Sam #2: May 18

Apologies in advance for the low-quality blogging today. I feel like a frog who has been frantically jumping from lily pad to lily pad in search of solid ground, and it wasn't until 8:00pm this evening that I finally found it. Of course I was unable to sleep well on the plane out of sheer excitement and the wide selection of movies available for viewing. Of the eight-plus hours I spent confined in the Boeing 767, maybe two of them were spent asleep.

We landed at Heathrow airport just a scoch before noon local time, which was 7am Atlanta time. We had a fairly simple time getting through customs. It was nice to land in an airport where you can understand the announcements over the loudspeaker. We had the great fortune to have a tube train wait 8 minutes at the airport terminal, so we all made it in the same tube. The oh-so-entertaining Piccadilly line ran us all the way over to St. Pancras, and along the way I texted Josh to arrange a meet-up at the station. He was nice enough to meet us at The Rendez-Vous, a gargantuan statue of a couple cough cough making out in public cough I mean, reunited. It was good as always to catch up with old friends, and the six of us shared a quick break at the random overpriced cafe beneath The Rendez-Vous. The honey cheesecake was soooooooo good, and had we not been under time pressure I would have ordered another one. Unfortunately we all had to leave at 2:30 to catch the 3:02 Eurostar train to Paris, so our time with Josh was short but sweet.

The Eurostar was comfortably seated for our weary bodies, but for the eardrums it was a nightmare on par with the infamous "Will it Blend?" video series on YouTube. The Chunnel was by far the easiest tunnel to deal with, as billions of dollars were spent on that delicate project. The English countryside is littered with ear-popping tunnels that seem to defy the laws of physics. How can such a short tunnel make me squirm so much? The French countryside was very pretty albeit monotone. I felt like I was watching a 100-foot poster rotate in circles with the same farms over and over again, kinda like super old-school special effects where the outlaws run on a treadmill and they loop Monument Valley behind them. The hot chocolate from the food car was PHENOMENAL though. Like wow. Wow. Wow.

We arrived quite smoothly in Paris and immediately we had to switch into French mode, which is somewhat of a challenge for me and very much a challenge for those who have never taken French before. Buying metro passes was very straightforward after Christian and I got finished heckling eachother about the price (eventually I did win but I was waaaaaaaay off to start with). It was like spring break all over again with my family; go to Saint-Michel Notre-Dame and switch RER trains. That station seems to be such a key station in this city. Riding the RER at rush hour was quite the exercise in claustrophobia and patience. We were only traveling 2 stops on the B line, yet there were masses of people lined up 4-5 deep on both sides of the train waiting to get on at each stop. We didn't just see Parisians, we heard them and smelled them and felt them (they're likable enough). The Parisian metro has an omniscient faint rotten egg smell that seems to permeate every inch of the station, from the new traincars to the risqué Keira Knightley ads for Chanel perfume (how Parisian).

After what seemed to be endless trains that weren't the right train to Vitry-sur-Seine, we nabbed a beauty of an express that was a 4-stopper. Once we left the station we realized two things immediately. One - we were no longer in the heart of Paris. The buildings looked less antique history book and a little more narrow-street urban à la Jason Bourne. Two - We didn't know where the guesthouse was. For my inner vedette (excuse my French), this was a super manly combination that absolutely must, in some way or fashion, result in a car chase, a shootout, and lots of loud angry French bystanders. To my back that had been hauling 40+ pounds of luggage since 8pm the previous evening, "them's fighting' words" (as an homage to my inner 1800's outlaw). After about one block of walking, which was eight blocks more than I wanted to walk, we stopped to ask directions in a pharmacy (see men do ask for directions) and discovered that we were only two blocks away.

The guesthouse is a small, adorable little property a stone's throw from the RER station. The proprietor is very friendly and very organized, and to boot he has wifi (so thank him for reading this). Our room is a 2-story loft kind of deal with one bed on the ground floor and two beds up top. It's very kitschy with neat artifacts and a giant painting above my bed. Gotta get to sleep though, because apparently the neighbors coming in later are from Las Vegas and they're gonna be up late. If ya can't go to Vegas, might as well bring Vegas here! Should be interesting.

Grosses bises!
~Sam

p.s.- Keep up with the Twitter account. It allows you to track the GPS location of each tweet.