Friday, November 24, 2006

Trying To Go To London


Travel Troubles.

It all started with the loss off my most precious documents. The passport is okay, but the people who give visas seem to have decided that if one loses a visa, one must jump through teeny tiny hoops set at dangerous heights in order to get a new one. Except they won't tell you how to get to wherever the hoops are, and you might not see all of them because they're all hidden like little Easter eggs. I had scheduled a visit this weekend to visit my aunt and cousin+wifey in London, and the desk for the airline closes exactly forty minutes before departure. Exactly forty minutes.

Yesterday, (Happy Thanksgiving) my father mentioned that though I could leave France without a problem, I might have some issues if I tried to get back into the country without a visa. I had asked the woman at the American Presence Post in Rennes about this very subject, and she had indicated that I shouldn't have any problems, but I figured (a.k.a. between Dad and Aunt Rhoda I was half convinced that I was never going to be able to leave France, ever) it would be prudent to double-check. I went down to the Bureau of Foreigners (that's the exact translation) and waited for about an hour to have a lady tell me that all I needed to do was attach a couple documents, one of which I didn't have. This conversation, once she actually stopped interrogating me long enough to tell her why I was there, took about thirty minutes, and I was already starting to feel pressed for time. The missing document was something the folks in Rennes were supposed to have copied for me when I went there, but they didn't. It was 11:00 am.

Panic! All I could think of was how the last time I called the APP Rennes (who had the document I needed) it took them four days to respond. Of course, I forgot that I called them on a holiday, but that didn't stop my respiration and heartrate from increasing at a dizzying pace. I rushed to school and found the number for the consulate in Rennes, and with my heart in my throat I called. Success! The lady answered. Ambiguity! She said she didn't always keep a copy of the files she sent to Paris, but she would look. She also told me I would have to come to Rennes to pick it up, which is a two-hour train ride one way. Success? She said she could fax it, but I didn't have access to a fax machine. Panic! At the Disco! I was running around, trying to print off copies of all the documents that I thought I might need, and asking for a fax machine. Success! The woman in the Office of International relations offered to let me use hers. Bigger Success! The document came through, I made copies and trundled home to eat and finish packing and tidying my room. Small failure. I couldn't find a stapler, so I had to just paper clip the documents to my passport. Small success. My room is tidy for the first time in a month.

Success! I got on the train on time, and arrived in Rennes with about an hour until the Ryan Air desk closed for the flight. Failure! It turns out that the shuttle to the airport left while I was getting off the train, and the next one didn't come until 5:01 pm, and would reach the airport after the office closed. I sat down to wait for a taxi, but the most taxis were waiting for customers who had summoned them ahead of time, and there weren't a whole lot of them waiting around. I sat there for an hour. Tiny success. I grabbed a taxi. Failure. The taxi came at 4:40. I had 25 minutes to get to the airport and to the Ryan Air check-in point. Failure! The traffice was ridiculous. I know the taxi driver could tell I was anxious because he kept reassuring me that the traffic would ease up one we exited the city. Bigger failure! We didn't get out of the city until a little before 5:00. HUGE FAILURE I ran up to the desk at, according to the airport clock, 5:08:30, three and a half minutes after it closed. The crabby lady refused to let me slide by; I was obviously not the first late and desperate customer she had dealt with. Despair. I shed half a tear before trying to find another plane to London. There were none leaving from Nantes, so I called home, called Aunt Rhoda, bought time on the internet (which was achingly slow) to search for flights. There was one from Paris, but it would have cost my an extra 200 euros. Er, maybe not. I thought about sleeping in my own bed for the night, but by the time I gave up trying to find flights I had also missed the last train from Nantes to Angers.

So here I sit at the B&B, having choked down a nasty sandwich from the vending machines and reserved another flight (at twice the cost of the original, and this is one way), I sit typing this entry on free WiFi. The internet came with a room that smells as if someone had opened a can of air freshener from the '80s and added some nursing home smell on top of it, and I can oncly access said internet while sitting in the reception area. Thus far six guests have mistaken me for an employee. I don't even know how to end this thing

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Thanksgiving and Peanut Butter

Two small points of interest and a postscript:

1. I will, for the first time ever in my short but venerable life, be missing all Thanksgiving celebrations. Not only am I outside any country that celebrates the day of great feasting, but the two American students who are hosting [separate] Thanksgiving dinners are doing so on Saturday. I am leaving to visit Aunt Rhoda and Company on Friday afternoon, and ergo will be absent from the possible overindulgence that will occur in Angers on a small scale. Hence, I charge anyone with a conscience to pray that I run across some pumpkin pie within the next two days.

