34° 21′ 24″ South Latitude, 18° 29′ 51″ East Longitude
A few photos from South Africa
Currently listening to:
The Cure
4:13 Dream
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Travel
To recap
We returned from South Africa to an apartment whose entire floor surface was littered with all the crap Julien and I had accumulated for the past two years.
After a week of head-scratching, we managed to fit everything into 3 trunks to be shipped, 4 luggages to check in for the flight back to Paris, two backpacks and two laptop cases to carry with us in the plane. We said goodbye to friends (another post on this) and bid our goodbyes to 2 years in Qatar.
We left 30°C Doha and arrived in 2°C Paris. It was a Friday night, and the peripherique was packed. It took us one hour and an extremely talkative taxi driver to get from the airport to the 15th arrondisement, as we were crashing at Julien’s cousin’s flat for a week until a room at the aparthotel we’d be staying in would be available.
After a weekend that comprised of an exhibit (From Miro to Warhol), concert tickets (Black Angels, December 8th) and various cocktails with friends (overpriced Mai Tais, chardonnays and a strange banana rhum cocktail at a snotty cafe close to the Eiffel Tower), it was time for the dirty work: apartment-hunting.
I have a lot of stories to tell about apartment-hunting, but I leave that for another post; needless to say it included 90 euros worth of phone credits trying to book appointments for apartment visits, nonstop walking under the rain and cold, numerous cups of dégueulasse McDonald’s coffee in order to use their Wifi, and a surprisingly huge number of apartments viewed that I would never dream of living in.
We are now in a hotel near La Defense. We wear creased clothes straight from our luggages. We spend our two day weekend lazing around, hanging out at FNAC, getting lost in the streets, checking out the Christmas markets. We cross our fingers for a good apartment to come our way soon, and look forward to the exciting possibilities life will bring us in the following months.
Currently listening to:
Metric
Live it Out
Fast, Dumb, Silent
An ostrich can run up to 60kms per hour. As two-toed birds, they are very fast runners. Also, they are silent animals: they make no sound, except for some squeaks when they are babies, and during mating season. They are not the brightest bulbs in town: their eyes are bigger than their brains.
Our guide rattled off these facts and information as we stared at the ostrich standing in front of us, its neck bobbing up and down like a snake, knowing that in a few minutes we were going to ride the fastest, dumbest and most silent bird in the world.
“Do you realise,” I whispered to Julien, “that we are about to ride the fastest, dumbest, and most silent bird in the world?”
“If that thing comes towards us from behind,” he whispered back, “we won’t hear a thing. We’ll be knocked over, trampled underfoot and that will be the end of us. It’ll be like being run over by poltegeists with feathers and beaks.”
We turned our attention back to the guide, who was cheerfully trying to muster some enthusiasm from the group. “All right! First, we’re going to stand on the ostrich’s egg. These are hard, thick shells, and you’ll be surprised that they can carry anyone’s weight.” A rather rotund man in our group drew in a sharp breath. We were now standing in front of a fence. In the middle of the field squatted an ostrich inside something that resembled a teepee,
“Now,” said our guide. “Let’s stay close together, shall we? I’ll lead the way with my poking stick…” She reached for a long branch with thorns sticking out on all sides, “… and if an ostrich comes running towards us in anger, I’ll use this to poke its eyes and we can run to safety.”
“Maybe we should just leave its eggs alone; that way we don’t need to poke its eyes?” I whispered to nobody in particular.
The ostrich, calm and not at all angry, moved away as our group approched her eggs. She looked bored, as if she were used to encounters with weird human beings whose sole intent was to take each other’s photos while standing on her unborn babies’ shells. The group pushed me towards the direction of the ostrich eggs when the guide asked for the first volunteer. “You’re the smallest and the lightest one of us; you go first,” they reasoned. Then they hedged behind the safety of our guide’s poking stick.
The egg didn’t break, and we had a merry time documenting the experience while the ostrich looked on lazily.
