Coffins

In my ongoing tribute to Ricardo and wife being in London, I'm reprising the emails I sent home during my trip to both London and Paris. This is entry #7. My buddy and co-worker, Haywood, met me in Paris.

Monday July 10, 2000

Subject: Coffins and the lousy Italians

I've made it to Nice and I'm at an "American friendly" internet cafe since the sun went behind the clouds momentarily and soaking up the sun is not possible. The cafe's basically a bunch of HP Pavilion’s thrown on top of concrete blocks and wood. That's it. But he serves American coffee, so I'm here for a while! If only he would turn off that lameMexican music. The weather was great yesterday-mid 80's with no humidity to speak of. Awesome. Today some front went through that has brought clouds in and screwed everything up. Should get nice later though.

Coffins

So after the last episode of typhoon Haywood in our little box hotel room and bathroom in Paris, we checked out and did a whole bunch of nothing during the day before heading to the train station at about 8 p.m. We didn't have 3 hours for dinner when we were hungry so we went to.....yep, McDonalds. I'm not proud, but if you don't have 2+ hours at least for dinner, you can't go to a regular restaurant. Hell, if you don't have 30+ minutes, you can't even get a cup of coffee. The chicken sandwiches are not the same as in the States. I'm not even sure what meat it was. Ewww.

So we got to the train station in about 15 minutes even though we allowed for an hour plus. Oh well. After finding out that we had to wait until 20 minutes before the train arrived to be told the track, we headed for the big open area with everyone else--at least everyone else that was a bum and NOT taking a train. They seem to congregate in the train station--strength in numbers I guess. They didn't give us any trouble, but this poor Asian woman and her boyfriend, both American, were getting harassed. The boyfriend was bigger than me, but didn't do anything. The girl came over and asked the ticket person for help who, typical of the French, acted like this has never happened before and didn't know what to do. Call the cops you jackass! Jeesh. With the 30 bums downstairs don't tell me this has never happened before. Finally the boyfriend got up and yelled at the bum so he left. I don't know if I ever saw security in the station at all now that I think of it.

While we were waiting and talking to this couple from North Carolina, Gene and Jonna, somebody's dog went to the bathroom right in the middle of the station. Apparently, while I was upstairs where the bum was verbally assaulting the couple, some poor woman wasn't watching where she was walking--who really expects to find dog crap in the middle of a train station though?--and she took a tumble on her keyster. Now, I'm thinking, based on what I've seen over here so far, Gene and Jonna are going to leave, their train wasn't for two hours, before that pile gets cleaned up. Much to my surprise, an hour later the doo was removed. Of course in the US, the doo never would have existed and if it did, the lady would own the train station after suing or it would have been cleaned up inside of 5 minutes. Interesting what cultures put up with though.

So our train arrives and Haywood and I pile on looking for our "couchette", the French word for coffin near as I can figure. The aisle way doesn't fit two regular sized people, much less two people and luggage. I walked by one large lady and felt really dirty after squeezing by her.

If you're unfamiliar with these overnight trains, several cars are designated as sleepers with 2 people per "room" and several other cars are filled with couchettes, where the room holds 6 people. The rooms are the same size as the sleepers by the way, hence "coffin". Haywood and I "walked" into the room and just started laughing. My suitcase took up half the available space while it was standing up. It wouldn't fit width-wise at all! Three bunks a side and he and I had the middle bunk on either side. The slots were 6-1/2-7 feet long I figure, three feet wide and three feet high. I felt like a contortionist trying to get in the thing, which was the only choice with no where to go outside the room and no where to stand inside the room. Suddenly the room in Paris was looking like a luxury suite. No one should travel this way unless: 1)you're under 21 and you have 5 friends; 2)you're dirt poor; 3)you're some kind of fish that has just been netted off the cost of Portugal. While we were getting ready to go to sleep, Haywood chimed,"Have you seen my shoe? It's gone!" Which at the time, was just hysterical. There was no place to lose a shoe! Then in the morning, he was putting his shoes on and kicked me while I was in the other bunk, that's how close we were. No one in the room said anything to anyone else, other than Haywood and I talking to each other, which was odd since we were all packed in so tightly. Surprisingly, our compartment companions, all French, weren't very friendly.

Other than being really uncomfortable and crowded with strangers, this mode of traveling sucked. Think about it; you take a shower in the morning, check out of your hotel, go do whatever during the day, ride in this coffin-car all night long and arrive at your destination the next morning smelling pretty ripe. Not good. Oh, and none of the water is drinkable on the train either. That made brushing my teeth tough. Oh, they did have a "snack car" though--only 5 cars away. I made the trek praying that they had lots of alcohol, which was all Haywood and I wanted at this point. The "snack car" was two vending machines that had candy, chips and warm water. Great. Five cars worth of squeezing past people who HAD to stand in the tiny aisle, back to my coffin for the night.

They do give you a bottle of water and earplugs for you in your coffin at least. They don't give you much of a pillow however. Take your shirt off, roll it up and that's what I was sleeping on. Nice. You can imagine how excited I was. All we could do was laugh.

As When I traveled in Italy, the toilets on the train are something else all together. When you pick up the toilet seat, you can see the tracks whipping by! Yep, you're going potty right down to the tracks. That's their method of "waste disposal". That just can't be good. And the toilet paper's red, so I'm picturing these tracks with a bunch of crap and red toilet paper all over--we were not the only train remember. Thankfully, they don't let you go to the bathroom on the train while in the station--for obvious reasons.