Hmm, so we've had a bit of a major change of plans. For the better or for the worse, I'm not quite sure yet, but I'm glad at least to finally be on the bike. But anyway, more about that later. Right now I want to talk about Paris.
Paris was amazing, awesome, confronting, illuminating, distracting, frustrating..I'm just throwing adjectives against a wall here really, but I can say with some surety that I enjoyed our stay there immensely and wished it could have been longer (and it actually was longer than we'd planned, but that chapter will also come later).
I'll start from the beginning. After lugging our (cardboard) bike boxes to the train station in Frankfurt, (trying all number of combinations from simply walking the re-assembled bikes and the boxes in one hand; running to a corner with the bikes, running back, grabbing the box, running back to the box (phew, that was tough); before finally settling on riding with the box tucked under our arm), we set about disassembling the bikes again (every time I do it, I fear I won't be able to put it back together again the same way), eventually getting everything into the box and onto the train with five minutes to spare (wow what a horrible running sentence).
It was a nice train trip. The sun came out for us (I even pulled out my sunglasses for a couple of minutes haha), and we got to witness some lovely French landscapes, including quite a few pastures which had been so inundated with rain that they resembled rice paddies. An instant after we left (temporally scaled to granodiorite weathering rates), we arrived at Paris, where a quick evaluation revealed that getting all our stuff onto the metro wasn't going to be a feasible option. So instead, we elected to reassemble our bikes and ride with our panniers to the youth hostel where we'd arranged to stay that night.
About a quarter of the way through the rebuilding process, this dilapidated women in her early thirties came up to us, stuck a postcard in my face, on which was written a poorly fabricated sob-story about her starving children and asked for money. When my vulnerability showed up in my feeble reply in French, she pressed closer, and in truly bad acting style, threw her hands in the air, grabbed at her scarf most wretchedly and proclaimed 'Pensez vouz a les enfants!' (or something like that). I gave her a euro in the hope that she'd bugger off, but she just moved on to badgering Luke, and I was just preparing to break out one of my 'piss off' phrases when a security guard came running towards her and shouted 'Vous!'. With a school girl like giggle, she ran away up the stairs, and our saviour proceeded to lecture us, first in french ('Vous compliquez la Situation' or something like that) and then in surprisingly impeccable english (apparently she ripped off some American guy for 700 euros and his passport – who carries that much cash anyway:S).
Well it was sure an interesting introduction to Paris. Maybe the stories were right after all and Parisians were all meaner than an IQ of 100 (oops statistics joke). I was starting to lean that way but was prepared to give the city the benefit of the doubt. By three o'clock, the bikes were up and running, but we didn't know how to get to the hostel (probably should've researched that before we left) and we didn't want to ride with the empty cardboard boxes the whole way. Waiting until another security guard's back was turned, we cunningly concealed the boxes behind a lamp post, and rolled off to see if we could find an open wireless network connection to cadge off.
Turns out we were in luck! One notch on the 'Things I like about Paris' tally is the amazing abundance of free wifi access. The whole time we were there (which wasn't very long, but still), there was only one case where we couldn't find an open network to use on my laptop. In this particular instance, we were able to use Google Maps to work out exactly how to get to 'Aloha Hostel' from Paris Est. Three hours later (on a route that was supposedly only 6km:P), and after consulting the google map gods at least another five times, we finally got there.
I wouldn't say it was a particularly nice place, or that cheap either at 21 euros ($45) a night, but it offered a bed to sleep in, and a safe place to store our bikes, so that covers off most of the important things. After moving our stuff into the room, we went off in search of the other main important thing: food.
I'm definitely going to bring out the chalkboard and add food to the list of Paris' virtues, because it is truly superb! Being a vegan, a lot of what's to offer was cut off for me, but on so many occasions, the food blew me away. Incredibly crusty baguettes eaten in an uncouth fashion, breaking off bits while walking around; superb coffee; the best corn chips I have ever tasted (seriously, wow!); lovely pasta – basically everything I ate was fantastic.
Waking up early the next morning to go for a short run, I managed to get myself a little lost as is the wont of many an unsuspecting tourist set loose in that epitome of unplanned cities. Unfortunately for me, I had the 'Back to start' function on my running watch (with GPS functionality). I say unfortunately, because although the watch did try to lead me back to the hostel, I ended up 5km away, having glanced down every ten seconds or so to make sure I was still following the large arrow on the screen, which I later realised was actually the compass arrow (doh!). I got back in the end, but ended up going quite a bit further than I'd intended!
