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...