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I needed that!
Apr. 10th, 2006 12:34 amYou know how the first taste of a cold beer, the first of the day, always hits the exact spot?
What I want to know is why they don't make the whole glass or bottle taste like that.
Anyway, I've just had the first mouthful of a cold Heineken, and it hit the spot all right. Normally I don't drink by myself, but this time I'll make an exception.
Here I am in the bar of the Hotel du Gare in Bayeux. No internet, but it's a comfortable place to sit down and write about the day, the very long day I've had.
First of all, my hostel in Paris, the Auberge International des Jeunesse, sucks. Maybe it is the room, but I don't think so. For a start, the whole thing shuts down between 1000 and 1500. You want to have a jet-lag recovery or a nap after lunch, tough - you go stretch out on a parc bench for five heures.
I arrived about 0900, very tired after a long flight from Hong Kong via Siberia, St Petersburg and Copenhagen (or at least, eleven kilometres from those places). I had schlepped my luggage, my very heavy and cumbersome luggage, on the train from Charles de Gaulle, through four transfers and multiple flights of steps. At peak hour. I was a puddle of sweat, and what I wanted was a shower, a shave and a snooze, not neccessarily in that order.
I was feeling very Parisian - a bit whiffy and with a fashionable dix-et-sept cent shadow - even if my clothes were totally non-fashionable. I would have needed faded jeans and a roguish look to fit in.
Anyway, the young lady gave me a bit of paper, said "come back at three" and directed my perspiring self to the luggage room. Friends, you have heard of the sewers of Paris? Well, my hostel had its own catacombs, and they began with a narrow stone spiral staircase. How I managed to traverse it without wedging myself solid somewhere along the way, I'll never know. It was very atmospheric, and I use that word in its literal sense.
I took advantage of the dungeon's privacy to shift my shirt and fill my backpack with everything I needed. No way was I going to leave my laptop there!
Place de la Bastille, Notre Dame, le Pantheon, Jardins des Luxemnbourg, Musee des Moyen Age (or at least the outside), Boulevarde Saint Michel, an Internet cafe and Shakespeare & Co where I released a book in that famous bookshop. And home again.
I wanted to see the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, but I was buggered. I needed a kip urgently.
(Intermission in my bar in Bayeux - cafe au lait, and I managed to find the right money, but there's no prizes for understanding French here. It's taken for granted! Bloody good coffee, too.)
So I had a shower and a shave. OK, the room was on the third floor (and I had to lug my bags up four flights from that blasted basement), but it was the shower that took the biscuit. The controls were unfamiliar, but even when I exploited the full functionality, all I got was a trickle of water - lukewarm if not cold water - dribbling down from a wonky shower head about three centimetres from the wall. And it turned itself off every ten seconds. What I wanted was a steaming spray of hot stuff that I could luxuriate and sing the Marseillaise under.
I got my head down on my top bunk for a couple of hours, and then at dusk I wandered off down the rue in my shorts and t-shirt, everyone else rugged up against the chill of printemps, must have been all of 15 degrees. Humph, wimpish Parisians! Found a coin-op laundry and gave my washing a rinse, as the laundry dispenseur wasn't working, or at least not in a fashion that I could fathom. Internet cafe next door where I spent a pleasant hour.
Oh yeah, French keyboards aren't the same as English. The letters are swithced around, they have the squiggly characters in place of the numbers, and I am not exaggerating when I tell you I spent a whole minute searching for a question mark. I had almost decided that Parisans knew everything, when I found it hidden away in a corner.
A cold slab of pizza from le boulangerie across le rue as my clothes got a second go through the drier. Mmmm.
And then I got some serious sleep. The noises of my room-mates did not disturb me, though the fact that we were four in a closed room with duvets the only bedclothes was not my idea of sleeping comfort. Judging by the wy they looked, they came from a warmer climate and were happy with the heat.
I awoke for good about four in the morning, and because I had planned ahead, I was able to quickly change, grab my small pack and tripod and set off into the Paris predawn.
Talk about your atmosphere. It was cold, like about zero degrees, maybe less. Dark and the only folk around were latenight revellers herking into the gutters and supporting each other down the avenue. I loved it. No tourists and very little traffic. Took a few time exposure photographs of the rues, et Notre Dame.
