So… today was one of those journeys that needs to be documented. Even Jess says so, because texting, and trains.
I woke up this morning to the first truly bad weather I had seen in Paris. It was pouring down rain, which was beautiful to watch on the canal while I ate breakfast, but horrible to walk through to get to the metro. I was soaked from the knee down by the time I got to the station, because as most of you probably know, umbrellas can only do so much. At least there’s no air conditioning on the metro though, so it was nice and toasty and warm.
I made sure to get to the train station early to activate my Eurail pass. This was technically my first day traveling with it, and you just have to check in at a ticket counter so they can validate it and things. The line to the ticket counter took about thirty times as long as the actual validation process. Go figure. I had been to French train offices before though, so at least I knew what to expect. And then came the waiting for the train, which thankfully didn’t take long.
The harder part than waiting, however, was deciphering my ticket. Train travel is so common in Europe that it’s not really necessary to cover the platforms with staff members to ask. Everyone just knows what they’re doing. And I mean… I thought I knew what I was doing, but there were more numbers than I expected there to be, because for some reason TGV numbers coaches by ranges rather than letters or digits even though those ranges have no correlation to the seats found inside. I could figure that much out with my limited French though, and did eventually find a seat that looked like mine. I figured if it was the wrong one the conductor would tell me when he came around to check tickets, so I might as well assume it was the right seat until then. And it was. Just on the wrong train.
Now, before you think I’m a complete idiot, I was at the right platform. They post departures on big screens and then when the train arrives they tell you which platform it’s at and you go and get on and it’s all very organized and easy to follow. What I hadn’t been told, or at least hadn’t heard in all the French, was that that there were two trains connected to each other going to Montpellier, there the train I was on was going to detach while the train I was supposed to be on kept going to Perpignan. You would think they would used different numbers on the coaches to make that clear. Excuse me, different ranges. But no.
At least I my conductor theory worked. He took one look at my ticket, glanced up, and asked rather doubtfully, “Parlez vous Francais?” When I said no, he proceeded in slightly broken English to tell me I was on the wrong train. Which train did I need? The first one. Of course, I didn’t know there were two yet, so I had no idea what that meant. I was quite confident of my platform navigating abilities, and I’d been on the train a full ten minutes early. I couldn’t have missed it. I had heard about separating cars though, so I asked if he meant there was a train up front I needed to move to.
“No. No. Transfer. Montpellier.”
From which I concluded maybe my platform navigation wasn’t so good after all. Or there had been a second train. At any rate, I knew I needed to get off at Montpellier, so I did. Only for the sign to tell me the train to Perpignan was leaving from the same platform I was already on. In three minutes. At this point, I would just like to say thank goodness for Brits.
It seems that a group of four or five British travelers were having the same problem I was, and one of them had managed to find someone who spoke enough English to explain. Had just found them I might add. With that three minute leeway that had already become two. And now they were sprinting down the platform towards the front of the train. So I followed, and quickly found the display on the side of the train reading Perpignan, and not Montpellier. Well, they piled into the space between the cars and I piled in after them and it seems there were already two French people in there and then the doors to the coach opened and another one came out and I don’t know if you realize how small that space is but the answer is very. And now there were nine people squeezed into it, most of them with very large luggage.
And then the train started to move.
Well, this drew shouts of outrage from the Frenchman who had just emerged from the coach. I gathered a few moments later that he was meant to get off at Montpellier and had just been too slow. As for the Brits, they had far too much luggage to even begin maneuvering with that many people in the area, and they were all between me and my correct coach, and there wasn’t any luggage space left on that deck, so I eventually I gave up and decided I was just going to move up the stairs (which were right behind me) until everyone got their stuff sorted out.
The upper deck seemed pretty empty. Lots of luggage space, where I left my bag, and even a few empty seats in the coach. A glance downstairs told me they weren’t much closer to figuring things out, so I decided to take one of the seats. This was my first encounter with The Italian.