To add to the unplanned high mileage for the day, we ended up walking around Paris for literally the whole day, leaving at 10am and returning at about 8pm. The purpose of the day had been two-fold: to locate new bike boxes and to go to a post office to send money to the 'Dachgeber' foundation (which publishes a book with the names, addresses and contact details of thousands of Germans willing to accommodate cyclists for free).
After walking to the exact spot of a bike shop with cruise missile accuracy (having uploaded the co-ordinates of the shop onto my watch), we discovered no trace of it whatsoever. I was shocked and perplexed: Google Maps had lied to me! No trace of the business could be found on the internet, so presumably, the whole venture had folded, neglecting to tell Google in the process.
That search abandoned for the time being, we found a post office, and I managed to conduct the whole process of sending money to DachGeber's rep in Germany all in French. I was very proud of myself because it turned out to be quite a complicated saga! It was very much a case of city traffic French (stop start), and the fact that the woman behind the counter managed to understand me perfectly was probably more a testament to her intellect than any competency I had, but still, I managed it, just as I managed to conduct many more simpler transactions in the few days I was there.
Being in a country where not many people speak English, and those that do, look at it as being beneath them, is a perfect environment for language learning. I was quite simply thrown in the deep end. Some would say that it is evidence of a particular kind of French nastiness, but I far prefer it to Germany where one only has to have a slightly less than perfect accent before they address you in English! And although I made many mistakes (one that sticks in my head involved us walking into a Cafe and my saying 'Nous douvrions 2 Cafes' or 'We should 2 coffees' – he understood though:P), they seemed really pleased that I was making an effort. Apart from the strange Gypsy woman at the train station, I didn't meet a single unpleasant Parisian.
We maintained our blissful stroll around the city all day, eventually finding another bike shop that was inexplicably closed (we were within the opening hours). That led us to give up, even though we probably should have pursued the search a little more aggressively given we were supposed to be taking the train to Madrid the next morning.
I guess you can imagine what happened the next day. After riding around desperately in search of a bike box, Luke nearly dying of cold in the unexpected dump of snow after a rather odd decision to leave his warm clothes and jacket at the hostel ('oh the last few days have been clear skies, it'll be fine'), getting completely lost and running out of time, we realised we weren't going to make the train. It's a good thing the decision was reached to go somewhere warm instead of dashing around in an expensive last ditch effort to make it there on time involving multiple taxi fares because upon checking the tickets, I realised that the train had actually left at 7am, not 3pm like I'd thought and from a completely different station to what I had thought (another doh!). To this day, I don't know how I came to those conclusions!
After dealing with some rather intense feelings of frustration and annoyance, we went back to Paris Est station, and after an awkward encounter with a very pretty SNCF (French rail) staffer, whose english was not much better than my french, I emerged with a new set of tickets to Madrid for the following day in my hand. Luke was still very cold, so I proposed that he stay in a cafe next to the Oberkampf metro station and keep an eye on our bikes, while I delivered the bike boxes that we had eventually managed to find back to the youth hostel.
The metro was quite fun, especially with the large cardboard boxes to take on with me. That kind of behaviour on a German inner city train would earn you some rather nasty glares, but from the Parisians I got smiles and laughs as I struggled to manhandle the boxes into a comfortable position. The journey back to the youth hostel took quite a while, but I enjoyed “people watching” and “people eevesdropping” and was quite fascinated by the concept that for one euro and sixty cents, one could remain forever in a sort of train spotters' heaven. The way back was much the same and I was feeling glad that I hadn't kept Luke waiting for too long when I emerged from the underground at Oberkampf to discover that I didn't recognise the scene at all. “Of course, the exit is at a different location to the entrance. I just need to walk in that direction and I'll find the station and the Cafe”
So I walked in that direction. Unfortunately it was dark by then (6pm – sunset at 5:30) and all the visual references I had compiled during the day became a liability not a help. All of the Cafes looked the same, and walking towards one promising looking one, I began a confused circumnavigation of the Oberkampf area that didn't end until 90 minutes later after having asked countless people 'Savez vouz ou se trouve la gare de oberkampf?' (and of course prefixing the question with the polite excuse me please kind of thing) and being told on almost every occasion 'it's straight ahead, but verry far away'. Despite being wracked by guilt, sure that Luke would be worried sick, pulling at his hair in despair, unsure if we would ever find each other again; I walked into the cafe to discover him happily reading his book, not phased at all, and not too cold anymore either. Worries resolved, everything was sorted and it was merely a case of riding home.
