Shadowfiend23 @ Wrocław

I’m going to try out a slightly different style for this post about our second day in Rome. Again, I will upload the pictures later. You know the drill!

General Thoughts about the Day:

Awesome Tourist Sites We Visited:

More to add later (like descriptions)

Colosseum –   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colosseum

Roman Forum –  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Forum

Palatine Museum –  http://www.historvius.com/the-palatine-museum-735/

Spanish Steps –   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Steps

Trevi Fountain –  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevi_Fountain

Pantheon –   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome

Santa Maria Sopra Minevra –   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Maria_sopra_Minerva

Four Rivers Fountain –  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fontana_dei_Quattro_Fiumi

Sant’Agnese in Agone –  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sant%27Agnese_in_Agone

Sant’Andrea della Valle – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sant’Andrea_della_Valle

Musei Capitolini –  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitoline_Museums

Food:

For breakfast, we tried to go to Victoria Emmualle 2 square (or something like that) because Deanna had read that they had a market there Monday to Saturday 7:00 – 2:00, but we saw nothing of the sort. There was a weird lady with a witch-cackle of a laugh. So that’s something. Anyway, since we couldn’t eat there, we went to a small caffe place right alongside the square. Three Chinese people were working there when we arrived, which I only mention because I was impressed that they knew Chinese, English, and Italian at the very least. I got a cheap caffe (  0.80 euro), Deanna got a small cup of juice, and we both got croissants. French croissants are way, way better. Seriously.

For lunch, we ate at a crappy-ish food stand in the metro station near the coliseum. We each had half of a pizza, and they were pretty good. Greasy, but good. Not nearly as good as the pizza the night before.

For dinner, we ate at a nice-ish restaurant near our host’s place. Deanna and I never really had an anniversary this year, so we treated this dinner like it was the anniversary dinner we missed out on. Needless to say, it was amazing. We had a caprese di buffalo, a bruschetta, a calzone, some awesome pepper and cheesy noodles, and two desserts. One of the desserts was a chocolate cake with ricotta cheese, and it was pretty good. What was the other dessert, you ask? Well, my friend, it was a tiramisu with five different kinds of berries – a red berry I don’t know, a similar green berry I don’t know, raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries. A red sweet sauce was poured over the berries. I’m not sure what it was exactly that made the tiramisu so heavenly (but I think it might have been the unknown berries), but all I know is that I absolutely loved it! As did Deanna. Both of us greatly preferred the tiramisu.

Sorry readers out there for not posting more often! Since I have such a steel trap, I’ll definitely just retroactively describe what’s been going on for the past month or so. Don’t worry!

Anyway, Deanna and I have begun our exciting trip to Italy! The internet isn’t too great here, so I will just add the text for now – the photos will come later.

Our trip began on the morning of October 22. We woke up, did last-minute packing, then headed out from our room in MontFerrand. We got some pastries from the local boulangerie on our way to Jardiland  (  http://www.jardiland.com/  ), the spot where we had agreed to meet with Jeff, the driver for our “covoiturage” to Lyon. It was a dark and windy morning, and after sitting on the bench waiting for Jeff for about a half hour, I decided that I wanted to bring my sweatshirt along on the trip in case it was going to be cold. So I ran back to the room in MontFerrand, grabbed the sweatshirt and some other important papers, and ran back to Jardiland. It was only 8 or so at that point, and Jeff wasn’t supposed to show up until 8:10, so we weren’t too worried. Jeff ended up being a bit late, but we found him nonetheless. Apparently another woman was traveling with us, so we all introduced ourselves. Deanna and I sat in the back while the woman sat in the front with Jeff. In hindsight, this setup might not have been ideal, because apart from the first 30 or so minutes, the front became the “French area” and the back became the “English area”. I didn’t want it to happen that way, but once they started talking they never really made much of an effort to include us. I listened for quite a bit of their conversation. I remember that they were talking about underage drinking and how they thought it was a growing problem in France. Anyway, the trip was rated as taking about three and a half hours, but it ended up being maybe one and a half or two. After arriving in Lyon, Deanna and I got our grub on at Mezzo di Pasta, a French attempt at Italian pasta (like Noodles & Company in America). We waited a while before deciding to finally buy the train tickets to go to the airport (it was only 12:00 at this point and our flight wasn’t until 3:20). The train tickets were 12.50 euro each! Seemed like a ripoff…

We did all the normal airport stuff and made our way to the gate. It was only 12:40 or so at this point and the entire gate was deserted. So Deanna napped while I played some Plants vs. Zombies for about 30 minutes. Then we bided our time until we could board the plane at 3:00.

