Day €1,56; or, I'm too tired to figure out the time exchange rate here.

8 (jeudi) mai 2008 – 11:00 AM (CEST)

—11 days until internet access—

Oh, man. That’s basically all I can say without using expletives (since my family is probably my primary readers) about this trip so far. I started this trip on Tuesday morning (CST time) with an almost decent flight to Philadelphia. I say almost decent because the landing felt like we were swirling down a drain. I had finished my final essay (which I think is a very insightful piece of work, if I do say so myself) for Prof. Bidima on the plane, but when I tried to turn it in at the Philedelphia airport, I could not find wireless for some reason, so I boarded the plane thinking I’d turn it in when I got here.

The plane trip was long (as expected), and it felt like my knees were giving out from being bent so long. They do take care of you on the flight as much as they can – they served us dinner and breakfast along with inordinate amounts of beverages. I had to pee a lot, which was fine because the girl sitting by me was a nice Asian chick who had just finished her MBA at Oregon State and was speaking Mandarin into a small looking mouthpiece on her headphones the whole trip. I watched Juno (which I enjoyed) and National Treasure Two. Nicholas Cage, just stop acting, okay? I think we’ve seen all one or two characters you can do. Also, if discoveries were really made that fast in the real world, I would already be a Nobel Prize winner. I tried to sleep a little, but it was very difficult because I, being my normal technologically inept self, could not figure out how to get the chair to lean back.

We landed (much better this time) at Charles de Gaulle on Wednesday at 7:55 AM (CEST). We exited and got in line for the police des frontières (border police) to present our passports and a yellow carte de débarquement (disembarkation card) given to us by the flight attendants. After waiting for about 20 minutes, I got up to the front of the line, told him good morning, and handed the officer my passport. He looked at the visa and stamped it (~15 seconds), and he didn’t look at the carte. I waited for my baggage for about 35 minutes since mine were basically the last to come out, and my duffle bag got somewhat caught in the luggage belt. This should have been a good foreshadowing point of how that duffle bag was bad news, but I was too busy thinking that being in France felt like one large comprehension test. I went through customs, which in France means walking through a hall where no one is and not having anyone look at your baggage.

I got to a pay phone and called my friend Micah who has been studying in Paris for the past semester at about 9:00 AM. I proceeded to the bureau des informations (information desk) where I asked where I could find the RER (the metro that goes between the outlying suburbs to the metro of Paris proper). I hopped on the metro that goes between terminals to get the RER station where I met up with a girl that had flown on the plane with me. She was going to Paris to be an au pair (a nanny who speaks a different language to the children) after she had quit all her classes for the semester. Being an au pair seemed to me to be a good idea if you want to just screw around Europe because the parents provide you with a place to live, food, sometimes a car, and an allowance on top of that. We figured out that we were going to nearly the same place, so we decided to travel together because France would be easier to deal with if the “stupids Américains” traveled in packs. We bought an outlandishly expensive ticket at 8,20€ ($128) after grappling with the machine for a while. I also bought a cell phone at this time for 49€ ($736), whose instructions are all in French (which isn’t too bad, but it’s not too easy). At this point, I learned two wonderful things about France. Apparently, tax is already added to the reported price, so if it says “49€”, it’s 49€. Also, the lowest amount something can be is 0,10€ ($2), so there’s no equivalent to the horrible penny of the US.

We get to the station, and we decided to take the express train – at least, that’s what we hoped. The train was postponed three times, so we decided to jump on the standard. Bad idea. We knew it was going to stop at every stop on the way into town, but at some of them, we were there for at least 5 or 10 minutes (38 minutes in US time). Right near the end of the ride, a woman claiming to be from Romania came up to me singing/begging for money. She said her child hadn’t eaten recently, but when I looked at her daughter, she was smiling and looked rather healthy. I called shenanigans on her, which promptly arrested her and took her away. I finally got to my stop (Châtelet) and got off. This is the point at which I realized that the Parisian metro system is one of the biggest jumbled messes I’ve ever seen. There were over 10 exits, so I didn’t know where to get out to meet Micah. I actually exited once, and went all the way to the surface, only to turn around again. I tried to get out again, and the machine said that my ticket was invalid, so I thought I was going to be stuck in the metro. After wandering around until about 11:00 AM, I finally ran into her and her snazzy boyish haircut. I didn’t have time to go back to her house, so we escaped through an elevator to the surface to find a coffee. If there’s anything you don’t want to be doing in Paris, it’s pulling around luggage after a transatlantic flight.

We sat for about an hour at this swanky coffee shop. I had an Orangina and she had a coffee, which was 7,50€ ($30). Sodas in France are a lot better than those in the US because they actually taste like the real food they are imitating instead of just high fructose corn syrup. People watching should be a job because Micah and I are pretty much experts. I met my second beggar there, who was rather easy to wave off. We got this old couple sitting by us to take our picture, and then we went back to the metro because she had class at 12:30 PM, and I had a train to catch. After we parted ways, I again got lost in the metro. It seems odd though, because all I had to do was take one train to Gare de l’Est, but when I got there, I could not find how to get to the train station. After asking about three people and going up and down endless staircases (for which I am now feeling the repercussions), I found the train station on the surface.

