hostels and hotels
By: Rebecca Peterson
Tags: Vacation, Hotel, Travel, Europe, France

My sister was an au-pair in Toulouse, France, for a year. At the end of her year there, I visited her and we traveled in a big semi-circle around France, hitting the places we most wanted to see. We stayed in hostels because that’s what we could afford. (I couldn’t even afford that; I ended up with several thousand dollars of credit card debt I spent the next couple years paying down. It was worth it. Life is short. How many times do you get to visit France with your sister who has become very fluent in French?)

Our first day we travelled to Carcasonne, a fortress castle on a hill above a town called Nimes, where the particular indigo dye used for denim originated from. (The word “denim” comes from “de Nimes,” or ‘from Nimes’.) We walked up a slowly spiraling cobblestone street flanked on both sides by houses painted various pastel colors with faded denim-blue window shutters. Hilariously, we dragged heavy wheeled suitcases behind us, because we were between destinations and would not arrive at our hostel till that night, in a different town, and could not find a place to safely keep our suitcases during our day trip. It was only two years after 9/11, so the train stations would not allow us to keep our luggage in lockers.

Our arms hurt, the suitcases bumped and jostled and jiggled and jerked along the big cobblestones. We were tired, sweaty. But we were filled with the excitement of the first day of an adventure. We dragged our suitcases up narrow stone staircases to climb to the top of the castle’s rampart walls. We looked like two silly American college tourists, so silly we didn’t even have the good sense to “backpack” as most American college students would do on a budget. In hindsight I could’ve packed much lighter, but I wanted my trip to be perfect and needed to wear the perfect clothing. It was France! I wanted to be stylish!

After Carcasonne we waited at the train station, to take a train to Arles, where Vincent Van Gogh did his most famous paintings and went insane. While we waited on the platform, a creepy old Frenchman began speaking to us. I avoided him by giving off my best vibe of “leave me alone, I am not interested.” But my sister was too polite, too nice, too afraid to be considered a bitch, so she half-heartedly showed him engagement out of a sense of obligation. When the train arrived she said “Let’s try to find a place on the train where he won’t find us.”

We could have chosen a compartment that had other tourists, but I saw him climb onto the train behind us and notice us, and so, a little panicked and not thinking strategically, I quickly ducked into an empty compartment, my sister close on my heels. We soon realized our error when the man joined us in our compartment. Now we were alone with him. He continued to try and chat with us, me not comprehending most of what he was saying, my sister carrying the brunt of the conversation.

He did that thing some men do. He tested our boundaries. He lightly touched our knees supposedly to emphasize something he was saying, tapped us, very “innocent” touching but it’s always a test to see how uncomfortable it makes the woman. Eventually he emboldened himself enough to rest his hand on my knee. I looked at him, made eye contact, and said firmly, “Non.”

He didn’t try to touch my knee again, but he touched my sister’s knee. She was too afraid of disapproval to be that bitch and say no.

Finally after what seemed like an eternal train ride, we arrived in Arles and grabbed our suitcases as quickly as we could and high-tailed it down the street, hoping our walk to the hostel would be un-disturbed by Monsieur Creeper. Thank heaven he did not follow.

Halfway to the hostel a wheel popped off the cute green suitcase my youngest sister had loaned me. Damn! That was going to hinder our trip, since we planned on walking many places with our luggage. I picked up the wheel and burned my hand! Dropped it and realized just how much friction a small suitcase wheel can build while being dragged to and fro across cobblestoned streets. The next day I went to a small department store and found a suitable replacement.

Our hostel was suitable. Outside there was music playing loud in the street! Beats and bass, bumpin. “How extraordinary!” I kept thinking. My first evening in France and there’s a party happening! We were itching to walk around town.

We walked past an old home with lots of windows. Out of every window, in every window box, an eccentric person had placed all variety of stuffed animals and fake flowers.

