When last we left our heroine, she was preparing to depart for Paris, via London and a magical bus. I hardly know where to begin with such a superlatively fantastic saga. I suppose I should start where I left off: Thursday morning.
As it happened, Lauren was perfectly capable of fetching her own mother from the bus station. They nearly passed me on the street without noticing (which would have meant I would have been left sitting at the train station for hours wondering where either of them were) but I spotted them (with my glasses off no less) and we all went back to Trinity. I bopped around the room for a bit and then went over to Courtney's room just to escape what basically amounted to two Laurens in my room. I helped her pack, fixed her iPod mini and learned all sorts of things I absolutely never wanted to know about the common fly. It's horrifying and I won't repeat a word of it so don't ask.
Finally, it was about three and I knew Mike would be out of class shortly so I went back to my room to wait for him. We had all sort of decided to use my room as the meeting point so I was excited that I would be off to Pairs within the hour. I blared my peppy 80s music and did some more quality bopping around. Slowly, everyone started to appear and I just got more and more euphoric. Lauren's obnoxious request that we leave and meet up somewhere else because she wanted to take a nap couldn't even quash my mood. I was pumped and we were going to Paris. Paris, France. It was too good to be believed.
We took a double-decker bus from Oxford to London and positioned ourselves at the very front of the upper level. It was like a ride in Disneyland sitting up there, watching as the bus darted in and out of traffic always nearly hitting some hapless bicker or pedestrian. It trucked along through the English countryside, resplendent in the sunshine and abounding with numerous cows and sheep. Courtney busied herself with her camera and we all merrily joked around the whole way to London. We finally pulled into the city proper after driving about half and hour through London's very own Suburbia and it was a thrill unto itself. One of the best experiences of traveling is the abrupt feeling you occasionally get when you just suddenly know where you are. This happened to me quite a few times over the course of the trip and it's a wonderful feeling of familiarity and competence. The bus was weaving through rotaries like there was no tomorrow and sped past Notting Hill Gate and then, all of a sudden, we were at Hyde Park in Knightsbridge and I just knew where I was. It was like a mini-homecoming.
We all hopped off the bus and found ourselves near Victoria Cross Bus Terminal, where we had to pick up our bus to Paris in nearly four hours. We were pretty ravenous by this point (Oxford provides no lunch for us poor students) so we headed into a nearby mall and finally decided on a place called Molly O'Grady's, an Irish pub. Mike and I split a pint and we all had excellent hamburgers. More hilarity with Courtney's lack of photographic ability ensued and then we wandered around for a bit (and did an impromptu performance of "The Jet Song" from West Side Story) until it was time to return to Victoria Cross. There we checked in, stocked up on provisions (lots of water and candy bars) and waited for the bus.
It wasn't a long wait and soon we all piled into this new bus. It was only one storey but we still got the front seats. Apparently no one wants them because there is no leg room (as I would come to realize over the course of the ride). But it was a fantastic way to ride. Everything opened up before us on the road and we had a great view of just about everything. The bus driver was a small Italian man who spoke no French and no English and had a penchant for European techno music. The entire way out of London we listened to the Euro-beats and Courtney and I danced in our seats. It was our own little rave. We passed over the Thames and saw the London Eye and MI-5 headquarters. It was extremely exciting.
After leaving London, things slowed down and the sun finally set. It stays light forever in Europe, starting at about four in the morning and going strong until at least ten at night. It throws the body off a little bit since you think it's about five judging by the light and come to find out it's 10pm. It's probably why it's so easy to stay up late here. Courtney and I talked while the boys listened to Eddie Izzard off of Mike's iPod. The moon was gigantic and orange as we drove towards it and we amused ourselves by trying to photograph it. It was impossible but we walked away with many artsy-night-highway shots. Finally we drifted off to sleep a bit.
The bus driver, as I said, spoke no English and no French. His only company was his little GPS machine which periodically barked things at him in Italian. He was very calm about the whole thing but having a machine shout incomprehensible directions every so often cut down on my ability to sleep very well. Courtney was out cold when the machine shouted something and jolted me awake. Blearily, I looked around. We came around a corner and were at some kind of well-light terminal yard below us. As I continued to look around, I finally noticed the gigantic cliff face behind us. More interestingly and most importantly, the cliff was white. I immediately shook Courtney and she groggily came about. "The White Cliffs of Dover!" I was whispered excitedly. "I thought you might want to see them." She was appropriately excited and whipped out her camera.
