Feeeeeebo!

Well hello friends!
Ariel and I are in Amsterdam, she says hi.
Hi! I say. We are at a hostel that recently upgraded us to a shiny, 3 person room instead of a dingy 6 person room.
E here. You are probably thinking to yourselves, "who is the third person?" (actually, I doubt that you were until I asked the question for you, just roll with me here).
A here. Our third person is ZACK BAXTER (private eye). No really, he's just a dude from San Luis Obispo whos is such a bro-dude it ain't funny.
E: but nice. And decent, so no worries there. BUT we have a TV! Not that we've really used it. We watched a weird video of a cowboy watching mini "Indians" doing "war dances" and it was a leetl unexpected.
OH! Paris was nice, we didn't see our host F much but we saw museums and the seine and stuff. We went out with F one night and caught up with him and his friends after they had had quite a few drinks of an alcoholic nature. The girls at the table next to us went outside to smoke, leaving a bag on the banquette and 2 full beers. We speclated for a little while about them leaving the beers and whether or not they were really coming back.
Then F's friend V took the beers.
The girls came back and sicced the bartender on us until another friend of F's paid for the drinks. F and one of them talked heatedly and good-naturedly about the drinks and V's "honest mistake." We continued talking to this table of people and chatted about Paris and things to do there. It was nice. As we were leaving Ariel apologized to one of the people and the girls said dismissively
"Don't worry about it (eye roll) that was so Parisian."

A few days later F, Ariel, and I went to a free showing of Hitchcocks "Foreign Correspondent" in a park. 10 minutes into the movie it started to rain and instead of leaving everyone pulled out raincoats and huge umbrellas and stayed. We only had my small, leaky umbrella to stay under and therefore got soaked because that umbrella barely keeps one person dry-ish. Luckily, the rain ended 5 minutes before the movie did.

And then Paris ended.
Actually, only our visit in Paris ended. We reserved tickets for Amsterdam for the 6:25 am train because the jerk at the ticket office said that that was the only available train. He was a dirty rotten liar, so when we missed that train by 30 seconds (we had to get our eurail passes validated and therefore missed it even though we got to the validator-man exactly at 6:24:52 and the platform was 20 feet away) we got to take the 6:55 train to Brussels and then a domestic-y no-frills train the rest of the way. Wa-hoo.

And now, I am tired and am going to bed. Will explain Febo later.
Say goodnight Ariel!

Goodnight guys! I will try to update my blog at some point as well. When there aren't people in line behind me glaring if I use the internet for more than 5 minutes. Bums.

So...

After Paris I went home for a week and a half, to pack and to wait for Ariel to finish her stuff in Edinburgh. It was nice, and I didn't do much other than take care of Hannah and wandle around.
Theeen Ariel came and we hung out for a while. We saw "the taming of the shrew"in the park and it was nice.
Then we left for Paris, where I am now in a rediculously expensive internet cafe. We are couchsurfing and staying at this guy, F's apartment in the suburbs. It's a little hard to commute into the city to do our toursit thing, but he's really nice and fun to hang out with and it's great being able to crash at his place for free as well as having a local to talk to.
And my time's about to run out.
More later.

P. T.: The End

Yeah, so then I went back to my hostel and didn't sleep much because it was noisy and slightly too warm. The next day I read in the Tuilleries for about 2 hours and sunburned strips down my shins (my left shin is now peeling) but got a nice, biscuit-like tan on my shoulders and back because of my strapless dress. Then I went and bought an overpriced, depressing sandwich. I ate that in the (shade) Tuilleries as well. I sat on a nice bench for a few minutes before I was joined by some guy who sat at the other end. I wasn't even close to facing him so the first few times he said "bonjour" I assumed that he was talking to someone else. Then I realized that he was talking to me. I turned slightly to see a middle-aged dude whispering "bonjour" at me. I said it back, and turned so that I was facing as far away from him as I could. Unfortunately, having said bonjour I couldn't take it back and he proceeded to try and have a conversation with me, despite my unresponsive body language and one word/sentence answers. The conversation went something like:

Awkward Man: So, are you Parisian?
Our Hero: Um, no.
AM: Oh, where are you from?
OH: San Francisco.
AM: Oooooohhh, I thought that you were European. I am Egyptian.
OH: What did you say? I can't understand your French very well...
AM: repeats himself
OH: Hmm.
AM: So, you want to get a cup of coffee or a glass of wine with me?
OH: Um, No thanks. SO... I have finished my sandwich and don't really want to talk to you, so I am going to give you a tight-lipped smile and say au revoir. so, um, au revoir. Walks away.

Theeeen I went to the Musee D'orsay, I prefer the Centre Pompidou.
I ambled back to the hostel because I was going to then wander around Montmartre in the evening. I walked into my room and one of the other people staying there beamed at me and said what sounded to me like:

"We all Japanee!"

