To finish up about my previous trip, Scotland was great, probably my favorite place that I visited on my trip. Here are some pictures:
Kathryn and I made a cake and stored it in the sink overnight and then ate it straight out of the sink in the morning
Ruins
Bobbie's in a church! Sort of.
Well, it used to be a church.
Just tryin to stay in touch.
Kathryn's friend Stephen and I ran into the North Sea in our clothes at 2 AM. It's a St. Andrews tradition (called the May Dip) to run into the sea at dawn on May 1st. It washes your sins away. But Stephen had had an exam and obviously I hadn't been there, so we decided to do it at 2 AM on May 5th instead. COLD.
Kathryn and I on a really old bridge.
One really interesting thing that happened is that in the Glasgow airport I met this cool girl who was heading to Paris to catch a train to Brussels. We sat next to each other on the plane and chatted and then I helped her get into the city from Beauvais. From there I went with her on the Metro to get her to Gare du Nord, but then looking at her train schedule she realized that it was too late and she was going to have to spend the night in Paris. Thanks to Ryanair being insane, I had basically now spent about seven hours with this girl, and I felt comfortable offering her my floor. So we went back to the Cité, made some pasta, and crashed. She left in the morning but gave me the book she'd been reading (The Rabbi's Daughter by Reva Mann) which was pretty cool. I read it in Cannes! But I am getting there.
So I got back from Scotland on a Monday night, exhausted, broke, with a guest, and not looking forward to going to class on Tuesday. But I did, and I went on Wednesday, too, although of course I was exhausted because Wednesday mornings I have a translation class at 8 AM and I can almost never sleep on Tuesday nights because I have anxiety dreams all night about oversleeping and I wake up every hour panicking that I didn't hear my alarm. Even though I always hear my alarm.
Anyway, so Wednesday I was exhausted. I went to my eight AM class, then ran back across the city for my 11:30 class, then had some lunch and ran back to Clignancourt for my 3:30 translation class. My friend Emily is in that class. She had told me she would meet me there instead of the lobby of our building because she had to buy a bus ticket, but when I got there she was nowhere to be seen. She came in about 45 minutes late, and she wrote me a note on her translation assignment:
"Do you want to go to Cannes this weekend?"
"I don't know, I'm exhausted and broke and just got home from traveling two nights ago and just spent my first night alone in my room in three weeks. Where are you staying?"
"In a condo."
"Whose condo?"
"It's 311€ for four people for three nights."
"I don't know, probably not. Who's going?"
"James, Stephanie and me."
I pretty much wished I could go to Cannes for the weekend, but didn't feel like I could do it. I was completely exhausted and pretty broke and just didn't want to deal with it. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt like I had to do it. So what if I am broke? I can scrape it together. So what if I am exhausted? This is my last month in France. I have never been to the Côte d'Azur. When else in my life am I going to get the chance to do something like this? When else in my life am I going to be able to just hop on a train and go to the south of France? I have to take advantage of my situation. Faut que j'en profite, as they say! I'd rather be broke for the rest of my time here, eating only spaghetti, than wishing I'd gone to Cannes when I had the chance. So finally I scribbled on Emily's paper...
"YES."
Of course it turned out to be much more complicated than that, but I didn't know that at the time. What I did know was that a) Stephanie was asking Tessa if she wanted to come, so I had to get my yes in before Tessa, b) the travel agency closed at seven and we didn't get out of class on the other side of Paris until five and c) neither of us had a cell phone with us so we couldn't just call Stephanie and tell her to meet us there, we had to go all the way back to the Cité U.
So as soon as our class got out, Emily and I booked it to the Metro, which we took from Clignancourt to Gare du Nord. At Gare du Nord we were waiting and waiting for the RER B, but it never came. Finally I didn't feel like we could wait there anymore, so I told Emily I was going to try and take the 4 instead, and she decided to wait and see if the RER came. I took the 4 to Denfert-Rochereau, where I learned that the RER was on fire and that there were delays between Châtelet-Les Halles and Gare du Nord (which is where we had been). But it was fine at Denfert-Rochereau, so I got on it there and when I got off one stop later at the Cité U, Emily got off the same train. Turns out she had given up on the RER as well and taken the same route I had. We ran into the Fondation shouting Stephanie's name. She came running down to find us, as she had been on the roof and had seen us running into the Fondation. We sat around for a bit trying to find train tickets, but I was really anxious about getting to the travel agency before it closed. There were plenty of tickets online to go to Cannes, but we couldn't find any to get back. So we gave up on that and decided to go to the travel agency. James had given Emily his money and she had Stephanie's too, so we were set for that. We ran to the tram, took it to the 4, took that to the stop where the travel agency was, and made it inside around 6:45 PM. The woman already had all of Stephanie's info and just had to take my name and birthdate and add me to the reservation. We had done it! Now we just needed to buy train tickets.
