Thanksgiving revelries, episode 1
And we’re back, sports fans! Or, at least, I’m back, returned from my trip to the wilds of eastern France. I had a wonderful weekend with Aunt Suse and her friend Jill, and am not looking forward to returning to the humdrum life of an English assistant. Oh well – only 19 more days until Christmas break and England!Aunt Suse and Jill met me in Reims early Wednesday afternoon. We took a brief tour of the cathedral, then went and had lunch at a brasserie that had been recommended to me. As we entered, the waiter asked us if we were there for lunch – I said yes. He then handed us three menus full of extremely expensive, large dishes. We looked at each other – this wasn’t what we were in the mood for. We started to slink out, but the waiter caught us. I explained our situation, and he said, “Oh, do you just want sandwiches?” We did, so we ended up having ham and cheese sandwiches – with butter. Blech. Oh well – when in Rome…
After lunch, we headed back to Laon, and after checking into the hotel, I left them to take a nap for a couple of hours. In the evening, they came over to my place for the 25-second tour (and to give me lots of DVDs and other marvelous goodies!) and to meet the other English assistants. We then went to a crêperie that Hannah and Lauren had been to and highly recommended. The restaurant was small and trés mignon (very cute), and their menu was prodigious. One and a half to two pages were devoted to each of the specialties that they serve – salads, galettes, and desserts. Aunt Suse and Jill had galettes, which are basically crêpes made with whole wheat flour, and I had a salad and a delicious dessert crêpe. The evening was made even more interesting by a very flirtatious waiter! He kept smiling at me and winked at me six or seven times.
Not really my type, but still, it was fun to feel attractive. On the way home, we stopped in for a glass of wine (or, in my case, a hot chocolate) at a bar supervised by an adorable old dog of the poodle variety. She was sitting at the table nearest the door, watching everyone who came in, and she allowed herself to be patted for brief periods of time before returning to her watch.
Thursday was a bit hectic, at least in terms of organization. I had the morning off from school, so the three of us met at my favorite patisserie, chose a few pastries, then walked up towards the cathedral. Aunt Suse and Jill wanted some coffee, so we smuggled our pastries into a café directly across from the cathedral, ordered our drinks and a couple of slices of quiche, and interspersed our consumption of the quiches with bites of the pastries, snuck when the proprietess’ back was turned. After stopping by the train station so that I could buy my youth discount card (50% off – whoopee!), they dropped me off at my school. Shortly thereafter, my afternoon schedule changed, and I had already told Aunt Suse and Jill when to pick me up. I knew that they were intending to go to the market that happens on Thursday mornings, which is about a fifteen-minute walk from my school. I made it to the market in about seven minutes, and found Aunt Suse and Jill. I gasped out the change of plans, and then walked around the market with them for a while.
Aunt Suse nearly got herself a houseboy. One of the vendors had some nice wool jackets that both Jill and Aunt Suse took a fancy to, and during the course of some good-natured haggling (with me as translator – cool!), the guy said that Aunt Suse should take him back to America with her. He then proceeded to tell her all the reasons why – he would cook, clean, do the laundry, be her chauffeur, take her dog for a walk… She was tempted, I could tell, but to the poor man’s dismay she decided to take only the sweater. As a last attempt, he pointed out how dashing his dreadlocks were!
Aunt Suse remained resolute.
Thursday evening we headed towards Strasbourg, intending to stay in Metz that night. More on wonderful Metz tomorrow…
Thanksgiving revelries, episode 1
{summary} {body} {extended}Happy Thanksgiving!
Hello everyone -
I hope that everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving today, surrounded by friends and loved ones, and so full of good eatings that you can hardly move from the table to the sofa.
My wonderful aunt and mother conspired to bring me a little bit of Thanksgiving here in France. Mom made some dressing/stuffing for me (dry, just the way I like it) and put in a packet of gravy mix. Aunt Suse made me four wonderful pecan pie-lets, following the family recipe. Then, somehow, Aunt Suse managed to smuggle these things over in her luggage - I don’t know how she did so, but I’m so glad that she did! I just returned from a quick lunch eaten in the cantine here at school, but for those fifteen minutes I wasn’t in France - I could see myself back in the US, surrounded (as I wished for you above) by those I love. It has made me very happy, as does having at least one family member here with me during the holidays. Thank you so much, Mom, and thank you, Aunt Suse, and thank you, all my friends and family. You are all in my thoughts today, and I look forward to giving each of you a hug when I get home.
much love to all,
Julia
This past and coming weekend
I spent the weekend in Beauvais with two assistant friends from the UK, Sarah and Lauren. I had known that Sarah was in Beauvais, but I hadn’t realized that Lauren was there. Sarah is the girl with whom I’m going to spend Christmas break – she lives about an hour south of Liverpool, just near Wales. Lauren is from Scotland, near Edinburgh, and we’ve made plans for Sarah and I to go visit her while we are in England!
