Where To?

Tags

Europe, flights, horoscope, Madrid, Spain, summer, travel, vacation

Hello, readers. It’s time for the audience participation portion of Creative Exfoliation.

What would you do if you had six weeks to kill in Europe? I’m wondering because in a few months I will be doing precisely that.

In my fantasy version of summer 2012 I while away my days drinking espresso in Parisian cafes and reading books on the grass underneath the Eiffel Tower. I rent a exorbitant apartment that is roughly the size of my kitchen back home, take French lessons, and act all literary. I make a valiant effort at sticking to a modest budget but ultimately blow all my money on nightly excursions in search of good wine and live jazz.

That may very well still happen, but I am not certain. I’ve been pondering summer travel options ever since I came home from my last trip and have been tracking flight prices to Paris on multiple web sites.

Now, lest you think I have a secret money laundering ring to finance my frequent vacations, I should probably set the record straight: this flight is going to be free. No, I still haven’t resolved my ongoing dispute with that airline that shall remain nameless for now. I’ve simply decided it’s time to cash in my miles on my credit card (the Capital One Venture card, if you’re looking for a recommendation.) Although I have accumulated enough miles to cover pretty much any flight I want, I’ve been bargain shopping with the intent of applying any leftover miles to my accommodations.

Finding the best airfare is a labor-intensive process. When I’m planning a trip I typically track flight prices on multiple booking sites. I check my desired routes daily for a month or more. I compare multiple dates to determine the least expensive days and months to travel. When my itinerary is flexible, I compare several airports – particularly when flying to Europe, where low-cost carriers offer an extensive network of connections between European cities. Sometimes the cheapest option is to fly into the least expensive European airport, then take a train or budget airline to my intended destination.

(Sometimes these plans go maddeningly awry, but this is all part of the grand adventure of travel. I am learning to take detours in stride.)

I’ve spent the last month watching airfares to Paris slowly tick upward as the summer holidays approach. The London Olympics have inflated the already steep rates to airports all across northern Europe. Paris, with its convenient “chunnel” access to the UK, is raising its prices dramatically in anticipation of the Olympic tourism sure to come.

Yesterday my horoscope told me that the moon in Gemini would allow me to get away, or to meet new faces. It also advised me to explore unusual places or places where I have never been before.

Now, it bears mentioning that this horoscope was from the same source that promised me intensely passionate romance on Monday. Well … if you’re a regular reader of my blog then you already know how that turned out. But a few hours after reading yesterday’s prediction I found a transatlantic flight that fell substantially below the average range for summer travel. It was a direct flight.

It was a no-brainer. I booked it.

So I am taking the cheapest path onto the European continent this summer, which happens to be through the Madrid Barajas airport. I need to be back in Madrid on the day of my return flight. (Actually, given my last ill-fated trip to a Spanish airport, perhaps I will make a point of being in Madrid a day or two prior to my departure.) The six weeks in between are, at this moment, entirely up in the air. So I am looking for your recommendations. Where on the European continent (and heck, let’s throw northern Africa into the mix just for giggles) would you love to return?  What restaurant have you never forgotten? Where are the best views, the friendliest locals, and the cheapest (not grossest) hostels? What would you like to read about on this blog?

Ready … go! (And thanks!)

Él No Habla.

Tags

Barcelona, Buck, dog, language, Spain, travel

Esteban is teaching my dog Spanish.

I can’t get a good handle on Buck’s linguistic progress, but he certainly is taken with his new teacher.

“¿Qué pasa?” Esteban asks when Buck wanders into his room. Buck stares at him with his usual beseeching expression. Esteban says a few words that I don’t understand, and Buck leaps up, shakes his entire body, and playfully bats Esteban’s arm with his nose.

I figure in this economy, bilingualism can only help my dog to distinguish himself from all the other dogs competing for whatever it is that dogs compete for.

I never know what to say to the dogs that I meet in my travels. I have a passable French vocabulary, but in most of the countries that I visit, I just don’t know how to say things like  “Well, hello! Aren’t you pretty? Who’s a good boy? Who’s a good boy?”

And the thing is, when you’re thousands of miles from home and missing your own furry friend, these are the kinds of things that you really want to be able to say.

I have attempted to prepare for such moments by talking to Buck in French. I thought perhaps he might respond to my tone of voice and develop some sense of what I was saying to him. He mostly seemed to think it was kind of weird.

