What is the last day in a series of bad days? Usually it is the day that beats all others with the sheer scale of it's horridness. It is the one that blows all other bad days out of the water, and also it is typically the day before things start to get better. I prefer one truly horrid, greek tragedy sort of day to this anti-channakah-like eight days of small, ruinous distasters.
What does it mean when all your adventures of late are only bad adventures? Unlike pirates, cowboys or even shipwreck survivors these adventures don't end with burried treasure, the badguy behind bars or even getting the boy-- because the boy lives in Washington DC and a plane ticket costs nearly five-hundred American dollars.
Friday night was borderline good, just crazy kids hanging out and talking over the music until the wee hours. The high point was Alexis and Mamadou rapping followed by Cody and Josh beating Wisconsin-Erin and me at a club-building contest. If you've never built what our frightening brittish hostel-mates in Barcalona called "a club," you just stack beer bottles one on top of the other and hope they don't fall over and splatter you with residue (residue= beer and cigarette ashes in France, ALWAYS). Cody beat his own personal record of seven bottles and I beat my own personal record for time spent staring at a map of Europe. The entire world has an opinion about where you should go, but I find lately that the entire world is drunk and should not be trusted.
Saturday also had a strong start, as we tracked down my bank card at H&M and happily retreved it before heading to Dunkerque for the Mardi Gras/Carnaval fesitivities. Once there we traced the line of colorful and slightly-smudged cross dressers to it's source at the ciy hall where the band played, the people danced and sang with their umbrellas and feather dusters and many a pickled herring was tossed. Beads? Who needs beads when you can have a pickled herring sealed in plastic? Directly after this colorful display of the french roots of some good ol' Louisiana culture, a nearby ATM proceeded to sequester my newly found bankcard, leaving me hungry, cashless, cardless and in a strange, strange land full of cross dressers.
Saturday night we narrowly caught the last train home where we met a man with Algerian parents who explained that if he had been born in America, he would be considered an American but because he was born in France, racism prevents him from being considered French. The common trend seems to be that in the north of France, where people are comparatively warm and friendly, anyone who strikes up a conversation will mention two things: how much they hate the current American government but how, despite that, they believe in American ideals and wish that they had been born there. Everyone's been there somewhere. Everyone wants to be from California. Nodody doesn't want to be a Californian.
Sunday, nothing is done all day accept the reading of "House of Leaves" and the eating of marvelous European Kabab, which is not shish-kabob and should never, ever be confused as such.
At midnight, a group of Americans+Amélie (french)+some remarkably football-savy Quebecois go in search of a superbowl. As Matthew put it "It's shown in 189 countries around the world, what the hell is wrong with this one?" We considered renting a hotel room to watch the game on the cable but figured that the receptionist wouldn't respond well to 12 people who just want a room between the hours of midnight and four am. The extensive search leads to Gino's (home of the best coffee on earth) where the bartender agrees to let us watch until half time (3 am) as long as we buy drinks.
The Superbowl, in France, is watched sans-commercials, sans commentary and amidst the cat calls of drunk australians who believe that Soccer is clearly the manlier sport because no soccer played in history could ever take a football player in a fist fight. Regardless, the halftime show with the great Sir Paul (which I like the call America's-Last-Ditch-Effort-at-Respectability) was entirely over the heads of everyone there, who just wanted to see Janet's other one (except Michigan-Geoff, who, like me, was waiting for Ringo to jump out in his Mr. Conductor suit). All I really wanted was just one chicken wing.
Phrase du jour: Vive la Vélo! (Long live the bicycle! Chanted by car protestors, ching-ching-ching!)
No comments:
Post a Comment