I didn’t know it at the time. All I knew was that there was a man in a very designer looking blazer wearing large reflective sunglasses with his hand/arm/thing in a sling. But the two seats across the table from him looked open, so I decided to try to take one. He immediately gave me this funny look and said something indecipherable that started withe “pardon,” and ended in something more difficult.
I assumed from the context that the seat was taken, mumbled something that I hope sounded like an apology, and embarrassedly hurried out of the coach determined to sit in the seat I’d actually reserved. The Brits had started to figure themselves out by then. One of them was transferring bags up the stairs to the emptier space, so I stood out of the way and waited for them to be done. The conductor came by and checked my ticket somewhere in there, so at least I was on the right train, but the seat… well, I would see later.
Once the downstairs space between the trains was more or less cleared with the exception of the man who has missed his stop, I thought it was safe to retrieve my bag and head back down, except what I had assumed was merely not enough space for the Brits’ giant suitcases was actually not enough space for my much more reasonably sized backpack either. So I put it back upstairs again and attempted to find my seat. A seat, it turns out, that was occupied by a toddler. A toddler accompanied by her parents and infant sister in the three other seats around the table.
Again with the language barrier I stopped, scrunched up my brow to display confusion, and pointed at the seat. They all gave me blank stairs. At which point the lady across the aisle from them tapped me on the shoulder and pointed at the empty seat next to her, which was definitely not my seat, but I was not about to complain. Far be it from me to split up a family when I wasn’t even being asked to sacrifice my space by a window.
So I settled in for more quiet viewing of the French country side, finishing up my book on the Career Foreign Service in between until we finally made it to Perpignan, a French border town where I was meant to transfer to my train for Barcelona.
Now, it was nearly a two hour layover, and there weren’t any lockers for me to check my bag and go exploring, and it was still raining, so I bought some tabouli from a nearby supermarket for dinner and settled in to wait. Wait and watch, I suppose, because you see some of the most interesting people at train stations.
The first was a man asking for money so he could buy a ticket. I don’t know if he actually planned to buy a ticket, but I pretended not to understand his Spanish or his French and went back to my reading. The second was the Italian man, who first wandered over to harass a pigeon that was scavenging behind my bench with rapid cooing and loud hand gestures. As the pigeon rounded the bench, he followed it and struck up a conversation when he saw me watching. I explained I don’t speak French and he switched to the limited English he seemed to know; which, when he found out I was from Texas mostly consisted of Bush, petrol, chapeau, and a very confused face as he pretend to ride a horse while trying to remember the word cowboy. He was funny, but a little creepy, and didn’t seem too offended when I went back to my reading.
Then there was the the group of college aged boys traveling together whose origins I couldn’t pinpoint for the life of me. From across the platform I had them pegged as American based on body language and style choices, but when they ended up in line behind me to board the train they were definitely speaking not English. It sounded vaguely like Dutch, but it was hard to pinpoint as they were only using it in between cringe worthy examples of their dreadful Spanish, consisting primarily of “gracia” and “un cerevaza por favor.” [sic] My final judgement is German, but eh, what does it really matter.
The final character I didn’t happen across until I actually boarded the train. She was sitting in my seat, in fact. I know because it was the window and I had gotten super excited about the window because do you know what’s between Perpignan and Barcelona? Lots of pretty things, that’s what.
When I arrived, however, she wasn’t just in my seat. In fact, she was more or less splayed across both seats, shoes off, feet hanging into the aisle with her hand in a bag of crisps like she was on the couch at home. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of that, it was just a bit of a surprise after the rigid structure of Britain and France. And she moved graciously when I showed up, but into my seat by the window, not hers. Moved, I say, and then started to laugh.
It caught me off guard the first time, until I realized she had her headphones in. But then it happened again, and again. It was rather disconcerting to be honest, and not a little annoying, especially considering it was fairly loud while the rest of the train was near silent. That was around the time I realized her headphones were connected to the console between our seats, tapped into the in flight movie. It must have been a funny one, but she was the only one watching it.
I momentarily entertained the idea of getting out my headphones and attempting to join in, language barriers be damned, but even from my not window seat I was having a hard time getting over the beauty. Though I had a rather obstructed view, the sunlit landscape of the Pyrenees mountains was breathtaking. Oh Catalonia… is it really fair for anywhere to be this gorgeous?