For some reason I feel even more self-conscious talking to animals in a foreign language than I do talking to people. Other humans share the effort to come to some sort of linguistic common ground. When I talk to foreign animals, they just stare at me.

I had a similar experience with a small child when I recently visited Barcelona. Eileen and I were at a park across the street from La Sagrada Familia when we noticed a little tow-headed boy wandering out of the fenced play area. He looked to be about two years old, and he was wailing inconsolably. When no adult responded to his cries, we looked at each other uncomfortably, and then approached the child.

We immediately realized that we had absolutely no idea what to say to this little boy. We didn’t even know what language he spoke. All we could surmise from his cries of “Mama!” was that he had lost his mother.

Eileen went in search of a police officer while I stayed with the boy. ¿Hablas español?” I asked. The boy stared at me. “Tu parles français?  Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

He wiped a ribbon of snot across his face with the back of his hand and stared at me but did not respond. I realized that I had absolutely no idea what I could possibly say to console this child. How could I communicate with him when I could not even determine where our limited vocabularies intersected?

I dug through my purse for something – anything – to amuse him. The purse of a single woman is not well-equipped for such a task. I found my passport, some credit cards, and a handful of Paris metro tickets. And one tissue.

Well, that was a start.

He grabbed the tissue in his grubby hands and wiped it clumsily across his face. Then, as small children are inclined to do, he handed it back to me. We could not share a conversation, but we could share his snot.

It was at that moment that his mother breathlessly ran over, embraced him, and thanked me profusely in French. I was so thrown off kilter that I didn’t know what to say except “Ohhhhhh … français!” She smiled and nodded.

“Well come on, kid,” I thought to myself. “Why didn’t you just say so?”

I think the boy and I were both a little bewildered by the whole encounter.

Buck seems to find Spanish much easier to grasp than French. Or perhaps my good French accent is not enough to convince him, and he is just responding to the natural ease of a native speaker. Whatever the reason, his Spanish vocabulary now rivals mine.

But his accent is totally unconvincing.

What I Saw

Tags

Barcelona, Europe, France, photography, Spain, travel

Well, folks, seeing as how I forgot to bring my camera adapter on last week’s European adventure, I’ve been posting lots of writing without pictures. You know, the kind that you didn’t want to read when you were a kid. At some point I will probably go back and add some images. But for tonight I figured I’d overcompensate with a photo post. Here are a few of my favorite images from the trip.

Let’s get right down to business, shall we? I love food. I love just about everything about it: shopping for it, cooking it, eating it, photographing it, reading about it … it’s pretty much my favorite thing ever. Tasting the local food is a major part of my travel routine.

I am particularly fond of French food, of which we ate quite a bit while in Paris. It has a reputation for being fussy, but this reputation is not well-deserved. When done right, French cooking is elegant in its simplicity, staying true to the character of every ingredient.

I love the richness of French food, but I rarely feel compelled to overindulge. I wish I could say the same of Spanish food. The robust flavors made it nearly impossible for me to stop eating. My poor stomach is still recovering from a giant tapas hangover.

One of my favorite travel pastimes is to visit the beautiful cathedrals. Every European town has one, and ours pale in comparison. Whether you see them as a testament to God’s greatness or as artistic and architectural triumphs, they are truly awe-inspiring.

These stunning cathedrals are some of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. But one of the reasons that I love Europe so much is that beauty is everywhere. From the architecture to the unexpected pieces of public art, there is an aesthetic quality to European cities that draws me back again and again.

These are the images that linger in my mind’s eye long after I leave.

Twist of Fate

Tags

Barcelona, problems, Spain, travel

Readers, when I said that I am learning how to adjust to any unfortunate circumstance, I did not know that I would soon be tested on it. Today I was driven nearly to tears when a momentary lapse of attention cost us a tremendous amount of money.

We awoke early this morning, quickly readied ourselves for our homeward journey, and took the metro to Barcelona Sants, a large train station with several regional lines and a shuttle to the airport. We followed the signs to the airport line and identified our desired platform, where our train was scheduled to take off in mere minutes. We descended the escalator and boarded the train without considering the possibility that multiple train lines might share the same platform. Now we know that they do, even with departure times that are just minutes apart.

After a breathtaking twenty minute ride along the cliffs of the Mediterranean coast it occurred to me that our surroundings didn’t look very airport-ish. Slowly I was overcome by the sickening realization that we were about to miss our flight.

