“Day one of seven“, I hear you ask. “I thought you were only supposed to be in France for six days?” Yeah, funny story about that.

Before we get started, here’s the executive summary of my trip to France: anything involving international travel, horrendous; everything else, wonderful. Now, to business:

I left Germersheim last Thursday (8. Dec) on the 11:22 south to Karlsruhe. The plan at this point is as follows: from Karlsruhe, take the train to Basel, Switzerland, where I would catch a flight to the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. I would then navigate the Paris Metro system, eventually arriving at Gare St. Lazare, where I would get a train to Caen in Normandy, where I would be met by my lovely friend Ann who’s an exchange student at the university there. We would party it up for three days in Caen, then head back to Paris for the remaining three days, after which, I would fly back to Basel, and you can guess the rest from there.

It all looks so easy written down.

From the very start, things didn’t work quite as smoothly as hoped. The train from Germersheim to Karlsruhe was later than I had counted on, meaning that my dash to the bookstore made me miss my train to Basel. No big deal; there’s another train headed for Basel in an hour, and I’ve built plenty of padding into my schedule. I sit down at a cafe with my new purchase (the German translation of my favourite book in the world, Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood) and kill an hour.

Things do not improve once in the Basel airport: my flight to Paris is an hour late leaving the airport. This means that I’ve missed the train I intended to take from Paris to Caen, and even though some rational part of my mind knows that there’ll be another train to catch, the rest of me is starting to get pretty anxious at this point. I should mention that it’s now around 7PM, and given the rush-rush-rush I’ve been doing since leaving Karlsruhe, it’s been quite a while since I’ve eaten. The adrenaline in my system isn’t helping, either.

Also not helping is the fact that Charles de Gaulle airport takes top prize in the “Worst Designed Airport Collin’s Ever Been In” competition. It takes me a good 15 minutes to figure out how to get from Terminal 3 (where I landed) to de Gaulle’s Metro station, even though they’re only 300 meters apart. Stress levels are on the rise.

So, I buy a ticket to Caen; this is the easiest part of the next two hours. My route through the Metro system requires me to change trains at Gare du Nord, which sounds simple until you find out that Gare du Nord is probably bigger than the city I live in in Germany. I spend a good 25 minutes looking for the train to Gare St Lazare; I can see where it is on the map, it’s right there, but the signs pointing the way play a fun little game: you’ll follow them for a little bit, then they disappear. Totally gone. Poof.

I break down and head over to what appears to be an information desk, intending to ask how one crosses the 3mm of map-distance to This Spot Here. It’s at this point that the accumulated stress, hunger and adrenaline overcome me: I forget the infinitive form for “to go” in French. All I can come up with are the irregular forms, in any number of tenses, but I can’t summon up one of the regular forms that will get me back to the infinitive. Here’s a fun puzzle: ask the question “where do I need to go to get over here?” without “to go”. My solution: mumble where I should have said “allez” and let the other guy assume the right verb.

Once set in the right direction, I finally make it to Gare St Lazare. But the fun doesn’t end there, no sir. If you’ve ever had a dream about being lost in a maze of twisty little passages all alike, you were dreaming about Metro stations. You feel like you’re underwater and you’ve run out of oxygen: you are trying desperately to get to the surface.

Now, a word about the French rail system. Despite my initial encounter, the Paris Metro system is actually quite excellent; the rest of the French rail network, however, needs — shall we say — “work”. The French need to get over whatever issues they have with the German-speaking portions of Europe and go talk to the Swiss and the Germans about how to run a rail system:

  • In Switzerland and Germany, they know at exactly which platform train X will be leaving from, on any given day, for the next decade. In France, the train is assigned a platform when it gets to the station. This means that there’s a huge crowd gathered around the main train board, waiting anxiously for their train to be assigned a platform.

  • In Switzerland and Germany, they have boards (posted on every visible surface) showing exactly where train X is going, every stop it will make on the way, and exactly when the train will arrive at those places. The French, on the other hand, simply tell you where the train is going, and God help your poor, dumb ass if the geography of Normandy is something you’re less than fluent in. Oh, and if you try and ask someone, “Hey, is this train going to Caen?”, not only do they look at you like you’re clearly mentally handicapped, but they’ll probably berate you for not knowing; that was my experience at least.

So, I’m finally on the train to Caen, two hours later than expected. I spend the entire two-hour train ride worrying that Ann won’t still be at the station and what I’ll do if she isn’t. Fortunately for my frazzled nerves, though, Ann is indeed still waiting for me. At this point, 12 hours after I left Germany, she is the most welcome sight in the world. We head off to her dorm on Mission: Put Food in Collin, spending the tram ride bringing each other up to speed on our respective European adventures.

After my mental state returns something approaching “normal”, we head over to one of the bars on campus (yes, that’s right: “bar on campus” and “one of”) to meet some of her friends. After a beer there, the whole place decamps and heads back toward town, toward a bar on the waterfront.

If you ask me what we did at night in Caen, and if I say anything other than “go to clubs and dance till wee hours of the morning”, I’m lying.

During the course of the festivities, I get to know Ann’s best friend in Caen, another American girl from MTSU named Elizabeth. Turns out, she too knows my former roommate, one Mr. C. R. Langley; Kevin Bacon, eat your heart out.