Eventually I gave up trying to follow the rules and just moved to an empty window seat. It was one of those half windows where the wall starts, but it was still lovely. I was distracted enough that it was only after I sat down that a brief exclamation of surprise drew my attention to The Italian who was conveniently enough seated across the aisle. He didn’t say anything, probably because I was clearly preoccupied with pressing my nose to the window like a five year old, and when he started adjusting his sling with much groaning and fanfare, I was careful not to look lest I get drawn into incredibly uncomfortable conversation again.
The train did arrive eventually though. I was so excited to be in Spain I almost forgot that I’d planned to stop by the ticket counter to make sure to book a few trips only reservable from Spain. It was a nice test of Spanish I hadn’t used in ages, though compared to France everyone was far more patient and kind. (Note: The French weren’t unfriendly, but as per the stereotype they weren’t about to go out of their way.) When I couldn’t find the appropriate line, the security guard I’d asked even walked me over to the ticket kiosk and got me a number himself. 764.
They were serving 688.
I considered leaving, but it’s summer in Spain and it wasn’t like the sun was going down anytime soon. Besides, I was going to have to do it sometime and then was as good a time as any. So I went to the restroom, taking long enough for them to make it up to 703, and then settled in to wait. A little more than an hour later my number was finally called, by an elderly gentleman at window number 16.
As has become my custom as of late, I greeted him and kindly asked, in Spanish, if he spoke English. “No,” was his confused reply, “but you speak Spanish,” said with a smile and a gesture as if to point out I had addressed him in Spanish after all. And thus began the game of broken languages and charades in which I tried to communicate that I wanted to reserve a bunch of random tickets and he kept telling me it was too late, which I knew wasn’t true.
I’m still not sure where we got turned around. He would ask where I was going, I would tell him, he would ask when, I would tell him, he would tell me it was too late, and I would get confused because the people in France had offered to book the same ticket for me earlier that same day - an offer I refused because I thought it would be easier to book them all at once. I should point out they were Spanish trains too, so if anyone should have access it was this guy.
Anyway, he kept asking the same questions, and I kept giving the same answers and pointing to the paper where I’d written all the information down so things like this wouldn’t happen. This went on for maybe five minutes before I pulled out the tickets I had booked in France, several for dates sooner than the ones I was trying to get from him, and showed him that it was, indeed, somewhere in the realm of possibility.
At which point he went, “Oh! Where are you going?”
And this time when I told him he actually booked me a ticket. Perhaps it is just leftover anxiety from Egypt that makes me suspect he might have been trying to get out of work. It didn’t help though that at five to eight, five minutes before the office was due to close and with only one of the something like eight tickets I wanted booked, he tried to tell me he had to shut his window. I had enough Spanish to refuse to accept that, and he continued until I had the five I need to complete my journeys in Spain. Then I gave up, because really?
Anyway, you would think such an entrance might have hurt my opinion of Spain, but it hasn’t. I haven’t seen much more than the train station and the metro, but there’s a sort of energy in the air that’s just… pleasant. And the weather is spectacular. I’m going to have to buy myself a skirt tomorrow it’s so lovely and warm. Oo, or maybe a sundress. I do love a good sundress.
Speaking of the metro though, can I just boast for a minute that I made it all the way to my hostel this evening without so much as consulting a map? I mean, I looked at it beforehand of course, but I feel like I have a reached a whole new level in cartographic navigation. It’s a very nice hostel, one from the same chain I was staying in in Paris because they gave me a discount, but I think I mentioned before that it’s not the best place for meeting people. Lots of kids here to drink and party, a couple large school tours, very few of the types of travelers I like to meet. Alas, I’m sure I’ll find some eventually. And if all else fails, there’s always the next hostel.
Until then I can’t wait to explore Barcelona. Now if only I could convince my body to get some much needed sleep!
P.S. Just thought it worth mentioning, apparently I may not be getting any passport stamps this trip. Silly EU and their relaxed intra-union border policies. Looks like the stamps I have will just have to stay in there lonely.