We arrived at a nondescript stop and looked around, bewildered. We had absolutely no idea where we were, where we were supposed to be, or how we were supposed to return to the place we had left.

We pulled out our printed confirmation from Aer Lingus. There was no phone number to be found. We were going to miss our flight, and there was nothing to do about it.

It’s nice to have the kind of friends who can get you out of a jam when you need them. It took about thirty seconds for me to fire off a text to my friend Chris (who will be a familiar character to the readers of last year’s Italy stories.) Chris has traveled enough, and it tech-savvy enough, that I know I can count on him to answer any travel question at any time of day. Within moments I had the phone number for the Aer Lingus call center courtesy of my dear friend in Munich.

As luck would have it, the call center number was restricted on my cell phone. So much for advance communication.

We arrived at the airport approximately thirty minutes after our flight had taken off and were perplexed to find no Aer Lingus employees … anywhere. We learned that Barcelona is not a major hub for the company, which only operates in the morning and leaves immediately after the last flight takes off.

We spoke with a few Spanish airport employees who listened sympathetically to our problems, told us to wait for five minutes, and then disappeared behind closed doors for twenty. Spaniards, we learned, move very, vey slowly. We were advised to call the Spanish Aer Lingus line, but every effort proved futile – calls from two cell phones and an airport land line remained “restricted.” I tried to obtain an access code but was greeted by a recorded greeting in rapid-fire Spanish.

I wanted so badly to hear a friendly Irish accent from a garishly green-suited employee. I knew that our chances of a refund would diminish with every passing minute and, after a few maddening hours of waiting at the ticket counter, my suspicion was confirmed. We were completely out of luck.

We wandered through two terminals, inquiring about the price of last-minute transatlantic flights. It became miserably clear that we would not be flying out today, and that we were never going to find the best price without internet access.

A phone call and a train ride later, we dragged our bedraggled butts across the threshold of the Hostel One Paralelo where we were greeted with kisses and sympathetic hugs from the staff. They offered us the last two available beds for the weekend. Payment, we were told, could be dealt with later. We sank into the chairs of the common room and used the free wifi to purchase a return flight that cost substantially more than our initial round trip itinerary.

Chris’s initial attempts to help us had been unsuccessful, but he still managed to save the day. As I lamented our lost money, he pointed out that round trip flights are often cheaper than one-way trips. This was a revelation – it had never occurred to us that the smart choice might be to purchase a round-trip flight and toss the return ticket when we got home. As luck would have it, Chris was absolutely right, and our new tickets were completely refundable. Once more we carefully navigated the travel site, canceled our booking, and purchased new tickets, saving $120 apiece.

This is a small fraction of what we spent, but for now I prefer to focus on what we saved rather than what we lost.

We opened a few bottles of Catalunya Tinto and gathered around a long table to tuck into mounds of polenta with sautéed vegetables with our fellow guests. Slowly, thoughts of lost money receded in the glow of our communal feast. In a few minutes, the entire hostel is going out for a night of dancing.

As you know, I am a believer in fate. We missed our flight for a reason, and clearly it was not to stay in our beds.

Insecurity

Tags

Barcelona, email, Europe, hackers, Spain, travel

We have enjoyed tremendously good fortune this week, having made friends everywhere we went. There were the musicians in Paris, the businessmen in Barcelona, our gracious hosts at the Hostel One Paralelo, and more American teachers than I can count. We have enjoyed convivial communal feasts and numerous late-night excursions with strangers. We wished warm farewells to a few, and have pledged to keep in touch with others.

The hostel scene is particularly conducive to social interaction. I’m not sure if it is the act of sleeping and dining in close proximity to strangers that fosters friendship, or if it is simply the exposure to like-minded people who are willing to sleep and dine in close proximity to strangers.

As I have stated before on this blog, I am a big believer in travel friendships. There is a unique intensity to the bonds forged on the road. Perhaps it is the disequilibrium of stepping outside of our routines that strengthens our connections. Perhaps the very act of travel leaves us primed and ready to notice the beauty in strangers. Or perhaps it is the belief that when we throw ourselves upon the mercy of fate, we will meet the people we need to meet in that particular moment.

Time and time again I have found this to be true, and this has contributed to my increased sense of trust in humanity and in fate. Once in a while, though, travelers will cross paths with unseemly characters. This happened to me on Wednesday night.