Getting to Beauvais turned out to be much more of a challenge than I had expected or paid for. I went to the train station on Friday around five and bought my ticket to Beauvais (via Paris-Nord) without much difficulty. I boarded the train and confidently started the ride to Paris.
Between Laon and Paris lies a little town named Crepy-en-Valois. Its station was surreal at night, something out of an apocalyptic-future movie like “Bladerunner.” We pulled into the station between rows of aged, battered aluminum-boxes-on-wheels, the interior of each lit in that sickly yellow color peculiar to trains of that age. Their cars were empty, save for a few holding listless passengers who seemed trapped or oppressed by the light, slumped (either sitting or standing) motionless and dejected on their likewise-motionless transport. On the platforms in between the trains, little covered shelters hunkered. Each was large enough for only three or four people, and each was similarly empty but brightly-lit, this time with an acrid fluorescent light that clashed nauseatingly with that on the other trains. Finally, after several minute in which no one that I saw moved, disembarked or embarked, my train shuddered out of the station, passing the crowning details: now and again, out of the darkness between the shelters, clocks emerged. Their faces are numberless and purple-black, with the strict pattern of minutes and quarter-hours marked off by harsh dashes of phosphorescent green paint and traversed by thin sticks in a lighter shade of the same glow-in-the-dark green.
The difficulty of the trip was Paris. Every train going into and out of the station was hugely delayed. There were hundreds of people literally waiting for a sign – the enormous departures sign that dominates the main waiting area in the Gare du Nord. I went up to the first floor balcony and watched the people below while waiting for my train’s platform to be put on the sign, and I was reminded of those videos that you see in health class of blood flowing inside out bodies. I don’t know about other people, but when I first think of blood vessels, I think cartoonishly, with the walls of the blood vessels drawn very strongly and the vessels being easily delineated from the surrounding flesh. That’s why it is so surprising to me to see the videos – how do they make them? – of what it actually looks like inside there. Things are much more organic, for lack of a better word. Rather than rigidly defined pathways of movement, there is a mass of semi-fixed cells, threaded through here and there by thin flow lines. It was the same with the people standing below me: the fleshy mass, fixated on the departures sign and only occasionally mobile, and the various pathways threading through, ranging from the largest and most stable artery, running along the edge of the main waiting area between the masses and the entrance to each of the platforms, to the small, transient streams that are momentarily defined by the movements of one or two people towards the snack stand or the restrooms and then disappear. In place of the organs we have the exits and ticket lines, to which most of the movement is directed.
I waited for an hour in the station before being given two false notifications on the departures board, under whose direction I rushed here and there and attempted to be taken to Beauvais. Finally I boarded the train that the gods of SNCF had decided would be my chariot, chose a seat on a non-smoking car and settled down to wait… for an hour. Two hours after my train was originally supposed to leave we hurrumphed out of the Gare du Nord, and an hour and a bit later I was greeted at the Beauvais station by my two slightly-tipsy friends, who had passed the waiting time in the pub across from the station. ::smile::
The weekend was lovely. We didn’t do much of anything, but we had so much fun doing it that I decided to stay an extra day and only got back yesterday (I went with the intention of returning on Sunday). Beauvais is a nice city; quite a bit larger than Laon, and possessing of a fine, exceptionally tall Gothic cathedral. I found it unusual to look at a Gothic church and get a tall impression rather than a wide impression. The inside was quite beautiful, although it was obvious that it had sustained quite a bit of damage during the wars. There is a lavish astrological clock that one can pay money to hear chime, but I found the medieval clock just next to it more interesting and beautiful. The medieval clock is undergoing repairs, both to its works and to it face, I think, but you could see the face, which had a series of paintings on it and a moondial.
