Landing in Dublin and I’m realizing that I’m on the other side of the world, or at least that I’m not on the same continental shelf.
Being in an airport I really couldn’t make any observations or conclusions about Ireland which was a shame as I really did want to explore the country, but I couldn’t do the entire continent on this trip and some sacrifices had to be made. I will just have to hope that I return to Europe one day.
I do have to say that they had the friendliest customs agent that I’ve ever dealt with in my life. Whether that’s due to Irish customs training or just a coincidence I’ll never know.
Then waiting for my connecting flight to London the problem began. I turned off my phone and turned it back on. The phone picked up something called Vodaphone, they seem to argue for a bit and then the phone did nothing more. One of those “Gah” moments when you realize that you’re in a foreign land with no communications.
I used the airport Wi-Fi to see if I could find a solution and the only solution that my phone provider gave was to call customer service. Something that I would have to deal with at the hotel later on. I wish the phone had worked as it was 5 in the morning here but 11 PM back home and I could have just called to catch my mother before she went to bed.
London
Landing in Heathrow and I have 90 minutes to get to Liverpool street station to catch a train and I made a ridiculously bad and rookie tourist mistake. I took a taxi.
You may think that you have traffic gridlock going home at 5 pm on a Friday afternoon in Houston but that’s nothing compared to average weekday traffic in London.
Even though the taxi driver did a marvelous job of giving me a guided tour of London as we passed several landmarks I couldn’t really concentrate on that as I watched my table time slowly tick away.
Long story short is that I missed my train. After asking round I found the customer service booth and a friendly ticket agent stamped and approved my train ticket for a later train and I was off to Ipswich.
Sitting in the train I was somewhat astonished to think that less than 24 hours ago I was in my bed in Houston and now I was on a train in East England heading to a little town that I barely heard of.
Once at the train station I got out and found a local taxi driver and asked him to take me to my destination.
“Can you take me to the 493rd bomb wing museum at Debach?” He had barely heard of it but was willing to try and find it. We roamed round the countryside and asked some locals. At one point a common pheasant flew past the taxi with its brilliant green and red plumage and I exclaimed “What was that?!?”
“Oh that was just a pheasant”
“What do you mean just a pheasant? That was amazing!” I thought to myself and almost made him stop the taxi to look for it, but we continued.
We finally found the museum at a large commercial farm. The farmer was in and explained that his father was in charge of the museum, but he was out visiting another farmer and wouldn’t be back today.
We drove to the actual site. The runways and most of the buildings were long since gone, tractored away and returned back to the giant potato patch which it was before the war. A few old metal and brick buildings were left and I looked round as the taxi driver waited for me.
Truthfully it was all rather anticlimactic although I don’t know what I really expected. When my dad was alive, I’d asked him if he ever wanted to return here and he shrugged and said “What for? That was a different time and it’s over now.”
Walking round the remaining buildings, I tried to imagine him as a young man in uniform and the bustle of activity that once took place here.
This was my one thing I told myself that I had to do, and I’d done it. I sighed and asked the taxi driver to take me back to Ipswich and to recommend a nice pub.
Later on at the station and waiting for the train back to London I watched as people got on and off. Ipswich is an ex-burb of London. People take the train into the city and come back here in the evenings. Groups of kids come to school here and take the train to some other town.
I think I would like this.
It was full dark as we pulled into London. I used the train Wi-Fi to download a map onto my phone which became useless as Londoners don’t believe in street signs or door numbers apparently. As far as I can tell I roamed round central London, the City of London (hilariously the city of London and London are not the same thing), and east London.
An ex-Londoner later explained that London was really a collection of small cities and that locals don’t need street signs as they know where they’re going.
Along the way I walked past bistros, gastropubs, restaurants, terraced rooftop bars, and all sorts of nice places to go at night and all useless to me as I was lost. Of course, there’s never a cop round when you need one and the locals seemed to be more lost than I was.
Some how I managed to find a building with a street name, and it was the street I wanted and finally found the Whitechapel hotel at around 10 at night.
Using the hotel Wi-Fi and my tablet I quickly got onto Skype and called my phone provider and exercised magnificent restraint while dealing with them. After about 10 minutes of fiddling around with the settings the phone started working again.
The next day armed with a reliable phone map and actual sunlight I felt emboldened enough to tour the city on foot. All the fabulous gastropubs and bistros seem to have disappeared and to this day I have no idea of where it was that I roamed that night.
