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.  :-)