I probably will not be able to update this weblog nor check my email until next Monday or Tuesday, as my wonderful aunt arrives tomorrow for a long weekend of fun in Alsace! We are going to visit Strasbourg, a city right on the German border about which I have heard much good. I will have another long update sometime next week, but in the meantime have a wonderful Thanksgiving! Think of me while you are lying in your post-dinner comas: would that I could be there to join you. :-)
Not much to say, but maybe after the weekend…
I’m going to Beauvais this weekend to visit another friend. She too is an English assistant, and she’s the one with whom I’m going to spend Christmas. It should be fun.
Then, next Wednesday, Aunt Suse arrives! Yay! I’m really looking forward to her visit. We’re planning to go to Strasbourg for the weekend, since neither of us have been. It will also be wonderful to be able to speak English without…having…to…slow…myself…down. And to show off how much my French has improved. ::grin::
The weekend
I just passed a very enjoyable weekend with some friends in Chateau-Thierry, a little town near Paris. We didn’t do much, but just getting to be around them and talk with them was very nice. They are also language assistants in the same département that I am in – we met at the training sessions in Amiens in September. Two – Jana and Joanna – are German language assistants, while the third – Adam – is an English assistant.
What was most remarkable to me is the diversity that these friends represent. For example, last night we sat down to dinner with one of the professors who lives in the same hall as them at the school (they have a similar arrangement to the one that I have here). The professor is French, Jana is German, Adam is Northern Irish and Joanna is Bulgarian. It was incredible to me to realize that I was sitting at a table where no one is from the same background, and yet we all got along fine, conversing alternately in French and English and all able to contribute to the conversation and enjoy one another’s company. I know that it sounds clichéd, but it is sad to me that we all could get along so well and yet there are so many people in the word who cannot. I know that the five of us there in Chateau-Thierry all share similar backgrounds, at least in terms of religion (which seems to be the cause of much of the world’s arguments), but at the same time we are all so different. I can know, intellectually, the problems of growing up in a country cut by civil disagreements, as one finds in Northern Ireland, but I can’t really understand it, since I haven’t lived it. The others can speak of the greed and arrogance of America, as well as its melting-pot mentality, but they can’t really know all the nuances that make American life what it is. And so on.
I don’t know that I really had a point with all of that, other than that it is wonderful for me to be able to call such a diverse group of people my friends. We’ve made plans to visit each other, not just while we are here in France, but once we’ve all returned to our home countries. This is what I was hoping for out of my year in France – the chance to meet people from other countries and to explore our differences, but also to realize our similarities.
I have been homesick since I arrived here, and I am still homesick. I have never experienced such a degree of homesickness and alienation before, so it was easy for me to sink into a mire of self-pity, which fed the homesickness, since I tended to think, “if only I were home, everything would be better.” My stubbornness also had a say – I have set myself to do this, and no matter how unhappy I may have felt, I knew that I would be mad at myself later if I were to give up. I’ve never been one for giving up. And the stubbornness actually increased my unhappiness, since I felt trapped and was mad at myself for having chosen so poorly and stupidly, as it seemed. Why decide to leave everything comfortable and comforting for seven months?
Then, in the middle of last week, I forcibly realized that my homesickness and depression are to a large extent determined by the amount that I dwell on them. If I choose to revel in my self-pity, then of course it’s going to flourish, as will the things that it nourishes, like my homesickness. On the other hand, if I choose to remember that I chose to be here for the exact reasons that I have been unhappy – the challenge and the difficulty and the language barrier – then I can remember the joy of the challenge and the rewards possible. So I did.
I have resolved that I will do something unusual – probably travel – every weekend for as long as my funds hold out. Even if it’s something as simple as traveling to a town only 5 euros away by train for a day each weekend, it will still give me something to look forward to through the more prosaic weekdays. And I will try to discover enjoyment in my teaching. I have never wanted to be a teacher, and I didn’t apply for this job for the teaching experience. But neither should I regard the teaching as a chore to be slogged through each week. That isn’t fair to the people with whom I work; nor is it fair to the students, for whom I am the excitement, the novelty.
In short, I have decided to stop dwelling on the things that have been getting me down – the language, in particular, as well as the loneliness. I have to put effort into friendships and even just socialization, not just sort-of expect that it will fall into my lap. Additionally, my French improves when I don’t obsess about it. I will make mistakes – there is no doubt about that. But one of the first things that my friends in Chateau-Thierry said to me was that my French has greatly improved; this is one of those things that it’s extremely difficult to gauge for yourself, since you are constantly around your own mistakes and stumblings. I need to trust myself – trust that I am intelligent enough to improve even when I can’t necessarily observe myself doing so.
