was an indoor activity.
See, all day the weather here has been rather...bipolar? It actually hailed on us for a few minutes there, and then alternated between warm brilliant clear blue skies, and these sudden black clouds of freezing huge pummeling raindrops. By the time we got back to the hotel, we had to change. We had also just narrowly avoided getting caught up in some sort of random protest, but we heard people yelling and blowing whistles and decided it was time to turn onto a side street.
We came back to the hostel and crashed for two hours, then headed out for dinner at an Italian place that served pizzas we figured were personal, but turned out to be the size of hubcaps. It had more of an Italian vibe to it, the people were a little more boisterous, and the waiter juggled my empty wine glass for us. I felt a touch guilty when I absolutely could not finish my hubcap pizza...
And now here I am, word-documenting this blog entry because our hotel has no internet.
Our hotel doesn't have much, except its “two star deluxe” rating. Situated on the Rue Saint-Sebastien in a neighborhood that's quite noisy at night, the Hotel Saint Sebastien is decked out in yellow, brown, and vibrant turquoise all over the inside. There's one geriatric elevator smaller than a porta-potty, and we're on the fourth floor. We braved the elevator to take our baggage up, but otherwise we use the stairs. Our door lock is the most ornery thing that ever lived, and we take turns wrestling with the key hoping we haven't locked all our luggage into the world's most inadvertently secure hostel room.
(My computer battery died at this point, but there's a snapshot of Paris for you...sorry it's rather abrupt, but there's so much more to be blogging about that I've got to keep my head above water, here. Expect an Avignon one before long.)
-G
Avignon-March 30th, 9:35 PM
I seem to be acquiring a basic understanding of the way this blog will have to work. Despite all my hoping, my host family house does not have the internet, and so I will have to write these as word documents, then post several at a time. You may have learned this from the fact that my first Avignon entry will appear directly beneath what I had time to write about Paris.
I said before that the time seems to have stretched here, and that remains the case. Has it only been five days? I hope that one day on this trip, I will pass the point of being able to count how many days I have spent here—it's so important for me to be able to live in the present here. So while I miss you all insanely already, I do everything I can not to look ahead to coming home. While I don't want to forget the incredible experiences I've had even after less than a week, I hope that this will be the last time I mention a specific number of days.
As I sat alone in the Columbus airport on Wednesday, the world stretching out before me, I can still remember the electric buzz I described, but that has faded now, into something of a joyous stupor. I have stopped trying to wrap my mind around where I am. Perhaps I will familiarize to it, or perhaps every dingy shop front window, every bedraggled mutt that wanders down the street, will be a new thrill. Thus far, this journey of mine has been the most exhausting string of emotion after emotion that I've ever encountered. Unfortunately the jet lag does seem to have caught up with me, and since France just moved our clocks forward last night, I lost another hour. Still, I refuse to sleep too much, no matter how exhausted I am, and if I wouldn't go to bed at 9:30 in the states, I certainly will not do so here, either. So, my brain throbbing from an entire quarter's worth of French spoken in less than a week, I decided it was time to turn on some rock music, put away my French journal, and speak some English. Thus far it has had a magnificent calming effect, just hearing the familiar melodies of 2112 is like a little piece of home that isn't doing anyone any harm.
I told Mom on the phone tonight that I don't want to spend my life over here with my mind living hundreds of miles away—back home. So although I might want to boot up the computer and write a blog entry every night (I certainly have enough material at this point,) I try to limit myself. That makes a night spent under the dim glow of the computer screen feel like a reward, and this system seems to be a good one so far. We'll see if things change when classes start.
But I'm sure that my emotional journey is not what you are reading this blog to learn about. So, let's both indulge ourselves, you and I, and I will run down as best I can my life in France since I left Paris.