Somehow, in the eight hours that I slept, my email account had been hacked, blocked for excessive spamming, and reset to display in Chinese.

I can only assume that this was the result of surfing on an unsecured wifi network. When one traveling in a foreign country, this is often the only internet option available. My first instinct, upon arrival in a new neighborhood, is to pull out my iPod Touch and search for an open network. It is my travel lifeline – this is how I communicate with my friends, learn about my surroundings, and take myself from lost to found. Open wifi networks are a Godsend. They are also, by their very definition, not to be trusted. There is no guarantee that the information transmitted will remain secure. This is why, as a matter of habit, I do not engage in any online financial transactions when I am on the road.

I don’t know if it was a moment of prescience or just a happy coincidence that last week I linked all of my banking and credit card accounts to a new email address. Whichever it was, I have congratulated myself many times over for that decision.

Even if it was my junk account, I was not prepared to surrender my email to Chinese hackers. But how does one correct such a problem when even the instructions to reclaim my identity are written in foreign characters?

I can remember a time, not so very long ago, when I would have panicked to find my email blocked and displayed in Chinese (and on a Spanish web browser, no less.) I would, of course, be lying if I told you I was unconcerned by this state of affairs. But in recent years I have become comfortable with foreign keyboards, Google translate, and international texting. After much toggling between browser tabs and a few text messages, my account was restored with a new password. Normal life resumed (or as normal as life can be while backpacking in Barcelona, anyway.)

Finding a sense of security on the road is a delicate balance. How does one stay open to chance encounters without becoming vulnerable to pickpockets and hackers?

I am starting to think that the only security that means anything is the secure knowledge that when the chips are down, I can take care of myself.

More New Friends

Tags

Barcelona, Europe, food, hostel, Spain, travel

Barcelona may be the friendliest city in the world.

We arrived at the Hostel One Paralelo shortly before 11:00, which means that we had been traveling for eight and a half hours. Our journey from Paris had gone quite smoothly, save for a bit of wandering in confusion upon arrival (and believe me, I know of no greater discomfort than wandering in confusion in a foreign city -at night – where I don’t speak the language.)

We rang the bell and waited for a few moments. The door was opened by a tall man in a green Ramones t-shirt who cried out my name as if we were old friends. They had been expecting us. He asked if we had just arrived in Barcelona, and we replied that we had. He asked if we had eaten dinner yet, and we replied that we had not. He asked if we would like some pasta carbonara, and we replied that we would very much like some.

The next thing I knew, we were ushered into the common room of the Hostel One Paralelo where a lively crowd had gathered. Our green-shirted host, whose name was Angel, urged us to put down our bags and have a seat. Complimentary beers and plates of pasta quickly appeared in front of us. We had not even checked in yet.

A young woman approached us to say hello. We exchanged the usual small talk: our names, where we were from and what we do. Lauren was an American living in Bordeaux as an English teacher. She was delighted to hear that we were music teachers and told us that she had spent one year as a music major at Ithaca College before switching to a major in French.

Because of my involvement in the a cappella community, I happen to know quite a few music majors and recent graduates from Ithaca College. At least four of them are friends of Lauren. It is a very small world, indeed.

After a leisurely dinner and a lengthy session on the complimentary wifi, we finally got around to the check-in process. Angel gave us a tour of the hostel, including the fully stocked kitchen, courtyard, and hot tub. The walls were painted with Picasso and Dali-esque images, and at the reception desk they were playing The Eagles’ “Hell Freezes Over” at full volume. Angel carried our bags upstairs to our well-equipped room and informed us that at 12:30 he would be leading the group to a nearby club for the evening entertainment.

It should be noted that Eileen and I are undoubtedly the oldest guests in this hostel, and clubbing in Barcelona is not really our scene. Nor, I suspected, was it Lauren’s. So the three of us walked together to a nearby restaurant for wine and tapas.

It should also be noted that, even for old ladies like us (and, for that matter, much older ones indeed) going out after midnight is not at all unusual around here. We have not made it to bed before 2 am since our first night in Paris, and we are far from alone.

We enjoyed an unusually heavy and long sleep, wandering downstairs around 11 am to find that breakfast was still in full swing. We had been told that breakfast would cost 2€50, but none of the employees seemed to have the slightest interest in collecting our money.

