Weekend roadtrip to Normandy

Here’s a picture of the weekend roadtrip, in two segments: Friday night, hour by hour, and the other days in my typical stream of conscience.

Carlos and I were sitting in Culture Biere on Thursday night and decided that this weekend could not be spent in Paris; it was raining, there wasn’t much going on, and all around it was the best weekend to leave Paris. But Friday morning I told myself we weren’t really going to follow through with the idea of going on a trip- it was too out of the blue and train tickets were expensive.

(Here's a picture a photographer took in Culture Biere, because of course we are very important people and they needed to have us on their website)

Now, here’s the hour-by-hour of the decision to leave:

5ish pm- After a little reading, a little work, and a lot of procrastination, I fell asleep.

7ish pm- I called Carlos and found him in a complete state of euphoria (like a little kid when they’re excited about a trip) and so I started looking for train tickets to not ruin the 2 year old’s dream.

9ish pm- After a very long time of looking for train tickets and only finding absurd prices, I called Avis and made a reservation to rent a car because it was only a fraction of the cost of two train tickets. There’s a catch: Avis only had stickshift and Carlos can’t drive because he’s a wittle, wittle, under-21, baby. That leaves me driving stickshit; I mean stickshift, in Europe, for the first time. I learned to drive in Colombia in a jeep from the Stone Age, and so I convince myself that I still remember how to drive stickshift, even though it has been six years.

A bit after 9pm- “Carlitos… yeaiiiiiiiiii! Pack and come over, we have a car and so we should probably figure out where we are going.”

9:50- After an extremely protracted, exhaustive 3-second discussion of where we wanted to go to, which consisted of me posing the question and Carlos responding very authoritatively, “Normandie,” I start packing and Carlos started looking online how to drive to Normandy from Paris. You might be wandering where in Normandy. Wherever the stickshift car and my ‘France on a Budget’ guide would take us.

Around 10:30pm- Leave my house.

10:57 (exact time- it says so on the contract)– We signed the Avis contract and got the keys from the car rental, which closes at 11pm. Some of you may be thinking that it was cutting it too close. I call that Snappelin’ Austrian-like efficiency.

After scaring Carlos to death about how I couldn’t drive stick shift, almost crashing into the garage door as I took the car out of the Parking place, cruising in our Fiat Panda and having dinner at a place where the Arab pizza man was sure all women were a mix between a goddess and the devil (because he explained this as he made our pizza) we finally left Paris at midnight.

3:20 am (Saturday): We arrive in Honfleur, our first stop. There are a couple of recommended hostels in my guide, but none of them are open.

We wondered around for a while (and had a cat follow us the entire time) and then decided to go back to the Ibis we had seen at the entrance of Honfleur. It was four in the morning by now and Carlos could drive for two minutes, right? We reached the Ibis and had a car behind us. All of a sudden, the seemingly regular car, metamorphosed into a bloodcurdling thing with blue lights on top. My nerves were racking. Three huge, intimidating policemen and a dog (I’m not kidding, they had a dog) got out of the car and asked Carlos why we had stopped, and he explained we were going to the hotel. They asked where we were from, at which point I obviously screamed ‘COLOMBIA!’ (No, I’m kidding- I kept it to myself and avoided getting deported) and upon hearing Carlos’ “Spain” response, said good night. They got back into their car, took the blue lights off, and almost as quickly as they had scared us to fatality, left. I felt the air going into my lungs again, but the trembling lasted about 30 more minutes.

At seven thirty in the morning (after only three hours of sleep) I got a call from Tony, Misuncita, Pablo, OT, and Manue, who were celebrating Misun’s birthday at 3912, to say hello. It was an amazing surprise, and I almost cried. But I was too asleep to cry. (Honfleur)

On Saturday we walked around Honfleur and visited the beaches of Normandy, and ended up finding another Ibis in Caen, the capital of the Basse-Normandie region to spend the night. We went out to ‘El Che Guevara,’ and I promise it has been one of the most incredible places I have found in France. The ambience was great, with sand on the floor and some of the best mojitos I’ve had. The music was all classics, and the people we met at the door were great. So we danced and drank with them, exchanged e-mails and promises of future visits (including an invitation Carlos got to go to Algeria), and of course never heard from them again.

