Day 16- Stories

The plan was to visit the train station early, well plans don’t always go as planned. When Jill and my alarms rang we looked at each other and with no words needed we knew we would have to change our schedule and go to the train station after class. When we finally awoke the sun flooded our eyes, we were not ready for a day of class, and train station, hopefully everything goes as planned so that we can get to the apartment and rest up before our excursion tomorrow.

Although physically tired, mentally I was excited for breakfast. Seems so trivial I know, but two days ago I found hot peppers in the market and haven’t been able to use them yet. Okay even that sounds weird, but let me explain. Everything I have tried here in France that should have a bit of spice to it, doesn’t. The mild salsa tastes like tomato paste with onions, wings don’t have sauce on them, and there is not such thing as buffalo sauce as far as I can tell. In the beginning of the trip I walked around to every market looking at the hundreds of different products, not a single hot pepper. Thankfully I finally found a hot pepper, and I was thrilled to use it.

 I started to mix up my eggs and cut up my pepper, I was meticulous about picking out most of the seeds because the pepper looked as if it would be pretty hot. Well “pretty hot” ended up being an understatement my mouth was on fire. I pushed the peppers to the side, and just had the eggs, maybe next time. The fiasco with the Hot peppers would have been fine if it ended there. But of course, that’s not where it ended. As I sat at my computer typing up some last minute homework for class I touched my eye, I would say it was an accident, but it wasn’t. I pulled my hand away and instantly filled with regret. First the burning was subtle. But every second got worse and worse. I sprinted to the bathroom and started to flush it out with soap and water. No good, now it is on both eyes. I yelled to Jill “Google how to get pepper off of your eye!” I have never squeezed my eyes so tightly before, not for a scary movie, or the bright sun. She finally replied, “it says milk helps, do you want me to get the milk?” “YES, MILK, MILK!”

I can only imagine what this scene would have looked like from the outside with no sound. Two American girls running around, then one grabs the milk and starts to pour it into her hands, and the girl bent over the sink is splashing the milk viciously in her face. Seriously, thank the lord we don’t live on the ground floor, or else we might have had an audience. Thankfully it worked. Because I am pretty sure a trip to the hospital for hot pepper in my eye would have made the fiasco a little less humorous.

We finished up our homework and headed to class. Today we work shopped our papers (in a café of course). Its nice having just 4 people because we get a lot of attention and can really get good feed back on our work. Yes there is work, even though it may not seem like it.

After class we headed to the train station to book our train to Florence Italy to see my friend Jessica. We get to the front of the line and the “English” speaking teller is open. Perfect. Although I know I should be working on my French, with the more serious encounters, I feel safer speaking in English. Sadly this man didn’t really speak English. He knew as much English as I knew French, which is most certainly not enough to make your station say you speak English. The worst part was he was so quite. It is possible that he was afraid that his English wasn’t up to par, but I was wishing he would yell what he was saying because being quite made it worse –note to self-.  When we finally find some type of franglish we both can understand he tells me that the train plans are not possible. We were supposed to make plans months ago. OH MON DIEU. (omg, en francais) so now what, I ask what could he possibly work out, we need to get to Italy. He spends a lot of time looking up schedules and finds a way to get to the edge of Italy for free with our Eurail passes, and says we have to find our way to Florence from there. Deal, we take the schedule and then look at him with big puppy eyes and ask if he would help us book our trip to Germany, and our trip back to Paris. He seemed a little annoyed, but all went well and he got all of the rest of our tickets for exactly when we wanted them. Another saint, even though he was grumpy.

It was late by the time we got back into the center of town. We bought dinner, a burrito for me, and chicken nuggets for Jill, and headed back to our apartment to rest up for our upcoming excursion.

Not every day has pictures, but every day is full of stories. The benefit of a blog v.s. a photo album.