We ate with Joe, Courtney, and Mike, three American teachers in their late twenties who are six months into a two-year contract at the American school in Kosovo. They are on vacation too this week and have spent it, as they spend most of their weekends and holidays, traveling around the continent. They have visited ten countries in the last six months.

After breakfast we took a leisurely stroll down to the beaches of Barcelona where we watched surfers and Eileen dipped her toes in the Mediterranean. We ate gelato and marveled at the captivating mix of Baroque architecture and modern sculpture and graffiti.

For lunch we went to La Champagneria, which came recommended to us by the overnight receptionist at our hostel. We would not have found it without his instructions. It was located on a small side street near the port. We walked past it at first, for there was no name on the door, and the assortment of pig parts hanging from the ceiling gave the impression that it was a butcher shop.

On second glance we realized that this was the eatery that had been recommended to us. On third glance, we realized that it was absolutely packed.

There are no chairs or tables at La Champagneria; only a long bar at which one can order from an assortment of Spanish hams, cheeses, salt cod, olives, and sardines. They serve three kinds of wine by the bottle. Diners belly up to the bar to place their orders and eat their meals standing wherever they can find a patch of floor in the narrow shop. It was the sort of environment that could easily intimidate a couple of American tourists, but two businessmen gestured for us to stand next to them at the bar and poured us glasses from their bottle of champagne.

We spent a very pleasant hour in the company of our new friends, who worked for a bank and were on their way to assess the value of a boat that was for sale in the port. Their English was only slightly better than our Spanish, but they were more than happy to introduce us to Barcelona’s local delicacies (and more champagne.) They were also more than happy to pay our bill.

For dinner we enjoyed the made-to-order paella at Bosque y Palermo. Upon walking in the door we enjoyed a Cheers-like greeting from a crowd of guests from our hostel, proving once again that it is a small world indeed. The paella came in a cast iron pan, brimming with mussels, clams, squid, prawns, and threads of saffron. at 9€ apiece, it was both a bargain and a tremendously satisfying local dish.

Upon our return to the Hostel One Paralelo, we were greeted by a new evening receptionist, a handsome young Italian man who wondered why we had not joined everyone for the complimentary dinner, which he had cooked. He showed us the recipe for tomorrow’s meal and invited us to help with the cooking.

I can think of far worse ways to spend an evening.

Oui, Paris

Tags

adventure, AMA, Europe, France, Paris, perspective, Spain, travel

Have I mentioned lately that I’m going to Paris?

Well, I am. In ten days. I’ll be traveling with a friend and colleague who has never been to Europe before. We will spend the first half of our February vacation exploring the (exceedingly cold) City of Lights before taking a train to Barcelona for a (slightly less freezing) celebration of art, architecture, and octopus. (I hear they eat octopus over there. I’m down with that. I’m not sure if Eileen is.)

Have I mentioned lately that I’m really, really looking forward to this?

My love affair with travel began in the summer of 2007 when I took my first tour with American Music Abroad. For nearly a month I journeyed across western Europe with three busloads of high school musicians and their teachers. We performed at the American Cemetery of Normandy, climbed the Eiffel Tower, ate moules-frites in Belgium, and chased Austrian dairy cows with our cameras. It was my first experience with extended travel. It takes considerable stamina to keep up with an active AMA itinerary, and it requires a certain independent streak to leave one’s life behind for an extended period.

I absolutely loved it.

Ten months later I returned to Paris. I took the trip on two weeks’ notice – I needed to get out of the house, and I remembered liking Paris an awful lot. It also happened to be a period in my life when I felt compelled to prove my autonomy. I had never traveled alone before, and the prospect terrified me. I remembered very little of my high school French, and I didn’t have a clue how to get around the city without an AMA tour guide. I spent four days getting lost, eating crepes, avoiding the lecherous leers of the local lotharios, and discovering the kind of confidence that comes from doing everything wrong and somehow surviving anyway.

Having checked off the goals of traveling alone and traveling for extended periods of time, my vacation hobby quickly developed into an obsession with personal one-upsmanship. I’ve spent the last four years exploring ever further beyond my comfort zone. I have wandered the streets of Paris at 3 am. I have explored the excavations beneath Vatican City. I spent a jovial night with friends in the cargo hold of a bus where we were serenaded by an accordion-playing Tyrolean driver. I have been kissed by an overly attentive Italian waiter. (I caught his eye by ordering the octopus, FYI – and I escaped his advances by beating a hasty and ungraceful retreat out of the restaurant.)

