Arrival in France & Weekend à Paris

Five days after taking off from Atlanta, I finally have enough time and charge on my computer to write an update. It’s going to be outdated by a day since I can’t post it until tomorrow morning when the school opens up and I can sneak onto Blogspot and paste this in. They’re pretty strict about censoring just about any useful or fun website – in addition to the obvious ones like Facebook and Twitter, they also blocked the train company and phone/internet service providers’ websites, which is just a bit inconvenient for me. Why they want to stop students from booking trains and looking at cell phone and internet options, I couldn’t say… but hey, at least Gmail and Blogspot work! I guess I can’t be too fussy.

The plane ride over went fairly smoothly, except I hadn’t realized until right before it was time to go that the itinerary included a change of airports in New York from La Guardia to JFK, which in turn meant having to reclaim my baggage and then re-check it at JFK. I was starting to feel a little grumbly about StudentUniverse’s devious ways of forcing you to make up for your cheap ticket until I got to the check-in counter at JFK and realized that booking through them meant that my second bag was free, though American Airlines usually makes you pay $50 for checking an additional bag. So I’d say that more than made up for the slight inconvenience and $13 shuttle between airports, and StudentUniverse thus redeemed itself. Of course I did still have to pay $50 for my giant monster overweight bag, but I guess that’s to be expected when you’ve got 7 months’ worth of heavy winter clothes and boots all crammed together. Or maybe I just overpacked. I probably did.

I arrived in Paris around noon after approximately zero hours of sleep. I tried to doze off a couple of times, but it just wasn’t going to happen, especially since I had gotten thoroughly sucked into George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones.

Since my friend Caroline lives on just about the exact opposite side of Paris from Charles de Gaulle airport, I decided to splurge on a taxi rather than trying to drag 100 pounds of unwieldy suitcases across town via public transportation. It would have involved taking the RER train down from the airport to change over to the Métro and then changing lines again at least once or twice, indubitably annoying the crap out of countless Parisians and myself, in order to get to the line that would take me closest to Caroline’s house, and then I’d still have to remember how to get to her place from the stop while lugging the suitcases across cobblestones for several blocks. Yet despite the obvious drawbacks of the public transportation option, that 50 € taxi ride still smarts. This would probably have been much easier if I’d had Caroline’s phone number (though I guess not all that much easier, since I didn’t have a functioning phone with which to call her), but all I had to go on was her address. Thankfully Caroline had been looking out the window for my arrival, since otherwise I might have been stuck outside the gate for who knows how long!

We took just enough time to go up and drop off my suitcases beforetaking off with her father, Gérard, to a nearby Italian restaurant called Veni’s. Caroline also brought her new puppy, a two-year-old Shih Tzu (like Toulouse!) called Chéli, along with us to the restaurant. When he’s not behaving himself with great composure in public (which he actually does admirably), his favorite thing to play with is 1.5 liter bottles of Coke, which it’s funny to see him tear after and viciously attack, since they’re about as big as he is.

Ok, enough digressing about les petits chiens adorables. After a sleepless night and airplane food, I was fairly ravenous and ordered a four cheese pasta that was a perfect blend of gorgonzola, parmesan, chèvre, brie, and penne. Dessert was the fabled chocolat liégeois, and it was every bit as tantalizing as I remembered. For someone who’s not normally a big fan of chocolate ice cream, I sure can tear one of those apart.

After lunch, Caroline and I did some strolling around Boulogne and then took Chéli for a long walk in the Bois de Boulogne, which is a surprisingly large little forest at 2,000 acres, especially considering it's right in the middle of Paris. Caroline had agreed to babysit that evening for someone in the apartment building, so I came with her. I confess I wasn’t much of a help by that point, though, as I could hardly keep myself awake. Despite the tiredness, I only slept for a couple hours before waking up in the middle of the night feeling completely alert. I managed to read myself back to sleep after trying to doze for a while, but apparently my body’s not having the easiest time adjusting to the time change.