The Gare de Lyon is open air, and the chill of the Paris morning bit into us as we attempted the world's most foolish feat and ventured from our hotel to the train station—on foot, and loaded down with baggage. Jenna, Kristin and James had booked an 8 AM train, and underestimating the time it would take to get five teenagers and their respective baggage halfway across a city on foot, they arrived on their platform (so they say, I wasn't there...) about thirty seconds too late, and had to buy new tickets for the 9:00 train. Megan and I, on the other hand, were three hours early for our 11 AM departure, and we spent three hours camped out amid a forest of suitcases in the room which translates from the French into 'waiting room.'
A strange little room, the most curious mix of tourists and les clochards, a French word that roughly translates to 'bum,' or 'homeless man.' This is one of those places in Paris where people have an excuse to spend a few hours without speaking or paying anything, so it appears to serve as a constant shelter for les clochards. So, on one end of the room were the tourists, some speaking French with heavy foreign accents, others of us not speaking French at all. Not only did our accents expose us, but the baggage did its work to betray as well. On the other end of the room sat three dirty, unshaven, balding men. One of them snored as he sprawled backwards in his chair, an empty wine bottle held loosely in one hand. The other leaned forward and engaged in a fascinating conversation with the empty air in front of him, speaking French with a thick “inebriated” accent and addressing the open space as though engaging in a vital discussion with some companion that only he could see. The third clochard watched the second, a sly smirk on his face the entire time, as though he were watching a particularly droll film.
After two hours sitting across from les clochards, Megan and I decided that we would prefer to find our platform and wait the final hour in the cold. So we forked over a few euros apiece for some hot chocolate (to warm our hands just as much as for nourishment,) and waited for TGV 6111 sitting on our suitcases because the benches were full.
At first, it was a little intimidating when I realized that I would be making the entire three-hour train ride to Avignon facing backwards, but luckily I dodged the motion sickness and tried my very hardest not to sleep much. Silence is sacred in a first-class train car, and the only sound came from the 18 month old baby sitting across from me, babbling incoherently, but with the flawless closed R's and tight U's that I can only dream of perfecting. Linguistically, it was so humbling to hear this child, immersed in the sounds of the language from the very beginning, when I chose to make a career of learning what she will know from birth.
The first twenty minutes or so was going through urban Paris, so there were only brick walls and graffitti to admire. Once we were out in the country, I decided that there was no better way to travel through France than by train.
The countryside was a patchwork of brilliant yellow and vibrant green, peppered unevenly with tiny villages each of which might have been a toy. Over each of the towns the church steeple inevitably towered—the church is the patriarch of these small cities. And then I got a look at my first mountain.
Looming up over the horizon, with the snow-capped stone clearly visible against the backdrop of the cloudless blue sky, were the French alps. While the telephone poles were rocketing by at least two per second, the mountains hardly moved at all as we chugged along, giving me a taste of their true enormity. From time to time I inadvertently dozed off against my window—once at the most inopportune moment of the ticket-puncher's rounds. Suddenly someone was shaking my shoulder with an insistent “Mademoiselle? Mademoiselle, ton billet s'il vous plait?” Lurching back to consciousness I fumbled for my ticket, bleary-eyed, and handed it to him. He gave it a quick punch to verify that I hadn't ridden past my stop, and gave it back with a sympathetic smile. I doubt that I was the first jet-lagged tourist he'd had to rouse just to get his job done.
A thousand different textures moved past like a slideshow on that train ride, each one with its own distinct color palette and obscene beauty—a beauty that is supposed to stay safely tucked away in the pages of travel brochures and the wild imaginations of those of us trapped in an Ohio sleet storm. Here I was, experiencing it first hand, my body screaming for some rest, but my mind too enthralled to risk closing my eyes and losing one moment of the sights.
