You can’t get there from here. Seriously - doesn’t matter where you want to go, not even back to Madrid, whence you’ve just come. It’s a goddamn space-time anomaly. Well, you can, but not on the tourist ticket (which is 3€ to book the train all the way through to Paris). Instead, you have to pay full-fare, first class, 123€ because that’s all the trains they have. Oh, and when you get on the train you find out that you don’t actually have a seat and have to sit in the corridor on a folding chair and stand up every time someone wants to go to the loo. Unless I want to stay in France until next week sometime, then maybe. They don’t have a 2nd class or anything else class, because everything is first class. It’s France, there is no second class. Now, to my untrained eye it looks just like the 2nd class trains in Spain, but it’s goddamn classe-primo. Oh, and even though your euros are good here, your $1200 euro-rail pass that is supposed to be good in 30 E.U. countries (including France) is not.
This of course leaves me in the place I want to be the least amongst people that hate me the most, without any reason to hate me whatsoever. Well, except that I’m American. Oh, and I’ve got the unmitigated gall to be an American amongst good proper French people, as no one should do, ever. Unless you’re so rich or famous to be worthy of sycophantic adoration, whereupon you are welcomed to France with open arms and willing smiles. Suck ups. So here I sit having a regular old (Classe Primo) cup of coffee in a regular old (First Class) cafe eating a regular old (Nombre Uno) piece of bread. Seriously, calling everything first class just because it’s French doesn’t make it so. Telling girls in bars that my name is Brad Pitt doesn’t give me pouting girls lips and perfect hair and Narcissian bone structure. I’ve tried.
France has always hated Americans, and yet up until about eight years ago we just put up with it. Maybe it was because of our debt to Layfette that we turned a blind eye. Then suddenly they did something typically French (post- 9/11) and we were allowed to hate them finally. We really held their feet to the fire for a while with that freedom-fries thing. This isn’t a chip on my shoulder or some grand anti-french racism on my part; it’s from my own experience. I have no good memories of anything french. French Bread hurts the roof of my mouth. French Onion Soup has too much cholesterol. Lately, I find that Chilean and Australian wines are indistinguishable from their French counterparts. French kissing is nice enough, but that just reminds me of sex and I’m not getting enough of that to not be bitter. France has recently taken to stand against America in various international political situations just because (and this was from a French Prime Minister) they don’t care if they are wrong, they just don’t want us to be right. That’s not reasoned balance of power, that’s just being an dick.
France is jealous of American superiority, so they stomp their feet like a toddler and tell us we have stupid faces. France is a bitter, impotent old troll making snide comments under it’s breath at virile youth. It’s the war-torn barfly well past her prime who refuses to age into elegant maturity and instead takes every opportunity to take everyone else down a notch. It’s not superior, it’s childish spite and hate-filled rudeness. It’s not sarcastically funny or ironically instructive; its just common, mean recalcitrance. It’s just so French.
And it’s not just IN France that they are this way. In Fiji I met a traveling French couple who kicked other peoples belongings across the floor of the dorm because they didn’t want to step over or around them. Seriously - it was shockingly petulant. In a hostel dorm, EVERYBODY’S stuff is in EVERYBODY’S way. The rooms are, by definition, small and seriously lacking shelves or personal space. The idea is to pack as many people per room as possible - thats what a hostel IS. Everybody else I’ve travelled with gets on fine in these environs. French people kick and throw things out of their way like children.
In Bangkok and South Africa, I tried to have a conversation with some of groups of people speaking French on a couple of occasions and they literally got up and walked away. Just standard traveller talk - “Hi, I’m Todd - Where are you from? Uh… Bye?” In Mauritius, the island is home to both Indians and French - the Indian people I met were very friendly and helpful, but the French were unanimously impossible to get help from. In Morocco, people ask you for money in French and if you say no they insult you as they walk away. My friend was called a whore because she deigned to bargain with the locals instead of taking the exhorbanent first offered price for something. I wouldn’t pay some boy to put his grandmother through HVAC school or any of the other situations I was supposed to resolve for them because I was American, and I was called fat, well, because I am, but that’s not the point. Hell, everyone in South Florida knows the only thing worse than New Yorkers are the French Canadians. I can’t wait until Lance is back on the bike, because this country wont hardly be able stand to have a Texan whup their asses for an eighth time. I will laugh until tears come.
I know I’m an asshole sometimes, But I’m a sweetheart 99 times out of a hundred. I never yell at people. When I meet someone in a service job, I sympathize. Hell, I EMPATHIZE because I worked in restaurants in South Florida where New Yorkers come to visit just to be rude and obnoxious. I put up with slow service all around this world because I know that we Americans move too fast and it’s refreshing to do things on Fiji-time or Africa-time. HOWEVER. No people on this planet do slow and insolent better than the French. Seriously, in this case, they are definitely First Class.
I feel like a modern day Diogenes, wandering the earth with a backpack and a Petzl head lantern, searching not for an honest man, but for a pleasant Frenchman.
The food’s not even all that good.