***
The ostrich we were going to ride had a sack over its head, which had a comical but disturbingly sad effect on the huge bird. It felt silly to be sorry for it, but I couldn’t help it.
“Just sit on its hump,” instructed the sunburnt man holding the ostrich steady as I climbed over and perched on the bird’s back. “Now lean back and relax.” The most unhelpful advise I’ve ever heard. The man then lay the ostrich’s feathers on my bare thighs. “All you have to do is hold on tight, yeah?”
“But won’t it hurt them to— ” I started to say, when the man whipped off the sack from the ostrich’s head and slapped its ass, and suddenly the fastest, dumbest, most silent bird awoke and ran straight towards ten of his ostrich friends as I held on to its feathers for dear life, screaming in fear and bobbing up and down awkwardly as the man hooted and shouted “Faster! Faster!” to agitate the ostrich into a frenzy.
Three loops later, legs trembling, I slid unceremoniously off the ostrich and the sack was placed over its head. It stood still.
“How was it?” Julien asked.
“You’ll see,” I told him. “Your turn.”
Currently listening to:
Death Cab for Cutie
Narrow Stairs
In South Africa
After the turbulence… the goddam turbulence… we finally landed in South Africa. It’s pretty cold here this evening (temps go down to 12 degrees in the evenings, these days, according to the weather reports, but tonight it’s a cool 19 degrees) — a welcome change from the seemingly never-ending temps in the 30s of Dohell.
Since this is a road trip, we are nervous about driving on the right hand side. It’s disorienting.
So here we are in this pretty hotel in Cape Town, freshly showered, consulting the interweb for tomorrow’s meteo. We can hardly understand their accents, and they can hardly understand ours (or just Julien’s? hehehe) but I have a feeling we’ll all get along in the next 2 weeks.
End and start again
Dukhan
Beep & Bop, my Uglydoll keychain, suntanning
Beach finds
Currently listening to:
Syd Matters
Syd Matters
The Penalty
When our plane landed in Detroit, the Americans in the flight started clapping their hands, perhaps overjoyed at the sight of snow outside the windows.
The French woman from across the aisle nudged me, showing me the card we needed to fill for customs. “Do you think we need to declare cheese or saucisson here?” I remembered I had two packs of saucisson (one for my family, one for me, hehe) in my luggage, and I shrugged and ticked the box indicating that I had meat or meat products. The lady did the same.
Bug-eyed and pissed off at the prospect of taking yet another plane, I collected my bags and handed my form to the Customs guy. “Hold on,” he said, second-glancing my form. “What’s this product you declared?”
“Saucisson,” I told him. “Dried sausage, the kind you get in France.”
“Sausages. That’s meat, eh? Hmmm.” This guy was a real rocket scientist. “Thank you for declaring this, ma’am. I’ll have to ask you to go thru that counter on your right…”
After having to explain again what saucisson was to the woman who was wearing gloves and going thru my bag, she extracted the precious saucisson packages, which were harmless and delicious, my comfort food. “Thank you for declaring these, ma’am. We really appreciate it. If you hadn’t declared them, you could have been fined up to 300 USD.” She gave me a huge, warm smile, and emphatically dumped the packages into a huge garbage can.
It took all my efforts to not scramble over the counter and retrieve them.
After the bag check, the equally-upset French woman fell into step with me. “They’ll probably be feasting on my fromage and saucisson later,” she said bitterly. As we rounded the corner, she sighed and said, “Well, at least they will have a taste of something wonderful and delicious for once, no?”
Ah, the French. You can strip them of their fromages or saucissons at customs, but they will only end up pitying American food.
Currently listening to:
Iron & Wine
The Shepherd’s Dog
In Chicago
Currently listening to:
Battles
Mirrored
Paris
I haven’t forgotten how beautiful this city is, but being here is different from remembering what it’s like. Like yesterday, when I was in the Metro, I found myself reverting to the old habits, like automatically boarding the second carriage, and taking the foldable seat next to the door. I realised how nice it was to people watch, wondering what people were thinking, making up stories of where this person was going and what kind of book he/she liked to read. Or like yesterday, at the bus stop, some people were smoking and stamping their feet to shrug off the cold, and the smell of the cold and the smoke reminded me of those winters when Julien and I would walk to the nearest tabac in the snow to buy cigs.
