Des vacances imaginaires en France

Given the time and finances to travel wherever I wanted, je voyagerais…en France! I traveled to France three years ago with a group of students from my high school, and since then I have always dreamed of returning some day. During my eighth grade year and all four years of high school I studied French, and I worry now that if I go too long without actively speaking it that at some point I will lose the ability, so…what better way to ensure that I remember than by actually speaking with native French people? Outside of brushing up on my language skills, I would have to say that the biggest thing I would hope to get out of going to France would be a sort of cultural blending: Elliott plus Frenchness. Both are a little weird, but I have the feeling that the result would be highly entertaining.

Putting together a travel itinerary is a new and invigorating pursuit for me, and as I don’t really know how things will turn out right now, I think I shall just put activities and images on paper and mix them about until something cohesive results. Here we go.

Week 1: Food
Last time I arrived in France I was really wiped out—there was a little kid behind me on the flight over the Atlantic who saw fit to scream and kick my seat most of the way there—but I’m going to pretend in this case that I will be arriving well-rested and most certainly not under the effects of mono. Under this assumption, I will have plenty of energy to expend during the first leg of my trip in…Paris!

If a city can have a natural frequency, Paris’ must match mine exactly, as last time I was there we resonated with each other like crazy. My stomach is accustomed to the best sorts of food, thanks to my mother’s amazing talent for cooking, but Parisian cuisine takes gastronomy to a whole new level, and I think the best way of recognizing this general wonder is to dedicate ma première semaine à Paris to the pursuit of finding the tastiest restaurants and eating at them. In between meals, my expanding stomach will call for frequent snacks, so I will periodically have to stop at boulangeries or crêperies for a quick baguette-and-cheese or crêpe-and-fruit pick-me-ups.


In terms of moving between all these great eating places, my primary method of getting from here to there would probably be foot travel, which would help me to burn calories, prep my stomach for the next meal, and look around for more good spots to eat. At night, I will try to find a promising bed-and-breakfast or, failing that, a room for rent above or near a breakfast-oriented café. Ah—and the most important thing: all of my interactions with other people should be conducted en français, bien sûr! To encourage mobility, I think that all I would really want to travel around with would be a backpack—Rick Steves has a great deal of advice on that subject, I’m sure.

Week 2: Sightseeing
Having spent the last week conducting nothing but a tour-de-force of Paris’ culinary offerings, week two will find me focused more on my eyes than my stomach. During my previous visit to Paris a group of us students went up la tour Eiffel around 10 at night and oohed and ahed over the view (which was quite a fun activity in itself), but then, since the elevators going down were all full, my friend TJ and I decided to make our own entertainment by running down the stairs instead. In this vein, one of the things I would be itching to do on my return to Paris would be to run all the way up the stairs and down. Actually, there probably is a group of other crazy people who run the Eiffel Tower at some sort of odd time like 7:13pm on Tuesdays, so I’ll have to ask around and try to discover this cult if possible.


During the first week I will already have done quite a bit of walking, but focused almost solely on food I will have missed out on a lot of other on-foot activities. To address this shortcoming, week two will find me visiting the Champs-Élysées to do some shopping (but not much buying; I’m far too frugal for that), the Palace of Versailles (which my grandparents tell me is an incredible place to see), and the Louvre. Last time I was at the Louvre I felt like a narcoleptic I was so tired from the plane ride, but this time I will be fully prepared to see things as they are...or at least as I perceive them, but in an improved state of mind.

Week 3: Music
France has a very lively techno scene, and going on my dream trip there I would be wrong to miss out on it. I wouldn’t really be sure where to start, but I suppose if I asked around enough I could probably find someone who worked in the industry. What would be even better is if I could actually create some myself…I’d have to get really lucky in finding someone to teach me, but I think it would be a lot of fun to create my own ambient electronica in the vein of Air, Aphex Twin, and Microstoria. Even if I don’t manage to find that someone, there’s still much entertainment to be found just in hanging out on the street listening to people perform all different kinds of music—I remember last time some of my friends and I watched a group of college-age kids perform near a fountain, and having that sort of impromptu musical experience can be a treat as well.


Week 4: Elsewhere
Paris is a great place, but I would probably feel shortchanged if I spent a month in France and saw nothing else. During week four, then, I will spend some time on the coast, starting with Caen. After taking a train or bus there, my first act will be to visit the beaches of Normandy and le Mémorial de Caen; I have a lot of interest in World War II and I think it would be worth my while to imagine D-Day as an actual event rather than the glorified and generally bloodless event portrayed in video games. From there I will continue westward and south around the coast by bus or by train—I don’t really know what to expect from this, but I plan to spend a lot of time hanging out in small towns, getting a feel for a different sort of lifestyle than what I experienced during the last few weeks of my trip. The eventual goal, I suppose, would be to get to Bordeaux, which I’ve heard is renowned for its wine. I can’t say I care for wine at this point in time, but perhaps I will in the future.

Well, that’s the grand design for my travels in France. I’ll have to see if it makes sense when I read back through in a couple days (maybe after taking some Tylenol next time), and I should also figure out what to spend approximately on each leg of this trip. For now I think I might take a nap, though.

Nostalgia

Last time I was here I kept getting distracted—that is, I found it far too easy to do anything but write, so I ended up writing about that inability. This time, however, I decided to motivate myself by leaving my laptop charger in my room, so now I must relate my experiences in the span of ninety minutes or less. Take that, Elliott!