2. I have a French nickname. Last Thursday I was sitting in the building that passes for a student union, typing up the Paris blog and reading emails, when a fellow American student popped a squat beside me. Andrea was waiting for a classmate from a translation class to meet her so they could do their homework together. When Stephanie sat down we introduced ourselves, but did not say much more than that. Eventually I pulled a bag of Peanut Butter M&Ms (courtesy of Jessy Elliott) out of my backpack and offered it to the two girls. Stephanie asked what was different about this particular brand of M&Ms, and when I tried to explain that "il ya a de beurre de cacahuètes dans les centres des M&Ms"—there's peanut butter in the middle of the M&Ms—she laughed uproariously at my pronunciation. To soften the blow to my speech ego, Stephanie patiently coached Andrea and myself on the pronunciation of cacahuète. It took me so long to finally say it right that Stephanie decided to call me Cacahuète for the rest of the night (she turned out to be a fairly hep cat), and when I saw her last night she yelled, "Ah, mon cacahuète!" when she saw me. Stephanie and Andrea did not emerged unscathed either, since Andrea could not pornounce the word for frog, grenouille (guess what her nickname is), and in retribution we poor browbeaten foreigners decided to call Stephanie by her favorite word in English—Coconut.

Postscript: When I was in French class this afternoon I repeatedly drifted into the land of daydreams and random thought, and a recurring thought was on the various names for my favorite carnival/fair food: "cotton candy", "spun sugar", and "candy floss". However, the more I thought about it (I was really bored), the stronger my conviction became that the name "candy floss" is a near-oxymoron. The purpose of floss and flossing is to prevent the development of cavities and other such oral afflictions while the effect of candy consumption is the appearance of cavities. Why on earth would anyone want to floss with candy? Isn't that basically putting cavities in your mouth, as in "Here, Mr. Cavity, why don't you just snuggle up between these two molars here?" Such nonsense.

Post-postscript: The correct pronunciation of cacahuète is harder than it looks on paper, and to an anglophone, would not seem at all phonetic. Ditto grenouille.

Friday, November 17, 2006

Examens Blancs


This week we had the French version of midterms, know as "Examens Blancs." It's a ridiculous practice, because they count for nothing, but they each take up three to four hours of one's time. They are scheduled outside of class time (similar to finals in the American system), but classes continue nonetheless. I had three exams, two of which counted as my finals. The two that were important went fairly well in my opinion. The other, well. It was as if I had never gone to that class before, showed up the day of the test, and said, "Hm, this looks fun! Let's see if I can sound like an idiot." So, in a sense, I succeeded there, too. I wiped out. This weekend is going to be completely dedicated to relaxation and figuring out how to delete songs off the computer while keeping them on my iPod.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Paris, Take 2

Permit me, firstly, to apologize for my long absences between posts. If you want to know why, try going to a foreign country for a while where you don't speak their language, going without consistent internet access, midterms that count for nothing for the French but count as your finals, and keeping a blog. So lay off me (Barron). This stuff takes time, expecially when some people thinks they need to point out my grammatical errors.

Well, on November second I packed my bag, bought a coat (that's another story), and shipped myself back to gai Paris to meet Mlle Nina Badoe, longtime friend and fellow international student. She flew in from Norrich, England, where she's studying for the semester, and arrived in the Charles de Gaulle airport about thirty minutes before my train came in to the same airport. As soon as I got in I gave her a call, and she said she had found a friend already (she does that. I don't know how, but she does) who could help her find the train station. I got a call back later saying she had found herself Charles de Gaulle 1, rather than CGD2, where the TGV station is located. No sweat, I thought. I asked a lady to direct me to CDG1, but I guess my thick accent made it sound like I was asking for Terminal 1, which is most certainly not the same. In the meantime, a young man walked up to me and started speaking in a language I didn't understand at all, though it sounded a bit like Spanish. He got across to me that he spoke no French, no English, and no Spanish, and that he was speaking Portuguese. That was about all we understood of each other. He was pointing to phone numbers on a sheet of paper, and I was asking him if he needed to use my cell phone, and he just kept speaking really fast Portuguese, and I was trying to tell him I had no idea how to help him (which I thought would have come across in my complete lack of Portuguese), and eventually he said something that might have been "Thanks anyway," and walked off. So I was misdirected, lost, had to give the phone to a Hertz employee so he and Nina's friend could talk to each other and figure out what was going on. Two hours and an empty stomach later, Nina and friend finally found me as I sat in Terminal One. That sure was encouraging.

We didn't do much that first evening, other than check in at the hostel and eat McDonald's (we had a craving. I have no excuse), but we did take a long walk around the block and freeze before returning for a good night's sleep. The people at the hostel seemed to take a liking to us, and used us to practice their English whenever we showed up.

