The FINAL 36 hours in Roissy. And I've traveled an amazing total of ZERO kilometers in 5 days.

5 am. This  is day 5 of my stay in Roissy, in the cheap airport hotel close to CDG.   I've worked a lot, I've been sick, and the prospect of making it to Sardinia to meet my friends is not overwhelmingly large.    Add to that, that during yesterday's bout of sickness, I managed to climb out of bed, start the computer, and renew my room. I even made it to the front desk to pay for it. Imagine my joy when after the internet's 2 am refusal to let me in, I walked to the front desk only to find out that the receptionist not only let me wait forever while she dealt with something else, took my money, but unfortunately  neglected to record that payment or even my continued presence in the room.  So I paid again for the room at 2 am.

Horrible?  Not really.  Slightly annoying maybe, but there are reasons why this can't be considered a failure of even tiny proportions:

The first time the travel demons struck:  'Trapped' in Hong Kong for 2 weeks. Great Fun ! No, really!

1) The morning bike ride 2 mornings ago into the farmland around Roissy was as exhilarating as no bike ride in Canada has been for decades.
2) It might be a cheap hotel next to an airport, but the air is fresher, and it's quieter in my room than in any room I have occupied in Vancouver in decades.
3) This is not the first time that travel plans have collapsed (that's why I refrain from planning everything in detail). The most recent example of such a planning failure happened only last October.  I was meant to fly to Vietnam from Hong Kong, but a post-airline-travel stomach bug kept me pinned down in Hong Kong (the hotel was MUCH MORE expensive then ;-).  But I eventually made it and I'm still feeding on the joy and wonder that I encountered in the much-shortened trip in Vietnam.   Or in 2013, when I missed my flight to Vietnam from Hong Kong because I had neglected to apply for a visa.  I got to explore Hong Kong for 14 days.  In retrospect I wouldn't want to be without that Hong Kong time in my memory banks (Yes, the pics are here somewhere, check 2013.). Yikes, that was ONLY 3 years ago????  

So there, not all that starts poorly necessarily ends poorly !

















6 a.m. There is something I am MEANT to do! 

Oh right !  Hop on the bike ;-)

Hell on Earth

 JUST on the other side of that highway bridge ....

 I shouldn't be too hard on those car drivers. After all, they chose their own punishment. They never get to see any of this, even though they live here.

Noon. Conveniently (!), the woman that yesterday took my hotel money but didn't record the transaction (so that I had to pay again is) is not working today (as she was supposed to) but in school.  Maybe she will learn there that bad karma is to be avoided at all costs. Ah well. Considering there is absolutely nothing wrong with my room, paying CAN $88 for one night instead of $44 ain't so bad after all.










A bit after noon, I walk over to Aeroville (Never mind Google Maps, I have found the shortcut) to eat some Thai food. The TripAdvisor crowd has given it high marks, so I'm going to try it.    Fool me for trusting the TripAdivsor crowd again.  Precooked chicken in a BLAND green curry with hectic service that gives you the feeling that they'd rather see your back with your money on the table.  

Looks great, tastes Yukky

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Since I'm 9 hours ahead of PST (West Coast Time), anything sent off here by 6 pm should get to an office in Vancouver at 9 am.  Convenient, eh?


At 3:45 pm it hits me.  I was so focused on meeting my friends in Sardinia, I failed to pay attention to logistics. With a TGV to Marseille out of the question (no bikes taken), I would spend two days taking slow trains to get there. I'd spend one day on a ferry to Corsica.  That's three (3) days of no cycling. PLUS three (3) days on the way back. I barely have two weeks left of my time here and I'd waste a week on trains and ferries (as much as I like them otherwise.  What to do. I can't let Wilhelm & Ute hang again. Wouldn't be right.  So I come up with a crazy idea (usually the best). Why not spend the time fruitfully by cycling to Frankfurt instead.   Sure, I'll miss the ocean, but I'll get that later in the year in Vietnam.  
And I could visit Wilhelm & Ute, Ingo & Lissy, my pseudo uncle & aunt in Frankfurt, and last but not least my old army friend Uwe in Frankfurt.  Oh my. There is a plan.  

An hour later I have booked a room in Montdauphin.  Any person skilled at reading maps will instantly see that Montdauphin is due East of my present location.  That ain't the way to Sardinia ;-)  Fatherland watch out, here I come!

6:10 p.m.   Translation has been sent off. (Now only 2 smaller translations left)

Looking in Google images for pictures of Montdauphin (NOT Mont-Dauphin!), this kind of stuff is all I come up with: Hmm. should be relaxing ;-)

Funny thing, as I find out later in the day, the above picture shows the actual front gate of the place where I'm staying ;-)  La Domaine de la Coutelouire, Horse breeders and owners of many strange chickens and a VERY lovely dog.

Pinker and pinker (or another 36 hours in Roissy)

So when I downloaded pictures from my cellphone to my laptop, I came upon one that I forgot about.

