I'll be back...

I'm going back to Paris in the fall. So awesome. I don't really have anything to say about it right now but I'm excited.

Look for actual, meaty, full-of-juicy-goodness updates in the future, probably starting in August or September.

Reflections

I haven't written in too long. It's been a crazy last few weeks, full of projects and tests and papers and such, and also more of the wonderful memories of some of the best months of my life thus far. I can't believe I'm actually leaving. It's not even like I'm going home anymore, since I've just become so familiar with Paris in the last ten weeks.

I've been on the brink of tears several times in the past couple days, packing my bags, taking my last metro rides, crossing the Seine one final time, eating my last Parisian meals, and saying goodbye temporary goodbyes to the friends I met here. It's amazing how involved you can get in just ten short weeks when you're so immersed in the city.

I don't know how to make this appropriately emotional to convey the proper feeling of loss that I'm going through right now, in preparing my departure. I love this city. I love the friends I made here. I love the lifestyle. I wish I could stay. I want to come back and live here after college; maybe I'll teach English or something.

I want to reaffirm how lucky I've been to come here this quarter. By total chance, I met some amazing people who are only here for the same brief period as myself. Mark Applebaum was the best visiting professor I could've hoped for. I also met Jen, with whom I probably never would've crossed paths had I not come here. Also, my host brother, who currently has an internship at a(n investment?) bank in NYC and my host mom, who is downstairs with her boyfriend, most likely playing scrabble. And the rest of the Fond de l'Autobus crew who I will dearly miss this next week and hope to hang out with when we get back to campus.

At the same time as loving (nearly) every minute I was here, mon séjour has also highlighted some of the things I love about California/the USofA and refreshed my joie de vivre aux Etats-Unis. I can't wait to get back to my car, to fast food, to a five-minute commute, to living close to my friends, to shorts and sandals, to evenings not at clubs and bars, to courteous service, and above all else, to playing music. I've realized in these last ten weeks how much of myself I've devoted to band, and how weird it is to be gone. I also feel like I missed a lot of stuff, like the installation of an AV system, Bandquet, Ski Trip, a new set of Dollies, a new Tree and an entire basketball season, not to mention an entire quarter's-worth of parties. Damn.

I'm gonna miss paris. I may continue posting on here as I think of things that I'm going to reminisce about, but for the most part I think that this is about it for this blog. I'm kind of sad I didn't keep up with it the last couple of weeks, and that I didn't write more earlier. I've got a lot to say, but I guess it just doesn't pour out of me like the wine pours out of bottles here.

I leave you with this. It's the goodbye video Jen and I made for our final Practicum project. It's sad.

Bad Luck in Barcelona

I don't know when my last post was and quite frankly I don't care right now. I'm just going to recount the events of the past 18 hours or so before I get on to doing the rest because that's what's most vividly standing out in my mind. So hold on to your seats because you're in for a treat if you're reading this right now. A very long, somewhat depressing and altogether unamusing treat (at least in my opinion). But a good story nonetheless.

02:30, March 2, 2009. Barcelona apartment, carrer de Diaputacio. Jen and I are packing up our bags after a very amusing weekend in Barcelona, filled with good food, sightseeing, clubbing, cooking, wandering and other touristy things to do in Barcelona. Midori, Michael and Heimunn are getting ready to sleep, since their flight doesn't leave until 10:XX whereas mine and Jen's flight leaves at 06:50 (to make it back in time for class in the afternoon. We're throwing things into our bags in the last minute and we make sure we remember everything we brought--passports, cell phones, chargers, computers, clothes, toiletries, mustard, etc. As the others go to bed, we say our goodbyes and leave the apartment we rented for the weekend to walk to the airport shuttle.

The airport shuttle is a little more than a mile away from our apartment, so we have some time to talk as we walk. It's an amusing walk, involving life stories and the such. It's a Sunday, night, so there aren't too many people out. We pass maybe one or two other people on the sidewalk, and taxis and buses periodically pass by. As we near the Arc del Triomf (knock-off of the Parisian Arc de Triomphe), two guys on a moped whizz by us (on the sidewalk), knocking into Jen. They don't stop and just veer around the corner at speed. They also happen to grab her purse in the process. 