Yet more photos
Me in the Plaza de Oriente in Madrid.
A fantastic griffin in front of the Palacio de Velasquez in the Retiro (Madrid).
How Laon has looked for the last two days. It has cleared up today, but I have to admit that I actually liked the fog - it made everything seem magical, like an elf was going to step out of the mist between the trees and say hello.
Mademoiselle Defarge
***Spoiler warning***: for those of you who haven’t read “A Tale of Two Cities,” read no further in this entry. In fact, turn off your internet access right now and go read the book. It is fantastic. I read it in 10th grade, and I couldn’t put it down, and I cried at the end. It was only the second book I had ever cried at – the first was “Cyrano de Bergerac.”
How could the authorities in “A Tale of Two Cities” not realize that Madame Defarge’s knitting was coded messages?!?! I have been knitting my fingers off for the past four days (hence the title of this entry), and I honestly can’t believe that the authorities just didn’t immediately take her in for questioning. I mean, take a look at this:
k3, k1, *p1, k9, p1, k1, k3, k1,*p1,k1, p7, k1, p1, k1, k3, k1, *p1, k1, p1, k5, (p1, k1), k3…
Now tell me, don’t you want to reach immediately for your book of ciphers upon reading that? I certainly would have at first. Now, however, my brain takes those arcane combinations of letters and numbers and translates them into detailed motions in my hands and fingers. Amazing. And yet, I still can’t turn French words and phrases into anything other than gobbledygook…
The return of the entry
Since Paul so graciously helped me to figure out how to rewrite my CD-RW, here, without further ado, is the entry I wrote on the 12th (I haven’t changed any of the time references):
I’ve had a number of interesting-to-ponder questions come to my mind in the last few days. A couple of them are too ponderous for me to feel comfortable to put on this weblog, especially since I really don’t know what I think of them myself. However, I will offer you these two on a somewhat lighter note:
- when talking with one of the other English assistants while I was feeling down a few days ago, she told me, as if to cheer me up, “Well, just think about it this way – it can’t get any worse than this.” I told her that that didn’t cheer me at all, quite the opposite, and I prefer to think of it in this way: “it could be much worse.” (…I started to write an explanation of why that is cheering to me, but then I realized that would somewhat negate the point of asking this question, so I’ll leave it be.) So, here’s the first question: which way do you prefer to cheer yourself, given these two choices?
- I got to see my favorite episode of the fantastic TV show “Stargate: SG-1” last night. Those of you who know me and who know the show, you get one guess as to which episode this is. Taken your guess? That’s right – the episode where everyone gets caught in a time loop and repeats the same day hundreds of times, with only Til’k (spelling?) and O’Neill able to remember the previous go-rounds. While laughing at what the pair decides to do when they realize that they can basically do whatever they want without fear of any consequences (since the slate will be wiped clean at the end of the day), it occurred to me to wonder what I, or other people, actually would do if given that option. The cynical part of me immediately said, “for an answer, look to the looting that occurs after a natural disaster or during a riot.” But that doesn’t seem to me to be a complete answer – it’s not something that I would choose to do were I given the option, certainly. So, for the question: what could you do if you knew that there would be no consequences to your actions?
I know that neither of these questions is exactly novel, but they have been on my mind and I thought that I’d share them. For some crazy reason, some people out there (you, gentle readers) have decided that it’s interesting to see what’s going on about me and inside my head, so I will not fail them. ::smile::
On a different note, I saw a gentleman walking down the street the other day whose facial hair combined color and placement to an amusing end. The gentleman had hair running along the jaw line, close-trimmed, and a little tributary of hair running from below the middle of his bottom lip to join with the hair on his jawbone. This isn’t that unusual of a shape, but the fact that the hair along the jawline was white and the little bit of hair on the chin was black, combined with a strong jaw to begin with, created an oddly pugnacious look. Since white naturally tends to stand out and dark tends to create the look of a hollow (thanks for the instruction in stage makeup, Stephie – it’s come in handy!), it looked as if he perpetually had his lower jaw stuck out in an overgrown “I don’t wanna” pout. As I said, unusual on a man who looked to be near 50.
Grr, argh.