Around the end of the last post, I managed to sleep 10 or 11 hours within a 15 hour period.  WOW.   Now I'm finally starting to realize why. No more spoiled-rotten daughters of the house doing laundry at 1 a.m.  No 4 a.m. cat whisker in my face begging to be let out. No 4:30 am skewered cat meaow demanding to be let back in. No elephantine foot-steps above my head and the old wooden ceiling. Not a single car is audible here.  Yes, the planes taking off at CDG have maybe made it to 100 or 200 meters when they fly right above the hotel, but these hotel people took sound-proofing serious.  NO NOISE, NADA!   No wonder I sleep.  But it's not only my sleep that has benefited. No, all that absence of  WMDs (Weapons of Massive Disturbance) also have an amazing effect on the amount of work I can get done.

O.K, this tune might sound old, but as cruel as it sounds, I am looking forward to the day when certain criteria have been met, so that I don't have to go back to Vancouver anymore, because then I will have done enough time in purgatory.

Not a stock photo. I'm eating one of THESE ;-)

 It is 4 a.m. and the croissants should be at their freshest right now. But I'll give them a while to cool down ;-)  

Breakfast is good, I have an epiphany, and use the time to mentally detach from a Facebook friend, who I though was one in real life as well. Beware of all those pink-heart and smiley-face icons!               Amazing how well a brain can work when it's in an amiable environment.

5:15 a.m. Less than an hour until I should go visit the power-line and the buildings with the reflecting windows again.

Just before I leave, I receive an invitation from my friend Alan to join him at this year's Bridge School Benefit concert in Mountainview California on October 22nd.  We went to that concert 2 years ago and it was a blast. Neil Young, Tom Jones, Beach Boys, Pearl Jam, etc. etc.   Oh, you can't be serious when you ask whether I accepted the invitation!  I'm going to see Neil Young, K.D. Lang, Willie Nelson, Dave Matthews, Metallica, and I don't know who else.  

Yippee!  

The day gets even better. I get out the bike to get some exercise and maybe snap a few decent pics like yesterday.

 I noticed the weird blocked bus lanes yesterday already.  The industrial park area is criss-crossed by roads. And then is another SEPARATE set of roads only for buses and bikes.

 And they're paved with that soft reddish tarmac that they use for bike lanes in Holland and for those running tracks in schools. You know, the soft, smooth stuff.  That's what the bus lanes are made off. And they're not in use, because concrete blocks refuse anything wider than a bicycle access to them.  Get the idea yet?  It gets better. I follow one of those bus lanes past Ikea. That's where the bus lane crosses a Freeway on its own bridge.

 And what is on the other side of the freeway?  Pristine, unspoiled farm land. OMG, I LOVE France!

At 8:30 am, I hear a knock on my room door. It's a bit early for cleaning service but I open the door only to see a Chinese woman with her take-away breakfast in her hand at first stare at me and then utter what I take to be apologetic words in Chinese.  Not remembering your room number is not tragic. But given that I'm in the handicapped room, which has a wider door than all the other rooms and is located in the angled corner of the corridor (only one corner room), I'm not sure how she managed to do that ;-).

Somewhere around noon I try to go out for a smoke, only to discover that the hotel is being inundated by a thundershower.  Pressing myself against the hotel wall lets me inhale a few puffs of nicotine, before I refuse to get any more wet.

At 3:30 pm the sun and heat are back and I bite the bullet to go on the 1/2 hour ride to the TGV train station at the airport. 

I'll never look at truckers in their parked 18-wheelers the same way ;-(

 I need to buy a train ticket to Marseille tomorrow. 1.5 hours later I'm back without a ticket because I was told that bicycles without boxes are not allowed on the train to Marseille.  And I don't do bikes in boxes.                  What now?  Translate now. think later. But visiting Frankfurt from Paris has been popping into my mind,  and taking the bike on a TGV to Quimper ;-)

Depressed and discouraged by this news, I sleep after my return from the train station until 8 pm. A quick Salad Nicoise (even that doesn't taste right anymore) and a glass Rose, call Grandma, and go back to bed. I get up and enjoy water-kettle coffee at 1:30 am and attack the translation with renewed vigour.  No point being sulky. I'm in France!  Get the bloody work done and come up with a new adventure !!!!

It starts shortly after typing the above sentence.  For the following 20 hours I do nothing else but pray to the white porcelain queen.  WTF?  Stomach can't handle stress anymore?

Is there a mirror on the toilet?????

La Vie en Rose II (or highlights of a translator's first 36 hours holed up in a cheap hotel close to Paris)

O.K., so I'm not actually in Paris, I'm typing away in a good but dirt-cheap airport hotel close to CDG airport in Roissy.  And it's not all that boring, but just not as exciting as I had planned the trip before I knew that I would be taking a HUGE translation with me ;-).

Add to that a vicious jet lag (When I start typing this, it is 1:30 am, I arrived here at 11 am and slept between 3 pm and 6 pm and between 9 pm and 11 pm.  Now I'm just waiting for breakfast to open at 4 am ;-)

French TV is showing French-synchronized versions of Law & Order (the old ones, Lenny is still on the beat ;-) and time passes alternating between translating,writing a bit of blog, and smoking outside.

