I arrived in Paris this morning here, but last night in New York. I hijacked Nick’s neighbor’s wireless (sometimes it works) and was promptly baffled as to why I would have gotten my daily listserv digest email in the middle of the morning. It usually comes after midnight, and I remember deleting it last night, so…right. I’ll be doing that a lot, I expect. Not to mention the five minutes of pacing that followed an email from a coworker–when she says “I’ll see [other person] tomorrow, so I’ll ask her,” just what the hell exactly does that mean to me?
I have just spent 13 hours traveling; my head is not where it should be.
Actually, that’s a funny story.
Earlier this week, I made a contingency plan in case I got work in Midtown yest–um, Wednesday. I decided I should leave by 3:30 (or maybe 3:00, really) in order to get out to JFK in plenty of time for my flight–it takes about an hour from Midtown. And it seemed like the stars were aligning to place me there on Wednesday, so I began to think of that as The Plan.
When I realized (Tuesday night-ish) that I would, in fact, be leaving from my apartment after all, I quickly did the math. Two hours to JFK from my place, so subtract two hours from 3:00, and leave at 1:00 to make it with time to spare.
Recall that the 3:00 version already included an hour of travel time, and you’ll be well ahead of where I was when I realized that I was on the wrong A train and began contemplating my options for a switch. I could just get out, wait for the next train, and finish the boring two-hour ride, or I could switch at 59th Street for an orange train, go to Rockefeller Center, pick up the bracelet that is being resized there that I would love to have for this trip (Nick gave it to me; he should get to see it on), and then take the V back up to the E, which is much, much shorter from there than the A is from where I was.
Still with me?
The problem was that I had plenty of time for that extra errand, and to save my life I could not figure out where it was coming from. I kept tapping my watch, and counting forward and backward. I looked like a–well, let’s just say I looked like I really belonged on the A train. I decided to go with Plan B.
The bracelet, of course, was not ready. I suspected that it would not be, since I was told the following when I dropped it off:
“It’ll be ready Thursday. Wed–Thursday. Wednesday, actually. Wednesday. You’ll come back Wednesday?”
When the girl seemed to hurt that I had not remembered that she had told me Thursday, I just slid the slip bearing the large “Wednesday!” in her handwriting back into my pocket and lugged my suitcase away with me for another round of trains.
On the flight I sat next to this five-year-old girl who was exactly like a huge puppy–floppy and squirmy and desperate for attention. She kicked me. All. Night. Long.
I did, however, get enough sleep (just) to look into Nick’s suggestion that I take the train instead of a cab (much cheaper, and much less frustrating during rush hour–and maybe even a bit faster, although reasonable people can disagree on that point).
Paris’s Métro scares me. It’s not the trains themselves–the RER express trains can be a little confusing, but mostly I caught on quickly. My problem is buying the ticket to get on in the first place.
First of all, have I mentioned that my French “r”‘s just blatantly suck? So when Nick always urges me to get un carnet–a discount pack of ten tickets–there’s part of me that always wants to tell him to go buy himself a stupid carnet, if he’s so clever. My first instincts are not always constructive.
Above and beyond that, there are all these rules for tickets: there are zones, and some won’t work for the RER, and some RER tickets don’t work for some RER destinations, and unless I just show the ticket agent my directions and throw myself on his mercy, I cannot negotiate the transaction–I have no idea which information about my trip will be relevant, and I get far too nervous to understand rapid (and usually so-so) French through a speaker that makes the agent sound as though he’s under water. Hell, I can’t do that when I’m not nervous (probably. We’ll never really know, because I always am).
When I got to Charles de Gaulle’s Métro station, though, there was a ray of hope–it was an RER-only station, and Charles de Gaulle doesn’t remotely count as “Paris” in the Métro’s system. There had to be a million people a day doing exactly what I wanted to do.
I sidled up to one of the automated machines (a sibling of the one that had actually reduced me to tears on one memorable occasion), held my breath, and…”One ticket to Paris” was an option. I hit the button, counted out my change, repeated the whole sequence because the stupid thing timed out while I was counting out my change, and was off and running.
It’s funny: in the airport proper, everyone spoke to me in English. From the moment I got to the subway platform, though, in spite of the fact that it’s still technically in the airport, and I still had all my luggage, everyone addressed me in French. I got asked for directions three times in one hour; how’s that for bizarre?
Practice it with me: “Je n’ai aucune idée; j’suis desolée.” (That’s desolé for you, gentlemen.)
I have to say, crossing the Seine right under the Eiffel Tower gave me chills. I started grinning like an idiot. I couldn’t wait to get to the apartment, take a nap in the non-bed, a shower in the absurdly hard water, and then see what’s out there for me today. Even if I get no farther than the café on the corner (it’s outdoor weather here, more or less) and some grocery shopping (I just polished off the leftover baguette; now there really is no food), it will have been a wonderful day.
And when Nick’s across-the-street neighbor came out onto his balcony just now in his underwear (as always) and carefully dropped something silver and black and roughly the size of a thermos onto the head of a passerby (that part’s new), it just felt like another kind of being home.