Recently in travel Category
Yesterday I went to Tours with Sheena. When we got there we were like "Wow, what a cool, gorgeous city! Let's just walk around the city all day." So we did that and then we were kind of over it and ready to go home. A lot of stuff was closed since it was a holiday, Toussaints. We went out to lunch at some random semi-British style restaurant that reminded me of somewhere Kevin's parents would take us. There was lots of carefully selected kitsch everywhere, like a big rhinoceros head. Sheena ordered a "salade mexicaine." I finally got to have mussels, fries and beer. It was awesome. Usually when you order something that has mussels in it you get like two mussels and you always wish you had more mussels and less pasta or whatever. But when you have a giant cauldron of mussels a la charantaise (steamed in onions, white wine and cream), there is no way you could possibly wish for more mussels. It was pure heaven. The combination with the fries and beer worked really well and made me feel all old-fashioned and cool. It also made me take a mental note to buy a vegetable when I returned to Poitiers. It's been a while. After lunch we got freakishly strong coffee that cracked me out for the rest of the day and night.
We wandered around for a couple more hours in the streets. There was a main street that ran into the Hotel de Ville that had lots of closed shops, cyclists and rollerbladers. It was really bright, sunny and glarey and when you looked down the sidestreets it looked like San Francisco. We went to a neat store and got stuff to send our boyfriends, then found a park and watched the fashionable families with their cute kids playing around. In the United States, there seems to be an idea that when you're a young, single adult, life is fabulous and fun, and then when you get married and have a family it's a sort of resignation that turns everything into mundane drudgery. You are no longer good-looking and life is no longer fun or exciting. But in France, they make it seem like family life is just a new, different kind of fabulousness. Here, having a family is cool. Families in the U.S. aren't cool, unless you're a painfully chic urbanite for whom your child in designer diapers is merely an accessory, and that's not really cool either. French parents with four kids are still fit and fashionable like in a J. Crew catalogue or something, and their well-groomed and well-behaved children seem to add to the sense of urban flair and charm rather than to diminish it. Of course I'm stereotyping and not getting at what I'm really trying to say, but there's something, I can't put my finger on it, that is different about families here.
Sheena wanted to see some castle and I agreed to be agreeable and because we had to at least do something, but I wasn't really into the idea. Luckily she wasn't that motivated about it and we didn't end up going. I feel like I ought to be interested in historical stuff like castles, but boastful displays of tacky, excessive wealth (amassed at the expense of the vast majority of everybody else who was working their butt off for nothing) just don't do it for me. In the train station, when Sheena went to look at a display of history tourism pamphlets, I gravitated toward the Selecta machine to see what kinds of weird French junk food were offered. There was Monster Munch, Tiger bars, and the ever-present Kinder bars. Despite their funny German appeal, I really don't get why Kinder bars are so popular. Tiger bars are better.
This has become my theme song, not primarily because it's appropriate, although that too, but also just because it's such a rad song. It always comes on at ridiculous moments when I'm running, and makes them precious moments. I'll be like, "I love this hill! I'm gonna miss running up this hill!"
Last night I had the obligatory missed flights/personal belongings spread across security checkpoints dream. I'm a little bit nervous about flying, but I'm more scared of leaving my laptop on the plane than something catastrophic happening. Actually, that would be catastrophic. I've been looking forward to today for a long time, but in reality it's probably not going to be that much fun. The sad goodbye, the airport chaos, then being stuck on an airplane for 12 hours. I won't even get there till tomorrow! But whatever, I'm still really excited. I'm going to read like 10 magazines!
After the least fluffy pancakes of my entire life challenged my beliefs about the limits of toughness and established permanent residence in my digestive tract, Kevin drove us up to Lake Padden. The seemingly remote mountain haven was only about five minutes out of downtown. We read and I ran around the lake with all the other athletic, outdoorsy women and their dogs. I refueled from my workout with a refreshing White Russian at the Black Cat, and we talked about the benefits of moderate drinking while watching the sun set over the bay.
Following some deliberation we checked into the Fairhaven Village Inn, which, though two or three times more expensive than the Aloha, was about 10 times more comfortable. It was all, "We've arrived." There was all of that nice hotel stuff: a big, clean, room, a nice bathroom with all kinds of tiny bottles of lotion and stuff, terry cloth bathrobes, and a continental breakfast with fresh waffles and fruit and all that. The hotel was new, but many of its decorative fixtures had been recovered from the building that previously stood on the site that was all old and stuff, maybe Victorian era, like much of Bellingham and especially the Fairhaven area.
To make up for the swankness of the hotel, we went out for burritos at Casa Que Pasa, the total gringo hippie burrito restaurant, which was actually damn good, and followed up with a drink at the Triple B, where Bellingham's 12 hipsters drank to '80s music and showed off their style. I drunkenly ranted to Kevin about everything I learned from being a hipster, then after one drink we returned to the hotel and watched cable.