Well, there was going to be a lovely, long entry here - I typed it up last night on my computer. However, When I tried to write it to the CD-RW that I bought and used for the first time for my last entry, even though the computer recognized it as a CD-RW, it wouldn’t let me alter it in any way. So there’s no long entry. Just this. Sorry!
A few more photos
Another interior shot of the Reims cathedral
In the Maison des Arts et Loisirs in Laon, shortly before the Berlioz concert I attended.
A neat fire escape in Laon. Most fire escapes look like this one, in fact, but this was the first that I had seen.
Glass pens in the window of one of the libraries (book stores) here in Laon.
On an altar in the Cimitiere St. Just.
The kitten that I saved. This was during the weekend that I kept her illicitly in the school (I’m not allowed pets); she now has a safe, warm home. ::happy sigh of relief::
Travels, tap dances and dreams of teenagerhood
Sorry that I didn’t write on Saturday - I decided at the last minute to go to Reims with Hannah, Lauren and Andrea (the new English assistant from Slovakia). We passed a very nice, if rather cold and blustery, day there, trying to shop for Christmas presents but also finding it hard not to get things for ourselves. I did relatively well - I found one Christmas present and spent only 3 euros on myself (not counting the 2 euros spent on pastries…).
I spent most of the day yesterday at the house of one of the English teachers at my school, Emmanuelle. She and her husband, Luc, invited me over for lunch, which on Sundays in France translates into an hours-long, multi-course meal. The day was incredibly relaxing and enjoyable. We ate lunch, during which I discovered that I really like mustard a la ancienne, which is uncreamed mustard - it’s grainy and delicious. Her adorable 2-year-old son provided running commentary and criticism on every subject from the food to my large shoes.
He was so cute! And so well-behaved - I honestly couldn’t believe that he was in his “terrible twos.” After lunch, Luc took their little gas molecule outside to bounce around in a less-confined space, and we joined them a bit later. Then E, L and I played a little football (translation: soccer) and took a walk over to a match that was taking place in their village’s soccer field. Florent buzzed alongside us on his little tricycle, and showed much greater respect for the roadway than the grownups. He insisted on riding on the grassy shoulder of the road rather than in the road itself, since he said that he didn’t want to be run over.
That rather journalistic description doesn’t supply the amazing contentment of the day. It is a very blustery autumn - in fact, the most autumny autumn that I have ever experienced, all changing colors and sudden showers and mistral-like winds - and I’ve discovered that autumn is a marvelous season. Passing the day in a little French village with an unpronounceable name, having a long, languid lunch and talking in a mixture of French and English, being around the obvious love in this young family, watching Luc rake yellow leaves from the ground around their dormant garden, walking through a drizzle to watch the local soccer team duke it out with another team on a field with old Frenchmen in caps leaning on the wooden railings… I felt welcomed and comfortable. It was wonderful. ::contented sigh::
Changing moods entirely: yesterday evening I wanted to watch “The Rock,” which was showing on TV. Unfortunately, the station that it was on is one that I couldn’t get very well at all - static-y and in black-and-white. That was fixable - all I had to do was program my TV to look for that particular station on channel 10 rather than on channel 1. Unfortunately, the decade-old remote control for my TV hadn’t had its batteries replaced since it left the factory, and I didn’t have any AAA batteries. I borrowed some from Hannah, then proceeded to spend half of the movie trying to figure out which of the hundreds of combinations of buttons-whose-markings-had-been-rubbed-off-by-a-decade-of-use told the TV what it needed to do. In the end, it turned out to be something like this: press the yellow button four times, press the “up” volume button, press the yellow button several more times, press the “up” volume button again and again, waiting in between each press for about ten seconds while the TV searches for a signal in that band range, then press the sticky blue button, then do a little tap dance for the gods of the television, then press the grey button - or maybe the orange one - and so on. Apparently my dancing was acceptable and I got to watch the last hour or so of the movie. I missed the awesome chase sequence through the streets of San Francisco, but I *did* get to see the great shot at the end with the MIGs breaking formation in the sky above a flare-holding Nicholas Cage. Also got to see many close-ups of Ed Harris’ eyes, which was *so* difficult, let me tell you.