03:04, March 2, 2009. Barcelona sidewalk, Passeig de Sant Joan. The guys on the motorcycle did Jen the favor of alleviating her of her passport, phone, iPod, wallet (containing all of her other ID and credit cards), headphones, sunglasses, keys, metro card, camera, lipgloss and the belt to her Burberry coat (I'm probably forgetting things too, but the point is that they took pretty much everything important she had). Unluckily enough, she had a total of about 30 centimes and $30 Canadian, which is essentially like another 15 centimes. Turns out my iPhone was also in her bag, so if any of you left me drunk messages or texted me or anything since I left, I'm never going to get them. I called my parents this morning to tell them to deactivate my phone, aaaaaand it's already broken, so I'm not too torn up about it. (It still sucks major donkey balls...)

Anyway, we kind of start to freak out, trying to figure out if we could make it on our flight back to Paris or something. We figure that Jen's going to be stuck in Spain as long as she doesn't have a passport so we head back to the apartment (another 15 minutes) to make some phone calls to have her cards cancelled and see if there's a Canadian embassy in Barcelona and figure out how we're going to get back to Paris. As we turn around to walk back to the apartment, we see the two guys on the motorcycle race down the cross-street right in front of us, as if to rub it in our faces. Such assholes. So we make our way back to the apartment, Jen continues to freak out as I try to console her laments of the uselessness of her Burberry coat without the belt (and the fact that she didn't have any form of ID or money).

03:18, March 2, 2009. Barcelona sidewalk outside Barcelona apartment, carrer de Diaputacio. We make it back to the apartment, Jen without her phone (or much of anything else except for clothes) and I without any credit left on my phone, and both of us without a way into our apartment except to ring the doorbell. We figure we know which apartment we were staying in, except there're two sets of doorbells next to the door of our building (one on either side). So we ring the doorbell, no answer. Figures as much, since by this time it's nearly half past three and everyone is asleep. I ring it again. No answer. Ring. Ring ring. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing. Ring ring, ring ring, ring. No answer. Riiiiiiiiing riiiiiiiing riiiiiiing riing ring riiiiiiiiiiiiiiing. Finally, an old-sounding woman answers, "¿Si?" and I realize that I've just woken up an old Spanish lady, and we're like "Oh my god, I'm so sorry for waking you up." and she replies, "No comprende" or something that we don't comprehend either and she goes back to bed.

Next doorbell, which we figure is the right one, because if it wasn't the one that I thought the first time, it must be one right next to it (across the hall). Riiiiiiiiing. Same deal. 

"¿Si?" 

"Mother fucker. Shit. Sorry, we have the wrong apartment. We got robbed and we don't have a key to get back in the apartment. Can you let us in?" 

"Ehhhhh... Umm... Terz a paad un de ozer door..." 

"..."

"..."

"We're so sorry for waking you up..."

"¿Si?"

03:27, March 2, 2009. Barcelona sidewalk outside Barcelona apartment, carrer de Diaputacio. Third try's the charm. Same deal with the three full minutes of buzzing, but this time the speaker is louder so we're really annoyed (and pissed off and stressed and worried too). This time a man answers.

"¿Si?"

"Shit. We're so sorry to wake you up."

[British accent] "What the fuck are you doing???"

"My purse got stolen on the way to the airport and now we can't get back into the apartment building."

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ and the door clicks open.

"THANK YOU SO MUCH! We're so sorry to wake you up."

So we're in the foyer of the apartment building between the front door and the glass door into the stairwell, and we're stuck outside once again, but kind of inside at the same time. So annoying. We don't want to buzz the guy again, and we're not really sure at all which our apartment number is, so I climb over the glass (using the shelf-y thing next to the door and almost shattering the glass (methinks). Anyway, it was sketchy but we made it into the building. and continued upstairs to our apartment, where we banged on the door and rang the bell for a good minute before Michael came to let us in.

At this point, I'm just glad to get into the apartment. It's probably too late to take the shuttle and I don't want to leave Jen alone in Barcelona to figure out how to get her passport back. Anyway, we get straight to business.

"Dude, what the hell are you guys doing back here?"

"So, these two guys on a motorcycle jacked Jen's purse and now she doesn't have a passport or a money or a phone or anything. Can we borrow your phone to make some calls?"

"Yeah for sure. Holy shit. Those assholes."

"Seriously."

"So what're you going to do about your flight and stuff?"

"I have no idea. I guess we'll have to fly out later."

"Shit man, that sucks. Those guys are huge assholes."

"I know, dude. Fuck them."