Instead I did some of the bigger tourist sites and roamed round tower bridge, the tower of London, St Paul’s, “the city”, the Globe. I probably could have and probably should have budgeted another day for London and still it would not have been enough.
It was a rainy evening in London, so I had dinner at a nearby Turkish restaurant and the next morning I walked from my hotel to St Pancras to take the Chunnel to Paris.
Paris
Apparently as it was a Saturday the French rail workers had a weekly strike and some of the rail service had been suspended but they allowed one train to go through and luckily it was my train.
The Chunnel was…..meh. 20 minutes of darkness and suddenly I was in France holding my breath that my phone would work. It did.
I got out at Gare du Nord and walked south along the Boulevard de Sebastapol passing street hawkers vending all sorts of wares in French, Arabic, German, and other languages that I could only guess at. Crossing the Seine and stopping on the Ile de la Cite and looking east I see Notre Dame.
Momentarily I am torn. Just take a little detour and snap off a couple of pictures. What could it hurt? But maybe I’ll get lost like the other day. So, I keep going. It’ll be there waiting for me once I’m settled in.
So that’s one of my genuine regrets in life.
Finally I arrived at the Hotel des 3 colleges right next to the Sorbonne and checked into a tiny little room before going out to walk the local neighborhood and get my bearings and here I must confess that I felt what I suppose could be termed culture shock as I realized that I was in a foreign country that spoke a different language that I could not intrinsically communicate in.
Walking around and listening to people talk to each other in a foreign language I suddenly felt very isolated and had a genuine urge to run back to my room but then I realized that I hadn’t eaten since Breakfast and that someone in Paris had to speak English.
So I walked to a patio bar and tried out the basic French I had and unsurprisingly enough the waiter spoke English. As I waited for a trout and potato dinner that I will never forget I indulged in my favorite pastime, people watching.
At a nearby table were what I guessed were parents and their kid here for a university visit, a gang of 20somethings sitting at a nearby fountain, one with a guitar and a cigarette in his lips, another with a skateboard, a young woman at a nearby table talking into her phone in British accented English,
“well why can’t you tell her that you want a divorce?”
Okay…. enough people watching.
The next morning, I went to a café next to the Sorbonne and had breakfast and tried to mind my own business this time and then I saw that they sold cigarettes as well as food here.
Gauloises Blues, world renowned among smokers as cigarettes so strong and hip that they instantly turn you into a lanky, tall, world-weary, French noir cinema star that drives a motorcycle and has a deep and interesting back story.
Oooooof. Tempting.
One secret about smoking is that it never leaves your system, the craving I mean. You can be clean for years and it will sporadically peek out to nudge you. Of course, you can nudge right back but when there’s other smokers around it gets harder to push back and they smoke a lot in Europe.
Foregoing the nic fix I finished breakfast and wound my way towards the Eiffel tower. Looking up at all the stone façade work of the buildings that I passed I reflected that trying to recreate this today would cost a fortune. All the intricate stone carvings, the metal downspouts, the balconies, no way you could recreate Paris nowadays.
I passed by Invalides and pondered visiting the Emperor to pay my respects but just flicked off a quick salute in his direction and found myself on the Champs de Mars looking up at the tower.
As it was a Sunday morning the park was full of families, soccer players, and of course tour groups and hawkers. I threaded my way through all of these to the tower. Also, careful to stay on the path and avoid all the doggie accidents on the grass.
The lines to go up were already long and getting longer as tour buses arrived so I passed on going up and kept going north to rest on the bridge over the Seine and watch those weird tour bus boats float past.
After walking a bit more I found myself approaching the Arc de Triomfe on the Champs Elysees and this time I could not resist.
McDonald’s.
Look, if you put a mickey D’s on the Champs Elysees, you’re gonna get Americans. Yes, they do have a Big Mac and it’s not a Le Big Mac. Just a Big Mac.
Rain again. A hazard you have to accept if you come to Europe in April. Took a cab back to the hotel and hoped that it would abate but it got worse and didn’t lighten up till early evening. So many other things to see and do here! But not if you have to trudge through the rain.
So unfortunately I finished my day at a French-Vietnamese restaurant near my hotel and got ready for my trip South the next day.
Overall I liked Paris but I found London to be more laid back and sedate at least going by first impressions.
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