The Final Year

Ok, it’s been a furious bunch of days. It’s also been a long time since I could sit and write. So now comes an abridged version of the abridged version of the past few days.

   I set out from my large, stinky hostel in Geneva to see the lake, one of the main reasons for my stop there. I really oughtta know more about Geneva, but I don’t, so I was content to just go out and sit in the sun by some water. When I reached it, across from me was a water spout of tremendous size. It spouted a hundred feet in the air and looked like it was about a foot around at the base. I strolled around the long end of the lake, which Geneva grips like a baby holding a carrot, and headed out onto the spit of man made breakwater that the spout shoots out the end of. They allow you to walk right up to it, stopping you at about five feet away. In actuality, the spout is about six inches across at the base, and is angled carefully away so that we tourists remain perfectly dry even in such close quarters. A boatload of teenage boys drifted by under the fallout about twenty feet away and were practically blown off the boat under the exceptional downward force of the water. The best part was that occasionally the wind would blow a cool mist of the water onto the pathway, a brief respite from the blazing sun.

   I decided I really wanted to be out on the water, so I found a tour boat dock past an interesting sidewalk that is just inches above the water line where you can hand-feed swans, and boarded the massive vessel for a one hour tour of the buildings that sit along the lake’s coastline. It was an hour of being on the water, baking in the sun, and listening to absolute rubbish. The tour left me unfulfilled, so I went to a nearby dock where they rented motorboats by the hour, and splurged +50 (that’s 50 Swiss Franks, approximately $40) for a self-guided tour. I sat down, got the instructions, cranked the motor, backed away from the dock, and floored it. The engine gave a great bellow and shuddered violently, sending the boat forward at just zippier than a snail’s pace. They had clearly rigged the thing to keep speed down to a minimum, so I had to keep the throttle at maximum just to get past the throng of paddle boats. I putted around at a loud pace for about forty five minutes, then went back towards the dock. Across from the spit of breakwater that has the water spout is a almost identical man made spit of land covered in nude sunbathers. Well, not completely nude, but with the girls laying about in nothing but tiny thongs and the guys laying about in nothing but tinier thongs (no, Nicholas), it reminded me of some of the seal beaches I’ve seen in California. Aurf aurf aurf went the mass as I passed by back into the marina. At the last minute I took a detour to explore a little inlet I hadn’t seen before, but was stopped immediately by sidearmed police men on menacing looking boats. I also was stuck in a current. I didn’t quite realize before that moment that Lake Geneva is just a really wide, gentle portion of a river. A river that begins again right next to that police boat. A river that gets suddenly narrow, converting the great gentle flow of the entire volume of lakewater into a narrow channel in a matter of feet. And I was going down it, past arm waving cops screaming in French. I threw the gearbox into reverse, which successfully buried my back end into the water, and proceeded to fill my fiberglass bathtub at an alarming rate. If I were an inexperienced boatsman, I might have jumped ship at that point. However, I drew from my years on the sea and spun the steering wheel as sharply as I could while simultaneously shoving the throttle past neutral and into full blast forward, the now heavy back end spun around gracefully, and in front of the gaping policemen I did a perfect sliding 180 degree narrow-channel-u-turn. Then I sat in front of them for an awkward set of minutes as my pathetic, loud engine inched me against the current back towards the marina again. I gave them my biggest "Hello, I’m a Tourist" smile and ignored their nonverbal insults until my boat was successfully on the lake. I approached the dock and gently nudged the bow into the rubrail, walked forward and hopped off onto floating dry land, painter in hand, and tied the boat to a cleat as though it was half full of water when I rented it. Hands on my hips and a smile on my face from having been at least momentarily waterbound, I set off to see the rest of the city. I saw it. There’s really not much to see specifically in Geneva. There’s a lot of pretty views of the Mont Blanc mountain range, a bridge to an island in the bay, and that water spout. And the nudists. Other than that, I just sort of sat and took in the place. Eventually I returned to my hostel and had dinner with my Australian roommate who wanted desperately to discuss the declining state of video games, despite my numerous attempts to steer the conversation elsewhere. We also learned that our other roommate from the day before had missed his train because he had returned to retrieve his left-behind cellphone, which turned out to have been stolen by the manager of the hostel, who was forced to return it (sans sim card, which he claimed, inexplicably, was never inside it) and give him a free night’s stay when my roommate called the police and reported the theft. The police in Geneva are scary.

