Wednesday, May 21, 2008

International travel

I was in Paris visiting my friend Sarah and her friends. We spent a lot of time at a café and I checked my itinerary to make sure we would have enough time to do everything I wanted to do while I was there. I was shocked to find out I was scheduled to leave at 3:30 the next day, and from an airport I’d never heard of: Mairie Montreuil. I figured that I had gotten some sort of deal on the ticket that only let me stay there for a day in a half.

Concerned about getting lost trying to find the airport, I went into several shops to ask the proprietors in slow but grammatical French if they could tell me which way to turn. They responded in English that I should stop wasting their time and ask people in the metro stations instead. I eventually found a way there by consulting my handy metro map.

Before I left Paris I made sure to eat some Turkish Delight.

Instead of making it back to the United States, however, I ended up in Japan, which was about to host the Winter Olympics. I rode a bullet train around a snowy mountainside that had gigantic, curled, wooden ski-like things stuck into the ground in lieu of trees. There were bullet trains similar to mine that followed different, colored tracks. I looked back out my window and saw another train that was shrink wrapped with Disney characters on it.

I think a little girl was molested on my train, a practice that was apparently considered OK in the country. I tried to escape the train, and ended up clinging to its red, curly-cue track and making my way slowly to the ground. When I got there I thought about how jealous other people would be that I had made it to the Olympics, however peripherally.

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