A Cold Place to Be

Dec 16, 2008
Lille, France

Dear Blog,

Last Thursday I took the tram into Lille at 4 o'clock. Michelle's train was scheduled to come in at ten. I wanted to give myself plenty of time. Six hours seemed like enough. But what to do...I couldn't just hang out outside; Northern France is a cold place to be in December. Wondering, I took the second right from Lille Flandres to a sandwich shop I knew. I wanted to solicit the advice of the man who shaves the Kebab meat. He suggested that I buy a sandwich. Who's he working for? I wondered. But I didn't have time to figure it out before my sandwich was ready. I poked at it a few times with a tiny fork, and discovering no new ideas between the bread, I ate it. With mathematical precision, too: For every four parts kebab that went in my mouth, 6 parts smeared onto my hands or face. And that diabolical sandwich man only gave me one napkin. Not enough, Monsieur! Thinking unnaturally fast, I went to a book shop and handled the paperbacks until my hands were covered in only a thin layer of sauce. By this time I was in the Books in English section, so I picked up a couple and found a chair next to an olive skinned man with a closely shaved head. I noticed he was reading a Cartesian treatise. I gave him a fat stare and he pretended not to notice. He knew the game, this one. I sat down and began reading something about a professor sleeping in a pile of leaves. Surely You're Joking! I thought. And then I'm so clever, which was just patently untrue, so I laughed. The man next to me looked up, studied me and my book, and then asked what I was reading. It's about a physicist. And it's funny? I shrugged. He was a funny guy. Monsieur then decided my face was familiar. Hadn't he and I had met before? Yes. He was sure of it. You're from London, he explained, on holiday in Lille for three months. O. Right. Well. He was only a previous meeting, an ocean, and a month away from the truth, within a reasonable margin of error, so I let it slide. We talked a while longer, awkwardly, until the bookstore closed and I bade my new old friend au revoir.

Outside the clock on the Commerce Tower hung like an unripe fruit. Only 7:30? If anyone would have been there I would have complained. But lesson learned. You don't need to be six hours early to pick up a girl from a train station. I looked around. The moon shone down through the clouds like a phosphorescent pupil in a black iris, the universe a giant cyclops, me a pawn in a particularly long and drawn out game of chess. Your move, the cyclops universe seemed to whisper. Pawn to giant supermarket! I loitered in the isles, poked at the soft breads, pinched at the hard, and established an intellectual rapport with a 75 Euro crayfish. I left the store with a bag of peanuts and a bottle of water. I picked up a newspaper and walked to the train station. I found a corner, sat on the floor, pulled out the peanuts, the water, spread the newspaper over my lap to read, and shrunk into my coat. A train station in Northern France is a cold place to be on a December evening.

It wasn't long before I noticed a man in gray clothes and pink skin looking at me. I kept reading my paper. It wasn't much longer before I noticed he was walking towards me. I kept staring at the newspaper. In fact, it seemed quite sudden that he was standing over me. I looked up.

"Vous endormez ici? Are you sleeping here?" He asked.
What? No. I'm waiting for someone.
"D'accord. Alright." He didn't look convinced. He held out a package of hot dogs "Les voulez-vous? Do you want these?"
My brows furrowed. Non. Merci.

Then he walked away. What just happened? I wondered. But in my heart, I knew. I had just been mistaken for a bum. I wasn't sure how to feel, so I responded with bemused amusement; I laughed. But lesson learned. With a wrinkled wardrobe, a home-job haircut, and such an informal demeanor as mine, you shouldn't blanket yourself in newspaper, lest you suffer by the inferences of others.

I stood up in what I hoped would be a dignified manner, though it seems Dignity is too haughty a sophisticate to be seen fraternizing with a man of my posture and profile. I slouched over to a nearby McDonalds. It was my last resort. In France, as in America, McDonald's is a seething hub of degeneracy, idiocy, and high decibel garrulousness. I merely wanted to trade a Euro for a coffee and a warm place to sit, but the true price was much higher: a possibly fatal exposure to the most virulent collection of pockmarked humanity in the city. In my haste to leave, I dropped a pen under a table. A man succumbing to the toxic effluvia of the crowd gasped and pointed to where it fell, but in retreat you let the dead lie where they fall. It wasn't my pen, anyway.

Not long after, Michelle's train arrived. Finally! I walked down the platform, scanning faces. I saw the one love, but its lips were moving. She was talking! With a man! What's going on here? I wondered. I put my detective's face on and let them walk past. I tailed them for a few steps, but didn't learn anything interesting. Bored, I slipped up abreast with Michelle then slipped my arm around her shoulder. She was surprised. She said au revoir to the mysterious man, and suddenly we were alone, together. She excitedly explained that she had just held a conversation, all in French, for an entire hour, and it had come easily. She was as happy as a song bird on a spring morning, her gold plumage radiating brilliantly in the cold, dreary terminal. I took her back to my cage.

The night passed.
Dawn came.
Dawn went.
Morning took her
back to the train.

But I was there too, with my feet propped up on the seat in front of me. Brussels is just half an hour from Lille by train. And I'd been hearing good things about the waffles in Belgium. Michelle and I were deep in some horribly interesting conversation about French grammar when all of a sudden a conductor appeared out of nowhere. He told me to move my feet and demanded to see our tickets. Fine. There, jerk. He rubbed a wand over our tickets which nullified them at Brussels-Midi Station, so that's where we got off.