   The next morning I awoke with just enough time to checkout (carefully, with all my belongings), and go to the train station. I had the shock of learning that all the trains to Paris were full for the day (a first for me), but found a way to get there by changing trains in Lusanne instead.

   After a few wrong turns in Paris, I found 23 Rue de Godot de Mauroy, walked in the front door, and gave my parents a big hug. I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around it, but there they were, standing in front of me, in a hotel in Paris. After all I’d seen and done, it was odd and wonderful to have them here with me. No more hostels, no more backpacking, no more communal showers. My trip is almost over.

   That night we found a wonderful little brasserie on a little cobbled street across from a gigantic columned building called le Madeline. I still have no idea what it is, of course, but it served as a landmark for most of our feeted (I don’t mean fetid) excursions. The next morning we all set off for the Louvre, the Seine, and Notre Dame cathedral. I was expecting an enormous line at the largest museum in the world, but there was none. None. I don’t know why, but we were allowed to walk straight in, where we saw some incredible stuff like the Winged Victory and Venus de Milo sculptures, the Mona Lisa, and a crayon drawing of a Horcrux done by a child on the back of his ticket while he waited for his family to finally get done staring at boring stuff. We walked around for a couple hours, not even scratching the surface of The Louvre (I don’t know how the French can take words that should have 4 syllables and pronounce only one, then take a word like "Louvre", which has one syllable, and draw it out for three or four), but I had to leave SOMEthing for when I come back to Europe. So, after exiting the museum and throwing away my horcrux drawing, we hit the Seine, lunch, St. Chapel, and Notre Dame cathedrals in quick succession. Notre Dame was particularly disappointing, as inside it just looked like a regular old (old) cross-shaped Catholic cathedral. As everyone was pretty grumpy by the end of the day of walking, we went back home, ordered a pizza, and went to sleep.

   The next day went much more smoothly. We decided to try for the Eiffel Tower and Arch de Triumph. We discovered that nearby was a tour bus that hit those and did a river tour on the Seine for a four hour excursion, so we signed up and headed to the bus station. We sat down in the upper level of the double decker bus, and proceeded to see the bottom 20 feet of some famous Parisian landmarks. I could tell by their footings that they were very old. The Arch de Triumph was especially stone-like at the bottom. Then we were branded and herded like cattle down a gangplank into a floating greenhouse, where we spent an hour looking at the bottom twenty feet of some more famous Parisian landmarks from the water.

   After our trip in the heatbox we disembarked at the Eiffel Tower, which was the first thing I’d seen in Paris that hurt my brain. I just can’t believe how light that collection of hundreds of thousands of tons of steel looked. And I didn’t know this, but it actually reflects the sun, so it positively glimmers in the afternoon sky. We had tickets to the second floor, so again we herded to the impressively complex two story elevator, slid up the inside of one leg of the structure, and took in the incredible Paris skyline. Our day was complete. The bus eventually deposited us back on street level, where we found a nice little brasserie, different from the nice little brasserie from the previous night, to have dinner and some Italian ice cream. Sleep.

   Having completed most of our tasks, my parents decided to allow me to plan the next day, and I wanted very much to see a couple of the famous modern buildings in the city. The first is called Le Grande Arch, and it’s a skyscraper in the business district that is perfectly cubical, with a gigantic gaping hole cut out the middle. It looks a lot like a really deep picture frame. There’s an elevator that shoots right up the middle of the empty area to the top floor, where you can look out over Paris right down the central axis that connects the center of this building with the Arch de Triumph, down the Champs Elises (or however that’s spelled), through the Arch de Carousel, and to the tip of the new IM Pei glass pyramid in the center of the courtyard out front of the Louvre (loovera). It’s such a great way to give the entire city a feeling of connectedness and singularity, unlike, say, Rome, that felt like a hodgepodge of preserved ruins and dirty buses.

