(2009-03-12, jue) Paris – but not till after midnight
Class couldn’t go by fast enough today. It was a typical enough Thursday morning, with grammar and culture class. It was also the last class of the week, since all the students had plans to take a three-day weekend and we’d informed our professors of the same. (We’re not really bad students, though, since two of our three profs had already cancelled class due to personal plans! The third prof was still holding class session for anyone who wanted to come, so we could watch a Spanish movie on the classroom projector. I hope Jason enjoys his personal showing of Pan’s Labyrinth.) The weekly meeting after class with our program director Jorge was pretty entertaining though, what with his dramatic presentation on how we would have to run through the Madrid airport en route to Barcelona next weekend (more on that next week, after we go) while various clumps of people drifted out throughout the meeting to go catch flights out of Granada.
Laura, Karen, Ana, and I were one of the last clumps out, to take our rolly suitcases and backpacking backpacks with our nice plastic sacks filled with bocadillos and fruit down to Gran Vía and ditch this country of fried food and bulls for the weekend. Before I tell you about all our shenanigans, let me give you a quick run-down of our travel plans from door to door:
- 1408-1300 – the 3€ Gonzalez shuttle bus from Gran Vía by the cathedral
- 1645-1815 – RyanAir flight from Granada-Jaén Airport (GRX) to Barcelona (Girona) Airport (GRO)
- 1955-2140 – RyanAir flight from Barcelona (Girona) Airport (GRO) to Paris-Beauvais Airport (BVA)
- 2200-2245 – BVA airport shuttle into Paris … I forget which metro stop –
- Metro ride to Anvers
- 0030ish – Walk over to Woodstock Hostel to check in
Ten hours to ditch school and get to a hostel in another country? Not too bad, I guess! It was a fun-filled adventure, though. We met another American girl from the CLM, Alisha, at the Granada airport while sitting in the waiting area for our plane. A pretty nice girl, fun to chat with, up from Connecticut where Laura hails from. Her plans were to visit her friend Mike who’s studying in Paris, but her travel plans were just the same as ours, so we hung out for the rest of the trip into Paris.
Baggage was a bit of a problem. This is basically our first time travelling on our own, so it was definitely going to be learning experience. I think Analecia learned the most about luggage. Laura brought a mountaineering backpack; Karen and Jess, duffel bags; for me, a small rolling hand suitcase; and what of Ana? Her medium-sized rolling hand suitcase, three inches too thick for the RyanAir hand luggage restrictions. (We realized why when we got on board and saw that the overhead luggage bin really is that small on RyanAir’s economy flights.) That was the lesser of our worries though, when Ana weighed her luggage. Advisory to passengers: hand luggage must be 10.0 kg or less; checked luggage, 15.0 kg or less; overage is charged at 12€/kg. Analecia’s oversized hand luggage? 17.6 kg. Let’s pop that baby open and see what’s inside: a laptop, five pairs of shoes, a full outfit for both days in Paris, and a variety of bottles for the bathroom. Oh man. Well, let’s take out that laptop, they don’t let you check them, and redistribute some of those bottles, and throw some out, and … well, the check-in lady let her get away with checking in a 16kg bag (and, of course, paying to actually check a bag). Karen, on the other hand, pulled a sly move and yanked her fruit and sandwiches out of her carry-on bag before she weighed it. Nope, they don’t care how heavy your pockets are, and a good thing: her bag barely made the cut.
Other things to giggle about: since Jessica and I both went on the CLM-hosted bike trip yesterday and received snazzy blue CLM Sports Department t-shirts, we wore them (along with some of the other girls) to school; and since we’re in marching band, we’ve been using our little blue UDMB knapsacks that were the party favors for last fall’s band banquet; and then we ended up sitting together on the plane. We made a pretty cute set of band buddies, in our matching blue shirts with matching royal blue bags. Also reminiscent of home; the hot dog listed on the RyanAir in-flight food menu as a “Premium Hot Dog with [Heinz] Ketchup: You know … New York style.” On the flip side of the menu, you could also find 3€ one-shot “Bullseye Baggies” of whiskey, vodka, etc. (that looked like condom wrappers, honestly.)
Flash forward to Paris: we had an easy enough time finding Alisha’s friend Mike at the bus station and, with his aid and advice, getting to our metro stop in Anvers. Once we got off the metro, though, it was a bit of a cluster. Mike informed us that that part of town, in Anvers, was a tourist pocket, and darn if he wasn’t right: first we asked two French girls by the metro stop for help, but they were just visiting Paris for the weekend; and the next group of girls we asked, who incidentally spoke Spanish, were an Italian school group! C’est la vie. By dint of wandering around and trying to follow the scant directions provided by the hostel, we eventually found Rue Rodier, home to Woodstock Hostel. (P.S. I’ve been having a really tough time typing “hostel” with an “e” because, in Spanish, it’s spelled “hostal” with an “a” and there are literally hundreds of hostales in Granada.)
About one in the morning, we finally check in at Woodstock, which has a cute paint job (lots of purple and green solids) and half a VW Beetle in the lobby with bumper stickers all over it. Some guy was sitting downstairs playing guitar while another traveller surfed the web. We paid for the two nights, got the key to our room, six beds (as Laura’s friend Lisa would be joining us for the next night), got a couple slips for wifi access (which they limited to 2-hr blocks, but as many of those as you wanted), and went upstairs to dump our things and get ready for bed. “Going upstairs” entailed carefully picking our way up a slightly sagging, but still sturdy spiral staircase two stories up to the 200s. Three pairs of bunkbeds awaited us, as did a sink (with hot water!), a small terrace, and a funky painting over the beds. The toilet had its own little room, as did the shower stall (which also had a sink). All in all, it seemed a pretty typical hostel, although I was a little surprised to see the sign downstairs asking residents not to consume outside alcohol in the lobby, as it violated the hostel’s liquor license. Yay Europe!
I spent a little time outside decompressing and taking night-time photos of our neighborhood. Next door was a Thai restaurant, a boulanger (bread shop), about forty bikes, and about twenty motos. Laura joined me outside to stand around and chat while I photo’d and, while we stood on the corner, a couple walked by and started to speak to us in French. “Parlez-vous anglais?” Yes, they did: “We are ze stars of Pa-ree! You should take pictures of us for magazine!” Work it, baby, work it! They wished us a good stay in Paris.
Then, it was time for bed.