I shared my room with 3 Japanese ladies, all traveling around France by themselves. One was only staying in Paris, and she was only there for 6 days. She flew 17 hours to get there and then 17 hours back, for a week-long trip to Paris. I am still amazed. The only one who spoke any English coherently was an English teacher from Tokyo, so we didn't talk much. Sigh.
I chickened out of going to Montmartre because the neighborhood is flanked by gnarly ones and I didn't want to deal with that. So I walked down to the Seine and wandered up and down it's banks and ate an ice cream cone that tasted like it was flavored with mint tea, instead of peppermint oil, I was not amused.


Across the Seine from the Louvre.




The Seine, with the Unsatisfactory Ice Cream Cone.

Then I took out my map and a man immediately materialized out of the crowd and asked me slime-ily (and in French) if I were alone. I gave him a cold look and said no. Then I put my map back in my bag, walked 10 feet away and took it out of my bag. ANOTHER man appeared as if from nowhere and asked, in very good English, if I needed any help. I thanked him and declined his offer.
Then I decided that I was sick of being a Single Woman Traveler instead of a random tourist and took myself back to the hostel. I can assume that maybe they just wanted to help, or were innocently concerned that I would get lost or was lonely, but I can just as easily assume they were looking for a single woman tourist who was therefore vulnerable to... whatever. I hate that about traveling by myself, the feeling that isn't always there but pops up more frequently than I like that I am potentially vulnerable, or that because I have no obvious protection that I am easily taken advantage of. It drives me NUTS. Single Woman Tourist seems to be synonymous with "easy prey" in some people's minds and I therefore have to put up with more CRAP than a single man tourist.
Sigh.
The next morning I walked around Montmartre (around Sacre coeur etc.) before I had to leave to catch my bus back to London.


Me and Paris, from Sacre Coeur.


Montmartre bit.


I accidentally found the Moulin Rouge. Look! There it is. It's surprisingly small.

After stumbling upon the Moulin Rouge I caught my bus, and an annoying seatmate. Some Italian guy who talked and talked and talked and would NOT shut up, and was an idiot. It is entirely possible that he didn't understand what I said, but he usually responded appropriately, and I could understand him perfectly. He asked my advice about talking a cab from the bus station to his host family's house in Tooting, which would have been a 50 pound cab ride, and completely ignored me and pretty much told me that I was wrong. He then pulled out a tube map to show me that Victoria Station and Tooting Broadway were very close together and wouldn't listen when I told him that the tube map was in no way a representation of the geography of London (it guides you on using the tube. The lines have been straightened out so that you can read the map, not learn about London). When I told him that there was no such thing as a pass for the tube that would allow him to use it as much as he liked for a flat fee paid in the beginning, he ignored me again and implied that I was not European and therefore did not know how European metro systems worked. I was too polite to deck him and tell him that I had lived closer to London than he ever had and therefore being European did not enter into the equation, and that this was London, not Paris. I also did not point out to him that he was a moron. I am polite and kind and restrained.
Despite my chatty/idiot seatmate the bus trip was fine and they let me into the UK again (phew! they don't sometimes because they're afraid that we will try to work under the table now that we have friends and flats and connections). ALSO, instead of taking the ferry we went in the Chunnel (Channel Tunnel!). The bus drove into a train and the train bolted through the Chunnel in 35 minutes. I was amazed. The train makes sense though, if there's an accident in the Chunnel, it would be out of commission for months, and no one could be rushed to the emergency room in time.

I have now been over (in an airplane), through (in the ferry), and under the channel.

After leaving the bus, ditching Chatty Cathy, and working my way through the web that is the London underground (the line I wanted to take was down, so instead of 5 stops and no changes I had to change and go 11 stops) I had to take the train to Royston and then a bus to Cambridge because THAT line was down as well. Stupid public transportation.
All in all, though, despite the complaining it was a very nice little trip.

P. T.: Part the Second

I spent my first day in Paris bumming around. I went to the tourist office where I found out that Fridays after 6 pm people under 26 years of age are FREE. Which was exciting for 2 reasons, 1) Because I can't spend much money and 2) I hadn't been able to meet anyone at the hostel and therefore had no one to go out with on Friday night. After the tourist office, I went to the Centre Pompidou, which I LOVE, they have fantastic exhibits there, I want to go back there again and again and again. I was there for 4 hours and had to leave at the apex of my visit there because i either had to eat or pass out. On the very top floor they have an exhibit of modern art made between 1900 and 1950, which I think is my favorite time period for art. There were some great exhibits on design as well. There was a suite of rooms dedicated to Philippe Starck as well as to inflatable furniture (and designs of inflatable living quarters, there was one actually on display. It was large and squishy and a violent banana color, it kind of looked like something from Barbarella). Then I bummed around the Tuilleries and then the Louvre. They have excavated the dungeons of the old palace that used to be there, which was pretty cool.
The Louvre has some pretty spectacular collections are archaeological artifacts, not only because they are well preserved etc, but because they have been curated and are explained well. At the British Museum the little explanatory panels are useless, they only say something along the lines of "bronze headdress with lapis beads. 1500 BCE. Donated by Sir Fancy-Pants McPorkington " which I find frustrating. English people amass impressive collections of treasure/archaeological artifacts in order to die and leave them to some museum. Where the curators carefully place them in glass cases and leave us to wonder at the implications of the object (who wore it? why? what does it say about that culture?). At the Louvre, everything was carefully explained and put in the context of the culture (for example: there was a room dedicated to agriculture in Egypt because they're economic and social systems were based on agriculture. There was even some discussion of peasants and slaves. Museums in England definitely have exhibitions with Ancient Egyptian artifacts, but they're all about gold and fancy sarcophogi with fance and jewels. Luxury goods that some dude collected because he had the cash to do so and then gifted the whole damn thing to some museum.)
oof, outta steam. more later.

