Bienvenue

28.09.10

It was such a long journey today.  My smaller bag decided to bend its bottom wire so I had a similar issue going on from last summer in NY (if any of you know that story).  Charles de Gaulle was a little nuts and hard to tell where the RER (railroad) was supposed to be.  Eventually, I figured it out and hauled around my two bulky bags (about 80 extra pounds extra weight), messenger bag, and purse.  I was working up a sweat and cursing to myself as I tried to carry these bags simultaneously down and up series of steps.  Several people in Paris stopped to help me which was very nice.  On the train to my town, I asked an older man in my car/cabin what stop the conductor just said and then he proceeded to help me with my bags on the way out.  It was hard to stop grinning from inside the train windows when I saw all of Blois pass by as it was stopping by the station.  This is my city now.

I saw the Sacre Coeur from the RER for 5 seconds as we passed through a space in the buildings.  That’s when it set in that this was Paris, about to be Blois.

Then, when I was walking away from the train station, a high school age guy came up and asked if I needed help.  He didn’t know much English but he lived on the same street as me so he walked me (and my broken bags) to my place.  He and his friend both seemed very humored by the fact that a franglais-bumbling jetlagged American girl was around them, still dazed by travel and France in general.

I borrowed one of their phones and called my landlady’s house.  Valerie wasn’t home due to her boyfriend’s recent appendicitis surgery so I was let in by their housekeeper, Jessica.  I came in and met Camille (12) and Antoine (9), Valerie’s kids.  Louise (7), her youngest wasn’t home yet.  Both Jessica and Camille spoke to me for a while, all in French.  Talk about jump starting back into French mode.

Sososo tired.  More to come later.

Bonne nuit!