   After the Grande Arch, we went to what I always call The Inside Out Building, which is properly known as the Pompadu. It’s a modern art museum that has all it’s structure and mechanical systems on the outside, leaving the inside for the art. The structural system is quite ingenious, converting the downward pull of the weight of the floors to an upward tension handled by thick cables anchored to the ground, but you really don’t care about all that, do you? Outside were some people playing traditional Australian instruments, and amazingly a group of Tibetan Monks doing Tuvan Chants, where they sing two notes at the same time. It’s an absolutely remarkable sound, unlike any other singing you’ve ever heard, and takes years of practice to master. It was beautiful and haunting, and made me reach into my pocket and give them five euros. Then I went inside the massive museum. They were having a special exhibit on Los Angeles in the postwar decades, and also one on Morphosis, the LA based architecture firm headed by recent Pritzker Prize winner Thom Mayne. It was interesting, but not nearly as interesting as running into one of my SCI-Arc professors, named Roland Wahlroos-Ritter, outside the doors. Talk about uncomfortable. Neither of us knew quite what to say, so we just hemmed and hawed until a sufficient amount of time had passed that we could not-impolitely say our goodbyes.

   The next stop was le Grande Palais, a glass-domed thing built for the Paris Exposition of 1900, but it was closed, so we just walked around it and headed over toward the Eiffel tower, having dinner on a riverboat on the Seine beneath the towering sunset-lit structure.

   We had decided not to just take a train through the Chunnel to get to London, but to find a way across by water. A short taxi ride got us to Gare De Nord, one of the main train stations in Paris. From there, we took a train through Lille to Calais. Another expensive taxi ride got us to the Calais port, where a ferry shoveled us through the English Channel across to the incredibly white, incredibly cliffs of Dover. Pictures pictures pictures. A rough bus ride from the large Port of Dover got us to the town’s main train station, where we caught a final set of cars to London, Waterloo station. Braving the underground (well, my parents braved, I felt right at home, finally), we found our tiny little tiny of a tiny hotel and found spots for all our combined stuff in our tiny little tiny of a tiny room. It has a small cabinet that opens up to reveal a full kitchen, complete with pop-up Soux Chef.

   We found a nice little British Pub and had Chicken Tiki Masala and Guinness, then went back to the room and crashed. Today, we woke up rather late with the intention of seeing Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and The Eye, with a stop off at the famous Harrod’s department store. When we got to Harrod’s, however, we spent two and a half hours there, looking at (and occasionally buying) the amazing things they sell there. For instance, there is an entire room full of fossils you can buy. Yes, fossils. There was a wood-inlaid antique table for sale for £56,000, just sitting out amongst all the other furniture. That’s more than $100,000 out on the floor, in just one item. We also stopped to get tickets to The Producers on Monday night, which I’m very excited about.

   The List sufficiently destroyed, we headed on the Underground to Green Park, near Buckingham Palace. We stopped to get sandwiches and chips and drinks and sat out having a picnic and feeding the pigeons until a gruff man forced us to pay £1.50 each for the chairs we were sitting on. As we strolled through the park I noticed that there was quite a bit more security around than the last time I’d been through there. We arrived, took the obligatory pictures of the guards and their changing, then looked over as a small black car containing a waving Prince Charles and Camilla shot down the driveway and through the rapidly closing gates. That’s right, stunned beyond belief, I got to see the future King and Queen of England today. For about half a second.

   We wandered around in flabbergastion for a while before we headed off on foot for Big Ben. When we got there, it was surrounded by a mile-thick throng of camera’d tourists, all snapping madly at the big clock as it stood over us thinking, "oh, dear, I wish they wouldn’t all push so," in a slow, deep British drawl. We pushed our way past the rest of the Parliament building and Westminster Abbey into the park I’d previously visited for a nice sit on the bank of the Thames. Then we rose, and went back to the Underground for a crowded ride in rush hour subway traffic to our hotel. I have no idea what everyone wants to see tomorrow, but we have midnight tickets to see Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra at the Globe, so that should be interesting. More later.

-C

This entry was posted on Friday, July 14th, 2006 at 11:04 am and is filed under EuroTrip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.