And then I got lost. My $2.50 compass had become detached from its lanyard a day or so ago, and I'd lost the compass itself in the train coming in. Lost in France. I needed to head south and west along the Rue Saint Germain and Rue de Babylon, but after a while I wasn't sure of anything except that I was somewhere in the Latin Quarter. Honestly, I had no idea of direction at all.
But eventually I worked it all out. Napoleon's tomb at the Hotel des Invalides just before dawn and the sun rose as I photographed the Eiffel Tower on the Champs de Mars a few streets away. I almost had to pinch myself to believe that I was standing here looking at the thing. I didn't have to force a smile on a timed exposure - I was over the moon!
Bonjour to three soldats patrolling around the base of la tour avec submachine guns and wary faces. Cherry blossoms in a nearby parc. Crossed the Seine as the city began to wake up. Joggers and dogs straining under lampposts.
Lost again on the way to the Arc de Triomphe and I had to walk all the way up les Champs Elysees, time running out before breakfast back at the hostel finished and the thing itself closed.
Biut I made it. The Arc had a school group of teenagers chattering and horseplaying around the tomb of the inconnu soldat. Left a book there and then caught le Metro all the way to the Gare du Lyon, five minutes walk from my hostel.
Baguette and coffee, cold shower and hot shave, and then a taxi from the rank outside McDonalds to Gare St Lazare. The taxi driver had a beautiful Peugeot 607 and I found enough French to compliment him on son belle voiture. Lovely creamy leather seats on it.
Bought some internet, coffee and cheesecake at a nearby Starbucks and caught up with my email. I even managed to catch a bit of Jim Hawkins' show, but not the BookCrossing update - I had to scamper for my train.
As much as one can scamper when laden down with three or four hefty bags and a tummy full of chesecake, anyway.
Caught it with a minute or two to spare, managed to hoist my big bag onto the overhead rack, and settled down with my Moleskine as we made our way out through the suburbs. Before I knew it, we were in le pays, fields vert and villages straight out of two centuries ago. Picturesque ain't in it - these were fair dinkum dripping with atmosphere, and this time I don't mean le fragrance.
I lapped it up. Farmhouses with half-timbers and undulating roofs. Ruined monasteries on the ridges and delightful little churches in the middle of every village. Utterly gorgeous.
Caen came up soon enough. I hadn't been able to book a battlefield tour, or transport to St Malo to catch my ferry, but I could hire a car for the same amount. A tiny car. A manual car. A left-hand drive car.
It was with some trepidation that I fronted up to Avis across from the gare. A quick look at my drivers licence and credit card, and they wheeled out a tiny Opel - just enough room for me and my bags. I was kind of hoping they'd upgrade me to a decent-sized car for the same price. An automatic car. A right-hand drive car. Alas!
Somehow I managed to cram everything in and set off in la mode Australien, comme un kangaroo! I wasn't game to try a left turn for a while, and I made a slow tour of some of the less interesting parts of Caen at the head of a procession before I managed to find the ring road and then the highway to Bayeux. I even got up to 110kmh for a short space. Nervewracking stuff, and I'm sure people were duly impressed at the way I indicated changes in direction with my wipers, the stalks on the steering wheel being on unfamiliar sides. Hell, everything except the pedals was on the wrong side!
Bayeux was difficult, I've got to say. I had absolutely no idea where I was going, despite the maps I'd carefully printed out back home. The ring road whooshed me straight past the railway line (I couldn't see if there was a station there) and when I turned off for the town centre, I found myself in a system of narrow, one-way streets where I was leading a slow procession that occasionally stalled at intersections. So when I found the municipal car park in what I took to be the middle of town, I pulled in, found a "granny"* and propped.
I bought an hour, looked around, found the tourist information centre (a long and picturesque ramble from where the signs indicated it might be) and asked about the Hotel de Gare. I'd researched this one back in Australia as having cheap rooms, maybe twice as expensive as the "Family Home" hostel, but considering the variety of reviews of the hostel and the fact that I hadn't been able to contact them, and my mixed experience in the Paris hostel, I wanted to try the hotel first. The young lady behind the counter gave me a brochure and marked out a route to the station. I always ask if they "parlez-vous Francais?" but then communicate in French as much as possible. It gives me a chance to let my schoolboy French out of the box where it has lain for thirty years and I figure that the locals probably appreciate me making the effort. The last thing I want to do is play the arrogant tourist expecting everyone to talk my language.