I woke up this morning to the first truly bad weather I had seen in Paris. It was pouring down rain, which was beautiful to watch on the canal while I ate breakfast, but horrible to walk through to get to the metro. I was soaked from the knee down by the time I got to the station, because as most of you probably know, umbrellas can only do so much. At least there’s no air conditioning on the metro though, so it was nice and toasty and warm.
I made sure to get to the train station early to activate my Eurail pass. This was technically my first day traveling with it, and you just have to check in at a ticket counter so they can validate it and things. The line to the ticket counter took about thirty times as long as the actual validation process. Go figure. I had been to French train offices before though, so at least I knew what to expect. And then came the waiting for the train, which thankfully didn’t take long.
The harder part than waiting, however, was deciphering my ticket. Train travel is so common in Europe that it’s not really necessary to cover the platforms with staff members to ask. Everyone just knows what they’re doing. And I mean… I thought I knew what I was doing, but there were more numbers than I expected there to be, because for some reason TGV numbers coaches by ranges rather than letters or digits even though those ranges have no correlation to the seats found inside. I could figure that much out with my limited French though, and did eventually find a seat that looked like mine. I figured if it was the wrong one the conductor would tell me when he came around to check tickets, so I might as well assume it was the right seat until then. And it was. Just on the wrong train.
Now, before you think I’m a complete idiot, I was at the right platform. They post departures on big screens and then when the train arrives they tell you which platform it’s at and you go and get on and it’s all very organized and easy to follow. What I hadn’t been told, or at least hadn’t heard in all the French, was that that there were two trains connected to each other going to Montpellier, there the train I was on was going to detach while the train I was supposed to be on kept going to Perpignan. You would think they would used different numbers on the coaches to make that clear. Excuse me, different ranges. But no.
At least I my conductor theory worked. He took one look at my ticket, glanced up, and asked rather doubtfully, “Parlez vous Francais?” When I said no, he proceeded in slightly broken English to tell me I was on the wrong train. Which train did I need? The first one. Of course, I didn’t know there were two yet, so I had no idea what that meant. I was quite confident of my platform navigating abilities, and I’d been on the train a full ten minutes early. I couldn’t have missed it. I had heard about separating cars though, so I asked if he meant there was a train up front I needed to move to.
“No. No. Transfer. Montpellier.”
From which I concluded maybe my platform navigation wasn’t so good after all. Or there had been a second train. At any rate, I knew I needed to get off at Montpellier, so I did. Only for the sign to tell me the train to Perpignan was leaving from the same platform I was already on. In three minutes. At this point, I would just like to say thank goodness for Brits.
It seems that a group of four or five British travelers were having the same problem I was, and one of them had managed to find someone who spoke enough English to explain. Had just found them I might add. With that three minute leeway that had already become two. And now they were sprinting down the platform towards the front of the train. So I followed, and quickly found the display on the side of the train reading Perpignan, and not Montpellier. Well, they piled into the space between the cars and I piled in after them and it seems there were already two French people in there and then the doors to the coach opened and another one came out and I don’t know if you realize how small that space is but the answer is very. And now there were nine people squeezed into it, most of them with very large luggage.
And then the train started to move.
Well, this drew shouts of outrage from the Frenchman who had just emerged from the coach. I gathered a few moments later that he was meant to get off at Montpellier and had just been too slow. As for the Brits, they had far too much luggage to even begin maneuvering with that many people in the area, and they were all between me and my correct coach, and there wasn’t any luggage space left on that deck, so I eventually I gave up and decided I was just going to move up the stairs (which were right behind me) until everyone got their stuff sorted out.
The upper deck seemed pretty empty. Lots of luggage space, where I left my bag, and even a few empty seats in the coach. A glance downstairs told me they weren’t much closer to figuring things out, so I decided to take one of the seats. This was my first encounter with The Italian.
I didn’t know it at the time. All I knew was that there was a man in a very designer looking blazer wearing large reflective sunglasses with his hand/arm/thing in a sling. But the two seats across the table from him looked open, so I decided to try to take one. He immediately gave me this funny look and said something indecipherable that started withe “pardon,” and ended in something more difficult.