Paris Trip: Part I

My 6 months of work-visa were up as of Friday the 8th. I had to leave the country by that time and come back on a tourist visa (which technically isn't a visa, it's something like a "visitors pass" because USA citizens don't need to get special permission to enter the UK. I looked it up, and a fair amount of countries do need them. Mostly for people from third world countries who are seeking asylum, or want to come and work or for medical tourism. People from certain African countries need to get a TB test before they enter the UK, makes sense). SO. I had to change the stamp on my passport and to do that I needed to go through immigration and the only way to do that is to leave the country and come back again. After hemming and hawing and investigating cheap places to go and cheap ways to get there, I decided to go to Paris, even though it's Ariel and my first stop on out European Tour because I speak a little of the language and there are a bazillion things to do, also because there is a bus that goes from London to Paris. And it is pretty cheap (ryanair is really only cheap if you book far enough in advance).



So, I took an 8 hour bus ride from London to Paris. It was really nice. I had my iPod and some mystery novels and most of the bus to myself. I curled up and read trashy literature and ate prefab sandwiches and listened to my headphones.
Dover was nice, small and I got to see the famous White Cliffs of Dover. I didn't take a picture of the money shot (the picture that everyone takes of the cliffs. I figured that I would take a picture on the way back. I didn't for reasons that I will explain later).





The port itself is designed exclusively for cars. Not people AND cars, just cars. As if the people should never get out of their cars, or if they meld with the cars to become one being that happens to have a motor and wheels and no brain.
It's an enormous parking lot dotted with building and crisscrossed all over with white lines delineating lanes going this-a-way and that-a-way and marking out parking spaces in neat grids in order to organize the cars to board the ferry. It feels incredibly mechanical. Very, very, programmed. All of these precise lines of cars slowly rolling into cavernous rooms on large boats. It felt like being a part of a giant organizing and collating machine, all right angles and efficiency and obedience. A car/person brings people onto the boat, where it lets them out. Then the whole ferry (feeling like it's built of many many little cars) crosses the channel and docks. All the parts run back to their cars and putter out single file in their little lanes.
If robots ever took over the world, the world would be much like the port of dover: efficient transmission and organization of data and things. Luckily Dover's a really pretty town, and the sun was shining and the sky was blue and the water a milky green and the sea gulls were screaming so it wasn't as chilly as I am describing it and I enjoyed it.
Once we got to Calais the entire bus was pulled over and sent through customs (I assume that this is a pretty big port for drug-trafficking) and I sent my bags through an x-ray machine and said that I had nothing to declare and then everything was alright. Sorry, no pictures of Calais, it wasn't terribly pretty.
Then the buss and I rolled into Paris, where I took the metro to my hostel and slept there. Which was very uneventful.

To be continued...

Google

So. While meandering through the interwebs just now I searched "European knife laws" because I was thinking that having a little swiss army knife would be super helpful with the whole eating cheap picnic-style aspect of my upcoming European Tour. It was unhelpful-ish (except for the UK website about their laws, which is great. More on that later) because I found almost NO info about carrying knives. But, I DID end up on a white pride website. Ah, the internet. Someone on this site had posted a question about carrying knives in Europe, not because he wanted to cut open baguettes and slice cheese, but because it's illegal to carry handguns in Europe. My immediate thought was "where do you need to carry a handgun for protection in the US?" Ok, grizzlies aren't something that you want to meet unarmed (at least with bear-mace, which is a HUGE spray-bottle of mace) but people aren't really THAT crazy. An outlier is exactly that, the exception to the rule. For a million incidents, only one may need guns to keep it under control. I think that it's a little silly to always expect to be the exception. A zealouts extreme take of the Boy Scouts' maxim "always be prepared." Which means that you will always be traveling with too much baggage, both emotional (oh, the paranoia and self-doubt!) and physical (knife, handgun, compass, fish hook, water filter, spare boots, tire patch kit, magnifying glass, spare saw for cutting fire wood, 6 or 7 copies of your passport, money belt, extra travelers checks, rape whistle, pepper spray, penicillin, spare under-pants, nail clippers, sewing kit, spare gas, flare gun, book of common phrases in every single language ever [I'm talking to YOU ancient Greek, you never know when you'll fall in a wormhole and end up somewhere unexpected!]). So, I am trying to not over-plan my trip too much. Maybe I will try and under-plan it. The less crap the better.

Damn, i've rambled on forever on something not terribly interesting. Sorry. I will post later about an English person's relationship to their government, which I think is kind of interesting.