After the movie, I briefly amused myself by seeing how many cuss words my French-English dictionary lists. I started this search in the spirit of scientific inquiry, of course. There was one word that kept being repeated in the movie for which I don’t have the exact translation. (I’ve also heard it used extensively by the teenaged gamers who use the computers in the internet “cafe” where I sometimes check my email.) Unfortunately, my best guess as to its spelling didn’t show up in my dictionary, but that led me to see how many other words I could find. This led to the distressing discovery that I can only think of four words to even try to look up! (They were all in there.) I mean, don’t you find it a bit odd that a 22-year-old can only think of four really offensive words? I feel like I should petition to spend a day back in high school, just to brush up on my vocabulary. Either that, or I should invest in the book that I’ve frequently seen - “Shakespearean Insults for Fun and Profit,” or something like that. Might be more satisfying in the long run. I mean, why call someone something banal and everyday when you could call them a “hackneyed, short-staffed cur?”
Dum dee dum…
I don’t have much time to write anything right now - have to go teach the English Club for the 8th graders in just minute - but I’m probably going to go to an internet cafe tomorrow, since otherwise I won’t be able to use the internet until Wednesday. Tuesday of next week is Armistice Day, so everything will be shut, including the school and the internet cafe.
Neat (well, I think it’s neat) thing - I went to have my mandatory “you’re a foreigner who wants to live in France so we must make sure that you are up to our standards” medical exam yesterday morning. That wasn’t the cool part - the cool part was that I had to have an x-ray taken, and they let me keep the “printout” - you know, the black transparent plastic sheet that they hold up to the light and look at appraisingly. So now I have a full-sized x-ray of my torso - lungs, heart, rib cage, that sort of thing. I’m thinking about having it framed. :-)
Have to run! I’ll try to write more tomorrow.
A few photos
My room.
View from my room.
The outside of the high school in which I live.
A gargoyle on the cathedral in Laon.
The cathedral during the festival Les Ecrits Lumières. Cool, huh?
Reflections in one of the many windows in Laon’s Cimitiere St. Just.
A fantastic picture that I took inside the cathedral in Reims. Should be on a postcard!
Morton, my stalwart traveling companion, enjoying the flight from America to France.
Now that I know that I can write CDs on my laptop and use them to transfer things to the computers at school that have internet access, you can expect to see many more photos. I just need to go buy a CD-RW. :-) Woo hoo!
Trip to Madrid, in brief (sorta)
What a nice week I’ve had! Madrid is a wonderful, beautiful city, and Toledo is charming as well. I arrived early Tuesday morning, after a long, restless night on the train. I enjoyed the novelty of riding on a sleeper train, and my trip back to France on Saturday night went more smoothly - I didn’t wake up quite as much - but I think that I much prefer riding on trains while upright. As strange as this may sound, it’s the motion that is the most distracting for me; the rocking side-to-side motion that is so soothing to me when I’m sitting up on a train is changed into a difficult head-to-feet rocking when lying down. At least, it was on these two trains, simply because of the way that they were laid out - perhaps there are other sleeper trains that are arranged so that the beds run parallel with the forward motion of the train, not perpendicular to it.
The biggest adjustment that I had to make was that of timing. Spain simply runs about two hours later than anywhere else I’ve lived. Shops don’t open until 10(ish - everything is Spain seems to run on the “ish” schedule), lunch is from 2-4 p.m., the “afternoon” doesn’t begin until after 4 p.m., and people regularly meet at 10 p.m. for after-dinner (or with-dinner) coffee with their friends. I went to a club on Halloween night, or rather, All Saints’ Day morning, and didn’t leave for the club until 2 a.m. I got back to my room at 5 a.m., and as I walked out of the club and past the entrance to a few other clubs, there were still people waiting in line to *enter*!
I passed my days mostly in doing lots of nothing in particular. I did visit the Prado on Wednesday morning, and was fairly impressed. I must admit that I still prefer the Louvre, but that has a great deal to do with my personal taste in art. I tend to prefer Italian or English painters, and am not really that fond of either Goya or “El Greco,” two painters of which Spain is justifiably proud; hence, the Prado, with its emphasis on Spanish painters, didn’t hold as much for me as it might have. And I must say, Goya’s Pinturas Negras are highly disturbing. Why anyone would have wanted to paint those things on the walls of his house, where he would have to look at them every day, is beyond me.
