It was perhaps 10am when we finally emerged on the French, or wrong, side of the Channel. Straight away it was all wrong. Everyone was driving on the wrong side of the road and there were bagettes everywhere, like a hand grenade had detonated in a granary.
People always knock England, Nat especially, but we really take it all for granted. I'd come from a place where modern and new buildings made of glass and steel line the roads and the countryside is well tended, I had arrived in a place no less beautiful, but there was a lack of cleanliness and freshness about it I'd never encountered before. It had a rustic farmhouse charm, everything was nicely built from tan bricks and the sun shone.. right onto the graffiti.
Im a fan of graffiti in many ways, I enjoy such classics as "Stacey C. is fat whore" as much as the next man, but in France its everywhere. I didn't see a single building, wall, roadside, tree, car, train, person or nun that hadn't been tagged with spray paint, and while some of it was quite good it sort of ruined alot of things too.
Paris lay just ahead and I have to be honest. it was nowhere near as pretty as I'd always believed. My view was of rundown apartment blocks, graffiti and broken windows.
I'm fully aware that there are some truly wonderful places in Paris, St. Germain for one, so I guess I'd just been on an unfortunate route into the city. Yet, and I never thought I'd say this, London seemed prettier, cleaner and more alive than its counterpart. We arrived at Paris Nord on time, and with the abuse of the driver still fresh in my mind we disembarked to find the Metro system, which turned out to be around a million times better than the London Underground. Almost instantly all my assumptions of the Brit hating and snooty frog were evaporated in a welcome that was warm and genuine.
The woman in the ticket booth smiled at me and then treated me as if I was the only other person on the planet with the same blood group, and again later on the platform, a nice african gentleman pretty much threw himself onto the live line to prevent us missing the gap.
We got to Gare de Lyon a little early, but so did our TGV service, which was fast, efficent and pleasant on the way there but on the way back proved that if the French rail network were a racehorse, you would just shoot it and make it into substandard adhesive products than attempt to get it to do what you'd like.
It was a pretty good 8 hour train ride to Antibes, where I got to enjoy a great view of the Alps, which are great for snowboarding if you can avoid the ladies named Bunty and Francesca, with mink coats for the apres-ski and stupid multicoloured jumpsuits for the on-piste.
It was fucking hot, to be blunt, when we got to Antibes. Nat's sister, Julia, was waiting for us on the platform as she was to be providing us with somewhere to live for our tiem in France. She was genuinely happy to see us, not least because it had been a long time since the sisters had seen each other. I left them to it, and as they jabbered on in Polish we began the hot walk back, her giant suitcase in tow, which had begun drawing other pieces of luggage into its orbit.
We arrived at a more than modest studio apartment, where I promptly died from heat exhaustion. It was around now that the news was broken to me that our epic journey would take 5 hours longer on the return leg, and I would arrive at Hardcore Towers at 5am, thats 2 hours before I had to work a 13 hour shift.
Now, if you had been in the apartment opposite and you had seen me, you would have thought that I'd just set fire to my own hair and attempted to extinguish it with a bucket of hot sulphuric acid. Fiery, angry tantrum over, I died again.. on a sofa.
Luckily for me, tomorrow was the start of some seriously good things...
More Tomorrow..
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