Ninety minutes isn’t so bad, though—there should be plenty to talk about. If you look out the window, for example, there are those two men standing in the grassy area across the path from the bench, which is unusual given that most people just stroll about the paths. I wonder what the occasion could be. Sitting on the bench is a tan-hatted, black-jacketed man with his golden retriever—and what a coat! The dog, not the man, that is—he or she probably enjoys the combination of sunlight with a rather brisk temperature. The squirrels are certainly enjoying the day as well, as I take their narcoleptic gathering of debris to indicate. Or at least that’s how I imagine their behavior, since they always seem to dart from one place to another and then pause (or in my mind sleep) for a moment or two before moving on. I wonder what the squirrels’ opinion on the weather is…I’ll just have to ask one of them on my way out.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, little seems to have changed in the study area where I hang out in the Allen library. Actually, I suppose that one thing did change, since someone stole mon table de travail, but at this new desk I do get to look at some different books. I could go off again about all the oddities of the strange book series around me, but I think I’ll focus on just one this time: that of Moody. John Moody was apparently a very busy person, since he developed a whole collection of euphoric Moody’s Railroads, egotistical Moody’s Governments and Municipals, and vindictive Moody’s Public Utilities between 1930 and 1950, enough to fill an entire bookshelf. Densest of them all is Moody’s Industrials, which looks poised to defy the heavy-object-supported-by-carton-of-eggs trick. So as not to appear too lazy, I think I’ll give Moody’s Railroads 1946 a look-see. Hmm…it seems that the East Jordan & Southern Railroad Co. owns “1 locomotive, 1 gasoline locomotive, 1 combination, 1 motor coach, 1 work car and 1 snow plow”, and that Missouri & Illinois Bridge & Belt Railroad Co. has but a single diesel locomotive. Moody may not have been the most exciting guy in the world, but it looks like his attention to detail was second to none. This tome, as one of his smaller works, clocks in at about 1500 awe-inspiring three-column pages, and given the lack of computers in his day, I can only imagine what it took to create such a behemoth.

Looking back outside again, the view is rather empty. No one is hanging out in the grassy area, and the squirrels are even MIA. But the sunlight—I can just imagine that it’s summer right now, perhaps the beginning of august, and all I have to do is jump from the window and sprawl out in the grass to enjoy…well, let’s think. There would be the warm weather, for one, maybe eighty degrees in the sun; there would be the perpetual sound of someone mowing the lawn and the phantom smell of fresh-cut grass; the leaves would sway ever so slightly in the breeze; from far off would come the sound of people running and laughing—ah, the nostalgia but brings tears to my eyes. And look there! A couple and their heavy-footed toddler have strolled onto that very swath of grass. Do you think they’re remembering the summer too? Making believe that sun and blue skies are here to stay? How I wish…

But it will be summer soon enough, and then I’ll be excited for school to start again, that harbinger of self-improvement but also the cold, and the process will continue. Anyway, my ninety minutes is up. Goodbye, for now.

Noise

You’d think it would be quieter here. Not just because everyone hides from everyone else, hunched over laptop or a textbook or a paper, but because libraries have such a reputation for squelching noise. But that’s the problem with quietude: the unexpectedness of sound amplifies its effect, and soon the shuffle of papers becomes a riot at a publishing warehouse, the tat-tat-tat of key presses becomes a volley of machine gun fire, and the zipping of purses, backpacks and bags becomes a tear in the fabric of space-time. The people here seem to realize this dichotomy between sound and its absence, and take the position that foreign sound is best served drowned, preferably by the buds that dangle from or grasp at their ears. This treatment only addresses one aspect of a library’s noise, though, and operates under the assumption that one can study just as well with music being piped through one’s consciousness. For those whom this assumption fails I give my sympathies—your presence in this place is a testament to your ability to reconcile discomfort with purpose, or else explains why you fail to accomplish much while here.

To pretend that noise is particular to sound would be to ignore its other manifestations, and would discredit its derivation from something much more general: the Latin word nausea. Study desks in the library are bombarded not only by that most forward of agitators which I have already mentioned, but by all manner of sights and sensations. The shelves at one’s side, for example, provide such a menagerie of garish colors and obscure book series that one cannot help from wondering at titles such as Employment Status of Medical Assistance Clients and Persons with Dependents with DSNS Medical Coverage and Society of Actuaries: Reports of Mortality and Morbidity Experience, and why there is a reprint of Best’s Life Insurance Reports from 1921 and 1922 but those from 1916 to 1919 and 1926 onward are originals. And did someone steal the report from 1920? Or has it been checked out? Perhaps the university has yet to acquire a copy. Then there are the messages on the desk itself: a command to Stop All Mariage!! followed by a rejoinder in dissimilar script: But Learn to Spell First! One can also glean that some mysterious person loves Ken, and that Thorban is a senior citizen.

But those are merely two sides of one’s view—leftward and to the front—and I have neglected thus far to mention the most important view of all, which is what one can see through the window at the right. Forget sounds, book titles, and decontextualized messages—the window is the fence between this side of the pasture and the other, and thus gobbles one’s time like a group of chubby bunnies with a bag of marshmallows. Oh the people one can see, traipsing from here to there, pursuing tasks whose complexity and scope are bounded only by the observer’s imagination. That one there? He just finished a proof on how to tell if a program is in an infinite loop, and is rushing to tell his professor. That other one? She is off to the same professor with a counter-proof, and has discovered an efficient way of breaking secure sockets layer encryption. The greatest noise of all, though, is the nagging wish that one were actually out there, participating in all those interesting things, rather than being trapped inside, at a desk with nothing but homework and studying to keep one company. On second though, the noise really is starting to get to me, so I think I’d better leave.