I assumed from the context that the seat was taken, mumbled something that I hope sounded like an apology, and embarrassedly hurried out of the coach determined to sit in the seat I’d actually reserved. The Brits had started to figure themselves out by then. One of them was transferring bags up the stairs to the emptier space, so I stood out of the way and waited for them to be done. The conductor came by and checked my ticket somewhere in there, so at least I was on the right train, but the seat… well, I would see later.
Once the downstairs space between the trains was more or less cleared with the exception of the man who has missed his stop, I thought it was safe to retrieve my bag and head back down, except what I had assumed was merely not enough space for the Brits’ giant suitcases was actually not enough space for my much more reasonably sized backpack either. So I put it back upstairs again and attempted to find my seat. A seat, it turns out, that was occupied by a toddler. A toddler accompanied by her parents and infant sister in the three other seats around the table.
Again with the language barrier I stopped, scrunched up my brow to display confusion, and pointed at the seat. They all gave me blank stairs. At which point the lady across the aisle from them tapped me on the shoulder and pointed at the empty seat next to her, which was definitely not my seat, but I was not about to complain. Far be it from me to split up a family when I wasn’t even being asked to sacrifice my space by a window.
So I settled in for more quiet viewing of the French country side, finishing up my book on the Career Foreign Service in between until we finally made it to Perpignan, a French border town where I was meant to transfer to my train for Barcelona.
Now, it was nearly a two hour layover, and there weren’t any lockers for me to check my bag and go exploring, and it was still raining, so I bought some tabouli from a nearby supermarket for dinner and settled in to wait. Wait and watch, I suppose, because you see some of the most interesting people at train stations.
The first was a man asking for money so he could buy a ticket. I don’t know if he actually planned to buy a ticket, but I pretended not to understand his Spanish or his French and went back to my reading. The second was the Italian man, who first wandered over to harass a pigeon that was scavenging behind my bench with rapid cooing and loud hand gestures. As the pigeon rounded the bench, he followed it and struck up a conversation when he saw me watching. I explained I don’t speak French and he switched to the limited English he seemed to know; which, when he found out I was from Texas mostly consisted of Bush, petrol, chapeau, and a very confused face as he pretend to ride a horse while trying to remember the word cowboy. He was funny, but a little creepy, and didn’t seem too offended when I went back to my reading.
Then there was the the group of college aged boys traveling together whose origins I couldn’t pinpoint for the life of me. From across the platform I had them pegged as American based on body language and style choices, but when they ended up in line behind me to board the train they were definitely speaking not English. It sounded vaguely like Dutch, but it was hard to pinpoint as they were only using it in between cringe worthy examples of their dreadful Spanish, consisting primarily of “gracia” and “un cerevaza por favor.” [sic] My final judgement is German, but eh, what does it really matter.
The final character I didn’t happen across until I actually boarded the train. She was sitting in my seat, in fact. I know because it was the window and I had gotten super excited about the window because do you know what’s between Perpignan and Barcelona? Lots of pretty things, that’s what.
When I arrived, however, she wasn’t just in my seat. In fact, she was more or less splayed across both seats, shoes off, feet hanging into the aisle with her hand in a bag of crisps like she was on the couch at home. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of that, it was just a bit of a surprise after the rigid structure of Britain and France. And she moved graciously when I showed up, but into my seat by the window, not hers. Moved, I say, and then started to laugh.
It caught me off guard the first time, until I realized she had her headphones in. But then it happened again, and again. It was rather disconcerting to be honest, and not a little annoying, especially considering it was fairly loud while the rest of the train was near silent. That was around the time I realized her headphones were connected to the console between our seats, tapped into the in flight movie. It must have been a funny one, but she was the only one watching it.
I momentarily entertained the idea of getting out my headphones and attempting to join in, language barriers be damned, but even from my not window seat I was having a hard time getting over the beauty. Though I had a rather obstructed view, the sunlit landscape of the Pyrenees mountains was breathtaking. Oh Catalonia… is it really fair for anywhere to be this gorgeous?