Eighty percent of Caen was destroyed in WWII, and so the city, rebuilt in the 50’s and 60’s, is not exactly an architectural cloud nine. But its college-town feel and the palace of William the Conqueror make up for it. (Church in Caen)

On Sunday we drove to Rouen. You would think that from Caen to Rouen we would find at least one place to have lunch in, but no. Nothing, nada de nada. I’m serious. We stopped at a pizza place along the way that finally had an ‘OPEN’ sign. I wasn’t very happy with the thought of pizza, but my stomach was even unhappier with its growling and the gastric juices. We had had bread for breakfast, and I had had bread for dinner the night before. Which reminds me, I didn’t tell you about dinner. Carlos wanted oysters, and insisted they could be eaten without cooking. I ate three, and my decency ran out. I felt terrible after he had spent an hour opening every shell of the dozen and a half oysters we had bought, but when I saw the thing move when I poured the lemon juice on top, I couldn’t handle it. So much for being educated and eating everything, with the slithering salty oyster every ounce of politeness I had in me died. So I had bread, while I watched poor Carlos eat the rest of the 15 oysters that were left and apologized profusely.

So back to the pizza place- it was 5pm, and it was open. We walked in, and just to make sure, we asked if it was open. ‘Yes, we’re open’. Ok, so we ask for a pizza. But the pizza place, which only made pizzas and was allegedly open, would only make us a pizza after 7pm. So we left the OPEN pizza place and headed for Rouen, hoping we would find something else.

We got to Rouen at about 6pm, and nothing served anything salty to eat. All we found were sweet-crepe places, and ice creams. What is with these people? No one has lunch/dinner on Sundays? So we ended up eating at the very gourmet Quick. I have to confess, the salad wasn’t terrible. I mean- it could have been worse. It could have been open, but only serving two hours later.

Finally we left for Paris, and returned our Fiat Panda right on time, again in the Snappelin efficiency of 10 minutes before the Avis closed.

Passport-less, illegal and apt for deportation

I have the tendency of forgetting everything, but this time I really crossed the line. The international-line of forgetfulness. I was meeting my mom in Geneva for the weekend, and since I had a dissertation due on the Monday I got back, a friend had offered to look over it and correct my grammar/writing style atrocities.

Well, I end up going to sleep at three in the morning, right after packing and correcting the paper, and waking up at 4:30 for my 6 o clock train. I get to the station on time, get on the right train; everything seems to be just as a responsible person would have done it. So I close my eyes on voiture 18, place 53 and fall asleep for 3 hours of beautiful sleep. About fifteen minutes before getting to Geneva, I wake up and hear the voice of the girl next to me asking her mom what she was holding in her hands. The mom explains that “La Suize c’est pas chez nous” and so they need identity cards.

Shit, my passport.

Wait, wait, let me paint the picture for you. You know that sound that fingernails make when you scratch them against a blackboard added to the headache from not having a good night’s sleep in a long time? Well, I heard that, along with the voice inside my head telling me I was going to get deported back to… France? US? Colombia???

It was my first time in Switzerland, I hadn’t gotten off the train, and I was already there illegally. I start praying. Kinda like when I cooked for my birthday, but this time it was praying in addition to cold sweat on my forehead and a horrible headache.

So I get off of the train, and as I am passing passport-control, I explain to the officer I left it in Paris.

By now I was thinking- What are passports, seriously? What are these paper things that define “where” we are from and how hard it is for us to get in and out of certain places? What are nationalities and countries, and what in the world are PASSPORTS? How can a piece of paper, that doesn’t even have your criminal record on it, determine anything about your life? And yet it suffices to go through immigration with a Colombian passport in any developed country to realize that it matters a lot. To whom? I’m not sure, but it matters.

I vote we get rid of this bureaucratic idiosyncrasy and if necessary start carrying around our criminal records. That says a lot, not a piece of paper that determines where you were born or where you were naturalized. Ugggh.

Back to the story- the second officer I talked to asked me my nationality, where I lived, why, etc. etc, and told me I could either go back to Paris, and come back to Geneva, this time making sure not to forget the passport, or “take the risk of staying.” So of course, I inquired if by ‘risk’ he meant I would get arrested as soon as I crossed the sliding glass doors into apparent freedom. He explained it was a 200 Euro fine, but that I would not get fined immediately, only if on the day I returned to Paris I was asked for it again and didn’t have it.