"Seriously."

Anyway, the conversation continues more or less in this fashion as we try to figure out how to make calls to Canada. It's not working, so I figure Heimunn's phone would work because she makes international calls all the time (because she's cool like that). So I go to wake up Heimunn but she doesn't wake up so I just take her phone. Anyway, we have the same problems on her phone and we end up going to actually wake up Heimunn to figure out if she can dial out.

"Yo, Heimunn. We need to call Jen's dad because her purse got jacked but we can't figure out how to dial internationally. Can you help us out?"

"Mmmm... Aaaaah luf sheez..."

"Heimunn. Jen's purse got jacked on the way to the airport with her passport and everything so we're trying to call her dad but we can't figure out how to dial internationally. Can you help us out?"

"Wait. What????"

"Jen's purse got jacked by two guys on a motorcycle while we were walking to the airport. We need to call her dad to cancel her cards, but we can't figure out how to dial Canada. Can you help us out?"

"Holy shit. Yeah, for sure. Hold on a second."

By this point Midori had woken up too and joined in the conversation.

"What??"

"Jen's passport got jacked with her purse so she can't get on the plane anymore."

"No way. What happened????"

"These two guys rode up on the sidewalk next to us and grabbed her bag as the rode past. I couldn't believe it."

"Shit. That sucks."

"Yeah, so now we're trying to call her dad to cancel her cards and stuff."

And we continue back to the living room to make some calls.

03:51, March 2, 2009. Once again in the Barcelona apartment, carrer de Diaputacio. Jen finally get through to her parents using Midori's phone, which is the only one with enough credit to call Canada. She also leaves messages to the Stanford in Paris staff telling them what happened and that the should call her back. Her dad cancels her cards and we're all trying to figure out if there's a Canadian embassy in Barcelona. Heimunn finds the Canadian consular number in our Barcelona guidebook and we note it, but it's four in the morning and there's nothing we can do. More phone calls are made to the police, Jen's family and such to try to figure out what we can do the next day, settling on going to the police station to file a report in the morning then going to the consulate to get a new passport and the Orange store to buy more credit for our phones, all of which are pretty much out of credit at this point. Midori leaves her phone with Jen so people can contact her, and we go to bed to get some sleep (it's 05:00 at this point) before hitting the pavement again in search of a new passport.

08:27, March 2, 2009. Still in the Barcelona apartment, carrer de Diaputacio. Michael, Midori and Heimunn left that morning to catch their 10:XX flight. I'm woken up when Jen gets a phone call from some Stanford program staff-person (I don't recall which one) and re-explains her situation. Her phone cuts out in the middle of the conversation and she gets a text a couple minutes later confirming that her phone (the one she's borrowing from Midori) has, in fact, run out of credit. So now Jen and I are stuck in Barcelona without flights and without any way to contact people, so we eat an apple apiece and split a banana and head out to file a police report.

08:59, March 2, 2009. Police station, Plaça Cataluña. We file a police report, and the police seem to blow it off as something pretty commonplace. I think I even heard a term for motorcycle-thieves, like "motorcyclistas" or someothing like that. Anyway, Jen filed a report, which involved her listing all the things that got stolen, and documenting the value of each thing. Turns out the guys stole about 1500€-worth of stuff, not even including sentimental value of the photos on her camera and the Burberry coat's belt and bag and iPod etc. That was a pretty hard blow. We took a copy of the police report and made our way to the Canadian consulate. 

10:11, March 2, 2009. Canadian Consulate, overlooking Plaça Cataluña. There is no god. Or maybe there's just too much bureaucracy. Jen can't get a temporary passport because she's going back to Canada on the 27th but she can't get a real passport either because she's going back to Canada on the 27th. We spend two hours filling out forms to apply for a new, semi-temporary passport (two year validity) that they don't issue in Barcelona. She needs to go to Madrid. Great. So Jen works on forms and getting contact info and such for emergency contacts and references to confirm her Canadian citizenship while I try to find planes, trains and automobiles and such to Madrid and Paris while Jen's dad (in Canada) tries to help out Jen with contact info and Madrid info and all that jazz. The kicker is that all the money Jen has is $120US borrowed from Heimunn and 20€ that Midori loaned out. To add to the fun, she can't receive a wire-transfer because she doesn't have photo ID. I check my credit card, which is nearing it's limit, and we decide that we could get tickets to where we need to go with it.

