I went to Spain to meet my friend Melissa from Atlanta. We spent two days in San Sebastian. It was fun… mostly. Definitely an adventure.

I ran into Jessica (a French student, even though she has an American name) on the way to the train station. It turns out she’s the first person from Metz (the first Messin) I’ve met at Supélec. I’ll have to see if she’s going to be around for the summer because most of the French students are leaving in a week or two. In fact, I think I hear one of their farewall parties through my window…

I had a bunch of time to kill, so I wandered around Montparnasse. There was a cool looking military history museum, but I was closed. I had my first French crêpes, which were kind of interesting. I think you can get literally anything on your crêpes. The crêperie had much better Sangrias than the ones in Spain…

From Paris, I caught a TGV night train to Irun. The TGV night trains Irun, in a word, suck. The seats don’t even recline, and I’m incapable of sleeping while sitting up. Add to that the loud French people on my car, the dude with the headphones playing way too loud, and the fact that I didn’t know there’s apparently a lightswitch on each car (so I didn’t try to turn the lights off), and I probably got 3 hours of sleep all night. The train ride from Irun to San Sebastian was nice and painless, especially given that there’s some local train bahn.de hasn’t heard of that runs every 20 minutes or so.

When I got to San Sebastian, I found out Melissa had only been able to get a two person hostel room for her and her friend, so we spent two hours trekking around San Sebastian looking for a bed for me. It turns out there was some kind of convention in town, so I ended up paying 120 euros for the last bed in a pretty nice hotel. Ouch. Good thing I worked non-stop for a month before coming to France. The next night we were able to get a triple room at a pensione. If you’re ever in San Sebastián, Pensione Larrea is comfy, clean, comes with bed linens and towels, and the woman who runs it is super duper nice.

San Sebastián is seriously into tapas. Apparently in most other parts of Spain, the bars only have them during certain times of the day. In San Sebastián, they’re pretty much in the bars constantly, and they’re all pretty good. The bars all also have a local white wine called Txacoli (it’s Basque, pronounced chacoli). It’s a little bit fizzy, and it’s apparently essential that it be poured from as high as possible, because all the bartenders did that. Before I learned its name, it was easy to ask for it by just miming a pouring motion from the top of my reach.

So we ended up not doing much of anything, because the weather was pretty crappy (cold and wet) which ruled out the beach. On Saturday, after getting a bunch of tapas and some Txacoli, we hiked up a hill in the town to see and ruined castle and a giant Jesus statue. The view was pretty nice: the ocean on one side, the city nestled between lush green hills and the beach on the other side.

On Sunday, there was a fair representing all the different regions of Spain, with good and fine from each. I sampled the wine of Rioja (a region that apparently includes San Sebastián), which is some seriously good stuff: I brought a bottle back with me. I also got some wine from Extremadura that I wish I’d gotten the name of. Finally, I tried some Manzanilla, which is a kind of Sherry from Andalucia. For some reason it at first gave me the impression of being sweet, even though it was very dry. It was some pretty good stuff too.

I had serious problems with Spanish. I couldn’t stop myself from sayingOui instead of Si. Plus, every time I would search for a word in Spanish, I’d usually come up with an Italian one instead. And, I would always try to pronounce Spanish words in Italian. In spite of that, I could understand a surprising amount of spoken Spanish (like maybe 1 word in 4, but usually those were the key ones), and even more written Spanish.

Getting back to Metz today was an adventure. I needed to get to Hendaye (Hendaia to the Spanish) at 10:30 am. Unfortunately, I got the time of the train wrong (it left at 7:45, not 8:45). So, I hopped onto a train to Irun, hoping I’d figure stuff out from there (no one in the train station in San Sebastián spoke English or French, so I could only do the most simple of communication). The people in Irun did speak French, but they had heavy Spanish accents and there was a jackhammer going full-tilt in the station. So, I ended up getting help from a Brazilian migrant worker of all people, who showed me where to get the Topo, a metro that went from downtown Irun to the train station in Hendaye. Good times.

The TGV back to to Paris was cool. TGVs, in case you were wondering, are fast. It’s hard to realize because the ride is much smoother than with trains like the EuroCity. But when you see how fast you’re passing cars on the highway, it really sinks in.

Being me, I started my day by running around doing chores I should have done a week ago. One of them involved going to CVS to pick up a prescription. The lady at the counter of course butchered my name and called me “Jack-ques”. I corrected her and said “No, it’s ‘Jacques’”.

“Oh,” she replied brighly, “you shortened it!”

“No, that’s the way it’s spelled,” I said, leaving what I really thought unsaid. And then I thought, “that’s the last time I’ll have to deal with that bullshit for three months because at the very least people in France will be able to say my name.” And so, that brings me to France… almost. First, the trip.

The lady at the checkin counter in Atlanta insisted on calling Strasbourg “Strasenburger”. I have no idea why.

I talked to a retired woman in the departure lounge who was doing an “elder hostel tour” of England and France. She told me that this was her first time going to France because “The French can be so…”. She seemed at a loss for good word, so I suggested “French”. She happily agreed, so I explained to her my theory that acting less American would probably go a long way toward making the French act less French. Of course, that’s a bit harder when you don’t speak any French.

There was a moment of panic on the flight when I woke up and couldn’t find my glasses. I fumbled around trying to figure out how to turn on the light, until finally the lesbians in the row behind me took pity and showed me the button carefully hidden on the armrest. OK, it wasn’t really hidden, but I was half blind. Even with the light, I couldn’t turn them up, so I had to go to the flight attendant, who exclaimed “Ah, c’est vous qui les avez perdus!” Phew… the idea of doing a connection and then finding a train and getting to Metz without my glasses had me seriously panicking.

This trip was all about timing. I had pretty much 5 minutes to spare in my connection from Paris to Strasenburger. I arrived at the Strasbourg train station, got my pass validated, and realized the next train left for Metz in 3 minutes. I didn’t mind having to hustle because it meant not having to wait.

The train ride was pretty boring. Guess I didn’t miss much by only taking one train ride in the first 22 years of my life. The iPod was the smartest purchase I made for this trip (well, second behind the Eurail pass, but that was a no-brainer). What with the music and the noise-cancelling headphones, those train rides go by twice as fast.

So I’ve met three people in my residence so far, and none of them is really from France. One of them’s from Austria. He speaks fluent German, French and English and is working on picking up some kind of Chinese. My suitemate is really French I guess (his parents were native-born, but his grandparents were from India). I have a feeling that having non-native-born grandparents still makes you somewhat of a foreigner here. The last one is my “mairenne”. I think she said she’s from Morocco. Or maybe she just has a Moroccan name and is from France.

One of the French guys was amazed that you would have to pay fees to go to a public university. Ahh, the French and their socialist ways.