The plane ride was mainly normal, although I would say that the view was gorgeous as usual. The in-flight instructions were interesting because the crew was all clearly French, but most things were broadcasted in both English and French. Sometimes in Italian also. We landed in Rome right on time, somewhere around 5:00.

After making our way into Rome airport, I walked up to a man at a Tourist counter to ask him, in Italian, where we could find the bathrooms. He pointed us down the hallway, to the left. I was very satisfied that he understood me. The classes had helped me somewhat, apparently. After that, we bought the Rome Passes and tickets for the bus to Termini station. The bus ride was ok apart from a screaming child in front of us (whom the parents did not even seem to try to calm…). Deanna and I were surprised to see how shabby the outskirts of Rome were. There were dumps, shantytowns, and dilapidated buildings galore. I suppose all that makes sense though.

After arriving in Termini station, we were baffled as to our next course of action. My French sim card was only valid until the end of the day, and we needed a phone in the next few days to call our hosts and to call the next driver for the covoiturage we were taking from Rome to Florence. We wandered around the station for a while hoping to find a 3, an Italian phone carrier like Verizon, because we knew they were offering a nice deal, but to no avail. We stopped in a cybercafe and paid for 15 minutes of internet to search for the store, but even after going to one of the “supposed” locations in Termini station, it was nowhere to be found. We finally settled on Wind, another Italian phone carrier. We stood in line for about 45 minutes to finally be helped by one of the Italian cashiers. I spouted out all the info I could think of and asked for advice about what we should do (in Italian). The cashier ended up recommending a certain package to us that seemed  like a deal, so we took it. Essentially, we paid 20 euro for a sim card, 250 minutes, 250 sms, and 2gb of data for a month. I thought that sounded like plenty, and the data especially was enticing since I really wanted a reliable way to have a good map of Rome on hand at all times. There was some trouble activating the sim card, finding the pin code for it, and getting the data to work, but by the next morning we had finally gotten it to work. After following the map we had taken a picture of back to the cybercafe, we made our way to the host’s apartment on Via dei Latini.

We were shocked by how big the place was! Essentially, the host Caterina is renting us an empty apartment for the next few days! Crazy. After dropping our stuff off, I collapsed into bed and fell to sleep almost immediately. Deanna was kept up by the ambient noise and by the neighboring apartments (because some tenants were talking almost right outside our place).

And thus ends our first day in Italia!

More will be added later!

Tuesday (Oct. 1) was my first day of training, and it was not bad at all. Deanna and I woke up at about 8:00, hopped on a bus, got on the tram, and arrived in Montferrand at 10:10 – just in time to meet Remy and get the letter the bank had sent him asking for certification that I was staying with him (even though I am not and was not – we don’t go back there until the 6th). After getting the letter, Deanna and I hightailed it back to Place de Jaude and I promptly handed the receptionist the letter. She told me that I needed to come back on Friday to complete the opening of my account. (As a side note, I find the red tape at the bank – and elsewhere – a bit ridiculous. I will have been to the bank five times now as of Friday and the account is still not technically open)

After the bank trip, Deanna and I returned to David and Julien’s to sleep a bit more. After sleeping until 12:00 (the training started at 2:00), I took a bus down to the Inspection Academique and scrambled inside at 1:50. The meeting was very informal, and it mostly consisted of us being given a plethora of documents to complete. (We needed to sign up for social security and give our French bank account info so that we can get paid) There were supposed to be 10 of us at the meeting, but one girl had withdrawn from the program and another has apparently similarly defected (she hasn’t shown up, hasn’t contacted anyone, and isn’t answering any emails). Also, as a side note, I am the only guy in the mini group (which consists of those English assistants in the Puy-De-Dome department who are teaching in Clermont-Ferrand at the primary level). After working on the documents and discussing general topics regarding the TAPIF program, we were dismissed for the day. I headed back to David and Julien’s to find Deanna awaiting me eagerly.

The rest of the night was pretty quiet until the time came to have our “pre-dinner” drinks. David and Julien poured me a glass of a champagne (it wasn’t from champagne, but the liquid was of the same type), and I quickly downed it. It was good champagne, but I was mainly drinking it out of politesse. But then they poured another glass for me. So I drank that one too. Then, at dinner, I had two glasses of red wine for similar reasons. Then, David was telling me about the “eau de vie” that he had in the cabinet. Apparently, “eau de vie” is like Everclear, so it’s something like 90% alcohol. He was excited to show me it, and I (somewhat) reluctantly decided to have a small amount with some sugar. Then, I had some “clementine” liqueur, which was pretty good. Needless to say, by this point, I was feeling pretty buzzed from the alcohol. David, Julien, Deanna, and I had all been drinking, and even though I had had the most by far, it was pretty fun to have a laid back evening with everyone. We told jokes, recounted stories, and watched a bit of TV. Then, after doing a minimum of sleeping preparations, I fell relatively quickly to sleep.