Anyway, the consulate closed at 12:30 so we had to leave. Jen, feeling the physical effects of the stress, went to a KFC to try to relieve herself a little bit while I changed the US Dollars into Euros. Not a great exchange rate, only got 87€ for the $120, but it's better than nothing, and clearly more useful than dollar bills as well. Then we made our way to Sants Estació (a big train station) to find Jen a train to Madrid since we couldn't book them online for the same-day. 

12:47, March 2, 2009. Sants Estació. The Canadian Embassy in Madrid closes at 17:30, and the train to Madrid takes a little over three hours. The ticket person tells us that Jen won't be able to make the 13:00 train and the 14:00 train won't get in on time for her to make it to the Embassy today, so we decide to go try to charge our cell phones and make some calls. 

We walk down to the Orange store, a few hundred meters away from the station, and there's this large English-speaking woman who tells us that we can't purchase credit for our French phones in Spain. How convenient! However, the large woman tells us that there's an internet café around the corner that we can make cheap calls to the US and Canada where people speak English too. We find it and Jen makes several calls to her dad, the Stanford in Paris people, her Dad again, etc and we figure out that we're going to put her on a train that afternoon to Madrid and she can stay in a hotel near the Embassy and she can work out the passport stuff tomorrow. I guess that works out alright. So we're both hungry by this point and Jen's pretty worked up, so we go back to the station to get some food and look at the train schedule again.

14:24, March 2, 2009. McDonald's at Sants Estació. I get six McNuggets, fries and a coke and Jen gets a Big Mac, fries and a coke. I eat upwards of 70% of the food because Jen is nauseous with stress and fatigue. I don't blame her. I do what I can to assure her that everything will be alright and she'll make it back to Paris. The Big Mac is comforting to me, having a little bit of America in my belly. The McNuggets, not so much. I don't know why they're so weird in Spain. Or Europe in general. And the Coke as well. I like it better with fake sugar.

14:45, March 2, 2009. Internet café near Sants Estació. We make some more phone calls, and Jen's dad tells her she has a hotel reservation. I call my parents and tell them to deactivate my iPhone so the motorcycle thieves don't run up a bill playing with google maps and looking at porn. Then we get on the internet and check up on emails and facebooks and such. Shoutout to Shü-Fry for getting Tree this year, and to those living in Mirlo, which is where I got assigned for the spring. Hooray, living with friends! Booooo, living in FloMo! I guess I can't really complain though. It's better than home. Jen got a little pick-me-up too when she found out she's living in XØX when we get back. I don't understand why, but she seems to like it.

15:32, March 2, 2009. Back at Sants Estació. We're at the ticket booth, getting a ticket for the 16:00 train to Madrid. Jen has no money, so I put it on my card. The ticket booth attendant-guy was really nice and we were joking about how I was paying for her ticket and shipping her off because I was tired of her (not that I actually was,) and when I gave the guy my credit card, he was like, "John W. John... Wayne???" John Wayne??" and I replied, "No, it's Walter," but he kept joking around, which was nice, because I went back a little while later to figure out how to get a ticket to Paris (on an overnight, which I'm waiting for now.)

17:38, March 2, 2009. Barcelona Franca station. I sit down and start writing. I write for two hours and now I'm here, still waiting for my twelve hour train ride to Gare d'Austerlitz in Paris (21:05-09:00). I can't help thinking how long a day it's been and how far behind my work I'm going to be and wondering if my teachers will let me make up a test that I won't be prepared for because I was helping my girlfriend (yes, Jen's my girlfriend if you didn't already figure that out) get a new passport.

A rather unfortunate end to a good weekend, I would say. But definitely a good experience nonetheless. I'm going to make a public service announcement and suggest that you be careful when you think you're the safest. And when you don't think you're the safest. It's good to be careful all the time when you have a lot of valuable stuff in on your person. I always knew that this kind of stuff happened, but I never really thought it would happen to me. It still hasn't really happened to me, but it's much more immediate now than ever before.

Best of luck to all of you in your travels. I'm going to write about the rest of the weekend another time I guess because I'm all written out.

Over the Hump +1

I'm officially done with six weeks of school, and am thusly a week past being over the hump. I guess I should do some reflection of what I've done so far or something. Anyway, I think that's more for myself to do than for me to do on this blog, at least when I need to catch y'all up on the last week.