I keep dozing off and finally get up and grab a cappuccino from the machine in the lobby at 3 am. One hour until breakfast ;-)

There are already things that I have to do today: Must go to that HUGE mall Aeroville right next to Charles de Gaulle airport and buy stuff essential to a bicycle trip through France: water kettle, instant coffee, cork screw, wine, etc. etc. etc. 

When I have a cigarette outside at 3:30 am, there is something new in the hotel lobby. Something unbelievably enjoyable. It is the smell of real fresh croissants being baked right here on the premises somewhere. OMG, that smell alone is worth the price of the plane ticket. 

The most fool-proof way of getting to heaven? Rip open a real fresh croissant, pour honey in it, eat.  

Surprisingly I am the only one in the breakfast room at 4:20 am, and that is good. None of the queuing or wiggling around other people trying to get to the toaster or the jam.  Right, jam. No, not the usual choice of strawberry or raspberry. Mediocrity would never survive in France for long..  Abricot and Red Cassis are some of the choices. And they even taste like the real thing ;-)

shady figure 

 No surprise, during the post-breakfast smoke at 4:45, it is still dark outside.

A new celestial body ?`

In a working break, I check Canadian news and wish I hadn't. There is this video of a Toronto cab driver driving in the designated bike lane part of the road. A cyclist knocks on his window to get the driver to keep his distance, and with a quick intentional swerve of the wheel, the cabby knocks the cyclist off his bike.  A sign of the times in Canada ;-(


At 6:30 it finally gets light outside.  Time to take the bike for a spin. Yes, it's an industrial estate area by the airport in the North of Paris, but the air smells fresher than I've smelled in weeks.  Strange world.  And it's the PERFECT time that I roll out of the hotel's driveway ;-)

At 8:30 am it's time for a break, so I go for breakfast again. Hey, it's been 4 hours since the last one and the guy who baked the croissants left at 6 am, so for anyone who might be interested, this is my first breakfast !  Two breakfasts for Euro 5.90, not bad ;-)

For a moment I am questioning what I'm doing here. I'm a 15 minute tram ride from the centre of Paris, and I'm staying in this hotel 3 nights without even a single excursion to that tourist Mecca.   
But then I've had numerous 1 or 2 day-stints in Paris before, with or without bike, so that I've seen pretty much all of the sites. And sight-seeing is not advisable right now anyway, since Parisians have left the city for their annual August holidays (My friend Joanna is in the Beaujolais right now), and the city is teeming with tourists.  
On the other hand, I have a very functional and VERY QUIET room (triple glazing and inaudible air-conditioning) with a price for 3 nights that I couldn't even get a room for one night for in Vancouver.  No distractions, I can work here ;-).

At 9:30 am, I head out to cycle to Aeroville, to buy utensils and food. Not what most people do when they go shopping in Paris ;-)

 


After an hour and a bit I am back in the hotel with a brand-new water kettle, cork-screw, plate, cup, knife, as well as a bottle of FABULOUS Voigner (Euro 3.65!), bread, cheese, salami, instant coffee (Not crappy Nescafe but the heavenly Dutch stuff we discovered in June ;-).








At 11:30 am I'm getting tired.  That's o.k., it is 2:30 am in Vancouver and I've only been over here for 24 hours ;-). I'm going to wait for Hippopotamus to open (noon), have an appetizer Salad Nicoise with a glass of wine, and hit the bed for an afternoon nap. 

Nap? Not quite. I wake up at 7 pm.  And I still could sleep more. Better save that for tonight though. Wow. Must have needed that ;-)




It's time to head to Hippopotamus again for my Salad Nicoise (this time with a Rose). Again I notice the poor manners of some North American tourists. When I came in here, I at least stuttered to the waitress "Bon soir. seulement un peu de francais", accompanied by thumb and forefinger close together to indicate how little the peu really is.  At the hotel reception, I had used "Bon jour. Parlez vous anglais?".  Not so with the representatives of the North-American Way of Life at the table next to me. No Greeting, just a blunt question:  "You speak English?" is all they throw at the French waiter/manager.  And they probably don't even notice the VERY extended pause of SILENCE before the waiter replies "Yes, we do.". C'mon, it doesn't cost you anything to learn the words for Good Evening and Thank You when you visit a foreign country.  No diplomat will be able to rectify the damage to bilateral relations that you just caused, because the damage has been done at the base level.  If I don't like you after hearing that, what do you think the French guy will think of you????

Maybe it's writing the above that exhausts me so, but upon return to my hotel I fall asleep again and don't rise until 11 pm.  On my first smoke break after that I see the most adorable thing.  Guests have left their empty take-away containers in bags next to the ashtray outside the lobby.  TWO adorable tiny kittens have ripped one bag and one kitten has figured out that if it pushes its head inside one of those Styrofoam food containers, it will be in food heaven. 
Alas, when I come back with a camera, the kittens are well fed and no longer there ;-(.