So of course, I go the illegal way and take the risk. The train ticket would have cost half of the fine, plus the three hours of travelling that I could be spending with my mommy and the headache again.

My train on the way back was at 5:00 in the morning. Apparently bad people don’t travel that early because there was no passport control in Geneva or Paris. Fiuf.Now to the fun part- I had an incredible weekend with my mom. Geneva is like camp for adults who want to make the world a better place. You have the building where you cure everyone, Medecins sans Frontiers, the building where you make sure everyone is getting sufficient medication, OMS, the building where you make sure no one fights, ONU, and the building where you make sure workers have fair pays and nice environments. Really, its like the city of the future, for the alleviation of humanity from its own nature. I loved it.
We saw the United Nations of babies in a park- one of them was having a birthday party (probably turning 2 years old), and you could see all of his little friends were all from different continents and their parents had to communicate via a translator, or their fifth language, English or French. Seeying those 2 year olds I understood why 53% of Geneva’s population holds a foreign passport.

Geneva was really amazing. Maybe it’s the fact that I grew up in Colombian hecticness, but I don’t think I could ever live in such a calm place, but it was a great trip.

iCharge – well maybe I don't.

I am well aware that the French are known for being a lot more straightforward in their approach to strangers (and maybe the stereotype is true of some few sketchy people), but I didn’t know I could get something free from that.

For those Mac owners who know just how many products come with an i before it, you can probably relate to my need to only use Mac chargers, Mac organizers, and as soon as they start making it, an iLife. I had been looking for an apple store to buy a charger for my laptop, fit for the two-stick crazy electrical plugs that French walls come equipped with, but I didn’t need the entire charger, just the adapter that I could change on my own charger. (For you non-Mackers, the charger of most laptops has a little piece that comes off that you can change for any other Mac adapter, either a little piece, or a cable that will extend your charger).

Well, Mac doesn’t sell anything less than a 40 Euro travel kit that comes with every little plug you will ever need to use while on the terrestrial planet, and I really only needed the French one. I contented myself with using the typical 2 Euro converter that I had bought at BHV and thanked the 25-year old salesman.

As I was leaving the store, I remembered I needed an ATM and turned around to ask him if he knew where I could find one of these distributing machines, and he told me he would look in a map. I was thinking- Wow, I need to get one of these maps that have ATM’s painted on them. When he got behind the counter he passed me a cable and told me that they didn’t sell the adapters, and that he didn’t know why, and told me to take it quickly, because he could tell ‘in my eyes’ that I needed it. How corny, and life saving at the same time.

The cable he had given me didn’t have a price tag, a sensor chip, nothing. It was only wrapped around in a perfect Mac-out-of-the-box way, and so before the 40-year-old woman (who I assumed was the supervisor) came back, I thanked my guardian angel, and left. Cable included.

Tea at the Ritz

Right after the pig exhibition, I had agreed to have coffee with a friend in Place Vendome, in the Bar Vandome. I knew it was in the Ritz, but I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

It was out of this world. It was ridiculousness at its maximum expression. First of all, I was late to meet my friend who had asked me to go there. I ran, and lost two of my friends who caught up with us later. Except they almost weren’t allowed into the freaking place because it stinks with pretentious, pompousness and you have to be just as ludicrous to be there. Of course, none of my friends were expecting this, and our lost-student faces probably told the guards that there was no chance we had the budgets to be there.

But finally we sit down, and order tea. Except tea is not just tea. Its tea, and more biscuits and sandwiches than you can handle, and…. drum roll… the ‘house’ champagne.

In short, it was a three-hour event, that included amazing little cookies and biscuits and earl-grey, and champagne, and bathrooms with hot towels so you can dry your hands, and some of the most self-important people I have ever seen, and last but not least, an absurd bill.

I understood how shocked Julia Roberts’s character was at the sight of the hotel in Pretty Woman. Ok, it’s a stretch. But really, too much preposterousness. Later I found out there are songs about this. Why do I live in a permanent mental lapsus?

It was quite an experience, and truth be told, I had fun playing along. But it's checked off of my list of things to do.

Pig’s Art

A good friend of mine is taking a class on Contemporary art, and he has decided he detests it. Not the class, the art. I’ve been trying to figure out if I like it, or not, but there are so many different artists and styles that I can’t really know. We went to the exhibition of a Belgian artist, Wim Delvoye, who has a pig farm in China (to avoid punishment for animal cruelty) and he tattoos and stuffs them to make his exhibition. In short, one of the rooms had a video showing the pigs being pigs, and another room had the tattoo-ed, stuffed pigs.