Further along, on a narrow cobblestone street surrounded by three-story apartment buildings that existed since the Middle Ages, we encountered a man with a small organ and a monkey! The monkey wore a red velvet vest and played tambourines and bulged its eyes and pulled its lips back in a smile. People dropped tips in a brass pitcher.

A few steps further was a window in a wall. In a tiny room a small family was selling sandwiches. We bought two sandwiches and two Limonata. The sandwich was this: half a baguette, sliced lengthwise + tomato + fresh mozzarella + basil leaves + salt + pepper + olive oil + balsamic vinegar. It was one of the most delicious meals I’ve ever eaten. (For some reason I remember best the street food I’ve eaten while walking as a tourist.)

As we ate and continued to walk, we came around a corner onto a large plaza full of people sitting and drinking and smoking and chatting in the warm evening air. To our left on one side of the plaza was a cafe that looked extremely familiar, and a sandwich-board sign in front of us that showed the Van Gogh painting “Cafe at Night.” This was the cafe! I was standing right there looking at the actual cafe Van Gogh had painted! And there it was, being actually used the same way it had in the painting! People milled about and seemed to think there was nothing extraordinary about sitting at the same cafe that was in a Van Gogh painting. That was just ordinary life for people living in Arles. Later we saw the place where the prostitute lived whom Van Gogh had become obsessed with and sent his cut-off ear in a box.

While we were in France the World Cup was happening, and France was doing well, with Zane Zidane as their star player. People in Arles would put their television in their window and people would gather around on the narrow cobblestone streets outside a home, and watch television from the sidewalk. When something bad or good happened to their team, we could hear cheers all over the entire town. On a street corner, a group of men played pan-pipes.

We proceeded to Nice, where we stayed in another hostel and made plans to go to a dance-club our first night. It was Friday! A perfect night to see the town! Except that I had jet-lag and my sister too was exhausted. We decided to nap and wake up at 10pm, get ready and go. Only when our 10pm alarm attempted to wake us up, we were both groggy. “Should we get up and go to the club? Or should we keep sleeping?” we asked each other. We decided to keep sleeping.

In Nice we went to the train station to purchase tickets to a town called Limoges, where the famous “limoges” porcelain containers with hinged lids are made. Our dad had dated a woman named Barb who collected limoges, that was how we knew what they were. So we asked the man behind the ticket booth for two tickets to Limoges.

“Limoges?” he asked. “Quelle idee.” What an idea.

We understood his sarcasm when we reached Limoges. It wasn’t bad at all, a clean French town, but it wasn’t what we had expected. We thought there would be porcelain everywhere, and a factory. Our expectations were fueled by the memory of Dresden, Germany, where the Meissen porcelain factory and museum resided — so much porcelain we got tired of it! There were porcelain tiles decorating short walls along the sides of streets. There was a dairy shop completely covered floor walls and ceiling in blue and white tiles! We thought Limoges would be the same, but they didn’t seem to hold the same pride in their namesake product.

We went to a bar that Saturday night — a “Wild West” themed bar! A French guy kept talking to us and flirting with us. Asked us where we were from. “Seattle,” we replied. Like most French people, he did not recognize where Seattle was. “Nirvana?” we tried. “The Space Needle?”

Finally the thing we figured out he knew about Seattle was the WTO riots! Throughout France we had the same experience again and again: people didn’t know anything about Seattle except for the WTO riots.

The guy at the bar was trying to figure out if we were single. “So who do you live with?” he asked.

“I live with my mom,” my sister replied.

“I live with my fiance,” I replied.

That was the end of that guy’s flirtation. He disappeared for the rest of the night, and we went home, a little bored.

That night, I talked in my sleep. “Where are we?” I asked.

My sister answered, “We’re in our hotel room.”

I couldn’t make sense of where our hotel room was. “What country are we in?” I asked in my haze. I had slept in so many different rooms the past several nights, I was completely dis-oriented. My sister laughed and told me “France.”

“Limoges?” I asked, still uncertain.

“Yes,” she answered. “Limoges.” Quelle idee.