Jacques Fortier

The return to France wasn’t bad, with a few exceptions. I took the Eurostar (Italian high speed train) from Rome to Milan. While the other Italian trains are pretty sucky, the Eurostars are nice. A lot nicer than the TGV, but then the supplement is 12 euros instead of 3. While I was waiting for the train to leave, a guy came up to me and asked if this was second class. I said yes, then asked if he had a reservation (reservations are always required on high-speed trains, while on most trains your ticket kets you just get on any train you want). He said no, so I tried to explain that he needed one because it was a Eurostar. He started saying no that couldn’t be right, at which point I reached the end of my Italian. So the other people tried to explain it to him too, but he still wouldn’t believe them. They managed to convince him to go talk to the conductor (the train had left at this point), so thanks to us he avoided a big fine, but he was still pissed off he had to pay the supplement (a whopping 13.50 euros), and he never thanked us for saving him the fine. Jerk.

Anyway, I got into Milan, and promptly got crapped on by a pigeon, for the fourth time. The pigeons definitely saved the best for last. I was walking along, when I all of a sudden felt something wet hit my hair. I thought "Goddam, that’d better be water," then stuck my hand into my hair. "Fucking shit," I mumbled, followed by "Literally!" I went to find something to wipe it off, but for some reason when there’s pigeon shit in your hair and you suddenly feel it start to ooze onto your forehead and towards your eyes, it suddenly becomes very hard to remember the Italian word for napkin. So, I ended up just saying "Scusi!!" at a sandwich stand and pointing at my head like an idiot until the woman got a horried look on her face, shoved some napkins at me, and pointed me to the bathroom. I swear, the next time I come to Europe, I’ll be buying some arsenic and mixing it with some pigeon feed.

My train was 45 minutes late leaving Milan, and I had a 30 minute connection to make once it got to Karslruhe. Fortunately, the Germans made up a bunch of time once they took it over, because I ran out of credit on my cell-phone while trying to call Dan to figure out what I was going to have to do to make to Metz before noon if I missed my connection (I needed to get there before noon to take my suitcase back from the office in my dorm).

I made it Metz early Friday morning, got my suitcase, rented a room for a night, and promptly passed out (I think I had slept two hours the night before). I ended up just hanging out, catching up on the news, and writing in my travelogue all day because my feet were incredibly sore and I really didn’t feel like going anywhere else.

On Saturday, I headed to Strasbourg, and basically did more of the same. Everyone had been telling me to read The Da Vinci code, and since I didn’t have anything better to do, I went to the bookstore to buy it. I couldn’t find it except in large-print, so I ended up buying Angels and Demons, the book that came before it. I also got myself my last cheap trappist beer (some Chimay blue… quality stuff). The book turned out to be incredibly good. It had a good plot, and it was really cool because it was set mostly in Rome, so I had just been to a whole bunch of the places it described a few days earlier.

And now here I am, in the Paris airport, waiting for my flight to Atlanta. The airport actually has little desks with power outlets, so people with laptops can use them before getting on their flight without draining their batteries. I thought I was going to have to find an outlet somewhere and sit on the ground, and here I am with a desk and padded stool. Anyway, that’s pretty much everything. I have to go back and fill a bunch of holes in my travelogue, some of which I’ll do now and some of which I’ll probably do back in Atlanta. After I’ve let thing percolate in my head a bit, maybe there’ll even be some deep thoughts that no one cares about except for me.