May 4th, 2006
Do you want a beer or something from the kitchen?
“Do you want a beer or something from the kitchen?”
That’s what the girl on the bunk below me asked her traveling companion before she headed out. It’s 7:35. This is pretty cool. I’m in a third-floor shared room on a bunk in the corner (as I always have needed to be since first year of college), and there are a group of birds, maybe finches, chirping outside my window. Daylight pours through the tar-splattered skylight over my bed, and in the distance a jet sets off to who knows what centuries’ old European city.
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Europe is such a funny word. It always made me think of syrup. I wonder what its etymology is? So far my experience in France tells me that things are much more colorful here than in the United States. The hauntingly bare RER B train last night was furnished in garish blue, red, and yellow, with scratched graffiti marring virtually ever translucent surface. My room has a sloping roof, and acrylic-flecked burnt sienna walls, with an orange door and two hacked, rough equivalents of i-beams spanning the space in front of the exit, much like the exposed skeleton of some petrified giant. The floor is blue vinyl that reminds me of the pediatrician where we went until I was voting age. It catches the light from the pull-open window and I can see scraggly, potted evergreens in front of windows across the courtyard.
Goldeneye did come on again during the flight yesterday. Three times in fact which I half-watched while conversing with the lady sitting in my aisle. She was from Japan, and oddly enough on a Golden Week holiday that statistically mirrored mine: the same flights, same rows, same five days in France. Although my Japanese is at a comfortable point where I can talk about almost anything fairly simple, it wasn’t absolutely necessary in this case as she had spent nearly three years studying abroad in France and England. It was nice to have someone to talk to, it made the flight go a lot faster, and I can always do with another friend.
The hostel smells like coffee, or maybe all of Paris does at this hour. “Free breakfast” is from eight to nine-thirty. That beer the girl was talking about is starting to sound pretty good.