The Retiro (in full, the Parque del Buen Retiro) is huge and lovely and I could easily have spent longer than the three or so hours in total that I spent there. It has all the things I’ve come to expect of a good European park - one or two monuments, a slew of sculptures and fountains, one or more ponds, amiable-looking old people sitting on the parks soaking up the sun, a few homeless people sleeping amid their rags and rubble under a tree, children trying to hug pigeons that are distinctly infant-phobic… I went to the Retiro on Wednesday and saw the Crystal Palace and the big-multiply-columned-monument-thingy, and returned on Saturday simply to sit and enjoy the glorious autumn weather before returning to the rain and freezing temperatures of France.
Olga and I went to Toledo on Friday on a rather last minute decision. It was raining, windy and very cold when we first arrived, and we were not looking forward to a day spent in that weather. Fortunately, the rain cleared up and although it remained very blustery, it warmed up enough so that it was downright enjoyable. The old town of Toledo is exactly as an old European town should be, with the added exoticism of the slightly Arabic stylings of most of the buildings. The interior of the cathedral was incredible - lavish in ways that I had never seen before. In one place, a fresco stretched from eye level into a window-carrel fifty feet above our heads and incorporated statues into its stories. The main altar made me stop and stare, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why it was so much more impressive to me than all the other altars in the place. Then I realized that the bricks that surrounded the altar and its paintings were whiter than the greyish ones that composed the rest of the cathedral, and that the grout in between the bricks had been painted gold!
Toledo also boasts beautiful decorative tiles. Okay, that’s true of the whole of Spain, but I was particularly taken with the tiles in Toledo and, even though I knew that they were probably tourist rip-offs, I couldn’t help but buy a couple of pieces.
The food in Spain is wonderful (unless you are a vegetarian, in which case Spain and its museo(s) de jamon are hellish) - hearty, extremely flavorful, and fairly inexpensive. That’s what made the restaurant that Olga and I went to in Toledo doubly disappointing. We were running out of time before our train, and between our slim purses and dietary restrictions, had to pass up seemingly every restaurant. We finally found one called “Los Arcos” which met our needs, but it was… underwhelming. I think the most apt comparison would be to a Denny’s or Jim’s or some other diner like that in the U.S. The food tasted like it was out of a can, at least in the case of my first course of spaghetti, the bread was basically the equivalent of Saltines - no, of generic salted crackers, I like Saltines - and the choices for dessert were either a slice of melon or an apple (which was mushy). I had never been to a restaurant in Spain that didn’t at least offer flan or something like that - even the weird vegetarian/vegan restaurant I went to gave me vegan flan for dessert! Bottom line: if you are ever in Toledo, don’t bother with the restaurant “Los Arcos” - you are much better off going elsewhere.
Miscellanea (is that a word?):
-I love Spanish chocolate caliente (or simply chocolate). It’s not really meant to be drunk straight - you are supposed to dip churros, a sort of chewy fried dough, into it, since it’s that thick - but since I don’t like churros (and I *did* try them), I just sipped it with a spoon, like soup. Mmmmm…. ::blissful smile:: Additionally, the pastry called neopolitana crema is amazingly good as well.
-Spanish men are just as forward as they are reputed to be. I hadn’t been in town but five minutes, while Olga and I were riding the Metro into town, me weighted down with all my stuff, when a fifty-ish-year-old man in the train going the opposite direction (we were at a stop) made a “kissy face” at me. And the men make the most amazing range of sounds for “approval,” everything from the standard wolf whistle to barking or grunting to assorted words.
-There is a Julia travel company - I saw one of its buses around Madrid.
My enjoyment of Spain was more tempered than I think it would have been had I traveled straight from America to Spain and were headed straight back. I’m discovering that I’m something of a homebody. I like traveling very much, but in small doses - a few weeks at a time. And Spain also had the misfortune to make me feel like a stranger again. This is normal for travel, especially in countries where you don’t speak the language, I know. What I mean is that I was just finally starting to get settled down in France, feel like I might actually be carving a little niche for myself, and then I (voluntarily) disoriented myself again. On Saturday evening I was really surprised to find out just how happy I was to be back amongst people speaking French again (on the train) - I thought, “ah, *my* language.”
To sum up, I liked Madrid and Toledo very much - indeed, there isn’t anything I can think of that I *disliked* about Madrid. I intend to visit them again, and more of Spain - I would like to see Seville, which I have heard much about from Stephanie, who lived there for a while. I probably won’t get back to Spain during this sojourn in Europe, since there’s a whole lot more out there to see, but sometime in this lifetime…
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