This is more of a recounting of the last two days, the days happening so fast around here that my head spins a bit at the end of them. It’s frustrating, as I know I have two thirds of a month ahead of me, yet all I can think of is how little time I have left. So I run about, trying my best to see as much as possible. Yet oddly, this makes the days go faster, then I feel anxious about the end of the month. How silly. Well, if I keep feeling like this, perhaps I should dedicate a day to being bored out of my mind. “No, I must stare at the wall” I will tell myself, watching the minute hand crawl its slow way bout the clock. Perhaps I will feel I have enough time, then. But I doubt it. wink
The last evening in France was made easier by the knowledge that we’d be back in a week. We never did find that internet café we’d been told was about (which is why I didn’t load up any of these journal entries until yesterday). I suppose the directions of “two roads over, a café next to a salon” are rather vague, given the local. I think 80% of the shops in Paris could be described as café/brasserie, bookstore, or salon. The rest sell clothes. In any event, I forgot to take my parapluie (how I love that word), so the rain finally showed up, making us take refuge in the restaurant next to our hotel. We had avoided it originally, owing to an ominous “English spoken here” sign, but it proved to be wonderful anyway. The owner was a charming fellow who lied through his teeth and complimented our French, recommended a decent (and pas cher) local wine and left us alone when we needed the head-together time, but somehow always arrived with the food and drink just as we were starting to think about it. Some sort of sixth sense, I guess. After we arrived the place filled up with locals, couples of all ages and a few young families as well. Really, there is a certain community feel to eating establishments in Paris that is more reminiscent of an English pub than anything else. We let ourselves soak in the atmosphere while the warm fuzz of the wine kicked in, then it was literally around the corner to the hotel lobby.
When we go back (as we shall this weekend), I will take a picture of the hotel and lobby. It isn’t the Doubletree, Providence be thanked (I spend FAR too much time in those with work). It’s more like being in a small apartment complex, with an incredibly steep spiral staircase and a lobby/dining room/office/internet/social room that the travelers all congregate in. We finally met the third clerk last night, who hailed from Tunis. He gamely offered us a round of an odd Tunisian soda (vaguely cola-like, but with odd, almost cinnamon overtones) and we ended up in a long conversation with him and a Lebanese lady. We showed each other our houses (his in Tunis, that is) on Goggle Earth and learned that we both lived about the same distance from our respective oceans—although there is no surfing in Tunis thanks to the sharks eek . We spent a long time talking about language, the different people and cultures who lived in Paris, and where to go if he went to America (he was fascinated by the Wild West and Tupac Shakur). The lady had a few opinions on Tunis compared to Lebanon, and wanted to make sure I understood that compared to her, he was a bit of a barbarian razz People like that in every culture, of course, although I’m making her sound more difficult than she was. Certainly, she was an elegant enough woman, but I’d gotten used to that in Paris by now. Frump-woman, that’s me. *sigh* Anyway, it was truly interesting to get a first hand demonstration of just how truly multicultural Paris has become (“Aux New York ou Los Angeles I was informed.) And yet, at the end of the day, they all seem tres Francais to me.
The neatest thing was that it wasn’t until halfway through the evening that we realized that the clerk couldn’t speak English at all, and the woman only a little bit. It was as if we’d finally made some kind of breakthrough, and had reached a point where, while still hardly fluent, we could get by enough to actually get to know people. And to me, that’s half of travel. I love seeing different places, but I also love meeting people with different ways of seeing the world. It’s not just the technical joy of learning this song-like language called French, it’s the fact that it opens doors to different perspectives and ways of life.
The next morning, our clerk friend (who has started using the familiar “tu”) woke us at five in the morning for our trip. I will say, the Metro is an astonishing place that early on a Saturday, if you’ve seen it at rush hour. Very “post-apocalyptic”, at least in the sense that the stalls are closed and you can’t get a decent cup of tea. Fortunately, the Eurostar Chunnel train provided that, as well as roomy seats and huge picture windows. I brought my Woolf, but it stayed neglected despite my eagerness to get to it (I’m at that novelistic halfway point where the narrative threads are speeding up). Instead, I watched the full moon over the French countryside filled with little villas of fairybook houses and tall steepled churches. And, to be fair, a number of industrial zones, too. But there are still wide expanses of green between them.
Twenty minutes in the dark comprised all we got to see of one of the engineering marvels of the last few hundred years. We shot underneath the churning waters of the Chunnel and my principle concerns were about the six protagonists of The Waves. Heh. That, and my cup of tea. Soon we were racing along past the not as pretty, but truly cozy looking brownstones of England. I can’t put a finger on the differences between the French and the English countrysides. Not to sound like my mum settling disputes between my sister and I with regard to beauty, but I think they’re both tremendously appealing, but in different ways. Perhaps it’s due to my familiarity with the English side (I married into it, after all), but I find the English architecture less stunning but more approachable. More like a place I could actually imagine living in, though I would complain that the neighbors are too close on.
Speaking of which, we’re getting quite a bit of English country life now. Another train ride to Bath later, and our friend picked us up and drove us to the middle of a beautiful nowhere, also known as Glastonbury. I am not inventing that phrase, an older man in a pub told me that right off: “Are you lost? Only lost people ever end up here.” Not that the locals dislike the place, far from it. They’re just not used to regular tourists (New Age types, though, they get aplenty. More on that later).
My friend’s son is adapting quite well to English life, and is going to a public school. He is losing his American accent, playing rugby (to his mother’s great trepidation) and seems entranced with his school uniform. My American eyes are quite startled by all these young hellions who sport about so nattily dressed, but really they are like boys (and girls, it’s coed) everywhere. Costumes can’t change the fundamental nature of the beast, and my friend has to clean mud out of the boy’s clothes, be they slacks or blue jeans.
Oxy came down with a bit of a cold, so I propped him up in bed with hot drink, then headed out to prance about the walkways with my friend. Lots of good chatting about life, the universe and her new life here (long, mostly private story, but nothing scandalous. She’s married, even). We walked through muddy fields along public walkways (a thoroughly British concept) under astonishingly bright blue skies. I meant to get a picture of the churchyard she showed me where she would rest sometimes—it has people from all centuries there, all the way up to a few years ago. More of that English sense of the past that seems so foreign to me. I did get some shots of her house, which has lovely gardens (yes, plural). I can’t think of a better place to be.
Some of the garden
Obligatory food commentary—finished the night with chicken marinated in Stilton cheese. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. And the local beer was quite acceptable, too. I’m not much of a beer drinker, but I’ll take a half-pint of cask ale any evening. Especially when taken around a warm fire with friends.
Ta for now,
V