After waking up early and getting more baked goods from a nearby boulangerie (a different one from the second day for those of you out there who are keeping track), Deanna and I watched some French cartoons! One of the best ones was SamSam, a cartoon that recounts the adventures of a 7-year-old superhero named SamSam ( a link:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SamSam  ). Among the cartoons we watched was My Little Pony : Les Amis, C’est Magique! (Friendship is Magic in English). I had a bit of trouble understanding the specifics of the dialogue, but I got the gist of the story. After lounging around for a while, Deanna and I decided to go to Place de Jaude, the de facto mall in Clermont-Ferrand, to find a way for me to use a phone in France (either buy one, or rent one, or configure mine somehow…). We needed to do this because, as I have said, the apartment search was not going well and we had already learned that most apartment listings basically required that you call the landlord. (you can email them, but I have not gotten a single response by email as of now – and it has been weeks since the first email was sent) Another reason that we wanted to go into Place de Jaude was that I had agreed to meet up near there with other assistants who were stationed in or near Clermont-Ferrand.

So without really doing nearly enough research, we waltz into Orange, one of the phone carrier giants in France, and try to explain the situation to the workers (in French, of course). I thought that I did a pretty good job, but when it came time to give them my address, the woman couldn’t understand the name of the street. I don’t know why she couldn’t, I was saying it just fine. She even called over another worker who spoke English so he could ask me “What’s your address?” even though I clearly had understood the question. I wasn’t really irritated, but I still didn’t get why they were confused. My guess is that the street was in an unknown part of town (it’s in Montferrand, which is an old part of town) and that it was a bit too small. Anyway, we figured it out and she inserted the new European sim card into my phone. And just like that – boom – I had tweaked my phone into being a French smart phone, with a brand spankin’ new number.

After leaving Orange, I called Pierrette, the woman of the couple who was hosting us, to tell her that I had gotten a phone. She cheerfully asked if Deanna and I would like to join her and her husband to have apératifs. I accepted the invitation, even though I was only partially sure about what that meant. (I correctly had remembered that that entailed eating little snacks and drinking wine while chatting) After that, Deanna and I headed off to meet the other assistants at the looming black cathedral near the center of town. (this is the cathedral you will likely see in google image searches of Clermont-Ferrand. It is iconic.)

We made our way back to the main square and met up with other assistants from the TAPIF program. We all bought sandwiches from a little vendor nearby and ate them on the steps outside of centre Jaude. It was pretty fun to talk to other people who were roughly in the same boat as us, but we couldn’t relax very well because the apartment search was a dark, bleak cloud looming over our mental horizons. So after some prodding from Deanna, we said our goodbyes to the assistants, left the square, and went back to our little room in MontFerrand.

After making a few more apartment searches on leboncoin, we set up two apartment viewings : one was at 11:00 am the next day (Saturday) near the center of CF, and the other one was for right then and there – assuming we could find where to go. I tried to follow the directions given to me by the landlord, but I couldn’t quite understand him. I thought I heard him say “eglise Saint-Pierre”, which is in Centre Jaude, but he was actually saying the name of a church in Beaumont, a small neighboring village to CF. So basically Deanna and I wasted a train ticket and more time going to the wrong church and standing up a potential landlord. When he discovered that he had gone to the wrong place, he seemed strangely calm about the whole ordeal and ended up just saying that we could probably meet up tomorrow. After this small debacle, Deanna and I returned to our room quietly waited until our prearranged meeting with our hosts.

When the time came, our hosts greeted us outside our door and brought us up to a small sitting room. They brought out pringle-like chips, peanuts, and olives. We gabbed for a bit, snacking on the little morsels, until they offered to show us the cave beneath their house. Apparently, MontFerrand is a very old part of CF, and houses such as theirs were used to collect and store wine hundreds of years ago. They picked out a bottle of wine made by Remy’s family in the northwest of France and went back up to the little sitting room. We talked for a bit longer, and on our way out, Pierrette and Remy gave us a trove of fruit! We were so grateful because had pretty much only eaten sandwiches and bread up until that point. We went back down to our room and quickly collapsed into a deep sleep.

