Day One: Cold Comfort Inn
At last I arrive in my first accommodation in France. And I look in the mirror (and God knows the so-called Comfort Inn has many, many mirrors, so you can contemplate your grimy, pock-marked, doomed visage wherever you turn) and say to myself, "Well, this is where you would sit down and cry."
So I did.
How did we get to this point? Everything was going so well in the last entry... The Corsair flight was the best I've ever been on, fabulous food, totally cool flight crew. Miracle -- I slept enough to be refreshed! Was it the extra seat, or the extra champagne from first class?
Got off the plane quickly, got through passport control quickly, got my bag quickly. Lucked out with a hardened-but-motherly cab driveress (hair dyed Marlene-Dietrich-in-the-Blue-Angel ash blond) who got me to the Gare de Lyon with an hour to spare.
The Gare de Lyon is not the most welcoming train station in the world -- a big sooty space with nowhere to sit save one tiny, smoke-encrusted salle d'attendant, and no garbage cans (as I found when ready to throw away the husk of a Coca Cola bought to stay my flagging spirits -- I had to leave the station to find a waste receptacle). Had speech with a middle-aged dumpling of a Frenchwoman -- in any culture, they are drawn to tell me their troubles... in this case, why wasn't the departure gate for the Lyon train being shown yet, when Lyon is the principal city of the region, n'est-ce pas?
Je regrette de vous abandonner dans votre souci.
(juh ray-GRET duh vooz a-BAN-don-AY dahn vo-TRAH sue-SEE)
"I am sorry to leave you in your distress."
Heartlessly ditching Madame when the gate for the Nimes train came up, I walked into another genuine interaction with French people. I had an actual seat reservation, a new level of grown-up-edness in my traveling arrangements -- place 21 en voiture 2. The only problem was that the cars were labeled, with great creativity, 1, 12, 3, 4... I and another woman held out stoutly for voiture "12" being really "2", while a married couple begged heaven for why one wouldn't get into car 12 when you have tickets for car 12... This eventually being solved (in our side's favor -- Monsieur bowed to my ally and said, "Vous avez raison, Madame," before departing with dignity in his search for car 12), we settled in for our ride.
The countryside was beautiful -- that sinuous, serene quilt of black brown, sandy brown, black green, sandy green that proclaims that this land has been worked for as long as our species has known that scritching in the ground can eventually lead to a meal. Pale fawn cows punctuated the landscape, frowning a little from the effort to appear sufficiently rational creatures, along with some dithering moutons and even a couple of shaggy ponies.
Of course by this time, my head was snapping off my shoulders from fatigue. I couldn't quite manage to get into my new Ngaio Marsh whodunit, but it got too dark to look out the window, and I was afraid that if I fell asleep I'd end up in Montpellier.
Wellll. It would be unjust to judge a city by as little as I've seen so far... But I don't find Nimes at all prepossessing yet. To start with, every skinhead I'd avoid sitting next to on any form of public transit got off at Nimes. It soon became apparent at the taxi queue that the only way one was ever going to get transport out of the SNCF gare was to muscle aside the skinheads jumping the queue -- and believe you me, at 10:30 on a Sunday night when you just want to get to a safe bed, one is soon ready to start elbowing skinheads.
Have you ever driven through Eugene, Oregon? So far, Nimes strikes me as the Eugene of Provence. As we passed the sorry-looking strip malls, and the under-train arches that clearly no one ever walks past on foot, and the obviously long-term construction detours, I began getting less and less enthusiastic about this leg of the trip.
My lack of delight was complete on reaching journey's end. "Comfort Inn," my aunt fanny! If I had wanted to stay in one of those shoddy little motels you see outside Sparks, with names like "The Miner's Knothole" or "The Lucky Horseshoe Pit" -- man, I did not need to get on a plane to Europe.
It is a totally small, totally gimcrack dive. The color scheme -- powder blue and coral. Dark coral. As I sat on the pump toilet trying to convince myself that "that" feeling is not a developing UTI, hearing the trucks shift down on the autoroute and my neighbors' foreplay, I looked down to see ants merrily gamboling across the floor.
Chez moi, les fourmis sont nuisibles.
(shay muwah, lay for-MEE sahnt NEW-see-bell)
Where I come from, ants are considered vermin.
Bawling over, I wisely decided to take a shower -- grime was clogging every pore, and I've been around long enough to know that whatever the morrow shall bring, it will always be easier to face with clean hair. And now that I'm caught up here and having successfully conquered the desire to go blaring my miseries to those back home (who would only be distressed by them without having power to relieve them), I shall turn on one of the utterly inadequate little reading lamps and Ngaio myself to sleep. Everything will be fine.