Christmas Hijinks v. 3

The next few days, after arriving back from Edinburgh, were nice and relaxed.  Hung out with Nick a couple of times, went to see “Love Actually” (so much eye candy!) with Sarah, lounged about munching on Christmas leftovers, etc.  I went to a New Year’s Eve party with Nick and a bunch of his friends in Nottingham, since Sarah had all her friends in Newport and her parents had a few friends coming over.  I had a lot of fun, although I did end up feeling slightly – okay, very – homesick around midnight.  It was just so different than any other New Year’s Eve celebration I’ve experienced.  Instead of a quiet evening with my family and maybe some friends like the Elickers, I was surrounded by lots of people with increasingly-incoherent, strangely-accented voices, loud music, long-term couples… So I ended up missing my normal way of things, but since I will probably be back to the normal way next year, it was a good thing to experience something different this year.  The first and second days of the new year passed much the same as had the last few days of the previous year – quiet, spent hanging out with friends, eating good food, and maybe doing a spot of packing.  I just can’t believe that I didn’t notice the absence while I was packing…

Saturday morning (the 3rd) Sarah and I woke up at 4:30 a.m. so that we could be out of the house by 5 a.m. in order to be in Liverpool in time to catch the plane back to Paris at 7:30 a.m.  (Sarah chose the flights, not me!) At 4:45 a.m. I realized that I hadn’t seen my passport since Boxing Day.  Enter half an hour of hysterical turning-the-room-inside-out, helped by Trevor and Sarah.  At 5:15, not having found my passport, Sarah and Trevor had to leave so that Sarah, at least, wouldn’t miss her flight.  I continued searching, close to hyperventilation, until about 5:30, at which point Cathy told me, with the sense that comes with motherhood, it seems, that I had already missed the flight and could search more later.  In the meantime, I should try to sleep.  I agreed, and tried to sleep, but my brain was still whirring.  So I called Paul – thankfully, as I had wagered, he was still up.  We didn’t talk for a long time, since once I had calmed down some I was dead tired.  But still, the call had the effect I knew it would; Paul helped me to calm down and comforted me.  (Thank you so much, lad.) I would have called Mom too, but at that point I still harbored some hope that the passport would show up, and I didn’t want to have Mom panic until absolutely necessary. 

When I woke up at around noon, I spent a horrible few hours turning the rest of the house – and the garbage can – upside down.  No luck.  I think that I must have accidentally thrown the passport (and the large, red plastic folder that it was in?) out with the trash when I came back from Edinburgh on Monday and cleaned my room of the Christmas mess that I’d left it in.  I still don’t know why or how I could have done that – that folder was not inconspicuous (which is why I’d put my passport in it), and I wouldn’t have thrown it out if I had seen it.  ::sigh::  But that must have been what happened. 

So I then bit the bullet and called Mom.  She took it surprisingly well, all things considered, and when I called her back later on, after having searched for a few more hours, she had even come up with help for my solution.  I had already decided that I would have to head into London, to the American Embassy, on Monday and get a temporary passport.  I was supposed to be back teaching in France on Tuesday, but that wasn’t going to happen.  Mom, during the few extra hours that I had searched, had posted a note to her online friends, telling them of my plight, and her wonderful friend Liza, who lives just outside of London, leapt to my aid.  It turned out that she was actually going to be in Nottingham on Sunday (the next day), and so if I could get to Nottingham, I could drive back to London with her and not have to pay train fare, And then I could stay with her, and she would guide me into London and help me at the embassy.  I thanked the Pococks for everything (for the hundredth time – not nearly enough!), enlisted Nick’s aid (he drove me back to Nottingham – déja vu!) and there met Liza and her daughter Del.  Liza was dropping Del off for another semester of grad school in Nottingham, and she drove with me back to London that evening.

The next day, we caught an early train into London, went to the American Embassy, successfully applied for, waited for and received an emergency passport (oh, they were NOT happy with me), and then wandered around for a few hours before heading back to Liza’s.  By this point, I was feeling pretty rotten – the flu had really set in the night before, and I was queasy, weak and very, very tired.  I slept and lounged around for the rest of the day and for most of Tuesday – Liza convinced me that I should stay where she could take care of me until I was feeling better.  (She is so sweet!) On Tuesday, Liza, her American friend who is staying with her for several months whose name I keep forgetting and I went for a leisurely five-mile walk.  Although I couldn’t breathe, the lack of oxygen was made up for by the beautiful views and Liza and her friend’s charming tendency to see the world in LOTR terms.  Quickbeam made an appearance on our walk, as did the little hollow under the tree where the hobbits hide from the first Black Rider.  It was wonderful.  :-)

I had intended to go back to France on Wednesday, but all the trains into and out of the London Waterloo station (including the Chunnel train) were delayed or cancelled through Thursday, due to some sort of engineering problem.  So I resigned myself (darn!) to staying another day (it was actually really good – I still wasn’t feeling very well on Wednesday), and booked a flight from London Standsted to Reims for Thursday.  The ticket cost only £7 - plus £13 airport taxes, etc.  Still, it was much cheaper than the cheapest Eurostar fare, which can be as low as £40 if you’re lucky.  So Wednesday afternoon the three of us took a walk down into the main part of the little town in which Liza lives, fed the swans/ducks/geese/coots/seagulls that live on the river there.  It’s actually a lesser-known section of the Thames, before it flows into London proper.  We also saw the beautiful little church where Liza and her husband, Tim, were married.  When we got back in the late afternoon, I made cornbread for Liza, who loves the stuff; I had to call Mom first and have her read me the recipe off the back of the Clabber Girl baking powder canister.  :-) In the evening, we watched “Pirates of the Caribbean.” Yay Johnny Depp!

On Thursday, Liza drove me to the airport, I flew back to France and, thanks to a combination of slow customs processing for the 50 passengers that were in the one-room airport in Reims and a bus driver who decided that he didn’t want to drive to the train station until 15 minutes after the last person had boarded the bus, arrived 5 minutes after the last train that day for Laon had left.  After having a little bout of tired temper tantrum (I think I was justified at this point – I had been trying to get back to Laon more or less constantly for 6 days, and my flu had gotten worse again), I called a few people I knew, and one marvelous English teacher, Lilian, who has been so sweet to all us English assistants in Laon for the past few months, said that her husband could come and pick me up.  She would have come, but she was to have an inspector in her class the next day and needed to prepare.

So, I made it back to Laon at about 8:30 p.m. on Thursday night.  From Thursday night until Saturday day – about 48 hours – I slept for 24 hours.  I have never slept that much.  I didn’t do much of anything all weekend.  Mostly I just concentrated on convincing my body that this thing sticking off the front of my face is in fact made for breathing through.  On Monday (which I have as days off regularly), I went to the American Embassy in Paris and applied for my full-validity passport, which should be here this coming Monday (the 19th), and on Tuesday I went to the prefecture in Laon after my classes, applied for my replacement carte de sejour, was told that I could have it as soon as I had my new passport in which to stick it, and that I only need to have a carte de sejour, not a visa as well, in order to travel into and out of France freely.

::whew::  I am looking forward to a few weeks of calm, quiet and boredom.  I’ve had enough excitement for one month!  :-)

P.S.  Christmas thank-you notes will be a little belated this year.  I’m only just now getting around to writing them.  Sorry!  Can I use “international incident” as an excuse?