I thanked her "Merci, ma belle choux" and set off. Passed the building where the Bayeux Tapestry is displayed. Might take a look in later on. Crossed the ring road to le hotel, and in the foyer found a selection of people who could speak English and could pass me onto the next person. Hmmm. Anyway, the final chap couldn't understand that even if the price was something I was happy with, that I'd want to stay in a double room when single rooms might well be available in the middle of town. Cripes, mate, I'm not going to wander the narrow cobblestones looking for a single room which may or may not be a few Euros cheaper when my fall back is a bunk in a dorm in a dodgy hostel, which is not that much cheaper anyway. He took me upstairs and showed me the room. A small, plain, clean and tidy room with a double bed. Looked like heaven to me. And they had a car park. He could stop trying to talk me out of it anytime he wanted, I was sold.
Maybe the French think a double bed is wasted on a single man. I dunno. I wasn't going to share my bed with anything but a book, but the thought of a comfortable and private room for a good price was a nobrainer for me.
I retrieved my car, found my way back - an adventure that I won't bother to describe except that I find it a lot easier to walk along Bayeux's narrow one way streets than to attempt to navigate a car through them - and unpacked. Lord, how happy I am now!
And even happier after a beer and a coffee and "le plat du jour" which turned out to be fried chicken and chips, but cooked in a way that bore no resemblance to anything found in Australia. The skerricks of onion adhering to the chicken skin were a dead giveaway. Absolutely delicious, every morsel, and I wolfed it down.
Very happy here. It's plain, cheap, and comfortable. Full of character and colour. Breakfast included and I'm happy to eat my dinner in the bar as a "plat du jour" with a cold beer.
*a "granny" is two empty car parking spaces nose to nose - you pull into one, mocve forward into the other and you may move off afterwards without having to reverse
What I want to know is why they don't make the whole glass or bottle taste like that.
Anyway, I've just had the first mouthful of a cold Heineken, and it hit the spot all right. Normally I don't drink by myself, but this time I'll make an exception.
Here I am in the bar of the Hotel du Gare in Bayeux. No internet, but it's a comfortable place to sit down and write about the day, the very long day I've had.
First of all, my hostel in Paris, the Auberge International des Jeunesse, sucks. Maybe it is the room, but I don't think so. For a start, the whole thing shuts down between 1000 and 1500. You want to have a jet-lag recovery or a nap after lunch, tough - you go stretch out on a parc bench for five heures.
I arrived about 0900, very tired after a long flight from Hong Kong via Siberia, St Petersburg and Copenhagen (or at least, eleven kilometres from those places). I had schlepped my luggage, my very heavy and cumbersome luggage, on the train from Charles de Gaulle, through four transfers and multiple flights of steps. At peak hour. I was a puddle of sweat, and what I wanted was a shower, a shave and a snooze, not neccessarily in that order.
I was feeling very Parisian - a bit whiffy and with a fashionable dix-et-sept cent shadow - even if my clothes were totally non-fashionable. I would have needed faded jeans and a roguish look to fit in.
Anyway, the young lady gave me a bit of paper, said "come back at three" and directed my perspiring self to the luggage room. Friends, you have heard of the sewers of Paris? Well, my hostel had its own catacombs, and they began with a narrow stone spiral staircase. How I managed to traverse it without wedging myself solid somewhere along the way, I'll never know. It was very atmospheric, and I use that word in its literal sense.
I took advantage of the dungeon's privacy to shift my shirt and fill my backpack with everything I needed. No way was I going to leave my laptop there!
Place de la Bastille, Notre Dame, le Pantheon, Jardins des Luxemnbourg, Musee des Moyen Age (or at least the outside), Boulevarde Saint Michel, an Internet cafe and Shakespeare & Co where I released a book in that famous bookshop. And home again.