They are a set of unpretentious, kind of cute in their own pinkie, chunky way, pigs, and yet something, maybe the lighting in the place, killed the mood. Too bad because I would have really enjoyed looking at dead pigs.

(This is Louise, with her elegant Louis Vuitton; he uses a lot of well known brands and patterns)

I’m being facetious. No, I don’t think I consider that art, no I wouldn’t have one in my living room, and I hope if I ever have kids I won’t take them to museums of contemporary art and have the poor kids come bawling out of there because of dead pigs, and have to wake up at 3 in the morning because they’re having nightmares of these creatures.

Contemporary art is too much about the individual interpretation, and I am not sure I like that. I don’t want to have to do the work that the artist should have done himself. It’s like going to a restaurant and cooking your own meal, and then giving credit to the magnificent chef for letting you do it. Bollocks.

Maybe I’m too simplistic for it. I wouldn’t fill my house with corny mountain ranges and paintings of lake houses and my dog, but I want something I couldn’t have done myself. Throwing a pile of garbage together and calling it art is not for me. I am not saying art has to be visually pleasing- in fact, I find Dali a little troubling at times, but it is full of hidden pictures, and he reuses some figures, and I enjoy looking at the ensemble of his creativity.

But seriously, pigs?

Sickness and Ooeiness and Gooiness and Rain

An attempt at a poem to my newfound love, Actifed, which I will recur to again and again.

Last week I got a cold, one of those ooey, gooey colds. It came with monsters in my throat, and rain that came pouring down my nose. It made an iron of my forehead, and of my feet icicles instead, to complement my hands were drink shakers, and my armpits, great bread-bakers. I went to a pharmacist, who said, ‘You should take some Actifed.’ What an amazing piece of advice, though she charged me twice the price.

Clearly I'm not Neruda, but you get the point.

God said, let there be a keychain in the rain.

For those of you out there wondering, yes, I am still alive. Two hands, feet, legs, all complete. I do the checklist when I get home every night.

Today I was biking under the rain (getting wet because I still don’t have a raincoat) to meet Ana for coffee, a friend of a friend who goes to Sciences Po. I get to Sciences Po, and realize that my keys are not in my bag. Since my landlord is out of town until the 5th, and I don’t feel like sleeping in the metro, I start to panic under the rain. When Ana met me at Sciences Po, I don’t think she met a decent human being. Imagine the way a cat gets when you get her wet- that was me. Unfortunately, my problem was not the rain but the keys.

So there were 3 possibilities:
1. I could have dropped them at the bike parking place after unlocking the bike
2. There was a bus, one of those huuuuuge touristy buses full of cameras and maps and very lost, jet-lagged people parked on Rue Blanche letting people off. Since this is a one-lane street, I rode on the sidewalk to get past it, and when I descended the sidewalk, I did it the brutal way. Obviously everything in my stomach (and therefore my bike’s basket as well) jumped, and the keys could have fallen out then.
3. The street that passes directly in front of the Louvre is really, really, really bumpy. I normally avoid it, but since it was raining, and the sidewalk is compact dirt, I didn’t want to get all muddy. They could have fallen out as my brain was trying not to be mixed with my intestines.

I couldn’t leave my bike just anywhere without tying it because it would get stolen, so Ana and I tried to take the metro. Except you cannot get on a metro, or on a bus (we asked) with a bike. I call that mechanical discrimination, and being afraid of the competition. So I part Ana in the I’m-a-wet-cat way and left the bike at a friend’s house not too far away from Sciences Po, where they have a bike parking lot. When I finally got out of the metro at Pigalle, it was already dark. Not knowing if I would find my keys and if I had a place to sleep that night, I was now in the stage of I-am-a-wet,-homeless-cat-and-I-want-to-cry.

I ran to the place where I park my bike, and there, sitting under the rain and a lot of mud, was my orange keychain with all of its door-opening properties. The baker right next to the parking saw what had just happened and came outside and told me- I saw the keys but decided to leave them there for the owner to find them. I was not longer a wet, homeless cat. Now I had my fiuf-face and he said, ‘you have a lot of luck’. Damn right, and now I also have a raincoat.