The cheery musical tone preceded a calm female voice announcing that the next stop was the Avignon TGV station. There is a subtle art to getting off a train in France, and I learned by example. The moment one's stop is announced, even if the arrival is still five minutes away, everyone descending at that stop stands up, vacates their seat, gets their luggage together, and stands an inch behind the door, waiting to leap out the moment they open like racehorses out of a starting gate. This is because when a train is only pausing to let some people off, rather than finishing its journey, the doors only remain open for three minutes. If anyone or anything doesn't get off the train in time, next stop: wrong destination. I believe it was Melissa who learned that the hard way, as only one of her two suitcases made it off the train during that three-minute deadline. I think the other ended up in Marseilles, but they agreed to mail it to her host family, and at least she has her toiletries with her for now.
Reluctantly I tossed a half-euro to the lady at the bathroom counter: yes, the bathrooms cost money at the train station, and then Megan and I ventured out into Avignon.
Compared to the frosty Paris morning and its cloud cover, the warm sunshine on our faces felt like paradise. Happily we shed our sweaters that had done us so little good in Paris, and now were equally as useless in Avignon, although for much cheerier reasons. Then we gathered our bags and stood underneath the first “Taxi” sign we saw.
I wish I knew his name, but all I have to offer is that he was bald and heavy-set, with a smile that nobody had dared offer us in Paris. He looked from us to our bags and grinned, “Les americaines?” Ashamed to have been so easily pinned for what we really are, Megan and I offered a reluctant “oui” apiece, and told him where to go. He couldn't have been more different from the standoffish, hustled cab driver in Paris who drove the highways like a madman. We did not get lost, we didn't stew in an awkward silence. I spent the ride engrossed in the Avignon tourist brochure tucked thoughtfully into the back pocket of the seats. The ride for both of us, plus baggage, plus tip was still cheaper than my share of the Paris cab ride, and I was much happier to hand my euros over to this man, this first nameless grinning face of Provence.
The Hotel Magnan is nothing fancy, and since the program director hadn't yet arrived, we had to put all of our baggage into a single cramped room and wait for room assignments. Until then, we were free to roam the city—our new home for the next eleven weeks.
How different from Paris—the buildings are drawn near to each other, but in a friendly way that didn't have the claustrophobic feel of Paris. Along the Rue de la Republique, the main street, stores were skillfully packed one beside the other, offering far more content than I could have expected of a few city blocks. FNAC, a sort of French combination of Borders and Best Buy (electronics on the first floor, but with an incredible bookstore on the second) was where we spent most of our time that first afternoon. Typical to my somewhat eccentric taste in shopping, I spent nearly an hour in the children's book section, fascinated at this genre of the language that I had missed out on. I gasped and grinned at the antics of a baby hippo who wouldn't go to bed, soaking in each illustration. Then I read a book about a sheep who thought he was unlucky, but really he was lucky! He fell into a puddle and thought that was unlucky, but then he stunk too much for the wolf stalking him to eat him, and so he didn't know his own luck. Then he met a girl sheep named Brigitte, and I knew that this book and I were made for each other. Hopefully I will return to FNAC and buy said book, but I decided not to buy anything frivolous during my first hour in Avignon, so I reluctantly left my new unlucky friend behind and bought the more practical SIM card for my French cell phone.
Dinner that night was spent with the whole group at Woolloomooloo, something of an eccentric restaurant with the Rolling Stones “Paint it Black” blaring as we sat down on the cushions on the ground in place of chairs. It felt good having an excuse to speak English without feeling like I was betraying the program. You can't sing along with your favorite Rolling Stones song in French, you just can't. The food wasn't quite my cup of tea, but I was happy enough to stick to the couscous and chicken, eating around the peppers and tomatoes and entirely skipping the traditional “appertif,” an alcoholic beverage served before dinner to warm up the palette.
About half of the group went out drinking that night, but the rest of us took advantage of the free wireless internet...until we found out that the router was switched off at 11:00 to conserve electricity. All four of us were cut off, mid-instant-message with family or friends, and we consoled each other weakly, distracting ourselves with “girl talk.” As usual, I listened more than I spoke, but it was still enjoyable enough.