After sleeping from 11:00 p.m. or so until 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning, Deanna and I woke up and wandered out into the streets looking for a boulangerie (a bakery). Thankfully, we found one on a small side street after about 10 or 15 minutes. After walking in and trying out some of our slightly rusty French, we happily bought a croissant and a baguette. We were surprised by how cheap the baked goods were – the total came to about €1.80 ($2.43), which would be a steal in the U.S., especially for such tasty bread. We hiked back to our room and gobbled the bread with some of the leftover fruit from the night before.

We spent the next part of the day searching endless apartment listings, trying to find something that was going to work for us. We found an apartment that seemed pretty promising – and the address was not too far from our room – so we decided to hike over and check it out. The walk ended up taking way longer than we expected (maybe a half hour), and we ended up hating the location. So it seemed like we had wasted our time.

On our way back from the apartment, we decided that we needed to get something for lunch, so we stopped at a little sandwich place. They ended up having a pretty cool deal going on – for €7.50, we got an amazing sandwich, a drink, and a dessert. I got a kebab sandwich (which was great) and a coffee eclair. My drink was some kind of pop that tasted like carbonated Tang. So it was pretty good. Then, we walked back to our place and continued the apartment search. I got tired super early though, so I ended up going to bed at 7:00 or something crazy like that. And I slept until 5:00 a.m. the next morning, so I got a breezy 10 hours of sleep.

As a side note, I had a strange dream that I was in some kind of battle royale situation. I was locked inside a small village – where it was always twilight – and I was forced to kill every other combatant in order to escape. I won’t go into the details of the battles, but suffice it to say that it was brutal. I used my lucid dream abilities to stop bullets, to teleport, to throw spikes, to throw boulders, etc. I stood alone at the end of the competition in a square built for the winner. The commentators starting chiming in, saying how I was a monster for slaughtering the others so mercilessly. But I disagreed. I told them that I had done what I needed to, in fact, that I had beaten the system. I then raised my hands and wished for everyone to come back from the dead. And come back they did. So I had found a way to get everyone out of the arena alive – no one died in the end. The dream leapt forward one year, and I recognized one of the girls from the battle. She thanked me for saving her, telling me that she would be forever grateful.

My first two days in France are completed, and let me tell you – a lot has already happened. Let me start with the lead-up to the first day, including the trip here.

My first flight on my way to France was from Minneapolis to Reykjavik, a six hour flight. All in all, the flight was pretty uneventful. The plane had those TV screens on the back of each chair, so I ended up watching something pretty much the whole way. I watched three family guys, and two movies: The Incredible Burt Wonderstone and The Matrix: Reloaded. And I did all of that while playing my DS.The people seated to my left seemed to be an older hippy couple, so listening to them during the flight was pretty funny. Honestly, the flight was overall pretty great. I experienced the least amount of turbulence I can remember from all the flights I have taken. So that’s nice.

As the flight was coming to an end, we flew over a little bit of Iceland before coming to a stop in Reykjavik. The ground seemed to be a large expanse of black sand and craggy lava rocks. So naturally, it reminded me of Hawaii. My quick layover (about 30 minutes) in the Reykjavik airport was largely uninteresting – I had free wifi so I just browsed something random until we could board the next flight.

I was seated in an emergency exit aisle for this flight, and that was actually amazing for me since I had drastically more leg room. During the first flight, my right ankle cramped up from a lack of movement space. Also, I had an empty seat directly to my right, so I didn’t need to worry about elbowing anyone during the flight. This flight was largely uneventful as well. The most interesting part of it was hearing these older ladies behind me talking about how they had always wanted to go to Paris but hadn’t until now. They sounded ecstatic, which is great! (who wouldn’t be happy for them?) Anyway, my DS died during the flight, so I kind of just listened to conversations and hung out during the three hour flight (not bad, huh?). We got into Paris at 12:30 local time, a half hour ahead of schedule.

After hopping off the plane and waltzing into the airport, I got both of my checked bags and left the international arrival area. That was probably my first mistake. Honestly, this was about the time that this day started to go downhill. You see, the problem was that I hadn’t eaten or slept on either of my two flights. So I had been up for more than a day and hadn’t eaten for about 14 hours. It was about 12:45 by this point. And Deanna’s plane wasn’t supposed to get in until 3:45, so I couldn’t really do anything until she got there. So I had a backpack and two checked bags to babysit for about three hours while I waited for her. It probably wouldn’t have been so bad, but I was super tired so I didn’t really want to do anything with any of the stuff in my backpack. I tried reading The Hero With One Thousand Faces, but I didn’t have quite the patience for it at that point. So I kind of just paced around the edge of the terminal, waiting for some sign that Deanna had arrived. Once it started getting closer to 4:00, I started to wonder whether our meeting plan had been sound – we had decided to meet at the Hippopotamus café, but since neither of our phones were working, I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to find each other. So I decided just to walk over to the only exit from the international arrivals that I knew about, hoping that I would eventually find her. Thankfully, she appeared within 15 minutes or so.