Saturday was a day for errands. We made another run by the phone store, where I was trying to decide between getting a basic pay-as-you-go phone or something more internet-capable, since I had a rather accurate premonition that my internet situation here in Feurs would be somewhat sketchy. In the end I decided to wait, since even if I had wanted a smartphone, it would require me to provide a RIB, which is a kind of personal identification or routing number you can only have once you’ve established a French bank account… which you can only do once you’ve got established residency or a bill – like a cell phone bill… -- to prove you’re worthy of the high and mighty French banking system. One requires the other (gotta love all that French red tape), and since I didn’t yet know my address I thought it prudent to wait. I’ve since decided against going the smartphone route primarily because it’s just too expensive and I really don’t need anything fancier than text messages and phone calls (side note: it’s free to receive a phone call in France, no matter where it’s from!). A second convincing factor is that in order to get a phone with 3G at any kind of reasonable price, it would require signing a two-year contract that is apparently somewhat impossible to break. Since I’m only here for seven months, it just seems like a silly thing to get myself embroiled in when it’s something I don’t need anyway.

Another stop we made was to the SNCF store, which is the company that runs train bookings in France. This was a much more encouraging venture. I had bought tickets ahead in US for $302, which covered my initial trip down to Feurs and round trip to Paris and back when Brooke and Josh visit next month. After talking with an agent there, she got it down to $227 while upgrading me to first class. I also bought the age 12-25 rail pass that guarantees 25% to 50% off ticket prices and still got change back from my initial purchase. It was a good feeling!

Caroline cooked and invited some friends over for dinner on Saturday night with a plan to go out dancing afterwards. This meal was another shining example of the stark contrast between French bureaucratic inefficiency and their stunning brilliance in the realm of dining. Dinner begins with a fresh green salad with oil and vinegar dressing, but no side plate is used. Why waste a small plate or bowl when you can just use some bread to wipe up the dressing and re-use the same plate for your main dish? I love that it’s not rude here to use bread to sop up sauces and dressings like it is in the US. In fact, it’s wasteful not to. The main course was a quiche au jambon that Caroline made, and it was delicious. Not as delicious, however, as the amazing chocolate cake we had for dessert that she’d made from scratch that morning. I watched this cake rise from a soupy-looking half-filled baking tin to a marvelously fluffy pillow, and then sink back down to a splendidly dense and moist cake. Must get recipe…

Dinner had started around 8:00 and was wrapping up around 10:00, at which point I thought we’d head to the nightclub (“boîte de nuit” in French) that Caroline had in mind. What I neglected to account for was that Paris is a far cry from Athens; instead of closing at 2:00am, most places are only getting rolling by then. So to pass the time, we played cards until it was a sufficiently respectably late hour to go out on the town. Even at midnight, though, the club we went to was still pretty empty. From what I can tell by this one club experience, it’s best to go out with a huge group, since there’s a steep price of entry: either you buy a 750mL bottle of liquor for the exorbitant price of 115 € for something of Jack Daniels caliber that includes the price of entry for however many are contributing to it, or you each pay the 15 € cover that includes no drinks, and then it’s mandatory to check your coat for another 2 € (wouldn’t want anyone wearing too many clothes in the club, after all). Even with the jet lag advantage of being able to stay up later than my usual lame yawning-by-midnight self, I was still very tired. It also didn’t help that none of us were dancing, since the music the DJ was playing was entirely too soft rock for the taste of Caroline and her friends; we made our departure when a remix of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as weak house music came on. I actually kind of like the idea of mixing those two styles, but this one was done exceedingly poorly.

The one redeeming feature of the club – and apparently this is true of many French nightclubs – is that it was in the basement of an old building, so it had a rather crypt-like appearance. The reason these crypt-style clubs are so popular is that being underground and covered by stone walls and ceilings, much of the sound that might otherwise disturb the people living and working above the clubs is muffled. I guess it was around 1:30 when we left, since we wanted to make it back to Boulogne before the Métro stopped running. Caro told me that in Paris you either have the choice of going home before 2:00 or making the commitment to stay out partying til 5:00, when the Métro starts running again in the morning (though there’s also the expensive option of taking a taxi).

I’ll close this with a photo of the view from Caroline’s apartment at sunset that I took Saturday evening. I’d hoped to get around to describing my trip to and first day in Feurs tonight, but it’s 1:00am and I think I’ve already written enough here to give a whopper of a headache to whoever bothers to read all this Parisian drivel : )

Sorry the pictures are so small! I had wanted to post a few more, but the school's internet connection can only handle so much. One day in the perhaps imaginary future when I've got my own internet set up, I'll be able to get on Facebook and post a bunch of pictures there and update these. Hopefully in the next day or two I'll have made another obnoxiously long post on Feurs!