The next morning we piled our luggage in the lobby and followed Christophe on a tour of the city, starting with the University. True, it was closed, but we did see it. From there we saw the cybercafe, the bookstore, the club where we will meet our correspondents on Friday, and then, there is was: the Palais des Papes.
Avignon used to be home to the papacy, and looking at the Palais des Papes there is no mistaking that fact. As long as you can put your legs through the torturous stair climb to the top, the panorama is enough to make your stomach drop. The Rhone on one side, the mountains staining the horizon, it was simply incredible. We circled around and saw the ever-famous “Pont” d'Avignon (I put the word “bridge” in quotes because although it's a bridge, it doesn't actually go across the entire Rhone. It juts halfway into the water, but stops there.)
Dodging between tourists speaking English with thick British accents, we ended up on the far side of the Rue de la Republique, the main road. Here, a dozen cafe waiters stood shouting to passersby, each trying to convince patrons to choose them over the neighboring cafe. Rack upon rack of postcards screamed the word 'tourists,' but it felt good to be blending in for once. For all anyone knew, we were just there for a few days on vacation, and didn't have a care in the world about trying to hide our nationalities. The American college student, at least the females, seems a species centralized around the idea of blending in, around not just living with Europeans, but living AS a European, so that the real Europeans can't tell the difference. But, like our friend the cab driver illustrated, the natives just have a way of knowing that you are out of your element. “Les Americaines” might as well have been written on our faces.
Catherine and I settled for a lunch of ham on baguettes and water, good but more importantly cheap, but then indulged ourselves with a visit to the “Festival des Glaces,” the most tantalizing ice cream stand I had ever seen. I don't think I will ever be able to eat strawberry ice cream in the US ever again: the French variety was instant addiction and the frozen pieces of strawberry were magnificent. Not crumbs, but pieces: quarter strawberries winking merrily out from behind the neon pink ice cream.
After that we had a quick “briefing” at the hotel, during which Christophe told us some information we pretty much already knew, unless I'm mistaken. Katy outlined the mandatory French journaling process, and then we had a few hours to kill until our host families arrived.
Cathy and I were on a mission to Monoprix—a tiny French version of a Wal Mart without the food. She needed a hair dryer, and I was more than thrilled to be out and about in the city. After a lot of looking but not much buying, we ended up in a park alongside gorgeous gardens already in bloom, fountains, and children scampering on the flawless grass, despite their parents' cries of “non, c'est interdit!” (No, that's forbidden!) Roughly an hour there, and then back to the hotel. The host family meeting was scheduled for 5:00, but Danielle was early and we had barely been back ten minutes when Christophe was calling our names and beckoning us out into the lobby.
There was Danielle: in her brown wool coat and black ankle-boots, immediately offering to take one of Cathy's bags. One wouldn't guess her to be the 64 years Cathy surreptitiously discovered that Danielle is (she wrote down her birthday today, and the year was 44. Tricky, non?) Her French, slow, purposeful, free of the thick Provencale accent, felt as welcoming as she did. She lived very near, so we would just walk to her house. I didn't mention the four broken wheels on my two suitcases, and trailed almost a block behind the others for most of the walk, alternately trying to carry and drag my suitcases.
34 Ave. de la Trillade looks much smaller on the outside than it is on the inside: each of the three of us has our own room, Catherine has her own bathroom, Danielle her own bathroom. Kristin and I share the third, then there is a kitchen, sitting room, dining room, and a garden in which her small white car stays parked behind closed gates.
My room is just a little bigger than my room at home, with a wooden floor, white walls, and a cheery yellow bedspread. I also have a small desk, a chair by the door, a tiny closet in which I easily fit eleven weeks worth of possessions with room to spare (although eleven weeks of possessions take up surprisingly little room.) The only thing I can truly say I miss is having a clock that I can see in the dark, since the light on my watch burnt out a long time ago I don't know what time it is until the light's good enough to read a watch by, by which time it doesn't really matter anyway.
My window faces east, more or less, and the light is striking when I open my shutters in the morning.