I wanted to see the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, but I was buggered. I needed a kip urgently.
(Intermission in my bar in Bayeux - cafe au lait, and I managed to find the right money, but there's no prizes for understanding French here. It's taken for granted! Bloody good coffee, too.)
So I had a shower and a shave. OK, the room was on the third floor (and I had to lug my bags up four flights from that blasted basement), but it was the shower that took the biscuit. The controls were unfamiliar, but even when I exploited the full functionality, all I got was a trickle of water - lukewarm if not cold water - dribbling down from a wonky shower head about three centimetres from the wall. And it turned itself off every ten seconds. What I wanted was a steaming spray of hot stuff that I could luxuriate and sing the Marseillaise under.
I got my head down on my top bunk for a couple of hours, and then at dusk I wandered off down the rue in my shorts and t-shirt, everyone else rugged up against the chill of printemps, must have been all of 15 degrees. Humph, wimpish Parisians! Found a coin-op laundry and gave my washing a rinse, as the laundry dispenseur wasn't working, or at least not in a fashion that I could fathom. Internet cafe next door where I spent a pleasant hour.
Oh yeah, French keyboards aren't the same as English. The letters are swithced around, they have the squiggly characters in place of the numbers, and I am not exaggerating when I tell you I spent a whole minute searching for a question mark. I had almost decided that Parisans knew everything, when I found it hidden away in a corner.
A cold slab of pizza from le boulangerie across le rue as my clothes got a second go through the drier. Mmmm.
And then I got some serious sleep. The noises of my room-mates did not disturb me, though the fact that we were four in a closed room with duvets the only bedclothes was not my idea of sleeping comfort. Judging by the wy they looked, they came from a warmer climate and were happy with the heat.
I awoke for good about four in the morning, and because I had planned ahead, I was able to quickly change, grab my small pack and tripod and set off into the Paris predawn.
Talk about your atmosphere. It was cold, like about zero degrees, maybe less. Dark and the only folk around were latenight revellers herking into the gutters and supporting each other down the avenue. I loved it. No tourists and very little traffic. Took a few time exposure photographs of the rues, et Notre Dame.
And then I got lost. My $2.50 compass had become detached from its lanyard a day or so ago, and I'd lost the compass itself in the train coming in. Lost in France. I needed to head south and west along the Rue Saint Germain and Rue de Babylon, but after a while I wasn't sure of anything except that I was somewhere in the Latin Quarter. Honestly, I had no idea of direction at all.
But eventually I worked it all out. Napoleon's tomb at the Hotel des Invalides just before dawn and the sun rose as I photographed the Eiffel Tower on the Champs de Mars a few streets away. I almost had to pinch myself to believe that I was standing here looking at the thing. I didn't have to force a smile on a timed exposure - I was over the moon!
Bonjour to three soldats patrolling around the base of la tour avec submachine guns and wary faces. Cherry blossoms in a nearby parc. Crossed the Seine as the city began to wake up. Joggers and dogs straining under lampposts.
Lost again on the way to the Arc de Triomphe and I had to walk all the way up les Champs Elysees, time running out before breakfast back at the hostel finished and the thing itself closed.
Biut I made it. The Arc had a school group of teenagers chattering and horseplaying around the tomb of the inconnu soldat. Left a book there and then caught le Metro all the way to the Gare du Lyon, five minutes walk from my hostel.
Baguette and coffee, cold shower and hot shave, and then a taxi from the rank outside McDonalds to Gare St Lazare. The taxi driver had a beautiful Peugeot 607 and I found enough French to compliment him on son belle voiture. Lovely creamy leather seats on it.
Bought some internet, coffee and cheesecake at a nearby Starbucks and caught up with my email. I even managed to catch a bit of Jim Hawkins' show, but not the BookCrossing update - I had to scamper for my train.
As much as one can scamper when laden down with three or four hefty bags and a tummy full of chesecake, anyway.
Caught it with a minute or two to spare, managed to hoist my big bag onto the overhead rack, and settled down with my Moleskine as we made our way out through the suburbs. Before I knew it, we were in le pays, fields vert and villages straight out of two centuries ago. Picturesque ain't in it - these were fair dinkum dripping with atmosphere, and this time I don't mean le fragrance.
