The European Excursion: Landfall

The first three paragraphs here come from my original post of this name, back when I thought I might type fast enough to give detailed information basically as it happened. However, to keep this up while in Europe would have been a waste of time and resources, I feel. This is the story of my first couple days in Europe.

I write from Paris this morning, looking at the keyboard almost constantly as the French keyboard is quite different from its English counterpart. (For example, the A and Q are switched, and I have to use shift to type a period, which is one space off from what I'm accustomed to.) I can already feel the carpal tunnel setting in.

I flew out of Salt Lake shortly after noon on Monday (July 26). The flight to my connection in Chicago was uneventful, though I was very happy to see a brachiosaurus replica skeleton set up in O'Hare. On my way to London, I sat next to a friendly British fellow named Alan, who gave me some advice for my travels in the UK. I arrived at the airport around 7am local time, which was roughly the time I would normally being going to sleep. Thus, I can't say much about the bus trip to Reading. I got breakfast with Pavio and he showed me around town a bit, but I was so jet-lagged that I was perfectly happy to lie down on a bed to take a nap before seeing more and then finalizing our plans for France.

We took trains to Dover Wednesday morning. I think I spent about a hundred dollars on travel that day alone. I can't be sure if it was really cheaper than the train under the Channel, but I'm glad we took the ferry from Dover to France. It was a spectacular view. Dover Castle was the first real castle I've seen in person. We were somewhat lost in Calais. The French are not particularly accommodating to tourists, it seems, for there were very few signs giving us directions (and hardly anything in English, though that was but a minor inconvenience).

Lousy French keyboqrd:

(France was the only country to truly diverge from the standard keyboard. All countries, I believe, have variations, but the French went out of their way just to be different. Again, though, on with the story.)

We got to Calais, in northern France. If you have the chance, I must recommend taking the ferry. I think I would prefer it going to England, rather than from, simply so I could watch the white cliffs of Dover rise out of the sea. Pavio decided not to show his passport as he got off the ferry, and the French surrendered to him and let him walk on through. We eventually found our way to the train station, thanks to the phrase book Pavio bought on the ferry (which, after I successfully obtained directions on my first try, earned me the dubious honor of designated French speaker for our trip). There we decided to head to Paris instead of our original destination for the day, because there wasn't that enough time left in the day to see all we wanted in Normandy. While waiting for the train, we ended up talking to a couple of American ladies named Lisa and Pam, who were traveling with their daughters. They were also on their way to Paris. As the time of our departure grew near, we were finally able to find out which landing our train was going to leave from. (For some reason, none of the attendants knew when we bought the tickets a couple hours beforehand.) Unfortunately, the attendant told us wrong; and I promise it wasn't our lack of French-speaking skills, because Lisa spoke French. In fact, that's one thing that saved us when we realized that the train we saw across the way was ours. She and Pavio went to speak with the ticket seller, and had it not been for Lisa, we would have been forced to buy new tickets for the next train to Paris.

And so we waited a couple more hours at the station in Calais. We did get to talk about the gospel a bit with them, which was cool, and they gave us some good advice for traveling in Europe (some of which will be interspersed among these posts). This train was going to take longer to get to Paris because it had more stops, and would arrive far later. The French countryside is gorgeous—acres and acres of open green farmland—little of which you can see from the train. The view is almost entirely obscured by trees and hedges, affording the rider with brief snippets of the passing world, but never enough to get a decent picture.

We got into Paris around 10:30 that night. First impression: what a dump. Walking out of the train station we found dark and filthy streets. Granted, it was night, so dark is to be expected, but I expected Paris to be better lit than I found it. We tried asking a cabbie for directions, but I made the mistakes of (1) talking to an actual Frenchman, and (2) using English and then my poor French. I don't think the language order truly mattered. He curtly dismissed us with directions which were obviously false, as they contradicted what seemed like reliable ones from a guy in the station. Keeping an eye on our backs, we made our way through the city streets and metro system. We did run into a friendly Frenchman outside a bar when we stopped again to ask for directions. At last we found the squalid hotel we had decided upon based on its price on hostelbooker.com. (Note: The site is not all that great from our experience, and often has inaccurate price data.) By this point, we just wanted to get to bed, hopefully somewhere safe in a city that probably would not care if we died. Hurray for Paris.