France, Day 1

So basically all I had to accomplish in the entire day yesterday was getting myself from Dublin at 7:30 AM to Andrei's house in the south of France by 7:30 PM. As you can imagine, this was fraught with disaster.

The first goal was to get to the train station in Paris in time to catch a 1:16 PM train with Josh and Carolin. Since my flight from Dublin was supposed to arrive at 9:45 AM, this did not seem particularly challenging. I was very worried about making my connection in Dublin, but it turns out the thing I should have actually been worried about is whether the air traffic controllers in Paris would strike. Because they did! That meant only one plane could land at a time or something, so our flight was delayed for like 2 hours.

That's okay, I thought. If I can get through customs quickly (I did) and get my bag with no issues (I did) I can leave the airport by 12:15ish (I could have), and surely I have at least a fighting chance of getting to the train station in 45 minutes.

But I didn't count on all the signs being in French!

So I had to spend 10 minutes running around the airport like a crazy person looking for signs to a word or picture that might mean subway (didn't find any. maybe because I don't know any French.), and then I asked the information guy how I should go to the train station. It turned out there was a bus straight there. Yay!

But the bus didn't actually go straight there. First it had to stop at every other section of the airport. So I missed the train. I think I even missed the next train. And I saw no sign of Josh or Carolin in the part of the train station I thought I was supposed to meet them (although this was probably my fault because once again all the signs were in French).

After looking for them for a while, I decided to hang out at the station for 2 hours and then catch the next train to Avignon alone and then...walk around? I didn't really figure out that part of the plan because I really had to pee.

Unlike in other train stations I have peed in, peeing in the train station in Paris is not free. It costs 50 cents! In American money, that's like, close to a dollar! And yet, the rest of the train station doesn't smell like urine. It's incredible.

I, for one, decided to get my money's worth! So I spent about 15 minutes in the bathroom changing my clothes and freshening up and reorganizing my bag and hiding my passport and brushing my teeth and rehiding my passport and then some people started knocking on my door and yelling at me in French so I decided it was time to leave.

I didn't find Josh and Carolin in the bathroom but I did find them in a whole other wing of the train station I didn't find the first time. Yay! And the strike (which affected trains as well as planes) meant that we could use the tickets we had bought for the 1:16 train for a later train. Yay again!

The train ride did not really involve disaster. Although we couldn't all sit together. But that was okay because I used the opportunity to take a nap.

Then we arrived in Avignon and tried to rent a car. In the time it took us to rent a car (approximately 45 minutes) the weather changed from bright, sunny, and warm to dark, stormy, and cold. I was kind of okay with this in theory because I was really grungy from spending a night on a plane and I wasn't going to have time to take a shower before dinner at this point, so I was excited to get caught in a torrential downpour. I don't think anyone else was.

We decided to sprint to the car. In the time it took us to sprint from the car rental building to the car, we forgot which car was ours! So we sprinted from car to car until we found the one that opened. Then we couldn't figure out how to unlock it. At this point it actually started hailing. There are two key differences between hail and rain:

1. Hail hurts
2. Hail does not improve your scent

Getting caught in a storm no longer seemed like a good idea.

Once we got into the car, it became evident that someone had overstated his ability to drive a stick shift. I'm not going to point any fingers because I can't drive stick shift at all. But I will say the ride from the parking spot to the gate was longer and bumpier than usual.

The gate... didn't work. At first we thought it was because the card we needed to insert to lift it had gotten too wet. Carolin volunteered to brave the rainstorm again and go get another one (since driving there would have taken about 10 minutes). That didn't do the trick, so we tried to lift the gate ourselves. That also didn't work, so we smashed through it!

Just kidding. We had to wait for someone from the rental car agency to let us out. By this point it was already almost 7:30.

Luckily, we made it to Andrei's place without further disaster. Or after 150 disasters, depending on whether you count every time the car stalled as a disaster. And our reward was an incredible dinner at a tiny restaurant that included a dish that basically changed my entire perspective on pork (although, to be fair, most of my previous exposure to pork involved Shake n Bake). I think one day in the south of France may have cured me of my Bay Area food snobbery. Hooray for that.