I was about an hour early, so I sat down and people watched some more and window-shopped (which reinforced my feelings on Europe being unnecessarily expensive). My train was delayed by 15 minutes, then 25 minutes, and finally 20 minutes. I got on the TGV (train de grande vitesse, or train of large fastness), which seemed like it was decorated by someone who was blind because everything was orange and purple. There were only six people in the cabin, including a very nice woman who helped me figure out where I was supposed to sit. Americans always seem to have the idea that French people hate us, but if you approach them and show an effort in speaking French, they’re more than willing to help. The ride was about two hours, and the French countryside is beautiful. There are fields and fields of pretty yellow flowers and lots of tiny French villages that look right out of the Middle Ages in architecture. I fell asleep for a while finally, and when I woke up, I had that whole “where am I?” feeling. I saw my first mountains, which made me feel really disoriented looking at the side of them.

I met up with Dr. Brenner at the train station. He’s really cool and speaks English well. Another observation of French: the second they figure out you’re American, they decide that they’ll speak only English to you. At any rate, we had a long conversation on the way to my residence hall about how he thought I was from Miami and my research interests in chemistry. He suggested that we rent a car for the weekend, but almost all cars in France are manual, and something tells me that just wouldn’t work out. We get to the residential hall, which was a little… overgrown. He checked me in, at which I found out that I wouldn’t get internet for 12 days. Ah, the wonders of bureaucratic France. I started worrying about my paper for Prof. Bidima at this point, but I decided that I shouldn’t worry and he’d understand. (The trick with deciding not to worry is to stop worrying. I apparently don’t have that part down yet.)

I entered my closet… err, room. It’s rather small, but has a huge desk and lots of shelves. The bathrooms are communal, and there is no toilet paper, so you either have to be prepared or resourceful. The showers have no heads, so it’s a very weird flow. I suppose this doesn’t bother French people, because for the two days I’ve been here, I’ve yet to see someone shower other than me. After finally dropping off all my stuff and getting over the shock of not having internet for about two weeks, we went to the lab. The dorm is a ~25 minute walk from my dorm, but they have a very nice tram and bus system. We passed by lots of European Council building like the Palais des Droits de l’Homme (Palace of the Rights of Man). There were many nice parks, too. French people driving is rather scary though, so I white-knuckled it for a while. Dr. Brenner decided to grab a drink before we went up to the lab, and I ran into Matt and Christy there, two other people who are doing this program. It was great to see them because I finally felt not alone there.

As we were going in the elevator that only goes to odd floors (as opposed to the elevator that goes to only even floors, obviously), Dr. Brenner apologized over and over about how old the building was. He obviously has not seen Stern back at Tulane. There, I met Dr. Matt as well as two other professors whose names I’ve conveniently forgotten. I also met a Ph.D. student who was from Iran, to which Dr. Matt quickly made references to us being great friends. Dr. Matt then told Dr. Brenner that we shouldn’t stay in the lab and that we should all go get a drink. We went to a small café where Dr. Matt proceeded to force me to have a beer (which tasted much better than American beers). He then showed me the wonderfully novel thing that they call “pretzels” in France, which is exactly the same as the larger soft ones you have in Auntie Anne’s at the mall. He told me that I should have this other drink that was half beer half lemonade. It was also really good. They told me that they have lunch at the “canteen” (which is the cafeteria) for 3,20€, which is a pretty good deal. They also MUST (and I mean MUST) have their coffee afterwards at the same café because it is a “French tradition” according to Dr. Brenner.

After beer time, Dr. Brenner took me to a nice Italianesque restaurant called “Villa Blanca”. It was actually rather expensive, with entrées 15€ to 25€ ($548 to a compact car). I had a faux-filet (literally, a fake filet), which was a rather large steak. I ordered the sauce champignons (mushroom sauce) and interestingly enough, spaghetti as the side. It was amazingly good. Dr. Brenner loves his frites (fries), and he mused about the fact that they’re really Belgian although Americans call them French. He paid (which was totally cool of him to do), and he drove me back to the dorm. I went to bed after an odd shower (since you have to keep pressing this button so the flow continues) with the window open. This was the earliest I’ve gone to bed in about 5-10 years (10:00 PM).

I woke up today, took a shower and decided to write this. We crossed the Seine today, but we didn’t make it to Germany because we decided that the island in the Seine that you have to cross over is really sketchy (and we were ridiculously hungry). We bought provisions at a gas station / mini grocery store. I make a turkey sandwich. It’s VE Day today (also known as Armistice Day – the day WWII was won), so most places are closed. I think I’m going to take a nap for a while since I don’t have anything else to do.

Some nap. I woke up at 11:00 PM. I had a biscuit (cookie) that I bought at the gas station. It is very sweet. There don’t seem to be any artificial ingredients in it, which is really cool. I really do think I like European food better than US food because it’s much more natural tasting. I’m going to try to fill out the internet forms and turn them in tomorrow so I don’t have to wait that long for the internet. I’m also going to go and try to find an internet café tomorrow and hopefully see the 800 year old cathedral. I’ve heard that inside it there is an astronomical clock (that is, something that shows the positions of celestial bodies) that’s really cool.