This is the moment, however, when Stephanie happened to mention, "We should probably tell James," and Emily said, "You're right, James doesn't know!" This was the first I had heard of this - and we had just confirmed our reservation and paid for it in cash. Without cancellation insurance. Turns out that Stephanie, James and Emily had been planning on taking a bus tour around the Côte d'Azur. They would be staying in hotels and also on the bus, but the bus company was taking care of accommodations and everything, and they were going to go to four cities. This is what James had signed up for, and this is what he had given Emily his 170€ for. When Stephanie and Emily had gone to buy tickets on the bus, it was already full. But they had their hearts set on the Côte d'Azur, so they walked into the nearest travel agency and reserved a condo in Cannes. And nobody had been able to get in touch with Jim to ask him about it. Oops.
So that started making me really anxious, because I really don't like planning things when other people aren't on board, and I REALLY don't like spending someone else's money on something they don't know about. But there was no time to think - we had to go to the train station to try and buy tickets. We were right by Montparnasse station, so we just walked in there and got in line. We wanted to speak to a real person. It ended up taking us at least half an hour talking to an extremely patient SNCF worker. There were almost no tickets to come home when we needed to, because it was a long weekend so everyone was going away to the south to have a good time on the beach - just like us. Finally we explained that Emily and I needed to come back on Monday because we had Tuesday classes, but that Stephanie and Jim could come back on Tuesday. Also, Jim and I had 12-25 discount cards, but Emily and Stephanie didn't. We told him that he could split us up, we didn't all have to be on the same train. In the end he got it all figured out and it was upwards of a bazillion euros for all of us. It occurred to us then that we just did not have the means to pay for all of our tickets then and there. So, thanks to quick thinking on Stephanie's part, we bought the tickets home, because there were fewer of them. She said she had seen plenty of trains to go there on Saturday online, where they are also cheaper. So I paid for Jim's and my tickets, and Stephanie paid for hers and Emily's. We all ended up taking night trains, Emily and I on Monday night and Jim and Stephanie on Tuesday night. Whew.
When we got home, we decided to split up before trying to buy train tickets there, because we were all exhausted and sweaty from running around Paris all afternoon trying to make things happen. So I took a shower and put on pajamas and went to find Jim. Someone had to tell him the change of plan. When I got to his room, though, I discovered that I totally did not have the nerve to do it so I took him down to Stephanie's room and we told him together. It ended up being okay though, because Jim had not actually been very excited about spending all that time on a bus. Also, the bus trip had been 170€. Emily and Stephanie and I all ended up spending some more than that. James ended up actually paying like 35€ less. Not fair. But it did help sweeten the deal. So we were set with that. Now all we needed to do was buy the train tickets. Tiny problem though - for some reason the SNCF website chose that night to go down for maintenance. But it was okay, we got up in the morning and found tickets. Well, okay. I did. I found the trains that would be the cheapest for each person, which ended up being Emily and Stephanie on an 8h01 train and James and I pn an 8h16 train. Theirs was direct and ours stopped in Toulon where we had to change to a different one, so we were set to get there an hour later than they would.
That was Thursday morning. We still had to get through Thursday and Friday. And I had to do something else - figure out some solution to the fact that I was supposed to be teaching a class on Monday. I have a very strict boss so I was really worried about it, but it ended up being not so bad for two reason:
1. Erin is the kind of friend who is there when you need her.
2. My boss thinks Erin, Julia and I can do no wrong.
So I sent him a crazed email saying Erin was going to cover for me and please not to fire me. When I did eventually speak to him, he said, "Bobbie, don't you know you can do whatever?" Yeah. No need to worry.
Anyway, my ability to write coherent sentences is starting to fail me and this post has gotten really long - and I haven't even gotten to the actual trip yet. So I think I am going to end this post for now and pick it up later. Instead of finishing it, I am going to go to the Foire du Trône - yeah. A thousand year old carnival.
P.S. I would just like to share this website with y'all. I can't stop playing with it. It's not 100% accurate, but it does give a pretty good impression of what the world looks like to colorblind people.