I didn't enjoy the ride very much, being rather famished to the point where I crashed into a garbage bin (oh how hilarious that would have been to watch from behind:P) out of an inability to concentrate. Bruised ribs and all, I managed to get back to the hostel and savaged a serving of chips from a nearby store before grumpily and still hungrily (though a tin of fruit I'd forgotten about helped with the hunger) going to bed.
This morning I was all organised – bags packed; up at 4:30 to give myself time for a run before the train left at 7 – but somehow it still all went wrong. Luke was up quite a bit later than me, and the lack of urgency we both had (we thought the station was closer than it was) meant that we once again gave ourselves less than thirty minutes to disassemble the bikes and get them onto the train. We were done with less than three minutes to go this time. It was probably the most stressful moment of my life – desperately dashing to the other end of the station with half my bags to be told that I had one minute until the train left; sprinting like it was a track race to get back to the bike; pushing it so hard and so fast that I thought the box would break before I reached the platform, leaving bike parts all over the floor. I got there – Luke still a way off – and the attendants grabbed my stuff and ran onto the train with it, showing almost as much desperation as me. I watched in slow motion as he drew closer, pushing the bike box, but as the clock ticked over to 7.15, I watched in horror as the train began to...do nothing. It wasn't until seven minutes later that we left, the announcement citing 'Personnel problems'.
The train we were on was going to Irun – a town on the Atlantic ocean, right on the French-Spanish border. From there we would take another train to Madrid and all going well, be there by 10pm that night.
It was a relatively pleasant journey until we were told by the conductor (or more rightly, by a fellow passenger who translated for us) that we would need to grab all our stuff and move it onto the first part of the train, because the second half would not be going all the way to Irun. He seemed to treat us with some disdain, which I guess was fair enough, given our sloppy entrance and the amount of room we were taking up on the train (and of course my poor french). We managed to move all of our luggage to the front of the train save our bikes, which were a little too big to push along 10 carriages of sleeping Frenchies with their legs sticking out into the aisles.
This still meant we had to do another mad dash at Bierritz. It wasn't quite so bad as the first time, but it was still quite desperation inducing to be told you have one minute to get to the other end of the (very long) train. But we managed it, and we were sitting contentedly in our carriage as we arrived at the station before Irun idly listening to the announcement that the train would be going to Irun before a glance out the window revealed the first half of the train (one carriage up from where we were) moving off into the distance.
%$%#&*!
After thinking terrible thoughts about what I'd like to do to that conductor who had ushered us onto the carriage we were on, I tried asking a few taxi drivers if they'd take us to Irun. One said he might, but at the mention of the two bikes and the appearance of another customer, he was soon off, and we were left without any option at all to get to Madrid that day. After our horrific run with trains this trip, we decided to give up on Madrid completely and just start the tour from Irun instead.
So in the carpark of the train station, we reassembled our bikes, having a good chat to a Frenchman with perfect english and a Spaniard who didn't, but who nonetheless wanted to help put the bikes together. It was beautiful riding weather – 10 degrees and quite sunny, so the disappointment and anger at plans gone wrong disappeared at about the same time as my front brake finally stopped playing up thanks to a small adjustment by Luke.
We didn't ride very far at all today (~8km), but it was indescribably liberating to finally be free of the cursed bike boxes and to not have to live under the temporal constraints of any timetable imposed by anyone besides ourselves and the sun in the sky. Tonight we're staying in a Pension in Irun, which I thought, based on descriptions given, was a sleepy little town with barely a general store to buy a stick at, but which is actually a hub of development with unbelievable numbers of shops.
Dinner tonight involved quite a bit of fruit including two oranges, which at the time I announced to be the best I had ever had (and I've eaten a lot of Oranges in my time). As well as that, I had a kiwi fruit, an apple and this delicious sweet pastry kind of thing, all of which were fantastic.
Really need to learn some Spanish! Here in Irun, I can get away with speaking a bit of French because it's so close to the border, but I doubt that'll be the case all the way along.
The (very fluid) plan is to now head towards Barcelona, moving abreast the Pyrenees and passing through San Sebastian and Pamplona. It should be great:)
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