It has been seven months since I last touched down on American soil, and while I love my life in Massachusetts, I am itching for another adventure. Travel has a way of flushing the extraneous noise out of my cluttered brain. It reminds me to keep seeking inspiration, and it offers proof that I can roll with the punches (and often come out with a few hilarious stories to boot.)

What’s more, I’ve learned that my priorities here at home come into sharp focus when viewed from a few thousand miles away.

So, yes. This trip is exactly what I need right now. Paris m’appelle. I must answer.

Planning Shmanning

Tags

Europe, France, plans, SNCF, Spain, travel

Much of my mental energy has recently been devoted to the planning of my next travel adventure – if that’s really the right word for it. Indeed, the planning part has not gone so well. This really should not surprise me by now.

My friend Eileen and I booked our flight and hostels months ago: Geneva, Milan, Marseille, and Barcelona. We began to research our destinations. We bragged to everyone about our awesome itinerary.  I emailed, texted, and Facebooked a dear friend who lives in Munich and urged him to find a way to meet up with us for a few days. He characteristically resisted making plans, much to my annoyance.

This weekend we sat down to plan the final detail: train transportation between our chosen cities. Being a seasoned France traveler, I know that the best deals are to be found at the web site of the Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français, or the state-run train system. This is tricky, as it requires a reasonable grasp on the French language (and access to Google Translate just in case), an acceptable credit card (there seems to be no rhyme or reason to which ones get accepted and which ones don’t), and absolute confidence in what you’re doing, because the SNCF employees certainly aren’t going to help you.

I should know by now that SNCF actually stands for Seriously Not Cooperative Frenchwomen. I’ve managed to bore and irritate more than my fair share of SNCF clerks. They are masters of customer disservice. It’s not their fault. They’re French. Our beloved notion of customer service … well, it just doesn’t translate.

So it should not have surprised me one bit to find out that our desired itinerary could, for some reason, only be confirmed with paper tickets, and that these paper tickets could only be delivered to a French address.

I momentarily considered calling up an old flame who lives in Arles and asking him to be the middle man but decided that it would create far more problems than it would solve.

We looked at a few tourist-oriented web sites that were happy to sell me the same tickets on the same trains, conducting the transaction in my native tongue at three times the price. That simply would not do for my budget. It’s not that I can’t afford it. I simply refuse to pay three times what someone else is paying on the grounds that I was apparently born in the wrong country.

So we changed our itinerary. We would take a train from Geneva to Paris, then continue on to Barcelona. For some reason, although our departure location was the same as it always was, this itinerary would permit us to pick up our tickets upon arrival at the train station. Vive la bureaucratie !

We won’t get to eat risotto and tour La Scala in Milan or stroll along the Vieux Port in Marseille, and these facts make me sad. But I do get to go to Paris, and even though it will be my sixth visit, it still makes me glow with excitement. So we canceled our hostels, booked a new one, and started humming Edith Piaf songs.

I wrote on my Munich friend’s Facebook wall that Geneva > Milan > Marseille > Barcelona had become Geneva > Paris > Barcelona in the sincere hope that he will manage to arrange a rendezvous anyway.

I believe that travel holds essential life lessons for those who are paying attention, and one is that planning is overrated. Stalled trains, chance encounters, and labor strikes have made permanent changes to my itineraries and the course of my life. Things often don’t turn out the way I want them to, sometimes to my profound disappointment, and sometimes to teach me that my plans were all wrong to begin with.

The very next morning, I received a phone call from the airline that will be transporting us to Europe next month. They called to inform me that they had rescheduled our connecting flight to Geneva. We were now scheduled to arrive two hours after the departure of our non-refundable train to Paris. Unable to stomach the thought of another go-around with the SNCF web site, I bargained with the airline to take us to Paris instead.

I returned to my Munich friend’s Facebook wall to tell him that Geneva > Milan > Marseille > Barcelona had now become Paris > Barcelona. His response: “And you ask why I don’t plan ahead… ”

I will try to negotiate at least a partial refund on the unused train ticket, as it involves not just my money but Eileen’s. In doing so, I will bore and irritate yet another SNCF employee, and I will ultimately fail. On this I know I can plan.