It started to rain as I walked to the metro station from Julien’s grandmother’s flat. I passed that little store that sells second-hand Japanese goods, then turned the corner and passed the Korean store, and looked over the building tops to see the Eiffel Tower against a backdrop of gray clouds.
I walked all the way to Rue du Commerce and had lunch at a Chinese traiteur. I sort of missed the taste of the Frenchified Chinese food, which is what I used to eat all the time when I was living in Paris and couldn’t be bothered to cook.
And then I went to a local Monoprix, where I made a tour of the aisles and found myself remembering our usual grocery list… the grilled chicken that come in those paper packs, the jambon cru, the saucisson, the crab sticks.
Browsing the alcohol section, I marveled at how different countries and cultures can be, and how we slowly adapt to wherever it is we find ourselves in, no matter how hard we try to resist. I guess that when you move around quite a bit like we do, you don’t really lose a home, but end up adding a new one to the list.
Narita airport to the hotel
In Japan, the first conversation we had was in French.
We were in the train coming from Narita Airport, warily checking our guidebook to see which station we were supposed to get off, when a Japanese man in his late twenties approached us and asked us if we needed any help. Naturally he asked us where we were from.
“If I didn’t have a shinkansen to catch for Osaka, I would have showed you to your stop,” he said apologetically in French. He then gave us directions, wished us luck, bowed slightly, and left the train at his stop.
“Damn, the people here are friendly!” I marvelled.
“Yes, they are,” Julien agreed. “The complete opposite of France.”
***
The second conversation we had with a Japanese was not in French but English… and laced with alcohol.
We had managed to get ourselves to the Higashi-Nihonbashi station and were staring at the printed directions to the hotel when a man in his late forties approached us.
“Yes! I see you are lost? Can I help you?”
Thinking of the Japanese guy in the train, we explained that we wanted to get to our hotel, and showed him our map. We could have found it ourselves, but we were moved by their friendliness.
This guy wasn’t just friendly though. He was also drunk. Taking hold of our hotel directions and never letting go, he tapped his cane several times on the floor and announced that he would take us there. “Follow me!” he roared drunkenly. “I know the way, I live not far from there!”
He led us through a maze of streets. It was about 9 in the evening, and all the stores were closing. He kept on talking about a beautiful classmate of his with whom he lost touch with (Yep, talk about going down memory lane) and at one time was talking about Art History while Julien and I grew increasingly worried that he was taking us on a very long walk around his neighborhood instead of showing us to the hotel.
We felt a bit embarrassed for being so suspicious of his intentions, because after a long and winding walk, he hobbled up a street and then pointed to a huge neon sign. “There, my friends, is your hotel,” he roared. “YOU SEE?! I help you find your hotel!” Then: “Have a good time in Japan.”
And so we did.
***
More to follow. Meanwhile, some pictures are up on my Flickr account.
Currently listening to:
Serge Gainsbourg
De Gainsbourg à Gainsbarre
Getting your passport stamped
Getting through immigration at NAIA was a nightmare. We arrived from Tokyo and started queueing at 11pm. We got our passports stamped at 12:15am. People were squashed against each other, forming lines which merged into one a few metres before the immigration window, causing human traffic, which is not good for the morale of people who have just gotten off a plane. The background music of Christmas carols did not help. Children were crying like mad. People kept trying to jump queues, nonchalantly inserting themselves into lines that seemed to be moving. Lolos telling the same jokes about the hopelessness of our government, over and over. Crappy service, terrible conditions, no order whatsoever. All that, and when you leave the airport they charge you a terminal fee of 750 pesos. Welcome to the Philippines!