Eventually I gave up trying to follow the rules and just moved to an empty window seat. It was one of those half windows where the wall starts, but it was still lovely. I was distracted enough that it was only after I sat down that a brief exclamation of surprise drew my attention to The Italian who was conveniently enough seated across the aisle. He didn’t say anything, probably because I was clearly preoccupied with pressing my nose to the window like a five year old, and when he started adjusting his sling with much groaning and fanfare, I was careful not to look lest I get drawn into incredibly uncomfortable conversation again.
The train did arrive eventually though. I was so excited to be in Spain I almost forgot that I’d planned to stop by the ticket counter to make sure to book a few trips only reservable from Spain. It was a nice test of Spanish I hadn’t used in ages, though compared to France everyone was far more patient and kind. (Note: The French weren’t unfriendly, but as per the stereotype they weren’t about to go out of their way.) When I couldn’t find the appropriate line, the security guard I’d asked even walked me over to the ticket kiosk and got me a number himself. 764.
They were serving 688.
I considered leaving, but it’s summer in Spain and it wasn’t like the sun was going down anytime soon. Besides, I was going to have to do it sometime and then was as good a time as any. So I went to the restroom, taking long enough for them to make it up to 703, and then settled in to wait. A little more than an hour later my number was finally called, by an elderly gentleman at window number 16.
As has become my custom as of late, I greeted him and kindly asked, in Spanish, if he spoke English. “No,” was his confused reply, “but you speak Spanish,” said with a smile and a gesture as if to point out I had addressed him in Spanish after all. And thus began the game of broken languages and charades in which I tried to communicate that I wanted to reserve a bunch of random tickets and he kept telling me it was too late, which I knew wasn’t true.
I’m still not sure where we got turned around. He would ask where I was going, I would tell him, he would ask when, I would tell him, he would tell me it was too late, and I would get confused because the people in France had offered to book the same ticket for me earlier that same day - an offer I refused because I thought it would be easier to book them all at once. I should point out they were Spanish trains too, so if anyone should have access it was this guy.
Anyway, he kept asking the same questions, and I kept giving the same answers and pointing to the paper where I’d written all the information down so things like this wouldn’t happen. This went on for maybe five minutes before I pulled out the tickets I had booked in France, several for dates sooner than the ones I was trying to get from him, and showed him that it was, indeed, somewhere in the realm of possibility.
At which point he went, “Oh! Where are you going?”
And this time when I told him he actually booked me a ticket. Perhaps it is just leftover anxiety from Egypt that makes me suspect he might have been trying to get out of work. It didn’t help though that at five to eight, five minutes before the office was due to close and with only one of the something like eight tickets I wanted booked, he tried to tell me he had to shut his window. I had enough Spanish to refuse to accept that, and he continued until I had the five I need to complete my journeys in Spain. Then I gave up, because really?
Anyway, you would think such an entrance might have hurt my opinion of Spain, but it hasn’t. I haven’t seen much more than the train station and the metro, but there’s a sort of energy in the air that’s just… pleasant. And the weather is spectacular. I’m going to have to buy myself a skirt tomorrow it’s so lovely and warm. Oo, or maybe a sundress. I do love a good sundress.
Speaking of the metro though, can I just boast for a minute that I made it all the way to my hostel this evening without so much as consulting a map? I mean, I looked at it beforehand of course, but I feel like I have a reached a whole new level in cartographic navigation. It’s a very nice hostel, one from the same chain I was staying in in Paris because they gave me a discount, but I think I mentioned before that it’s not the best place for meeting people. Lots of kids here to drink and party, a couple large school tours, very few of the types of travelers I like to meet. Alas, I’m sure I’ll find some eventually. And if all else fails, there’s always the next hostel.
Until then I can’t wait to explore Barcelona. Now if only I could convince my body to get some much needed sleep!
P.S. Just thought it worth mentioning, apparently I may not be getting any passport stamps this trip. Silly EU and their relaxed intra-union border policies. Looks like the stamps I have will just have to stay in there lonely.
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