By the way, the next few parts of this are going to sound complaint-ridden, so sorry about that!

After we met up, we scurried off to Terminal 3 to get on the RER B line. We were a bit disappointed to learn that it was €19 for two tickets and that they only took coins, no cash, no cards. I still don’t really understand why it was quite so expensive. (That’s about $25 for those of you out there who were wondering) This part of the trip was pretty awful. I was lugging around two big checked bags and a backpack that was ~22 lbs through crowded Parisian metro stations (and on the metro itself). Of course no one tried to make any room for us when we needed it. Finally, we arrived at Gare-Bercy, the station closest to the train station we needed to be at in order to go down to Clermont-Ferrand.

We started pulling around luggage down an uneven cobblestone street while rain poured down on us, soaking us and the luggage. After getting to the station, we waited in line for about 15 minutes to see whether we could get an exchange for our train tickets (because Deanna’s flight was delayed six hours, so we missed the train we had originally booked). When we got to the front of the line, we found out two things: one, we learned that the tickets were non-refundable and non-exchangeable; two, we learned that we had “incorrectly” purchased the youth rate for tickets when you actually need a special card to do that (though I still don’t get this because our passports prove that we are under 25). So I had wasted €88 ($118) on two useless tickets. Also, I hadn’t taken out enough money to buy both of our tickets, and Deanna hadn’t taken any money out yet, so we couldn’t buy more tickets then and there. To top it all off, the closest ATM was about ten minutes away (how this was possible I also do not understand). So we drag our luggage back out onto the cobblestone streets, the rain eager to dampen our spirits. Long story short, Deanna ended up leaving all the luggage with me for a while as she ran down the street to find the strangely elusive ATM. She took out enough money and we trekked back to the station. Once there, we found that the ticket machines wouldn’t take cash – just credit. So we had to go back in line to get tickets. Also, as a quick note, it was about 6:45 right then, and the next train left at 7:00, so we were hurrying, to say the least. Thankfully, the woman behind the counter let us go to the front of the line, and we paid her the €114  ($153) that two full price tickets cost. Ouch.

Getting onto the train was quite an ordeal as well. Our tickets had an assigned voiture and seat, but we couldn’t see any labels on the voitures, so we had no idea where to go. A random man was nice enough to tell us where to go, so we sped off down the cars to the one we were supposed to go to. Our luggage barely fit down the aisles as we rocketed done the cars, and mainly people stared daggers at us for disturbing them (or for being foreign, or for being loud, I don’t know). We finally crammed our luggage in a side storage compartment and slumped down into incorrect seats (we couldn’t sit in our rightful seats because a man was already in one of them). A ticket man walked through and checked our tickets, but he didn’t seem to care that we were in the wrong spot. After that, we slept for most of the 4 hour train ride.

After the train arrived in CF, we started to worry about how we were going to make it to our first destination. We had no phone and no map, and it was about 10:30 by this point (and still raining). Miraculously, as we stepped off the train, we saw that Remy and Pierrete (the couple whose house we were staying in for a few days) were there waiting for us, holding a sign bearing Deanna’s name. I was so relieved to see them – it seemed like a turning point in the day. They brought our bags to their car, and we talked with them a bit during the short drive back to their house. Their house was actually very interesting – their garage door consisted of two wooden slabs that retracted when they hit the garage door button, and they have a central courtyard that leads to several guest rooms (like ours) and to their main house, which we haven’t seen yet. We brought our luggage into the room, and they showed us some of the general stuff we needed to know for our stay there. Then, Pierrete asked us if we were hungry, and we let out a resounding “YES!”. So she proceeded to bring us a super appetizing tray of fruit, cheese, and meat:

Remember, I still hadn’t eaten yet, and it was about 11:15 by this point. So by my count, it had been 24 hours since my last meal. Suffice it to say that I was starving. After gorging ourselves a bit, I feel into a deep, contended sleep. And thus ends my first day of my current trip to France!

Leave a comment if you’d like, and I hope any readers out there enjoyed reading my novelette of a first post!

Leaving for France on Tuesday!!! Super excited!