Once again, I don't remember everything that happened, just because things start to blend together when you're doing similar things all the time. We had Practicum presentations again on Thursday morning, so those were fun again. A couple girls recreated some Ingres paintings, another guy made some drawings of pigeons, someone brought us some cake and someone else made this crazy broken-wine-bottle-Jesus-on-a-crucifix. Good stuff. I wrote poems that I you can read below this.

Thursday night we went to a jazz club--Caveau de la Huchette in the Fifth. Not a particularly great band, but enjoyable nonetheless. The cool thing was that it was in this underground stone lair. It was seriously like a dungeon. (I think it was actually a courtroom, then a prison, then an execution chamber, but it seemed like a dungeon.) The other cool thing was that there was a big dance floor in the middle of the dungeon, and people were dancing pretty much the entire night. There was this old guy in overalls who was particularly awesome, though only because he was wearing overalls rather than for being a good dancer. I'm gonna get a pair of overalls when I get back. I feel like overalls need to make a comeback.

Friday, I met up with Michael and Natalia for dinner at a RestoU (Univeristy-associated cafeteria) for a really cheap dinner. It was crappy, but really cheap. Since they closed early, we went to get drinks at a bar before we met up with Heimunn. Turns out since we finished dinner so early, it was still happy hour! Hooray, happy hour! The bar was called La Bodega de la Soif, or something like that, on rue Guisarde. Nice place, and good drinks. Natalia ordered a ginger cosmo, which was really good. Jen joined us right after happy hour ended, so she had to pay full price, but then a girl started to put on nail polish (while sitting in a little, classy bar, nonetheless) and it started to smell bad so we left to go find a bottle of wine at a supermarché and hang out on the Pont des Arts.

We walked to the nearest Franprix and were looking at wine when we realized we didn't have a corkscrew (French lesson of the day: corkscrew = tire-bouchon), so we tried to find a twist-off, of which there were none. Then we figured we could just push in the cork, but we couldn't tell if they were synthetic or real, and synthetic ones are really hard to push in (as we discovered on another occasion when we had a bottle of wine that needed to be opened without a corkscrew). Anyway, it didn't end up mattering because you can't buy alcohol in supermarkets after nine or something stupid like that, so I bought a can of Pringles and a package of gummies and we went to find a convenience store that sold booze. I don't know if they don't care or if they don't have the same rules, but we bought a bottle of white wine (which the shop proprietor kindly opened for us) and we headed to the Pont (which means bridge, if you didn't know that). Anyway, we hung out at the Pont being generally jovial until we got too cold, then headed off to catch the last Metro home. I actually missed the last Metro and had to take the Noctilien.

Saturday early afternoon, I went to rue Cler in the Seventh, where there's supposed to be a pretty decent market. However, by the time I got there, it was pretty much just the shops along the street that had stands outside, so I don't know if it was because it's the off-season or if because it was too late that there weren't more vendors. We walked down the street to see what was around and ended up getting lunch in a café which was pretty good. I also bought a tire-bouchon at the Franprix at the end of the street, just to be prepared. Anyway, over lunch we discussed plans for some other time that dictate buying bread, meat, cheese and wine, then walking over to the Eiffel Tower to have a picnic. Then I went home to do some laundry and get some work done before going out that night.

Our night started in the Eleventh at Blue Elephant, a Thai restaurant with multiple locations in multiple countries. It was kind of expensive, but very good. I have to say, I miss Asian food. (We were discussing getting dim sum this weekend but plans fell through. We might go in the next couple of weeks, though.) We followed dinner with another failed attempt to buy alcohol at a supermarket, followed by a successful attempt to buy other alcoholic products at another convenience store. (I call them convenience stores but they really just sell food and drinks.) We proceeded to the Metro to go to the Grand Palais to try to see the Yves St Laurent collection, but it turns out the line was a couple miles long and we didn't feel like waiting for a decade, so we sat outside the Petit Palais (across the street from the Grand Palais) and drank our purchases, putting my earlier purchase to good use. After that, we headed to Showcase, a nightclub, which we failed at going to previously, and failed again that night but in a different way. Turns out it was really lame, at least while we were there.

Sunday was work-tastic, as well as Monday and not really Tuesday, but that's where I am now. I'm headed to Barcelona this weekend and I'm going back to Amsterdam the weekend after that, so I really only have one weekend left in Paris then I'm heading home. Crazy. See you soon, I guess.