Notes on traveling and snow

I'm noticing that a lot of my posts have to do with food. This one will be no different.

It's 2:15p.m. on Saturday afternoon. I was supposed to be back in Vélez two days ago, but instead I'm standing on a street corner in Paris eating a delicious and ginormous falafel with a tiny plastic fork. Beth, my enthusiastic host and fellow teaching assistant, is standing next to me and pointing out the growing number of other falafel-eating individuals who are migrating to our street corner and its shaft of warm sunlight. I slip my camera out of my coat pocket and "subtly" snap pictures of our quiet, chomping neighbors. There's a half-eaten loaf of fresh challah in my purse.

It's not a bad way to spend a Saturday afternoon. If it weren't for the hours spent in a frozen, snowed-in train station in Marseille and the canceled trains and missed buses that had characterized the last couple of days, and the obscenely expensive airport mistake I would make later that day, it would have been just about perfect. We'd even managed to get ourselves into the Pompidou Museum for free, Beth talking her way past the fact that I had no verification of the fact that I was a teacher. My favorite falafel place was closed because of Shabbat, but luckily the Jewish Quarter is full of non-holiday-conforming food joints, and I even got to introduce Beth to her very first challah.

The freak snowstorm in Marseille had started on Wednesday. It was the most snow the city had seen in twenty years, and it almost immediately closed the airport, stopped all southbound/-originating trains, and immobilized the entire city, blanketing it in as much as 30 centimeters of snow. That day's attempt to check out the town of Arles, where Van Gogh had his yellow house, ended in Avignon, when the train suddenly decided that it couldn't brave the remaining 5 or 10 miles. Hovering around computers and airport webpages that night, my chances for actually making it to Madrid on sch edule the next day were looking grim. A little before 5am the next morning I learned that my train was canceled, but I was able to catch a later one that finally got me safely to Marseille. Having said goodbye to Abi several hours earlier in the still-dim early-morning light of Valence, I suddenly found myself shivering and decidedly not French-speaking in the icy chaos that was Marseille's bus/train station. Not only was the airport still closed, but the shuttle buses between the station and the airport had stopped running, leaving me stranded in the station with my large suitcaseas many inches of wet snow sat unshoveled outside. No one seemed able to give me any information so, after traversing the length of the station in hopes of inspiration, I sat down at one of the few empty booths at a McDonald's bistro to take advantage of its free wifi. Several hours of shivering later, my flight finally showed up as canceled on the Ryanair website, and I hopped a train back to Abi's warm apartment. There, we did a bit of research and decided that the best plan would be to take a train to Paris the next night, spend the night there as well as the following day, then take a late plane from Paris to Madrid, spend the night in Madrid, and then take a bus from Madrid to Málaga. All in all, I'd get back to Vélez three days later than I'd planned.

There are worse things that can happen to a person than having to spend three extra days in France. 1 Euro crepes, Italian movies accompanied by Italian subs, Jewish Quarter falafels previewed by Jewish Quarter challah tend to make me smile, as do life-saving friends in really convenient places. It all seemed rather meant to be, a happy little accident of snow--that is until I walked into Charles de Gaulle Airport, having successfully maneuvered various subway lines and trains to get there, and discovered that I was in the wrong airport.

Cities should not have multiple airports. I am against this on principle. It is showy and presumptuous. It is potentially dangerous and costly. It very nearly made me cry. And it made my memory of Jewish Quarter falafel seem bitter and somewhat caustic. The taxi driver doubted that he could get me to Beauvais in time for my flight, not to mention the fact that it was going to cost me 100 Euros. The Vueling flight four hours later ended up costing me 180, plus the cost of the lost Ryanair flight, plus my travel fork I had stashed in my carry-on, plus my pride. It all got a little worse when, just as my new flight was getting ready to board, it was suddenly delayed, due to the heavy snow in Madrid that--probably--had delayed my original flight as well, meaning I probably could have foregone the 100 Euro taxi and opted for the train. When I finally landed in Madrid around midnight I had an hour and a half to collect my luggage, get out of the airport, and take the three different metro lines necessary to get to my next conveniently-located friends' apartment before the subway closed for the night. Despite managing to get on a train going in the wrong direction a couple stops before her street, I avoided that last problem, ringing her buzzer around 1:28am. Amber, knowing me all too well, sat me down in her kitchen and handed me an apple. Things got a little better.