The first day was the Eiffel Tower and the Moulin Rouge, plus a walk around the Montmartre area. Nina and I both were ridiculously tired after we climbed all those stupid steps, and that was when we decided not to see the Sacre Coeur up close until the next day. There was an American family coming down while we were going up, and the little boy was telling his mother that he was really tired and ready for a break. "My legs have been whining," he said, and I thought that was a very accurate statement. Not much was different from the last time I climbed that thing, save for it was sunny, and there was Buddhist monk running around in his orange robe and some really yellow socks with his sandals. I wanted to get a picture, but he was a sly devil, and I have no evidence of my monk sighting. After the Eiffel Tower we grabbed some lunch and subwayed over to the Moulin Rouge. Nina wanted to walk down the whole thing, but I was afraid of catching herpes. Then two tall transvestites walked past, and Nina changed her mind. Can't say I was sorry.

We stayed in the area for most of the afternoon, looking in shops around Montmartre, trying to find the breakdancers who had been there the last time (no dice on that), and marveling at Frenchiness of Paris. I could techinically sum up our trip in those three words: we wandered around. Or we wondered around aimlessly, because we didn't have a leader. That night we went dancing in a really crowded club, and stayed a lot longer than we intended, mostly because it was hard to move anywhere without climbing over people. We went to bed late, got up early, and headed back to Montmartre. The angry string/bracelet vendors were out in full force that Saturday, and cursed in English at everyone who didn't buy anything. I was really tired, so it was easy to put on a grumpy face that said "If you mess with me, I will rip out your spleen," whenever they came around.

There was also a harpist playing on the steps, which I thought was really cool. There was a family speaking something Germanic, and the dad was wearing giant yellow clogs. I would love to know how he fared climbing all those steps.
The Sacre Coeur was, again, very impressive, and I am of the opinion that everyone should see it at least once in their lifetime. The Moulin Rouge, on the other hand, looks nothing like it does in the movie, and is nothing special (save for the transvestites).




After the Sacre Couer we grabbed sandwiches and took the train to Versailles to see the famed palace. I was thoroughly astonished. I couldn't get the whole thing in a picture. When we walked through the gates there were, of course, more vendors, two who thought I should be able to speak Arabic, but it gets easier to say "no" every time I walk past a guy selling cheap Eiffel Tower keychains.



Versailles deserves its fame. It is massive, ornate, and gets more golden and fancy as one approaches the king's quarters. The chapel inside the palace is a very good idea—no excuses not to go. And, if all else fails, the church service could come to you. I did not, however, like the idea of waking up and going to bed publicly, though it might have been fun to have music accompany your every move. The queen, I think, was worse off. Who wants to give birth with half the court watching? I certainly hope Louis and his successors made that sort of humiliation worthwhile for their wives.



That night I tried to lead Nina back to a Fnac I had seen on my previous trip to Paris from the bus tour (she needed an adaptor for her computer). Apparently it's not easy to find things I've only seen while half-asleep through a bus window, because somehow we ended up walking down the Champs Elysées, and turned up next to the obelisk. Then we walked through the park and came out in the über-posh area, where Chanel and Gucci are located. We stared at expensive jewelery through windows and marveled at the prices, picked out the pieces that were deserving of our life savings, and continued to wander in search of Fnac (again, we were without a good leader), and by the time we discovered we were nowhere near that darn store we had walked for a good hour and a half. So we ate at a restaurant called Hippopotamus, dragged ourselves back to the hostel, and slept.


Sunday we went to mass in the famed Notre Dame, and it was fantastic. Marvelous music, marvelous cathedral, and hundred of tourists to snap photos and distract me from the sermon. It also happened to be the international service, so I heard Scripture read in English, Italian, Spanish, and French. Pretty cool. It was also freezing cold, but that's a side note. After the service Nina and I went to a café near the church, and the waiter spoke English to us the entire time even though I only spoke to him in French (Is that rude? I was offended, and need justification). Then we went to the Louvre. Wow. There is so much in there to see. We stuck mostly to the non-European displays, and took irreverent photos with several pieces of priceless art (I forgot my camera, so I'll post those pictures when I snatch them from Nina), saw the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo, and wore our feet to thin flappy pads. We were there for four hours, never stopping once, and saw maybe a quarter of all the Louvre has to offer. And we usually didn't read the display cards, either. That was pretty much it, that day. We were too worn out to do much else, and Nina had an early morning the next day, so we actually did homework that evening and rested. Then we went out to eat and the waiter asked me if I was from Beirut. Do I look Lebanese?

So it's settled. When I come back to France in a future summer or late spring, I will kayak on the pond at Versailles, see the rest of the Louvre, and find out what's the big deal about the Palais Japonais and the Hôtel des Invalides. Feel free to join me.

Are you happy, Barron?