All four of us were now awake a bit confused. We had phoned the bus company and had been informed that Euroline buses took the Eurotunnel from London to Paris. But we were at Dover and this seemed to suggest a boat to Calais was in our future. This excited me to no end since I've always had a strange fascination with Calais since reading The Three Musketeers. I think it would be the epitome of romantic adventure to shout back to someone as you're being dragged off in another direction, "Meet me in Calais!" I'm also a fan of ferries so I was quite excited about the increasingly real possibility that we would be on a boat that night.
However, logistically, it didn't make sense that this gigantic tour bus could be on a boat. The word "ferry" conjures up images of a little man in a rowboat happily rowing people across the channel while whistling or telling old yarns. Additionally, Courtney has horrible motion sickness and was petrified of having to take the ferry. I was torn between the thrill that I might be in Calais and concern that Courtney might throw up on me before that happened. Soon, however, it became quite clear that there was absolutely no Eurotunnel in this part of Dover and that we were shortly going to be somehow ferried across the English Channel. We were crossing the English Channel from Dover to Calais in the middle of the night under the cloak of darkness and the gigantic orange moon. I couldn't have been more ensorcelled with the whole situation even if Alexandre Dumas himself stepped out and led me up the gangplank.
The bus pulled into the gargantuan ferry boat behind a bus full of a marching band and we were all gestured at by the bus driver to get off. We were led into a stairwell and went up two flights before the whole thing opened up into a cruise ship. "It's like they felt like rewarding us for our business and were like 'Here's a cruise!'" Mike commented about the whole thing later. We were giddy and punchy from lack of sleep and crowed at our good fortune. Mike threw an arm around me and we all just laughed at the sudden turn for the more luxurious our trip at taken. There was a casino and a bar and a place to buy food and, best of all, the stormy desk with it's perpetual torrent of sea spray and wind that quite literally knocked my hat off. It was exhilarating to climb up to the highest deck and trust my body into the wind as I clung to the railing. The wind tore through my hair and the spray drenched my face but I didn't care. It was wonderful all the same.
After a bit, Courtney and I returned below where we had left Mike and Yuan with our bags. Mike happily leaped up to go look at the deck since apparently Yuan had broken out a deck of cards and was subjecting him to a math game. So they both went off onto the deck and I attempted to distract Courtney from the rising bile with small talk and a thrilling game of solitaire. Mike and Yuan eventually returned, the former with a bottle of gin and the latter with a bottle of rum, both from the on-board duty-free shop. Courtney was completely focused on staring out the window and not being sick by this point so we left her be. Mike and I started to get some concrete plans in order for the next few days (in Paris!). The whole ferry ride was surprisingly short and, before we knew it or could really process that we were on a boat, it was time to go back down to the bus.
We drove out of Calais and into the French countryside. It was completely black on all sides so we couldn't admire it as we had the English. So we all settled down and tried to get some sleep since, by this point, it was somewhere around two or three in the morning. This was our hotel for the night and we had to make the best of it. I had great trouble sleeping and wished fervently for a neck pillow but didn't have anything. I fidgeted around, catching little seven-minute stretches of sleep before being uncomfortably jarred awake by something or other. I kept giving up and my neck just got more and more sore as the sun started to rise. The countryside was monotonous as it came into view and I wanted to sleep more than anything.
I dozed until Paris. Our 7am entrance into Paris was anticlimactic at best since the bus depot was located in the 20th Arrondissement, which is almost outside the city proper. But we were there, in Paris and that gave me a little adrenalin to run on. We got ourselves onto the proper Metro and I almost dozed off on the ride over to the Hotel Tamaris. We got out and found ourselves on the Avenue de Dr. Arnold Netter. Our Hotel was no where in sight. As it happened, had we merely crossed the boulevard before us and walked about five feet, we would have seen both the correct road and the sign for the Hotel Tamaris, but, instead, we wandered off, sporadically asking random people for directions. Yuan abruptly knew bits of French and we would accost people off the street but then not understand what they were saying back. I was extremely shy and nervous about using my French so we didn't really get anywhere. Worse still, no one seemed to have heard of either the street or the hotel. When I tried to speak French, they didn't understand what I was saying. It was quite demoralizing. Finally, a group of Middle Eastern bakers directed us to a Chinese magazine shop that they thought would help. I went up to grandfatherly proprietor of the place and asked once more where the hotel was. He had no idea but drew us a map that would get us to the street the hotel was supposed to be on. I talked to him in extremely broken French and he just nodded and finally handed me the map. There was a little "x" in the lower left-hand corner with the label, "You're here." He knew English.
Feeling more than a little foolish, we left the shop and took the roundabout way to the street which eventually led us to about 100 feet from Dr. Arnold Netter's street. There was the Hotel Tamaris and we all trudged in, hoping things we would easier now that we had at least found the hotel.
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