It was only a short walk to the hotel, so as a lengthener, we started off in the wrong direction. After a while a map was consulted, the landmarks pondered, and 180 degrees turned. In our new direction the wind was at our backs, good time was made, affording us a stop to admire a large, brass horn near a busy street. I sang Patsy Cline's greatest hit through it for the pleasure of the other pedestrians, indeed the Bruxellois at large, though it was largely ignored or considered annoying.

The hotel was fine. Unremarkable, really. Well, remarkable enough to say that it was unremarkable. A place to set our bags down. I wanted to fill the ashtray with peanuts to make it feel more like a party, but the bag ripped and the nuts spilled into the bed, all over the floor, and into Michelle's bag. More of mess than a party. So we left. To Grand Place, the town square. A nativity scene-cum-pigeon roost wasn't attracting much attention, hidden behind the giant Christmas tree. Even the tree was boring. I mean, it was a fine tree and well trimmed, but it had to compete with the large number of glowing, growling, hooting sticks planted around the square. They looked like giant, stiff grass stalks with rectangular tips of glowing wheat berries, and they were all belching the sounds of the Amazon: bird calls and monkey howls. I…What…Uh…huh… We thought, then walked away.

Michelle likes to experience a city through its Christmas Markets, so we wandered through several, or maybe it was just one that we kept stumbling on from different directions. In between the booths of one (the?) market, a man accepting donations for the Salvation Army tugged the heartstrings of my Michelle, so she forced me to make a donation, which put me on both sides of charity in less than twenty four hours. At some point we wandered into the Asian District. Michelle found brown sugar at a Chinese market. A store worker explained: "This is sugar. You can mix it in your tea or coffee. It's good." You learn something new every day!

Night had come, bringing with it an uncomfortable frigidity, so we pointed ourselves back toward Grand Place and an Oriental pastry shop I wanted to sit in. But ho! Things were a bit different in Grand Place the second time around. The growling light sticks weren't growling anymore, they were dancing! Pulsing and changing colors to the rhythm of Christmas Carols, we learned that these were the Electrabelle Nights. When the dance ended, a horde of bubbles was unleashed upon the crowd of dazzled spectators.

We could have watched it all night. And we certainly took enough pictures to make it seem as if we had. But I was adamant that we visit that pastry shop. It wasn't far away. We ordered two expensive pots of tea, a white, moon-shaped, sugared-covered something, and a hookah. We sat, drinking, eating, and smoking peach flavored charcoal, completely content with our lot in life as we watched the train of shivering people steam past the window. Who knows what we talked about or how we made the decision to go to Amsterdam the next day.

We stayed long enough the next morning to take advantage of the hotel’s complimentary breakfast, to pack our bags, and to stomp to bits the last of the remaining peanuts on the floor. Then we put ourselves on the 11:15 to Amsterdam! What a picture that place is. Surreal. It’s so beautiful you don't believe it. And the Dutch, well, they're a genial bunch. We found a sketchy hostel with the same price, Michelle observed, as a stereo. It was downtown, just to the west of the Red Light District. An interesting place. It’s got a vibe like something from the distant past, the distant future, and Saigon all mixed together. A place where women in bikinis shake their fleshy wares in windows, and if you like what you see, well, it’s yours for a fee. A place where men on the street offer you cocaine and ecstasy while the police patrol disinterestedly only a few yards away.

Fortunately the Red Light District is only a very tiny portion of Amsterdam. Unfortunately it attracts and excites idiots, who make problems and create a buzz. The rest of Amsterdam seemed a peaceful, sporty place. The Dutch ride their bikes everywhere, keep big beautiful parks, and enjoy peanut butter and coffee creamer. Michelle stocked up.

Amsterdam is home to many fine museums and attractions. The Van Gogh Museum, Anne Frank’s house, the Rijksmuseum (exhibiting a fantastic collection of diamond encrusted human skulls), the Heineken Brewery. All of which we wished we would have been willing to pay to go into. But we weren’t. So Amsterdam’s art and culture and beer tours were left for our less stingy cohorts and Amsterdam, for us, was all shop hopping to get in from the outside. Holland is a cold place to be in December.

On the train home I told Michelle stories about my friends. George once saved a beached whale. Jerry had been delivering mail for Newman but got caught because he did too good a job. Elaine became the president of a company and bought George an $8000 hat, which he hid behind the couch cushion of a girl he’d just had a particularly bad date with. Kramer befriended a wig master working on Joseph and the Technicolor Dream Coat. Michelle napped. I stared out the window and wondered what Jerry was up to now. We were back in no time.

It was a good weekend. And now this is my last week in Lille. I move on to Paris Friday evening until Christmas, and then Michelle and I'll be hopping around Europe for the following three weeks. If we survive the planes, trains, and vagaries of each other's moods, we'll be back in Paris by Jan 19. Then I leave Europe on Jan 27. I'm heading back to Asia for four months. Nepal this time. You see, as a child, I never had the opportunity to spend much time in an orphanage.

So I'm going to make up for that now.

Blog,

Josh