I lapped it up. Farmhouses with half-timbers and undulating roofs. Ruined monasteries on the ridges and delightful little churches in the middle of every village. Utterly gorgeous.
Caen came up soon enough. I hadn't been able to book a battlefield tour, or transport to St Malo to catch my ferry, but I could hire a car for the same amount. A tiny car. A manual car. A left-hand drive car.
It was with some trepidation that I fronted up to Avis across from the gare. A quick look at my drivers licence and credit card, and they wheeled out a tiny Opel - just enough room for me and my bags. I was kind of hoping they'd upgrade me to a decent-sized car for the same price. An automatic car. A right-hand drive car. Alas!
Somehow I managed to cram everything in and set off in la mode Australien, comme un kangaroo! I wasn't game to try a left turn for a while, and I made a slow tour of some of the less interesting parts of Caen at the head of a procession before I managed to find the ring road and then the highway to Bayeux. I even got up to 110kmh for a short space. Nervewracking stuff, and I'm sure people were duly impressed at the way I indicated changes in direction with my wipers, the stalks on the steering wheel being on unfamiliar sides. Hell, everything except the pedals was on the wrong side!
Bayeux was difficult, I've got to say. I had absolutely no idea where I was going, despite the maps I'd carefully printed out back home. The ring road whooshed me straight past the railway line (I couldn't see if there was a station there) and when I turned off for the town centre, I found myself in a system of narrow, one-way streets where I was leading a slow procession that occasionally stalled at intersections. So when I found the municipal car park in what I took to be the middle of town, I pulled in, found a "granny"* and propped.
I bought an hour, looked around, found the tourist information centre (a long and picturesque ramble from where the signs indicated it might be) and asked about the Hotel de Gare. I'd researched this one back in Australia as having cheap rooms, maybe twice as expensive as the "Family Home" hostel, but considering the variety of reviews of the hostel and the fact that I hadn't been able to contact them, and my mixed experience in the Paris hostel, I wanted to try the hotel first. The young lady behind the counter gave me a brochure and marked out a route to the station. I always ask if they "parlez-vous Francais?" but then communicate in French as much as possible. It gives me a chance to let my schoolboy French out of the box where it has lain for thirty years and I figure that the locals probably appreciate me making the effort. The last thing I want to do is play the arrogant tourist expecting everyone to talk my language.
I thanked her "Merci, ma belle choux" and set off. Passed the building where the Bayeux Tapestry is displayed. Might take a look in later on. Crossed the ring road to le hotel, and in the foyer found a selection of people who could speak English and could pass me onto the next person. Hmmm. Anyway, the final chap couldn't understand that even if the price was something I was happy with, that I'd want to stay in a double room when single rooms might well be available in the middle of town. Cripes, mate, I'm not going to wander the narrow cobblestones looking for a single room which may or may not be a few Euros cheaper when my fall back is a bunk in a dorm in a dodgy hostel, which is not that much cheaper anyway. He took me upstairs and showed me the room. A small, plain, clean and tidy room with a double bed. Looked like heaven to me. And they had a car park. He could stop trying to talk me out of it anytime he wanted, I was sold.
Maybe the French think a double bed is wasted on a single man. I dunno. I wasn't going to share my bed with anything but a book, but the thought of a comfortable and private room for a good price was a nobrainer for me.
I retrieved my car, found my way back - an adventure that I won't bother to describe except that I find it a lot easier to walk along Bayeux's narrow one way streets than to attempt to navigate a car through them - and unpacked. Lord, how happy I am now!
And even happier after a beer and a coffee and "le plat du jour" which turned out to be fried chicken and chips, but cooked in a way that bore no resemblance to anything found in Australia. The skerricks of onion adhering to the chicken skin were a dead giveaway. Absolutely delicious, every morsel, and I wolfed it down.
Very happy here. It's plain, cheap, and comfortable. Full of character and colour. Breakfast included and I'm happy to eat my dinner in the bar as a "plat du jour" with a cold beer.
*a "granny" is two empty car parking spaces nose to nose - you pull into one, mocve forward into the other and you may move off afterwards without having to reverse
