Somehow my watch was fifteen minutes behind the train station clock this morning. I sauntered casually up to the line for tickets, saw the clock, did a triple take, and launched into a frantic scramble. I still missed the train.
But then I calmed down, got a ticket for a train an hour later, and now I am here in the oasis of Bertille’s parents’ house. A package arrived this morning from her brother, who is cycling across most of Eurasia with a Russian companion on what is nominally a UNESCO / Red Cross / international ambassador mission, but which is also a great excuse to spend two years on a bike, criss-cross two countries, and get funded to do it. In any case, it looks like the coolest experience ever. Sifting through the package was fun, too – we pored over every item, trying to figure out what it was for, what it said, where it was from. Somehow this box made it from India to the de Crevoisier doorstep in less than a week! That’s some real efficiency, especially considering how complicated it was to prepare the package. Apparently he had to go to the post office, show someone everything he was planning to send, box it, take it to someone else to have it hand-sewn inside a cloth sack, and finally brought it back to the post office to be sent.
As we were sitting down to dinner, two of Bertille’s neighbors, one of them (a) drunk, started fighting. We sat there and listened to the whole thing – drunken curses, sick sounds of them hitting each other, invitations to come back for more tomorrow morning, a girlfriend begging them to stop – really, the whole thing. My first impulse when I realize that something like that is happening is to call the cops, but Bertille’s family didn’t think it necessary, partly because the village’s only cop is on vacation, and the nearest police station is fifteen minutes away. Still, I felt like we should have called someone. My studies in cultural comparison tell me that my reaction is typical of Americans, and theirs is typical of French people : Americans bring in third parties, but the French don’t like to tell on people. Maybe that’s why we have the show Cops, and they don’t.
I most often get the impulse to write on this page when my life is shaken up. It’s when I’m bubbling with wonderful things. I am noticing more, thinking more. NOW IS ONE OF THOSE TIMES!
My trip from Philadelphia to Toulouse went really well. It didn’t feel interminable or lonely or harrowing, even when I spent an hour waiting in the chilly wind for a bus from Heathrow to Gatwick. Actually, the voyage abounded with highlights. There were lots of babies for me to make googly faces and waggle my fingers at, I eavesdropped on conversations between people in all sorts of languages and accents, I spent my last dollars on a Harry Potter book (GREAT reading for traveling), and a nice European boy gave me a phone card which will come in handy for keeping me in touch with Stew until he makes his own little eastward journey.
Laura scooped me up at the Toulouse airport. I enjoyed the mixture of familiarity and strangeness that I felt on the drive into town – I had expected my return to feel majestic or something, but the normalcy of being back was kind of a letdown. I was probably too tired to feel anything special, anyway. My suitcases clunked into the living room of the apartment, I practiced locking and unlocking my door, and that was it! Me voici réinstallée.
Yesterday, my first full day here, was very eventful. In the morning I had no hot water, shampoo or hair dryer, so my attempt to clean and style my hair resulted in a pretty cool (read: uncool) comb-over cum fluffy duck tail. I cheerily, unwittingly blew some fuses and destroyed multiple American electrical devices by plugging them in (although disappointing on the whole, the surge of energy they consumed before dying was pretty thrilling). I took out a chunk of euros and spent the first of them on a pain au chocolat. I waited obediently in a really long line to get a new transport card. I had two random encounters with acquaintances, Mitsou (to whom I spoke) and Elie (to whom I did not speak). I walked around, musing over what has changed and what hasn’t (Le Coup de Torchon disappeared, new metro stations appeared). THEN, the cherry on top was an excellent evening of café-hopping with with Flo and Xav.
Long, self-absorbed story, short : Tout va très bien.